Friday Sermon by: Robert Szilagyi

Summary:

In this Friday sermon, Robert Szilagyi shares three techniques for preaching: prepare well and know your audience, teach through history and stories people can relate to, and support your points with scripture, illustrating each from his own experience.

Video Transcript:

Praise be to God. Peace be upon everyone, and thank You, God, for giving me an opportunity to present myself today to my wonderful family of submitters. Recently I’ve been reading about different techniques for preaching, and today I’m going to talk about three which I think are very useful.

The first technique that I’m going to share is preparation. Any time you want to make a presentation or preach, a key technique is to prepare yourself: doing research, allocating time, reading, writing, using your peers for help or constructive criticism, spending money, and so on. You should always prepare yourself by knowing the audience you’re going to speak to. Are you preaching to atheists, Christians, Jews, traditional Muslims or submitters? Knowing the audience you are speaking to will guide you on things that can help you prepare.

Imagine going into a Christian household and telling them that, according to the Quran, chapter 4, verse 171, you should worship and serve God and not Jesus. Here you are, going into their house and commanding them what to do according to the Quran. You might get laughed at, yelled at, disrespected, or even thrown out. Now, if you know your audience will be Christians, you could prepare a different approach. You could start off by asking, “If I told you it was written, ‘Worship and serve only God,’ could you possibly interpret that to include worshiping me?” You already know that they’ll answer no to that question, so you can follow up by saying, “Well, here it says in Matthew, chapter 4, verse 10, that Jesus said to him, ‘Away from me, Satan! For it is written: Worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only.'” So, through Jesus’s words and their own understanding, the Bible teaches us to worship and serve only God, and not Jesus.

Through preparation, knowing your audience, reading, writing, and spending time and money, you can preach your points in a more efficient, receivable and palatable manner. It may even leave them thinking about, or fearing for, the foundations of their own beliefs. Knowledge is power, and God commands us to prepare our power against God’s enemies, as well as others not known to us. Quran, chapter 8, verse 60: “You shall prepare for them all the power you can muster, and all the equipment you can mobilize, that you may frighten the enemies of God, your enemies, as well as others who are not known to you; God knows them. Whatever you spend in the cause of God will be repaid to you generously, without the least injustice.” Praise God. The first technique for preaching is preparation.

Now I’m going to suggest another technique. When I was a teenager, my friend and I used to practice Islam together. At first we both claimed to be Sunnis; then I switched to claiming to be a Shiite. We used to debate with each other all the time using hadiths. Almost 30 years later, I met up with him, and I was so excited to share my newly gained knowledge of Submission. My first intention was to show him that the Quran is fully detailed, contains everything we need, and that the hadiths were not a good source for our religious laws and practices.

I proceeded to email him my points, quoting verses from the Quran using Rashad Khalifa’s translation. He responded, claiming the verses didn’t say what I wrote. He even went on to say that one of the verses proved his point that it was necessary to follow the prophet Muhammad and Hadith. I was confused. I couldn’t believe it: how could we be looking at the same verses and have such different understandings? After further communication, we came up with a way to work through it. We agreed to eliminate the parentheses from any of the translations when referencing our points. I started using the translation he preferred to make my points, and, praise God, he started seeing things differently. Today we can even use the Quranic Arabic Corpus, for example, which enables us to go directly to the Arabic, even if we don’t understand Arabic.

This brings me to my second technique: teach lessons using history and stories people can relate to when preaching. You see, I knew that most of you could relate to the situation of citing a verse and then being met with opposition, people claiming that it in no way means what you say it does. So I used my own historical account of expressing the correct understanding of the Quran by eliminating what’s in parentheses. God cites this method directly in the Quran, chapter 12, verse 111: “In their history there is a lesson for those who possess intelligence. This is not fabricated Hadith; this (Quran) confirms all previous scriptures, provides the details of everything, and is a beacon and mercy for those who believe.” So the second technique is to use history and stories to teach and to overcome objections when preaching. Praise God.

And now for the third and final technique. At an early age, God blessed me with belief in Him and belief that the Quran was sent by Him as guidance for mankind. The way I understood Islam prior to Submission was very Hadith-based and not agreeable to my Catholic family, so I barely preached or spoke about Islam to them. But about 10 years ago, when I was introduced to Submission, I began preaching to them heavily, especially to my mom, and everything was going well. We had several back-and-forth dialogues.

Then it was time for me to approach the topic of Zakat and express my understanding at the time that two and a half percent of my bi-weekly income belonged to her. My parents are very poor, but proud, and refuse handouts or charity. I knew that I would be met with opposition when telling my mom that I had to give her Zakat. I started the conversation by asking her, “Would you be willing to help me get to Paradise?” She said, “Of course I will.” I proceeded to tell her that God commands me to give her two and a half percent of my income. Of course, at that time we had not organized public Zakat yet, so I was doing it based on my limited understanding at that time. After some arguing, she agreed.

Now, my mom was familiar with the Bible and aware of my claims about the Quran, and she asked, “Where does it say to give two and a half percent of your income?” I don’t think she was negotiating how much I should give her; I think she was making me prove myself. After all, I was asking her to compromise her feelings about taking money from her children. She even said she thought the Bible said to give a ten percent tithe to the church. So we read Appendix 15 together, “Religious Duties: Gift from God,” but we basically just went to the obligatory charity, Zakat, section. I showed her chapter 6, verse 141, and how “harvest” translates, for me, into my bi-weekly check in today’s world, and chapter 2, verse 215, which shows that my parents are the initial recipients of my Zakat. We both accepted the two and a half percent from the appendix, but it always bothered me that I could not use scripture to prove it.

I learned a valuable lesson that day, and it’s the third technique that I’d like to share: be able to support your beliefs and preaching points with scripture. Since that conversation, I have searched for Quranic support that Zakat is two and a half percent. I asked the people in the Tucson community. I asked many others at two different submitters’ conferences. I asked at a couple of different Quran studies, one of which was even worldwide, and no one could provide me with Quranic support. Although my mom passed away about four years ago, I now have Quranic evidence to support that Zakat is two and a half percent, along with the correct, full understanding of Zakat. Chapter 6, verse 92: “This too is a blessed scripture that we have revealed, confirming the previous scriptures, that you may warn the most important community and all those around it. Those who believe in the Hereafter will believe in this scripture, and will observe the Contact Prayers (Salat).”

In conclusion, you can see that I put the three techniques into practice in this speech. Each point required preparation; I told a relevant story or gave a historical account to teach; and finally, I used scripture to support all three techniques. God, please help all of us to prepare, use historical accounts, and support our points with scripture when preaching.