A successful sermon is an extended metaphor: It brings unlikely things or events into startling conjunction. In this case, it is scripture – whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other – and the perilous circumstances of the congregation. We may doubt that we have much to do with Jacob wrestling the angel or the Battle of the Elephant; the skillful preacher shows us not only that we do, but that this connection is of vital and urgent significance. Some remote cataclysm of the past or future – the flood of Noah, the Day of Judgment – is in fact, as the preacher will argue, the most pressing concern we can have, for it embodies a terrifying analogue to our own fragile situation. For the preacher, our lives are not indefinable and one-dimensional but stratified in sacred time. For him or her, all of us cast scriptural shadows.

The homily nowadays is an endangered genre. I can’t count the number of occasions on which I’ve fallen into suspended animation during some rambling peroration from the pulpit or how vainly I’ve fiddled with the radio dial, especially when driving through our Southern states, in the hope of hitting on one good old-fashioned “hellfire” rant. A good sermon doesn’t have to be one you agree with (they’re more stimulating when you don’t). But, like a good poem or a stirring speech, it does have to have passion and rigor in equal measure. It has to rouse your emotions, and it has to make you think.

No one in the long history of the homily accomplished this better than Jonathan Edwards, who was born slightly more than three centuries ago, and whose life and works are enjoying a corresponding revival. He stands in the tradition of John Donne, Lancelot Andrewes, Bossuet, and Cardinal Newman as a master of the form. Edwards wasn’t only a superb theologian, philosopher, and sometime natural scientist but a consummate literary craftsman whose gifts show to best effect in his sermons. Some 1,250 of these survive – an amazing figure, especially when you consider that his collected works, still in progress under the auspices of Yale University Press, already occupy more than a dozen stout volumes.

Edwards conceived his sermons as shock tactics. He meant to rattle and alarm his auditors. He would have agreed with Kafka that words are “axes to break the frozen sea inside us.” He was particularly at pains to shatter the defenses of the “sermon-proof.” By pulverizing complacency he sought to force his flock into heartfelt conversion and a new birth in the spirit. Hence, the ferocity of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” his most notorious homily, delivered first at Northhampton in 1741, apparently to little effect (his congregation must have been inured or exceptionally unregenerate to sit through this verbal onslaught unmoved!).

When he preached it again, at Enfield on July 8 of the same year, the terrified listeners responded with “great moaning and crying throughout ye whole house” and with “shrieks and cries” that were “piercing and amazing.” It’s not hard to see why. Edwards constructed this inimitable discourse with a relentlessness of logic and of rhetorical savagery that compels our admiration even as its contents appall us. The sermon has the nightmare momentum of a Poe tale, with the crucial proviso that, for his listeners at least, this was no fiction but the searing truth.

This sermon, and 14 others, are now newly available in “The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader” (Yale University Press, 282 pages, $19), edited by Wilson H. Kimnach, Kenneth P. Minkema, and Douglas A. Sweeney. The selections, accompanied by a discerning introduction both to Edwards and to the sermon form, range from one preached when he was only 19 and just embarking on his ministerial career to his solemn and moving “Farewell Sermon” of 1750. Of the four previously unpublished sermons in the volume, two were delivered to an audience of Mohawk Indians through an interpreter. In their stark succinctness and simplicity, they show how Edwards could eschew rhetorical intricacy when, as he believed, souls – and political allegiances – were at stake. (He was in fact an impassioned advocate for the Indians.)

Edwards’s sermons succeed, both as evangelical discourse and as powerful literary compositions (though he would have condemned this distinction, because his language is so indelibly concrete).He never forgets to appeal to the senses and the imaginations of his auditors, however abstruse his doctrinal subtleties may be. In “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the time is always now. Edwards wants to convince us that at every instant we are held in God’s hand; if we accept that premise, then we must also concede that His hand may let us drop at any instant. “If God should withdraw his hand,” neither your state of good health nor your material circumstances “would avail no more to keep you from falling, than the thin air to hold up a person that is suspended in it.”

Edwards plays on two primordial human fears: of falling and of fire. And, to make matters more terrifying: “your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf.” Edwards had read his Isaac Newton; it is gravity – here, the gravitation of our own depravity – that plummets us down, not God Himself.

I’d be hard put to claim this as my favorite sermon by Edwards; it’s left too many scorch-marks on my memory. But “Heaven Is a World of Love,” delivered in 1738, shows another Edwards. True, he still expatiates to chilling effect on “God’s hatred,” but taken as a whole the sermon possesses an uncommon radiance. His God is not the cool divinity of the traditional Calvinist; Edwards worshiped a hot God. As he puts it, “Love is in God as light is in the sun, which does not shine by a reflected light as the moon and planets do; but by his own light, and as the fountain of light.”

Am I stretching things, like a latterday preacher binging on analogies, or does his vision of the life of heaven – the old utopian dream of a democracy of amity – still resonate for Americans? In this “chosen country,” neither pride nor envy, contentiousness nor self-seeking, will exist. Instead, “what a Canaan of rest, a land flowing with milk and honey to come to after one has gone through a great and terrible wilderness, full of spiteful and poisonous serpents, where no rest could be found!” Gaze fixed on the hereafter, does Edwards here give secret voice to his own deepest hopes for pre-Revolutionary America?

Despite bitter disappointments, chiefly his expulsion from his pulpit in Northampton (after 24 years!) by a fractious congregation, Edwards continued his mission, dying in 1758 of a botched smallpox inoculation after he had assumed the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). How odd to think that his “world of love,” thoroughly secularized, would reappear a century later in Walt Whitman’s distinctly un-Calvinist “Leaves of Grass” and “Democratic Vistas”!