been discussed and/or defined by other teachers of homiletics as well as by leading preachers who consider this idea of the sermon being focused on “one clear, compelling, biblically centered, and contextually relevant claim.” Haddon Robinson calls it “the main point or the big idea of the sermon.”2 Samuel Proctor calls it “the proposition or the relevant question.”3 What we are holding together in the phrase “sermonic claim”—what the sermon says and what the sermon is intended to do—Thomas G. Long