I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds.- Bertrand Russell

"Windows On The World" is the name of a classy restaurant atop the World Trade Tower in New York. It has tall panels of windows, and it is one of the best places - especially around sunset - to see what the Apple looks like from 60 or 70 stories up.

"Windows" is also a metaphor in preaching that describes the role illustrations play in making sermons concrete, powerful, and memorable. They let the light in. Through them we are able to see what is happening inside. Who lives there. How the furniture is arranged. Where the kitchen is, the play room, where to sleep when you are tired.

Balboa Island is accessible from Newport Beach, California, by only one two-lane bridge. Entirely surrounded by the pacific waters of the Pacific Ocean, there are only three or four dozen streets on the island, and many beautiful homes.

Nothing unusual about that. But what is slightly unusual is the tradition which has developed there that all living room drapes are to be left pulled open - even in the evening. A popular walker's pastime is to circle the island a little after sunset and see how the residents are going about life inside their homes.

Except for back-rooms and bedrooms, all is in view. Families at dinner. Rooms looking elegant with polished furniture. Kids watching television. Bridge games. Cocktails with friends. Flower arrangements, curving stairways, paintings and sculptures. Book readers. The "we've got it made" on evening display.

Sermon illustrations will reveal a more ordinary, truthful, and often broken kind of world than this if they are to illuminate what life is all about and are to contribute to the believability of what is being said.

Still, here are a few suggestions about homiletical windows. None is original, but I have come to believe in their value as guidelines, and make use of them over and over again. I won't identify their sources because in most instances I've long since forgotten them - or never knew in the first place. But here they are anyway, and they're free.

Try to have every sermon include what Dr. Ross Snyder called "one big scene." Remain with an illustration once you begin. And whether it is a major or minor one, sufficiently long enough to allow worshippers to see and feel the action involved, its latent emotional power - rather than settling for a two-sentence "passing reference."

Honor the Bible's own treasury of illustrations. But don't be confined to them. Today's world is a different one from the Bible's typically pastoral backdrop. Yet there are biblical ingredients present and constant - in theater, novels, literature, television, news items, hospital wards, travel, the world of science, the life of megacities, and the questions of children.

Honor also the difference between moralizing and giving hearers "struggle room." Preaching isn't serving packaged answers.

Allow your own soul, perplexity or ecstasy to show. But beware of over-reliance on the autobiographical. "Now when I was a boy in Missouri," complained a listener, "got to be awfully old."

Help overcome a "prose-flattened" world by the use of the poetic. Giving credit is important, but sometimes lines need to burst upon the scene, and do their work before anything is said about authorship.

Use aesthetic and visceral references to light up what you are saying, taking care to avoid ornateness or triteness. If we offend, as at times we will, let it be for reasons that reveal faithfulness to the truth.

Let silence become an illustration, too. Let there be times of absorbency. Give silence the opportunity to be "full," not awkward pauses.

Don't embarrass with illustrations that, even by stretching, could reveal a confidence, or to make the congregation worry that they may be in the process of having some of their personal worlds exposed without permission.

Take seriously the first few minutes of the sermon time. It may or may not involve the use of your "one big scene," but always should include some of the best of what the sermon contains.

Illustrate: to make bright. Luster (buried within "illustrate"): soft reflected light, sheen, gloss, glorious or radiant quality, splendor (American Heritage Dictionary). Both definitions help explain some of the magic of preaching when a transcendent light is allowed to shine in, through, upon, and past the stuff of daily living.

Windows are in all shapes and tints. They protect. Reveal. Enshrine yesterday and offer vistas of tomorrow. Dance with color. They are friends of the sun, and the trees outside. On dismal, rainy days they are good to stand before, maybe touch with your nose.

Congregations are windows through which we get the chance to recognize practical love at work. They are faith communities that include angels of all ages, of laughter and joined tears, of breaking bread with joy and grief shared beside an open grave. Of Christ risen, of hungry persons fed, the homeless accommodated, of patio sunrises, an open Bible, a tap on or an arm around our shoulder. Churches of resurrection, a community of witnesses, a place of healing, previews of heaven, baptismal waters and wedding vows, struggle and serenity, the prophet's mantle, the banquets of the heart.

Suffering is a well-known window on patience and brilliant courage. Hope is a window on the future. All sermons are windows of meaning, filtered through the passion and the sincerity of the preacher.

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal Word? He is a brittle, crazy glass; Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford, This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story, Making thy life to shine within, The holy preachers, then the light and glory, More rev 'rent grows, and more doth win;Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one, When they combine and mingle, bringA strong regard and awe; but speech alone, Doth vanish like a flaring thingAnd in the ear, not conscience, ring.

- George Herbert (1593-1633)"The Windows"

Windows have been opened for me by two modern artists of the imagination.

There's this wonderful story Donald Baillie tells in Out of Nazareth that sets up sound waves in the heart.

He was on a late Sunday afternoon walk through the Scottish countryside when he came upon a signpost which pointed the way to a small village he had once heard of, and which had been memorialized in a poem as a tiny out of the way place where nothing ever happened. He wasn't in a hurry so he turned in that direction for a look.

Upon arriving, the first thing that caught his attention was a neat, white church with a small adjoining cemetery, and he wound his way around to the front door to see if there was any notice there about evening worship.

Yes, there would be a service - one around seven. It sounded like that might get him home pretty late, so he decided to move on when he suddenly caught sight of a woman in the cemetery with a bouquet of flowers in her hands. And he wandered over to speak to her.

The two engaged in friendly conversation. Then she told him that the flowers were for the grave of her son who was buried there - who, after he had completed high school, had sat for an examination in a larger adjoining town, and had qualified for a scholarship to Oxford.

The whole village had experienced a burst of pride over that achievement. (People of the town I grew up in felt that way when John Smoller, one of our own, received an appointment to West Point. For our 7,000 inhabitants, it was a distinction comparable to being chosen as an astronaut or winning a Van Cliburn piano competition.)

The young man had excelled at Oxford. But, in the summer before his final year, he had drowned in a boating accident.

This Sunday was the first anniversary of his death. And the service that night was to be a memorial to his brief but splendid young life.

The reason Baillie wrote about this incidental meeting was to call attention to the fact that there are no unimportant places, anywhere. That in all kinds of surprising locations, deep and great human events occur even though the world at large may not notice.

The second story has a California twist:

A certain couple had two children. And the younger daughter took all the money she could find and went to the beach and spent it surfing - sitting on bar stools and living her own life.

She got into Trouble with a capital T.

And when she had spent everything she had - and was hungry and homeless, she became a cook's helper in a wayside diner where she lived on the little she could make, and no one helped her very much.

But one day she woke up. She came to herself and said: "The girl who used to work for us at home had more than I've got. I think I'll call home and tell them I think I've made a big mistake - that I have sinned against them, and against heaven, and against everything I ever heard in Sunday school and church, and that I'm not worth being considered their daughter. I'll ask them to let me come home, though, and I'll work around the house. I'll get a job. I'll do anything. I wonder if they're home now...."

So she went to the booth and reversed the charges, and her mother picked up the phone on the first ring, and her father on the second, because they had been waiting, waiting.

And the daughter said over the phone: "I've been a fool, and I've been bad, and I don't blame youif you don't want to have anything to do with me. I know I'm not worthy to be called your daughter."

But the parents both began to talk at once. And they said, "Oh, we're so glad to hear from you. Tell us where we can pick you up. We'll be there as soon as we can."

So they brought her home, and they got her some decent clothes, and even gave her some heirloom jewelry. They had a family party with the stereo turned way up, and everyone laughed, and it was like old times.

"It was even better than old times," the father said, with his arm around his daughter, "because we thought you might be dead, or worse than dead."

And they began to be merry. Very merry indeed.

Now her older brother had been at work, and he drove into the driveway and said to the first person he saw:

"What's going on?"

And whoever answered him said: "Your sister has come home and they're having barbecued veal out back because she's safe and sound."

But the brother was angry, and he stomped around in the driveway, kicked the tires on his convertible, let out a few curse words, and refused to go in.

After a while, his father came out and said: "Come in, son; sister's home."

But the boy scowled at his dad. "Look," he said, "I've been a good son. I've worked hard, and I've been obedient to you and Mom, and you never even had me and my friends in for hamburgers. But when this daughter of yours - who took half your money, and lived with all those beach bums - when she comes crawling back, you throw a party. What kind of justice is that?"

The father, knowing there was a good bit of truth in what his son said, answered, "Son, you are upset; you forget. We have always been together. You, and your mother and I have lived together in comfort. We've eaten well. Your friends have been our friends. Our home has been theirs. You have been a good son. Everything I have is yours, and you know it."

"Forget about my daughter. She's your sister, and she's come home. She's alive and well in spite of what she has done. She's repentant. She's beaten down. She needs us now, and she needs you. She was as good as dead and is alive. She was lost, and now has been found. Come in, please ..."

Jesus, said Fred Cropp, left the story there.

A legend tells of a boy who looked for some windows of gold which he saw far away "when he looked in the valley at sunrise each day." He set out in search of them, only to discover them at sunset as he started home again, when their light was reflected in the windows of the little cabin from which he had begun the search earlier the same morning.

There are windows through which we catch glimpses of things divine. Some surround the familiar spaces we occupy each day.