Address #1
A minister is the person who arises from among the congregation, goes to the community book, and reports on what is learned week after week. Preaching is local. It has an address. It’s a congregational event.
The preacher talks a congregation’s language. They learn the shape of a congregation.
My childhood: preacher in tails, doctrinal sermons full of theology, points, and sub-points.
Goal: noble simplicity, modeled by people like Barbara Brown Taylor and Eugene Peterson. Simple language but loaded.
There are some constant realities:
First, the preacher needs to be a person who loves the Bible. Week after week the preacher is sent to this book to dig up its treasures. It is our community book.
The Babylonians had to cart their gods away whenever the enemy approached. The problem is that gods are heavy. We do this too: try to carry God. In Isaiah, God says he will carry us. The central question of religion is: who is carrying whom?
I don’t think I know a good preacher who doesn’t ruminate over the text. He or she expects to receive something excellent from our community’s book. They then go to the pulpit, and say, “Brothers and sisters, I’ve discovered something excellent in our community’s book, and if you’re good I’ll tell you.”
Second, the preacher is a person who trusts God’s Word to have its own power and relevance. We don’t make the Bible relevant to our modern age. It’s not the preacher’s job to shore up Scripture and give it strength. The preacher’s job is to let Scripture shore us up and give us strength.
Part of our job is to trust the Bible’s story to fit within the divine drama and to let the stories release their power in our lives.
David Neff talks about going to a church on summer vacation. The preacher spoke on Moses at the burning bush and Moses’ willingness to embrace a career change. Too trivial! We impose our little schemes on the history of redemption. The next week: Mark 4, the calming of the storm. The preacher spoke on safety while we travel. We impose prosperity and self-help gospels on the text and forget who is carrying whom.
One way the Bible releases its power: the short ending of Mark. The women left the tomb trembling and afraid, and didn’t say anything. The scribes weren’t happy with the ending and wanted to round it off, understandably so. Mark has a beginning and middle, but you sense the ending is elsewhere. It’s as if he plays seven tones of the scale and stops.
Why four gospels? Why not one? We need multiple takes on the gospel. Mark’s take: God is on the loose. How could this be the end of a gospel, whose message is that through Jesus has broken through the barriers and gotten into our lives? The heavens were ripped open, the Temple, and the tomb. God is on the loose.
Third, Scripture is our book that we love and trust. The preacher is much helped in trusting and reading the Scripture by two means: a life of prayer and a program of general reading alongside Scripture. One of the reasons we read is out of respect for listeners. Most of us don’t have enough life experience to help us in our preaching, so we import nutrients. They read poetry (to tune into language), biography (to learn good judgment), journalism (to strengthen their grasp of contemporary events and trends), essays (to help focus thought), children’s literature (models of prose, drama, noble simplicity), fiction. Reading for preaching has little to do with making sermons pretty or lush, or to quote literature in sermons. Quotations are troublesome - large quotes overwhelm the sermon, small quotes miss context. Highly literary preachers can sound effete, over-pretty.
So why a program of reading? For one thing, the literature provides wonderful illustrations. But that’s not enough. That’s too much work, too narrow an aim. The preacher aims to become wiser through the reading. We need biblical understanding, but also a general understanding of how life works. Without wisdom, who can stand under the assignment of weekly preaching? With wisdom, the preacher can at least hope that the congregation will not always sit there with a look of patience, sadness, and amazement (to paraphrase Gilead).
Middle wisdom: not so profound as a proverb, but also not common knowledge. e.g. compassion can not seem like a gift but a load if the person offering compassion does it on his or her own terms.
Preachers can also get a little help with the dynamics for their sermons by reading, in the structure and design. We’ve been told for years that sermons should sound less like essays and more like odysseys, plotted narratives. The idea is that sermons need to move, not always by argument or application. In doing this, the preacher’s friend is fiction and biography. We can learn beginnings and endings. We can learn to create conflict but not resolve it completely, or build, as Jesus did, a time release that takes hold on the way home.
Read William Maxwell if you’re not familiar with him! He’s a short fiction writer. The shortness of some stories is instructive to preachers as well. They have a beginning, tension, at least partial resolution, in the same length as your sermon. It helps us also learn flashback and other narrative techniques.
I read Roman Fever by Edith Wharton every year just because of its ending.
A final reason preachers read is because if we hope to move the hearts of others, our own hearts need to be moved. So often, authors of great fiction know the route to our heart and how to move it. You can’t read the Grapes of Wrath without being moved.
Q&A
I don’t mean to denigrate the preaching of my childhood. All good preaching includes teaching, which is doctrinal. I was trying to highlight the differences. Today, there is a flow to preaching which often matches the text better. On the other hand, there is not the same level of seriousness. There is a danger to trivialize, which the older preachers never used to do.
Address #2
Fourth, think of preaching as an offering rather than preaching as performance. We don’t know each other’s hearts. We don’t even know our own hearts. There can be people sitting in front of us who have way more faith, or less faith, than we think they have.
Think empathetically. Who in my congregation really needs the word of this text? Who might misunderstand it? Offer the sermon as an act of neighbor love, offering what God has given to people who need it. Of course, what people do with a gift is not up to you.
Fifth, preaching is beyond prediction. you can tell something about the acoustics, electricity, and ethos even as a visitor. The Holy Spirit has a role in that. We’ve had messages we thought were well prepared flop; we’ve had messages that did not receive the same preparation, for good reasons, that have been used. Our words can be wiser than we are. There’s something that can happen between our lips and the congregation.
This is not an excuse for sloppy preparation. The first hearer of the sermon must be the preacher, who is convicted by the text. The message doesn’t just come by the preacher but through the preacher.
Sixth, the preachers who have been most effective are always asking, always seeking. They ask questions of the text and of God. A seeker is any person in search of God; all theologians are seekers. The wise seek after God in their study, their preaching, their listening to sermons.
Seekers assume that reality is far bigger than what we can ever grasp. They listen to others who stimulate and spend a lot of time in the interrogative mood. Wise people are always asking questions. Fools make a lot of statements, often without doubt. The wise seek after God by wondering.
When we ask questions of a text, it gives up its riches.
Seventh, create tension. One of the ways preachers can often preach grace is to create tension and then resolve it, asking questions and then resolving them. Eugene Lowry calls this an itch waiting for a scratch. You can make a question the refrain of your sermon. “What is your name?” “Are you the one who is to come, or do we need to look for another?” “Do you not care that we are perishing?” “Do you want to be made whole?” “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” The preacher who learns to use one of the Bible’s own questions can sustain tension throughout a message and resolve it near the end. Once the tension has been resolved, it’s time to stop. Use it with discretion - nothing will work all the time.
Another way to create tension is to take a text that has a plausible superficial meaning, and walk the whole congregation into a cul-de-sac with that meaning. The preacher makes it clear that this can’t possibly be the meaning and then leads the congregation to truly understand it. Examples: Matthew 7:1, or “be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” You have to be minimally plausible taking them into that cul-de-sac.
Eighth, we’ve had a lot of attention on how to write for the ear. Congregations can’t hear commas. There are lots of things that don’t work well in spoken English that work in written English. They don’t hear some consonants (e.g. “half asked questions”).
Eighth, don’t obstruct the flow of your sermon with supporting material. Think twice about asking the congregation to respond, especially if the issue is sensitive. Don’t talk about yourself all the time, especially if you come up the big winner or the big loser.
Finally, how do you preach sin in a no-fault culture? When we preach on sin, people can start to twitch. They know that you know them, and they know you. They want to know, “Who is your target?” You can’t silk them into generalizations, but you can’t pick on individuals either. They may think you’re just talking about someone else, and therefore give themselves a pass, or else they may think you’re picking on them, and therefore despair.
People can tell by how you communicate if your predominant emotion is one of sorrow, not gladness that someone has been caught. Sin grieves God, hurts others, and is a form of self-abuse. Preach and deal with sin only within a cradle of grace. The first word about us is not that we are sinners; it is that God created us with incredible dreams. It’s not the last word either; we’re redeemed. Never preach sin as the main topic, but as a parenthesis of what God is doing.
What a risky thing for God to entrust the message of reconciliation to us. Take that adventure seriously!
“Dancing on the edge of mystery” - doesn’t mean that you avoid propositions, but it’s how you get there. Story, etc. can carry a lot of freight. You don’t have to make it discursive and blocky.
The wise preacher leaves some things in suspension.
When we can’t resolve a text, there is nothing for putting it in suspension while we grapple with it.