Preaching To Friends

The more I read about preaching, the less my desire is to preach. Stanley Hauerwas is the main culprit in the attempt to curtail my sermonic aspirations. For example, treat the words below as gospel and I'm almost left wondering what else a preacher can do at a pulpit but stand there silently. Perhaps this only further supports Hauerwas's critique of the mind-numbing society that we live in.

...when a sermon is thought to be no more than a speech by the minister to provide advice to help us negotiate life, the content of sermons usually are exemplifications of the superficial and sentimental pieties of a liberal culture. Then we wonder why the mainstream church is dying. Why do you need to come to church to be told that we ought to treat everyone with dignity? Why do you need to come to church to be told we ought to share some of what we have with those who do not have as much as we have? Why do you need to come to church to be told that children say the darndest things? Why do you need to come to church to hear stories that give us insight into the human condition?

It is hard to re-imagine preaching. I recently completed a paper on discipleship, and one of the areas I briefly touched on was "preaching as discipleship" (see below). I'm not sure I avoided all the pitfalls that Hauerwas warned against (despite the fact that I quoted him numerous times!), but I suppose if I only think what Hauerwas thinks then one of us is irrelevent. No prizes for guessing which one.

Preaching is a time for the word of God to be uttered; a word which tears down and builds up, a word which is a summons away from and a call to follow. According to Stanley Hauerwas, “sermons…develop imaginative skills to help us see the world as judged and redeemed by Christ.”  They should tell “a story that makes possible our ability to live lives we do understand”.

Yet too often our preaching is disconnected from people’s reality and fails to make sense of our life of discipleship in this world. An answer is given when there is no question, support is offered when there is no need, and an idea is given when there is no desire to know.

Thus my primary challenge to preachers is this:

Know your congregation. Know their fears, their worries, their insecurities, their hopes, their hurts, their needs, their desires, their joys and their sorrows. Preaching as discipleship can only happen in the context of honest, mutual relatedness. In this context, you do not become a disciple’s psychiatrist, but rather their friend who as a word from God for them [cf. Jer. 37:17].

Henri Nouwen wrote that “perhaps teachers can never be true teachers unless they are, to a certain degree, friends”.  He wrote this in light of Jesus naming his own students “friends” (Jn. 15:15). Are church leaders today afraid to name the members of their congregation ‘friends’? Before we learn how to be good preachers and teachers we must first learn how to be good friends.

To preach as a formative act means teaching people the skill of “fitting their own small story into the larger story of God”.  It is only within the context of this story that the commands of Jesus can be taught wisely. We need not resort to moralizing to get people to behave the right way. Understanding Jesus means understanding that “…the teachings of Jesus are not proposed as ethical principles, but as a summons to that radical commitment which the now-intruding kingdom of God demands…”  As John Howard Yoder puts it, following the commands of Jesus “is not about some legalistic approach to copying Jesus, but rather about participating in Christ”.

Preachers proclaim the reality of the kingdom of God, and ultimately, the reality of the King and our participation with him in the life of the kingdom. Through such preaching we are discipling people by fulfilling what Hauerwas considers to be the task of the preacher – “to show how our lives are unintelligible if Jesus Christ is not the Lord”.

Our preaching should not “settle” matters, but should open up discussion and exploration and new pathways of obedience

Preaching: Creation

In reading The Cross-Shattered Church by Stanley Hauerwas (whose surname I can neither spell nor pronounce), I came across the following line:

…God’s good creation is not finished.

It struck me: God is not a retired Creator. In the beginning he created, and he is still creating. And as lofty as it sounds, the preacher gets to assist in this act of creating. For a preacher does not preach his own word, but he utters the word of God to those with ears to ear. And when God’s word goes out, it does not return to him void. This was true in the opening chapters of Genesis, and it is true even now. Through the folly of preaching God is creating a community of people for himself. His work of creation is not finished; maybe it never will be, since he is the eternal Creator.

When we preach the word of God, God is creating and re-creating. When we hear the word of God, we are being created and re-created.

Preaching: Presence

Jacob's words uttered in the city formerly known as Luz sum up what every preacher wants to hear from each member of the congregation: Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.

New Testament Scholar Daniel Patte explored Paul's preaching methodology in his book Preaching Paul, and attempted to glean some insights for the present day practice of the craft. For we are not in a cultural and sociological situation all to dissimilar to the one facing Paul on his missionary journey's throughout Asia and Europe: the language of the gospel is foreign to the masses, and the symbols and stories are nonsensical in our world of power and prestige. What do we do? What do we say to people for whom the gospel seems like the greatest of irrelevancies, or the greatest of mysteries? What did Paul do? What did Paul say? Tom Long (commenting on Patte's findings) writes that Paul

looked at the world of his hearers through the cross-resurrection refraction of the gospel, and by doing so, he saw something he could not have seen without the gospel lens: the trajectory of God in their world. He saw God at work in cross-resurrection ways in their present-tense circumstances, and he told them what he saw. God is present; God is at work in your world. Can you see it?

Paul saw the world through eyes that were coloured with the person and story of Jesus. And by looking at the world with these eyes, he could see that the story of the world was now wrapped up with the story of Jesus. "Our story became His story", as my former teacher likes to say.

Our stories of loss, brokenness, hurt, abandonment, find their fullest voice in the story of Jesus. When he cried out from the cross "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani", he cried the cry of ultimate suffering; he told the story of our lives in one tragic sentence. But at Calvary a new chapter was also being written, for God was in that place, reconciling the world to Himself.

In light of the cross and resurrection, the preacher can boldly proclaim that the resurrected crucified Lord Jesus still identifies with the weak, the marginalised, and even the sinful in the present time, and that he is powerful enough to make things new. The preacher can say that the Lord is in this place even now, though we may not know it. He is making our stories His story so that His story can become our story. The finished work of the cross has created fresh possibilities for today. The LORD is doing a new thing: do you not perceive it?

Preaching: Story

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. The truth behind this rather disturbing adage also applies to preaching. There is more than one way to skin a sermon…or something.

Many sermons today could pass as lectures, with their points and subpoints, logical structure, and symmetry. I read recently that the structure of a lot of sermons is to begin by telling the congregation what the sermon is going to be about, deliver the sermon, and then finish by telling the congregation what the sermon was about.

“Today I’m going to speak about the love of God….”

“The love of God is like…”

“This message was about the love of God…”

There is another school of thought, however: Narrative preaching. Highlighting the claims of Eugene Lowry in The Homiletical Plot, Tom Long writes that

…what really gets the juices going for hearers is not learning about ideas but resolving ambiguity, and thus, good sermons should be built on the chassis of a narrative plot that moves sequentially from stirring up ambiguity and resolving it, from conflict to climax to denouement.

One group of writers have as succinct a definition of preaching as you’re likely to hear: Preaching is shared story.

There is much that has been and could be said about this way to skin the proverbial cat, but one of the central truths commending it is this: When we preach grace, we are not preaching about an abstraction or a concept. We are telling the story of a God who has definitively revealed his grace through the story of Jesus, specifically the story of his death and resurrection.

This ties in with yesterday’s post. We bring people to the vantage point where everything is seen as gift by allowing them to be swept up into the drama of God’s gracious action towards his creation. The hearers of the story must become participants in the story. That’s the goal. The lecture-sermon (or lermon, if you like) cannot achieve this. It can do a lot of good things, but it cannot do this, because it does not make the story the thing. Something else is, but what exactly?

Preaching: Grace

I plan on reading a lot about preaching over the coming weeks, so I’ll be using this space to air some brief thoughts on the subject.

You know a book is going to be good when you’re underlining stuff in the preface. Such is the case with Tom Long’s Preaching from Memory to Hope. Writing about the kindness of a stranger that affected the life of his great-grandfather and all who came after him in the family line, Long says,

The more we know of life, the more we know that all that we have is gift, all that we are is grace.

I think one of the central tasks of preaching is to bring people to this perspective. If we are not at a vantage point where everything we see is the stuff of grace, then we do not see as we ought to see and we do not know as we ought to know. Good preaching should lead us to the humble knowledge of a world graced by God -- a world “charged with the grandeur of God” -- for this is the kind of knowledge that produces love.

And as with all preaching, this counteracts some things deeply ingrained into our minds and hearts - our misguided sense of entitlement and our delusions of self-sufficiency. The gospel of the kingdom works against such things, for it announces to us that at the heart of reality is a God of self-giving love who calls us to freely receive that love and to freely give it to those around us, enemies and friends alike.