Sermon Logic in a Hyperlink Generation

16 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by John McClure in Musings, Views from the Street

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circular logic, George Miller, hyperlinking, logic, preaching, preparation, public speaking, rabbit trails, sermon, sermon organization, seven +/- two, seven plus or minus two, short term memory

I think I’m noticing something about this generation of sermon-writers: they organize their thought as if they were using hyperlinks. When I challenged a student recently for having fifteen to twenty distinct ideas competing in a sermon, he was shocked. Each time I pointed out how he had either “moved on” to a new thought, or “engaged in circular logic” by coming back to a previously developed thought, or had “created a rabbit trail” by developing an idea with such detail as to lose track of the original thought, he said: “that’s easy to follow, isn’t it?” and “don’t you see that I come back to the main ‘page’? (notice the computer metaphor), or “that’s just a quick definition, right?” When the class was asked whether they could follow all of the nuances of logic in his sermon, remarkably, they got about 60 percent of it (not great, but significantly better than I had expected).

In 1956, George Miller conducted what is now a famous (if modestly contested) piece of research and concluded that short-term memory could only handle 7 plus or minus 2 “chunks” of thought at a time (further research suggests that the number should be lower – probably between 3 and 5 “chunks.” The issue at stake here, however, is the status of these “chunks” – whether these chunks of thought have to be completely discrete, and how much inner development is permissible.

And, of course, there is the cognitive science question that professor Miller would have found interesting: Is it possible that computers are changing short-term memory so that “chunks within chunks” are becoming more manageable? And, to push even further into this cognitive science domain: Is it possible that logic is changing? Is linearity absolutely necessary in public speaking? Or, will it be in, say, 50 years?

Of course, I have no answers to such questions. What I do know is that one still has to have identifiable “chunks” that can, in fact, be remembered, and that digression, circularity, rabbit trails, and other forms of circumlocution have a distinct tendency to obfuscate and obscure one’s message – even for hyper-linkers. After all, how many times has each of us begun following hyperlinks and NEVER made it back to the “home page” at all – forgetting the original link in the first place?! Fess up, please.

So how do we decide how far one can “link” within a “chunk” of thought? Is there a time limit? Rhetorical space limit? My hunch is that, as with hyperlinking, the shorter, more direct, and relevant the “trail of links” the better.

Extemporaneous Preaching and the Art of Improvisation

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by John McClure in Musings

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delivery, extemporaneous, improvisation, memory, preaching, preparation, sermon, speaking

The best extemporaneous preachers always acknowledge that extemporaneous does not mean “impromptu.” In fact, in order for the extemporaneous preacher to avoid rambling and loss of focus, more preparation is often called for. Some advocates for extemporaneous preaching prefer to keep the entire text-to-sermon preparation process in the oral domain and never write anything on paper, other than a few “cues” or lead sentences for each block of thought. Others go through the same sermon preparation process that most preachers do, sometimes preparing a completed manuscript, or outline, but opt for an entirely oral delivery that is not memorized, but improvised.

Perhaps the key question that haunts all extemporaneous preachers is “What if I forget!?

forgetful Kirk Byron Jones, in his book The Jazz of Preaching: How to Preach with Great Freedom and Joy, argues that the best way to address this question is through developing one’s skills at improvisation.

Jones notes that the word “improvisation” comes from the Latin words meaning “not provided” or “not foreseen.” In the world of jazz, improvisation means learning to trust the music, remaining open to its nuances and rhythms, and to the directions it might go. The key to good improvisation, according to Jones, is “having more than enough to say.” The jazz musician develops hundreds, even thousands of “riffs” and can employ them in the wink of an eye. This takes lots of practice or “woodshedding.” For the preacher, this means that preparation is hugely important – developing one’s ideas, illustrations, turns of phrase – riffs, if you will, so that one has more than enough to say in the pulpit. Of course, this also means that one must learn to keep this improvisation under control. In most cultural contexts, the sermon cannot become the equivalent of a Grateful Dead or Phish six hour improvisational jam session.

Extemporaneous preaching is not for everyone! For those who value the well turned phrase, or who simply cannot trust their improvisational powers, manuscript preaching is a probably a good idea. If it can be done, however, extemporaneous peaching maximizes rapport with listeners, increases listener participation, and enhances the power of tone and delivery in preaching. It can also help us respond to the immediacy of the situation, shaping our messages, to some extent, “on the spot” as an improvisation between text, theology, and life.

Epiphany as Sermon Form

03 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by John McClure in Musings, Views from the Street

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Bible and Preaching, epiphany, Eugene Lowry, homiletic method, homiletical plot, John Dominic Crossan, lectionary, lectionary preaching, parable, parabolic communication, plot, preaching, sermon form, sermon illustration

How does one preach “epiphany” in an “epiphany-like” way? And how does a preacher keep epiphany alive throughout the year in one’s preaching?

Epiphany, in one translation, means “manifestation.” It is the manifestation or “showing forth” of God’s glory and divinity in Jesus Christ. The word also translates as a sudden insight into the essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some ordinary occurrence or experience. Epiphanic truth, therefore, is truth that arrives as a sudden insight. It is the endpoint of significant delay, and is the hidden object of great anticipation. And its arrival is unexpected because it is not grand and overstated, but shows itself within the ordinary stuff of life – like a child in a manger.

Many of the best sermons are “epiphanic.” They delay the arrival of the sermon’s meaning or deepest “truth,” and then, within the anticipation established by that delay, “manifest” that truth by means of the ordinary – in an image of grace, mercy, hope in spite of despair, love, or joy within the fabric of everyday life.

Eugene Lowry’s “homiletical plot” is one such sermon form. In 1980 Eugene L. Lowry published a very popular little book entitled The Homiletical Plot: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form. In this book, he created what is now commonly known as the Lowry Loop to describe the way that a simple narrative plot functions in a sermon. The first part of the loop involves upsetting the equilibrium. An enigma is presented that energizes the sermon’s forward movement: something is wrong that needs fixing, something is out of balance that needs restoration, something is missing that needs finding, something is confusing that needs clarification, etc. This problem is deepened in the second, and downward part of the loop, called analyzing the discrepancy. Like a good plot line, the sermon goes deeper into the problem at hand, complicating the issue and creating a heightened concern among listeners. At this point, the sermon reaches the bottom of the loop in which the preacher discloses the clue to resolution. This is the decisive turning point in the plot. The gospel brings a reversal or “aha” that begins to move the loop upward toward resolution. This, in effect, is the “epiphany” or manifestation of gospel truth that is the heart of the sermon. This “clue” is often taken from ordinary human experience – a picture of “God with us.” From here the sermon moves upward in the fourth part of the loop, experiencing the gospel. The preacher fleshes out the good news of the gospel and its meaning. Finally, at the end of the loop, the sermon helps the congregation anticipate the consequences. The preacher unpacks fully the implications of the sermon’s message for the living of life. In order the help preachers remember each aspect of the loop, Lowry created a little memory device for each part of the loop: Oops!, Ugh!, Aha!, Whee!, and Yeah! The “Aha!” is the epiphany at the heart of the sermon.

Another epiphany-form is parable. Parabolic communication is designed to introduce as an “epiphany” some form of contradiction and unexpected irresolution where reconciliation and order are otherwise assumed. According to John Dominic Crossan, parable is the polar opposite of myth and functions as an agent of deconstruction, interruption, and change. Many parables take what listeners expect to hear and reverse it. In this form of communication, therefore, the epiphany in the sermon is some form of reversal of listener expectation. For instance, in the New Testament story of the Pharisee and the publican we assume that the original listener expected the Pharisee’s prayer to be accepted by God and the publican’s to be rejected. In the story, however, the opposite occurs, opening the story to new meanings. Epiphany within parabolic preaching is iconoclastic, introducing contradictions or unexpected tensions where none previously existed.

So, how does one preach “epiphany” in an “epiphany-like” way? In two ways, mainly. First, by acting like a storyteller and delaying the arrival of one’s “meaning” in the sermon – and allowing it to arrive as a “clue” embedded within the ordinary fabric of human life. Second, by interrupting and reversing listener expectations; showing how God’s ways cannot be “storied” at all, but often arrive in entirely unexpected and counter-intuitive ways.

Advent Sermons as “Love Letters”

01 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by John McClure in Musings

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advent, desire, letters, love, Maryville College, preaching, sermon, White Pine, WWII

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my family gathered at a sibling’s home in Kentucky. We used to gather at my parents’ home in Alabama, but both of my parents have been dead for more than a decade now. This year, my older sister brought two larger binders filled with letters that my parents had written to one another during World War II. She had discovered them in an old box taken from their attic, and had arranged them in chronological order. The letters we read were all written during August and September, 1944. At the time they were written, both of my parents were barely twenty years old. He was in boot camp in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She was at home from Maryville College for the summer. They had met at Maryville, and were secretly engaged. But they were now separated, and, without knowing it at the time, he would be sent into battle in just three months as a medic in Patton’s 3^rd Army, 365^th medical battalion.

On Friday after Thanksgiving, four of the five siblings, along with my daughter, son, and spouses sat and read aloud to each other these letters we had never before read. The more we read, the more deeply engrossed we became, hardly noticing the passing of time and the setting of the sun. We were caught up in the world of two young people, deeply in love, torn apart by war, struggling with decisions about vocation, marriage, family, health (my mother had a heart murmur), all of which was clouded over by war, the loss of friends in battle, and the complete uncertainty of the future.

The next day, with Thanksgiving over and the season of Advent approaching, it occurred to me that all of the feelings and hopes expressed in those letters are at the heart of the meaning of Advent. The letters were literally dripping with eros (love), by which I mean the deepest kind of desire that can be humanly experienced: desire for intimacy, desire for health, desire for peace, desire for family, desire for friendship, desire for life, desire for a work, desire for fulfillment, desire for a joy-filled future, and the deep desire to know and to be known by God. In many ways, Advent is the season of desire for Christians. Messianism is, at its core, an experience of profoundest eros – the desire for Emmanuel, God with us.

During Advent, preachers could do no better than to write love letters to their congregations similar to the ones my parents wrote to one another in 1944. In these homiletical letters, we might speak to our congregations as partners on a great journey. On this journey, there is often distance between and among us – but we will create ways to unite. There is violence, warfare, injustice, and poverty, and misery all around – but we will not let these harsh realities separate us from our hope for peace. As we travel, our bodies will sometimes fail us, hearts will murmur, joints will wear out, mental faculties will bend or even break – but we will find other ways to keep moving forward despite these difficulties. Our churches and religious institutions will change and sometimes fail us – but we know that the Word we follow does not let us down. Our families and friends will change and sometimes abandon us or die – but we will seize a few memories to live on, and if we can’t remember them, we will create new memories that will sustain us. But most of all, we will never stop feeling the eros within us. We will not run from this desire, but will instead live into it with all our might, finding in that desire the way toward a new future, the one that God is preparing for us. We don’t know what it is, but we desire it more than anything else in the world, like my parents did – she sitting on her bed in her room that summer in White Pine, Tennessee, writing beautiful hand-written letters to my father; and he, sitting in a silent corner of the mess hall, writing her back, as the world fell apart all around them.

This, at least in part, is what it means to preach during Advent. We preach as if our lives depended upon it, knowing that in spite of everything to the contrary, nothing can stop our desire for each other’s happiness, our desire for God, and our desire for God’s future. This desire is utterly irrepressible in all of us as Christians.

As preachers, we could do no better than to send love letters like this during the season of Advent.

Preaching and Love

05 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by John McClure in Musings, Who is this?

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

domestic violence, Eph. 4:16, Levinas, love, love God, love neighbor, preaching, purpose of preaching, sermon preparation, the love command, thou shalt not kill

The wonderful new preacher at my church, Mary Louise McCullough, preached a strong and thoughtful sermon this week on the Great Commandment. As I drove home from church I couldn’t help but reflect on love and the task of preaching. Her sermon seemed to embody perfectly much of what I think on this topic. I have long been committed to the idea that love for the human other and love for God are utterly inseparable.

Years ago, I came across what seized me as one of the strongest statements regarding love of neighbor as the locus of God’s word for the preacher. It came from an odd place for a teacher of Christian preaching – through the words of Jewish post-holocaust French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas:

“This face of the other, without recourse, without security, exposed to my look and in its weakness and its mortality is also the one that orders me: “thou shalt not kill.” There is, in the face, the supreme authority that commands, and I always say it is the word of God. The face is the locus of the word of God. There is a word of God in the other, (my italics), a non-thematized word.” (Alterity and Transcendence, 104)

For the preacher, what seems to me to be crucial in this quotation is that the very locus of the word of God lies in the face (visage) of the other. God summons us by God’s word through the reality of the vulnerable other person.

For me, this means that preaching begins in the summons by God, through the face of the other, to 1) desire good for the other and 2) to desire not to harm the other. These, it seems me, are two sides of the same love-coin. And the ultimate purpose of preaching is to bear witness to this word of love.

Although preaching has many other penultimate purposes: salvation, prophecy, healing, reconciliation, hope, challenging the principalities and powers, and so on, its ultimate goal is human flourishing before God. This aspect of love gives expression to what theologian Wendy Farley once called “eros for the other” by which she means love as an aching desire (eros) for fullness of life for all others as God’s creatures. This becomes the positive pole of love in Christian preaching, and it supports the church as it “builds itself up in love.” (Eph. 4:16)

The goal of love, however, also imposes a seemingly negative or at least cautious dynamic on preaching, indicated in the command “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” A homiletic of love is also a way of preaching that is deeply concerned with repairing and redeeming one’s theology and language in order to do less harm to the vulnerable in one’s congregation and in the larger culture. This does not mean that preachers are debilitated and unable to say anything for fear of doing harm. Rather, they are always aware that, when speaking for others, it is important that they have also done some prior speaking with others, in the deepest sense. In other words, preachers need as many real, loving, depth encounters with different kinds of people as humanly possible. This is not simply a pastoral practice, but it is a social and global practice.

For instance, some years ago, after preaching what I considered to be a prophetic and challenging sermon about “forgiving seventy times seven,” I received a phone call from a woman in the congregation who had recently escaped a violent relationship. She informed me that my sermon could potentially have talked her into staying in her situation, in which case she might not still be alive. Although not intending harm, my sermon suffered by not having learned from those who are caught up in dangerous cycles of violence.

The same could be said for listening to the experiences of those who have experienced depression or mental illness, those with long-term illnesses or disabilities, persons experiencing unemployment or financial disaster, women and children in Afghanistan, victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and so on and on.

Of course it is not possible to consult everyone! And we will always need to repair our language, based on well-placed feedback.

But it is possible to add one helpful question in this regard to sermon preparation: How might this message be heard by ______________? – and to put the most vulnerable faces we have encountered into the space at the end of this question.

When in doubt about how to answer this question, it is a good idea to ask someone, to encounter a living face and learn, or at the very least to do some reading and research.

At the end of the day, I am convinced that it is the great joy, but also the significant burden of preaching, to bear witness to the word of God (love) that summons us through the face of all others – for all are vulnerable. This word is the double-sided word of love that makes those of us who dare to preach desire with all our hearts to promote fullness of life in Christ on the one hand, and to do no harm on the other.