Five ‘Places” to Find a Sermon (part two)

20 Saturday Aug 2011

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In this post, I indicate two more places to find a sermon. Unlike the first three, the following two places are discovered, not by beginning with the biblical text,  but by beginning with your operative theology (Place 4) or  historical context and situation (Place 5).

Place 4. In the Theological Claims of the Text. In this approach, your operative theology (liberationist, feminist, evangelical, existentialist, etc.) and/or tradition (Lutheran, Reformed, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Baptist, Methodist, etc.) becomes much more active and acts as a guide, leading you to the place where you find a sermon. Following the lead of this theological guide, you travel toward a key theological claim at work in a text; a claim about justice, mercy, sanctification, salvation, hope, etc., depending on your operative theology. Once you arrive at that claim you will allow it to shape the message and form of the sermon.

William Sloane Coffin, whose theology was often strongly liberationist in tone, once preached a powerful sermon on the healing of the paralytic. His theology drew his eyes to the moment in the text when the paralytic, whose sins had been forgiven, was invited to get up from his pallet and walk. For Coffin this moment in the story revealed a crucial theological claim – that new forms of ethical responsibility should accompany and in fact complete our experience of forgiveness by Christ. To paraphrase Coffin’s words “the problem for the paralytic was not forgiveness, but responsibility – response-ability – the ability to respond to the love of God….to get up off that stretcher and walk.” Coffin then highlighted the tendency among many Christians to spend their time celebrating and basking in the blessings of forgiveness in a way that effectively kept them on stretchers – unwilling and unable to get up and do the liberating work of God. For Coffin, the theological claim of the text was the unity of justification (forgiveness) and sanctification (liberative action), and it was from this theological place that he preached his entire sermon.

When preaching from this place, your theology generates both the tone and focus of your sermon. The language of the sermon will not reiterate the words on the page of the Bible (place 1), develop continuities with historical events or formations such as “empire” or “exile,” (place 2) or imitate the way the language of the text works (place 3). Instead, the sermon will focus on a particular moment, or set of moments in the biblical text that identify, focus, or illuminate a particular theological claim you are making. Sermon listeners will hear those biblical moments shaped into a sermon by your theological claim regarding forgiveness, liberation, hope, idolatry, obedience, love, etc.

Place 5. In today’s situation as catalyst for the text’s meaning. In this approach, you begin the journey toward a sermon with something significant that is going on in your situation or broader context. You then ask what meaning or idea in the text is catalyzed by its confrontation with your context today. Throughout history we have seen how meanings in the biblical text are catalyzed by our own moment in history. Often these are meanings we could never have known before. For instance, the civil rights movement catalyzed new meanings from the biblical text about slavery, systemic evil, and oppression. The feminist movement catalyzed new meanings regarding sexual violence, forgiveness, and atonement.

Adopting this approach, you might pick up the newspaper or reflect on an important issue confronting the larger community or congregation. Then, ask “What meaning lies dormant within this text awaiting this moment in our history or life together as a nation, community, or congregation, to be discovered?” Although this may lead to a dead end (or to frightful eisegesis – so be careful!), it is amazing how often you will find a genuinely helpful idea, or an entire re-framing of the current situation provided by a seemingly unrelated biblical text.

The Sunday after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon I was slated to preach at a large church. I had originally chosen to preach John 3:16 – a difficult sermon in which I was trying to re-think more exclusivist interpretations of this passage. After the attack on the trade towers and Pentagon, I felt strongly that the situation at hand was catalyzing a different trajectory of meaning from the text – one that hovered around the deeper meaning of “belief” (“whoever believes in me”) as a form of trust. I moved the entire focus of the sermon toward the ultimate trustworthiness of God in a world where trust had been shaken to its core.

When preaching a sermon from this place, you will use language that shows how the listeners’ own context is, in fact, already there, in the world projected by the biblical text. The ultimate meaning of our context exists as a latent trajectory or horizon of meaning in the text awaiting this moment to be discovered. Instead of hearing you draw dynamic analogies from the words of the text (place 1), identify historical continuities behind the text (place 2), re-perform the text’s rhetoric (place 3), or locate specific theological claims in the text (place 4), listeners will hear you dig deep within the immediate situation and discover there a thought or image that serves as a catalyst for a hidden trajectory of meaning within the biblical text.

In summary, there are at least five places to find a sermon:

Place 1. On the page of the biblical text, finding equivalences to its obvious features

Place 2. Behind the biblical text finding historical continuities between then and now

Place 3. In front of the biblical text, in what the text’s language does to us as readers

Place 4. In the theological claims of the text, attenuated through the lens of our operative theologies

Place 5. In our situation, where trajectories of meaning from the text await this situation to be discovered.

For more about these options, see The Four Codes of Preaching: Rhetorical Strategies, and the section on “hermeneutics” in Preaching Words: 144 Key Terms in Homiletics. 

Five ‘Places’ to Find a Sermon (part one)

04 Thursday Aug 2011

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In this post and the next, I will describe briefly five “places” to find a sermon. Although there is nothing strikingly new here, it is always good to be reminded of the options that are available. These options are not, of course, mutually exclusive.

Place 1. On the page of the biblical text. In this approach, you find a sermon idea among the obvious features of the biblical text (in translation) or what is “on the page.” Of course, in order to be sure that you correctly understand what seems “obvious,” you need to study the text in its context first. But as a preacher, once you are certain what the text is saying, you will return to the words and thoughts (ideas, metaphors, images) “on the page” as the place to find the sermon. As you think about these words and thoughts, ask yourself: “What might be dynamically equivalent to this thought/image/word in today’s situation?” By dynamically equivalent, I mean to imply that you allow some well-considered latitude. Don’t remain overly wooden or literal when identifying an equivalent idea. For instance, In the story of Mary and Martha the image of Mary seeking instruction from Jesus is dynamically equivalent to any action of attending carefully to the words of Jesus in today’s context. A non-dynamic or literal equivalent would focus only on instances when women attend to Jesus’ words and thoughts today. This may constrict and overly narrow the meaning of the text.

When you preach from this “place,” your congregation will not hear you referring so much to the historical context for the biblical text as to the translated words on the page of the biblical text. In effect, you are asking them to live lives that are in some way imitative of, or closely analogous to the clear and straightforward meaning of the words on the page.

Place 2. Behind the biblical Text. In this approach, you find a sermon idea “behind the text” in its historical situation. Through careful exegetical study, you arrive at the text’s historical, traditional, social, and religious situation (exodus, exile, poverty, empire, wilderness, passover, etc.). Having arrived at this “place” behind the text, you will preach a sermon that invites the congregation to live in historical continuity with the community of people who spoke or recorded the words on the page. You ask questions such as? “How are we also people struggling with exodus, empire, or some other similar situation in these ways?”

In Ched Myer’s commentary on Mark’s gospel, for instance, he argues that the “fishers of people” text is best understood in a situation of empire in which the gap between rich and poor is ever-widening. He notes that Mark’s listeners would have heard these as apocalyptic words referring to images of fishers in Jeremiah 16:16, and Amos 4:2 where fishing hooks and nets were not only used for gathering in God’s chosen people, but for separating out the evildoers from their midst. In our current post-Enron, debt-crisis situation, the preacher may discover strong historical continuities between first century struggles with empire and our own struggles, and the need for “fishers of people” who will both gather in the wounded and pronounce judgement on the purveyors of empire.

When you preach from this “place,” your congregation will not hear the words on the page as much as references to “Mark,” or “Matthew’s community,” or “during the exile,” and other indicators that your sermon comes from behind the biblical text. In effect you are inviting listeners to live lives in historical continuity with our forebears in the faith.

Place 3. In Front of the biblical Text. In this approach, you find a sermon idea “in front of the text,” in what the language or rhetoric of the text does. One way to get to this “place” is to say: This text sounds like __________” (a sales pitch, a prayer, lamentation, praise, a lover’s quarrel, a negotiation, an argument, etc.) For instance, Tom Long once preached a sermon about Jesus’ trip to the temple as a little child. He was struck with the way the language of the text seemed to shout: “Everything about this person is a mystery!” He used the litany “Did you ever get the feeling there’s something going on you don’t understand?” to draw the reader deeper into the mystery of Jesus created by the language of the text.

When you preach from this “place,” your congregation will not hear so much the actual words of the text, or about “Mark’s community’s desperate struggle with empire,” but a re-performance of the text’s rhetorical or communicative force – what it “does” to us.

Let’s stop here for now. These are the first three places you can go, if you want to find a sermon. These are all “bible-centered” approaches – starting in, behind, or in front of the biblical text. In the next installment, we will look at two places you can go that are not as textually centered – but which still honor the biblical witness.

For a more detailed description of these options, see The Four Codes of Preaching: Rhetorical Strategies, and the word “hermeneutics” in Preaching Words: 144 Key Terms in Homiletics.

The King’s Speech and Learning Preaching

19 Tuesday Jul 2011

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The movie The King’s Speech caught me completely off guard. Having struggled in a similar way with stuttering for the first 10 years of my life, the movie was, at times, painful to watch. As I re-assess my experience of viewing the movie, however, it occurs to me that this early childhood experience has been deeply formative of my later life and work. Several things have become clearer for me these days about how preaching is best learned and taught. Here are a few:

1. We preach best from a “voiced” place. In their book Saved from Silence: Finding Women’s Voice in Preaching, Mary Lin Hudson and Mary Donovan Turner encourage a classroom exercise that I have used off and on over the years. They suggest that preachers should try to recall places and times when they felt most “voiced,” and image those moments when preaching. This, of course, also suggests that we learn preaching best in safe spaces where we feel voiced – which, sadly, is sometimes not the case in homiletical education.

2. Finding words that will work for you is a crucial aspect of learning to preach. It is not always easy to connect one’s inner voice with one’s outer voice as a preacher. I can recall what it was like to have tremendously important thoughts and ideas that I could not vocalize. The same is often true for preachers. Part of the problem here is the pressure to perform perfectly or at least competently within a more or less standard idiom or “King’s Speech.” It’s not that the stutterer doesn’t hear, experience, or know what this idiom is, it is the fact that some of those words and patterns of thought just won’t work. Alternatives must be found, and time taken to shape difficult sounds and ideas. For the preacher, this means seizing and trusting what we can articulate, and not worrying so much about what we can’t. I won’t be able to say it the way homiletical royalty such as Fred Craddock or Barbara Brown Taylor do. I may not even be able to say it the way the preacher down the road with the fast-growing church says it. But I have to put that out of my mind for now, and take hold of my best possibilities for articulation right now.

3. All homiletical speech is, to some extent, stuttering speech. There is nothing wrong with uttering our love for God in whatever sounds or gestures can issue forth best from us. God has been known to honor and use all kinds of “speech.” I’ll never forget one Sunday more than a decade ago when Dougie, a young child in our congregation, sensing that I was sad over the recent death of my father, curled up in the pew with his head on my leg, and was sad with me for about 10 minutes. A pretty amazing sermon – and not one word spoken! When teaching homiletics, this translates for me into a certain amount of generosity for the sometimes idiosyncratic or idiomatic ways that students often speak. Increasingly, I find myself asking “What is this preacher trying to get out? What is he or she trying to say?, and how can I help her or him say it better;” rather than saying “This makes no sense at all,” or “This is not good “King’s Speech.”

4. Learning to preach requires endless creativity. In the King’s Speech, the speech therapist used music as a way to connect the King with his voice. The same was true for me. As a child, whenever I sang, I felt loquacious! Words were no longer hurdles to jump over, but turned into liquid flowing freely and happily. I could say amazing things when I sang. As you learn to preach, there may be creative options for getting the words out that you have never considered. Many of these are connected to the arts (literature, music, drama, visual art). Don’t be afraid to explore these creative methods. I think that my recent return to music as an analogy for theological “invention” (deciding what to say) in my new book, Mashup Religion: Pop Music and Theological Invention, is one way for me to begin to explore such options.

To summarize, I suppose what I am trying to say is that learning to preach is not simply a matter of learning “the King’s Speech.” In the end, it involves imaging ourselves as truly voiced by God, entering a safe, un-pre-judged space for homiletical production where we can find words or other expressions for the gospel that will work for us, seizing and trusting the voice we have right now, uttering our love for God and neighbor in whatever sounds or gestures issue best from us trusting that God will honor and use them, and engaging in endless creativity (yes, even singing!) to get our homiletical expressions flowing freely.

Narrowing the search for the right sermon illustration

15 Friday Jul 2011

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In the old days (meaning when I was a parish minister) publishers produced books such as 5000 Best Sermon Illustrations, or Stories for Sunday, and we would plow through mostly irrelevant, sentimental, and usually dated ditties culled from Reader’s Digest and well-known sermons for a gem, often wasting untold amounts of precious time. Nowadays, the Internet stands in, and the preacher’s wrist is worn out clicking on link after link – sermon helps, newspaper websites, blogs. Of course, preachers also search for illustrations in lots of other places – books, pastoral and personal experience, etc.

When illustration-searching seems to be going nowhere, it might be due to one, very simple problem – the need to narrow your search. We all know that the key to good browsing is to know what we’re looking for in the most specific terms possible.

In our book, Claiming Theology in the Pulpit, Burton Cooper and I identify several needed “theological moments” that should go into sermon preparation, and one of them needs to occur before going in search of illustrations. This “theological moment” can be tremendously helpful for narrowing one’s search for the right illustration. Here’s a little process to try.

1. Identify what, in particular, you are trying to illustrate or illumine with an image, picture, story, etc. Write it down.

2. Now stop. Don’t start searching yet! Have a “theological moment.” Ask yourself what broad theological category you are illustrating (sin, faith, the human condition, evil, church, hope, God, salvation, eschatology, grace, etc.).

3. Without over-ruling the theological emphases in the biblical text, remind yourself what you, within your operative theology (liberationist, evangelical, process-relational, existentialist, feminist, etc.) want to communicate on an ongoing basis about this theological category. For instance, if the broad category is sin, remember that sin looks different for a liberation theologian (Segundo, for instance) and an existentialist (Tillich, for instance). Right? For the liberationist, sin is the oppressive misuse of power, for the existentialist, sin is any idolatrous attempt to secure oneself against one’s finitude. If your category is a bit more specific – forgiveness, for instance, remind yourself of any issues attached to the idea of forgiveness that you don’t want to forget from within your theological perspective. A feminist-liberationist, for instance, will want to remember the close relationship between forgiveness and justice.

4. Now, return to the task of finding an illustration. Hopefully, this little exercise will considerably narrow your search. If you’re an existentialist, you now know that you’re looking for an illustration for sin that is a picture of self-securing idolatry. If you’re a liberationist, you’re now searching for a picture of oppressive power. If forgiveness is your target idea, and you’re a feminist-liberationist, you’ll go in search of a story where the restoration of justice and right relationship precedes or accompanies forgiveness.

This simple practice, applied consistently, can considerably narrow your search for illustrations, assure theological consistency, and save you precious time in sermon preparation. Try it.

The importance of unguided reading

12 Tuesday Jul 2011

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The English literature department at The University of the South (Sewanee) in the early 70s was fairly conservative and single-minded. As a student majoring in English Lit I was forbidden to pursue any literary critical option other than form criticism. In our courses, we were not permitted to read anything after Joyce.

The drama department, on the other hand, was filled with wonderful renegades, reading and performing Beckett, Pinter, Osborne, and others, and harbored a few who were bantering around terms like “structuralism,” semiotics, and “archetypal criticism.” I had some small ability as an actor, which led me into the clutches of these mis-guided people on occasion, and I began to read “outside the lines” prescribed by the English department. Of course, I ran into serious trouble when I wrote my honors English thesis – “An Archetypal Study of Moby Dick” (can you imagine!). I’ll never forget the day I found myself sitting at the end of a long wooden conference table in the library basement defending my work, as ten Oxford drape-clad form critics leaned forward eagerly awaiting their turn to attack.

I survived (barely), and surprisingly discovered that my mind had been stretched by having to defend my ideas. Not only had I learned form criticism better, but I had pushed into new territory (archetypal criticism, structuralist criticism) that would prove immensely important in later years. And I had pursued and learned to defend ideas that stoked my emerging intellectual passions.

Unguided reading became a kind of obsession for me in later years, and continues to be crucial to my work today. At the University of Glasgow, studying Anglo-Irish literature, I thrived on the tutorial system, reading the book list for the M.Phil, but spending hours parked in the library stacks reading other books next to those books on the shelves – and on surrounding shelves. This practice continued when I later arrived at Princeton for doctoral study. It continued when I began to write – juxtaposing structuralism and semiotics with homiletics in The Four Codes of Preaching, continental philosophy (Levinas primarily) and theologies of the interhuman (E. Farley) with homiletics in Otherwise Preaching and The Roundtable Pulpit, and theories of culture, cultural production, and composition in Mashup Religion.

I find myself worrying a lot these days that we insist on too much coursework for our students at Vanderbilt, or too much controlled reading, not allowing the latitude for students with genuine intellectual passion to pursue unguided reading. I’m not sure what can be done, but from where I sit, this kind of reading is absolutely crucial if students are to find the scholars that speak most powerfully to their true and best intellectual interests and instincts.