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The King’s Speech and Learning Preaching

19 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by in Who is this?

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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

Posted by in Connecting the Dots

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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

Posted by in Connecting the Dots

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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.