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Tag Archives: preaching

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.

Collaborative Preaching

01 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by John McClure in Who is this?

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Bible and Preaching, bible study, Biblical Hermeneutics, Christianity, Church, collaborative preaching, conversation, dialogue, feedback, John S. McClure, preaching, preparation, Presbyterian, Religion, Roundtable Pulpit, sermon

I wrote a little book about “collaborative preaching” some years ago, and have been gratified by the number of folks who have adopted this method, and for all that they have taught me over the years.

Collaborative preaching is preaching that involves an intentional effort to involve others in both sermon brainstorming and feedback.

The Sermon Roundtable. As a collaborative preacher, you will form a small group of lay persons (what I call a “sermon roundtable”), including those from within and outside the church. This group meets each week with you to discuss biblical, theological, and experiential materials for the upcoming sermon.

It is important to keep the group small: usually 3-4 members. It is also important that the group changes regularly – every two to three months – so that an “in-group” dynamic doesn’t take over, and in order to add diversity to the insights that are provided to the preacher.

The Tag-Team Approach. One of the best ways to accomplish this constantly rotating group rhythm is through a “tag-team” approach. Each group member joins for a designated length of time. When a person leaves the group, it is their responsibility to “tag” someone to take their place. The goal is to seek someone who will “shake the group up a bit,” adding a new dimension to the biblical interpretation and theological ideas in the group. This might be someone younger, or older, or of another race or ethnicity, or from outside the church, or of another faith, or of no faith.

Change Group Locations. Another way to add richness to the process is to meet in different social locations so that sermon messages are not constricted by the worldview of your congregation. Sermon brainstorming might take place, for instance, in a public place such as a library or shopping mall, or at a women’s shelter or homeless shelter.

Your Task, Should You Accept It. Your primary task is to begin conversation about the biblical text, and to take careful notes. When you prepare the sermon, you will make use of aspects of both the form and message of the collaborative brainstorming process.

Face-to-Face is Important. Of course, collaboration could make use of technologies such as Facebook, blogs, bulletin boards, etc. But the genius of this method comes, in many respects, from its embodied, face-to-face quality. Much of what you can take into the pulpit comes from actual group dynamics, including bodily postures and attitudes: leaning in, hesitating, following, dodging, getting a footing, interrupting, re-framing, etc. I say more about this in the book.

Why Do It? The goals of this type of preaching are many: educating congregations on what sermons are and how they function in the community, increasing ownership of the ministry of proclamation in the church, teaching the Bible, widening preaching’s audience, promoting a public form of theology in the pulpit, and symbolizing a collaborative form of leadership in the church.

Beyond these goals, those who use this method testify to three surprising results:

1. Sermon preparation time is shorter. You would think just the opposite. If the groups are small and kept to about one hour, it is amazing how many new ideas for preaching can be introduced.

2. It is harder to avoid tough topics and prophetic issues. Again, you’d think just the opposite. But if you lead in a truly open-minded way, people will usually raise the tough issues. Most people want to hear their preacher deal with these topics.

3. Your “authority” in the pulpit will increase. Again, this seems counter-intuitive. But, as Jackson Carroll points out, authority in a late modern context is largely a function of relationships, and this method of preaching builds relationships around the pulpit.

A Couple of Videos. If you are interested in this method, or just want to know more, I’ve prepared a couple of small video presentations about it.

Portable Preaching

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by John McClure in Musings, Views from the Street

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

application, Christianity, Church, focus statement, Fred Craddock, function statement, homiletics, Lucy Rose, preaching, Religion, sermon, Spirituality, Thomas G. Long

John Henry Newman

John Henry Newman, in his essay “University Preaching” said the following:

Talent, logic, learning, words, manner, voice, action, all are required for the perfection of a preacher; but ‘one thing is necessary,’ – an intense perception and appreciation of the end for which (the preacher) preaches, and that is, to be the minister of some definite spiritual good to those who hear…. (bold-face and parenthetical change added, as quoted by John Broadus in his Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, 255).

In homiletics textbooks, this idea that sermons should have a “definite spiritual end” is normally labelled the “sermon application.” And in homiletics classrooms, teachers of preaching such as myself often speak about this as the business of making sermons “portable,” giving listeners something that is not only memorable, but motivational – that leads to specific actions, behavior, or to a new persuasion. Application also refers to “bringing home” an idea. Portability means that the message “comes to roost” – – it suddenly becomes about us, in this room, in this local situation and can be taken away with us into our daily lives.

I find Newman’s words helpful – urging us to offer some “definite spiritual good” to the listener. “Definite” means unambiguous, clearly stated, and decided beforehand by the preacher. “Spiritual good” implies that the sermon influences the human spirit in some way for the better.

In a similar fashion, Thomas G. Long, in his much-used basic preaching text The Witness of Preaching encourages preachers to jot down both a “focus statement” and a “function statement” before crafting a sermon. The focus statement summarizes the preacher’s message. The function statement summarizes the preacher’s desired result. For Long, this result should be tethered as closely as possible to the literary or rhetorical thrust of the biblical text preached. He wants us to ask first of all: “What do the words of the biblical text want us to do or become as a result of this sermon? Texts don’t just “mean” things, they try to do things!

At least three aspects of this way of thinking are much debated.

1. Should the preacher always decide beforehand what spiritual good is to be brought home at the sermon’s end? Inductive homiletics, under the tutelage of Fred Craddock, questions this presupposition. Instead of moving from the exposition of a general truth to its “application,” the inductive sermon moves through a range of experiences toward a general truth. In many inductive sermons, the listener is left to complete the picture – drawing conclusions that best fit their own faith experience.

Craddock’s picture of “Inductive logic” (from As One Without Authority)

2. The persuasive element in application-oriented preaching is sometimes called into question. Lucy Rose, in her book Sharing the Word: Preaching in the Roundtable Church, argues that this persuasive and transmissive model of communication is non-dialogical and reinforces a gap between pulpit and pew. It makes the goal of preaching the business of transmitting what the preacher wants to happen into the hearts and minds of rather passive listeners. This tends to disempower listeners – even if and when they nod and articulate their consent, as in call-and-response forms of preaching. In effect, listeners learn to be passive – awaiting the portable golden nugget(s) to arrive each week.

3. Others believe that “applications,” especially when they are too specific, let some people off the hook. If the preacher is too precise in spelling out a particular “pay-off”, people may find wiggle room enough to say, in effect: “That’s not about me.”

Despite these concerns, when interviewed about preaching, sermon listeners indicate that they generally listen for some kind of portable “take home” element in sermons. The Listening to Listeners to Sermons Project, a massive empirical project funded by the Lilly Foundation, contained several findings that point directly to the desire among listeners for some kind of “portable” application in sermons. Three of these, summarized by Ronald J. Allen, who spearheaded this project, point toward sermon portability:

  • The sermon should center in the Bible and make the biblical material come alive for the listener
  • The message needs to relate in a practical way to the lives of the listening communities
  • Congregations are eager for sermons to help them make theological and ethical sense of the range of life‘s issues
  • Ministers ought to be specific in helping congregations draw out the implications of the Bible and their deepest theological convictions

I sometimes draw out the distinction between denotative “applications” of the gospel, and the connotative “implications” of the gospel. This idea is not new. The great mid-twentieth-century homiletician H. Grady Davis, in his book Design for Preaching put it this way:

“…a sermon idea of more than a bare thought. It is a thought plus its overtones and its groundswell of implication and urgency.”

Whereas an application might denote a particular sought-after behavior or attitude, an implication is not always explicitly stated. Implications surround us with images, ideas, questions, angles of vision that “implicate” us in some way. Instead of striking directly, like an arrow, implications absorb us into a sphere of gospel-influence.

Implications should not be wishy washy. They can and should be intentionally pursued by the preacher. They can be honed as carefully sought “spiritual goods” within sermons, and might include such things as being implicated in the gospel’s relentless hope, or its ethical challenge, or its unexpected offer of forgiveness. Preachers still have to decide ahead of time what such implications are, but they do not have to turn them into a highly specific sermon-takaway (or a list of such things).

In the end, it is likely that all sermons have some kind of function (even if it is to put the listener to sleep). Finding that function, whether an “application” or an “implication”, truing it up, refining it, and focusing it on the situation of one’s listeners can be crucial for making a sermon portable in the best sense of the word.

Preaching the Good News as GOOD News

30 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by John McClure in Musings

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

anger, Good News, Gospel, imperatives, John S. McClure, motives, nagging, positive preaching, preacher, preaching, preachy, sermon

Preaching the Good News…

Image …as Good News

For a variety of reasons, we often fail to communicate any motivating “good news” in our sermons. From my experience, there are several reasons for this.

Sometimes we cave in to the culture’s pejorative definition of “preach” – thus the need to sound “preachy.” We load sermons with hard or soft imperatives: “we must,” “we should,” or “let us,” and “we are called to….” When this happens, I am reminded of the hospital nurse, using the “nurse’s ‘we’”: “we need to take our medicine now,” “let’s sit up now and eat some lunch.”

At other times, we worry that the congregation is not doing all that it could do to support our exciting vision for church growth or social justice. We feel compelled to nag at our congregations for their failings.

At other times, we lose sight of the redemptive good news altogether. We are lost in doubt, lack of theological confidence or conviction, and can only muster a few “hints and helps for daily living” as a positive message on Sunday morning.

In the worst case scenario, we allow ourselves to become angry with something in the congregation or culture at large. We feel the need to “load up on people” week after week, dividing the sheep from the goats.

There is certainly plenty of bad news in this world, and the good news that we preach should not appear pollyannish. With this in mind, I still feel compelled from time to time to remind myself that the heart and soul of preaching is the good news of God’s redemptive grace and mercy. Whether preaching a text from the Hebrew Bible or from the New Testament, we are fundamentally in the service of a God of redemption and hope. With this in mind, I offer these suggestions:

  1. Preach only what inspires you. It is easy to finish several hours of exegesis only to arrive at a completely flat, moralistic, and insignificant message. Ask yourself whether your message is inspirational good news for your own life. Then proceed.
  2. Examine your motives. Be sure that you are not motivated in your preaching by either anger or your church administrative agenda. Are you motivated by the desire to preach a life-changing and world-changing word of grace and hope?
  3. Be sure that the good news you preach is faithful to the biblical text you are preaching. There is not only one good news message in the Bible. God’s grace and mercy take many different shapes. It is not always “personal salvation” or “liberation,” or whatever our doctrinal preference may be. Seek out the richness of God’s redemptive presence in the Bible.
  4. Although there are occasions and biblical texts that call for an imperative word from the pulpit, it is best to avoid both the hard and soft imperative voice in preaching, unless it is first grounded in the solid indicative of God’s grace. Weed out the language of “must,” “should,” “ought to,” “let us,” “we are called to,” and try using the language of identity, possibility, process, and vision. Give the strong impression in every sermon that the church is a powerful agent of grace, living more deeply into its redemptive identity every day.
  5. Regularly rethink your theology as it meets your congregation. Ask yourself: What do I really believe? What is God doing in our midst? Who is Jesus Christ and what is Christ’s good news for our world today?

These simple practices may help us reorient our preaching toward a redemptive purpose so that the good news that we preach on Sunday morning is really good news to our hearers.

Preaching and Penn-Gate

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by John McClure in Views from the Street

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

domestic violence, hermeneutics, interpretation, Penn State, preaching, preaching and Paterno, sermon, sermon illustration, sermon preparation, sexual abuse, sexual violence

The allegations of childhood sexual abuse at Penn State last week call for a response from the pulpit. The statistics are clear: one in three girls and one in seven boys are sexually molested before the age of eighteen. If one adds the striking numbers of those who are experiencing domestic violence, the situation looks even worse. This means that most congregations have many members and visitors who are survivors of childhood sexual abuse and/or domestic violence. At that same time, if statistics are correct, many congregations unknowingly harbor perpetrators of sexual or domestic violence. And to make matters worse, as the Penn State situation suggests, our congregations are certainly replete with bystanders – those who are potentially part of the larger “culture of complicity” that prefers silence on these matters, moves perpetrators from one place to another unchecked, and, in worse case scenarios blames victims and survivors.

Some years back, pastoral theologian Nancy Ramsay and I co-edited a book entitled Telling the Truth: Preaching About Sexual and Domestic Violence. The book, originally published with the United Church Press (Pilgrim) is now available free as a pdf file from Google Books. Here are just a few thoughts taken from that book.

First of all, it is important to remember that we have three audiences when it comes to sexual violence: (1) victims and survivors, (2) perpetrators, and (3) bystanders. The bottom line, then, is that we must preach, over time, three fundamental messages.

  • Message One to Victims and Survivors. To victims and survivors we preach words of welcome, which includes words that listen, lament, resist, seek justice, offer compassion, and convey hope. Victims and survivors need to know that our worship services and sermons are safe holding environments for their pain and suffering. They need to know that their innermost selves, often haunted by shame, fear, helplessness, and sometimes hopelessness are welcome, heard, and honored. They need to feel genuine solidarity, not only in suffering, but in resistance, the struggle for justice, and the difficult process of re-creating lives that have been de-created by violence.
  • Message Two to Perpetrators. For perpetrators, we preach clarity. The goal is to assess with stark clarity the damage that they do, and to state in no uncertain terms that the damage cannot be undone. Nothing they can ever do can restore fully what their victims have lost. No rationalization or self-deception is possible. This is not so much the voice of judgment or condemnation as it is the voice of clarity. Even if we hope in our heart of hearts for eventual transformation for perpetrators, there must be no cracks through which they can slip as they listen to our sermons. Only this kind of preaching brings the possibility of genuine self-confrontation that could, perhaps, lead to change.
  • Message Three to Bystanders. To bystanders, we preach breaking ranks with the status quo. Listeners can be encouraged to bind their allegiance to a higher authority than the culture of complicity around them, and to make clear decisions to speak up and speak out in situations of known or suspected sexual violence. They can also be invited to re-create their church as a genuinely safe place and become a force for resistance, justice, compassion, and healing.

Here are a few more homiletical encouragements:

  • I encourage us to avoid the isolated sermon on this subject, to build messages to these different audiences into the fabric of many sermons on a variety of subjects, including sermons on human sexuality, creation in the image of God, justice, compassion, family relationships, marriage, forgiveness, judgment, hope, power, healing, anger, relationships, and violence. It is not always possible or advisable to address all three of these audiences simultaneously. Over time, however, it is crucial to do so.
  • I encourage us to develop a consistently nonviolent theology. A nonviolent theology is a theology in which violence is clearly identified as evil and in which, in the last analysis, neither the ways of God toward people nor the ways of God’s people toward others are implicitly or explicitly violent. By saying “in the last analysis,” I mean to imply that we do not remain unaware of and uncritical of the biblical tradition’s collusion with the violence that we, as interpreters, ultimately refute. We cannot avoid the “texts of terror” in the Bible or the entire violence-laden sacrificial system that undergirds much of the Old and New Testaments.
  • I encourage us to examine our illustrations for subtle ideologies that are complicit with violence and abuse. Many illustrations encourage family roles, relationships, gender stereotypes and attitudes that subtly feed violent or abusive attitudes.
  • I encourage us to avoid illustrations that place the experience of sexual violence “out there.” Statistics, and references to “Penn State” or “the Catholic sex scandal” have the effect of turning our gaze outward and away from the reality of sexual violence in our own midst. Brief narratives that particularize rape or battering as an everyday occurrence in a world identical to that of our congregation will underscore that this problem is immediate and “in our midst.”
  • I encourage us to use language that names sexual violence appropriately as a sin of volition. Carol J. Adams invites us to avoid “eliding agency” when speaking about abuse. We subtly let people off the hook when we only speak about “violent relationships,” “incestuous families,” or “battering couples.” Better to say “when a man molests a child…,” or “when a man batters his wife…,” or “for abusive men….” This may sound terrible to our ears, but this is precisely the reason for such language – to make us aware of the terror we are naming.
  • Finally, I encourage us to develop a delivery that is non-violent. There is a cartoon in which a preacher is in a tall pulpit hovering over the first few pews, ranting and raving like a barely chained beast. About four pews back, a young child is whispering to his mother;” What are we going to do if he gets out of there?!” The cartoon identifies another way in which the church and its preaching can be unwittingly complicit with violence. Our nonverbal communication often conveys messages that can be abusive and prevent those who have been abused from seeking our help. Why would a victim or survivor of violence seek help from a violent communicator? I’m not asking us to take the energy from our delivery. Just to assess it for messages portraying hostility, manipulation, or coercion.

There are many other aspects of this topic: the need to create a community of education and accountability around sexual violence within our congregations, the need to develop our own clear sexual boundaries as a part of our own professional ethics as clergy, the need to develop and create pastoral and theological resources around these realities in our midst. Again, for much more on these topics the reader may want to read chapters from John S. McClure and Nancy Ramsay (ed.), Telling the Truth: Preaching About Sexual and Domestic Violence.

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