Tag Archives: preaching

Don’t Re-hash the Bible. Exposit or Interpret it.

11 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Views from the Street

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In my previous post, I focused briefly on sermons that incorporate “wind-ups” that actually “wind-down” sermons. I asserted that one such wind-down occurs when the preacher begins the sermon by re-hashing the biblical text. I made it clear that by “re-hashing” I was referring to a non-interpretive, non-expository walk through the text – sort of a “tour-guide” approach, pointing out this over here, and that over there as we go, providing more background for this, identifying the original significance of that for the ancient community. The kind of thing one finds in a good non-thematic, verse-by-verse Bible commentary.

A shift toward exposition, however, will put the preacher into a slightly different posture – one that allows the text to interpret us. Theologian Karl Barth was a proponent of this approach. According to Barth:

“I have not to talk about scripture but from it. I have not to say something, but merely repeat something. If God alone wants to speak in a sermon, neither theme nor scopus should get in the way….Our task is simply to follow the distinctive movement of thought in the text, to stay with this, and not with a plan that arises out of it.”

Barth’s approach is not far from “re-hashing.” Those who know Barth’s theology will know that he’s worried about too much interpretive intervention by the preacher. He seems to want something fairly close to simply repeating the text. Notice, however, his reference to the ‘movement of thought’ in the text. This is crucial. The preacher doesn’t just “walk through” the text, but does so, over the course of the entire sermon, in a way that helps the listener discover how thought moves in the text, how the semantic motion within the text captures our thinking and re-shapes it in some way.

A shift toward interpretation (hermeneutic) will put the preacher in yet another posture – one that interprets the text by moving the listeners attention toward a particular aspect or dimension of the text in order to draw out a particular meaning for today. In this regard, I posted a few weeks back on five “places” to find a sermon in relation to biblical texts. Each approach assumes that sermon listeners are invited to take a particular perspective or angle of vision on the text. Is the preacher drawing my attention to some analogy to my life in the text (place 1), to a profound historical continuity between Matthew’s church and our church (place 2), to the way the language works and wants to shape us (place 3), to a timeless theological truth (place four), or to a hidden trajectory of meaning we could never have seen, if it weren’t for what’s happening right now in our church or world (place 5). No matter which of these interpretive models is at work, the biblical text will be heard in its fullness, but from a particular hermeneutical perspective.

Re-hashing gives the sermon listener little or nothing of either exposition or interpretation. Re-hashing is largely movement-of-thought-less, and perspective-less, and leaves the listener groping for an angle of vision on the text. When this occurs listeners will provide several of their own…or just check out altogether for lack of focus and direction from the preacher. From great biblical preachers you’ll always hear the text (its content, world, context), but from a particular perspective – one charged with theological meaning and energy.

Some of us are correctly concerned that our listeners don’t get to hear the biblical text often. In a biblically illiterate world, it is natural to feel that by repeating the text in slow motion, we create a better opportunity to hear Scripture and let it soak in.

I have two things to say to this. First, we need to counter the assumption that “front-loading” scripture is the best way to get the text heard. With most biblical texts there’s a lot going on – a lot to take in and process! For the sake of both memory and understanding, it is better to introduce the biblical text in dynamic ways throughout the sermon. Each movement of thought in a sermon can capture some aspect of the text and bring it to life – creating a picture of the whole. For the biblical preacher, there shouldn’t be a single thought communicated that can’t be pegged to something in, under, behind, or in front of the biblical text. We can allow our listeners to re-hear the text dynamically throughout the sermon, instead of at the beginning only. Here’s a picture of this:

Sequence 1 Sequence 2 Sequence 3 Sequence 4
Theology
Message
Experience
Scripture

In this model, each sequence of thought in a sermon contains four things (see The Four Codes of Preaching): 1) a biblical warrant (again, see the five places to get a sermon), 2) a message to our listeners, 3) theological shaping, and 4) some kind of experiential connection or illustration. In this way, scripture is heard strongly throughout the sermon.

Second, we need to work on interpretive reading. If a unit of scripture is read aloud in worship service each week, we can work hard to make it a dynamic, energized, and interpretive reading – one that accents and emphasizes those elements in the text that will be crucial for the sermon. If we are those who read the text aloud, we can provide clues regarding what to listen for and how to hear the text. If we use lay readers, we can work with them each week to insure that this is occurring. A good reading should stand alone, and will do far more than a tour of the text to bring the Bible alive in the hearing of listeners. Even an intervening children’s sermon or anthem between scripture reading and sermon will not dull the impact of Scripture well-read!

The Garageband Sermon?

21 Wednesday Sep 2011

Posted by in Musings

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In my new book, Mashup Religion: Pop Music and Theogical Invention, I develop a series of analogies between making popular music and composing theology in a variety of forms: sermons, blogs, educational events, etc. One of the analogs to music-making in the book is the multi-track recorder or DAW (digital audio workstation). DAWs come in lots of shapes and sizes (Garageband, Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Acid Pro, etc.). These software programs assist musicians as they record or “track” audio. In effect, they help musicians layer and sequence (or stagger) bits and pieces of audio. Typically a recording will consist of rhythm tracks, melody tracks, lead tracks, and fills. By analogy, in a sermon, we layer and sequence four types of audio tracks – scripture tracks, message tracks, theology tracks, and experience tracks. Here’s a little video to show you how this works.

 

 

For more on this book and other analogies between making popular music and composing theology at the interface between academia and popular culture go to the blog I’ve set up for the book at http://mashupreligion.blogspot.com

 

The Place Where God is Revealed!

03 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by in Connecting the Dots

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Over time, most of us as preachers have a typical “place” where we find most sermons. (See the previous two blogs for common options) If you were to look carefully at the past year of sermons you’ve preached, you could identify the usual place you travel to to get your sermon messages. If you go to a particular place over and over again, you are tacitly telling your listeners that this is the place where God “speaks” or reveals God’s self – not only in preaching, but in our lives.

If you go to Place One, finding the bulk of your sermons in the obvious words and sentences on the page of the Bible (in English translation) you are, in essence, telling your congregation over time that God reveals God’s “Word” through biblical propositions. This is sometimes called a propositional view of revelation. If you find your sermons mostly “behind the text” in the history to which the text witnesses (Place Two) you are telling your congregation over time that God is revealed in history. This is sometimes called a historical view of revelation, or revelation as history. If you find your sermons mostly “in front of the biblical text,” in the way the language works (Place Three) you are telling your listeners that God is revealed in symbolic forms. This is sometimes called a symbolic view of revelation. If the place where you find most sermons is a theologically charged moment rumbling beneath the text that makes a claim on our lives (Place Four), you are telling your congregation that God is revealed as a sovereign reality transcending history to which the text bears witness. This is sometimes called a theological or Christological view of revelation. If you tend to find your sermons at a place deep within your current historical and cultural context where fresh ideas and insights about God are sparked by the ways in which biblical symbols and contemporary events interact (Place Four), you are telling your congregation that God is revealed within your context. This is sometimes called a contextual view of revelation.

What is important to see is how the way in which you use the Bible (sometimes called your biblical hermeneutic) shapes an understanding of God’s revelation within your congregation over time. Of course, no one will call it this! Lay persons do not go around saying things such as: “Our congregation has a contextual view of revelation.” Or, “My way of interpreting scripture is grounded in a propositional view of revelation.” Regardless of this, congregations are being formed, or “catechized” over time, by the way you preach – in this case by the way you use scripture in relation to God’s revealed “Word.”

Now, if you were to see yourself as a conscious an intentional practical theologian, you might work backwards from the view of revelation you want to support and shape in your church toward your preaching. In other words, you might ask yourself: “What view of revelation is needed in my congregation?” Or, “What understanding of revelation would help this congregation grow as people of God? Then, once you have answered that question, you might decide on the best “place” in relation to the biblical text from which to preach in your community of faith.

At the end of the day, I would argue that all of these views of revelation have some truth in them. They are not mutually exclusive. Not all of them, however, will be helpful at a given time within the life of a congregation, and sometimes too much of a good thing breeds problems.

For instance, if your congregation has a long history of always going to Place One, and your listeners have, therefore, learned a propositional view of revelation, they will encounter serious limitations when it comes to interpreting difficult issues in our context that were not addressed head on in the biblical text – ordination of gays and lesbians, ordination of women, sexual and domestic violence, etc. A simple dynamic equivalence approach to the words on the page of the Bible (in translation) will not be helpful for understanding women’s role in first century Christianity, or biblical words like “pederast”  that are commonly (and wrongly) confused as being similar to homosexuality in today’s world. In such a congregation, it might be helpful to shift the focus and preach more often from Place Two. This will begin to teach a more historical view of revelation, lessening the grip of what “seems obvious” on the surface of the biblical text. You might also consider the ways in which a contextual view of revelation (Place Five) could be helpful.

On the other hand, for a church that has, for a long time, imbibed a historical view of revelation (Place Two), the text may seem far removed for ordinary life today. For years sermon listeners have been told (tacitly) that they need a special interpreter, with knowledge of the ancient historical context in order to get to the place where God is revealed. This may have taken the Bible away from laity in the congregation, giving them the feeling that there is nothing in scripture for them – unless, of course, you tell them where and what it is. In this situation, preaching sermons from Places One, Three, or Four might be helpful as a way of returning the Bible, and access to God’s revelation, to ordinary folk.

It is possible, therefore, to think of any number of practical theological reasons to change your usual homiletical practice, choosing the best place to find each Sunday’s sermon in your congregation.

For more on this see “Word of God” and “hermeneutics” in Preaching Words: 144 Key Terms in Homiletics

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.