Out of Practice

I've recently agreed to a semi-regular preaching gig. In many ways, I'm excited about this. I think in terms of my craft, I'm still improving. And I'd like to see what that looks like on a more regular basis.

But in other ways, I realize I'm out of practice. Sermons aren't just speeches. They come from what Barbara Brown Taylor calls the preaching life. It is more than just reading a text and finding something to say. Sermons come from life as much as they come from the Bible--and they come from a particular kind of engagement with life. And I think I might have a little rust in this regard.

For instance, I used to be in the habit of having two kinds of books going all the time--a novel and a biography. I wasn't surfing for sermon illustrations. I was widening my interpretative horizons by listening to other stories and other lives. I can't tell you the last biography I read (maybe Dylan's, Chronicles) and the only novels I've read recently were the Harry Potter books I read from Thanksgiving to New Year's last year (yes, I read all of them straight through). I've been reading other kinds of books the past few years. And while they have changed me, deepened, me, challenged me, they haven't done what stories of other lives do. (I've decided that getting a PhD is reading the same 10 books over and over for four years. I'm ready to read some different books).

I refer to this kind of reading as funding the imagination. The more thickly textured your imagination, the more you have to say about things. There's more raw material lying around that allows a spark to become a fire.

I'm more and more convinced that really interesting people read across diverse literatures. They know more than one thing, and because of that, they are able to draw inferences and make connections in ways that surprise us and leave us wanting more. I think this is the genius of my friend, Richard Beck, whose blog is never dull. And I never see Richard when he doesn't have a book in his hand, and not just a psychology book. He reads broadly in diverse literatures. Good preachers do the same thing. And I will need to find a rhythm again for this kind of life.

And please don't tell Richard I think he's interesting. He's insufferable already.

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

I am four days away from the Acts 2 sermon at the Pepperdine Bible lectures. This one has not appeared willingly. But I'm at a place now where I'm confident that its going to show up. The sermon is now writing itself. One choice leads to another. One image builds on another and forms a circle with others, both reflecting and anticipating.

I have my text memorized. I have the first two moves in draft form. The third move is sketched. And I know the basic shape and thrust of the final move. I will end the sermon with a series of refrains that ends, "but, God raised him up." The salvation offered in the text is that God still pours out his Spirit on those who unwittingly find themselves resisting his work in the world. This was true for the devout Jews in Jerusalem. It's true for us as well.

That's where we'll end. And I hope it is a cascading moment. That the momentum of the sermon launches us into the final phrasings. It's a little like ski jumping. You don't always hit the perfect place to soar, but when you do...

But before we get there, I want to bring us back to some of the themes put in play in the earlier moves. The sermon starts with the hope of Israel. I want to end going to all the world. The sermon begins with the longing of Simeon and Anna. I want to end with our longings for more. The sermon begins with our relationship in Churches of Christ with Acts 2. I want the sermon to end with the possibility of a new relationship with Acts 2.

That's a lot of plates to spin. The risk here is to be so scattered that all the energy of the sermon spills and is dissipated. But I think I have a way into the move that will allow the pieces to fall neatly together. We'll see.

Sermon endings are the hardest part of preaching for me. I much prefer the anticipation, the building, the development. I like working in commas, not periods or exclamation points. But this sermon deserves some exclamation points.

So, if you're helping me with some good sermon mojo, pray for clarity and courage.

I want to have the sermon written by Sunday evening. I will fly to Malibu on Monday, giving me all day Tuesday to rehearse. I will write a manuscript, which is not my usual practice, and I will likely take it up to the podium with me. But I plan to have the sermon orally manuscripted, which means I've said it aloud enough that I no longer need to read it. It is another way of internalizing, of conforming, of preaching from the inside out. It's not memorizing proper. But its pretty close.

The rehearsing is so important. The more I've done this, the more I realize how important my actual voice is, how important cadence and rhythm is. And I've learned how what I hear in my head is not what others hear as I preach. I'm slower than I think. I need to think constantly about energy. And its important for me to actually preach it, not just memorize it, for me to feel the sermon, to bodily anticipate the next moves.

Which brings me to one last observation. Preaching, at least for me, is a full contact sport. That is, I'm realizing how physical my preaching is. Even beyond the fact that I don't stand behind the podium (although I'm not a pacer), there is a sense in which preaching starts in your toes and involves concentrated effort, a projection of yourself for 25-30 minutes (the typical length of a lectureship sermon). And I am now 50. And while I don't think I have one foot in the grave, I know that I'm no longer the person I once was. And in particular, I have a benign essential tremor that used to only show up in my hands, but now I can feel throughout my body, especially when I'm coursing with adrenaline. And I will be coursing with adrenaline. And when its bad, my voice has a tremor and gets thin and reedy. And all of that robs me of a feeling of power, or projection, or connection, or incarnation, or something. And so, I'm anxious about that.

Thanks for those of you who have traveled through this preparation with me. I am taking several conversation partners with me into this moment.

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

My sermon in eleven days (gasp) is finding a certain form, some momentum of its own. It has begun to write itself. Things are coming together. Images are overlapping. Focus is emerging.

This state of affairs is one reason I resist those notions of preaching that begin with guiding statements. The focus of this sermon is... The function of this sermon is... In my experience, those things come with the process, somewhere in the middle or toward the end. Sometimes, alas, not at all.

I'm beginning to like this sermon. That doesn't always happen. My liking it doesn't guarantee a good sermon, but it certainly influences my energy and sense of anticipation.

This sermon will consist in four "moves." I know what each of them consists of. I don't have yet the exact language, but I know what each of the moves is doing and how they fit together. The third move is huge and I sketched it today. The inspiration hit me in the middle of a conference I am attending. I scribbled it on a scratch pad in the middle of someone's powerpoint presentation. Hopefully, they thought I was taking furious notes.

My wife, Nancy, has lovingly cautioned me about putting too much of my sermon on my blog. Like that would ruin it for both people who read my blog. And with this move, she is right. It needs to come out of the blue, be a little bit surprising.

I'm writing today only to leave some hint of an instinct I have, an issue that I have to negotiate often in preaching. And this issue has several layers. It has to do with the listener's proximity to the text and to the sermon. The first two moves that I have written about previously allow the listener some emotional distance. I am talking about someone else. Simeon, Anna, the community in Jerusalem, God. They have a certain space or distance from the sermon. I hope that they will begin to see themselves through empathy with Simeon and Anna. But I don't press that identification in the opening move. I allow them the distance of empathy without too much identification. I want them to sense longing without asking them directly to touch their own (that will come in the final move).

This third move, however, I need them to see themselves in the sermon, to place themselves in the text. And I want them to do that in a way that runs contrary to their typical ways of identifying with the story. In other words, I want them to see themselves not standing with Peter and the eleven, but with the crowd who says, "brothers, what shall we do."

This is tricky. I can't do this baldly or in a heavy-handed or moralistic kind of way. If I say it directly, they will easily wriggle away. I still need them to have the distance of observation--to talk about someone else--in such a way that they recognize themselves. And that needs to be obvious enough that they don't miss the implication. It needs to be simultaneously indirect and implicating.

One way to do this, the way I have chosen in this sermon, is to narrate the experience of the "devout Jews" in terms that are both ancient and contemporary. I will be talking about the devout Jews of the text, but my use of anachronisms will make it clear I am also talking about us. I am figuring them, but I am aimed at us. The occasion of pilgrimage, both to Passover and Pentecost, and to the Pepperdine Bible Lectures, provides the necessary overlap of figures. I hope, in ways that are both playful and poignant, to have them experience the "uh-oh" of the text.

This is hard. It requires a certain pace, a patience with the implications. It requires a parallel structuring so that the images can be interpreted easily, but not obviously. If I do this move well, everything I say in the final move has a chance. If I don't, if I'm careless or clumsy or korny or too obvious, the final move of the sermon may be clear but lack poignance.

I love this. This is one of the things about preaching that makes it challenging, rewarding, and fulfilling.

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

Here are today's reflections. This is the theological heart of the sermon, the next move. These are impressions, not yet sermon words, though many of these impressions will make the final cut. I'm interested in what they inspire in you, where they send you, what images and impressions they evoke.

God raised Israel's messiah from the dead. This that you see and hear is the work of God, the result of raising this Jesus from the dead, seating him at the right hand of God in glory and handing over to him the kingdom. God has made Israel's messiah, Lord of all, giving him the authority to pour out the Spirit, the effective power of the Kingdom of God.

This that you see and hear is God's keeping his promise to Abraham, that through Abraham all the nations of the earth will be blessed. It's what Mary and Zechariah sang about under the influence of the Holy Spirit,

he has shown mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our ancestor Abraham.

This is God guaranteeing the world's future through Israel's messiah. Through Jesus, who pours the Spirit out on the 12, on Peter and James and John--and Mathhias, the freshly minted apostle, completer of the 12, the newest representative of the new Israel.

Jesus, pouring out the Spirit in Jerusalem, the city of David, Zion, God's holy mountain--not in Rome or Alexandria or Abilene or Searcy. Jerusalem. (more here)

And this has happened in the presence of devout Jews--devout Jews from every nation under heaven. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, oh my! God has placed devout Jews, people like Simeon and Anna in every corner of the globe, so that through Israel and the announcement of Israel's messiah, every nation on earth will be blessed.

This is God keeping this improbable story alive. This is God keeping faithfulness, breathing life in a story left for dead, raising it up, bringing it back to life, time and time again.

And here in a decisive way, in a way that leaves no doubt. In Israel's worst moment, putting to death God's annointed, the one attested by God through signs, deeds, wonders, in this lowest moment, God's greatest affirmation. He raised Israel's messiah from the dead and enthroned him forever, securing once and for all Israel's central role in the promise of God for all the world. Once and for all consoling Israel, redeeming Jerusalem, and through this, saving all nations.

This is the day that Simeon and Anna longed for, a line drawn by the Holy Spirit directly from their hearts to Pentecost. This is God's emphatic "yes" to all human longing for more, for fuller, for poured out, for extravagant mercy, for life without the threat of death, for the great and glorious day of the Lord.

Preaching, the Thick and Thin of It, 2

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to preach at a local congregation. They are in the middle of a series tracing the broad strokes of the biblical narrative. They've asked me to do a few of the sermons in the series, and Sunday I had Genesis 12 as my sermon text.

In previous posts, I've talked about the preaching imagination, and particularly the need to render both the world of the text and our world with thick description. Also, I think a lot about what is performing in the text, and how can I get it to perform in the sermon. So, what would I do with Genesis 12 along these lines.

This is an important text, a game changer in many ways. What is surprising in light of that is the scarcity of detail. There is no prelude or back story. No build up this moment. We have precious little detail about Abram and have no indication that Abram knows anything about this God who is calling him. We have an astounding promise stated directly and without conditions. And given the scarcity of information about Abram, his decision to "do as the Lord said" is pretty stunning. So, what is performing here? Lack of detail. The lack of detail we have makes the details we do have more impacting.

What's performing on the listener's side of the ledger? Familiarity. They know the story and they automatically hear other stories along with this one. This sermon has a lot of potential for echo and allusion. Also, the world of stories we live in revels in the motivations of characters. The drama is played out in the psyche of the characters before it is in real action. Inner landscapes are as important as outer ones. The biblical stories typically resist that kind of psychologizing, which serves to put the emphasis in the story on the initiative and action of God. I want to bring these worlds into conversation.

So, here are some snippets from the sermon:

"Now the Lord said to Abram..." Just like that. Abram's minding his own business, just hanging out in the middle of a genealogy with his fathers and his barren wife, and the Lord speaks to him.

This can happen, evidently. You can be minding your own business, mending your nets by the Sea of Galilee, or checking your email, or watching Wheel of Fortune, and the Lord can just interrupt you. "Abram!" Just like that, "the Lord said to Abram..."

"...Leave your country and your kindred and your father's house and go the land that I will show you."

Which is asking a lot, isn't it? Country, kindred, father's house. Leave what you know. Leave the things that give you identity, your sources of security, the life that has been handed down to you. Leave it for the land that I will show you.

It would be one thing to say, leave country, kindred and father's house and go to California, or Dallas, or Miami. At least then you would know how to pack. Nancy and I are going to Uganda in a few days. We're not prepared for Africa. We need shots and lighter clothes and different foot wear. It helps to know where you're going. But Abram gets none of this. None of it. No destination. Only a land that he will be shown, which puts all the stress on the one doing the leading. Which I don't think is really a very popular notion. If you were a travel agent and this was your business, I think you'd go broke.

I think that because a few years ago I wrote a book with Randy Harris and Doug Foster called, "Seeking a Lasting City." But that wasn't our first title. The title we wanted was "Leaving the Land We Know," but our editors nixed it. "It will scare people. They don't want to leave what they know. They'll think you're asking them to leave Churches of Christ." Not much of a market for this leaving country and kindred and father's house, evidently.

But Abram got more than an invitation. He got a promise as well. And what a promise. "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed."

That's an astounding promise. Really. One that you could only believe if you suspended belief, hoped against hope.

And its made to Abram. And we know precious little about him. We don't know if he's a person of faith. We have nothing of his exploits. Know nothing about his character. All we know...all we know...all we know about him is that his wife is barren.

If we were vetting likely candidates for this story, the one thing we know about Abram would disqualify him. Great nation. Blessing. Great name. It screams family, offspring, fertility. And Sarai, Abram's wife is barren.

Which makes you wonder about the promise maker. Who makes wild promises like this? This isn't business as usual--it's not like a "your money back, no questions asked" kind of promise. This is an all in promise. This is life out of barrenness, creation out of nothing. The Lord is all in. He's put his reputation on the line in the form of a wild promise.

But here's the kicker. "In you all the families of the earth will be blessed." I mean why not. Promise a family to someone incapable of having a family and then promise them all the families of the earth will be blessed through this impossible family. Why not?

"So Abram went as the Lord told him."

(pause)

Seriously. Just like that. "Abram went as the Lord told him."

(pause)

Now, I'm not one to criticize biblical writers, much. But I'm thinking that most story tellers worth their salt make a bit more of this moment. Give us some sense of the inner turmoil within Abram. He's tortured. Country, kin, and father's house verses this fantastic, unsecured promise. He's torn. And in his inner conflict lie the seeds of success or failure. This story depends on how he will work out his inner demons. Cue the music. Which way will he go. Close-up on his eyes, the worry lines on his forehead. Follow him back into Sarai's tent. We hear her say, "Might as well go. Stupid hope is better than no hope. There's a fine line between trust and desperation and we're walking it Abe."

Now that's a story.

But we have none of that here. The story refuses to look at anything other than the promise.

God--a preposterous promise--trust. That's all we have.

God--a promise--and trust.

Which it turns out, is really all you need to tell a story about God.

It's not that our story lacks drama. The human characters are always trying to hijack it, change the plot just a bit, make the outcomes a little less risky. Make it less a comedy or tragedy and more a fairly tale.

Abraham would rather trust his ability to pawn Sara off as his sister than trust the promise-maker.

Sarah tires of waiting for a son, so she sends the concubine into Abraham's tent. Let's kick start this thing a bit, take it into our own hands.

God's not even above injecting a little drama, asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

But all of these serve to highlight the basic elements of the story here in chapter 12. God-promise-trust.

Next post, the rest of the sermon.

Preaching, the Thick and Thin of It

In recent posts, I've talked about my evolution over time related to my understanding and practice of preaching. That shift is a move away from a "bridge" theory of preaching. According to the bridge theory, we have two static objects, the text and the contemporary world, that are separated by a massive temporal gulf. The trick is to lift something universal out of the particularity of the text, walk it across the homiletical bridge, and find its dynamic equivalent in the contemporary world.

This is a tall task, and has three built-in deficits that I am trying to overcome. First, it leaves the particularity of the text behind in favor of some universal principle lifted from the text. Second, the quest for the dynamic equivalent is very difficult to calibrate. We've all had the experience of our illustrations overpowering everything else in the sermon. It's hard to measure those things out, find a term that weighs the same as another.

Which brings me to my third problem. Meaning making is far "thicker" than translating one term for another. The bridge theory is a "thin" strategy for finding meaning between two subjects. The "point" of the text, some universal meaning that transcends culture, is a thin strand around which to find shared meaning. This is not typically how we come to understand something or someone, particularly when that something is culturally distant (like the Bible).

Clifford Geertz, a significant cultural anthropologist, marveled at the capacity of humans to gain understanding of each other across massive cultural divides. For Geertz, it was impossible to escape one's own cultural trappings in order to think like a native. It was equally impossible to find universals that could be taken for granted in every culture, thus providing a basis for translating one cultural meaning straight into another cultural setting. Against these "thin" strategies, Geertz proposed "thick" description as the way most of us come to understand one another across cultures. The more thickly we describe our own context and that of the other (through empathy), the more opportunity we have for meaning making. We're not looking for a thin link, but a web of overlap between two thickly construed realities.

While this produces understanding, it also simultaneously creates a new understanding. To understand oneself through another always makes for something new, what Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons. The attempt to understand creates a new horizon of meaning. (The word is living and active...).

Brueggemann is one biblical scholar who takes Geertz (and Geertz's influence-r, Ricouer) seriously in the task of biblical interpretation. Brueggemann sees understanding occurring between two thickly contested worlds--the world of the text, and the world of the reader/listener. By rendering both thickly, Brueggemann sees the possibility for artful appropriation. Brueggemann doesn't see a text as simply making a point. A text is an exercise in power--in naming and shaping a world. And meanings in these are always contested, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. Faithful preaching takes the claims and counterclaims of both worlds (biblical and contemporary) seriously through thick description. For Brueggemann this moves preaching from a monological endeavor where all the traffic moves one way or the other, to a dialogical event where text and world are simultaneously active. (Monologue=thin, dialogue=thick).

This is how I think about preaching. I want to render both text and world so thickly that new meaning emerges. I want to move past just making points and illustrating them to creating alternative worlds. For my money, it is only this kind of preaching that lives up to the qualifier "gospel."

The Preaching Imagination, 3

OK, so I wrote tomorrow's sermon this morning. It's a guest gig and with a particular assignment. And the nature of the sermon, the expectations of the moment, have pushed me away from the things I talked about in the last post. I start with the recital of a text, but follow it with a big honking story, a large structure, a big old freaking funnel. Guidelines, instincts, not laws. FWIW.

I've talked a lot about the primacy of the text in shaping the imaginative landscape of the sermon. And most of my habits in concrete sermon preparation are related to the "world" of the text. Let me explain this a bit. Paul Ricouer talks about different worlds related to texts. There is a world behind the text--the world that produced the text full of historical and cultural meanings and a concrete occasion out of which the text emerged.

There is the world before the text. This is the world of meaning made between the text and the listener. This world is the primary world for Ricouer. Once a text becomes fixed in writing, it becomes independent of the world that produced it. Meaning happens in front of the text regardless of the intention of the original author, according to Ricouer. I take Ricouer's point here, though I am more optimistic about the lingering impact of authorial intention. I happen to think, however, that our best window into authorial intention doesn't come from reconstructing the exact historical circumstance, most of which is lost to us, but through attending to Ricouer's third world--the world of the text.

A text has a certain stubbornness to it. It can't mean anything. It can mean things never intended by the author, but its range of meanings are limited to an extent by the actual words and movement of the text. The text does something. It doesn't just lie there waiting for us to read whatever meanings we want into the text. It works on us. It zigs when we would zag. It has its own weather system. We can read in this world thinly, letting bare impressions give permission to take the sermon in whatever direction we care to. Or we can read thickly in the world imagined by the text.

This is more than asking what particular words mean. This is to ask,"what is this text trying to do?" This is a question of power. It is a question of rhetoric, not just literary device. This text has an interest. What is it interested in doing? And the next question is immediately, "what interests are being denied here?"

Take for instance, Genesis 1. This text is doing something, and it doesn't appear to be setting forth an exacting scientific account of the world we live in. It's giving us a sense that the good order we live in and count on is the product of God's word. And to say this is to say that creation is not the product of violence, of warring forces, gods and demi-gods, but of God's good intentions for all the created order. This is the world imagined by the text. And I want to read as thickly as I can in that world.

But there's another thick reading that makes for a good sermon. The sermon is after all, not simply a reading of the text. The sermon is God's word today. The sermon is part of the ecology of God's continuing word. It is supposed to say something about what God's word might be for this moment. So, there needs to be a thick reading of this moment as well. That requires a disciplined life as well.

So, a few commitments I have along these lines.

I read the NYTimes every day as a spiritual practice. I read it knowing full well its interests beyond simply reporting the news. This is part of what makes it valuable. It takes a stance in relation to the world--often one I appreciate, often one I resist. But beyond stance, it leads me into lives beyond my own. I pray for empathy. And I look for what drives people. What interests predominate our world of action?

I try to keep a biography going at all times, for many of the same reasons. I don't want my life to be the only one the sermon passes through. I've read biographies of Mandela, John Adams, Hannah Arendt, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, the UN commander in Rwanda, Emily Dickinson, the list could go on. I rarely quote in my sermons from any of these sources. (I'm not sure I've ever quoted Dylan in a sermon). This is part of rending the world thickly. I'm not mining for illustrations. I'm trying to figure out what people think they are up to.

I listen to music. I do this because this is the place where our poets show up today. What is the world imagined by Springsteen? by Dylan? by Green Day? I also watch movies and read the occasional novel. These are the places where "worlds" are constructed, where interests appear. Here's the deal. Most of the people who listen to sermons have more allegiance to the world imagined by Avatar than they do the world imagined in Exodus. I'm not looking for straw men to beat down. I want the partnership of others who are imagining worlds so that one I invite others into on Sunday is thickly construed, not a cliche, a real conversation about what it is we are up to in God's world.

And I journal. I carry with me a moleskine nearly everywhere I go and I take notes. Writing, composing, observing, is so important in developing a voice. And voice is the most powerful part of the sermon from the point of view of the preacher. Voice is the place of authenticity and conviction. Voice is more than style. Voice is embodiment. I want to hear a preacher's voice, not their artistic productions.

Next time, a hermeneutics of thickness.

The Preaching Imagination, 2

In the movie, "A Knight's Tale," knights joust to the strains of contemporary rock and roll. Characters in medieval garb function as odd contemporaries, competing to the strains of "We will Rock You" and "Taking Care of Business." The movie does not depict an ancient setting, but neither is it contemporary. The genre of movie has created an imaginative setting in which a temporal warp allows the viewer to stand in various worlds simultaneously. Good preaching does the same thing. The genre of gospel, a dramatic turning of the ages, allows the preacher to stand in a new world, neither ancient nor of this age, but a world of the gospel's own imagination. The sermon is an intertextual web that brings into creative interplay the echoes and allusions of Scripture, the contexts of contemporary communities, and the instincts of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Under the influence of the gospel, the sermon insists on speaking, even if somewhat anachronistically, in the present tense.

I wrote these words at the conclusion of an essay on preaching for ACU Press book, Preaching Romans, 2002. It's my take on the whole issue of relevance, and it begins with an assumption about the gospel. The gospel is fundamentally the announcement of a dramatic turn of the ages. As Paul says, Christians are those "upon whom the end of the ages has fallen" (1 Cor 10). Richard Hays suggests that "Paul believes himself, along with his churches, to stand in a privileged moment in which the clutter of past texts and experiences assumes a configuration of eschatological significance" (Echoes of Scripture in Paul, 161). Paul assumes a "nearness" in Scripture, an immediacy given the inauguration of a new age initiated by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

One way to say this is that Paul doesn't read Scripture as addressed to a historically distant "them," but to an eschatologically privileged "us." Again, 1 Cor 10, "These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down for us, on whom the end of the ages has fallen." I try to think of the sermon in the same way. In the sermon, by virtue of the gospel, Romans is not a word primarily for a distant "them" that we overhear, but a word to us. My job, in other words, is to assume relevance, not to make the text relevant.

This would again make my former professors of preaching faint. We were taught to think of the sermon as a bridge that connected what the word meant to the original audience to what the word means to contemporary hearers. I understand this impulse. It keeps the text in a position of primacy before we let our current notions slip into the potion of the sermon. And I certainly value the work of historical critics who have illumined the setting of so much of Scripture. I don't want to do away with this sensibility. I want to temper it, put it within a larger theological context.

There are several deficits built into a bridge theory of the sermon. Again, the bridge assumes that the biggest thing to overcome in the sermon is a historical chasm between the world that produced the text and ours. The way to overcome this is to isolate the original intention of the author through exegetical method, distill the text into some universal point or principle, and walk the point across the bridge by way of analogy and make the point contemporary through illustration and application. I will mention just two weaknesses of this approach here (if I can restrain myself).

First, the historical gap is not the only one that stands between the reader and the text, and it may not be the most significant. Ancient preachers and theologians knew well the historical spread between them and the text, but felt that this gap paled in comparison to the spiritual one that exists between text and proclaimer. The historical-critical method when applied to preaching tends to bracket these matters or hold them only to the final, secondary matters of sermon preparation. It was never suggested to me that I approach the text with any other question than "what did this mean to the original audience." (Forget for a minute the hermeneutical nightmare associated with that question). No one ever suggested to me that lectio-divina or other readings strategies might address far more significant gaps than the historical one.

Second, the text gets left behind in the sermon. The text too often is treated in the sermon as a historical artifact to be explained. The preacher and the listeners stand at a far distance from the text and observe it as visitors. Like zoo patrons, we plug a quarter into the machine and listen to an explanation of the text's original habitat at a safe distance. The text is trapped in the past tense. I have had students track when they feel most engaged with a sermon. It nearly always relates to direct address, present tense speech. The bridge theory of the sermon keeps the text in sepia tones, while the contemporary illustrations and stories are in vivid color. This is a crying shame given the dynamic range of much of Scripture. We're trading inspired writ for football illustrations.

OK, so I'm trying to move past a bridge theory of the sermon, and this is a theological move for me (more on this later), but for now a few implications for the sermon.

I assume relevance. This text has something to say, even in all of its strangeness (perhaps because of it), to all of us upon whom the end of the ages has fallen.

I preach as much as possible in the present tense. I prefer "Paul says..." to "Paul said to the Corinthians..." This is an instinct, not a law.

I frame the sermon with the language and images of the text, and I nearly always begin with the text. I can't tell you how many sermons I hear these days that begin with something other than the text. And because sermons, good ones at least, seek a certain symmetry, they tend to end where they begin. The illustrations dominate the imagination of the sermon.

I blend worlds as often as possible. One of my favorite comments about my preaching came from a friend who observed that there's a certain seamlessness between text and occasion. The sermon doesn't jerk you back and forth from one world to another. Narrate the text with a contemporary allusion. Talk about our world in the language and cadences of the text. Because of this instinct, I prefer echoes and allusions to full-blown stories and illustrations. I'm trying to open the imaginative landscape of the sermon, not close it down with one or two dominating images.

I know this post has likely raised as many issues as settled them. Which is the great thing about a blog. More to come.

The Preaching Imagination

Most of the time, I don't miss preaching every Sunday. Until I do it. Then I think, "Oh yeah, that's pretty great." And it is. Everything about it. The time in preparation. The routine of the week. The discipline of Sunday. The high wire of the sermon itself.

I'll admit that the time right after the sermon is the pits. I am so spent, I want to do anything rather than be with people. But the pastoral demands of ministry insist otherwise. No retreating into a dark room and some quiet music. Not just yet. And Sunday evenings nearly always bring some sort of post-partum depression. I never shave on Mondays. But this is part of the ride that makes it great.

I have changed my perceptions of the sermon a lot in over 30 years of preaching (I preached for a little church in West Texas when I was 18). I think of it less as public speaking and more as theater. I know this would give some of my old preaching teachers a stroke. Anything that smacks of performance is to be disdained as showing off, as an improper display of the personality of the preacher. It is the text, after all, that is important, not the preacher.

And I agree with that last statement, mostly. It is God that is important in the sermon--the gospel, not just the text. But the point is taken that the sermon is not about the preacher. So, let me explain what I mean by performance.

I like to think about the entire process of the sermon as form-ation. The initial moves in preparation are all about con-form-ity. This is more than boiling the text down to an essential point that becomes the focus of the sermon, dressed with illustrations and stories. This is, instead, to know the voice of the text, its warp and woof, the way it moves. A text is a world all its own, full of movement and echoes and allusions to other texts and other worlds. It is a thickly construed reality that cannot be distilled into a point.

I was taught to prepare for a sermon with a Greek NT, a concordance, lexicon, and historical-critical commentary. And these things are still a part of my routine. But they are no longer the first, either in temporality or in imaginative priority. The first thing I do now is read the text aloud, standing. There is something about standing and saying, something physical and auditory, that begins a conformity with the text.

I encourage my students to read poetry aloud to develop preaching capacity. You can read the Michigan Driver's handbook aloud without any act of interpretation or conformity. But not poetry. And many preachers I hear simply cannot read a text aloud. I am convinced that the most engaging part of the sermon can and should be the "reading" of the text. But in most sermons, its the place where the sermon drags, where attention is placed on hold until the interesting stuff starts again.

I memorize my texts now for every sermon. I started this because my hands tremble so that I can no longer hold anything as I preach. But the discipline has transformed the sermon for me. Often, I see listeners sit forward with wonder in their eyes as if they are hearing a text for the very first time. The best way to memorize a text is to have some sense of the force and flow of it. You interpret as you memorize. It is an act of deep conformity.

Prayer, lectio divina, silence, thinking of those who will receive the word. These are all acts of conformity--ways of letting the text work on me before I set my shoulder to more active processes of interpretation (Greek NT, concordance, etc). Increasingly, I want to think of sermon preparation as a being mastered as opposed to a mastering of the text.

As I begin to move from text to sermon, I am always asking what in this text wants to perform? What is carrying the rhetorical weight of the text? This is my script. I am not an improvisational actor. In Psalm 51 for instance, there is a piling on of images. Every word for sin is used. And there are multiple verbs used for how God overcomes sin. The verbs want to perform. They want to overcome the overwhelming, heavy, "my sin is ever before me. Surely I was a sinner in my mother's womb." I want more than for the word "transgression" to be explained. I want it to perform. And I want "create in me a clean heart, O God" to sing. And in the limits of one sermon, I want as many of these actors to appear as possible.

And then I think, "how can I best perform this, given where conformity to this text has delivered me, and how can I invite others into that same kind of conformity?" I used to think of sermon strategies--deductive, inductive, narrative plot, and the like. But I don't anymore. I'm after a seamlessness between con-form and per-form, let the chips fall where they may.

In all of this personality is subsumed under the initial acts of conformity. But it is not rubbed out. There is no escaping the fact that I am delivering this sermon, that my person is both the opportunity and limitation of the word taking on flesh. Older views of preaching focused only on limitation. But the incarnation suggests that God does not reveal himself through general principles in universal situations. God's word is not some abstract idea, but a word become flesh, requiring further demonstrations in the flesh. This is still God's work, but it doesn't come apart from actual lives in space and time, including the preacher's. The task is not to rub out the preacher's personality, but to bring it into fullsome conformity.

If the processes of conformity have been attended to, then the performance should be as big as possible, as creative as possible. Conformity should kick the stuffing out of any grandstanding, uses of humor that serve only the interests of the speaker, any gratuitous stories designed to manipulate the hearer. The preacher is free to let loose.

Truth is, preaching this way requires very few devices apart from the text. I don't keep illustration files. Very few of the "moves" in my sermons involve elaborate stories or illustrations. I use humor, but I never tell a joke. There are enough actors in every text to keep the preacher plenty busy.

I know that some might think that this kind of preaching lacks a certain relevance, a word for today, stuck only in Bible times. Perhaps. But I don't think so. I have ways of thinking about that as well. Next post.