If you were going to give a definition of "preaching at its best," what would it be?
Preaching is proclaiming the gospel...bringing Jesus Christ to speech. It can be as brief as "Jesus Christ is Lord" or as long as a lot of my sermons. There is something inherently auditory about the Christian faith. Paul says, "Faith comes by hearing." You might expect him to say, "Faith comes from experience with the risen Christ," or "Faith comes from searching for something more meaningful in your life." Paul simply says it comes from hearing something you had not previously heard.
Of course, our current context reminds us that there must be an experiential component within the church as well.
Yes - although we also have to remember that there is a sense in which words precede experience, and shape the experience. There are a lot of experiences you haven't had until you find a word for it.
One way to think about Sunday morning in your church is to think about it as a kind of struggle to see who is going to get to name the world. I keep telling the students, "There's nothing there when you look out the window, before you have words." Of course, you respond, "Well, there's a tree there, and there's grass." But you wouldn't know that if we hadn't told you, "Tree, grass" when you were little.
So experience is derived from language. We often think we are just a bundle of "experiences with God," and then we go out and try to find some appropriate words to name that experience. But it's the language-the story-that precedes everything else.
So a lot of preaching is about giving people a new vocabulary for their experiences.
Yes - and thereby reconstituting their experience, their world. One of the problems I have with preachers is that they will say, "I think that in preaching you try to relate the Bible to the modern world." But I'm bothered when Christians take the modern world too seriously. Part of the modern world's arrogance is that it likes to present itself as a Fact - "This is reality, okay, Christians? Adjust to Reality, accept what 'Is'." No, we want a prior question - who gets to define what the real Reality is?
How, then, does the preacher navigate between redefining things for people - giving them new language and new stories - yet translating things into people's current frameworks so they can be understood?
We just need to be mindful that, while translation is necessary, it's also very dangerous - because in leaning over the speak to the modern world, a lot of times we fall face-down into it. We end up not saying anything the world couldn't hear by reading Dear Abby. So, poor preachers, you have to pity us! We have to stand up each week and try to communicate using the language available to us!
We also ought to appreciate that preachers are engaged in "language instruction." In classes like "Intro to Psychology," the students complain that the whole first semester is spent doing nothing but learning new vocabulary, and I say to them, "Well good, maybe you won't complain when you come to church! When I say 'redemption,' it isn't fair for you to say, 'Wait a second. I'm a late 20th-century person from Illinois. You can't use a word like 'Trinity' with me.'" I as a preacher need to say, "Be quiet. Write this word down. I'll teach you how to spell it and how to use it correctly." That's a big deal. I went to Yale Divinity School. Our great theological heroes were all in the translation business - Tillich, Neibhur. They said, "Oh! Educated, thoughtful 20th-century people are all into existentialism, so let's take the Gospel and put it through that sieve, and see what's left." And today there's not much left.
Of course, contemporary evangelicals are doing the same thing, but now using therapeutic or managerial categories.
That's right. I went to an evangelical church near the campus where a lot of the students go, and at the end of the service I was filled with this great sense of grief. He said to the congregation, "Are you having trouble in your dating relationships? Jesus can help." I said, "What? I don't recall anywhere Jesus took anyone on a date."
We've got to remember that Christianity is inherently counter-cultural. We've had trouble with every culture we've ever found ourselves in. So as a preacher, I have to say to people, "I'm sorry. You live in North America, one of the most violent, bloodthirsty cultures ever created, so it's going to be bumpy. There are going to be words you don't understand. Be patient, we'll work with you on that. There are going to be stories that are going to go totally against the grain of what you've been told is reality. But you see, we aren't happy with official definitions of reality. We've got a counter-definition." That's one reason it can be so unpleasant on Sunday morning, because there's that feeling of being constantly assaulted.
About three weeks ago a woman came out after the service and said to me, "I know you would never want to hurt anyone with what you said, but I was really hurt by the sermon today." Suddenly, I caught myself thinking, "Why would you ever think we wouldn't want to hurt you?" I'm sorry; the material demands it! The thing that makes preaching tough is not simply how to have a coherent thought within 20 minutes or how to modulate the voice. The hard thing is Jesus! If we had something like Disneyland to preach, it would be easy. But we have Jesus to preach, and that makes bringing that to speech - with our language and our culture and our sin - just really hard.
Do you think that some of where we've gone wrong is our narrow, simplistic notions of conversion? Evangelicalism has tended to say, "Believe these things about Jesus so you can 'make the cut'-get to heaven-and then do the best you can during your remaining years on earth."
That's not the full gospel. Jesus meets a nice upwardly mobile young man and says, "You want to follow me? Great! One little thing, now that you've obeyed all the commandments: Go, sell everything, and give the money to the poor."
I think true conversion is all about being in relationship with the living Christ, trying to imitate him, to walk his way, disappointing him 90% of the time, but still saying, "Jesus, keep hammering me, keep making me more than I would have been if I hadn't met you, keep making my life count for something." There's joy in that, but there's also a lot of relinquishment and pain. The fun of being a preacher is to be right at that intersection and, frankly, I find it both invigorating and scary when you realize you are dealing with somebody's life!
When you see much of Jesus teaching, he spends a lot of time poking holes in people's assumptions. Do we need to learn how to engage with people in that kind of way?
I think so. I think that the mode of biblical literature really ought to shape our proclamation of biblical literature. If Jesus had wanted to preach 3 point sermons, he could have done that. He never did. That wasn't his way with the truth.
Being a Christian means loving Jesus for leaving things a little tense, and leaving it open and making us argue over it. Back to the rich young ruler-I was preaching on it once, and the story ends where the young man gets depressed and leaves. And Jesus says, "I tell you, you just can't save these rich people; it's as hard as shoving a camel through the eye of a needle. Of course, anything is possible with God."
I ended the sermon there, and people really got mad! "Well, now wait! What's the point? What are we supposed to do?" And I said, "Don't you find it interesting that the Bible leaves it that way? We never know if the young man ever came back, and Jesus never gives a few "helpful hints" about how rich people might be saved. He just lets it hang there.
But a lot preaching wouldn't dare leave it there; it would send people home with "7 Tips for Getting to Heaven Anyway."
I was recently with a bunch of evangelicals, and what struck me was that their preaching was so much explanation, explication. One told an episode of Jesus, and he said, "What was Matthew trying to get at here? What was he trying to communicate? Now let me explain this to you; I've got three things. First..." And I'm thinking, "You know, this is bordering on blasphemy here. I kind of think Matthew said all he wanted to say." Instead I got this sense of, "Here's what Jesus would have wanted to tell you if he'd had the benefit of a seminary education. He wouldn't have told you this stupid little story. Let me tell you three points." I'm for saying, "No. Maybe he was doing something very sophisticated, very deep here."
I was talking about Easter in the book of Mark with a group of preachers this summer. I said, "Well, you know they say there's no Easter in Mark. The angel meets these women and says, 'Don't be afraid, go tell.' And Mark ends his gospel by saying, 'They didn't tell anybody; they were afraid.' What kind of ending is that?" Well, we agreed that kind of ending defines the church. We're afraid a lot. And when you leave a story open-ended like that, think how complicated and sophisticated that can be.
I just don't want make following Jesus more "reasonable" than it really is, or make it sound easier that it really is. Jesus will say something perfectly absurd and outrageous, and you can just feel the sphincters tighten up in the congregation when you read the passage. But then the preacher will stand up and say, "Wait, wait, give me 20 minutes and I'll explain this to you, and you'll feel better and we can go home and have lunch." Rather than to say, "Jesus didn't seem to have any trouble with making people depressed."
How do you preach the Epistles as narrative?
Every one of those letters arose out of a story. Trouble is, Paul rarely turns aside and says, "Now here we've got a divided church in Corinth, and you've got these spiritual enthusiasts who were full of it, and these new Christians who hadn't had that particular gift of the Spirit, so I wanted to explain to them about the gifts of the Spirit." We have to imply and infer a lot of stuff. But every epistle arose out of a narrative.
There is a sense in which everything in Scripture is narrative-based. Stan Hauerwas and I did a book together on the Ten Commandments. We kept stressing that you really do violence to the Ten Commandments it you rip them out of the story of a God who says, "Hey, I brought you out of slavery; you are mine. Why do you think I brought you out of slavery? Because I'm against slavery? No; it's because you are going to be a slave to me. Now, here is how you are going to serve me. Don't have sex with other people's spouses, don't steal..." To get it, you've got to put it in the story. Of course, right after the Ten Commandments, what happens? Moses brings them down the mountain and finds out, "We're having a worship service with the Golden Calf." That's important to the story, too... "We always break the commandments; we never do what we're supposed to do." I'm simply saying that there's a narrative base to just about all of Scripture. I think a preacher has to be grasped by The Story, the master story, the Gospel, and assume that in everything in Scripture there is some kind of gospel lurking.
Is there a place for preaching propositionally?
Absolutely. Paul is an example. I love it when Paul is preaching propositionally, like in Romans, where he's explaining stuff and he's got this tortured logic. But then he just gets to a point where he says, "Myrtle, get over on the piano, I'm gonna have to sing this part: 'Oh, the greatness of God! Who has given Him a gift?'" You've got these doxologies that just pop up in the weirdest places. Or you begin Romans and Paul says, "They're having sex with dogs and cats, and men are having sex with men. Why do you get that kind of perversity? Because they didn't give God the glory; they didn't do doxologies; they didn't worship right." I say, "People, it all starts with singing a lousy song in church, and the next thing you know you are having sex with animals." What an argument!
Back to your question. We have a lot of people in this young generation who need instruction. There are a lot of people in pain, in large part because they are confused. A student whose mother was killed will come to me and say, "I wonder why God took her now; I guess he just had more use for her than we did." I said, "Wait a minute. She was killed on the interstate by a drunk driver. Can you tell the difference between a drunk driver and God?" We've got people in pain because no one loved them enough to preach, "I've got three things to say about the justice of God. One, not everything that happens in this world is because God wants it that way. Again, on one of my sabbaticals, I roamed around in some fundamentalist churches, and one thing that moved me was that I was sitting there with folks who looked like truck drivers and waitresses, and they all were there with their Bibles and a notebook. The sermons were the longest, most boring things I'd ever heard -laborious Greek word studies and all. I'm thinking, "I preach at Duke University, and I couldn't get away with that! They'd kill me for it." But these people were taking notes, and nodding, and getting into it. My theory is that these folks have wonderful experiences in life, but they never have help conceptualizing, theorizing. Well, they come to church and their church helps them think it through, and that's beautiful.
So I think there is certainly a place for propositional preaching.
Let's say you've got a bunch of promising young preachers sitting in class with you. What would be your best advice for them to become good preachers?
Keep trying to fall in love with Jesus. Keep allowing Him to fall in love with you. I really believe that when somebody is grasped by the gospel, you'll find a way to share it, you'll find the words. A lot of preachers don't have much to say because, frankly, not much has happened. The gospel is about something that happens. "This is the most important thing you'll hear this week! Here it is, I've got it for you."
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