Preaching Jesus Christ Today

Six Questions for Moving from Scripture to Sermon

Brownlee, Annette

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493410729
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This book approaches preaching as a theological practice and a spiritual discipline in a way that is engaging, straightforward, and highly usable for busy preachers. Bringing to bear almost three decades of practical experience in the pulpit and the classroom, Annette Brownlee explores six questions to help preachers listen to Scripture, move from text to interpretation for weekly sermon preparation, and understand the theological significance of the sermon. Each chapter explains one of the Six Questions of Sermon Preparation, provides numerous examples and illustrations, and contains theological reflections. The final chapter includes sample sermons, which put the Six Question method into practice.

1
QUESTION 1
“What Do I See?”

The Preacher as Witness

• Main action: Attentively read the appointed Scriptures.

We begin with attentiveness to the text—slow, patient reading—with the knowledge that this is a spiritual practice through which God molds and shapes the preacher. We begin with attentiveness characterized by deference to what we see in Scripture, even when it offends, confuses, or seems a dead letter. This is the role of the preacher as witness. Could we, with Augustine, understand that the slow, attentive reading of Scripture is meant to develop our weak perceptive powers to see that what is written in the Scriptures is better and truer—even if its meaning is hidden—than anything we could think of by ourselves?1 We proceed with this hope.

Attentiveness as Divine Remedy in a Postmodern World

In and of itself, attentive reading is a divine gift to a world of constructed realities, well barricaded against assaults. And not only our world. Augustine criticized the Stoics’ dependence on their own virtues. Why? Because it closed them off to a world beyond their carefully constructed selves.2 Paul Kolbet, in his retrieval of Augustine’s classical idea of the cure of the soul, aptly writes, “The world of signification we live in today is one where we are impatient with signification that does not refer to ourselves.”3

In August 2014, a subcommittee of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure of the American Association of University Professors wrote a report on their response to the growing demand for trigger warnings on university syllabi. They wrote:

A current threat to academic freedom in the classroom comes from a demand that teachers provide warnings in advance if assigned material contains anything that might trigger difficult emotional responses for students. This follows from earlier calls not to offend students’ sensibilities by introducing material that challenges their values and beliefs. The specific call for “trigger warnings” began in the blogosphere as a caution about graphic descriptions of rape on feminist sites, and has now migrated to university campuses in the form of requirements or proposals that students be alerted to all manner of topics that some believe may deeply offend and even set off a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) response in some individuals. Oberlin College’s original policy (since tabled to allow for further debate in the face of faculty opposition) is an example of the range of possible trigger topics: “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.” It went on to say that a novel like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart might “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.” It further cautioned faculty to “remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.”4

The debate about trigger warnings has triggered (!) an extensive conversation about the purpose of education, the role of texts in classrooms, the mental health of university students, and most importantly how to make college campuses safer places. Central to the conversation about trigger warnings is the question of the educational role of looking attentively at difficult texts. A New Republic article on the subject was accompanied by a picture of a young white woman wearing a blindfold.5 Must we look away from that which offends, challenges, upsets? Is exposure to any sort of “ism” a form of violence? How do we distinguish between that which is offensive and that which can cause trauma? Who decides?

Listening to God’s address is hard at the best of times. Eli and Samuel tell us at least this. If it were easy, the church would not have developed the discipline of lectio divina, and Thomas Cranmer would not have created a structure of morning and evening prayer to protect the reading and hearing of “the very pure Word of God, the holy Scriptures.”6 But when Scripture offends? The church, of course, has already exercised its own form of trigger warnings, with the exclusion of difficult texts or portions of psalms left out of the Revised Common Lectionary and the Common Lectionary before that. Pastors who select their own weekly or daily Scripture are not exempt from this practice of excising portions of Scripture they deem unsavory. Selecting a single passage on which to hang a whole worship service or lifting up a theme well above Scripture’s thick jungle does not serve the spiritual practice of attentiveness as a divine gift.

What is lost with this trend is both the practice of reading difficult texts and the practice of listening to them and preaching from them. To look away is to shut a door on the Spirit as it enters our small worlds. As I noted in the introduction, Augustine writes of the discipline we must develop in order to stay with the difficult parts of Scripture. The skills we need to read Scripture properly are the very ones needed to act morally. Here is a divine remedy for a postmodern world. The art of attentively reading the strange, sometimes difficult words of Scripture is similar to the ability to love our neighbor across the chasm of difference and offense.

In the context of eroding skills and declining openness to hearing the strange voice of Scripture, the church claims to be a community poised to hear God’s voice. The fact that the task of listening to God’s address is situated within a community, in and of itself, as Augustine says, speaks of the social nature of sin and grace. He observed that Adam’s sin had to do with his joining a community that was turned toward itself, cordoned off from God. At its most basic level, the church functions as a community for hearing—albeit imperfectly and often not at all—because it is turned outward toward Christ and its neighbor.7

Scripture as Fixed Text and Discourse

Scripture is a fixed, written text. Though we take this for granted, this fact allows God’s Word to endure across cultures, continents, and centuries. Because it is a fixed text and canon (in many translations), we read basically the same words in Brooklyn in 2016 as were read in Bombay in 1614 and in North Africa in 314. Scripture is also more than a written text. It is discourse, address, interpretation, inspiration, and proclamation in gloriously varied ways. To explore how the Spirit uses Scripture to build the church by creating a people able to respond to it, we must first distinguish Scripture as fixed text and discourse. Scripture displays characteristics both of written texts, consistent across time, and of things said, utterances, which will be read and pondered in ways that are not fully fixed.8

Both characteristics of Scripture—as fixed text and as discourse—allow it “to intrude on the church” as the one witness of the one Spirit, and allow it to be read, heard, preached, pondered, received, and embodied across time and contexts.9 To describe Scripture as only the construction of the church over the centuries is to collapse the distinction between what the text says and what the interpreter or interpretive community makes of the text. The church is committed to the belief that Scripture has been received from the prophets and apostles, and the church does not in any simple sense construct it. This allows the Spirit freedom and authority to intrude on us through the otherness of the text. To say that the Spirit uses Scripture to create a people able to respond to it is to speak of the Spirit putting the fixed texts to work sacramentally. The Spirit takes up the fixed texts and gathers them into a single discourse addressed to the church. In doing so, the Spirit renders human discourse as divine discourse.10

We begin the Six Questions with attentiveness to the written text because the written text is the main material of Scripture. To begin here in our role as witness means we pay attention to how the words form sentences and how the sentences connect to each other. In his book How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, Stanley Fish retells a story from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life (1989):

Annie Dillard tells of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “Well,” the writer said, “do you like sentences?” The student was surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that “if he liked sentences he could begin,” and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. “I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ‘I like the smell of paint.’”

As Fish writes, the implicit point is that “you don’t begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will hang in the Louvre”—or of how you will preach on a particular text. You begin with “a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.”11

Deferential Attention to the Text

What does it mean to have “deferential attention” to the text? Toward what should our deference be directed? First, we defer to Scripture’s words and sentences, including the difficult parts. We do not look away, skip, or gloss over. We pay attention to the nouns that are the subject of its verbs. We pay attention to what the text says, not what we think it says or what we want it to say. We do not extrapolate its meaning or teaching and then discard its words, sentences, and narrative. We take the actual words of Scripture seriously, all of them, even when they grate and hurt, as words intended by God for us on whom the end of the ages has come. We pay careful attention to what Scripture says and how the words work together in the text.

This simple practice needs to be emphasized. Paying attention to sentences—nouns, verbs, and direct objects—leads the preacher to identify the active agent in a sentence and, hopefully, to reflect this in her sermons. Let me give you an example. I recently heard a sermon on the parable of the weeds among the wheat (Matt. 13:24–30, 36–43), assigned in the Revised Common Lectionary, Year A, during the long season of Pentecost (the seventh Sunday after Pentecost). A fertile image for the height of summer. The sermon encouraged the congregation to “sow seeds of love,” and the preacher passed out packets of flower seeds printed with these words to emphasize the message. The focus of the sermon was on our actions, not God’s or the evil one’s. It was well-meaning, but what it lacked was a reflection on what the passage actually says through its nouns and verbs. In contrast to the sermon, the active agents in this story (the subject of its sentences) are the householder or the Son of Man (vv. 27, 30, 37, 41), the enemy or the devil (vv. 25, 39), and the reapers or angels whom the Son of Man instructs to gather the wheat and burn the weeds at harvest time (vv. 30, 41). The only action assigned to the congregation comes through the command to listen: “Let anyone with ears listen!” (v. 43). What might the congregation have heard if the sermon reflected an attentiveness to the text?

Second, we read Scripture in light of how the church has interpreted it through the ages. This does not mean our response is static or uncritical, liberal or conservative, per se. It does mean that we do not come up with our own personal interpretation of Scripture that casually ignores or contradicts how the church has understood Scripture’s meaning through the centuries. We do not read Scripture as primarily about the individual believer and personal piety. Rather, it is about God and Jesus Christ, the corporate community of God’s people, Israel and the church, and our role in God’s mission in Christ through the Spirit.

Finally, to defer to the text means we defer to Jesus Christ, who is revealed there and who is the active agent in many of Scripture’s sent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. QUESTION 1: “What Do I See?”
• 2. QUESTION 2: “Whom Do I See?”
• 3. QUESTION 3: “What Is Christ’s Word to Me?”
• 4. QUESTION 4: “What Is Christ’s Word to Us?”
• 5. QUESTION 5: “What Is Christ’s Word about Us?”
• 6. QUESTION 6: “What Does It Look Like?”
• 7. Using the Six Questions
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover