Wrestling with the Word

Preaching On Tricky Texts

Kate Bruce & Jamie Harrison, Jamie Harrison

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780281076499
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Bibles

Many biblical texts seem almost impossible to preach. They may be violent or terrifying or strange or abrasive. They may deal with matters simply beyond human experience. The preacher could well be tempted to choose an easier text on offer! But leaving taxing passages untouched means the Bible is effectively silenced. In Wrestling with the Word, well-known and accomplished preachers grapple with a range of notoriously difficult biblical Old and New Testament texts. As well as providing sample sermons - in an exhilarating variety of structural styles and voices - they offer ideas to help in the planning process of interpreting and applying such passages.'A well-constructed and delivered sermon has the potential to inspire people as few other experiences can.'
The Rt Revd John Pritchard, from the Foreword

Part 1

THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS

1

The call to preach

KATE BRUCE

Do you ever find yourself doing the rounds with a spectacularly tricky text and thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ Do you spend hours pondering, praying, researching and writing, and then wonder: will this sermon make any difference to anything? Is it self-indulgent? What right do I have to speak to these people? In a context where there are voices claiming that the day of the sermon is over,1 the preacher needs to think through: what is preaching, and what’s the point?

Before we go any further I sense an elephant perched on the coffee table; an elephant we need to name. The negative connotations of the word ‘preach’ in everyday parlance hardly give it a ringing endorsement. It is easy to caricature preaching as declamatory, one-way, authoritarian, pontificating pulpit patter of the ‘should’ and ‘ought’ variety. Is it just an expression of old-school paternalism, which treats people like empty vessels longing to be filled up with useful information about the fate, for example, of the Jebusites? Many of us have experienced flesh on this particular straw man; caricature can come horribly close to experience. So, shouldn’t we just cease the practice and be done with it?

Preaching: wrestling with understanding

Before we discard preaching, it would be wise to understand what we would be losing. Looking at six of the more common verbs used in the New Testament for preaching gives us a sense of its scope. Martyrein means to witness; parakalein to comfort or admonish; propheteuein means to prophesy; and didaskein refers to teaching. Keryssein, meaning to proclaim, is very close to euangelizesthai or preach the good news.2 This is not simply proclamation of an event in the past but of the presence of Christ now, inaugurating a new apprehension of reality.

A key question for any preacher is, ‘What am I trying to do in this sermon?’ A sermon may proclaim, involving witness and elements of admonition or comfort. It may invite consideration of the gospel, as with the more direct evangelistic address. It will always seek to identify something of the presence of God in the given moment and thus have a prophetic edge. While there are often aspects of teaching in the sermon, it is always more than a teaching event. The sermon alone simply cannot be expected to develop the biblical literacy of the congregation; this belongs to the wider teaching ministry of the Church.

In summary: the sermon is an event in which by the grace of God and in the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ is present. There is clearly here an argument for the sermon as sacramental event.3 Preaching is more than an appeal to cognition: it is a corporate event in time that seeks to ignite the heart, appeal to the mind, and move the will.

Preaching: wrestling with the objections

Let’s attend more closely to that elephant perched on the coffee table and wrestle with the criticisms that have been levelled at preaching.

Under the oppressive boot?

Doug Pagitt sees preaching in terms of ‘speaching’; an authoritarian practice with the preacher as ‘teller’.4 Similarly, Stuart Murray denounces preaching as ‘declaiming from an authoritarian height’, a vestige of Christendom, ‘related to clericalism, massive buildings, unchallengeable proclamation and nominal congregations’.5 Implicit in these critiques is a failure to differentiate between authoritarian and authoritative preaching. Preaching as an authoritarian, controlling practice can have no place in the Church; bullying, declamatory certitude lacks love, imagination and wisdom. Honesty, openness and vulnerability, undergirded by love for the hearer, are hallmarks of the authoritative preacher.

Honesty means not glossing over the difficulties in the Scriptures; we cannot pretend that tricky, thorny texts do not exist. Ignoring them will lead to preaching a very selective canon and sliding over challenging material. Sometimes the Bible does not seem to contain good news for many of its characters. This needs to be wrestled with, to see how such texts might be handled responsibly.

The preacher is first audience of the sermon. Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor in the USA, asked her congregation for feedback on her preaching: ‘Almost all of them said that they love that their preacher is so obviously preaching to herself and just allowing them to overhear it.’6 Her authority as a preacher comes from her honest struggle to live authentically; she inhabits her sermons. In contrast, Frederick Buechner critiques a form of preaching in which ‘men in business suits get up and proclaim the faith with the dynamic persuasiveness of insurance salesmen . . . you feel there is no mystery that has not been solved, no secrets there that can escape detection’.7

There can be an unimaginative, rabid certainty in preaching, deeply off-putting in a culture more open to the nudge of suggestion. Buechner describes another kind of preaching that is ‘not seamless and armor plated’.8 Such preaching is deeply and deliberately earthed in the life of the preacher: it is authentic, open and honest.

Challenging, provocative sermons that boldly ask us to wrestle with tricky texts and to be honest about our conflicted lives are part of the formation of a mature community, a means of drawing people in and deepening faith.9 There is a place for authoritative monologue in homiletics, but there is no place for authoritarian hectoring that seeks to enforce conformity and crush dissent.

Generates passive hearers?

Listening to a sermon can become a passive exercise if the content and performance fail to engage, and if the hearers do not regard themselves as in part responsible for the making of the sermon. Attentive listening involves concentration, analysis and question. The sermon we hear will never be quite the same as the sermon preached, since the active listener is working on the interface between the words spoken and their own particular situation and experience. ‘It is the sermons we preach to ourselves around the preacher’s sermons that are the ones we hear most powerfully.’10

The preacher’s challenge is to engage active listening. This calls, among other things, for preachers to name difficulties with tricky texts, bringing the congregation with them in the journey. This is a matter of courageous questioning, compelling content and creative performance. In this view the work of the preacher is close to that of an artist, a poet or a linguistic musician.

Sitting and listening does not have to mean passivity. Murray, although opposed to monologue preaching, writes of the importance of poets and storytellers stirring the churches into re-imagining God’s kingdom.11 Storytellers deliver monologues but we don’t connect listening to their speech with passivity. Walter Brueggemann argues for preaching to be seen as poetic speech that peels back the layers of inanity and tedium and discloses new hope and new possibility.12 The genuine reception of such disclosure is far from passive. A number of theological questions fall out from this. Who makes the sermon? Is it God, the preacher’s skill or the listeners’ attentiveness? What is the theological importance of deep listening? (See Chapter 2).

Poor means of teaching?

Some argue that preaching is an ineffective means of teaching, creating a dependency on the preacher, who is seen as an expert among those largely ignorant of faith.13 But what is meant by ‘teaching’? The communication of information relating to Christian belief and practice is only one aspect of preaching. The sermon is a form of discourse that seeks to engage hearts as well as minds; an invitational exploration of a text and its implications in a particular context. It is part of the sacramental life of the Church and feeds into the Church’s wider teaching ministry.

‘The sermon fails to develop powers of thought and analytical skills.’14 This might be a valid objection if the sermon does not pose sharp questions, drawing in congregational engagement, perhaps through naming problems in the text and inviting the congregation to join in wrestling with such challenges. A sermon that facilitates congregational application, opening opportunities for further discussion, has the potential to draw congregations into deeper, critical biblical engagement.

Doug Pagitt argues that preaching ‘takes the Bible away from the hearers . . . and reminds them that they are not in a position to speak on how they are implicated by this story’.15 On the contrary, the preacher has the opportunity and responsibility to enthuse, challenge, and encourage the hearer. The preacher asks explicitly or implicitly, ‘Where are you in this text?’ ‘How do you respond?’ ‘So what difference does this make to us?’ The purpose of the sermon is not to dominate and disempower but to serve the community, inviting people to read and wrestle with the text for themselves.

The effective preacher comes alongside the hearers, asking difficult que...

Table of contents

• CoverImage
• About the author
• Title Page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Readers
• Part 1: Theological Foundations
• Part 2: Sermons on Tricky Texts
• Part 3: Wrestling with the word
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Charity