Rethinking the Sermon Part 2
What is the chief objective of the sermon?
For many it is to educate. For others it is to address an important
issue. For still others it is to address the weekly lectionary passage
and apply it to today.
None of these acheive the importance of the sermon as being the
prophetic and dramatic re-telling of the story of God. The sermon
notes in the bulletin attest to this.
There are spaces for names, spaces for dates, spaces for the three
points of the message. But where is the space for living within God’s
story?
Acts 2 is a briliant example of this type of sermon. Peter does not
go into the apologetics of Christ’s resurrection like Lee Strobel, or
talk about the intricacies of the new covenant like N.T. Wright. Those
men are right in talking of such things, but they don’t often in
sermons. But all too often sermons become a regurgitating of
commentaries and books, a sermon as academic paper instead of sermon as
prophetic and dramatic retelling.
Being prophetic and being dramatic does not mean telling the future
or dressing up as a mime. Instead it means A) weaving the stories of
God into a story that continues today; and, B) taking that story that
continues today and making it an active story, one that people can
live, move, and have their being in. Living in God means living in God’s
story.
This is why I think the sermon needs less homiletics and
organization and more storytelling, more meditation, more questions
than answers. A sermon does not need to be the three points on how to
tie up a problem in a nicely wrapped box. A sermon needs to be an
example of living prophetically and dramatically in God’s story. It
needs to be a story that is a branch of the Story.
Jesus preached in this way. His sermons were not heavily structured
and belabored. They were parables and pithy thoughts, poetry that
pushes the listener into a place of meditation and contemplation.
Compare Jesus’ sermon on the mount to any of the major sermonizers today and startle at the difference.
Fortunately, some in the history of the Church have continued the
prophetic and dramatic way of the sermon. Prophetic voices like St.
John of Chrysostom and his Paschal sermon
are great examples of how the sermon can become not the labeling of
doctrine but the drama of doctrine, to borrow from Vanhoozer, and that
we do not need to reconstruct prophecy on large timelines but instead
live every aspect of our lives with a prophetic imagination, to borrow
form Brueggemann.
This was originally a guest post on evancurry.com This is an attempt at re-thinking, not re-doing, which are different.
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Your blog posts (parts 1 and 2) remind me of Fred Craddock’s little book OVERHEARING THE GOSPEL, in which he uses frequently Soren Kierkegaard’s quote, “There is no lack of information in a Christian land; something else is lacking.” By Craddock’s estimation, Kierkegaard’s main frustration was that preaching had devolved into mere information giving.
You said:
“This is why I think the sermon needs less homiletics and organization and more storytelling, more meditation, more questions than answers. A sermon does not need to be the three points on how to tie up a problem in a nicely wrapped box. A sermon needs to be an example of living prophetically and dramatically in God’s story. It needs to be a story that is a branch of the Story.”
I really hope that you are in a position to do something different with “the sermon” – one of the things that totally turns me off is when preachers stand up on Sunday morning and speak with certainty about what “the truth” is…I think it does a lot of harm because anyone who has lived very long knows that things aren’t as clear in scripture as most preachers make it sound and God is not so easily put into a box as we’d like him to be. I think the kind of sermon you speak of would be much more likely to create a space in the hearers for God to do some transforming work. I also think that we need to help each other learn how to be okay with not having certainty – not having all the answers – knowing how to live out our convictions but at the same time being poised so that we are not so certain that we can’t hear the spirit redirecting us or revealing that we had misunderstood something.
Good thoughts…
I was pushed out of a church in Hong Kong by elders who thought this form of ‘preaching’ was not Biblical and therefore I was not ‘fit for ministry’. It seems I raised more questions than I bothered to answer, admitted my own struggles with living out the gospel, and horror of horrors, suggested that ‘getting it right’ was not God’s agenda so much as transforming us to look more like His Son (which is a lifetime journey that none of us will ‘get right’).
The battle may not (only) be in the pulpit but (may) also exists in the pew (so to speak). I still think Peterson’s thoughts on subversive spirituality hold something of a way forward for ministers here.
I always appreciate your thoughts in this blog. It reminds me I’m not alone out here in Thailand with no one with whom I may think out loud.