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On preaching

By Peter Sellick - posted Tuesday, 30 September 2008


There is a danger that, in these days of the almost universal failure of the church and the consequent loss of nerve that goes with that failure, that preaching becomes an exercise in damage control. In an age in which preaching is thought to be about filling spiritual needs, which is another way of saying that we want to stay in our sins, only the bravest preacher will take the outrageous claims of the gospel seriously.

Time and again I listen to confronting readings that threaten the whole view of our lives only for them to be carefully avoided in the sermon. The gospel is thought to be too hot to handle.

When Israelites was encamped around Mt Sinai the fear was that the Lord would break out and destroy them. Contemporary preaching aims to still that fear and offer instead profound insights, helpful suggestions and cute uplifting stories. The Word of the Lord no longer goes out like a roaring lion; it is carefully shut away for fear of offence.

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Part of this domestication of the Word may be put down to the church being so much on the back foot and the concern not to frighten the punters. This means that the preacher has to be “oh so careful” not to say anything in particular that would discomfort his audience. People do not come to church to be discomforted but to be comforted, assured, patted on the head and sent out to spend another week of the grind of modern living. So preaching has become pastoral in the weak sense of the word.

Along with this comes a necessary anthropocentric theology in which the love of God for all and all conditions of men is the main and only point. The possibility of judgment is excluded as is the reality of universal depravity. The result is universal boredom, for who would want to come to hear a message so banal and so irrelevant to the troubles that we all experience in life?

One of my pet hates is the sermon illustration. This is a story that has a vague connection with an element of the readings and is told in order to bridge the gap between the reading and the hearer. The thing is, much of scripture consists of story and so the preacher uses a story from the contemporary world to illustrate a story from the ancient world. What happens, of course, is that the interpretation that results goes the way not of the ancient story but of the modern. So our view of the world and of ourselves is confirmed and the teeth of the dangerous stories of scripture are pulled.

Cultures may have changed during the last 2,000 years but fundamentally, human beings have not. We are still subject to false hope, still nervous about death, still struggle with our worth and our righteousness and our lives are still largely a mystery to us. Try as we might we still find our closest relationships the most difficult and we still find much of our work pointless. This means that the concerns of the writers of scripture are still our concerns and the stories told meet us directly with familiarity. So to place an illustrative story between us and the scripture is both unnecessary and confusing.

Preaching is an extension of the incarnation; it is the fulfilment of the promise given at the end of the gospel of Matthew that he will be with us until the end of the age. So the preacher is no commentator on the Word, he stands in the place of the prophet and says, “Thus says the Lord”. The words of the preacher are generated directly from the Word made flesh, who dwelt among us full of grace and truth. It is the failure to understand the gravity of what the preacher does that disarms him.

This is no time for false modesty. It is no time to protest that such a role is beyond us or even blasphemous because in preaching we make ourselves like God. Unless the preacher understands that in his mouth the Word is enunciated then he will only ever utter trivialities, and tell cute stories, always opening with a joke.

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Preaching is serious talk because it creates a new reality, it raises us from our graves, and it gives us a hope that is not false. To listen to many preachers it is as if this were not the case and that it is the duty of the preacher to explain using historical critical method how the text came about and in what cultural environment. Such scholarship is useful but not at the expense of the strangeness of biblical texts. It is not the role of the preacher to give a lecture on the culture of the Middle East but to speak anew that Word that goes into the world and accomplishes its purpose in us.

We must become accustomed to the fact that scripture is not only culturally alien to us but that it is alien to us fundamentally as a Word that is spoken over and against our intuitive grasp of what life is about and how to live it. To hear the Word is to find that your most certain conclusions about life are overturned.

Karl Barth used to say that God meets us vertically from above. This saying is not the result of an unreformed cosmology but articulates the alien and threatening nature of a God whose thoughts are not our thoughts, nor his ways our ways. If the preacher is not prepared to countenance an encounter with such a one but rather seeks to gather enough satisfying material to fill the gap on Sunday morning, then he betrays his calling. The preacher’s desk during the week is a place of crisis. This is the blessing of sustained ministry that each week we dare to read the allotted readings with fear and trembling, not knowing where they will lead us.

The study of theology is, of course, essential to this pursuit. Not that it gives us the content of sermons but that it gives us a framework or a language in which the sermon can be placed. The battered and bleeding who attend a liturgy do not need a smart account of long debated theological issues. They often come because hope is failing and the fire of love is threatened and they are at a loss. A lecture on the filioque will not suffice. As their plight is a strong plight they need strong medicine, an unflinching declaration of the gospel is the only help we have despite the crowd of “helpers” in secular form that surround us.

The preacher is in the business of the cure of souls. As has been the case in all ages our souls are damaged by wrong thought. We seek our lives in the wrong places and by the wrong means and we become the living dead. It is the preachers business to indulge in truthful speech even if that speech, or particularly if that speech, scares the bejesus out of his listeners.

Do we really think that the forces that are arrayed around us, more powerful than in any other age, will be cowed by the limp junk that is trotted out each Sunday from pulpits across the land?

It is a great pity that we have lost the figure of Satan, the tempter, from our preaching. Such language has always been metaphorical, no such actual being exists, but it is a name, the name of the devil, that reminds us that the forces of this world that conspire towards our death are real and powerful.

As we have lost the sense of systemic evil, even in our own dear hearts, we have lost the sense that Christians rightly have enemies. One might think from listening to many sermons that we live in a benign world and all men are committed to making the world a better place. We wonder at how hard the old liturgies labour over sin. Cranmer’s prayers of confession seem to go on forever and leave no place untouched. John Locke’s image of our minds as being clean slates defuses such gloomy talk and teaches us that we do not inherit the sin of Adam. We are released into a morally neutral world where we might do as we will. There is no place for preaching in such a world because there is no adversary.

Such talk immediately brings to mind some very serious preaching, still found in some sections of the church that lives off the economy of belief and eternal damnation/eternal blessing. I have been surprised by the amount of ink used by 16th century English Protestant writers in outlining and warning against the dangers that overtake the unbeliever in the afterlife. This is where the theological understanding of the preacher is crucial.

The Medieval obsession with heaven and hell as places of joy and pain reserved for the generate, and the ungenerate, after death was based on a theological mistake even though there are some passages, particularly in the gospel of Matthew, that give it some credence. Surely, the use of fear to bolster faith is a contradiction since Christ is the one who casts out fear. It is the theological formation of the preacher that will determine how biblical texts are interpreted and subsequently the kind of sermon they preach.

This is why a deep knowledge of Christian dogma is essential for good preaching, we must be trained to listen for the unique Word in the face of all of the words that surround us. It is often the case that poor preaching is just a mouthing of the commonplace in what is a domestication of the transcendent.

Part of our problem in this is that congregations do not expect anything to happen in sermons because nothing has happened before. If the preacher says something with a bit of an edge to it they are likely to become anxious and restless so used are they at having all aspects of their lives confirmed. It is in this situation that the preacher must be at his most cunning in changing the expectations of his audience.

I use the word “cunning” because the position of the preacher in today’s church is precarious because the gospel is captive to the status quo, the ordinary, the therapeutic and the uplifting, not to mention the sentimental. This means that the preacher has to use all his skill in order to be faithful to the gospel and to take his listeners with him. In an age when the word “preach” has become a pejorative this is a mighty task indeed and should attract our brightest minds.

A recent publication from the Australian Theological forum entitled Don’t Put out the Burning Bush edited by Vivian Boland OP is a welcome addition to our understanding of preaching in the church today, especially the chapter by Bruce Barber “Lanterns at Dusk, Preaching After Modernity”.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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