A Break in the Preaching Stuff

Okay, enough with the sermonizing stuff for a moment.

I found another writer who shares the idea of faith laughing here.

Preaching pt.5 - Assumptions

N.T. Wright warns the preacher and teacher of the Gospel to never overestimate how much people know about the Bible or the faith, and never underestimate their ability to learn.

'Nuff said.

Preaching pt. 4 - The Congregation's Imagination

I was warned in seminary about the desire to impart knowledge as if we could unscrew the top of someone's head, pour in the information, and then screw the top back on. The warning was simple, it doesn't work.

So the art, rarely science, of preaching Good News requires the preacher to invite the imagination of the congregation into the process of preaching the sermon.

Rumi, the great Sufi poet, says of how reading poetry feeds the soul, "Actually, friend, what you're eating is your own imagination." When a sermon feeds the soul, is it not the same?

If the sermon simply seeks to impart knowledge, state facts, or exhort behavior, it will typically fall flat. If, instead, the preacher can evoke some image from the imagination of the congregation, if those in the pews can find their story being woven into the story being told, if their journey is acknowledged and honored in the journeys of the sermon, then a connection is made and something new is born of their imagination.

Inspiration and imagination are intimately linked.

Insomnia stinks

I think the title of this entry speaks for itself.

No more caffeine after lunch.
No more caffeine after lunch.
No more caffeine after lunch.
No more *yawn* Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

What is Preaching pt. 3

So exploring preaching (or as I like to say, procrastinating writing the sermon for this week), on a blog called faithlaughs, means I probably need to talk about humor.

Trying to describe humor is a terrible idea. If you have to explain the joke, it isn't funny.

But I think humor is necessary for preaching. Humor does several things at once. It ties together things that normally don't go together. It interrupts the usual view of the world and turns things on their head. In the form of clowns and parody and satire, humor takes ordinary things and blows them all out of proportion, sometimes showing us what we were not able or willing to see otherwise.

Such interruptions of normal life are not incongruous with the Bible.

I Corinthians 1:26-29 - (NRSV)

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

Rome doesn't stand a chance against such holy humor.

In preaching, humor breaks the seriousness which often infects and deflects the joy of our connection with creation, one another and God. If it is done well, humor interrupts our business-as-usual thinking that lets us settle for tomorrow being much the same as today.

I am also convinced that people learn more while laughing. We tend to be more open to learning while laughing, even if what we are learning what we have gotten wrong.

How I Do That, pt. 2

As I think about preaching, a few things come to mind.

Walter Brueggemann (and you should get used to reading that name often around here) counsels preachers to "stick close to the text."

I am sure that means different things to different preachers and readers of the Bible. For me it means following internal references in the stories to other Biblical stories, letting the stories speak for themselves, not assuming everything in the Old Testament is simply there as a pedestal on which to place the New Testament, and trying to find how to connect with what the story meant to those who heard it first (an impossible, but necessary, task).

This leads me in often opposite and sometimes conflicting directions. Letting the story speak for itself can mean drawing in other stories. Letting an Old Testament story have its say about the way of God without making it only a pre-frigurement of Christ, but also always having the lens of the Gospel as the means of understanding what is going on.

So staying close to the text for me means working and breathing and living in the paradoxes of scripture. Sometimes they are dissonant chords, sometimes minor or major, sometimes they resolve, and sometimes they do not.

How Do I Do That?

I don't know how I do what I do, and that bothers me.

This may be the final polish on the plaque that declares that I am a nerd, but I want to understand things. I especially want to understand how it is that stuff works. And it seems even more important to me to know how it is that I am doing what I do.

The mystery in question is preaching.

I know why I am preaching, or at least I have palatable answers for me and for others when the question arises.

Why do I preach? In no particular order:

1. They pay me to, and after all it is a big part of my job.
2. I enjoy it. For someone who hated to do homework, I love having study and an oral presentation each week.
3. As Walter Brueggemann says much better than I do, we are a narrative people, and we live by stories. (See here for Brueggemann's description of how this works.) These stories (Torah, Gospel, Law and Prophets, the stories of faith in ordinary lives) are far better than the stories of Rome, or Washington, DC, or any other empire on earth.
4. As the Rev. Dr. Dow Egerton used to say to us in preaching class, "I love to tell the story for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest..."

But how does it work?

I read the scriptures in the lectionary for the week, and sometimes an idea hits me then.

1. Sometimes I have two or three false starts.
2. Some weeks I realize I am writing several different sermons and need to pick only one to preach.
3. Some sermons start as a spark from something I read or heard or overheard or watched.
4. Some come all at once and my fingers and the keyboard have trouble keeping up, and some are like building a small model where you have to leave it alone time and again for the glue or paint to dry, only to come back later, add a few pieces and leave it again.
5. Some get typed up fairly quickly, and then sit to ferment for a few days, so I can come back and distill what is good out of the mix.

It is a strange and unruly thing to do something week after week, and to be told I do it fairly well, and still have no clue how it is done.