Some Temptations in Preaching

As I started my ministry at my current church 2 years ago, one of the things that I was concerned about was the task of preaching every week. I was really worried that I would be overwhelmed and ineffective. Well, I have learned that any effectiveness in preaching has everything to do with the Holy Spirit and nothing much to do with me. It is my job to prepare the sermon through prayer and study and then get out of the way, so that the Spirit can work. I'm still working on this. I'm noticing, however, that there are some temptations in preaching that I deal with on a regular basis.


I'm currently reading (albeit slowly) Will Willimon's book Conversations with Barth on Preaching and several points that Willimon (or Barth) makes early on have been really helpful in dealing with these temptations.

1) I am tempted to make sermon preparation and preaching an exclusively intellectual enterprise. Willimon says on pg. 24: "Our fertile imaginations are not the key to biblical interpretation but rather the work of the Holy Spirit. The source of any interesting interpretation is prayer." Wow, I need to hear that every week. Sometimes I operate as if by uncovering some obscure fact or some hitherto unknown meaning for this word or that phrase, then the "true" meaning of the text will shine forth, based on my research and understanding. Willimon states further, on page 27: "Biblical preachers must cultivate the art of relinquishment, letting go of our dearest insights in deference to the Bible's insights." I love how Willimon shoots that idea down so eloquently. My imagination or research or ability to make connections or draw conclusions are not the things that bring cohesion and clarity to the text - that's the work of the Spirit. My intelligence or skill (any that I possess are given as gifts of God) don't lead people to repentance or salvation - that's God's job.

2) I am tempted to focus on myself or my own experiences. I have been trying lately, and with varying success, to steer sermons away from stories or anecdotes about myself. Far too many times, I have begun sermons or introduced points by saying: "When I was…" You can fill in the blanks: "…in college"; "…in seminary"; "…growing up" - on and on. So often, I have made my experience the starting point of whatever point I was trying to make. In comparison to God's Word, my life is a pretty sorry starting point. I've had a good life and I've been blessed beyond measure, but I'm not the focus of the sermon! Willimon states aptly regarding this point, on page 33 that we preachers too often seek refuge, not in some philosophical system or school of thought, but "in that last pitiful asylum of the modern person: our own subjectivity." We assume that our experience is the best starting point for the work of preaching, we focus not on the God revealed in Christ, but on our own experience. George Hunsinger (as quoted by Willimon on page 73) states this clearly: "Experience, Barth acknowledged, can scarcely be presented as absent from the life of faith, but neither can it be regarded as central to the life of faith. We believe in Christ, he insisted, not in our experience of Christ; we attempt to listen to the gospel, not to our experience of the gospel; we believe in salvation, not in our experience of salvation." I tend to think I'm getting something right when I don't talk about myself in the sermon at all, but rather focus on God's redemptive work through Christ and how God is working in us through the Spirit. Here's one final thought (pg. 71): "God is the object that stimulates our thought and talk about God, not anything subjectively arising from within us. Barth criticized that sort of modern theology 'which starts with pious experience or faith'."

3) I am tempted to be an exegetical show-off. Barth states, "preaching is exposition, not exegesis. It follows the text but moves on from it to the preacher's own heart and to the congregation." By the way, I did not learn the word "exegesis" until I went to seminary. It means the careful, close study of Scripture. The basic meaning is "to draw out of". In exegesis, the preacher is trying to draw out of the text the meaning that God is trying to communicate. The opposite of exegesis is eisegesis, which is when we put into the text our own meaning. When we are seeking meaning from the text it's exegesis (which is appropriate and rewarding); when we go to the text with our minds made up about what it means and read the text having already decided what it says and means, that's eisegesis (which is lazy and almost always inappropriate). I sometimes am tempted to make my sermon about my own exegesis and not about what God wants the congregation to hear through the proclaimed Word. The bridge between exegesis and exposition is prayer. In order to know my own heart, in order to have any idea about what the congregation needs to hear, in order to hear what God is speaking - prayer must be the central piece of the work of preaching. I am learning this, however slowly. One temptation for me is that I want to "show my work". I want the congregation to know that I've studied, taken my time, pored over the passage. But, that's more about making myself look good rather than pointing the way to Jesus Christ. This is related to my first temptation - there's a lot that I'm learning to let go of, to relinquish things that I might find fascinating, but that have no bearing on the Gospel message I'm called to proclaim.

4) Finally, I tempted to try to be likeable. I want my congregation to like me, to find me agreeable. I don't want to make people angry or upset, or even confused. Giving in to this temptation means that I water down the truth, I underestimate my congregation's ability and desire to hear a difficult, challenging word. It means that when I give in to this temptation, I'm not speaking what God is calling me to speak, when the message is hard to hear. I'm finding that preaching, real honest-to-God preaching, requires courage. I'm working on it. Here's what Barth says: "My calling is to speak and speak clearly…If I wanted to be liked, I would keep quiet." Amen.

Some Thoughts on This Week's Scripture

This Sunday, I'll be preaching on Luke 10:25-37, otherwise known as the Good Samaritan passage.  This is one of those texts that present a bit of a challenge in preaching.  I really enjoy preaching obscure passages that folks have probably never heard a sermon on before (for example, on my last Sunday at my previous church, I preached on 3 John 2-8 - that was fun).  It's hard to preach on a passage as famous as the Good Samaritan because:

1. You're tempted to take shortcuts in preparation, because after all, you probably consider yourself sufficiently familiar with the text already.  To counter this impulse, I've got a note on my laptop dock at work that reads "Read it again - you don't know it as well as you think you know it."  That has helped me on many occasions and is helping me this week.
2. I assume that my congregation also considers themselves sufficiently familiar with the text.  After all, everybody knows this story, right? 
3. A further temptation for me is to try to jostle some obscure detail out of the text that people might not have thought about before.  That kind of gimmick-centered preaching gets old pretty quickly.  I also try to steer away from "The Greek says...".  The "obscure fact" or reliance on the original languages can be helpful, but only if used in very small doses.  (However, I worked hard learning Hebrew and Greek - I'm pretty adamant that it will not go unused.)

Here's what I'm thinking - sometimes we Christians simply need to hear the Gospel proclaimed, in all its shocking, life-altering, world-shaking power.  I can't remember where I read this, but a good preacher once said (basically): "You don't have to jump off the steeple every week in your preaching.  Sometimes what you need to do is to simply preach the Gospel."  That idea has stuck with me and is giving me some encouragement and direction this week.

Regarding this week's text, the story of the Good Samaritan is easily reduced to simple moralism and shallow sentimentality.  But, if you learn anything about Jesus in the Gospels, it's that he doesn't really do simple moralism or shallow sentimentality.  The shallow, surface lesson here is: "It's good to help out people in need."  That's what has stuck in our culture.  A "good Samaritan" is anyone who helps somebody else.  And that's about it.  Well, of course, there's more to the story than immediately meets the eye.

I'd venture a guess that most Christians know this, too.  We might suspect (and probably have heard before) that this story is not quite as simple as "helping people is good".  After all, there is a reason Jesus specifies that a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan pass by.  It's not general, unidentified people.  We know, too, that the priest and the Levite were representatives of the Jewish religious institution, representing God (supposedly) and the worship of God in Israel.  For Americans (especially those of us in the South), the "preacher" would fill this role nicely (or even the "Christian").

The Samaritan, for Jews in Jesus' day, would have been public enemy #1.  Jews and Samaritans (for the most part) hated each other, deeply.  If you read the Scripture, notice that the Jewish lawyer can't even bring himself to say the word "Samaritan" at the end of the passage, even as he acknowledges that the Samaritan in the story represented the true neighbor. 

This is, on one level, a story about our expectations and assumptions about other people based on their role in society or on their ethnic identity.  This is also a story about our own prejudice and the hatred or anger we harbor in our hearts toward other children of God.  Maybe it's not even hatred, maybe it's simply that we regard "those people" as less than ourselves.  And we all have a "those people".

This story is especially apropos considering the ongoing debate about immigration.  I have heard a good number of people talk about "them Mexicans" or "those illegals" as if they were livestock and not beloved children of the Living God.  A question that I'm hearing from this week's passage - what's more important: following the letter of the law (in the case of the priest and the Levite, it's Numbers 19:11-13) or helping people in need, no matter their immigration status?  Maybe the conversation for us Christians needs to be "how should the Church respond?" instead of "what should our lawmakers do"?

But it's not simply about immigration.  Many Christians, like all other groups, have their own sets of "others" that pose a threat and are cordoned off from the rest of humanity.  Just to run down a list: homosexuals, Muslims/Jihadists, liberals (or conservatives), atheists, secularists...you get the idea, "those people".  I love that Jesus and the rest of the New Testament pushes us, again and again, to not see "those people" but to see a neighbor, a child of God lovingly created in His image.  To not see an enemy, but a child of God.  And that's hard work.  After all, some of those Jihadists would as soon see me and my family killed before they'd offer me a cup of water.  But, going back to Jesus, I'm not responsible for their sin - my part is to pray for them and love them (and that doesn't mean that I should take my family to the next Al Qaeda gathering to hand out tracts).  "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." I'm working on it, if you're a Christian, you should too. 

Apologies for the rambling nature of this post.  I'll attempt to make it up to you with this uplifting and inspiring quote from Kierkegaard: "The matter is quite simple.  The Bible is very easy to understand.  But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers.  We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly.  Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly.  'My God', you will say, 'if I do that my whole life will be ruined.'  Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship.  Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close.  Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of a living God.  Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament."  Chew on that for a while...