I'm thinking this morning about my preaching. I was asked recently how I'd characterize how I preach.
It's strange, I think, that I never thought about it. I'm not sure I've ever put into words what it is I do when I stand to preach, not in some existential way. I've had plenty to say about preaching generally. I've taught others to preach, I've evaluated the preaching of young ordinands, and I've sat in humble submission listening to scores of other words. But what I do and think when I preach? Not so much.
I've seen and heard lots of folks talk about their preaching. "I want help in making connection with my listeners, relating the gospel to their everyday lives." "I want to preach sermons which really hit my people where they live." And, looking back, I'm sure I felt that way once upon a time. I know my earliest preaching was in a similar vein. I wanted to address the culture; I had a lot to say about how the Gospel relates to the world. There was a time when I would have thought that the first goal of my preaching was to relate the gospel to contemporary culture. Relevant messages, thought-provoking preaching, connecting God to our daily lives -- all of those would have resonated with me.
But as I sit here now, staring at a lit-up screen? If I'm honest with myself, I don't think that way anymore.
Sometimes, I'm pretty sure, in leaning over to listen to and connect to the modern world, I fell in. Where I sought to build those bridges early on, I now know it was for one-way traffic: The modern world, rummaging around Scripture, says "This relates to me", but is pretty picky. My earliest preaching was pretty much just the modern world telling the Bible what would work and what wouldn't.
Here was my turning point. I recall, being fresh out of school, struggling to preach Mark 10.1-12. I didn't want to do it, because preaching about divorce in the modern world is dangerous. Still, the Lectionary and the Church's wisdom hadn't done me any favors. So I preached. And I dared to say that the way we Christians marry and divorce says a lot about God. It angered someone, enough that she said she'd never be back.
I learnt a lesson about preaching that day: The Bible doesn't want to "speak to the modern world". The Bible wants to change the modern world -- transform it, convert it.
I now say things to preachers like, "The Bible wants to read us, narrate our lives as Christians in a fresh, strange way". By which I mean: We're not called to bring the Bible into our modern world, but to tell the modern world that it's turned upside down (Acts 17). The task of preaching, I think, -- at least my preaching -- is to present this "strange new world of the Bible" (Barth) as the real world. Without apology.
Without apology. That means my preaching isn't concerned to make connections, to make the Bible more palatable to our modern sensibilities. My preaching is proclamation -- telling forward, speaking on behalf of -- the strange new thing that God is doing in the world. That "strange thing" is Jesus.
For all our progresses, "the modern world" is also responsible for ethnic cleansing and economic oppression. We're as much Auschwitz as internet. Why should preaching be comprehensible to that world?
Too often Christians have treated the modern world as if it's an unalterable fact, a reality to which we were obligated to adjust and adapt, rather than a point of view with which we might argue.
Fortunately, the Bible says there's an argument to be had. Modernity is just one way of saying how the world really is. The Bible is another.
Rather than reaching out to connect with our culture, my preaching now aims to reach out to connect others with Jesus through the Church. There's no way I can distill the Bible in all its beautiful complexity into being understood by an American in 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or even an hour. I'm good, but I'm not that good.
I've been learning basketball for 17 years. I'm pretty sure Jesus is even more complicated than basketball.
The point is not to speak to the culture. The point is to change it. God's appointed means of producing change is called Church. God's typical way of producing church is called preaching.
Which means, in the eyes of lots of my peers, when it comes to preaching, I'm probably a failure.
I've told my preaching students for the past 10 years that they need to learn some basic homiletical skills and techniques, and they'll need the kind of critical feedback that can help them to become a better preacher that is preaching class. But the most important bit of wisdom I try to pass on? Don't ever try to become a "good" preacher.
By that I mean: I've discovered, in my preaching, that if you want to be a polished, professional preacher who delivers carefully-crafted homilies, forget it. I've learnt that to preach is to accept responsibility for the Word in the world.
My preaching is an impossible task. I should speak for God, but I can't force God to speak. No exegetical felicity or theological acumen prepares me to preach. I preach only because I dare to believe that God is in the world, with us. So only God can speak to a congregation. As Karl Barth famously put it: "As ministers, we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, so we cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability, and by that very recognition give God the glory".
That's why I think my preaching is sheer foolishness (but I'm in good company as a fool; see Paul in 1 Corinthians 1.18-31). That's why I say that a good sermon is a failed sermon. When I'm trying to speak God's new word and looking out at a sea of bored, distracted, yawning faces, people furtively glancing at their watches -- when I myself, the preacher, start glancing at my watch and wondering when it will all be over. Anyone who has to preach regularly will know this experience. It's an exemplary experience, because it's here that you encounter the real nature of preaching: The fact that it arises not from the preacher's fullness, but from an unbearable emptiness; the fact that it is always bound to fail -- it has to fail -- unless some miracle occurs, unless God speaks.
Preaching, I think, is at its most beautiful when it isn't quite finished. Because, to me, my preaching isn't over until Monday morning. When we've all gone home, and out into the world, is it any different? Has there been a transformation? God's glorification?
My best sermons are never complete, never finished on Sunday morning. Which is why I gave up preaching from notes long, long ago. When I stand up to speak, I'm marking a vacant spot -- a need, a prayer, for something different to happen in the world. I'm not worried to connect it. Because I'm waiting, in my preaching, for Someone else to speak and act.
As I sit here this morning, thinking back on my preaching, I realize I'm trying to resist the temptation of being a "good preacher" for lots of reasons. I want to make it easier for myself to fail. Because I think preaching works best when God speaks, acts, saves, transforms. Not me.