1. The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. It's an event in which the speaker and listener surrender control and meet Someone bigger than ourselves. In other words, preaching is an act of love.
2. When this encountering happens, the blind come to see what's hidden from the sighted. Mere human words are ignited with a fire that burns the pages without being consumed, and speaker and hearers find they're on holy ground.
3. "How could the Word ... be a Word which contains both Yes and No and is therefore self-contradictory? How could it speak, like so much poor preaching, half of grace and half of judgment, half of life and half of death, half of the love of God and half of the power of the devil?" (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/3, p. 230).
4. The preaching of the Word of God is a lot like preparing a good marinara sauce. It's not just a matter of knowing what to include; it's a matter of knowing what to leave out. The silent spaces, and the dangling questions left without an answer, preach the Word of God more than all our cliches and formularies.
5. Preaching the Word of God that is the Word of God will rarely ever mean "expository preaching". Expository preaching, like Chuck Swindoll et al do it, is nothing more nor less than textual legalism. It's unfaithful to the character of the Word of God. You just can't preach the text that way.
6. But, more importantly, the preaching of the Word of God is not proclaiming the text of the Bible. It's proclaiming the Gospel -- which is to say that preaching is Jesus speaking of himself. Preaching is that act of love if it finds the speaker and hearers together gazing at Jesus. But it's failed completely if it has our noses in a book.
7. Preaching the Word of God, then, in an encounter for which we must prepare. God is about to gift us with the Gospel! We'll never be ready for that gift, but we can get ready for it. The preacher does this in the study for hours, so those in the pew must prepare as well. Read and pray and serve. Because preaching isn't an encounter for the lazy.
8. When the preacher preaches, God speaks. To each of us. This is our hope, but it's also our expectation. This treasure comes in cracked jars. Sometimes we preachers are inept and errant. More often than not, I am. But God still speaks. Just as the presence of God in the Eucharist is independent of the moral rectitude of the presider, so the encounter of the Word of God in preaching. All preaching is theologia crucis.
9. But be sure to discern this presence. The gold the preacher brings might still be fool's gold. You must test the spirits -- which means that you must be critical. You must listen not only to the Word but also for the Word -- which means (as the Reformers taught) that you must distinguish between Bible and Gospel.
10. Pray. Critical intelligence is a necessary condition for listening to the sermon, but it is not a sufficient condition for hearing the Gospel. Only the Holy Spirit can give us the ears of evangelical faith and understanding. "Veni, Creator Spiritus!" Epiclesis is as crucial in the ministry of the Word as it is in the ministry of the Sacrament.
11. "When Christ calls us, he bids us come and die" (Bonhoeffer). To encounter the Word of God in preaching is to die. I don't mean this figuratively, either. In the preaching, we become an ex-people. It is our reality coram Deo. Listen to the sermon as your obituary. It is. Judgment is now.
12. Resurrection is also now. Just as the sermon is our obituary, it is our announcement of new life, a rebirth. The preacher is more a midwife than a surgeon. This no-people is now a people!
13. One who hears the Word but doesn't do the Word hasn't heard anything life-giving. "Sermons are dangerous things; that none goes out of church as he came in" (George Herbert). "What a wonderful sermon", folks will say to me. I only know to respond: "We'll see". When the liturgy is over, the leitourgia begins: Your ministry of reconciliation and liberation.
14. Once you belong to a church, the only grounds for leaving it are heresy or apostasy. Lousy preaching, alas, is not a status confessionis! Besides, God does not speak only from the pulpit, he speaks in the readings, prayers, creeds and communion. Bear with your preacher -- he may be a cross sent for you to bear! -- and make him a better preacher by being a better listener ...
15. Preaching students will ask me, "What is a sermon?" Wrong question. It's not a what but a Who. A sermon is Jesus Christ expectorate. Every Sunday we each eat the book; it is sweet in the mouth but bitter in the stomach (Revelation 10.9-11); I spit out the Word and spray the congregation. When grace hits the mark, it always begins with an unpleasant recoil.
16. Encountering the Word of God in preaching, again, begins as much in silence as in speaking. Before I preach, I better listen. Only because I listen should I ever preach. God gave us one mouth and two ears -- and the preacher is even more obliged to use them in proportion.
17. If I'm preparing the material to preach, I'm wrongly and woefully inadequately prepared. If the Holy Spirit hasn't been with the preacher in the study, he's not going to accompany the lazy bum into the pulpit.
18. Context, context, context. A text without a context is a pretext. The context of scripture, of course, but also the contemporary context -- the Bible in one hand, the news in the other. The clash of two worlds: Scriptura probat mundum.
20. Preachers fret over relevance. Churches demand "relevant preaching". So hear this prophetic Word: Forget it! God alone determines relevance. The forgiveness of sins, the whole of the Gospel, is relevant -- but not because, as the world thinks, the forgiver finds inner healing, but because the guilty one is a sufferer in need of acceptance and embrace. When relevance rules, the tail of the world wags the dog of the church. If you're preaching a relevant sermon you can safely guess you're not encountering God.
21. The Gospel is not legalism. If your sermons amount to "Repent and be forgiven", you're doing it wrong. Instead, the Gospel is a proclamation: "You are forgiven, and therefore now free to repent". Even pagans say, "If you're sorry, I'll forgive you". More to the evangelical point, how can we repent of sin when sin is only known as sin forgiven, when we can only know ourselves as sinners in the light of grace?
22. Technique? Skills? Voice coaching? Forget about them. A sermon is not oratory; a sermon is sui generis. Besides, all theological speech is broken speech. Moses had a stammer, and Paul was embarrassingly inelegant. Smooth tongues are often forked. What has been called "word-care", however, is a different matter: The practice of word-care is crucial. Literature, particularly poetry, is the school of word-care. Remember: You are responsible for every word you preach! Every blessed word! Those who would preach would read and speak with poets.
23. Technology? Forget it! When the brain multi-tasks -- like listening and watching at the same time -- it always quits listening. Period. Substantively, if the medium is the message, how can the medium of IT -- icon of postmodern power -- square with the word of the cross? A thought-experiment I give my preaching students: "What would Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech look like in PowerPoint?"
24. The Church, the Body of Christ, the congregation in that place and time: Know it and love it. This is the perichoresis of preacher and community, and it must lie at the heart of every sermon. If you don't laugh and weep with your people, you've got no right to expect them to hear you preach.
25. Finally, preach like there's no tomorrow. There is no tomorrow. In the sermon, tomorrow is already today. Homiletics is eschatology. On the other hand, if you haven't struck oil within twenty minutes, stop boring!