The Beauty of the Word: The Challenge and Wonder of Preaching

University

Introduction

1

Obligation and Inability

From the first time I preached, as a very idealistic but fidgety twentyyear-old, until just this past Sunday, having grayed now into my fifties, I have never shaken loose from the often-quoted thought of Karl Barth:

We ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory. This is our perplexity.¹

Perplexity I’ve had plenty of, and so has everyone else who has ever dared to stand in a pulpit. Yes, we have an obligation to preach. When I was a novice, that obligation felt rather noble, like the holy conflagration in Jeremiah’s youthful soul: There is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in (Jer. 20:9). As I grow older, the obligation some days feels like being stuck. Yet if I shovel away the debris of weary routine, there are still smoldering embers underneath it all.

The obligation to speak of God, whether it feels like zealous passion or the numb inevitability of this week’s calendar, is inextricably paired with an inability we know all too well. We go to refresher courses, read how-to books, mimic pulpit giants, fiddle with technique; but at the end of the day, at the end of every sermon, we sag a little, not having said quite enough, not precisely nailing the heart of the thing, sometimes even boring people, or (far worse!) merely entertaining them for a few diversionary minutes.

In a way this book is about failure in preaching, although I would defend homiletical failure as the only genuine sacrifice of words on the altar of God’s Church. We’ll talk about more than failure, including how preaching might miraculously work, the fascinating linkages between the prophetic sermon and the funeral homily, and what I call the aftermath, how we feel when we sit down and field reactions. We will cover what we actually talk about, the way texts operate, where sermons happen (or don’t happen), and how the whole constellation of tasks for which we are responsible and quirks that reside in our peculiar personalities might mingle and issue in something lovely, come Sunday.

But I do not think Paul was blowing smoke or being typically manipulative when he said he preached in weakness and in fear and in much trembling (1 Cor. 2:3). Homiletical giants write books that promise your sermons can be powerful and compelling; but Paul, without whom none of us would have jobs, said that his message was folly (1 Cor. 1:18), and that God’s power is made perfect in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). As Michael Knowles has put it, "For Paul the cruel death and unexpected resurrection of Jesus provide not only the content of his preaching, not merely the means by which preaching is made possible; they determine also the manner and the method by which he preaches."² In preaching we not only talk about powerlessness; we rather shamelessly put it on display. I am writing to invite us who preach to become weaker, to relish the folly, to thrive on our inability.

Preaching is an obligation, and we suffer an inability to do it well. Barth hatched his obligation and inability idea in a milieu that at least feels simpler than mine. Preaching has always been well-nigh impossible, but it simply must be harder now than ever. Nobody sees your robe or the degrees and ordination certificate on your office wall, and therefore grants you any authority. If anything, the opposite prevails: listeners are hungry for a word from the Lord, and yet they are poised to debunk. We preach to under-equipped deconstructors who read The Da Vinci Code or The Shack but never open a Bible; who surf the Internet and Google up spiritual answers; who have short attention spans and are frankly exhausted from their week long before you ever get cranking on your sermon; who are intrigued by other religions, other spiritualities, other diversions, other … well, anything other than what is old, tried, true, traditional. Gail Godwin has imagined an aging priest complaining to his grown daughter in words that explain well her novel’s title, Father Melancholy’s Daughter: My ministry has been a stop-gap one. I came along too late, you see. The church I wanted to serve started crumbling a long time ago…. It’s been my fate to preside over its final humiliations. Nobody gives a damn about symbols anymore.³

So much is made about preaching being tough in this postmodern, post-Constantinian, post-tried-everything world. But after we engage in a bit of appropriate self-pity, we probably had best recognize that preaching has always been tough, an uphill battle, against all odds, pressed to the margins. We find our multicultural milieu to be daunting; but Christianity was birthed, and somehow survived, in a world where Christians were fewer than 1 percent of the population for over a hundred years, and where the average Mediterranean city featured literally dozens of divinities worshiped by fawning crowds. Even in Old Testament times, when we might blithely assume everybody in Israel believed in God, the prophets declared God’s Word—but theirs was what Walter Brueggemann calls de-privileged testimony.

It is de-privileged because it is the evidence offered by a community that is early nomads or peasants and that is late a community of exiles … a great distance from the great hegemonic seats of power and the great centers of intellectual-theological certitude. Israel always comes into the great courtroom of public opinion and disrupts the court, in order to tell a tale of reality that does not mesh with the emerging consensus that more powerful people have put together.⁴

Always. There never has been, and never will be, some sunny epoch when truthful preaching was or will be received with great zeal and passionate responsiveness. Preaching is hard, but that is why it is meaningful. Preaching is odd, unconfined, and unconfinable—hence its freedom.

And I can hardly blame my audience for homiletical short circuits. The burden is on me, on all of us; the inability would still be fully my own even if every person in the pew were savvy in Scripture, rigorous in prayer, fully formed by liturgy, and holy in lifestyle. They aren’t, and I’m not either; so we adjust to these bare-knuckle facts and try to devise another sermon, acknowledging there is one and only one way to proceed: preaching does not depend on the cleverness, intelligence, or preparation of the preacher, but solely on the beauty, the inherent persuasiveness, of the One we proclaim. Not our persuasiveness, as we are shackled with inability, and not any kind of retro view of the authority of Scripture, but only the beauty of the Word stands a chance out there these days.

THE LYRE OF ORPHEUS

Frequently I contemplate a sermon the young Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his father was the pastor. How the Christian Overcomes Evil was punctuated by an illustration from mythology. The sirens sang seductive songs that lured sailors into shipwreck. Two, though, managed to navigate those treacherous waters successfully, and King contrasted their techniques. Ulysses stuffed wax into the ears of his rowers and strapped himself to the mast of the ship, and by dint of will he managed to steer clear of the shoals. But Orpheus, as his ship drew near the sirens, simply pulled out his lyre and played a song more beautiful than theirs, so his sailors listened to him instead of to them.⁵

Every preacher knows how it feels to grit her teeth in labor, to strive valiantly to keep his rowers with him, just to survive to preach another day, to keep the Church afloat. We slam the office door and grope about for something to strap ourselves on to. We may declare resolutely that the Bible is inspired, that truth is revealed only in Scripture, and so we cram that Word into their ears. Or we fumble across the bookshelf and finger a thick commentary, place it next to the latest collection of catchy illustrations, hoping some invisible magnetism sparks some arc we can type into the computer, for time is pressing and we have to get to the hospital—although we would prefer to get outside in the sunshine for a while.

But think about Orpheus. Calmly, deploying some simple artistry, Orpheus trusted the beauty of the song, and he played. Frankly, if the preacher wants to be effective (and later we will have to examine how we can fall into a dark hole and never get it if this is our sole objective), we have to reckon with the harrowing truth that most Church people nowadays won’t let you stuff anything in their ears. They could care less if you are tied to the mast of all those slogans we fall back on, like The Bible is the Word of God, or The Church is of God, or whatever we say Baptism or scriptural Christianity requires.

If we are to persuade, if we are to give voice to the mysteries of God, then we must take quite seriously the task of picking up the lyre and playing the song in ways that are lovely, although perhaps in the way a young semitalented guitar player might woo his lover, the sincerity and courage of the attempt compensating for lack of talent. St. Augustine urged preachers to marshal their rhetoric, to teach, to delight, and to persuade…. When he does this properly he can justly be called eloquent, even though he fails to win the assent of his audience,⁶ although Augustine clearly believed all preachers could persuade and win assent.

By temperament and training, I have tended to preach like Ulysses, strapping myself to some mast (the inspiration of Scripture? the authority of the Church?) and straining to shut out the voice of evil, forgetting that we have this beauty, that God may be thought of as Beauty. Christendom has plenty of beauty: our buildings (whether a historic cathedral like Chartres or the little wooden A-frame my grandfather and his friends built with their own hands after strong winds huffed and puffed and blew the old Church down, both things of beauty perhaps in the way a child’s coloring and a Rembrandt are both very much art), our liturgy (whether Cranmer’s elegance or the rhythm of an African chant), the music (in its dizzying diversity), stained glass, sculpture, the lilt of spring’s first flower, the face in the mirror.

So why does so much of our talk veer toward ugliness? In my preaching I have railed against various woes: I attack society’s decadent pleasures with a Scrooge-like sourness. I attack war with a verbal violence. I say, You should pray, you should serve the poor, you should be holy, unwittingly conjuring up in my listeners’ minds memories of some battle-ax schoolteacher wagging a chagrined finger. The singer Jewel, in I’m Sensitive, after noting that if we’re told we’re bad that’s the only idea in our heads, hauntingly suggests,

But maybe if we are surrounded in beauty,

someday we will become what we see.

What is beauty? Scholars who write about aesthetics often quote Rilke (Beauty is the beginning of terror), but for my money I prefer Elaine Scarry’s image:

You are about to be in the presence of something life-giving, life-saving. It is not clear whether you should throw yourself on your knees before it, or keep your distance, but you had better figure out the right answer because this is not an occasion for carelessness or leaving your posture to chance. It is not that beauty is life-threatening, but instead that it is life-affirming.⁷

The Church is an ark of the covenant that bears beautiful words that matter. The Church is a manger, and swaddled inside is Jesus—the one about whom we sing, Fairest Lord Jesus, Beautiful Savior. Something life-giving, life-saving: it really is unclear whether to kneel or run, but you have to look.

Through an unlikely chain of circumstances, I found myself at a gathering of Pentecostal clergy, and during worship I noticed the man next to me drift away from the crowd, his hands lifted, gazing somewhere beyond the ceiling, repeating over and over, O Jesus, you are so beautiful. O Jesus, you are so beautiful. What is that? We more frequently go at Jesus with the latest deal we’re working on, asking him to add his leverage to our agenda. Jesus, can you help my back stop hurting? Can you make my spouse more responsive? Can you hold off on the rain until the picnic is over? How many light years is this paltry religiosity from the compelling loveliness of a man gasping, O Jesus, you are so beautiful? Was he a great orator? I don’t know, I don’t care. He played the lyre and I was entranced.

Can I be like Orpheus and trust the beauty of the Savior? I can adamantly say true things about the teaching authority of the Church or the Scriptures being God’s Word, but do such truths stand a chance in our destabilized intellectual culture? Isn’t our best, truest chance simply to let the beauty be itself, and allow Fairest Lord Jesus, Beautiful Savior, to draw people to himself?

HIS BEAUTY IS OUR DEFORMITY

What is our song? Jesus did not come down as a mighty warrior, unleashing a divine juggernaut to crush his foes. Jesus came as an infant. When my oldest was born, I took her to the Church where blue-collar laborers, men with gruff voices, melted at the sight of her, their voices cooing with sweet peeping sounds, their massive hands become gentle pillows holding her. Jesus, nursing at Mary’s breast: how beautiful. Why did the fishermen drop their nets and traipse off after a guy they had just met? Wasn’t there something compelling, something beautiful about him? This Jesus was gentle with those who had been roughed up by life: lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors. How beautiful. His teaching: instead of Blessed are the rich, the cool, the good-looking, he said, Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the peacemakers. How beautiful.

But some didn’t think so. They arrested this beautiful Savior and executed him, nailing him to an olive shaft: the zenith of ugliness. And yet St. Augustine, contemplating the crucifixion, wrote that His deformity was our beauty.⁸ The very beauty of God, hidden and revealed simultaneously in the cross.

Why does this beauty matter? Because, despite our wariness, we all want to give the fragile crystal of ourselves away to what is truly beautiful. Because we laugh, we cry, we dream, we long to be moved. Listen to this marvelous thought from Stanley Hauerwas:

We must be attracted by a beauty so compelling we discover lives not our own. Such a discovery comes through suffering and takes time, because we do not give up our illusions easily. Liturgy is quite literally where we learn to suffer God’s beauty and so suffering discover we are made in God’s image. Through worship we discover the truth about ourselves, making possible lives of goodness otherwise impossible. The beauty, the goodness, and the truth of our liturgy is tested by our being sent forth. If we are not jarred by the world to which we return, then something has gone wrong. The beauty we have beheld in the gift of God’s Son leaves its mark. Formed by such beauty we no longer desire to live by the lies that would have us call lies true, evil good, and ugliness beautiful.⁹

We have seen the beautiful Savior, and we won’t even notice the door slamming behind us as we drop our nets and traipse off after him, mostly listening to his Orphean song, our only words to him being either Jesus, you are so beautiful, or something like I’m sensitive; I’ve seen enough ugliness; show me your loveliness. Maybe if we are surrounded in beauty, someday we will become what we see.

How does a sermon become that more beautiful song? Is it even possible? Having preached for more than half of my life now, I recognize how many of my sermons have been rather pedestrian, flat-footed, sound enough theologically and exegetically, but falling with a bit of a thud. But then there are moments when I feel as if that lyre is in my hands, and listeners miraculously overhear the music that truly is beautiful, the truth that is mesmerizing, even if only for a few moments in the middle of all my verbiage, despite my fumblings. So I am writing to think about how and why this happens, how it might happen again for me and for you.

This is in no way a How to preach beautiful sermons book that, if you only read and put it into practice, you can sail smoothly into calm waters. Instead, I want us to reflect together on the subject of preaching, with some personal ruminations and theological suggestions tying what we do in the pulpit to how we run the Church and live our personal lives. I want us to learn what I still hope to learn before I’m too old to preach any longer: that failure is embraceable, that brokenness has its peculiar loveliness, and that what I’ve been missing in my dogged determination to succeed and preach effectively is precisely the grace of God, which I talk about but never quite acknowledge. If any of this is helpful, encouraging, or a prod to the imagination, then we can be grateful to God. If it isn’t, we still have to figure out how to negotiate the perilous rocks without strapping anybody to any masts or stuffing wax in anybody’s ears.

The Subject Matters

2

What to Talk About

So how do we decide what exactly to talk about come Sunday (or come Wednesday or Thursday or Saturday night when we’re actually writing)? In this section I want to explore the ways we select what we will say and the way we handle a given text. What is a text anyway? How does a text do its work (and thus how does a sermon on a text try to mimic that work)? How do we manage to say things that are truthful, full of truth, or at least not full of BS or riddled by semitruths? Where do sermons happen, from the preparer’s viewpoint? In the office? In a bar?

I prepare, preach, read, and listen to a lot of sermons—my own, those of colleagues and folks who are kind enough to share with me or even ask for some conversation on our mutual displays of inability and obligation. Most suffer, when they suffer, from some sort of shrinkage of subject, a narrowing of what we talk about; or it’s all just a bit flat, superficial, or obvious. When we address people who bother sitting through a sermon, we need to grapple with their deepest dreams, wounds, and secrets. The preacher’s fantasy should be that anyone paying attention might say of