Willimon's Challenges of Biblical Preaching

I had the pleasure of listening to Will Willimon last Monday share about the challenges of biblical preaching. Of course, if you hear Willimon preach, you'll think there are none. Here are the top five take-aways from the conference.

1. The Bible is old. It is different from the world we live in. We try to make it recent and relevant. This is typical of modernity. God forbid we have a conflict with the Bible because modernity wants to harmonize everything. This is why reason became the great equalizer. But you can't harmonize everything. Modernity is afraid of conflict and has given us the most violent century to help bring this unity. Willimon: "You no way to unify without the army."

2. Scripture always talks about God. It rarely talks about us, even though we want it to be about us. We make it good ideas and principles for living so that it's about us. The challenge of the Bible is that it's about God.

3. Scripture is about conversion, not agreement. It's supposed to sound odd and impossible.

4. Is our Christianity best suited for people who are 30? Willimon: "Most of my best ideas were before I was 35." I get the feeling we preserve the faith until people will settle down and have kids and then come back to it.

5. If anyone hears anything at all during a sermon, it's a miracle. It's not grace if it's predictable.

Preaching and Obama

Heather's Uncle, John Beukema, is a pastor who used to work for Preaching Today. He is an associate editor (meaning he did lots of work but gets little credit!) of The Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching. It is a tremendous book on preaching with almost two hundred articles by about over a hundred contributors ranging from Bill Hybels to Andy Stanley to Rob Bell to Rick Warren to Will Willimon. I love using it for short preaching ideas throughout my week.

I just finished three chapters on preaching to Latin-, African-, and Asian-Americans. What stood out from all of these chapters is the feeling of marginalization from which these groups suffer. Preaching to them, then, is often done by focusing on Scripture's stories of marginalization. Simply acknowledging the marginalization begins to have healing effects.

Which leads to Obama. Many Conservative critics (prophets?!) have perfectly good critiques of Obama, but these critiques have to be couched in acknowledging the marginalization over which Obama's presidency is a symbolic victory. This is nothing new; it's just hitting me--most of all as a preacher--with specific people in my congregation in mind who have suffered and continue to suffer marginalization.

Preacher and Prayer through Eva's Eyes 2

Eva has two things underlined in chapter 2, the second completely resonated with me as well:

"Life-giving preaching cost the preacher much--death to self, crucifixion to the world, the travail of his own soul. Crucified preaching only can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man."

Interesting sidenote: Karl Barth said that the only preacher is Jesus.

Was Jesus just a preacher of principles?

Often we hear pastors pray for God to speak in the event of his or her preaching. I think this is a fine prayer and pray that indeed God answers it! However, I wonder if those who then intentionally preach principles regardless of the biblical text are taking their own prayer seriously. If we are asking for God to speak through his Word by his Spirit, then we must first remember that God has already done this in Jesus. The Word of God has (literally) spoken to us. If God continues to speak to us through the Word, as many pray, then it follows that we are asking Jesus to preach that morning. If the preacher preaches principles, then it follows they believe Jesus to be a preacher of timeless truths, removed from his historical context. Of course, there is room for preaching some kinds of principles--akin to the sermon on the mount, but if we're asking Jesus to preach, we should let him do so in a way that reflects how he already has.

Efficiency and "Tachnology" in Preaching

I was listening intently, taking notes, and energetically critiquing the Christian leader who would later, sadly, have a moral failure, when his words hit me deeply: "Efficiency is the value of the day." He believed that churches must exhibit a high degree of efficiency in their activities because today people value efficiency. Whether or not people do value efficiency, I wondered what implications this had.

Skip ahead two years. I am reading Jean-Francois Lyotard's "The Postmodern Condition." Lyotard notes that a technological society is concerned with decreasing input and increasing output. This means that a technological society values, you guessed it, efficiency.

Which brings me to yesterday. I was reviewing my notes in a book on preaching, when I came across this quote: "The very presence of such media [as TV clips] serves to associate the sermon with the glamour, power, and authority of the same technology that rules the world. The medium really is the message. Technology is the new symbol of power" (Richard Lischer, The End of Words, p. 27). Media allows us to engage several senses at once--we see and hear at once. In part, it increases efficiency.

I think, in part, the church aims to be efficient. Efficiency is not a bad thing; in fact, being more efficient en route to our goal is a good thing. However, efficiency is not a value. There are many things the church does that are not efficient. Preaching is one of them. Pretending to make something efficient that really isn't, like preaching, by using contemporary tools, like technology, is dangerous because the church cannot do culture as well as culture can and so the church's use of technology comes off being tacky. It's tachnology.

Of course, there are some who really can use, say, technology to real communication and I envy them. But for those of us who can't...well, I'm not sweating it anymore.

Preaching after Nietzsche

I have been sitting in on an existentialism class at the local university. The professor is a little too taken with critiques of religion, but other than that it's a good class.

Anyway, after reading and discussing Nietzsche, I think I know why I am uncomfortable with focusing on application in preaching. Nietzsche wants to rescue the individual from the herd mentality that he sees created in Christianity. He thinks Christianity creates weak people who are then controlled by "morality," "the good," etc. He desires, instead, that the individual be regained and empowered to critique, among other things, religion.

When I focus on application in preaching, what comes to mind is the herd mentality: one person directing a group of people how to live out (on a good Sunday) a biblical text. I think this falls into the trap of following not the Spirit, but the preacher--who may be a decent person, but who certainly doesn't have the corner on the Spirit. I have been trying, instead of applications, to offer implications of the text. What questions should I bring to the Spirit with regard to my life/character/choices in light of this biblical passage and its place in the shaping of God's people?

It's easy to think that people need more direction: they need a preacher to spell it out for them; they need to be led to the edge of the water. It's likely they do, but the role of preaching is limited. Pastoring will likely include some of this more applied direction, which is why I think Nietzsche's critique must be heard, but then overcome. This post is titled "Preaching after Nietzsche," not "Pastoring after Nietzsche."