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Jesus preached only one sermon in his lifetime — the Sermon on the Mount — and it began with the word blessed. Blessed is from the Old English word bledsian or the Proto-Germanic word blodison. Both these words come from the root word blod, from which we get our word blood. Blessing involves blood. No blood, no blessing. To drink blood or to have blood poured over you was to be blessed by whatever it was the blood came from.
Preaching is the discipline and craft of turning water into Cana wine22 and decanting the old, aged-to-perfection Jesus wine into new bottles. Preaching is the primary means whereby the miracle of Cana continues, as Jesus turns our life from water — tasteless, colorless, odorless — into homemade vintage wine, known for its vibrant flavor, vivid sparkle, and alluring aroma.
In preaching, each speech act must be a baring and bearing of the story of Jesus in what is less a performance art than a participation art. Preaching today takes place without audiences, only with participants and partners. Giving blood is not a matter of donor and recipient but of donor and participant. Of course, participation art can become performance art. When that happens, preaching moves from being a relational discipline and craft and becomes merely a solitary performance.
(there are no chairs at the Lord’s Table: the posture of faith is not sitting but walking toward, kneeling down, standing up),
You can’t point to Jesus if you’re trying to make Jesus fit your point. Semiotics is important because it’s the language of the human body. When asleep, and your body needs to tell you it’s time for a bio break, how does it communicate that to you? You dream of water. Even in your state of sleep, you “read the signs” and interpret the “sign” of water, wake up, and head for the bathroom.
A semiotic sermon reads the signs of what God is up to in the world, connects those signs in people’s lives with the Jesus story, and then communicates the gospel by connecting people in relationship to Jesus through stories, images, and gestures. A semiotic sermon is a search for that holy grail receptacle that conveys Christ’s incarnational presence from giver to receiver. And every preacher knows how often that semiotic receptacle can feel just as elusive and unobtainable as the Holy Grail itself.
Semiotic preaching is as much liturgical as it is exegetical. Are words the best conveyers of the divine? Or are experiences, intuitions, emotions, images, and stories more reliable and memorable? For Jesus, parables were the most trustworthy purveyors of truth. Semiotic preaching, really a new form of expository preaching, seeks to reconnect us with the stories, images, relationality, and resonance of the Scriptures as they were told, written, and intended to be received. In semiotic preaching, we return to the roots of our faith and to a method of conveying truth favored by Jesus himself.
Transincarnational (transductive) preaching is preaching that mediates the revelatory power of the Holy Spirit; it points to God in the midst of the congregation, in the midst of lives. Semiotic exegesis, EPIC delivery, and a transincarnational theology of relational “knowing” create a kind of preaching that engages and changes lives.
The church’s century-long experiment in a bloodless Christianity has left the body of Christ plasticized and ossified, a fossil of its former self. A living faith requires a healthy circulation of the blood of God’s creating, redeeming, and sustaining covenant for the world. The mystery of life in Christ is both corporeal and corporal.6 From trough to cross, the blood of the covenant is the life source that ensures our resurrection hope.
would say preaching is like giving blood, the transfusion of Christ’s resurrection power into the body of the Church. Without the giving-blood preaching that brings together body and spirit, the body is only “dem dry bones.
Cultural critic Seth Godin says that the average person is exposed to three thousand ad messages a day.14 Each of these ads is a sermon in disguise. Messages bombard us in more channels and frequencies than Girl Scouts have cookies. White noise emits everywhere. In such a noisy world, preachers need to preach a sermon that can talk, walk, shake hands, and invite someone to dance.
While traditional preaching still echoes a “smash the icons” Gutenberg mentality that privileges words, points, and principles over images and stories, images are the bread and butter of semiotic preaching. Part of creating an EPIC sermon is dynamically and relationally to introduce metaphors, images, and stories (narraphors) that “make the familiar strange,” that catapult the participant into a realm of the unexpected, unusual, and mysterious. A great metaphor takes a familiar image and gives it a twist in order to introduce an unfamiliar vision. Great metaphors or narraphors (extended
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Semiotic preaching revels in the mystery of life itself. It reveals truth in all of its beauty. It invites all to the table to follow Jesus where he will take us — into new places, uncharted territory, unfamiliar landscapes. It doesn’t seek to nail down, firm up, work out, or objectify the Bread of Life. It serves the Bread of Life piping hot, fresh from the ovens of suffering and sorrow, joy, and celebration. It celebrates the leaven that is faith, the mystery that is Christ. Only through images, metaphors, and stories (narraphors) can profound truths be understood or conveyed to others.
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the Bible was never written in verses. Jesus never taught in points, whether three, five, or ninety-five. Jesus wasn’t known for touting propositions or praised for the clarity of his teachings. Jesus wasn’t known for his well-prepared lesson plans, or for having disciples who could pass quizzes on his parables. Jesus was best known as a master of metaphor, a legendary storyteller, and a powerful healer who communicated in signs, images, and gestures. Therefore, to understand Jesus and the Scriptures, we need to train ourselves and others not to exegete more words but to exegete images. The
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Jewish traditions had a way of finding meaning on four levels.15 The first was the peshat, the literal and simple understanding of Scripture as found in the Mishnah (the oral interpretations of the Torah and Writings). The second was the remez, the more complex typological meaning, represented by the studies of well-known rabbis in the Talmud or gemara. The third was the derash, the metaphoric or parabolic meaning and in-depth exegesis associated with the studies of the midrash. The sod was the fourth and deepest level of meaning. The most spiritual in nature, it contained the very secrets of
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The image of the pelican in Christian art, sometimes called “Pelican in Its Piety,” appears everywhere in the late Middle Ages — in paintings, icons, drawings, misericords, altar cloths, and stained glass.17 The image is based on a legend of the pelican sacrificing itself for the sake of its children. It’s a legend that predates Christianity, but early Christian writers linked the story of the pelican to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and his continued nourishment of his “little ones.” The image of the bird plucking its breast and spilling blood for its young reminded Christians visually
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The church is the corpus Christi, the sacramental image of Christ in the world. The sign of the pelican signifies the church as a nurturing giver of life to the congregation and of love to the world. Just as the community of Christ receives the ultimate gift of life from the Creator, so also must those children grow up themselves to become givers of life. The pelican gives life so that life can be passed on. Biblical themes of lineage, covenant, flesh, and embodiment all flow together in the early image of the pelican’s tale.
More than half the time, Jesus derived his preaching from the people more than delivered a message. They set the agenda. Ralph L. Lewis calls it the “Jesus’ start-from-scratch, listener-centered attitude.
recent study testing brain activity found that the brain is most active when the subject is telling a story. As award-winning children’s author Philip Pullman puts it: “All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions. . . . Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.
As Paul Ricoeur has taught us, narratives and metaphors are inseparable. A narrative, or story, is nothing but an embellished and embroidered metaphor. By the same token, we could define a metaphor as nothing but a dense and distilled narrative. Therefore, when we speak of narraphor, we are simply naming a form that Jesus used in his preaching and teaching. “He did not speak to them except in parables.”8 Parable literally means “alongside of,” and Jesus built his stories alongside of the native images, reports, and experiences of the people to whom he was speaking.
In Jesus’ storytelling, meaning is layered and “lessons” are conveyed in a kind of code. Deciphering these images and lessons takes time, commitment, and engagement with the Storyteller to delve into his deepest meanings.
The most powerful metaphors both create and destroy. Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter developed a theory of innovation termed “creative destruction.”12 The theory proposes that innovation rises phoenixlike from the ashes of destruction. And the most powerful metaphors do exactly that. They draw you close, inviting you in, only to subvert meaning. They destroy your prior worldview and usher in a new one in a moment of revelatory epiphany.
Paul Ricoeur uses the term rupture,13 or “the inexhaustible capacity of the parable to speak with the grain and against the grain.”14 A good metaphor or a good narrative can’t have rapture without rupture. “Metaphor produces new possibilities of imagination and vision. When the reader is seized by this ‘re-figured world,’ the narrative effects become revelatory and transformative.”15
Points are sharp and cutting. They are hard to pick up. Metaphors are fuzzy and embracing, which is their blessing and their curse. Metaphors can take on a life of their own, which is why literary critics recognize the text as “alive” and “independent” with a reader’s right to interpret.
Puritans so distrusted metaphor: “metaphors make us blind.”17 Puritan divines insisted that the New Testament used no metaphor, none being needed once revelation was complete and “plain.” Since all metaphors are lies, they argued, parables were really similitudes.
The practice of giving blood requires knowledge of the body — its symptoms, strengths, vulnerabilities, and idiosyncrasies. As a preacher, you need to know your culture’s and your congregation’s peculiar storyboard and find ways to connect those story lines with the story of Jesus in ways that allow them to participate in and connect with Christ’s powerful and life-changing presence. This is what I refer to as “blood work.” Blood work is the practice of preaching. It is semiotic preaching gone EPIC (experiential, participatory, image-rich, connective).
The core issue of preaching is not “getting something said”; it is not even “getting something heard”; it is getting something experienced that can transform your life for God and the gospel.
What rational was to the Gutenberg world, experiential is to the Google world. In the ongoing battle between Aristotle and Plato, Aristotle wins in the twenty-first century. It’s the difference between sermons that evoke the response, “You really gave me something to think about, Preacher” and those that garner “That message really moved/touched me.” Plato insists that philosophy reigns supreme; Aristotle makes a place for drama, the arts, poetry, and experience.
In our day, the challenge is not belief but authenticity of faith. You can “believe” that Jesus is Savior of the world or “believe” the resurrection is true and still not give your heart to Jesus. But to “trust in” Christ is another matter entirely. Faith is “trusting in” Christ and allowing Christ to live in you. Trust and faith are EPIC words. Faith is not just accepting propositions about Jesus. Faith is being in a grace relationship with Jesus. And that four-letter preposition with defines the experiential aspect of EPIC.
Marketing is the art and science of getting people to want what they don’t need. Preaching is the art and craft of getting people to want what they don’t know they need but can’t truly live without: daily experiences of Christ.
A good narraphor helps people remember, and it functions as a sensory icon — like the touch of Jesus’ robe. For people to remember sermons, they must experience Christ within them — not just intellectually but “bodily” with the senses. And they must experience Christ not just individually but communally, as a “
Body and blood sermons do more than reproduce the preacher’s personal experiences of God; they make God’s truth the preacher’s experience. Experiencing God’s truth requires both reason and emotion. That’s why every sermon should give people something to see, something to hear, something to touch, something to taste, and something to smell. EPIC preaching makes you think and feel at the same time.
Reformed theologian and Presbyterian leader Tim Keller says that the church must come out of its cognitive bias and move into more experiential modes of worship: “If even I see this, then maybe it’s here.”20 It is not enough simply to give Christ intellectual assent. We must “taste and see that the LORD is good.
EPIC preaching is nothing more, nor less, than helping people experience God. Every study of churches that are “healthy” and “alive” comes to the same conclusion: they mediate transforming experiences of God.
Jesus preached toward the prize of something higher than clarity: conversation, relationship, and participation. Jesus’ goal in preaching was not that everyone understand him, but that everyone experience him and interact with his message.
is not enough to listen to the message; listeners become hearers and hearers become doers when they “take part” in the message. Semiotic preaching moves from a listening paradigm to a participation paradigm.
Participation is the essence of what we will call the “transductive (or transincarnational) method” — focusing less on taking apart passages and more on finding ways for the congregation to take part in the message dynamically.
participatory preaching requires relationship building and adaptability. It involves taking on the stories of all participants, who will themselves begin to “cowrite” the story. Authentic participation creates and modifies experience.
The revolution that we call the “digital age” may be more aptly termed the “age of interactivity.” No longer are people satisfied with stimulating their minds. They expect holistic stimulation: mental, emotional, physical, spiritual.
A parable is by definition participatory — an animated experience whose ending is left open. Preaching is a collaborative process between pulpit and pew. A sermon isn’t a sermon until it is received, and its success is based not solely on the preacher but as much if not more on the congregation. Hence Jesus’ call for active listening: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen
In participatory preaching, the congregation is not a passive consumer of content but an active author of experience and creator of participation. The congregation is part of the homiletic team and is involved in the process of sermon composition and design.
In a content analysis of the 125 incidents of Jesus’ encounters with people, Ralph L. Lewis has found that “roughly 54 percent of those encounters are initiated by His hearers. Instead of standing up and proclaiming the message He wanted the people to hear, He responded to His audience’s questions, objects, doubts. He allowed and welcomed their involvement.”30 In traditional pulpit-centric preaching, great labor is spent on writing better opening sentences. But in participatory preaching, time is spent on creating better opening (and closing) interactions.
Images are the thoughts of the heart. You grow a soul by the cultivation of an image garden. People today are like the Israelites in the desert. They follow the pillars of fire and the cloud, not abstract commands and disembodied voices. Image-rich preaching moves beyond literacy to imagacy. Literacy is the ability to read, write, and think critically about words. Imagacy is the ability to read, use, and think critically about images and stories. The art of imagacy is what makes narraphors memorable. In an image-rich sermon, imagacy invites people to participate in the incarnational power of
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One of the shifts we need to make from traditional preaching to semiotic preaching is to realize that the power of the Word isn’t in the words — it’s in the images, the stories, the music of the text. In traditional pulpit-centric preaching, we learned how to exegete words. Semiotic preaching exegetes images.
“As God hath spangled the firmament with starres, so hath he his Scriptures with names and metaphors, and denotations of power.” — John Donne (1572 – 1631), English poet and cleric31
Barbara Brown Taylor, writes, “The church’s central task is an imaginative one. By that I do not mean a fanciful or fictional task, but one in which the human capacity to imagine — to form mental pictures of the self, the neighbor, the world, the future, to envision new realities — is both engaged and transformed.
The prevailing homiletic approach encourages preachers to identify the “main principle” or the “key idea” or the “big point.” So, for example, if I were preaching about the flood of Noah, I would identify the “main principle” as God’s judgment and mercy. This is not the goal of EPIC preaching. In EPIC preaching, we look for the “master metaphor,” the leading or controlling image that reframes the conversation or concept. This metaphor can be a character, a key moment in the story, an artifact or artifice, even a word that functions as an image. Metaphors are not the sermon’s seasoning; they’re
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the solution for many preachers has been to remedy that gap by using charts, graphs,33 and PowerPoint, where the power is still in the point — not in the image. Image-rich EPIC preaching acknowledges that no point or proposition can explain the feeling and insight of knowing in one’s heart that one belongs to God. Image-rich preaching sears the image and living presence of Christ into the hearts of his followers.
“The only gift greater than the air you breathe is the hand you hold.” — Old Irish toast
the worlds of the academy and the church remain forums for disseminating “information” to or at people rather than involving people in the process of connecting with each other in a “network” of experiences. Most sermons still involve preaching to a passive audience in a world resistant to being passive — a world where people every day navigate their way through congested crowds of choices and connections.
