The Franz Liszt of homileticians, Walter Brueggemann, contends that when the language of homiletics and liturgics becomes prose rather than poetry, “there is a dread dullness that besets the human spirit, and we all become mindless conformists.”50 Why the dullness of our spirits and dryness of our souls? Could dull, dry, prosaic preaching have anything to do with the state of our souls? Might bland speech blanch our spirits and deflate our churches? Maybe we need more poetry in our preaching, replete even with a small portion of poetic license.
