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Narraphors invite conversations and contributions; points invite assent or arguments. In transductive preaching, the sermon is a communal act in which the congregation becomes an essential part of the sermon composition.
If the congregation is in some ways more central to the preaching craft than the preacher, the need to exegete the congregation is more pressing than ever. In this participant-observer transductive model of preaching, there are of course times when people must cease being participants and start being observers. But even in the role of observer, everyone needs to have ringside seats. There are no more “spectators.” We are all participant-observers.
In the Gutenberg world of “seeker-sensitive worship” of the past decades, the prime directive was nonparticipation. Check out any old etiquette manual and you’ll see that nonparticipation applied to all aspects of life: don’t ask a famous person for an autograph in a lavatory; don’t crush a walnut in the crook of your arm in a restaurant; don’t applaud in church. Today, in this Google world and karaoke culture, a participatory or interactive homiletic is based on the priesthood-of-all-believers notion that the whole community is called to collaborate in the ministry of Word and story. It takes
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Without participation, how is the preacher to know what is being preached? This homiletic of interactivity can take many forms. In fact, the language of preaching needs to learn from the language of the Native American Pueblos (Tewa), in which everything has a different name depending on its state of interactivity. For example, wood that is the trunk of a tree has a different name than wood burning in the fireplace or wood legs on a chair or wood leaves that we call paper. For the Pueblos, everything is defined not solely in terms of its inherent properties but primarily in terms of its
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Interactivity is the opening up of spaces in which people can respond and participate. An authentic homiletic of interactivity means more than a “ ‘rhetoric of listening’ through which the biblical interpretations and theological insights of the congregation find a voice in the pulpit.”81 Abductive and transductive interactivity are when you (1) actually alter the content of the experience by your participation and (2) leave behind evidence that you were part of the experience.
Too often interactivity is like checking out of a motel room: once you leave, no one would ever have known you were there. That’s why, perhaps, musician Brian Eno is correct when he argues that the word unfinished is better than interactive.82 If you can get someone to finish your sentence, it’s no longer your sentence. Since they got there before you did, it’s now their ...
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The challenge here is that interactivity is beyond the preacher’s control, challenges tidy minds, and necessitates that the preacher be willing to be educated in public. An abductive and transductive homiletic is fundamentally an out-of-control homiletic. Everything about modern worship said control: bulletins with their “orders of worship,” lockstep ushers, people sitting straight in even rows.83 In fact, we chose to control rather than to create. We have conceived preaching within a logic of control rather than a logic of creativity and risk.
To embrace participation is to embrace imperfection over control, to leave lots of breathing room for God’s Spirit to work, to go in directions you did not plan to go. Transductive worship is more slot machine than gumball machine: worship where you never know what’s coming up next versus putting a quarter in and the same thing comes out except in different colors. “Seek-thy-face”84 worship is now “in-your-face,” down-your-throat, out-of-control, off-the-cuff worship. African-American
The highest moment of the transductive message is when the pas de deux becomes a pas de Dieu — not just a dance together as a community, but a dance of the community with the incarnate Spirit of Christ. A renewal and rejoicing of the covenant relationship in all of its beauty and holiness. A transformative, transcendent dance with the resurrected Lord of life. Transductive sermons open up abductive preaching to the “incarnational power” of Christ’s presence. The body of Christ comes “alive,” stepping in time and singing in tune to the pas de Dieu of the risen Lord.
Facts go straight to the head; stories go straight to the heart. — Ingmar Bergman, Swedish filmmaker
CHANGE THE STORY, change the world. Preaching is a revolutionary act.
Jesus’ favorite expression was “Pay attention.” We most often pay partial attention or selective attention. But we can train ourselves to better attend to attention — to pay attention to the story of the Scriptures as it is lived in our lives, in our postal code, in our world.
Christianity expects so much of the heart yet speaks so much to the head. Jesus spoke to both as his hands brought head and heart together for a full encircling of truth. Narraphoric preaching turns acoustic space into embodied space. It engages the whole being in ways that open up new conduits of creation, cognition, and re-cognition, which can lead to change of heart and thoroughfares to truth. It embraces the body in as many ways as possible to know the story sensorially and thereby experience increased awareness of the divine.
The story of Dr. Taylor’s massive stroke is now famous because of her 2008 TED Talk video and the bestseller that followed from it, A Stroke of Insight (2009). In the midst of that stroke, Taylor was able to study her left- and right-brain functioning “from the inside out.” Her conclusions stunned the world. While the left side of her brain was shutting down, so was her ability to comprehend numbers, analyze, and verbalize. Additionally, as her right brain emerged the stronger, her sense of individualism decreased, and her relational sense of connection to the world around her increased. As
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Dr. Taylor discovered through her own experience that although we are trained through our industrial-era educational systems to approach the world from left-brained angles (objectively, critically, departmentally, disciplinarily), this one-sided approach can hamper our ability for relational engagement and holistic embodiment.
To be sure, we need left-brain faculties to hack our way through life’s jungle of detail and jumble of facts. Faith is not a thought-free zone. But God gave us separate hemispheres for a reason. Each one of these two hemispheres is very different structurally, physiologically, and psychologically.5 The right hemisphere makes connections and loves possibility and novelty. The left hemisphere pins things down and loves maps, charts, and laws. The two different realities dance in creative tension, a choreography of complexio oppositorum, that is the spark of all human creativity and imagination,
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The Gutenberg world thought that being left brained was being spiritual. The Google world is prone to think that being right brained means being spiritual. The truth is that only a whole-brained being is spiritual. Our right brain lies largely unmoved and untapped through left-brain lectures, where we end up with theology without wonder, dogmas without silence, and creeds with cataracts. What is more, TGIF culture increasingly resides in a rightbrain neighborhood. We live in a world grown leery of taking things apart. In order to reach people missionally, we need to design experiences of unity
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why do some worshipers claim the music of the ser vice is more of a “message” for them than the preaching? Music enables people to “experience” Christ and even theology. How? The right brain turns the entire body into a lyre on which the winds of the Spirit can play the chords of truth. Music turns our being into a theremin that can give off “good vibrations,” vibes that are true and beautiful as well as good. Without engaging our right brains, we are left flat, able to analyze, to categorize, and to theorize but without sound or significance. We are left only with signifiers. Without right
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The left brain is linear, differentiating, and time oriented. The right brain is intuitive, creative, connective, the home of emotional and spiritual intelligences. The left seeks to concretize and separate; the right seeks to merge and join. The right brain is the source of many of the human characteristics we value most: love, reverence, the experience of art or literature, affection, companionship.
In the words of medical historian W. F. Bynum, “The Renaissance allowed the right brain to flourish, whereas the Reformation turned out to be a leftbrain disaster. For the most part, so was the Enlightenment. . . . Worst of all, though, was the Industrial Revolution, the ultimate triumph of materiality, exploitation, and greed.”10 We are now coming out of, in McGilchrist’s graphic words, “the left-hemisphere’s most daring assault on mankind.”11
today we can be found approaching the text in an attack mode: “unlock” the passage; barrage the Bible with a variety of hermeneutical and exegetical strategies. We analyze texts, dissect passages, take apart words, construe points, principle-ize concepts. We make the stories of Jesus add up like 1 + 1 = 2. Or at least a + b = ab. And we take those locked and loaded, solution-packed answers, download them into a lecture, count “one, two, three” for good measure, and randomly shoot our points at unsuspecting parishioners, hoping for some bull’s-eye hits. The problem is, for all our attempted
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Before 1630, paintings of the crucifixion often depicted the split side of Jesus on the right side. Later painters generally moved the wound to the left side. Why? Because in this book, William Harvey argued from empirical evidence that the heart was on the left and the circulation of the blood was circular. It is also obvious from this book that Harvey didn’t see the heart as a mechanical pump or muscle, but almost as a metaphysical entity.
It was Descartes who made the heart a machine and in so doing enthroned thought while diminishing emotion. The truth is, the heart is covered in neurons, making it a little brain, a whole mind, a head at the same time a heart.
Have you ever wondered why some of Jesus’ stories seem to complicate or even cloud truth rather than clarify or simplify it? Perhaps God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, is not content to speak simply in bullet points, PowerPoint, or “Just-the-facts, ma’am!” but forms and informs us instead through imagination, intuition, and epiphany.15 Perhaps God wants to reach us through both sides of our brains. If the left brain is enthralled with the letter of the law and the right brain by the spirit of the law, then no wonder Nicodemus could not understand what Jesus was talking about when
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“The mystery of one’s relationship to God cannot be captured in proposition form and passed directly from one human being to another — not even if the sermon is impeccably logical and flawlessly delivered. It must be wrapped, like faith itself, in the paradoxical distance and intimacy that stories provide, in the grandeur of myth, the lilt of songs, the memory of legend, and the seductive disorientation of parables.” — Robin R. Meyers
In the beginning was the Word. In the end was the commercial. In a culture that thinks and traffics in images, right-brain dominant people hold the keys to the future. In the discipline and craft of preaching, words come last. Metaphors create a culture. And biblical metaphors create a biblical culture.
The world’s cities understand that the future belongs to right-brained people, even if churches don’t know what to do with them. The pursuit of what Richard Florida calls “the creative class”17 has become the holy grail of urban growth and development. The difference is that cities are chasing the creative class “as if it were a high-stakes, zero-sum game,” whereas the church is ostracizing and outlawing its creatives and artists. In a culture that every year spends billions generating competing, contrasting images to the gospel, almost every one of which is a lie, it is imperative that
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In his classic book on the parables, C. H. Dodd speaks of Jesus’ parables as “interaction metaphors.” His definition of a parable is famous: “A parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.
Jesus invented parables that invited participation. Jesus’ metaphors “demanded participation and personal decisions from listeners.”21 In the words of Amos Wilder, “A true metaphor or symbol is more than a sign; it is a bearer of the reality to which it refers. The hearer not only learns about that reality; he participates in it. He is invaded by it. Here lies the power and fatefulness of art.
Franz Kafka understood the open-endedness and the “fatefulness” of parables when he wrote, “If you only followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables.”23 In other words, a “hearer” of the Good Samaritan parable truly becomes the Good Samaritan. That’s the ultimate in participation. This interactive component, by the way, is one of the things that irritated people most about Jesus’ parables: they didn’t want their minds teased into active thought.
For Jesus metaphors were not smokescreens to be cleared away but filters through which we comprehend truth and healing instruments. Jesus used metaphors as a curative medium. His metaphors left divine imprints on the smithy of the soul. He authored phrases and metaphors that won’t go away until we do. Metaphors such as kingdom, mustard seed, and leaven fuse into our minds an image of a new kind of world driven by love and human dignity.
Jesus was well versed in the Hebrew method of exegesis, the PaRDeS, the four levels of interpretation — literal (peshat), typological (remez), metaphorical (derash), and revelatory (sod). The metaphorical level was called the “kingdom level,” in which the metaphors could facilitate one’s understanding of God’s kingdom in everyday life. The metaphorical mode of interpretation (the derash) is likely the layer of meaning that Jesus alluded to when he “explained” the parables to his inner circle. The revelatory level (sod) is most likely the level on which “he opened their minds so they could
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“The first time, the Logos made the flesh; this time the Logos was made flesh, so that he might change our flesh to spirit, by being made partaker with us in flesh and blood.” — Gregory of Nyssa
Our communication is becoming more and more parenthetical and more aphoristic at the same time, as any political campaign will attest. We love double direction, the pithy tweet with the density of poetry but the spaciousness of prose.
His everyday practice of paradox didn’t spring from some philosophical sense of absurdity’s beauty. Rather, he practiced paradox from a Trinitarian mind-set in which only contradictions make it possible to apprehend the real within its confounding totality.
The tensile strength of paradox is what makes Jesus’ parables so compelling. A seeming contradiction is juxtaposed in a way that reveals a higher truth. Jesus’ paradoxes are often the kernels of his metaphors that pop open unexpectedly and infuse the air with revolutionary ideas, bits of astounding truth that burst from the story and tantalize the hearer. Paradoxes topple our belief systems and hoist us into new territory. Disjunctive thoughts throw us off balance just enough to allow us to grasp hold of new perspectives and to land on different ground. Metaphor and paradox dance together to
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“A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.” — Blaise Pascal
A pun is a peg on which the preacher hangs a perception. A pun is a playful means of accessing memory and makes easy the retrieval of stored experiences in the unconscious mind. Of all the embarrassing “offenses” of your right brain, your left brain finds puns the most repugnant.
“Oratory: The art of making deep noises from the chest that sound like important messages from the brain.” — H. I. Phillips
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.
Jesus spoke in public through parables. But Jesus conducted private tutorials with his disciples. During these teaching sessions, Jesus often asked questions to judge whether they were “getting it.”51 And vice versa, his disciples asked him questions. They wanted further clarification about the parable of the sower.52 They wanted to know the difference between “clean” and “unclean.” Jesus answered them but not without registering his frustration at their dullheadedness and dim-wittedness.
Twenty-first-century consciousness involves a sea change in human cognition. “Points” no longer make points. People are beginning to think in brand-new ways, which are creating whole new experiences that move from knowing God with our left brain to knowing God with our whole brain; from faith formation through catechism to faith formation through proverbs, metaphors, music, images, imagination, and dance; from teaching through disquisition to teaching through narration by artists, mentors, coaches, and directors. People today aren’t hungry for new information or brilliant messages; people are
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We imagine and dream, not in viewpoints and values, but in narraphors, moving and meshing within horizons of hope. Our dreams for the future play out in alternative stories, scenarios, and signs that we wish to live within. When it comes to life, it’s all in the story.
Why then are we so intent on delivering mechanistically structured sermons that disincarnate truth into distilled points delivered in lecture styles that challenge the eyelids of the most caffeinated? We have been trained to deliver left-brain theological algebra to people with EPIC cravings. We have defined what is “real” in abstract, scientific Enlightenment terms that spell endarkenment for twenty-first-century participants. We have “industrialized” faith into prepackaged and “tested” dogmas wrapped in paper and coded in words and wonder why the divine ends up in the dust heap.
An organic sermon is in a sense not crafted but grafted from the lifeblood of Jesus, the “true blood” of the gospel. This labyrinth of vessels must deliver the blood to the body with pulsing vitality. How do we graft such a network of connections? How do we know it is vital and true?
German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) once observed that all storytelling emerges from two fundamental experiences: the state of being rooted to a particular place and the act of traveling. The two types of stories are (1) “moving in” stories (roots, home), and (2) “moving on” stories (wings, journey, pilgrimage). Everything else falls somewhere in between staying home and pilgrimage.18
“What is familiar is not known.” — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Too many sermons are straightforward to the point of banality.
To overcome the deadening effects of habits and to swerve the truth, it is necessary to defamiliarize: to portray familiar things in unfamiliar ways; to approach the subject crabwise, trawling assumptions and surmounting obstacles. Creative preaching is a fertile combination of difference and similarity: so similar that we can recognize it and see ourselves in it, so radically different that we can learn from it and grow beyond ourselves from it.
“If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards like raindrops through the abyss of space.” — Roman poet/philosopher Lucretius (99 – 55 BC)
