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Metaphors are examples of revelatory complexity condensed in a single word. Just as there is no such thing as a “simple cell,” there is no such thing as a “simple word.
Poesis is the art of making images. “Image” is different from “symbol.” A symbol stands for something else and points to something else. An image is something that stands for itself and may or may not be a symbol. The most powerful images are those that are embodied experiences. There is a revolution going on in our understanding of cognition (“grounded cognition”) that demonstrates the priority of bodily states, ritual motions, and situated actions to the very act of cognition itself.
The conclusion should not be the climax of the sermon. The participation is the climax of the sermon. Don’t even think “conclusion.” Think closure — but a “closure” that isn’t an enclosure but a portal with you as the porter. The greatest sermon is an unfinished sermon, a sermon of everlastingness.
An “altering” close keeps your people riding on the wings of the Spirit even after they leave the church.
Here are some “altering” questions: What do I want people to experience? What questions do I want to tantalize them? What images do I want them to keep sensing all week? What healing do I want to take place? With what part of discipleship do I want people to be challenged? With what truth of Jesus do I want them to be stunned?
you should at least focus on two or three. By giving your hearers an “aftertaste,” you supply a “foretaste” of their week as followers of Jesus. However you choose to close, challenge people to turn their lives toward Christ in even more earnest and joyful ways, to keep them dancing in the never-ending song of life. As John Wesley said, we must experience the means of grace as often as we can in order to keep perfecting ourselves in sanctifying grace.
While illustrations bring light to a sermon by clarifying concepts, animations bring a sermon to life.31 You illustrate points; you animate experiences.
Fred Craddock started us on this startling path of rethinking Jesus’ use of “illustrations,” and whether they were illustrations at all: “In good preaching what is referred to as illustrations are, in fact, stories or anecdotes which do not illustrate the point; rather they are the point. In other words, a story may carry in its bosom the whole message rather than the illumination of a message which had already been related in another but less clear way.
Those homileticians who argue that 75 percent of Jesus’ teaching is illustrations33 are therefore confusing illustrations with animations. Jesus animated, not illustrated, his messages.
The semiotic preacher learns to see everything as a potential animation — every song, sparrow, surprise, and sortie holds narraphoric promise — hence the need for preachers to be “globalists” rather than “specialists” in their reading and interests.
Words are living symbols that pass on truth in their organic breathings as narraphors.
If good communication is less “tell” than “show,” then the preacher is an architect of images, an “imagesmith” even more than a “
The genuine sign of greatness in a sermon is one slow-burn image — a deep image, not a penultimate point or superficial analogy.
Metaphor is another name for veer, for swerve, for indirect interaction, for “telling it slant.” Metaphors involve two different realities that are forced together to form a new reality, with the metaphor itself a frame that connects the conjoined meanings into a revelatory focus. But there is one key feature of the metaphor that is both the source of its creativity and of its frustration, its magnetism, and its distancing. The interactions of frame and focus make metaphors fuzzy. In other words, even though a metaphor is easy to pick up, not everyone will get it, and those who do will be left
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“A screwdriver is for screws. When you pry open a paint can with it, you have committed a metaphor, which is the second use of things. . . . All we do is metaphorical.” — James Richardson, Princeton poet
homileticians have primarily seen the metaphor as a means of communication between an active preacher and passive congregation. Semiotic preaching uses metaphor in combination with story as a narraphoric conduit for the interactive experience of the risen Christ, who alone can bring true metanoia.
Cultures are symbol systems. The current culture is expressing its spirituality through images and metaphors, symbols and stories — not words. In the new consciousness, words often get in the way of the truth. Twenty-first-century people hear and learn differently than most churches communicate. People today build their world on metaphoric narratives. That’s why the ultimate in power is not to sit in the corner office. The ultimate in power is the right to choose your metaphors and stories.
metaphor is metamorphosis. Change your metaphor and you change your world. Change your metaphor and you change your body. Change your metaphor and you change your mind.
Metaphor is metamorphosis that becomes morphological.
The Willie Nelson of homileticians, Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney, used to complain that preachers learn to preach in Greek when they ought to preach in Hebrew. By that he meant that Greek is the language of words; Hebrew is the language of images. Jesus was a Jewish preacher, not a Greek preacher. He majored in images and stories, not in ideas, syllogisms, and logic.
An image reflecting from a metaphor is more than just an image. It is a new reality that changes what we thought we knew into something we now know differently.
We see what we want to see. People are conditioned to see in prepared lenses, through conditioned eyeglasses. Images mirror contrasting alterations to those settled frameworks. New images disturb the status quo and can even create new realities — but only if those contrasting images are in relationship, which distinguishes an image from a metaphor. A metaphor is an image changer.
The metaphorical reframing of images empowers metanoia at the moment the participant enters into an experienced relationship with Christ through the conduit of the narraphor and entrusts his or her life to the Christ of that experience.
Images are identity makers, not just identity markers. The images we hold of ourselves and others come from the way we image them or “imagine” them to be. As Madison Avenue would say, “Perception is reality.”
The more experiential the image, the more effectual the embodiment. The greater the embodiment, the greater the change not only of heart but of living out the gospel in a world we are to be “in” but not “of.”
Memory is the reproduction of images as well. And reproduction is recreation.
Metaphor is not just something we use for communicating; metaphor is how we think and reason and how we make sense of our world. Our actions are congruent with our metaphors.
The virtual nature of so much of our culture is making us hungry for more tactile, more iconic, more multisensory experiences. We have also learned from neuroscientists that in terms of neural activity, only our lips and our feet command more of our brain’s attention than our hands. When you hold something in your hands, your brain stands at attention.
Metaphors are not propositions. Propositions are metaphors gone bad. A proposition is a metaphor in sheep’s clothing. All attempts to relate truth take both propositional and metaphorical form. We hear the proposition, but we engage with the metaphor. Metaphors keep things moving. They are magnets for relationship. They create community. Metaphors are fungible with “fuzzy edges,” which makes it easier for people to pick them up and share them. Some metaphors don’t use words at all. These are “phatic” images, signals that maintain dialogue but have little or no intrinsic meaning. Stooped
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Gardner says that creative people, first, think in metaphors; second, mix metaphors to create new metaphors; and third, brainstorm to create and produce new ways of seeing.
perceptions of the world, ourselves, each other, and God are dependent on what metaphors we trust and hold. Our metaphors carry with them our values and visions. They influence the way we think, feel, and experience the world. Metaphors are not merely language; they embody all aspects of the human experience.
Metaphor is not persuasion. Metaphor is not assent to an equation or a proposition. Metaphors appeal to the whole-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts person, to the emotions as well as to reason.69 Metaphors change lives, not because they make sense but precisely because they don’t.
The metaphorical act is an act of metamorphosis.
Morphing is a whole body transformation. It is metabolic, metaphoric, and metamorphic. As the process of metamorphosis is different for each person, so must the metaphoric stages of preaching also be a journey. In a sense, semiotic preaching is a lifelong journey on the “disciple ship,” with all of its storms and stops, upheavals and downturns, tidal waves and lighthouses. Each sermon is another hoisting of the sails, steering of the vessel, on that “disciple ship.”
A metaphorical “turn” is a twist, a transfiguration, an unveiling so momentous and shocking that it shifts something from or into view. When it happens, it appears so obvious that we wonder why we hadn’t seen it that way before.
The metaphorical turn goes far beyond a mere “hook.” A hook draws you in, gains your attention and interest, keeps you “on the line.” But a hook won’t change your life. Advertisers are in the business of luring you with an image of something ideal, massaging your soul until you desire things you don’t need. Preachers are surgeons of the soul, replacing one image with another so that you can be healed by the blood and power of Jesus. A metaphorical
A metaphor by its very nature lifts language into experience and then further into the wild blue yonder of beyond. Preaching makes metaphor a participatory event, a shared reality, a communal experience as well as an individual experience. In a sense, it is living a dream of a better reality now, not just described, but felt, sensed, experienced, tasted. At the very moment someone participates in that reality, he or she enters the “twister.”
But the key to the use of metaphor is the “is/is not” tension. Every metaphor is a bipolar extremist. A metaphor is true . . . and false. To say with the psalmist, “The Lord is my shepherd,” is to say something both true (“the King of Love my shepherd is”) and not true (God is not a shepherd, and we are neither sheep nor dogs). Literalize the metaphor and you lose the metaphor. Of course, some metaphors are easier to literalize than others.
Because a metaphor is an interactive, relational experience, our understanding of the “meaning” of a metaphor must likewise be revised. Metaphorical “meaning” is not a conceptual construct. The meaning comes from the mind’s hospitality to the image, which stirs the imagination. And if it’s in your imagination, it’s in your heart, head, hands, and liver.
Without shared metaphors, there are no shared streets, no shared neighborhoods, no shared society.77 Without shared metaphors, there are no changed lives, no changed churches.
Preachers are not mere sculptors but motion picture directors.
Metaphors are most powerful when embodied within narrative.
The power to change the world belongs to the storytellers. The world is story shaped. The stories we tell shape the world we live in. So we had better tell the right stories — the good, the true, the beautiful. Christians, have we no story of our own to tell?
Jesus is not a statement but a Story; Jesus is not an idea, but the Source Image; Jesus is not a proposition but a Person who invites us to follow him in narraphors.
We cannot keep alive the memory of Jesus without images because memory is nothing but the reproduction of images. If something is alive, it will reproduce. If something does not reproduce, it is dead.
Mary Douglas describes ancient literature as being written in precisely this way in her book Thinking in Circles (2012). She describes the art of storytelling in ancient literature, including in the Bible, as “ring composition,” a technique that places the meaning in the middle, framed by beginning and ending in parallel. To read linearly, for Douglas, is to misinterpret the text. Stories are a series of metaphors and folds, like Russian nesting dolls. The largest opens in the middle to reveal a smaller doll, which opens in the middle to reveal yet a smaller doll, and so on. According to
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If Jesus had told everyone everything right out, there would be no need for relationship. There is a price to discipleship, and an affiliated reward: the mysteries of the kingdom. The parable is a call — a call into relationship with the Source of all secret wisdom.
When you’re exegeting metaphors, you don’t read word for word but metaphor by metaphor. The semiotic sermon seeks to design a participatory experience, a conversion conversation, an immersion into an alternate reality, a Christ consciousness where there is fullness of joy. It appeals to the whole brain and is as much sensory based as logic driven, as much emotionally charged as it is intellectually chiseled.
Rhetoric is the public addresses of the mind: it argues people into belief in the words and principles of Jesus that ensure right living. The semiotic sermon opens the soul to the resurrection reality of Jesus and a right relationship with God through the assurance of Christ’s saving grace, which ushers in a life of unending alleluias.
Every culture is a complex adaptive system of networks and narraphors. Within that semiotic universe, text and context are woven as warp and weft of a single tapestry. God designed the Scriptures to serve both an original purpose and a present purpose. These are not separate. The discipline of historical context is integral to the integrity of transmitting the text today.2 No text exists in isolation from other texts or from the overarching biblical message. Semiotic exegesis discerns how any text functions in the wider biblical context. Some meanings we discern by taking out our exegetical
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