Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching

by Leonard Sweet

Without a lived-in look and experience, persuasion is merely a kind word for manipulation. To “persuade” as imaginal event with “style” is not to convince someone of a set of points and postulates, but to enable someone’s mind and heart to be metaphorically “turned” (the best translation of the Greek metanoia) to the reality of the gospel — to dream a new reality and to be thrust into it experientially.

Creativity can be much more life-altering than persuasion. Creativity draws not only from the head but from the heart and encourages people to touch the robe of Jesus in new and life-changing ways and to trust with a faith that floods the imagination. But in order for “soul surgery” to be complete, the sermon must use that imaginative power and emotional resonance to “reframe” people’s images of God, themselves, and others. Reframing creates fresh images of a new life with Christ.

Too much preaching has aimed to help people “understand” the gospel; too little preaching aims to lift up Christ in the context of community. Too little preaching is hearts on fire, and too much preaching is heads in the sand.

MY FAVORITE WAY OF EPIC1 PREACHING? I don’t always get to do it (and don’t make an issue if I can’t), but when I’m invited to preach somewhere, one of my first questions is, “Do you have a live Web feed?” If the answer is yes, I then ask the second question: “Can you find me a dancing partner?” In this type of EPICtivity, I stand in the middle of the congregation with my Bible open to a text that is also featured on one of the two (or three) screens up front. Together the congregation and I exegete the leading image(s) of the text. The second screen, however, is totally under the creative promptings of my VJ (video jockey), my dancing partner. Preferably, this is a person who has grown up on Google.

no longer is the quality of the performance the standard; instead, it’s the quality of the participation.

Googlers not only want to “experience” apps. They want to engage with them, participate in them, help create them. Koinonia, the Greek word for community, is arguably best translated as “participation.”3 If you want to pump up your preaching with apps, you need to treat your congregation as a coproducer of your sermons. Preaching is no longer soliloquy or dictation but conversation and dialogue.

In literary criticism, there is a school of interpretation based on “reader response”; in a sense, this is what is missing in homiletics texts: how the preacher and congregation work together to create the sermon using interplay and interaction. In the semiotic sermon, you cannot escape interplay. It is there whether you want it to be or not. Metaphors are by definition experiential, interactive, and relational. EPIC preaching is at its best when it turns images into props and when those props become interactive icons that people can take home with them. Jesus was a master at this.

EPICtivities move participants 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 ministers. “I pretty much preach one-point sermons,” says the Miles Davis of homileticians, Louie Giglio, a popular speaker on college campuses. “My goal is to give them one image to take away with them that will help them live out their lives the rest of the week. It’s all about story, about inviting people into God’s story, about telling about others who are joining God’s story. People aren’t hungry for information — they hunger to know that there is a God who loves them.

Good music will carry a bad sermon a long way

To “trust the Spirit” is not first an intellectual response but an emotional and spiritual response. People in pews can believe in the historical Jesus intellectually without trusting Jesus as the Lord of their lives. Knowing Jesus is the Savior of the world is not the same as knowing Jesus as your Savior. Trusting the Spirit is personal. And every sermon must be a “personal” experience of gospel grace.

“The intellect must not . . . be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights, to keep it from leaping and flying.” — Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), pioneer scientist

A great deal of our worship habits have to do with control: hence command-and-control preaching. The preacher was the controller: of the space, what was said and when, the order, the flow, the timing, the outcomes. Parishioners had very little influence over the course of the ser vice and almost no influence within the sermonic space. When I first started out in ministry myself, I used to demand total control over the worship ser vice, even when carried out by other persons (staff or lay). Though the “harmony” of the ser vice may have been “tighter,” I’ve since learned that turning folks loose with narraphors and allowing them creative freedom has made for some very powerful ser vices where the liturgists or musicians or worship leaders were able to develop the narraphor in a way that I totally missed or was unable to express. I’ve come to the conclusion that the Holy Spirit writes better harmony than I do

“Conduct-and-unwrap” homiletics — I choose these two words carefully as a replacement for “command-and-control” homiletics. The transductive preacher is more of a symphonic conductor than a solo performer. This does not mean any diminishment of virtuosity. In many ways, “conduct” requires more strength and confidence than “command,” since the preacher’s personality is always in play, with attendant weaknesses and strengths more visible than ever. But the very nature of the preaching enterprise is now a communal affair.

Preaching now requires a reveling in paradox — a constant melding of structure and spontaneity, failure and success. Preaching is the dance of preparation and improvisation, standing and shuffling, firm footage and roundtable, top-down-and bottom-up-ness, hierarchy and free form, storytelling and story catching, formulation and nimbleness, a skeletal grid and a fleshy adaptability, a confident mastery of material and an openness to learning from anyone — anywhere, anytime, a set trajectory, and the trench ability to adjust on the fly.

Preaching needs to rediscover the abandon of faith. Sometimes you leap wingless into the unknown then surf the unpredictable winds of the Spirit. Other times you are shoved, only to discover under you the breath of God — “underneath are the everlasting arms.”6 Once you go live, it’s hard to go back or go dark.

Preaching needs to rediscover its origins in the kinetic East. The word homiletics is based on a Greek verb meaning “to converse.” The Greek word often translated “preaching” in the New Testament is dialogizomai, which means to have a dialogue or conversation between people. When Paul “kept on talking until midnight” in Ephesus7 and young Eutychus fell to his death, it wasn’t that Paul bored him to death with a monotonous monologue. Rather, Paul was convening a time of questions and answers, which involved everyone and kept them interested.8 In this type of preaching, the participants have a chance to drive the teaching by their own questions and steepen their learning curve. In the words of Wolfgang Simson: “The style is kinetic: the topic of discussion literally moves around the table from person to person, and everyone is involved. After such deliberation, a consensus is built, collective opinion emerges, and corporate action can follow. . . . The participatory and kinetic model is most effective in changing opinions and values and therefore in changing people.

Preaching is the craft of evoking incarnational experiences of the transcendent. The issue of preaching is not getting something said; it is not even getting something heard; it is getting something experienced as a community that can transform lives for God and the gospel.

You are not preaching to “inform” people of what and whom they should believe. You are preaching to embolden and empower people to take the necessary steps toward an incarnation of Christ in their lives. Whether you use apps, arts, litanies, or liturgies, your task is to make sure these serve to infuse the “blood [that] has that particular thing in it” into the body that is the church.

There is no sin in trying and failing. But there is salvation. It’s time for the church to make failure possible in the same way companies like 3M, Rubbermaid, and Proctor & Gamble introduce new products each year fully expecting that a significant percentage of them will fail.

In spite of their hard shells, lobsters — or what those who fish for them call “bugs”17 — keep growing for their entire lives. How is a lobster able to grow bigger when its shell is so hard? How do crustaceans mature? The lobster sheds its shell at regular intervals, about twenty-five times in its first five years alone. When its body begins to feel cramped inside the shell, the lobster unzips itself from the tight carapace in order to grow a more spacious one. It looks for a reasonably safe spot to hide while the hard shell comes off and the pink membrane just inside forms the basis of the new shell. But no matter where a lobster digs in the sand and mud to find a protected den for this “molting” process, it is vulnerable. Without its protective shell, it can get tossed against a coral reef or eaten by a fish. In other words, a lobster must risk its life in order to grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said long ago, “In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.”19 “Disciple” or “learner” is Matthew’s favorite word for a follower of Jesus.20 Preaching enrolls people in the Jesus School, which is peer-to-peer learning. Jesus even promised us a divine teacher; he said, “The Holy Spirit . . . will teach you all things.

The EPIC sermon, by contrast, is an interactive experience. You don’t attend worship; you attend a concert. You participate in worship. You contribute to worship. Yet we count attendance, not participation.

Semiotic preaching cultivates not a passive audience issuing consensual nods but a playing field of participants with spontaneous voices and movements. Preaching in a sense is more “blood sport” than chess match. As in any field sport, there are guidelines and markers. But during “play,” the ball can move around spontaneously and be touched by any number of hands in the course of the action.

Semiotic preaching requires a new theory of congregation. The issue is not how you become a better preacher, but how your people become better participants, a better congregation. The congregation is now an essential part of the sermon composition. The real content of the sermon is not the information but the interaction. A participative or interactive homiletic is based on the priesthood-of-all-believers commitment that the whole community is called to collaborate in the ministry of the word. The preposition with must replace for in everything we do. We don’t do anything for people. Everything we do must be done with people, including preaching.

John Stott stressed the need for “partnership” between preacher and people in determining what needs should be addressed by the preacher without abnegating prophetic responsibility.28 The sermon is most participatory as “controls” decrease. The preacher serves as a sort of coach, but the congregational responses and interjections create the energy of the event. In an interactive sermon, one doesn’t just hear an occasional “Amen” or “Have mercy!” but responses include facial expressions, swaying bodies, nodding heads, raised hands, foot tapping, shouting, tears, and hand clapping, among others. During the Great Awakenings, participatory responses characterized both black and white preaching. What happened to the white church? And why did the black church continue such responses? How can you infuse a sense of interactivity back into your twenty-first-century “awakening” churches?