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Kindle Notes & Highlights
They said, “We wanted to find someone who would stand up there and bleed with us.”
The ancient religion of Mithraism that competed with Christianity in the first four centuries also celebrated initiates with blood.
But the Mithraic worship of Wall Street is not the bull, but the bull market.
Preachers bleed the love of God. Jesus warned his disciples that to journey with him meant carrying the bloody cross every step of the way. This applies most of all to preachers.
Foreshadowing Christ’s sacrifice, a lamb was used in the Passover,15 and lambs were used in the daily sacrifices of the tabernacle16 among other sacrifices.
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
Everyone knew “Hurricane Judy” believed she owed everything she had to her every audience.
“Time to give blood.” Give blood she did.
Her authenticity was as transparent and fragile as Cinderella’s glass slipper.
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
When that happens, preaching moves from being a relational discipline and craft and becomes merely a solitary performance.
Sacrificial and sacred, incarnational and iconic, the sermon is born of death and rises resurrected to whisper “Christ in you” to a community of faith.
Semiotics is best defined as the ability to read and convey “signs,” where a “sign” (be it an image, gesture, sound, object, or word) is something that stands for something else.
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.
The semiotic method connects biblical narratives to indigenous cultural landscapes and their native languages of signs and symbols. Semiotic preaching differs from traditional sermon building in its insistence on seeing the sermon itself as an incarnational medium.
For Jesus, parables were the most trustworthy purveyors of truth.
Semiotic exegesis, EPIC delivery, and a transincarnational theology of relational “knowing” create a kind of preaching that engages and changes lives.
Christians have become passive spectators in worship rather than active participants.
sermons fit for the twenty-first century must offer more meat on their bones and blood in their veins than higher criticism’s word-based exegesis has allowed for.
to adapt for the preacher what Red Smith, the premier sportswriter of the twentieth century, used to say about writing: “[It’s easy:] all you do is sit down and open a vein and bleed it out drop by drop.”
Creativity and practice must play together in the mud, sometimes for many hours, before an image or metaphor (or the combined form of image and story that I will define later in the book as a “narraphor”) emerges from the clay to reveal the incarnational Word of Christ.
Semiotic preaching must also be EPIC preaching — each sermon an experience of God that is image rich, participatory, and connectional. Each moment, a life-giving, Christ-infusing beat of the heart of God in the body that is
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.
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.
But 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
Jesus was best known as a master of metaphor, a legendary storyteller, and a powerful
The first was the peshat, the literal and simple understanding of Scripture as found in the Mishnah
The sod was the fourth and deepest level of meaning. The most spiritual in nature, it contained the very secrets of Truth itself, requiring intuitive and creative interpretation.
He spoke in different ways to different audiences. To some he spoke in images. To others, in parable and story. He took his disciples aside and removed for them the secret coverings of some stories and parables.
or what we might call “narraphors” — narrative metaphor.
In some illustrations, both blood and water are depicted, in harmony with the crucifixion account.25 Other
In the latter Middle Ages, this image would become an official icon, a symbol for the Holy Eucharist and the spiritual nourishment of the sacrament.
He is one of the first “preachers” to understand the EPIC shift of our digital culture and to successfully transition his “preaching” (aka “concerts”) from performance art to participation art.
Jesus began with his listeners.
Jesus derived his preaching from the people more than delivered a message.
finding our identity in the Jesus story, along with how to understand, interpret, and find meaning and the truth of Jesus in story. And we’ve lost the art of passing that storied identity along to others.
it any wonder that the Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones6 has become such a bestseller (and one of the cherished treasures on my bookshelf)?
I could not agree more!
brain is most active when the subject is telling a story.
“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.
The semiotic sermon begins by identifying and creating stories and images that fuse into our memories and allow for sensory experiences of a different world
As Paul Ricoeur has taught us, narratives and metaphors are inseparable.
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. He
And the most powerful metaphors do exactly that. They draw you close, inviting you in, only to subvert meaning.
Narraphors get us thinking about something we may not want to think about. They force us to look at life in new ways, and they outwit our reasoned defenses.
In the same way, a narraphor should lift language, thought, and reality and point to God first from the realm of experience and then beyond experience to revelation.
Supermetaphors create a relational reality.
Preachers are in the business of pollinating the planet with metaphors that fill the mind with truth, thrill the heart with beauty, and chill the gates of hell with goodness.
is not the preacher’s role to help the Scriptures come alive. The Scriptures are already alive. If they are not alive in our life, it’s not a problem with the Scriptures — it’s a problem with us.
Blood work is the practice of preaching. It is semiotic preaching gone EPIC (experiential, participatory, image-rich, connective).
