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from blood work to actually giving blood.
He took the gospel through, not past, that field; and in the midst of the field, he connected with people in ways that sparked the lowest and the forgotten to experience God afresh, to apply the Scriptures in new ways, to experience forgiveness, healing, and change of heart.
The worst thing to befall a preacher is to lose the common touch.
But nothing deterred Jesus from an arts and crafts homiletic that put the cookies on a low shelf.
EPIC preaching is embodied communication truth in a disembodied world.
“Yes, we may need to move mountains in order to help the people in the pew into this new world. Yet many of those mountains will be the obstacles we create for ourselves. As for the rest, a mustard grain of faith and our best educational footwork will go a considerable distance toward accomplishing our goal.”
If we want to engage the body, we need to make our narraphors EPIC. A body is meant to move and be moved. Narraphors are meant to be held, felt, and touched. Join me now for a closer look at the components of EPIC preaching.
The core issue of preaching is not “getting something said”; it is not even “getting something heard”; it is getting something experienced that can transform your life for God and the gospel.
In the modern world, the phrase “Are you experienced?” means something quite different: are you skilled, are you good, are you rationally and technically equipped to control a challenge or a project?
“You really gave me something to think about, Preacher” and those that garner “That message really moved/touched me.”
In our day, the challenge is not belief but authenticity of faith.
Trust and faith are EPIC words.
The essence of faith is the suspension of our knowledge and belief systems to trust in Christ with mind and heart.
Jesus’ parables were not given to be “understood” but to reveal. And what was revealed was the grace of God and the truth of the human heart.
Experiential preaching does the same; it “calls to” and “calls out” the flock to see and be seen.
Preaching is the art and craft of getting people to want what they don’t know they need but can’t truly live without: daily
And in our preaching, the icon is the narraphor. A good narraphor helps people remember, and it functions as a sensory icon
Craving for a more experiential encounter with God is what draws people to yoga, to Taizé, to Reiki, to everywhere except our rationalist churches where the primary sweet spot is a head nod over a heart skip.14
“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
Experiencing God’s truth requires both reason and emotion.
But Jesus preached toward the prize of something higher than clarity: conversation, relationship, and participation.
Preachers need to create an experience in preaching that will allow people to experience that truth of the living Jesus in their lives still today.
participation turns people into active agents of initiation and response.
“transductive (or transincarnational) method” — focusing less on taking apart passages and more on finding ways for the congregation to take part in the message dynamically.
No longer are people satisfied with stimulating their minds. They expect holistic stimulation: mental, emotional, physical, spiritual.
Even traditional preaching requires participation, so much so that some homileticians have argued, “The skills of the hearers are more important than the skills of the preacher.”28 What we must recognize is that preaching is not just a one-way communication; it is a two-way street. The preacher must also be an active listener. A
Literacy is the ability to read, write, and think critically about words. Imagacy is the ability to read, use, and think critically about images and stories.
“master metaphor,” the leading or controlling image that reframes the conversation or concept. This metaphor can be a character, a key moment in the story, an artifact or artifice, even a word that functions as an image. Metaphors are not the sermon’s seasoning; they’re the very meat of the sermon itself, and they are the mediators that carry the incarnational story of Jesus.
Image-rich preaching sears the image and living presence of Christ into the hearts of his followers.
“The only gift greater than the air you breathe is the hand you hold.”
fact, this is less an age of information than an age of connection. People are desperate to connect with God, with each other, with creation, with their culture, and with their community.
Binding together with others in community releases positive impulses toward the future.36
Preaching is giving voice to God — the sound of whose voice can break cedars, heal broken hearts, repair relationships, transform commitments, alter lifestyles, overturn philosophies.
The role of the preacher is to point prophetically to Christ in the midst of the congregation and to encourage people to open themselves to fuller portions of the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives.
It’s that delusion that has led us to the point where, according to a 2010 survey, more than one-third of people who style themselves “born again” confess to “rarely or never” reading the Bible. Among “unaffiliated” people (people not belonging to any religious congregation), more than two-thirds say they don’t read the Bible.
To preach from the Scripture is to bleed the truth of Christ, to let people know that no one is beyond Christ’s reach.
Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world.”13
The lectionary contains most of the important Second Testament sections.
Those not using the lectionary may opt for lectio continua (“consecutive preaching” of books or passages).
Whether the Bible is in book or digital form, preaching should so awaken a hunger for the narraphors of faith that we will always want its physical presence with us.
Nothing deadens like the drumbeats of familiarity.
In fact, emotions can be more discerning, more perceptive, than reason.
Preaching is nothing less than the craft of making the familiar strange. When we make the familiar even more familiar, we find ourselves on homiletic cul-de-sacs.
Jesus, Jonathan Edwards, Dwight L. Moody — none of them were “verse-by-verse” preachers. The way we have defined it, traditional expository preaching is “too easy.” What’s hard is taking the stories of the Bible and connecting them to the stories of your zip code.
“The homily is not so much an explanation of the scripture as a process of first entering their world (thus speaking from them) and then using this world as a lens to look out onto our world (thereby speaking through them).”
Topical preaching elaborates on a specific topic or theme and seeks to relate it to life. Scripture is deployed to back up the topic or theme.
Expository preaching speaks on Scripture passage by passage in order to allow the text to determine its own point or to allow Scripture itself to speak authoritatively and prophetically.
Jesus also had a different method of teaching and preaching to his inner group of disciples. How did they remember so much of Jesus’ teaching? Because Jesus was master of the “teaching moment.” He did more than quote or comment on Scripture. In fact, his teaching was not based, as all teaching was before him, on authoritative rabbinic interpretations. His teaching was self-authenticating: “You have heard it said . . . but I say.”
The methodologies used to understand meaning that most closely echo the PaRDeS Hebrew exegetical method might well be described as the methods of deduction, induction, abduction, and transduction.
Whereas a deduction shows a simple conclusion according to a law or principle, induction determines value.
