More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Faithful preaching requires such gifts as sensitivity to human need, a discerning eye for the connections between faith and life, an ear attuned to hearing the voice of Scripture, compassion, a growing personal faith, and the courage to tell the truth.
The sermon is action; the sermon is what the preacher speaks joined with what the rest of the congregation hears.
Christ is not present because we preach; we preach because Christ is present.
Good preaching, then, is preaching that leads to love of God, but also to the love of neighbor, and, for the preacher, the congregation is full of very specific and diverse neighbors.
The herald has one job, remaining faithful to the message, but the pastoral preacher must think about what parts of that message hearers need at this moment and what aspects of the gospel they can receive amid the pain and clutter of their lives.
Pastoral preachers see sermons as healing words addressed to concrete situations of human need.
A major strength, therefore, of the pastor image comes from the attention it gives to the healing power of the gospel and to the inner dynamics of the listeners.
A final problem with the pastoral image is that it runs the risk of reducing theology to anthropology by presenting the gospel merely as a resource for human emotional growth.
The preacher as witness is not authoritative because of rank or power but rather because of what the preacher has seen and heard.
Preaching is biblical whenever the preacher allows a text from the Bible to serve as the leading force in shaping the content and purpose of the sermon.
Biblical preaching is the normative form of Christian preaching. That statement can be taken in two different ways. When we call a certain practice “normative,” we may mean either that it is what is usually done (the normal, customary practice) or that it is the standard (the norm, the rule) by which all other ways of doing the practice are measured. When we say that biblical preaching is normative, we mean both.
Preaching that involves significant engagement with a biblical text is the standard over against which all other types of preaching are measured. If we ask about a particular sermon, “Is that a Christian sermon?” we are really asking if it bears true and faithful witness to the God of Jesus Christ, and answering that question inevitably takes us to the biblical story through which we know and encounter the God of Jesus Christ.
Over the years many strong and faithful sermons have been preached that were surely gospel sermons even though they were not drawn explicitly from specific passages in the Bible.
All gospel preaching, then, is in some sense biblical preaching. Biblical interpretation stands either in the foreground or in the background.
Biblical preaching—the kind of preaching that involves sermons that engage particular texts in the Bible—is normative first of all because it reenacts the epistemology of the church, or to put it more simply, it models the primary way in which the church comes to know God’s will.
Biblical preaching is also normative because the church has found that through such preaching the church is formed according to the pattern of Christ.
Throughout its history, the church has discovered that when it goes to the Scripture in openness and trust, it finds itself uniquely addressed there by God and its identity as the people of God shaped by that encounter.
week after week, in sermon after sermon, this action of going in faith to the meeting ground of Scripture is enacted. The very dynamics of reading and preaching correspond to the way the church comes to know the gospel, and the prayerful hope of preacher and hearers alike is that they will be formed and reformed according to the pattern of Christ.
This means that the church must not only listen obediently to the words of the Bible; it must also interpret those words as the human products of their own age.
Every text is a product of a particular time and place and reflects cultural attitudes and assumptions that are not necessarily the gospel.
Because the Bible is in human language, and the texts of the Bible were written both for and in social situations, everything about the Bible is culturally conditioned. Because the ultimate referent of biblical texts is God, everything about the Bible is infused with gospel.
texts that scream cultural bias are also gospel texts, and texts that shout the gospel are also culturally conditioned. There is no surgical procedure for dividing the tissues, no guaranteed way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Hearing the claim of God in and through a biblical text demands an act of faithful imagination, a refusing to let a text go until it has blessed us.
Preachers go to the Bible, then, not as “universal Christians” (there is no such thing) but with a particular theological heritage and viewpoint.
Theological traditions, then, are good things, guiding us in the conversation with Scripture. But there is a shadow side as well, and theological traditions can mislead us, too. We need a vantage point to be able to see something, but we cannot see everything from a single perspective. Theological traditions serve as means for the church to remember, organize, and comprehend what has been discerned of the gospel over time.
The biblical word does not come as a disembodied word, speaking timeless verities to all people everywhere. The Bible speaks to particular people in the concrete circumstances of their lives. It speaks “a word on target,” illumining our situation from within. The word of God we encounter in the Scripture does not attack idolatry in general; it dethrones our idols, severs the bonds of our old and crippling loyalties. It is not the word of God in the abstract but of God who is for us, of God who is against us in order to be truly for us. The living word that comes to us in the Bible does not hum
...more
When the sermon originates outside the text, we know from the beginning what the sermon will be about, but if it is truly to be a biblical sermon, we must not decide in advance what the sermon will say. The text must be allowed to surprise us, even to violate our expectations.
Regardless of the sermon’s starting point, then, preaching is biblical when the text serves as the leading force in shaping the content and purpose of the sermon.
Broadly speaking, exegesis is a systematic plan for coming to understand a biblical text.
Outline of a Brief Exegetical Method for Preaching I. Getting the Text in View A. Select the text B. Reconsider where the text begins and ends C. Establish a reliable translation of the text II. Getting Introduced to the Text D. Read the text for basic understanding E. Place the text in its larger context III. Attending to the Text F. Listen attentively to the text IV. Testing What Is Heard in the Text G. Explore the text historically H. Explore the literary character of the text I. Explore the text theologically J. Check the text in the commentaries V. Moving toward the Sermon K. State
...more
Despite the fact that it passes by relatively unnoticed, form is absolutely vital to the meaning and effect of a sermon. Like the silent shifting of gears in a car’s automatic transmission, sermon form translates the potential energy of the sermon into productive movement, while remaining itself quietly out of view.
A sermon’s form, although often largely unperceived by the hearers, provides shape and energy to the sermon and thus becomes itself a vital force in how a sermon makes meaning. Form is an essential part of a sermon’s content and can itself support or undermine the communication of the gospel.
In the simplest of terms, a sermon form is an organizational plan for deciding what kinds of things will be said and done in a sermon and in what sequence.
Sermon structure is about shaping communication, not merely about organizing information. A sermon form is a plan for the experience of listening, not just an arrangement of data, and it is the listeners who are missing from the typical process of outlining.
Craddock argued so persuasively for what he termed the “inductive” form in preaching, however, that it was difficult for readers not to be convinced that this was the sermon form par excellence.
Craddock proposed that sermons be shaped according to the same process of creative discovery employed by preachers in their exegetical work.
So instead of being told in the introduction what the sermon is about, listeners ought to move through the sermon as a process, putting together various bits and pieces of evidence, until they are able to discover the key claim of the sermon in the conclusion.
by the time the hearers arrive at the end of an inductive sermon, they ideally have become so engaged in this discovery process that they, and not the preacher, complete the sermon by naming its resolution in their own minds and lives.
Another powerful master sermon form, one embodying a very different sort of problem-solving process from the inductive form, has been suggested by Eugene Lowry in his influential book The Homiletical Plot.
Sermons, he claims, should be designed around five basic movements, or “stages”
I. Upsetting the equilibrium (Conflict). In this opening stage, which we have already described, the preacher poses the “problem” of the sermon in a way that can be felt by the hearers. II. Analyzing the discrepancy (Complication). In this stage the preacher diagnoses the problem by exploring it in detail and articulating the reasons that it exists in human experience. III. Disclosing the clue to resolution (Sudden Shift). Here is where the “Aha!” comes in Lowry’s form. In this stage the preacher supplies the clue from the gospel that provides the resolution for the problem. Lowry is
...more
A third example of a master form, this one theologically driven, has been suggested by homiletician Paul Scott Wilson.
“the four pages of the sermon.”
Page one—Trouble in the biblical text Page two—Trouble in our world Page three—Grace in the biblical text Page four—Grace in our world
The contemporary homiletician who has perhaps given the most sustained attention to the relationship between sermon form and the listening process is David Buttrick.
Buttrick’s massive textbook Homiletic,
Sermons, then, are “a movement of language from one idea to another,” and because of this Buttrick likes to call the individual ideas, or units, of the sermon “moves.” Because of his understanding of how human consciousness works, Buttrick insists that these moves must be built according to a single blueprint. Every move is required to possess three indispensable parts:22
1. Opening statement. The preacher must state, in one clear sentence, the main idea of this move, what this move is about (e.g., “We are all sinners”). This invites the hearers to “take a picture of this.” In addition, the opening must show how this move is connected to the one before, indicate the point of view of the move, and establish the move’s emotional mood. 2. Development. In the middle section of the move, the main idea is elaborated, sometimes through clarification or illustration and sometimes through the raising of objections. 3. Closure. In a terse final sentence, the main idea of
...more
As the debate among homileticians about sermon form continues, it has become increasingly clear that a sermon’s form should grow out of the shape of the gospel being proclaimed as well as out of the listening patterns of those who will hear the sermon. The dynamics of human listening, while certainly an important and often neglected ingredient in the creation of sermon form, must not serve as the only basis, and not even as the starting point, in considerations of sermon design.
The preacher who is a witness stands between the testimony that will be given and the people who will hear this testimony. Each side of this transaction has a stake in sermon form.
Most of the time, however, good sermon form results from careful thinking and planning in advance. Good sermon form is an artistic achievement, and no universally accepted and always reliable process exists for creating a satisfactory sermon form. Here are three suggested steps designed to raise the central questions that form must address.
