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If we only perform the critical analysis and not the attentive listening, we will gather data about the Bible rather than hear the liv...
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Rather, we are attempting “to connect the narrative or poetic or historical content of a text with the ways of thinking the Christian tradition has used to make sense of itself.”
“The reason is that we do not, or anyway should not, interpret the text individualistically but within a larger circle of interpretation, a community of discrimination where private views are checked, enriched, corrected, deepened.”
Ancient interpreters, precisely because they are not products of our time, can often help us discover treasures in the text otherwise hidden to our modern eyes.
“In relation to those who will hear the sermon, what this text wants to say and do is …”
A claim is more like personal address. It speaks to real people, and it wants a response.
witness in the form of testimony “is both a narration of events and a confession of belief: we tell what we have seen and heard, and we confess what we believe about it.”1
Therefore, when the preacher is exegeting the biblical text, the congregation is already there, sometimes literally in the form of a textual study group, and always in the preacher’s mind, imagination, and heart.
Sermons should be faithful to the full range of a text’s power, and those preachers who carry away only main ideas, it was alleged, are traveling too light.
known as the “new hermeneutic,” which emphasized the power of language, biblical language in particular, to generate events to be experienced rather than merely thoughts to be learned and applied.
preaching. Instead of conceiving of preaching as messages from the Bible, “preaching,” insisted Randolph, “must be understood as an event.”
Sermons, Craddock claimed, are not primarily ideas
processed in the brain. They are, instead, events that happen in the ear. “Faith comes by hearing.”4
Exegesis is, in short, an exciting adventure that darts first this way, then that way, resisting all reduction to a process of linear logic.
This is difficult in practice
A sermon, too, should embody the text’s formative force, not merely its information.
It isn’t fair in the race we call preparation of the sermon for the minister to have a ten-mile head start.”
Ronald Sleeth, was concerned that preachers who turned away from ideas and toward events would almost inevitably turn to storytelling and superficial autobiography in which preachers recounted narcissistic little “private parables in the name of self expression.”
Which does happen!
They can, instead, be seen as complementary, even overlapping.
So, upon closer examination, it turned out after all that ideas from the text do come across Craddock’s bridge between text and sermon.
In other words, Craddock managed successfully to travel both alternative paths, the event and the idea.
So if biblical texts interpreted in the context of Christian community function to shape Christian identity, then the goal of the preacher’s exegesis is neither the plucking of an abstract idea from the text nor some nonconceptual aesthetic experience but, rather, the event of the text’s actively shaping self and communal understanding.
Content and intention are bound together, and no expression of textual impact is complete without them both.
What a text says clearly governs what it does.
A text’s claim involves both a message and an intention bound up in the text’s own manner of embodying that message, both what the text wishes to say and what the text wishes to do through its saying.
In relation to those who will hear the sermon, what this text wants to say and do is
What the sermon aims to say can be called its “focus,” and what the sermon aims to do can be called its “function.”
One of the purposes of creating focus and function statements is to allow the light from the text to be refracted into a single clear beam illuminating these hearers through this one sermon on this given day.
In this case, the preacher has chosen what has often been called the Problem/Response form.
All sermon forms, even those that follow a biblical text verse by verse, are finally reshapings by the preacher, impositions of a new sermonic form on the text. Other forms could have been devised for this sermon and been just as legitimate.
In other words, like it or not, an outline pushes the preacher way over to the propositional side of preaching and away from the eventful side.
If every sermon were presented this way—I, II, III—the message implied over time would be that the gospel is essentially a set of major ideas with rationally divisible parts.
Homileticians have also charged that, despite all the brave talk about “movement,” the process of outlining actually tends to produce sermons that don’t actually move well but are rather static and turgid: next point, next point, next point, and another thing.
but these weak transitional statements merely reveal that the movement between these sections must be artificially constructed.
Fred Craddock is surely correct when he observes that any experienced preacher with nerve enough to reexamine critically one’s old, outline-style sermons will almost surely discover that some sermons were three sermonettes barely glued together.
When we create a sermon form, though, we are not primarily arranging the material. We are, rather, asking, “How can people best hear the material in this sermon?”
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.
“problem-solving activity,”
That question hangs in the air at the beginning, and the sermon rolls along the pathway of discovery, gathering clues, until it finally arrives at the place where the listeners are prepared to make a decision for themselves about the claim of the text upon their lives.
but for Lowry, any “felt need” on the part of the hearers—whether originating in the biblical
text, a theological doctrine, or a situation in
life—can serve as the organ...
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Lowry believes that sermons should begin by describing this problem, dilemma, or bind so clearly that the hearers feel “am...
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The preacher does not need to raise the problem;
But you do have to acknowledge it
What makes that introduction better is that it creates imbalance; that is, it generates conflict by raising to the level of awareness an experiential problem about love.
It is not at all clear, though, that marching someone else through those steps will generate the same “Eureka!”
it is inevitably being subtly taught that the purpose of the gospel is to resolve problems or that the best experience of hearing the gospel is a deeply felt “Aha!”
In other words, from one angle of vision, the law of God exposes our broken condition, but from another angle the law opens up a vision of a just and hopeful world, and this is the gospel of God.
What Buttrick has done is to produce an abstract schematic description of one way of thinking and to declare that process as normative for each section of a sermon.
The crucial question for form is, How can the preacher bear witness to these claims in such a way that these people can hear them?
Every sermon form, then, must be custom-tailored to match the particular preaching occasion.
