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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The actual lived experience of faithful people—as individuals, in churches and other communities, through their religious rituals and practices, and in their engagement with society—was increasingly being seen as a source for theological knowledge and not just as a target
Guest preachers, because they are, well, guests, unfamiliar with the local customs, are almost inevitably given an elaborate list of instructions before the service begins.
What is at stake is the more urgent matter of how worship leaders, including preachers, understand themselves and their leadership roles in relationship to the whole community of faith.
“What matters,” writes Moltmann, “is that public preaching and the preacher should not be isolated from the simple, everyday and matter-of-course language of the congregation’s faith, the language used by Christians in the world.”2
What does it look like for a congregation to point beyond its own institutional life in worship? One place we find this happening is in prayers of confession.
Lofty words are spoken at the dedication of a civic center or a country club, but no one confesses sin.
No discerning person can stand in this place in front of the community of Christ without a deep sense of awe and responsibility.
preaching is a calling on the mystery of the transcendent God who alone can save us.
I don’t understand preaching, but I believe in it deeply.
What is more, some who feel the call to ministry have been told by their churches, explicitly or implicitly, that they have no right to preach at all, and they consequently doubt their own authority to speak.
“Sundays come toward the preacher,” quipped the well-known preacher Ernest T. Campbell, “like telephone poles by the window of a moving train.”
pastors who have seen the people sitting there in the congregation hungry for a truthful word that clarifies and compels—sometimes not even aware how hungry they are—know that preaching is serious and urgent business.
To be a preacher is to be a midwife of the word,
The church is blessed, of course, by the rare preacher of exceptional ability, but the church is sustained most of all by the kind of careful, responsible, and faithful preaching that falls within the range of most of us.
we must be careful not to confuse the sermon with what the preacher may have written down beforehand or even with the words the preacher has in mind to say.
The sermon is action; the sermon is what the preacher enacts in performed speech
The sermon is an event of speaking and hearing,
Finally, there is the presence of Christ.
In the end we return to Augustine’s insight: sacraments are visible words; words are audible sacraments.”
God has chosen to meet us in the event of preaching, promised to be present there, and this is not because our sermons are good but because God is good.
Christ is not present because we preach; we preach because Christ is present.
To preach is to join our human words with the word that God in Christ in the power of the Spirit is already speaking to the church and to the world, and to speak in Christ’s name is to claim Christ’s own promise, “Whoever listens to you listens to me” (Luke 10:16).
If ministers picture themselves as “shepherds” or “prophets” or “enablers” or “teachers” or “evangelists” or “spiritual entrepreneurs” or “servant leaders” or “wounded healers,” these guiding images of ministry will prompt them to emphasize certain tasks of ministry and to minimize others.
three “master” metaphors: the herald, the pastor, and the storyteller/poet
Proclamation is human language in and through which God Himself speaks, like a king through the mouth of his herald,
Obviously, the herald image contains a very high theological view of preaching
The preacher’s job, this homiletician would say, is to go to the Scriptures, to listen there for the dynamic event of God’s word, and then to speak this word faithfully and truly and let the chips fall where they may.
It would be a strange, even a blasphemous, idea to think that the preacher could rearrange a few words in the sermon and thereby enable God to speak more clearly.
