In Season and Out of Season

Crafting sermons for all occasions

Davies

• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781848256040
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

A wise and practical guide to preaching in the Anglican tradition, illustrated with examples, that will inspire confidence and hone skills. It explores key aspects of preaching including: the importance of Scripture, the use of story, preaching at rites of passage, preaching through the liturgical year, and engagement with the wider world.

1 Preaching the Scriptures

‘I do like a text,’ commented a retired bishop in our congregation. He said it with an air of nostalgia as though hearing a sermon introduced by a text was something of a rarity these days. He, I felt sure, would always have preached from a text as his way into the passage of scripture and the theme of the sermon. I suppose the truth is that we need a peg to hang our thoughts on and if scripture is going to be a central ingredient in the homily (as I believe it should be) then a text is a good way of introducing it. Or maybe not. Scripture may be more often a real turn-off rather than an enticement to imaginative reflection. That is a terrible thing to say when you think how action-packed, how varied, how humane, how moving, exciting and challenging page after page of the biblical narrative are – both in the Old and New Testaments. Of course there are longueurs, bits that are frankly unreconstructed in their social or moral outlook, or sections that are incomprehensible. But taken all in all, the Bible is an amazing book (or more accurately, a series of books) whether or not one claims it to be the inspired Word of God. Perhaps that’s the problem. We just make such inflated and exclusive claims for our holy book (as we do for the rest of the ecclesiastical shooting match) that our contemporaries cannot take it or us seriously. Without being read, the Bible is dismissed as boring, irrelevant, illiberal and out of touch. It is not the Bible’s fault. It is ours for our complacency and overfamiliarity with a book we feel we know so well that we can ignore it. Or, even worse, we use it with such arrogant certainty about its meaning that we are forever using it to score points over other people.

Maybe a text of scripture is not the most user-friendly way of introducing the curious outsider or the scripturally suffocated to the treasure trove that we believe the Bible to contain. We need to be more subtle. And finding a non-biblical way into the sacred text may be the bait that will capture the interest and the imagination of our listeners. Perhaps I should stop referring to ‘sacred’ text or ‘holy’ Bible. Those words ‘holy’ and ‘sacred’ make assumptions and load the expectations of the potential reader – not always helpfully.

However, the preacher will need to be one who is immersed in the scriptures. Aidan Kavanagh’s dictum, ‘the homily must be soaked in the scriptures’, is a good one.1 And for the homily to be thus inundated the homilist also must be soaked in the scriptures. Familiarity with the scriptures – the Old and New Testaments not just the Gospels – is inevitably a lifetime’s endeavour and privilege. A preacher certainly cannot restrict his or her acquaintance with the sacred text to a few days before writing the sermon and reliance on memory of college lectures to see him or her through.

Of course Kavanagh himself would have taken such gospel-soaking for granted. Before he was a Yale professor and a leading liturgical scholar he was a Benedictine monk. And the Rule of St Benedict, which would have shaped his life and monastic vocation, is steeped in scripture itself and offers advice to the monk on how to make the scriptures central to his life. Lectio divina (sacred reading) is the Latin tag that describes a monk’s soaking in the Gospels. There are four stages of the lectio: reading the passage (lectio), meditating on a particular striking phrase, allowing it to take root in the reader (meditatio), allowing the meditation to turn into prayer (ruminatio), and finally, coming to the point of all prayer and sacred reading, the contemplation of God (contemplatio). This process of ruminating on the scriptures reminds me of the prayer that Thomas Cranmer translated from the Sarum Use to be used on the Second Sunday in Advent:

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning, grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy word we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.

That inward digestion is the Cranmerian equivalent of Benedict’s lectio; being soaked in the gospel. This is part of the spiritual ascesis that every preacher needs to develop and nurture: a spiritual discipline indeed for anyone who wishes to enter deeply into the wisdom of scripture and the mind of God. With that inward digestion, or chewing the scriptural cud, comes a familiarity with the text that is more than intellectual. It instils not a sense of one’s own cleverness at arriving at some new insight, but a proper humility as the chewed-over text becomes a source of grace beyond one’s dreams and, certainly, one’s deserts.

But the scriptures are not always approached or used with humility, but with arrogance and self-importance. Professor John Bowker, in one of his sermons, preached on a Second Sunday in Advent on the theme ‘The Word in the Words of God’, describes the result when scripture is wrested from its original, cultural context, but without reference to its cultural transmission and interpretation in other cultures and contexts, through ‘history and personality’.

The consequences of treating scripture as though history and personality made no difference to the words and content of scripture has been, in Christian history, horrendous. By lifting a text from its context and treating it as timeless truth, Christians claimed scriptural warrant for the murder of Jews (Matt. 27.25) . . . for burning women whom they regarded as witches (Ex. 22.18); by lifting a text, Christians justified slavery and apartheid (Gen. 9.25) . . . found justification for executing homosexuals (Lev. 20.13); by lifting a text (Gen. 3.16), Christians found warrant for the subordination of women to men, so that they came to be regarded as ‘a sort of infant’, incapable of taking charge of their own bodies and lives.2

Most distressing of all is that such abuse of the Bible continues to this day and appears to hold such sway within the counsels of the Church that church teaching reflects, or at least gives house room to this kind of debased theology. As a result, the claims of Christian theology in the modern world – the whole discipline of Christian apologetics – is marginalized and rendered incredible. The view that the literalist view of scripture is what most Christians believe certainly seems to be the opinion of much of the media, and seems to give permission to commentators either to disregard the rational Christian voice altogether, or to use literalist views as an aunt sally fit only for ridicule. This tends to be the approach of such media-favoured luminaries as Professor Richard Dawkins.

A sermon will not be heard by the millions who watch television each day, but many hundreds will hear a sermon each week. And some of those sermons will influence, for good or ill, those whose voices are heard in the secular arena, and whose views may shape the attitudes and decisions of others. How a sermon handles scripture, therefore, is not a matter of indifference.

John Bowker invites his hearers and would-be preachers on another route through the labyrinth of scripture. He suggests that scripture, far from being a once-for-all, never-to-be-questioned revelation, is ‘a long process of learning the name and nature of God’ through which ‘the self-giving of God for the sake of our rescue has been gradually apprehended, not despite cultural and historical relativity, but through it, in a way that respects the conditions of God’s own creation’.

Bowker uses this sermon, on a Sunday traditionally devoted to rehearsing the importance of scripture, just a few weeks before Christmas, to relate the words of scripture to the overarching interpretative focus of the Word, ‘made flesh and dwelling among us’. ‘This process of scripture does not insert nuggets of non-contingent words into the world: it delivers the Word of God into birth, and into both death and resurrection.’

This is very much the conclusion reached by the New Testament scholar Ernest Best in his From Text to Sermon, an excellent resource for preachers, which encourages the ‘responsible use of the New Testament in preaching’. After surveying the tricks, techniques and methods of scriptural usage in preaching down the ages, with some, not always flattering, examples of the art (including Origen and Newman, Fosdick and Niehbur), he draws his conclusions:

Firstly the preacher must know him or herself. That is to say we need to be aware of the presuppositions with which we approach scripture – our own theological perspective, the attitudes already predetermined in us which shape the way we receive the sacred text. Such self-awareness helps us to be aware of the inevitable limitations of our approach, and reminds us that others, not least those who listen to what we say, have their own presuppositions as well.3

That shouldn’t inhibit what we have to say, beyond giving our view a more mature perspective, for, as Ernest Best puts it, ‘We (the preachers) are the vital link between that which, or he who, precipitates himself in scripture and the understanding we convey to others.’ The ‘he who precipitates himself in scripture’ is picked up again when Best says, ‘All Christian thought and life must continually be brought back to its centre in Christ.’ Exact exegesis of the text, which Best urges on preachers as one necessary tool in their bag of equipment, ‘does not mean we go back to Jesus’ actual words, but back to him as the centre of theology’.

This returns us to the point John Bowker was making that the words of scripture, which themselves are often an exegesis of an exegesis, take us back ultimately to God and his Word. In words reminiscent of the Rule of St Benedict and the cud-chewing of the lectio divina, Bowker ends his Advent sermon thus:

Scripture does not solve all our problems or disagreements, still less does it dictate attitudes and behaviours as though we should be frozen in a time or a society when our best option was to follow the camels to the next oasis. We are challenged through scripture to realise that our best option is to follow Our Lord constantly toward the horizon of hope. By attending to scripture, by allowing its words and stories, its hymns and prayers and praise, to rest deeply in the memory banks of our mind, we will find that the words and actions of our lives are transformed gradually but persistently into a single word of love.

Best and Bowker suggest our preaching must begin and end with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. But perhaps we should take care in our preaching not to confine our sense of that God and of that Jesus within the intensely personal. Some Christian traditions strongly emphasize the personal relationship between Jesus and the individual believer, and evangelical and Ignatian spiritualities among others have helped to make the sense of God a vivid personal experience. Such experience and the witness that flows from it has issued in lives of goodness and service, and renewed commitment to God and to others. But sometimes there is a narrowness in this sense of the personal relationship and a certain cosiness that leaves little room for the clear New Testament experience of God’s transforming love as community. Jesus Christ was experienced by those who followed him in the flesh as crucified and risen. The personal touch had transformed their lives as it still does today. But their experience of transformation had to be recast beyond the personal so that others who had not seen might believe. St Paul in particular was the one who on the basis of his own personal conversion developed a theology not simply of personal discipleship (important though that was) but of the life of the Christian community which he characterized in a telling phrase – the body of Christ.

The encounter with Jesus Christ may indeed come to us as personal revelation, and we will be for ever marked by that moment of recognition and conversion. But the relationship with Jesus is never only personal, for we make our pilgrimage of faith alongside others, who have inevitably come to faith by different routes. God has given us to each other, despite our palpable frailty, to be a source of encouragement in the building up of the body of Christ.

We will come from different Christian traditions and there are different ways of receiving and reading the Word of God in scripture. But one way of emphasizing the corporate or community nature of the Word that I have come to appreciate draws on the liturgy of the Eucharist when the people of God assemble for Word and Sacrament. At the beginning of the service the Book of the Gospels is carried in procession – lifted high and given a place of honour, like a sacred icon in the Orthodox tradition. The book is placed reverently on the altar where later bread and wine will be prepared for the eucharistic feast. When the point comes for the Gospel to be read (after other passages of scripture have been heard), another procession forms; the Book of the Gospels, still closed, is raised again and is brought to a central place in the church. The reader, in the midst of the congregation, faces towards the west door or the exit – as though to say the good news we are about to hear needs to be heard beyond this assembly and these four walls. He or she opens the book, for the first time, as though we will indeed hear something as if for the first time; something entirely new.

Unusually when listening to a story, the congregation remains standing and faces the book and the reader. The congregation does not follow the text in individual pew sheets or Bibles, for this is something everybody needs to hear together (remember Cranmer in his Collect urged us to hear before we read). This is an important moment in the liturgy when the individual members of the assembly are made into a community. The corpor­ate reception of God’s Word empowers the body of Christ to live again.

And immediately after the reading of the Gospel the sermon follows. The sermon needs no further ascription or commendation, for it arises out of the Gospel we have just heard, and is part of our receiving of it. Both the gospel reading and the preaching which follows are shaping the Christian community and enabling it to be. Ernest Best puts it like this:

Our sermons . . . are new crystallizations. But the real crystallization is the cry...