God Be in My Mouth

40 ways to Grow as a Preacher

Doug Gay

• Publisher: Saint Andrew Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780861539963
• eBook ISBN: 9780861539987
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Based on a decade's experience of preparing ministry students to become preachers and his own experience as one of today's most gifted preachers, Doug Gay offers an imaginative, practical and inspiring guide for all who are privileged with the task of preaching. 40 short, pithy and often humorous reflections consider different aspects of the nature and practice of preaching and aim to fire the imagination, build confidence and develop creativity. It draws on a wide range of range of writers and theologians on preaching and the creative arts and incorporates voices as diverse as Stanley Hauerwas, Sam Wells and Miles Davis.

Part 1: Preaching

1.1 Finding the year

I begin with the question of what to preach, and when.

I remember times in my own ministry, especially in the early years, when the prospect of preaching weighed heavily on me. The Sundays stretching ahead seemed like an endless series of demands, or even question marks about whether I could deliver. How would I ever find enough things to say? Looking back, one of the things that helped me to become a preacher and to sustain a preaching ministry was what I would call ‘finding the year’. By that I mean three things.

The liturgical year

The first is (and here all of my Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopalian/Anglican friends and readers will have to yawn and bear with me) that over time I have become a more catholic kind of Presbyterian. In particular, I have come to trust the shape of the Christian Year, of the liturgical year. I have come to feel that it is somehow holding me and carrying me and moving me on. When I first shared that thought at a training day for preachers, I was surprised by how emotional it made me feel to express it. Without being too fanciful about it, there has been a sense that underneath these seasons, these long-established rhythms, were the everlasting arms. Through the shapes of these traditions, I have come to believe I am being sustained by God. That has affected my own spirituality very deeply, and I think it has also affected the spirituality of all the congregations and Christian communities I have been a part of. With every year that goes by, it means more to me that I live it through the rhythms of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor characterises us as too often living in the flat, homogenous time of secular modernity. But as a preacher it has been true more and more with each passing year that I have not only been inhabiting that featureless landscape. In learning to live by the Christian Year, I have also been learning to live by a different time signature; I have been walking the contours of a different landscape, with its own dark valleys and sunlit heights.

I grew up in the Exclusive wing of the Darbyite Plymouth Brethren, where the liturgical year was scrupulously ignored, so that every Sunday was both Christmas and Easter. For the curious, that feels more or less exactly the same as no Sunday ever being Christmas or Easter. Not all of me has climbed up the candle,2 but my timekeeping has. It matters to me as a preacher where I am in the Christian Year: whether I am preaching in Lent or at Pentecost. Each November, as I get ready for the start of Advent, there is a renewed sense of both anticipation and relief. Within this work of preaching, I believe that I, along with the whole worshipping community, am being held and shaped by something bigger and deeper, something older and richer than my own understanding.

The lectionary year

If that was one way of finding the year, the lectionary has given me another one. I am not starry-eyed about the lectionary,3 I recognise its faults and limitations but, in my case, finding the shape of the lectionary helped to settle me as a preacher. The lectionary gave me an A and a B and a C – but it gave me them one at a time. What that did was to change my relationship with Scripture. I still get most stressed about preaching when for some reason I have to choose, from scratch, which passages to preach on. When I am working with the lectionary (and I think this can also be true of preachers who work with a non-lectionary-based expository series) somehow I relax. I have a sense of being given something to work with, of something to push back against, of something to wrestle with and something to receive. I sometimes describe this to students as the Texas Hold-Em homiletic, where you have to play the hand you are dealt. I am also reminded week by week of the variety of literary forms that Scripture comes in, as every Sunday I am exposed to at least three.

Since each year of the lectionary features one of the synoptic Gospels, that becomes a key feature of my year as a preacher: this is going to be the year of Luke … but that is also true for the Old Testament and Epistles – this will be the year of Jeremiah, or Job or Galatians. I find myself looking ahead at the year with a sense of expectancy, as if I am waiting for a reunion with some old and very dear friends, who I haven’t seen for too long. Things have not stood still since the last time we met. We have things to tell one another. Already in November, I know it is out of these coming conversations that this year’s sermons will be born.

The life year

The third way of finding the year has come through the growing understanding that I have to preach as myself. Every year I remind myself and my students about Ugandan Bishop Festo Kivengere’s wise comment that when you preach you can’t be like Jacob, pretending to be someone else in order to get the blessing. You have to preach out of your own life, you have to speak with your own voice, you have to be present with your own body. Preaching always takes place within a life year: the year I got married, the year I moved to London, the year my first child was born, the year Rachel’s mum got sick, the year my dad died, the year Mandela was released, the year the Scottish Parliament was reconvened, the year I was twenty-six, the year I turned forty.

With the life year, like the lectionary, there is the sense of being given something to work with. Sometimes we are given something that feels unbearable, sometimes something that feels exhilarating. There is give and take, as the popular worship song by the Redmans puts it: ‘you give and take away/you give and take away’. In the midst of that, there is the call to preach honestly. If we try to fake it, it will break us. The Christian activist Jim Wallis once wrote that ‘we have nothing more to share with the world than we have ourselves’. In one sense, that means we have all the riches of the gospel to share, because all things are ours in Christ. But it’s also true that if we try to live beyond our means emotionally, psychologically or existentially, that attempt will hollow us out. Along with our selves, our preaching voices will become hollow.

The life year is not just an individual thing; it is personal and local, but it is also political and global. It is what positions homiletics as ‘contextual theology’. The life year will always find us, and find us out; but we also need to try to find it. This is one we are never done with: the struggle to preach in our own voice, in our own skin, in our own life, in our own place and time.

Finding the year

What to preach, when? For me it involves finding the year: the liturgical year, the lectionary year, the life year. The key point here is, of course, that in our preaching these will all become one. They will become this year.

The next whole year that lies ahead as I finish this book, 2017−18, will contain all of the traditional seasons, fasts and feasts of the liturgical year. It will once again, for the eighth time in my life as a preacher, be Year B in the Revised Common Lectionary – the year of Mark, the year of 1 and 2 Corinthians, the year of Jonah, Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Samuel. Some of the experiences it will hold for me and for the congregation I am part of, I can predict with some certainty; but many I cannot. It is also sobering to reflect that of course I cannot ever know whether I will be around for all or any of it. If I do live and preach through it, what is certain is that what happens within me and around me, what happens in my local neighbourhood and in the wider world, what happens in my life year, will have a crucial influence on my preaching.

Whenever I approach a new liturgical year, getting ready to begin again on Advent Sunday, I feel a great sense of anticipation and expectation. Whether or not we work with the lectionary (and obviously not everyone does), we have a new year of preaching ahead of us. A final thought here is that in this year that lies ahead, there is time enough for what needs to be preached. Across many denominations, there is a tendency to focus our preaching on certain texts: in the case of lectionary preachers, it is common to default to the Gospel reading more often than not, as if there was no time to focus on anything else. Compared to the reformed tradition that I stand in and the preaching traditions in which I was raised and formed, this kind of practical supersessionism is an unacceptable narrowing of the scope of preaching. To affirm that ‘there is time’ for preaching is to be ready for what an older homiletic text on my shelf calls ‘planning a year’s pulpit work’. It is to look out at the lectionary year and to say there is time for Luke, and for Romans, as well as for Deuteronomy, for Amos and for Job. In a 1983 lecture on ‘Preaching the Old Testament’ the biblical scholar Derek Kidner put it beautifully: ‘Not every by-road leads to Doubting Castle; the King has His own quiet meadows and curious villages.’4 (Put more prosaically, we should be wary of dismissing any part of the canon as a site for preaching.)

Notes

2 Or moved to a more ‘high church’ vision of liturgy.

3 I use the Revised Common Lectionary.

4 Kidner (1983); cf. Plantinga (2015), p. 1.

1.2 Naming the presence of God

Learning from Sam Wells

When Christians gather together to worship, whether two or three or two or three thousand, they are quickly reminded or become aware of three things. The first is that they are in the presence of God. The ability to name the presence of God is a skill. It is a skill that the scriptures train the Church to perform.5

The practice of preaching, like other kinds of practice,6 is informed and enabled by various kinds of ‘know-how’ and understanding. As preachers, we gather these from a rich range of sources, sometimes from a lecture, book or article on homiletics, sometimes from another theological or non-theological source, sometimes from observing others or reflecting on our own practice. Some of these insights we try hard to write on the walls of our own minds as reminders, others seem to imprint themselves. Throughout this book, I will be drawing attention to those that are most important to me as a preacher, and acknowledging their sources, since many come from other people.

One of the insights I return to most often, which has become central to how I think about worship and about the place of preaching within worship, is found in the quote at the beginning of this chapter from Anglican theologian and minister Sam Wells. I recommend reading in full the article from which the quote is taken, but the key words for me were these: ‘The ability to name the presence of God is a skill … that the scriptures train the Church to perform.’ It would be no exaggeration to say that these words changed my life; they certainly changed my work as a minister, liturgist and preacher, but they also changed my experience of reading Scripture. They did this not so much because they told me something I didn’t know, but because they told me something I did know – but didn’t realise I knew. Wells’s words crystallised an understanding of what was going on when I and others worshipped, in a way I found – and still find – profoundly helpful and persuasive.

In the article, Wells fills out their meaning by speaking of how as worshippers, through Scripture, we ‘enter a tradition of providence encompassing Noah’s rainbow, Isaac’s ram, Moses’ pillar of cloud, Hannah’s prayer, Daniel’s lions, Elizabeth’s child, the stilled storm, the Great Commission, the new Jerusalem’.

It will be obvious that, like Wells, I have a ‘high’ view of Scripture. The encounter with Scripture is central to my understa...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part 1: Preaching
• 1.1 Finding the year
• 1.2 Naming the presence of God
• 1.3 What do you see?
• 1.4 Who do you see?
• 1.5 Focus – what was the sermon about?
• 1.6 Function – what was the sermon doing?
• 1.7 Take them to the table
• 1.8 Take me to the water
• 1.9 When we come to die
• 1.10 God be in my mouth
• Part 2: Reading
• 2.1 On learning to read
• 2.2 What are you reading?
• 2.3 Are you expository?
• 2.4 On having (and being) a hermeneutic
• 2.5 Converging literacies
• 2.6 Cues for the sermon
• 2.7 Working the verbs
• 2.8 Working the nouns
• 2.9 Losing control – knots in the text
• 2.10 Preach like Jacob
• Part 3: Speaking
• 3.1 Beginnings and endings
• 3.2 Don’t preach like Jacob
• 3.3 Writing for the ear
• 3.4 How literary form informs the sermon
• 3.5 Preaching without a script
• 3.6 Preaching with a script
• 3.7 How long (has this been going on)
• 3.8 Feel it with me
• 3.9 Head, heart (gut), hand
• 3.10 Getting out of the way
• Part 4: Living
• 4.1 Pathos – being human
• 4.2 Look at me when I’m talking to you
• 4.3 Ethos – trust me, I’m a preacher
• 4.4 It’s a gig
• 4.5 God is with you in the pulpit
• 4.6 God-talk – other ways to hear the word
• 4.7 Be preached to
• 4.8 Preaching in love
• 4.9 Logos − the mind of the preacher
• 4.10 How was it for you?
• Conclusion
• References and Bibliography