A Preacher's Tale

Explorations in Narrative Preaching

Jon Russell

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780334056539
• eBook ISBN: 9780334056553
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

Many clergy receive little training in the arts of preaching and it is assumed that they will learn by gaining experience. The renowned American preacher Herbert O'Driscoll suggests that congregations do not want to be given a map showing them how to get to the coast, they want to be drenched in the spray. Narrative preaching is a means of achieving such immediacy. By dramatic story-telling, it invites listeners into enter the text imaginatively and enables them to experience sermons as transformative events. This book aims to provide not just a theoretical introduction, but a resource that uses sermons in the narrative style to reflect on how to prepare and construct them and how to deliver them effectively in the context of worship.

1

The Cool of the Day: Preaching with Imagination and Plot

Genesis 3.1–24

The sun is a huge, blood-red disc, as it slips slowly towards the horizon. The temperature now, after the heat of the day, is just perfect. Peacocks strut across the lawns, their iridescent tail feathers gleaming and winking; and further away, monkeys play lazily in the trees. The scent of jasmine wafts through the summer air, and the muted whoosh of a distant waterfall caresses the ears. It is a scene from paradise.

The Lord God rocks back in his chair, puts up his feet on the veranda, picks up his gin and tonic, and sips contentedly. The twist of lemon had been a particular stroke of creative genius. That tastes good. In fact, it’s all good: the sunset, the garden, the whole of creation really. A job well done. It had taken a while: countless eons to get the tectonic plates and the volcanic gases and the primordial slime to come together in just the right sort of way, and all of this on just one tiny planet; but his patience has paid off. These last weeks have been particularly good, as, species by species, he has brought the fruits of his creation to the man, to see what he will name them. ‘Elephant’ was a good choice of name, for instance: for such a huge and wonderful creature, you need a name that conveys bulk and conviction. Equally, ‘wasp’ seemed to fit the bill as well. Obviously wasps, while still good in the eternal creative scheme of things, were never going to be a big hit with the man and the woman; but at least they’d come up with an appropriately waspish name.

Speaking of the man and the woman, the Lord God reflects that, though wasps might be a bit iffy, man and woman truly are the pinnacle of his creation. Not because of their physical attributes; they are beautiful, but compared with tigers, for instance, they don’t come close. Measured against elephants, they’re puny; while racing gazelle, they lumber terribly. Nor even because of their brain-power; the man and the woman clearly have potential, but dolphins are pretty bright as well, and whales have huge brains. If whales can just work out how to make it onto the land some time …

But the man and the woman have soul. They can lift their eyes from what they are doing, and gaze in awe, and look to the Lord God, and recognize him. They can know. They can be known. With the man and the woman, the Lord God can share his creation, and his delight, and his wonder, and his hopes, and his very self. He takes another sip of his gin and tonic, stretches; and then gets up to go for his evening stroll. In the cool of the day, the Lord God walks in the garden of his delight, and sees that truly it is good.

But you take a big risk, with all this creating; and in the cool of this particular evening, the Lord God senses that something is not good. The man and the woman are hiding from him. How can this be? He knows, of course, before he even finds them, what it is that they have done. He knows already that the time of innocence is ended. There is an inevitability here: this time had to come. The man and the woman, to be truly human, must make their own way in the world.

And he knows what this will mean. For he sees the struggles they will have to undergo. The pains that they will endure, becoming themselves: the physical pains of tilling the soil, and bringing children into the world. And the emotional pain. He sees, in this evening hour, Cain and Abel, running and playing and laughing together outside the hut. Sometimes brothers can be the best of friends. They have such potential. But the Lord God sees again, hears the defiant question, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’, knows the agony with which the man and the woman will live, from one single, fateful, future day. And with that he sees all the wars and the ravages, the blood-soaked ground and the sob-wracked sky, and just how inhuman we humans will be to each other. So that when he asks, ‘What is this you have done?’, he knows that they have not the slightest iota of a notion of what his question might truly mean.

He knows too that there will continue to be good, as well as bad: love as well as hatred, joy and laughter to ease some of the pain. Courage and heroism will mark out the man and the woman and their kind, as well as brutality and indifference. He knows that he has created enough clues, around them and within them; he knows that enough stories will be told to ensure that there will always be some who can lift their eyes from what they are doing, and wonder, and see him, and know him and be known by him. But it will be painful, for all that. For dust they are, and to dust they will return.

He knows that they have chosen not to look to him, the man and the woman, chosen to leave him already; even before he questions them, before he sees their nakedness, before they are banished from the garden (together with their disobedience, and their excuses, and their adulthood).

And he knows that something will have to be done, one day, to win them back. To readmit them to the garden, with their eyes now open. He knows that to win a victory such as this will be costly; more costly, more painful than anyone could imagine.

The garden is terribly quiet now. The man and the woman are gone; the darkness has fallen. The Lord God cannot forget their faces as they left. Fear was there, it is true; and sadness. There had been gratitude for the garments he had made for them, indeed for all that he had given them. But there had been more. Excitement was there in their eyes at what their future might hold, and determination; desire for life, desire for each other. This time had to come; to create means to have to let go. Yet their leaving is more painful for the Lord God than for the man and his woman. Emptiness yawns wide into the night; and the only sound in the garden is the sound of falling tears.

***

The creation stories in Genesis offer a vast landscape for the preacher to explore. Some of the paths we follow can be quite rocky. Some can be dead ends. Some can lead into swamps of confusion. Do we tackle the issues of creationism versus science? Do we teach our congregations a little form criticism? Do we tackle the possible misogyny that would see Eve as responsible for the Fall? Do we offer chapter one of a biography of the accuser, if we think this passage travels that winding trail? Do we reflect on the doctrine of Original Sin?

Some members of the congregation hearing this sermon would have had considerable biblical knowledge, and been aware of the extensive literature that this creation story has generated over the last two centuries. Others might still hear it, more or less, as a piece of history. There are, I decided, more appropriate platforms than the pulpit from which to debate such questions! It seemed better to honour the form of the text, and use my imagination in order to tell a story.

Kate Bruce suggests a number of reasons why we might resist the notion that imagination should play a part in the construction of a sermon:

Linked to fantasy, idolatry, deceit, delusion and evil, imagination might not appear too congenial to the theologian. However, imagination can be defended on the grounds that, like any other aspect of human activity, it can be employed to positive or negative ends.5

She finishes her book by saying:

Imagination is vital to preaching if the hearts of the hearers are to ignite as people wake up to the reality of divine love pulsing through creation … Imagination is an agent of divine transformation…6

Thomas Long concludes that:

Listeners exercise imagination in the hearing of sermons, and preachers exercise imagination in the interpretation of texts and in the construction of those sermons. But the most exciting gift of recent biblical hermeneutics to the text-to- sermon process has been the imaginative dimensions of the text itself. Texts are no longer viewed as inert containers but as poetic expressions displaying rhetorical and literary artistry.7

David Schlafer, in Playing with Fire,8 invites us to ‘play’ as we construct our sermons, even though we are playing with fire. ‘Cool of the Day’ (a phrase from the NIV translation) employs this strategy, first to excite delight and even amusement in the hearer, playing off the pictures evoked by the creation story. Later, and perhaps surprisingly for the congregation, it suggests that the Fall is a necessary emotional and psychological consequence of creation. I also wanted it to evoke a little of the wonder of creation, through an imagination of paradise which invoked all of the senses. I tried to write a sermon that was consistent with the form of the text, in which God is heavily anthropomorphized. A God who would walk in the garden in the cool of the day and go looking for Adam would clearly enjoy a gin and tonic before his evening stroll! Of course, much is left out: this second creation story in Genesis is very long, but the biblical text is alluded to throughout. The allusions are not there to explain the text, however, so much as to enable the hearer to experience it.

The mood changes as the sermon progresses, from a deliberately playful reflection on creation, and the idea of God bringing species to Adam in order to name them, to the very serious issue of the cross. Creation and salvation are closely linked biblical themes, so that through this change of mood the sermon can look forward, with hope, to the far future: to another garden, and the story of salvation that will be told there.

The sermon is more than an exercise in imagination. It is also a plot, and an emotional journey. First of all, the scene is painted; in some detail, since this is after all a creation story. Next, we ask, ‘What is it that disturbs the untroubled waters of your opening scene?’ The plot that unfolds employs all the elements of the ‘Lowry loop’(discussed in, for instance, The Renewed Homiletic9 as well as in The Homiletic Plot itself10): creating the itch, exploring the discrepancy, disclosing the clue to a resolution, applying the gospel, anticipating the consequences.

Lowry’s ‘itch’ is created with the phrase, ‘But you take a big risk, with all this creating.’ The discrepancy is explored as we go on: ‘He knows, of course, before he even finds them, what it is that they have done.’ The clue to a resolution begins, ‘He knows too that there will continue to be good, as well as bad’; and the ‘gospel is applied’ as we hear that, ‘He knows that something will have to be done.’ Finally, the (unexpected) consequences are anticipated as the scene closes: ‘The garden is terribly quiet now.’

Lowry’s structure describes the way a plot works. It is dynamic: the story and the emotions it evokes progress. You don’t need to be Usain Bolt or Mo Farah in order to run, you just need a pair of trainers. And you don’t need to be J. K. Rowling or Ernest Hemingway in order to tell stories. But it helps to think about how plots and stories work. And if a plot isn’t working and making progress, the Lowry loop can be quite useful in understanding what’s going wrong!

You might not want your congregation to imagine God with a gin and tonic in his hand! You might want to say that the sermon misses the main theme of the passage, whatever you consider that main theme to be. But sometimes, a concentration on the ‘main theme’ can blind us to some of the subsidiary and perhaps playful aspects of Scripture. There is no summing up of the main points of the sermon, no concluding exhortations to the congregation for the coming week, no moral lesson to be extracted and applied. But the hearers’ empathy and emotions might have been engaged by the flow of the narrative, and stirred by the thought of God letting go after his work of creation, or grieving over it in this way. Thus, perhaps, they might come to know him a little better.

Notes

5. Kate Bruce, 2015, Igniting the Heart: Preaching and Imagination, London: SCM Press, p. 36.

6. Bruce, Igniting the Heart, p. 164.

7. Thomas G. Long, in David Day Jeff Astley and Leslie J. Francis (eds), 2005, A Reader on Preaching: Making Connections, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, p. 39.

8. David J. Schlafer, 2004, Playing with Fire: Preaching Work as Kindling Art; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cowley Publications.

9. O. Wesley Allen Jr (ed.), 2010, The Renewed Homiletic, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, ch. 4.

10. Eugene E. Lowry, 2001, The Homiletic Plot, expanded edition: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form, Lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Cool of the Day: Preaching with Imagination and Plot
• 2 Legion: Hearing Voices
• 3 The Certain Lawyer: Preaching the Familiar
• 4 Eli Seeing Clearly: Inhabiting a Character
• 5 Pictures of Heaven: Preaching Possibilities
• 6 Peter and Jesus: Weaving a Background Thread
• 7 Having Faith: Preaching a Slide-show
• 8 A Certain Ship: Playing with an Image
• 9 Weeding: Ways of Seeing
• 10 Advent Stars: Preaching from Shared Experience
• 11 Getting Ugly: Preaching the Peculiar
• 12 Don’t Do It, Lord: Preaching a Prayer
• 13 Luke’s Editor: Preaching Fiction
• 14 The Wife of Noble Character: Scene-shifting
• 15 Yearnings: Listening for the Unheard Voice
• 16 Great Gable Remembrance: Finding the General in the Particular
• 17 Resurrection Story: Preaching Poetry
• 18 Sarah Laughs: Panning Back
• 19 Speaking in Tongues: Getting in on the Action
• 20 Pictures at an Exhibition: Inventing a Narrative
• 21 Naboth’s Vineyard: Preaching the Past into the Present
• 22 Paul’s Sound-bite: Preaching St Paul
• 23 Five Husbands: Preaching Painful Stories
• 24 Grasping Rainbows: Preaching Questions
• 25 Lord of the Dance: Preaching the Gospel More Than the Passage
• 26 Party Spirit: Preaching a Proposition
• 27 In the Beginning: Avoiding an Explanation
• 28 A Christmas Journey: Preaching on the Move
• Afterword
• Further Reading
• Copyright