The Renewed Homiletic

O. Wesley Allen

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780800696566
• eBook ISBN: 9781451415322
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

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Storytelling Renewed

Charles L. Rice

School Days

In the late 1950s, the earliest theological influence on my fledgling preaching came from Karl Barth, by way of a young professor at Baylor who had spent a sabbatical with Barth. Dr. David Mueller came back from Europe to tell us that preaching was about the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. As a result, I treated my little country church—not far from George W. Bush’s ranch in the hill country of Texas—to a yearlong exposition, verse by dogged verse, of the epistle to the Romans. In the early ’60s, while at the seminary in Louisville, I majored in New Testament and stuck pretty much to Barth’s homiletic.

America changed in the 1960s, no less for preachers than for everyone else. The place of the church in society, the relevance of religion to the wrenching events of the day, the authority of leaders—none of that could be taken for granted. Many—both inside and outside the churches, and even in the seminaries—were not so sure that the preacher was any longer a player to be taken seriously. One semester in the late ’60s, at Union Theological Seminary in New York, Edmund Steimle—distinguished professor of homiletics and a giant among preachers—had no students. Students were mounting the barricades, just as the church and its theologians were seeking relevance, if not validation, in relation to the issues and crusades of the day. It was in this period that courses in preaching and books on homiletics began to choose titles that connected preaching to other fields and to pressing issues of the day.

By 1970, when my first book was published and I began teaching at Drew, I had been preaching for a dozen years as a student pastor in Texas and Kentucky. The year in New York (studying with Steimle at Union), followed by doctoral study at Duke (where I taught the 8 A.M. preaching labs for four years!) had alerted me to the changing status of preaching. The image of the preacher in my grandparents’ church, and in those country charges of mine—the awesome man opening the big book, putting his finger on the text, and speaking to us in tones befitting the Word of God—seemed no longer quite viable.

That first book, the last in “The Preacher’s Paperback Library” series, was one of those and books: Interpretation and Imagination: The Preacher and Contemporary Literature. My career as a preacher and teacher of preachers has unfolded along the lines of those beginnings—as a dialogue with culture, as self-expressive communication, and as storytelling.

Preaching in Dialogue with Culture. Professor Steimle, in his course on doctrinal preaching, assigned sermons on four doctrines for the fall semester in 1963. We were to think theologically about each doctrine—in my case, the priesthood of all believers, grace, the second coming of Christ, and the last judgment—and then we were to speak as nontheologically as possible. While working on that, I was in a course with Roger Shinn, “Christian Faith and Existentialist Literature.” A dialogue began in me, between William Faulkner and the Revelation of John of Patmos. That led to Saul Bellow, the movies, and an obscure poem about the streets of New York. In the beginning, there may have been an undue dependence upon the popular arts for something relevant or interesting to say in the pulpit. But with the help of Tillich’s theology of culture, the work of Frederick Buechner and Amos Wilder, and especially the biblical reorientation provided by Fred Craddock, the dialogue with culture became more faithful. I began to see more clearly the broader meaning of Steimle’s dictum in his November 1966 James Gray lectures at Duke University: “The sermon that starts in the Bible and stays in the Bible is not biblical.” Preaching is always, by its very nature, in dialogue with culture.

Preaching as Self-Expression. While in my first semester at Drew Theological School as a young scholar, Steimle asked me to give a paper at the Academy of Homiletics meeting in Princeton. I could hardly have been more nervous. We met in an elegant room where Dr. Steimle sat on one side of the fireplace and Professor Donald McLeod on the other, both in wingback chairs, as I stood with my back to the fire! I felt out of my league. But some preppy clothes from Brooks Brothers helped me look the part of a scholar, and an incident in my very first class provided me with material on which to reflect for the lecture.

The incident was this: in that first class at Drew I had heard a polished, biblical sermon that modeled sound preaching techniques of the day, but it seemed to have had little effect on the hearers. Right afterward, I heard a less obviously scriptural, but highly confessional, deeply human homily—given by my first female student. It not only connected well with the coming season of Advent, it also connected with the class on that dark November day. I used this incident to help me formulate my thinking about the expressive aspect called for in preaching.¹

Joseph Sittler became the theologian for this expressive aspect of my work. He asserts, “Preaching is not merely something a preacher does; it is a function of the preacher’s whole existence concentrated at the point of declaration and interpretation. The act of preaching is organic to the placement of the person (man himself) [sic] as believer, doubter, sinner, aspirer …”² I would eventually connect this concern for self-expression in the pulpit with ecclesiology and an understanding of liturgy and priesthood in my 1991 book The Embodied Word.³

Preaching as Story. In 1980, Steimle, Morris Niedenthal, and I published Preaching the Story to show the organic relation of preaching to the stories of Scripture, the preacher, the congregation and its liturgy, and the culture. That book presupposes that the Bible itself is best understood as an unfolding, overarching story comprising many diverse stories. Imagination is essential to exegesis and proclamation; one hears most clearly, most deeply, when listening with the ears of a wondering child. Preaching depends profoundly on the right brain, as in storytelling. We can trust the story—as Jesus so obviously did in his parables—to discover and tease out the ways of God. The story is not afraid of irony, contradiction, ambiguity, or playfulness. The arena of the story is this world, while its agenda reaches beyond the obvious and conventional. A good story always has the possibility of telling more than first meets the ear, and there lies the essential, ironic connection between the earthy, recognizably human story and the Word made flesh.

Preaching as Liturgy. A fourth theme that emerged halfway through my career is preaching as liturgy. It seems important to put it that way, not preaching and liturgy. The Word of God occurs as an event in time, and preaching is one movement integral to the whole. Preaching is impossible outside the people’s work, illumined and empowered by the liturgical assembly, its language, and action.

Vatican II and the subsequent new books of worship in the various denominations reshaped and enriched the liturgical context of preaching. The importance of this became clear to me through my experience as a teacher—students exhibited the disconnect between sermon and liturgy—and through a month’s stay at Taizé as part of a 1984 sabbatical. Looking for a place where the Word was spoken at the table, I joined an early Thursday morning Eucharist at the parish nearest Drew. This became the center of my spiritual life and the model for my teaching, leading to a new course at the Theological School, “The Church at Worship”, that comprised church music, liturgy, and preaching, and to the publication of The Embodied Word. That book calls for preaching at the table with the baptistery clearly in view.

Forty Years Later

For forty years now the Academy of Homiletics has been meeting in early Advent, working on preaching in relation to exegesis, hermeneutics, pedagogy, social issues, worship, theology, the arts, ecclesiology, and so on. The context of that work has been a constantly and rapidly changing culture, to which homiletics—like a canary in a volatile mine—has been particularly sensitive. It would be hard to come up with a field of study that by its very nature is so responsive to cultural change. For many semesters at Drew I taught a course called “Contemporary Preaching,” an embarrassingly redundant title coming from a preacher who cannot watch the news, go to a movie, or read the paper without Sunday morning coming into view.

So, from one preacher’s point of view, what shifts have we seen—some seismic, some slow and subtle but relentless—that reshape our homiletic? Forty years have brought changes not only to this vast and diverse country, but new links being forged every day between the economies, cultures, and religions of the world. Four categories, which inevitably overlap, provide a means of getting at so large a topic.

American Culture. For most people, especially those looking on from the outside, the tendency of American culture is toward wealth, consuming, entertainment, technology, personal—especially sexual—freedom, military power, diversity, and religiosity. As the largest transfer of wealth in the history of humankind is now occurring—the baby boomers beginning to pass their wealth on to their progeny, some thirty trillion dollars—the gap widens between haves and have-nots. The technological revolution in communication widens the distance between generations, the sexual revolution splits denominations, and religion coupled with politics polarizes the nation as it paralyzes politics. Electronic communication—from television to the Internet—has diminished interest in association (whether in bowling leagues or congregations), exacerbating historic American individualism. As the screen replaces the book, and Hollywood’s production neither displays nor demands poetic, ironic engagement, we see the decline of the active imagination. The implications of this for the spoken word in general and for the possibilities of preaching remain to be seen.

American Religion. Americans remain—certainly in comparison to the industrialized world—very religious. But, increasingly, this does not mean attachment to a denomination or to a congregation. Many prefer “spirituality”—vaporized religion, Flannery O’Connor called it—to the idea of practicing a particular religion. The historical roots of Christianity have been loosened, and the tendency is toward a more free-floating religiosity, sometimes institutionalized in the so-called megachurch. There is much less commonality of religious practice than half a century ago. As seen in Ken Burns’s marathon documentary The War, on that Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, just about everyone was getting ready to go to Sunday school. President Roosevelt prayed with the nation as if they were all in church together. As late as the 1950s most of us read from the King James Bible in church and Sunday school. Today’s preacher cannot assume—even in the gathered congregation on Sunday morning—common religious experience, attachment to a denomination or even to historic Christianity, or shared knowledge of or consent to the Bible.

American Theology. Two significant theological developments stand out. First, there is the resurgence of fundamentalism. Judaism and Islam are affected, and in American Christianity the tight theological system and closed mind of fundamentalism is widespread and found across denominations. Second, we see the decline of the authoritative theological voice as it is replaced by popular theology. This skepticism of authority, grounded in relativism and modern suspicion, questions all claims to possess and speak the truth. This would be somewhat analogous to the phenomenal rise of YouTube and other forms of electronic communication focused on personal experience and opinion rather than on any claim to academic authority or intellectual credentials. The convinced zealot quoting Scripture or the relativistic cynic can be a formidable auditor, not to be swayed by tradition, theologians, or even appeals to reason or human experience.

American Worship. There has been a considerable shift in the idea of church in America. Yngve Brilioth, a historian of preaching, once said that if there is anything we can say for sure about liturgy in America it is that there are no “liturgical fetters.”⁴ Recent experience bears that out. In music, architecture, liturgical symbols and forms, styles of preaching, churchly manners—anything goes. In some places the preacher cannot be sure that there will be a pulpit in the church! Large, popular churches avoid historic liturgical symbols, intent upon making the congregation comfortable and minimizing the unfamiliar or challenging.

Vatican II brought liturgical reform to most mainline denominations, and the Eucharist occupies a larger place in many congregations, but the integration of Word and sacrament remains incomplete. It may be fair to say that in the larger churches an entrepreneurial spirit—the need to fill the pews and subscribe a budget to support sound and light, multiple programs, and corporate-like staffs—can shape both liturgy and preaching.

Ecclesiology and liturgical theology continue to be marginalized, their pertinence to the present situation notwithstanding. For my own approach to preaching—formed in the ’60s—these four cultural shifts raise questions as to the content, form, and style of preaching today. In some cases, a homiletical approach long in the making would seem to meet today’s situation. Other aspects of a dialogical, self-expressive, storytelling homiletic may call for critique and renovation.

Renovation

I find myself surprisingly close to where I started, in fact, to a gospel hymn that my Baptist grandmother liked to sing in her kitchen:

Tell me the story of Jesus,

write on my heart every word.

Tell me the story most precious,

sweetest that ever was heard.

To be more postmodern, we might change the last line, “Sweetest that ever I’ve heard.” Be that as it may, what we hope for is to keep on telling this story, to ourselves and others, in such a way that it comes alive in our community, gathering weekly to hear it, living daily in it, alive to each other and to God.

Every month or so my partner and I drive down to hear the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. We have had the same seats, next to an older couple, for several years. They seem to enjoy the music, most of which they have heard before. It happened again this year. The woman was wearing her opening-night red dress and a flower in her hair. After they were settled, before opening her program, she looked all around as the orchestra tuned up and Verizon Hall filled. With unabashed excitement she said to her husband, “Oh, isn’t this wonderful! Just look at these seats!” To which he patiently replied, “You sit here every year.” It is something like what happened to that woman in the red dress that every preacher must hope and pray for.

Our house in the Delaware River Valley was built by German farmers two hundred years ago. One carpenter helping us with restoration said, “We should stop this project, tear this house down, cut every timber and board in two, and build two houses.” It is that kind of house: solid, showing the marks of human labor and care, with a lot of living seeping from plaster walls and squeaky floors. It is a good, and challenging, place to live. In the same way, looking back over forty years of preac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• About the DVD
• Introduction: The Pillars of the New Homiletic
• 1. Storytelling Renewed
• 2. Inductive Preaching Renewed
• 3. Celebration Renewed
• 4. Narrative Renewed
• 5. Homiletic Renewed
• Afterword: Mobile, Episodic, Intentional
• Notes