Proclaiming the Living Word: A Handbook for Preachers

A Handbook for Preachers

Gordon W. Lathrop

• Publisher: Augsburg Fortress
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781506447896
• eBook ISBN: 9781506447902
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In this handbook, author Gordon Lathrop guides preachers as they think about the central matters and purposes of preaching and engage in preparation for this important task. By providing wise encouragement and concrete tools for ministry, this book will equip preachers for faithful preaching in their assemblies

II

Preparing to preach

O mortal, eat what is offered to you, eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.

Ezekiel 3:1

Study, attention, and imagination as tools

For all of the disciplined communal character of preaching, we come now again to the pastor’s desk and the preacher’s individual work. Preaching does require such work. I have thought that this preparatory work of the preacher might be summed up as “study, attention, and imagination.” Let me be clearer.

A preacher begins to prepare, of course, by reading the texts appointed in the lectionary for the Sunday or festival liturgy as part of which the sermon will occur. First, he or she simply reads them, paying attention. I like to do this at least a week before the event itself. I begin with the gospel text, then turn to the other texts, on the grounds that the gospel always provides the symbolic center for what the preacher must finally do in preaching. But I carefully read the other texts as well, attending especially to their images and their patterns of failure yet promise, death yet life. I make a simple outline of each text, noting important phrases and verbal images. In this initial reading it is important not to skip any part that is puzzling or hard, any part that remains unsolved in a first reading—what some people call an aporia, a surprising contradiction or paradox in the text. As these readings work in the memory of the preacher in this coming week, it may very well be that the difficult and unsolved parts give the greatest gifts in the end.

In any case, study begins with simply and carefully reading the texts. The intention here is to make these readings available to the preacher’s memory as she or he goes about ordinary life and the ordinary work of ministry in the coming week, trusting that possibilities for preaching will arise from the juxtaposition of the texts with events in life and ministry.

On a subsequent day, sitting at a desk or in a good place for reading, this study can continue and deepen. If the preacher knows the biblical languages, she or he can read the texts now in the Greek and Hebrew or Aramaic. The rewards of this practice are manifold. One gift is the encounter with the rich vocabulary of the texts, a vocabulary depth not always caught by the English translation. Another gift is simply that such reading will, for most people, need to be slower and more attentive than reading in English. Such slower reading may bring along a necessary distancing from the texts, a new encounter with their strangeness and their surprises. Biblical stories or sayings are sometimes known too well, domesticated, harmonized, remembered in a children’s Bible version. Reading slowly in the original language can help reveal again the particularity—even the difficulty—of the actual text. This latter possibility may also be at least partly available to people who have no capability in the biblical languages if they read the texts in another language that they do know. That, too, may enable reading slowly. Yet another exercise might be to read the texts in several different reliable English translations.

Then the study needs to go on, perhaps on yet another day or perhaps right then. One next step should be to read the context of each text in the biblical book in which it appears. Ongoing, regular reading by the preacher, part of his or her ordinary study not directly related to immediate sermon preparation, should have helped him or her know the characteristics of each of the gospels, something about Paul’s work, and a basic awareness of the prophets, the Psalms and the wisdom literature, and the structure and sources of the history books and the Torah. Now this knowledge will help the preacher think about the context of the lectionary’s texts. The point is not that the sermon will be public Bible study but that Christian proclamation must use the texts honestly and maturely. One helpful practice might be to carefully read the whole of one of the synoptic gospels at the outset of the lectionary year when that gospel figures largely—and to regularly read the whole of the Gospel according to John every year.

Then a preacher will be helped by knowing the intertextual references used in the day’s texts: What passages from the Old Testament are being quoted or alluded to in the gospel or in Paul? How does the gospel pericope of the day differ from the ways in which the other gospels use the same event or the same discourse? Those differences can again help the preacher to attend to this gospel text. Assistance in finding these intertextual references is available. A synopsis of the four gospels will make the parallel passages clear. Footnotes or marginal notes in some study Bibles will do the same. Those study Bibles may also help with the Old Testament sources that the Christian writings have used. If the preacher reads the New Testament in Greek, the Nestle-Aland edition has splendid marginal notes that make the gospel parallels and almost all of the intertextual references clear—another gift that comes from reading the Greek—and the boldface type indicates actual Old Testament quotations. Checking words in a comprehensive lexicon can also lead to other passages where the same word or sequence of words occurs.

This study of intertextuality is important because a knowledge of the rebirth or reuse of Old Testament imagery for the purposes of the gospel book or of other New Testament writings is one of the great sources for preachers who wish to join the classic Christian use of the scriptures in their proclamation. How does the New Testament writer use the old scriptures to preach Christ? Then, awareness of the particular witness of one gospel book as compared with the others provides another such source. Perhaps the most important question for the preacher will be this: How does this gospel writer use this particular passage to point toward the cross and resurrection of Jesus at the end of the gospel book and toward the continued presence of the Risen One in the assembly of the church now?

An important next step in study will be careful consideration of the images used in this set of texts. Sources for this study include the yearly Augsburg Fortress online publication Sundays and Seasons, with its repeated section “Images in the Readings,” and the 2002 Fortress Press book, Treasures Old and New: Images in the Lectionary (see “Further reading for the preacher” on page 77), with its lectionary-keyed indexes. It may very well be that one or more of the images alive in these texts will provide the preacher the best way to speak of our need and God’s mercy in Christ on this Sunday, to articulate the life-giving presence of Christ toward which the gospel text in juxtaposition to both of the other readings points.

My God, my God, thou art a direct God, . . . that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest. But thou art also . . . a figurative, a metaphorical God too: a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions . . . ; thou art the dove that flies.

John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions ^[11]

Only then will it be time for the preacher to turn to the commentaries. Perhaps she or he has a one-volume commentary that has been especially reliable. Perhaps, over the years, a little library of brilliant commentaries from different series has been accumulated: Raymond Brown or C. H. Dodd on John, for example, or Adela Y. Collins on Mark, or Walter Brueggemann on Isaiah. Such a discriminating collection is a wise idea. In any case, reading in the commentaries can deepen what the preacher has found already, propose ideas that have not yet been considered, and begin to propose some solutions for the parts of the texts that remain a puzzle, while possibly deepening the puzzle elsewhere.

Two other matters belong to preparatory study. First, the preacher should think about the ways these texts will echo within this particular liturgy. Help can be found in the other proper texts of the day: the prayer of the day and the other short prayers; the psalm; the hymns that will be used, including especially the hymn of the day; the gospel acclamation; the proper preface; the particular thanksgiving at the table that will be used; and the commemorations that will occur in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Thinking about preaching
• Preparing to preach
• Conclusion
• End notes
• Further reading for the preacher