Making a Scene in the Pulpit

Vivid Preaching for Visual Listeners

Alyce M. McKenzie

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780664261566
• eBook ISBN: 9781611648966
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

How can preachers ensure that their sermons continue to engage listeners in a world defined by visual media and the short, segmented delivery of information? Alyce McKenzie harnesses the element of drama and the human fascination with scenes to offer ministers a modern means of sermon development and delivery.

McKenzie's core strategy is to invite listeners into scenes—whether from Scripture or contemporary life—and, once they are there, to point them toward the larger story of God's relationship with humankind. Creating such scenes unifies the whole process of preaching, she says, from the preacher's daily life observations to interpretation of scenes from Scripture, to sermon shaping, sequencing, and delivery. The process culminates in a specific understanding of the purpose of the sermon: to send listeners out into the scenes they'll play in their lives for the next week, equipped to act out their parts in ways that are kinder, more just, and more courageous than last week.

Chapter One

Scene Is the New Story

The house lights dim. The audience stops rustling candy wrappers. The curtains open. There is the Grinch in a Santa hat, standing by a mantle hung with stockings, loading a family’s Christmas gifts into a sack. A little girl in footie pajamas enters the room. We are about to be drawn into a scene.

The defendant is being escorted by the police from courthouse to jail. An angry crowd is gathering, trying to block their way. Somebody throws a rock. That’s all it takes. We are about to be drawn into a scene.

“No one wants her in this town. She doesn’t belong here,” the women were saying as she stepped in line behind them at the post office. As soon as they spotted her, their faces flushed and they offered a syrupy greeting. We are about to be drawn into a scene.

He sends both of his wives, his two maids, and his eleven children across the Jabbok River and is now alone, by the river, in the dark, dreading the encounter with his brother that will occur the next day. Out of nowhere, a man hurtles toward him and grabs him in a death hold. The struggle that will last all night begins. This is Genesis 32:22–32, and we are about to be drawn into a scene.

Scenes. They are everywhere: in our daytime thoughts and nighttime dreams, in plays, books, contemporary and historical experiences, and in the Bible. In a stage play or film, a scene is a unit of story or a story event within a larger story; it is “an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space” that has a significant impact on a character’s life.¹ I’ve shortened the definition to this: “the action that takes place in one physical setting in more or less continuous time.” A scene has a setting, a plot, characters, and a degree of conflict. In the hands of a skilled novelist, playwright, or preacher, it has one theme—not three, not five, but one.

Here is the scene that depicts how I first came to be fascinated with scenes. The class was held on the top floor of Stuart Hall at Princeton Theological Seminary. You know Stuart Hall even if you’ve never been in Stuart Hall: dark red stone exterior, high ceilings, dark paneling, the smell of layers of lemon oil consistently applied since 1876. It was the fall of 1990. I trudged up the stairs, twelve-pound “portable” computer in hand. I was late for class, a graduate seminar in the practical theology PhD program on the subject of Old Testament Hermeneutics, co-taught by professors Thomas G. Long and Patrick D. Miller. It was a bad day to be late. It was the day we were to sign up for our thirty-page papers on interpreting a genre of Old Testament literature for contemporary life. It was to be due in three weeks. By the time the clipboard came to me, someone had already nabbed the patriarchal narratives. Someone had purloined the psalms. Someone had appropriated the apocalyptic passages. Someone had even lapped up the legal codes. This left one lone, unclaimed genre: proverbial wisdom. Of course! This was a group of budding practical theologians; what use did they have for proverbial wisdom? A fellow student, whom, up until that point, I had regarded as a friend, leaned over and said, “Good luck getting a sermon out of a one-liner, McKenzie!”

After class I headed directly to the seminary library. What I discovered there made my situation seem much brighter. I discovered that proverbs had the shortest bibliography of all the genres! I checked out an armful of books and headed for home. That evening, after I put my children to bed, I opened the Bible to the book of Proverbs. I couldn’t help but remember a witticism by William H. Willimon, who had remarked more than once in oral presentations that “reading the book of Proverbs is like taking a long road trip with your mom.” With a long suffering sigh, I began to read.

Can fire be carried in the bosom

without burning one’s clothes?

6:27

There is a way that seems right to a person,

but its end is the way to death.

14:12

It is not good to eat much honey,

or to seek honor on top of honor.

25:27

Like a city breached, without walls,

is one who lacks self-control.

26:28

The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold,

so a person is tested by being praised.

27:21

The fear of others lays a snare,

but one who trusts in the LORD is secure.

29:25

At breakfast the next morning, I read a couple of proverbs to my then seven-year-old daughter, Rebecca. My second grader was clearly underwhelmed: “That’s just what everybody already knows, only in words you can picture.”

The sages responsible for coining and collating the book of Proverbs in the years following the Israelites’ exile from Babylon certainly did not follow the advice, “Don’t make a scene!” They trained their laser wisdom vision on multiple scenes in daily life around and within them and crafted their observations into vivid proverbs to guide the young and foolish and to remind the older and wiser. Centuries later, Jesus took a page out of the sages’ playbook and preached, not only in short sayings, but also in parables, a genre that is a longer narrative cousin to the proverb. The sages’ (including Jesus) homiletical example became the inspiration for my career-long passion for scenes.

The Rise of Story

Early Christian preachers imitated the homiletic of Jesus and the sages, preaching in scenic proverbs and parables, challenging listeners to discern how to apply them to situations in their daily lives. But when the preaching of the gospel entered the mission field of the Greco-Roman world, the scenes—which drew you in, changed you, and sent you out to play your part on the world stage—suffered a demotion. Their new role was to serve as anecdotes that illustrated the sermon’s conceptual points.

The expectations of non-Jewish audiences were shaped by several centuries of rhetorical training, the art of persuasive public address, perfected by Greek and Roman teachers. They drummed into their young students’ heads that speeches should teach, delight, and persuade.² Unfortunately, they divided reason from imagination, relegating the former to teaching and persuading and the latter to delighting. It was the function of the content, the logical argument, to teach and persuade. It was the function of style, word choices, and flourishes of delivery, to delight. Metaphor and imagery were seen as ornamental, as sugar sprinkled on ideas to make the medicine go down. This “great divide” between reason and imagination has influenced centuries of preachers to separate images, stories, scenes, and metaphors from ideas, concepts, and lines of thought.³

For the first several centuries, the purpose of Christian preaching, modeled after the rhetorical models of the Greeks and Romans, was persuasion. As the centuries rolled on, it morphed to explanation, as propositional preaching came to the fore. Such preaching took a couple of different forms. One that arose in the late medieval period was known as the “university sermon,” in which the preacher takes a central theme and divides it into three parts with explanations of each. Yet another was the Puritan Plain style sermon, which has its roots in earlier rabbinic strategies of exegesis/application. The preacher begins by offering background on the ancient text, then draws from it several doctrinal points, finally applying them to the contemporary congregation. The “three points and a poem” became the sermonic form of choice, with some notable exceptions, until the fourth quarter of the twentieth century. It is a time-honored form, still viable today.⁴ The sermon, “Finding Faith amid Your Fears,” in chapter 5 is a two-point deductive sermon that opens with a scene.

In the early 1970s, a movement arose that came to be called “the New Homiletic”; it focused on narrative and plot rather than propositions in preaching. It became the dominant approach to preaching from the mid-1970s to the early twenty-first century. It based its reliance on narrative on theological and biblical grounds; God’s interactions with humankind as reflected in Scripture have an interactive narrative shape. Texts are not reducible to propositions but are language events that seek to impact the existential experience of readers.⁵ So much for a theological, biblical rationale for narrative. Now all that was needed was an anthropological one. And in 1971, Stephen Crites, religion and philosophy professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, provided it in an influential article titled “The Narrative Quality of Experience.” In it, he claimed that “The formal quality of experience through time is inherently narrative.”⁶ He argued that human beings experience and process life in a narrative shape, attempting to craft a coherent, continuous plot out of the disjointed scenarios of daily life. His article contributed to the ongoing work of theologians, philosophers, ethicists, and biblical interpreters who believed that narrative was more than a faddish interest in storytelling. Rather, it was central to theological interpretation, ethical reflection, and biblical hermeneutics.

As Crites was writing his article in the early 1970s, I was sitting in church in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, the small town on the Susquehanna River where I grew up. I was listening to three-point sermons, which, though they had their moments, often left me wondering, “When life is so interesting, why is preaching so boring?” Fred Craddock, a young New Testament scholar and preacher, was wondering the same thing. In 1971, he self-published a critique of modernist, propositional preaching with a title tailor made for the recalcitrant, authority-averse 1970s: As One without Authority.⁷ His book described traditional preaching as the preacher going on the whitewater rafting trip of biblical exegesis for the sermon and bringing the congregation back a keychain. He advised preachers to take the congregation along on the trip. He advocated preaching that encouraged listeners to be active participants rather than passive recipients, nodding in intellectual assent, what he called “javelin catchers” for the preacher’s ideas. Craddock instigated a move away from propositional, didactic, authoritarian sermons toward sermons with plots. The narrative preaching that dominated homiletics from 1971 to 2000 was shaped by the dynamics of plot, moving from the bad news of how the human condition is to the good news of how it could be, by God’s grace.⁸ Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, other preachers and teachers of preaching joined in Craddock’s critique, offering their own versions of the whitewater rafting trip. Eugene Lowry’s “Lowry Loop” followed the narrative flow of Aristotle’s Poetics: from equilibrium, to disequilibrium, to resolution and transformation.⁹ Henry Mitchell’s classic Black Preaching recommended that the preacher “start low, strike fire, end high,¹⁰ His work, and that of Frank Thomas in They Like to Never Quit Praisin’ God, sought to offer the genius of African American preaching to preachers of all ethnicities. Says Thomas, “The nature and purpose of African American preaching is to help people experience the assurance of grace (the good news) that is the gospel of Jesus the Christ.”¹¹

David Buttrick’s “moves” mapped out a line of thought, carefully segmented and sequenced to arrive at a liberating destination.¹² Paul Scott Wilson’s Four Pages of the Sermon moved from trouble in the text to trouble in the world to good news in the text to good news in the world. Patricia Wilson-Kastner, in her book, Imagery for Preaching, offered Ignatian meditation as the form of the sermon plot. Guided by it, the preacher and people enter into the biblical story with an intention, ask for God’s grace, experience the story, and gives thanks for the resulting insight. All these sermon forms are variations on the plot of complication-resolution or problem-resolution. They are microcosms of the overarching Salvation Plot of creation, fall, redemption, and recreation.

Not everybody got on board the narrative train as it moved out of the homiletical station. Richard Lischer, in an essay in 1984, “The Limits of Story,” questioned the privileging of narrative as the most appropriate rhetorical mode for the discovery of the self and the experience of God.¹³ He pointed out that there are expanses of both Scripture and human experience that are not narrative in shape, and that stories need interpretation. In an era when many people are biblically illiterate, he asked, why jettison the teaching function of preaching in favor of a story that supposedly speaks for itself? He was suspicious of the complication-resolution plots of the New Homiletic, quoting literary critic Hugh Kenner, who called plot “a broom which sweeps everything in the same direction.”¹⁴ Finally, he noted that “stories can provide a desperately needed sense of order or they may arrogantly impose order on the disorder and anarchy of life as it is.”¹⁵ A more recent criticism of narrative preaching comes from theologian Francesca Aran Murphy in her book God Is Not a Story: Realism Revisited. She warns that narrative theology runs a danger of shrinking God to the confines of an anthropological appetite.¹⁶

The Erosion of Story

We have a lot to thank the New Homiletic for: its respect for the listener, its understanding of the sermon as dialogue, not monologue, and its view...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Scene Is the New Story
• 2. The Preacher as Scene Maker
• 3. Making a Scene in Scripture
• 4. Making a Scene in the Sermon
• 5. Scenic Sermons
• Appendix A: An Interview with a Scenic Sermon
• Appendix B: Biblical Exegesis for a Scenic Sermon
• Notes
• Bibliography
• For Further Reading
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Excerpt from Worship for the Whole People of God, by Ruth C. Duck