Preaching the Headlines

Possibilities and Pitfalls

Lisa L. Thompson

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506453866
• eBook ISBN: 9781506453873
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Preachers often feel stuck when met with quickly shifting and dense media topics that flood the headlines. If and when they determine it is appropriate to address issues that arise in the news cycle, they are often at a loss for how to speak about them from the pulpit. When preachers understand that a responsibility to sustain life is embedded in the purposes of preaching, they discover greater fluidity between the everyday world, the biblical text, and preaching itself. Preaching the Headlines reframes preaching as an ongoing conversation between the modern world and the world of the Bible, exploring where the divides between the two may be less rigid than we often acknowledge. The preacher uses what they know about life as a bridge to the text, while life in the text provides the bridge back to faith in the contemporary world.

The goal of the book is to help preachers do theological reflection on the everyday world as an integral part of sermon development. The process offered in this book is not a substitute for basic methods of sermon development nor a model of exegesis for preaching. Preachers will use this process as a supplement alongside their current method of sermon preparation. Before the preacher can ever translate the meaning embedded in the headlines, they have to learn more about the topics they seek to preach about. They do this by digging behind the headlines and expanding their own resources beyond theological traditions alone. This work is done in order to think earnestly about how faith might spur transformative action in our world for more just ways of living together.

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Straight, No Chasers

Guiding Assumptions

Faith is not neutral. Preaching is a practice of faith. Neutrality in preaching is not attainable. These statements are flat-footed, I know, but this point of clarity is one of the most important to have moving forward. Often people contest attending to the social issues that impact our lives based on appeals to neutrality, not being political, or not wishing to offend. Such claims are contradictory in and of themselves. People of faith affirm values, name what seems most meaningful, and do so in the midst of ample alternative views. We take a position or have an opinion about whatever we most believe. Those opinions have implications, for better or worse, whether they are implied or explicit.

People often appeal to false neutrality when they cannot reconcile or find a reasonable bridge between faith and what they have heard. This irreconcilability brings us to one of the greatest pitfalls when attempting to lay bare all of life in speaking with people of faith. Preaching goes awry and misses the mark either by not naming what is at stake in the claims being made or by not naming why people of faith should be concerned based on the values they claim. Often leaders themselves do not know how to create better bridges between a tradition and what appears to matter most in the world. This inability may be due to a tradition that seems at odds with the concerns of life on the ground or that may perceive the world that emerges from Scripture and today’s world as too far apart.

Without thoughtful, faith-informed insight, preaching that tries to engage the issues of the day risks becoming little more than a political stump speech, leaving many listeners to ask, “Was that a sermon?” But that to which we generally exclaim, “Yes! That’s a sermon!” also may be in jeopardy. Unless a message candidly addresses life on the ground and moves to the collective concerns of life together, it succumbs to being an insular message hovering in the clouds. These messages never attend to faith as a dynamic and significant influence on the way we live and operate in the world.

One must be in conversation with the values that matter to people of faith when seeking their ethical and responsible involvement in what seems to matter most on the ground. Doing so with integrity goes beyond merely addressing political or social issues with general scriptural principles that distinguish right from wrong or proof-texting claims with Scripture. It calls for preachers to mine Scripture and tradition deeply and thoroughly in order to build relevant and meaningful bridges between Christian faith and life on the ground while remembering that faith itself is not bound to a text and tradition is not static. Faith is dynamic and takes on its lively textures in our lives in ways that supersede any texts, creeds, and doctrines—even as these things spur our ability to remember the stimulus for belief.

Guided Conversations

“Name as many faith words as you can. Call them out,” she said. There were long pauses as the group struggled to answer, only mustering out a few words. “What stuff do you talk about at church?” she prodded. The momentum was slow going, but someone finally said, “Jesus!” Another person rang out, “Grace.” Eventually, one person’s response would spur someone else’s response. By the end, we had filled two full-sized whiteboards with words: Hope. Communion. Discipleship. Revelation. Creation. God. Sex. War. Crucifixion. Food. Bodies. Joy. Peace. Love. Wrath. Judgment. Forgiveness. Prayer. Salvation. Repentance. Floods. Prophets. Atonement. And so on.

She then recounted a story from an immersion course she taught at the Mexico–US border. The details of the story are not as important as what came next. She asked each participant to survey their collection of words and to choose five, narrow that list to two, and then choose only one to use in a sentence about the story they had just heard. That sentence was each person’s faith claim.

The instructions seemed simple enough: recall all that you know about faith, pay attention to this occurrence in the world, and now say something about it. The end goal was the same whether they started with something happening in the world or started with trying to recall what framed their thinking for understanding life with God and one another. The group had taken up this agonizing task in some form or another for seven weeks. There were no “right answers” to give. The process was about observation and responding. With a guide for the process, they thought and responded together, called upon what they knew, acquired new information, and tried collectively to discern their way to a more right-fitting response than the last.

I was exhausted from guiding countless sessions like this inside and outside the classroom. So I watched with relief as someone—who had done it longer than I—conducted this latest session: my former professor and now colleague, Viki Matson. Ten years had passed since I last sat in a classroom with Viki, watching her teach theological reflection by helping people do it on the spot. Now she was leading the sixth group of students over eight years to take my course Preaching the Headlines. This was the first time in all those years that a crossover was happening. One of my initial influencers in the creation of the course was guiding a group through the throes of its methods. The course was unfamiliar to Viki, but its methods were not. True, the process had morphed in the ten years that had passed as I used it alongside preaching methods and theories, but the essentials remained.

For years, I shrugged off comments from students like “Thank you” and “We couldn’t have made it here without you.” In those moments, through exhausting mind, heart, and spirit bending, the group had moved from piles of disjointed and vague thoughts to a coherent faith claim that rang with clarity and veracity as they surveyed what seemed to matter most in the times at hand. These were claims we believed had something or someone at stake on the other side of them. These were claims we felt people in our communities could understand, even in the presence of internal resistance. People may not have wanted to like the claims, as all their biases were challenged, for during the most generative sessions, even those of us in the room had to contend with our varying preferences and privileges. But folks would be hard pressed to deny them on the basis of their faith because the claims were formulated from the most bedrock values of Christianity.

After years of teaching, I needed my guide in the room that day more than I knew. Watching her reminded me that there was a method to this messy process. Some processes for thinking do more saliently open up the intersections between faith and life on the ground, including their pitfalls and possibilities. And those same processes breathe new air into long-used methods of sermon development and preaching—including how we encounter Scripture, how that encounter is impacted by our experiences, and how our faith claims buttress conviction and, ultimately, the message itself.

Eight years into teaching “my class,” I still needed Viki and every single group of those students to hold up a mirror to my approach. They helped remind me of its hopes and sharpen its techniques for more right-fitting outcomes. More than I wanted them to, I realized the students’ “Thank you” and “We couldn’t have” statements over the years were saying the same about me as I had said about Viki in the room that day. The process and I were guides that were helping the students better articulate what they most believed to be true. But in earnest, we, collectively, were the guides we all needed.

Sitting back to assess the framework out of which we were working and thinking helped me return to the classroom and this project with a broadened yet clarified agenda. My sole agenda in the pages that follow is to offer preachers, people of faith, and those interested in communities of faith the same that Viki offered me, that I offered students, and, indeed, that students offered me in return. My hope is to offer a guided conversation about faith and life.

What It Is All About

By now, it should be discernible that Headlines in the title Preaching the Headlines is a metaphor for all those things our communities are struggling with and wondering about. The focus here is not on splattering sermons with headlines. In a literal sense, headlines are specific topics found in actual newspapers or in leading stories on television, radio, or online outlets, whether local or global. The greatest interest is in the stories behind and beyond the headlines and their interconnectedness across subject matters. These are the stories of the broader issues at play in the world. These issues impact our daily lives—both our flourishing and our demise. People of faith are trying to determine why and how these issues are of concern to them. Such clarification enables sustained responsiveness—whether that response is via a pulpit or not. The headlines are the times at hand. The headlines are our lives grounded in the present day.

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Preaching the Headlines assumes, crisis or not, that we communicate and live our faith as though our lives depend on it. This is not about life in a metaphorical sense, as if it was removed from the body; it’s about life in its fleshy fullness—body, mind, and soul as one. The fullness of life includes its situated flourishing right here and right now. We’re attending to life in its fragility and in its greatest possibilities. Life’s greatest possibilities require the precursor of our survival. This is about real lives. Attending to life is not free of politics, but it is also not reduced to politics, party lines, allegiances, or divides.

This approach to preaching and conversation is about attending to the totality of life on the ground. Yes, we care for our spiritual, emotional, and physical needs in order for us to survive one more day in this dogged world. And yes, we attend to what makes the world so dogged in the first place. No border exists between pastoral care and the pursuit of justice, setting the world right-side up and calling out the chasm between the world as it is and could be. Both are concerns of God and both become concerns of those who claim to be people of God. This posture responds to the call of Micah 6:8 to do justice, love kindness, and move forward humbly with God.

Practically speaking, the preacher remains aware that in their midst is a survivor of domestic violence along with an abuser or someone who cannot make ends meet as well as someone who can help others meet their ends. The preacher remains privy to the person with limited mobility or hearing loss. The preacher is clear there are those with skin hues, family lineages, and life partnerships different from their own. As life goes, people have lost loved ones, and they themselves may be terminally ill. So the preacher chooses their language and body gestures and interprets Scripture in ways that take seriously what total well-being and life abundant mean amid all these realities. In other words, the preacher is accountable to each life before them. Most importantly, the preacher and community engage more right-fitting resources for this work—whether those resources are inside or outside the faith tradition.

Leaders think and communicate to sustain life, which means they are committed to greater humility and risk-taking. The preacher does not give answers because they do not have all the answers. Instead, they extend an invitation. The invitation is one that creates a different paradigm for how we think and act—to become more engaged persons, no matter how big or small the corners of the world we occupy. This invitation is made possible by faith leaders themselves asking better and more critical questions without knowing where the responses may lead.1 The push is for people of faith to claim their agency to think critically about, imagine, and pursue lifesaving transformations of the world at hand.2 Salvation becomes just as tangible as it is spiritual.

The greatest implications here are for supporting accountable and engaged people of faith. All of this assumes people of faith do not depend solely on answers from religious leaders and that they learn to pursue their own questions and hunches. Their dependence on religious leaders is one that holds leaders accountable for opening a space for exploration. In this space, they may judge for themselves together and access their capacity to think and act.3 These are matters of relationship, agency, self-leadership, and communal volition. This agency may take a variety of forms, including organizing communities, bringing affordable healthy food options to towns and eliminating “food swamps,”4 supporting local businesses, caring for people in nursing homes, helping formerly incarcerated people make a successful transition from prison, working to dismantle the prison industrial complex itself, being mindful of ableism in worship services, advocating for public policies that are just and compassionate, showing up at the protest line and local city council meetings, and more. There’s plenty of need to go around. The ability to engage the world around us in more responsible ways requires our willingness to think and interrogate in community.

Claims of Clarity and Substance

This orientation to the life of faith is not about relative truths or nonsubstantive claims. Instead, the community gains greater clarity about what it holds most true about its traditions and the possibilities that lie therein and beyond. For starters, we become clear that we cannot compromise our neighbor in the name of loving God. Loving God is not a warm, fuzzy, commercialized emotion; it is about living mindful of God. To live in awareness of God requires uncompromising effort in living mindful of our neighbor. The mandates of love, given in both the Old and the New Testaments of Christian Scriptures (Deut 6:4–5; Matt 12:28–33), demand the entire self; a half-hearted effort won’t do. We are to orient the very seat of our beings—our hearts, our minds, and our might—in the direction of God and neighbor. This mandate is not “works righteousness” but a “turning toward” that leads to “doing.”

This turning toward our neighbor does not erase or diminish our own well-being. In fact, how we attend to our neighbor reflects the health of our disposition toward ourselves—“love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31). Thinking less worthily of ourselves is not the way of loving our neighbor. We are not called to suffer to the point of our own deterioration and demise in the name of someone else. But practicing hate toward our neighbor also diminishes our own humanity. Practicing hate toward our neighbor illuminates the self-hate present in the need to claim ourselves as better or more worthy of the fullness of life than another. Ultimately, practicing love toward our neighbor reflects the vibrancy of our self-awareness and our awareness of God.

Neither the community of faith nor preaching holds claim to less, but both hold claim to more. They err on the side of love of God and love of neighbor in their most vibrant, radical, and embodied forms. They hold claim to life’s viability and love having the final authority over whatever we say and do in the name of faith. They claim our state of relationships as a flicker of the transforming realm of God5 that we hope is to come, a realm that breaks in from time to time, as it is simultaneously already here but not yet.

The assumption here is not only that the enduring structures of power and dominance that create the greatest woes in our midst will “be toppled,” but that we, as people of faith, have “personal agency in God’s vision” for that toppling and a more just world.6 Evelyn Parker describes this working relationship between hope and agency as emancipatory hope.7 We are invited to participate in both the toppling over and the realm to come. So in the face of many unknown “answers” to the question ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: We’ve Found Ourselves
• 1. Straight, No Chasers: Guiding Assumptions
• 2. Fleshy Parts: Race, Gender, Sex, Abilities, and Other Bodily Matters
• 3. Taboo Conversations: Religion, Money, and Politics
• 4. Struggles for Belonging: Environment, Land, and Borders
• 5. More Than Headlines: Preaching in Practice
• Conclusion: What Matters Most
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Working Preacher Books