Honest to God Preaching

Talking Sin, Suffering, and Violence

Brent A. Strawn

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506461267
• eBook ISBN: 9781506461274
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Old Testament scholar and interpreter Brent A. Strawn focuses on the importance of honesty in preaching, especially around three challenging Old Testament themes: sin, suffering, and violence. He makes the case that preaching honestly is critical in the church today. Without honesty regarding these topics, there is no way forward to reconciliation, health, and recovery. Further, it is imperative for today's preachers to deal with the questions of faith arising from these themes in the biblical text itself. In addition to key scripture passages, he turns to several contemporary authors and works as dialogue partners on the three themes.

Asserting that keeping secrets can lead to a kind of sickness, Strawn uses texts from the Pentateuch and the Psalms to model honesty about sin, without which there can be no reconciliation, and honesty about suffering, without which there can be no healing. He also looks at the book of Joshua and various psalms to model honesty about violence, which can serve as a way to contain, limit, and ultimately transcend violence.

Strawn frames these themes specifically for working preachers, so they can create sermons that speak to these thorny themes with depth and clarity.

1

Only as Sick as Our Secrets

Two Troubling Memories

I will never forget a particular moment when my wife, Holly, and I sat in a small church in central New Jersey, listening to a sermon in my first or second year of seminary. Given the subject matter of the present book, it seems imperative for me to be honest and say that, in my judgment, the sermon was a rather bad one. I don’t recall much of it now, years later, but I recall the gist of it because it produced an exchange in the pews that is forever burned into my long-term memory. The sermon was riffing on out-of-date, worn-out, and inaccurate presumptions regarding differences between the Old and New Testaments. The text being “preached” (I use that verb generously for the moment) was from the Sermon on the Mount, specifically from the so-called antitheses, where Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said . . . but I say to you” (see Matt 5:21–22, 27–28, 31–32, 33–34, 38–39, 43–44). If memory serves, we had just heard the bit about loving one’s neighbor but hating one’s enemy (5:43)1 when the dreadful interaction took place.

Directly in the pew in front of us sat a family from the church, as they always did. They were committed members and very involved; the father frequently led music during the services. Right after the part about hating one’s enemies in Matthew, the mother of this faithful church family leaned over to one of her children and whispered, loudly enough that Holly and I at least could hear it, “That’s what the Jews do.” According to this mother, Jews, whether ancient or modern, hated their enemies—apparently invariably and always.

Flash backward to a different memory from many years prior: I’m in high school, on a church youth group service project in Southern California. A few of us are on a brief break from painting the local church and are at the pastor’s house next door. He starts cracking anti–Old Testament jokes . . . well, no, correction: he starts cracking jokes about Jews. I was evidently uncomfortable (rightly so!) because, as I recall, my high school self said something. I asked the pastor, probably sheepishly, if such jokes should be made about God’s chosen people. His response was cavalier, I thought, even back then, but of course even more so now. It was, in effect, “They aren’t God’s chosen people anymore. They had their chance.”

Two Crucial Points

A great deal could be said about these disturbing vignettes and on many fronts. Obviously, the things the mother from New Jersey and the pastor from California said are racist, more generally, and anti-Semitic, more specifically—not to mention deserving of swift and thorough condemnation. The main thing I want to say about these two troubling memories, however, is that each, in their own way, is effectively countered by the two major points I aim to make in this book:

1. 1. We only know of Israel’s failures because Israel was honest enough to share them with us in the first place—within the pages of Holy Scripture.
2. 2. We would do well, in our preaching and teaching—but also more generally, in our religious experience, practice, spirituality, devotion, and so forth2—to emulate Israel’s honesty, not misuse and abuse it, because honesty provides a way forward, perhaps even the only way forward, to reconciliation, health, and recovery.3

Both of the antagonists in the vignettes described above failed—massively—to grasp these two rather basic points. With regard to the first point, the mother from New Jersey mistook Israel’s stunning candor in Scripture as some sort of moral (if not genetic) flaw that extended to the present day rather than see it for what it was and still is: a full baring of the soul before God and a public witness to all who will listen. Of course, it didn’t help that the preacher that day was not particularly sharp about such matters, and so his sermon actually enabled if not produced the mother’s profound misunderstanding.4 For his part, the California pastor mistook ancient Israel’s honesty as a track record of failure that disqualified Israel from God’s favor rather than realizing nothing could be further from the truth—as is clear from the New Testament itself (see, e.g., Rom 11:29).5

John 5, where Christ asks a man at the pool of Bethsaida if he wants to be healed, is worth contemplating at this point. In his response, the man dissembles a good bit by not answering the question in a straightforward manner:

Sir, I don’t have anyone who can put me in the water when it is stirred up. When I’m trying to get to it, someone else has gotten in ahead of me. (John 5:7)6

To his credit, the man says he’s trying to get there, but most of what he says doesn’t answer Jesus’s rather simple inquiry for a truth to be told: Does he want to get better or not? A famous saying from Alcoholics Anonymous, which I will return to more extensively below, asserts that “we’re only as sick as our secrets.” How could God forgive what is not candidly expressed, what isn’t acknowledged as wrongdoing? Or even if God could (and one expects and hopes God can),7 how can we be reconciled with God and with one another or find healing if we live in a stage of constant cover-up and denial? If, that is, we actually somehow prefer our secrecy and sickness and sin. Both the mom from New Jersey and the pastor from California missed how candid Israel is in Scripture; instead, they evidently preferred that Israel deny, cover up, and grow sick on their (not always) secret sins. When God asks Israel, “Do you want to be healed?” there is precious little dissembling. Quite to the contrary, the Old Testament frequently manifests full and at times disturbing disclosure. If nothing else, that disclosure indicates that Israel wants to be healed.

With regard to the second point, both the mother and the minister failed to emulate Israel’s humble and, one might add, humbling (if not downright humiliating) honesty in their own religious practice. Instead, both of these individuals appear to have assumed that they were somehow above or beyond what they deemed Israel’s deficient ways. Once again, nothing could be further from the truth, as evidenced in the prejudice and bias in both the mother’s comment and the pastor’s jokes: neither comes across as more virtuous than Israel’s candor—not in the least and quite to the contrary. Psychologists would no doubt identify both statements as classic instances of projection: blaming some problem or fault of our own on someone else, as if it didn’t equally (if not more so) apply to us.8 Projection might make us feel better temporarily, but since it isn’t true, it doesn’t make us healthier, only sicker. The god-awful truth is that the history of the Christian church is pockmarked with failures every bit as egregious as those mentioned in the Old Testament (and the New): the terrible history of Christian persecution of Jews is only one particularly horrific example in a far-from-stellar track record.9 Contrary to the California pastor’s arrogant self-confidence, one might well worry—and with very good reason—that it is perhaps we who call ourselves Christians who have “had our chance.”

I do not imagine that either of the two central points I argue in this book are particularly novel. The first one—about Israel’s honesty—is patently obvious (or should be) to anyone who has cared to read the Bible closely at all or with any degree of empathy. Surely preachers and pastors should be among the closest and most empathetic of readers, but sadly, that isn’t always the case.10 In my judgment, an empathetic reading automatically and in turn leads (or should) to the second point about emulating Israel’s honesty.11 But poor practice continues on both of these fronts, and so this book seems necessary if only to remind us of things that we already know (or should) if we took Scripture more seriously and approached our preaching and religious practices more carefully.

Three Points of Connection

In the three chapters that follow, I will explore Israel’s honesty in the Old Testament with reference to three primary subjects: sin, suffering, and violence.12 In each chapter, I will focus on a few primary texts or textual units, at least one from a narrative book and one from the Psalms. The latter repository should come as no surprise: the Psalms are famous for their candor, and the Psalter’s honesty about sin, suffering, and violence—while perhaps disconcerting to some readers—is no doubt a major reason why it has been treasured for centuries. It is with good reason that Ellen Davis has described the Psalter as “a kind of First Amendment for the faithful.”13 The texts I have selected from nonpoetic books are equally important, however; they reflect a kind of “storied” or “narrativized” honesty that can accompany, exemplify, or concretize the more liturgical and “spiritual” honesty of the Psalms.14 In fact, when read in concert with the Psalter, it is easy to see how the narrative texts, too, are equally liturgical and devotional (spiritual) in their candor. As such, the narratives Scripture so candidly preserves, and that are themselves so candid, do not reflect simply Israel’s “poor track record” or “rap sheet”—one limited to some persons or period, event or moment, only back there and only back then. Instead, these stories, no less than one of the great penitential psalms, are fundamentally and at root confessions, confessions that resonate right here and right now.

There is much more to say, since it will be my contention in this book that Israel’s honesty corresponds to and also facilitates crucial, indispensable aspects of faithful belief and practice:

• ✴ honesty about sin facilitates reconciliation,
• ✴ honesty about suffering facilitates healing, and
• ✴ honesty about violence facilitates recovery.

Underlying this contention is yet another—namely, that

preaching about these subjects is a primary means of belief and practice by which these facilitations happen.

Since it is so important, let me underscore the last point by rephrasing it: Honest preaching in the wake of Israel’s own honesty is a way—a central, indispensable way—Christians can move toward better, healthier, more peaceful ways of being in the world and with God. Honesty, including honest preaching, is a way—maybe even the primary way—we can experience reconciliation, healing, and recovery.

To be sure, more “honest topics” could be added to my list of three. The Old Testament is a large anthology of texts that reveals Israel to be brutally honest about a whole range of matters. I considered, for instance, a triad that was more alliterative: sin, suffering, and struggle, with the last item standing in for and including skepticism (another alliterative s!) among other things. Skepticism is definitely worth considering, but readers and preachers can surely do that work on their own—whether the topic is doubt or some other manifestation of uncertainty. In the present moment, when violence is such an area of concern among well-meaning (if not also psychologically projecting) Christians, not to mention a ubiquitous companion on our news and entertainment streams, it seemed important to address that issue here, especially since the general idea of “struggle” is present to some degree in all three of the topics discussed here. In any event, readers and preachers will be quick to see connections between what is said in the present volume and many other topics that could use a good dose of honesty. Readers and preachers will also be abl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Only as Sick as Our Secrets
• Chapter 2: Honest about Sin
• Chapter 3: Honest about Suffering
• Chapter 4: Honest about Violence
• Chapter 5: The Importance of Being Earnest—or, Rather, of Preaching Honestly
• Notes
• Author Index
• Scripture Index