Telling the Whole Story

Reading and Preaching Old Testament Stories

Holbert

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621895732
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Telling the Whole Story is both a book about preaching and reading the narratives of the Hebrew Bible. John C. Holbert (PhD in Hebrew Bible) was a longtime teacher of preaching and Hebrew Bible at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, having retired in 2012 after thirty-three years. In this volume he combines his two skills of careful narrative reading and imaginative story preaching to offer the first comprehensive look at this particular kind of sermon proclamation. The reader will also find here an introduction to the long history of story preaching in the history of the church, as well as a primer both in ways to read the narratives more effectively and ways to preach several varieties of story sermons.At the heart of this book four narratives from the Hebrew Bible are exegeted and are accompanied by four story sermons based on those texts: Genesis 2-3; 1 Samuel 15; Judges 4; and Jonah. The goal of the book is to help preachers who are looking for effective ways to proclaim the gospel using narrative texts from the Hebrew Bible to allow the rich stories of the texts to sound their ancient truth to the modern world

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Preaching and Story

Definitions

Since the rise of so-called narrative preaching, usually seen as tied directly to the “new homiletic” of the 1970s, there has been much confusion about the definition of this kind of proclamation. And I readily admit that my 1991 book, Preaching Old Testament, did little to clarify the confusion. I tended there to use interchangeably the terms “narrative” and “story.” Of course, in common English usage, this is quite natural; nearly every English dictionary I have consulted defines the one term by the other. For example in my very small, desk-size Webster’s New World Dictionary, “narrative” is defined, first, as “story; account.” And “story” is defined, again first, as “the telling of an event or series of events; account; narration.” However, this common interchangeability has led to confusion and imprecision that needs address.

Eugene Lowry in his 1997 introduction to preaching helps the move toward clarity. “Technically, the term narrative means a ‘story’ and a ‘teller.’”1 He borrows this basic definition from the classic 1966 text of Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative.2 It was that definition that lead me to use story and narrative synonymously in my earlier book. However, Lowry, the leading theorist and advocate of what he calls narrative preaching, defines narrative as a series of events related to one another in such a way as to evidence a plot. In effect, for Lowry, narrative is synonymous with plot. Plot, according to Scholes/Kellogg is “the dynamic, sequential element in narrative literature. Insofar as character, or any other element in narrative, becomes dynamic, it is part of the plot.”3 The content of any sermon can be plotted, and Lowry suggests how that is so in his famous Lowry loop, the five elements of a plotted sermon he first described in his 1980 book, The Homiletical Plot. Though in the new edition of this seminal and accessible work, Lowry rethinks his original five-element sermon plot design, sometimes reducing the elements from five to four and redefining the original terms, the basic claim remains the same. Sermons need to be “processes in time rather than constructions in space.”4 The metaphor employed is crucial; constructions are things built from pieces, nailed or tied together. Processes, or movements, in time have forward motion rather than vertical dimension.

Story sermons are subspecies of plotted sermons; all narrative sermons are not story sermons, but all story sermons are narrative sermons. If plotted sermons involve the telling of a story, the sermon should be called a story sermon. Hence, story and narrative in homiletical practice are not synonyms, but the former is an illustration of the latter. This is so, because stories by their very nature have plots, the Aristotelian beginning, middle, and ending. But narrative sermons, in this more precise sense, may or may not use stories in their plots. It is conceivable, although perhaps not too likely, that a narrative sermon may be completely devoid of stories. A plotted story sermon, on the other hand, uses a story or stories as the central content of the sermon. The four sermon examples in this book are plotted story sermons. In the subsequent discussion of the history of story sermons, more clarity will appear concerning the importance of these more precise definitions.

Story Sermons: A Brief History

The Bible

Story sermons are as old as preaching itself, and have their origins in the pages of the Bible. After King David pursued his adulterous affair with Bathsheba, had her soldier husband murdered in battle, and then married the publicly grieving widow, in a crude attempt to cover over his misdeeds, the prophet Nathan marches into the throne room of the king and delivers to him a story sermon. He speaks of a poor man and his one tiny ewe and of a rich man who entertained a traveler by stealing the poor man’s lamb for the main course, instead of taking a lamb from his own substantial flock. Thus ends the sermon. But not quite! David is enraged, and shouts that the rich man deserves death, and before his execution should restore the tiny lamb fourfold, so he could see the restoration of the poor man just before his eyes close for the final time. The story sermon here has done its work of personal engagement. Now it is quite true that Nathan goes on to clarify the point of the story, skewering his king on the story’s point. “You are the man,” he thunders, and it is indeed clear that David is that arrogant rich man (see 2 Sam 12:1–15). I will return to this story again, as we explore the possible reasons for preaching in just this way.

Further Hebrew Bible examples may be noted. The eighth-century prophet, Isaiah, tells the tale of the establishment of a vineyard by his “beloved,” a vineyard expected to produce sweet grapes. Instead Isaiah laments that the vineyard produced “wild grapes” or perhaps better “noxious weeds” (Isa 5:4). Isaiah 5:7 offers the point of the story.

Surely, the vineyard of YHWH of the armies is the house of Israel,
the Judeans are God’s delightful plants.
God expected mishpat (justice) but alas mispach (bloodshed),
tsedakah (righteousness), but alas ts’akah (an outcry).

One might call this use of story allegory, where each element of the tale corresponds to an element of the targeted concern, in this case an evil and recalcitrant Israel. However, extended metaphor is perhaps a better description, since not every part of the story (the dirt, the stones, the tower, etc.) has an apparent correspondent in the case against Israel. Still, it is a sermon, using story as the major element in the proclamation.

The most obvious example of a story sermon in the Hebrew Bible is the tale of Jonah.5 I will give extended treatment to Jonah as story sermon in a later chapter. In my earlier book, I suggested that Jonah itself represents the type of story sermon I called “pure narrative.”6 I would also argue that the book of Ruth is a story sermon, albeit a rather more complex and subtle one than Jonah.7

There is also the so-called parable of the trees in Judges 9:8–15. The story is spoken by Jotham as an attack against Abimelech, the would-be king of Shechem and against those elders of the city who murdered Jotham’s brothers in order to clear the way for Abimelech’s enthronement. In the story, various trees are asked to rule over the forest. In turn, the olive, fig, and grape vines are offered the rule of the forest, and each in turn rejects the offer, claiming that the work they are already doing is more important than any work as ruler could be. When the bramble bush is offered rule, it nastily says:

If you are really anointing me king over you,

then come, hide in my shade!

But if not, let fire burst out of the bramble

and devour the cedars of Lebanon!

In this story sermon, Abimelech is obviously likened to the coarse bramble whose quality of shade is minimal, if not absurd, and whose only practical use is for poor firewood. Also, a fire created by brambles is good only for the most paltry heat, let alone blazing hot enough to engulf the world’s mightiest trees, the fabled cedars of Lebanon. In short, the story sermon announces the serious shortcomings of the ridiculous but murderous Abimelech and warns of his dangerous kingship. In three short years, the very elders of Shechem who made Abimelech king turn against him. Soon after, Abimelech burns one thousand Shechemites, both men and women, to d...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Preaching and Story
• Chapter 2: Reading and Preaching the Old Testament Stories
• Chapter 3: “To Give, To Take, To Eat”
• Chapter 4: “Vulture, Son of Wretchedness”
• Chapter 5: A Question of Interpretation
• Chapter 6: “Things are Seldom What They Seem”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography