listening

Image via Wikipedia

So much of a pastor’s time is focussed on sermon preparation. When we read, we are looking for sermon ideas or illustrations. When we do our devotions we are looking for ways to help others see what is in the passage.

The first thing we do when we look at a passage is try to figure out what it is saying to others.

A while ago I wrote a post which related some questions I had come across which helped guide me in my understanding of certain passages.

1) What does this text reveal about God and his relationship to his people and his creation?

2) How does this theological message (this talk about God) connect with the larger Biblical story of Creation/Fall/Redemption/Recreation?

3) What grace does this text offer to us to us today?

The only problem with these questions it that they are other directed. Sure I include myself in God’s people and his creation, but looking at the questions I could very easily over look the fact that I am to be impacted personally by what I am reading in God’s word.

In the prologue to The Return of the Prodigal Son Henri Nouwen talks about his experience of moving from a place of outward focus to one of inward focus. Reflecting on Rembrant’s painting of the return of the prodigal son, he realised he needed to allow himself to be embraced by the father; he “needed to go to that place inner place where I too could be held as safely as the young man in the painting.” His movement from academia to chaplaincy changed the way he viewed himself and his relationship to others.

“I have a new vocation now. It is the covation to speak and write from that [inner] place back into many places of my own and other people’s restless lives. I have to kneel before the Father, put my ear against his chest and listen, without interruption, to the heartbeat of God. Then, and only then, can I say carefully and very gently what I hear.”

This is the vocation of every person who seeks to preach, teach, exhort, homilise, explain, … God’s Word. We are called to sit silently in the Father’s embrace and listen to his heartbeat. Only from that place are we able to carefully tell others what we have heard.

I have now changed the questions for understanding which sit on my desk.

1) What is this text saying about God, me, and our relationship to one another?

2) What problem/sin/trouble is exposed in the text?

3) What grace/hope/love does this text offer me?

4) How does this text connect with the larger story of the scriptures?

5) How can I help others experience this?

I think the last question is crucial. Reading the Bible is an experience, not just a mental exercise. It is an encounter with God and his living Word. As we read the record of God’s Word, the Holy Spirit takes the words and uses them to challenge, equip, rebuke, and train us in righteousness.

Related articles by Zemanta

• taking prayer seriously (onethingiknow.net)
• Life and New Life (rj-anderson.livejournal.com)

from gospel to sermon; a review

It is often rather difficult to preach on a passage within one of the synoptic gospels, because the story may be told slightly differently in all three. The question then becomes, “Do I preach on the story from all three gospels, or do I preach on the text in this gospel?”

David J. Ourisman, in from Gospel to Sermon: Preaching Synoptic Texts attempts to address this issue.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. I appreciate that Ourisman wants to take the context of the whole book into account as he preaches on the individual text. We should always keep the whole book in mind while studying and preaching a passage, but I am not sure that we should always bring it into every sermon.

He makes a good point regarding preaching from a lectionary. If one is going to go through a given synoptic gospel throughout the coming year according to a given lectionary, they should pay close attention to the book as a whole and how each sermon relates to the previous and subsequent one. I particularly appreciated the manner in which Ourisman discusses the books. He does a brief, but succinct treatment of each.

The main problem I have with the book is the manner in which Ourisman puts into practice the advice he gives in the book. His sermons do not seem to impart a lot of what he discusses in the chapters. For example, his sermon on Peter’s confession of Jesus in Mark seems to raise more questions than it answers. That may be an appropriate strategy to get the congregation to think through the issues a bit more, but the sermon seemed to be lacking something. Perhaps the thing that bothered me the most is his application. He took the theme and directly applied it to social issues without making a biblical connection between the two ideas.

I also wonder if it is possible for a person to do all he is asking for every sermon. In his defence I would argue that Ourisman assumes the pastor will be working on one book for a long time, and so most of this work would be done over the course of time, and would not have to be repeated for every sermon.

Overall I found the book quite thought provoking.

questions for understanding

On my desk I have a little piece of paper with three questions listed on it. These questions are ones that I have slowly gathered and honed regarding the understanding of a passage of scripture. There are many, I am sure, and I by no means have them cornered. But I have found them extremely helpful in my life to better understand a passage, especially as I do my devotions in the morning. So, without further ado, here they are.

1) What does this text reveal about God and his relationship to his people and his creation?

2) How does this theological message (this talk about God) connect with the larger Biblical story of Creation/Fall/Redemption/Recreation?

3) What grace does this text offer to us to us today?

These are, of course, huge questions to answer for every text. Though often they provide a nice prod to help place a text within the context of the Biblical story and our lives.

tragedy, comedy, fairytale

Frederick Buechner is a genius, at least in my humble opinion. I have to say that I have not read much of his stuff, but I have read his book on preaching Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, & Fairytale. This book outlines how in our world, the gospel is so much more than a simple outline of the proper doctrines to repeat. The gospel is a story that takes account of the pain and struggle that takes place in all of our hearts.

The story of Jesus is so much more than a simple ten minutes can outline (though that can cover the basics). It is more than the most seasoned saint will ever be able to grasp. It is a story. A story of love and loss, fidelity and betrayal. It is the story of God redeeming people who continue to run away from him.

Our current world desperately needs to hear this story, says Buechner.

The weight of these sad times we must obey and must obey just because they are sad times, sad and bewildering times for people who try to hold on to the Gospel and witness to it somehow when in so many ways the weight of our sadness all but crushes the life our of it. One wonders if there is anything more crucial for the preacher to do than to obey the sadness of our times by taking it into account without equivocation or subterfuge, by speaking out of our times and into our times not just what we ought to say about the Gospel, not just what it would appear to be in the interests of the Gospel for us to say, but what we have ourselves felt about it, experienced of it. It is possible to think of the Gospel and our preaching of it as, above all and at no matter what risk, a speaking of the truth about the way things are.

Speaking the truth about the way things are, not just how we hope them to be, not just how we make things to be, but how things truly are.

This does not mean that things are always doom and gloom. There is a lot of bad things happening in the world, but God is at work in the world too and his presence should be noticed. It may take more work, but sometimes light shines brighter in the darkness. Lee Eclov wrote an article for preachingtoday.com called The Gospel for the Gospel-Saturated: Preaching the good news in all its dimensions. He mentions how the gospel is often set against a very dark back drop.

The Scriptures take us into back alleys sometimes—sunless, trash-strewn, narrow, sinister, bums lurking. Over there—Saul huddled in the firelight with the witch of Endor. There—Jezebel and Ahab plotting. The scrawled graffiti—”Darkness is my only companion” and “I curse the day of my birth.” And there’s Simon Magus leaning over his abacus, toting up the profit margin in the gospel. Here, a snake; there, a lurking lion. Yet I imagine the gospel hiding around the corners of that dark alley, as delightfully out of place as a laughing child. Sometimes our job as gospel preachers is to portray the dark alleys of life, mirrored in Scripture, till people shiver at the thought. Then we show them the laughing gospel-child.

That is what we need to look for, both in the scriptures and in the world; the laughing gospel child.

preaching Christ

D.A. Carson has begun a three part series on this on Preaching Today Skills. He is going to outline eight different words that will help us preach the gospel well. Part one talks about preaching as being Christological and Theological.

“Christological preaching depends on strong biblical theology, on being someone who has read and reread the whole Bible and is thinking through the canonical connections, the tendons that hold all of Scripture together. How does kingdom track out? How does priesthood track out? How does temple or sacrifice track out? There are about twenty of these huge themes that, if understood, enable the preacher to move from a particular text along the line of these canonical themes to Christ. You still preach the text, but you handle these biblical-theological tendons that tie the whole Bible together, so people can see you’re not making a wild leap to get to Christ.

I don’t think a lot of biblical preaching today in evangelical circles is actually worldview-forming. Many preach the Bible in too “bitty” a fashion with an instantaneous, individualistic application that does not show how the Bible hangs together. If one aims to do Christological preaching, a lot of those problems are solved.”

…

Gospel preaching is also theological. It’s not less God-centered than Christ-centered. But it’s also theological in the sense that it is bound up with what was historically done by Christ on the cross.

We need to understand how the Cross relates to God, which means we have to understand something about the atonement and the nature of sin. …

The gospel is regularly presented today along lines that leave out the wrath of God and the need for reconciliation. In Acts, when Paul is preaching to Felix, he’s preaching what he says is the gospel, and the result is Felix fears the judgement to come. Whereas we preach the gospel in a way that nobody fears anything.

Does this mean that we need to go back to pulpit pounding and ‘putting the fear of God in people’? Well, I suppose in a way. But I think it means more than that. Carson is not saying that we need to focus on wrath and ignore grace. He is arguing that we need explain what sin is, so that we can properly understand what grace is.

So how can we express God’s wrath? Canadian culture is one that hates hate. The only thing, it seems, it cannot tolerate is intolerance. So how do we express a God who is loving, yet holds us to an incredibly high standard (and then gets angry when we cannot reach that standard)?

I have a two year old son, and when he continually tests my patience by doing something that I have told him not to do (over and over and over again). When I tell him not to touch something, and he looks at me, reaches out, and touches it, I think I feel a bit of the wrath of God. I am not angry at him simply for disobeying me, although there is some of that.

I am mad because I know that he can do better. I know he knows that he should not do it. I know that he understands how to leave things alone. I know that he can do better, yet he chooses to do what is wrong (remind you of Romans 7?)

We all experience this kind of anger, whether it is at our children or at the violence perpetrated by criminals or something else. We can identify with this kind of wrath.

Just imagine the kind of anger that fills God’s heart everyday as we do things which we know are wrong. He looks down on us, and expects so much more, and knows we can give him so much more, yet we choose to do the wrong thing.

Think of the amount of grace that he extends to us constantly.

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39, ESV)