Wrestling with the Word: Preaching On Tricky Texts

By Jamie Harrison

Many biblical texts seem almost impossible to preach. They may be violent or terrifying or strange or abrasive. They may deal with matters simply beyond human experience. The preacher could well be tempted to choose an easier text on offer! But leaving taxing passages untouched means the Bible is effectively silenced.

In Wrestling with the Word, well-known and accomplished preachers grapple with a range of notoriously difficult biblical Old and New Testament texts. As well as providing sample sermons – in an exhilarating variety of structural styles and voices – they offer ideas to help in the planning process of interpreting and applying such passages.

'A well-constructed and delivered sermon has the potential to inspire people as few other experiences can.'
The Rt Revd John Pritchard, from the Foreword

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Nov 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9780281076499

Book preview

Part 1

THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS

1

The call to preach

KATE BRUCE

Do you ever find yourself doing the rounds with a spectacularly tricky text and thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ Do you spend hours pondering, praying, researching and writing, and then wonder: will this sermon make any difference to anything? Is it self-indulgent? What right do I have to speak to these people? In a context where there are voices claiming that the day of the sermon is over,¹ the preacher needs to think through: what is preaching, and what’s the point?

Before we go any further I sense an elephant perched on the coffee table; an elephant we need to name. The negative connotations of the word ‘preach’ in everyday parlance hardly give it a ringing endorsement. It is easy to caricature preaching as declamatory, one-way, authoritarian, pontificating pulpit patter of the ‘should’ and ‘ought’ variety. Is it just an expression of old-school paternalism, which treats people like empty vessels longing to be filled up with useful information about the fate, for example, of the Jebusites? Many of us have experienced flesh on this particular straw man; caricature can come horribly close to experience. So, shouldn’t we just cease the practice and be done with it?

Preaching: wrestling with understanding

Before we discard preaching, it would be wise to understand what we would be losing. Looking at six of the more common verbs used in the New Testament for preaching gives us a sense of its scope. Martyrein means to witness; parakalein to comfort or admonish; propheteuein means to prophesy; and didaskein refers to teaching. Keryssein, meaning to proclaim, is very close to euangelizesthai or preach the good news.² This is not simply proclamation of an event in the past but of the presence of Christ now, inaugurating a new apprehension of reality.

A key question for any preacher is, ‘What am I trying to do in this sermon?’ A sermon may proclaim, involving witness and elements of admonition or comfort. It may invite consideration of the gospel, as with the more direct evangelistic address. It will always seek to identify something of the presence of God in the given moment and thus have a prophetic edge. While there are often aspects of teaching in the sermon, it is always more than a teaching event. The sermon alone simply cannot be expected to develop the biblical literacy of the congregation; this belongs to the wider teaching ministry of the Church.

In summary: the sermon is an event in which by the grace of God and in the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ is present. There is clearly here an argument for the sermon as sacramental event.³ Preaching is more than an appeal to cognition: it is a corporate event in time that seeks to ignite the heart, appeal to the mind, and move the will.

Preaching: wrestling with the objections

Let’s attend more closely to that elephant perched on the coffee table and wrestle with the criticisms that have been levelled at preaching.

Under the oppressive boot?

Doug Pagitt sees preaching in terms of ‘speaching’; an authoritarian practice with the preacher as ‘teller’.⁴ Similarly, Stuart Murray denounces preaching as ‘declaiming from an authoritarian height’, a vestige of Christendom, ‘related to clericalism, massive buildings, unchallengeable proclamation and nominal congregations’.⁵ Implicit in these critiques is a failure to differentiate between authoritarian and authoritative preaching. Preaching as an authoritarian, controlling practice can have no place in the Church; bullying, declamatory certitude lacks love, imagination and wisdom. Honesty, openness and vulnerability, undergirded by love for the hearer, are hallmarks of the authoritative preacher.

Honesty means not glossing over the difficulties in the Scriptures; we cannot pretend that tricky, thorny texts do not exist. Ignoring them will lead to preaching a very selective canon and sliding over challenging material. Sometimes the Bible does not seem to contain good news for many of its characters. This needs to be wrestled with, to see how such texts might be handled