Make a house a home

Make a house a home

 Some thoughts on preaching which hits home

We are preparing to move house again soon (2 miles across the other side of Oxford).  As we prepare for the process of transporting all our possessions from one house to another my thoughts turned to what makes a house a home?  The bare structure and location of a property only becomes home when it feels lived in and starts to reflect the personality of its inhabitants.

The same could be said to be true of preaching.  Many sermons which I listen to show evidence of structure, design and effort.  But they often don’t feel lived in.  They lack the warmth and personality which only comes when the preacher has inhabited the text for themselves and taken it home.

What are some of the errors which sermons make?  You can probably think of more, but these few thoughts came to mind.

Pegs

When you first move into your new house boxes get emptied and mounds of clothing, books etc. await proper ‘filing away’.  Should someone come to visit the chances are their coat will need to be draped over a chair or put on the bed.  Hopefully, in time, pegs will appear upon which you may hang your coat.

In a similar way, many sermons which I hear offer nowhere to ‘hang your hat’ so to speak.  There is content, but it lacks pegs.  Without this attention to structure, the hearer can struggle to navigate their way through the sermon.  Without pegs it is unlikely that hearers will be able remember salient points of the sermon for the week ahead.

Rhetoric gets a bad name today. But the later Greek sophists (Isocrates. Cicero etc.) believed Rhetoric to be the ability to speak with such clarity that the audience would be persuaded.  Philosophers think clearly.  Rhetoricians think clearly out loud.  Preachers should be doing the same.  This will in part be reflected by careful attention to the structure and form of the sermon.

Personality

It takes time for a house to become a home.  Over time the inhabitants will begin to stamp their own personality on their property – hanging curtains, arranging flowers, decorating to taste etc. 

Many sermons I hear lack personality.  Phillip Brooks’ now famous comment that preaching is “communication of truth through personality” is exactly right.  Obviously we don’t want the sermon to be littered with personal anecdotes and stories.  It is not supposed to be a talk about them.  However, congregations listen when they can see that for the preacher the message has hit home personally.

They have been moved by the message they are preaching.  They have made the connections as to how it applies to their own life.

Punch

Sermons which hit home are those which apply pertinently and pointedly to today’s world.  They are illustrated in real life.

Too many sermons I hear leave me only in the world of the text.  Now, of course, this is not the worst problem, there are equally many messages that never take me to the world of the text and only start in the world of today.  I guess the former may be the weakness of evangelical expository preaching; the latter is the weakness of liberal preaching.

John Stott has regularly repeated the need to engage in “double listening” – Hearing the voice of the text; hearing the voice of the world. 

When you move into a new house you are inclined to think: however did they live with that wallpaper?  How come they didn’t modernise the bathroom suite etc.  But of course, it is very difficult to see your environment and culture from the fresh perspective of an outsider. 

As preachers we need to retain the fresh “eyes” of an outsider, someone who has not spent the whole week labouring over the text, and who can see the difficult punchy questions which might need addressing.

At home in the sermon

By this expression I don’t at all mean that preaching should be psychologically therapeutic, only comforting and devotional.  What I think I mean is that I expect preaching to give me pegs (to help me recall and apply the bible to my life in the week ahead); personality (so I feel that the preacher has met with God in his preparation); punch (I see the issue with a freshness and pertinence for the week ahead).

On being ‘contemporary’ and ‘biblical’ by John Stott

“Imagine if you will, a flat territory that is deeply cut by a ravine or a canyon.  On the one side of the ravine is the biblical world, and on the other side is the modern world.  Between these two territories lies a deep gulf – two thousands years of changing culture.  Evangelical people like me live in the biblical world, on one wide of the divide.  We believe the Bible, meditate on the Bible, and love the Bible.  We are essentially biblical people.  But we are not so comfortable in the modern world, on the other side of the divide.  If like me you’re senescent, if not senile, the you probably feel threatened by the modern world.

Much modern preaching emanates from the biblical world.  Indeed, we wouldn’t dream of preaching from anywhere but the Bible.  But somehow this preaching goes up in the air but fails to land on the other side of the divide.  Our preaching is biblical but not contemporary.

Those who think themselves as liberal often make the opposite mistake.  They live in the modern world.  People listen to them because they seem to resonate with modernity, or post-modernity.  They are not chocked or threatened but the culture of the modern world – they have built in shock absorbers.  They read modern poetry, modern philosophy, modern psychology, modern science; they are moving with the times.  But in reality they have jettisoned biblical revelation.  They may be contemporary, but they are decidedly un-biblical.  Their preaching lands squarely in contemporary reality, but where it comes from, heaven along knows!  It does not come out of Scriptures.

… Evangelicals are biblical, but not contemporary, while liberals are contemporary but not biblical, and almost nobody is building bridges and relating the biblical text to the modern context.

{We need ‘double listening’} Listening to the voice of God in Scripture, and listening to the voices of the modern world, with all their cries of anger, pain and despair…

(From ‘Preach the Word’ (Edited by Greg Haslam) chapter by John Stott entitled “The Paradoxes of Preaching”, by John Stott)

Confidence in the tools of our trade…

Something has bothered me for a while.  I have not quite been able to put my finger on it until now.

 

My unease started when I began my new job teaching preaching at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.   There are a number of issues which I have been coming to terms with.  For one, you really set yourself up when you are introduced to a congregation as the tutor in preaching.  People expect you to be making comments or observations on another person’s sermon.  And, of course, if you are about to preach, you are supposed to be something of an expert and will invariably disappoint!  (Although my preferred definition of an expert is scientific: X is an unknown quantity, and a spurt is a gush of water!).

 

The second bit of unease is a degree of uncertainty as to whether a spiritual gift can really be taught by an academic institution.  Can I teach someone to preach?  At many levels the answer is ‘no’.   And of course, coming into an adult education environment where many of the students already have higher level degrees, persuading them to submit to being taught – well anything! – is a challenge.

 

But I have finally realised what it is that has been nagging away in the back of my mind.  I think it is this.  If I was a perfect teacher I could fill my students’ heads with all sorts of information and understanding about the content of Scripture, the tools of exegesis, the craft of sermon construction, the ability to communicate engagingly and convincingly etc., but never have taught them to preach.  In fact, it is possible that I could have made them worse preachers if they end up putting their confidence in the tools of the trade rather than in the thing that is most important about preaching.

 

Everything I am trying to teach them is focussed on filling up my student’s tool box in order to be able to prepare sermons throughout the rest of their ministry.  I am sure that this remains the key priority of theological education.

 

But, in order to preach, the preacher’s confidence should be in the God who is keen to communicate with the people he made.  The task of preaching is to let God do the speaking through His word.  I think that might be what the apostle Paul meant when he wrote:

2 Corinthians 5:20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.

 

1 Thessalonians 2:13 And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is at work in you who believe.

 

Should my students be confident in the tools of their trade?  Well, they should be able to use them skillfully and creatively in the same way a craftsman or an artist uses his lathe or brush.  But their confidence should be in God.  He is a God who makes and keeps promises.  Who reveals Himself through His Word.  When a preacher is faithful to that word congregations don’t just hear preachers, they hear God speaking through His word.

 

Consequently a congregation will soon become aware whether the preacher has met with the Lord as they have prepared their sermon.  They may be impressed when the preacher cuts and pastes a John Stott, Don Carson, John Piper (or whoever) sermon.  But they will not meet with God if the preacher has not.  The only way in which I can help mould and shape a new generation of preachers is by encouraging them to be deeply immersed in the Scriptures and ravenously seek the presence of God in the preparation and preaching.

 

In the context of an appeal not to harden their hearts towards the Word of the Lord, the writer to the Hebrews says: We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first (Hebrews 3:14).  I am cautious when we are overly dependent on our wit, our gift of illustration, our clever alliteration, our ability to tell a story, our PowerPoint or use of video clips.  A truly confident preacher is one who has confidence in God and allows Him to speak faithfully through his word.  This is a confidence which arises out of time spent labouring over the Scripture in God’s presence.  There are no tools for this task, only time and humility in God’s presence.