The purposes of preaching.
Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany--Fifth Sunday in Lent, Series CHow would you define the purpose of preaching? I am spending my sabbatical writing a book that I hope will help preachers and parishioners talk together about their understandings of the sermon's purpose, in order to identify the faith convictions that provide the basis of their various understandings and explore the implications of those convictions for congregational life and mission. In formulating my own understanding of the purposes of preaching, I've discovered that the list seems to be ever-expanding. Preaching brings unbelievers to Christ or the unchurched into the congregation. Preaching might be a doctrinal lesson for the faithful, a witness to the Good News of Christ, an exposition of Scripture, a pronouncement of divine judgment, or an assurance of God's love.
As I write these words, I have just completed a three-month preaching assignment in the same congregation, a real treat for a seminary preaching professor. Personally, preaching in the same congregation on a weekly basis keeps me open to, connected with, and dependent on God. For me, a purpose of preaching is to keep me spiritually disciplined.
In a collection of essays titled Purposes of Preaching (ed. Jana Childers [Chalice, 2004]), "leading scholars in the field of homiletics, all of them powerful preachers," describe the purposes of preaching in North America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Their list includes (1) theological interpretation of life through conversation; (2) exorcizing and building up the community of faith in practices of a discipleship; (3) opening people to God's ongoing and unfolding work in the world revealed in Jesus Christ; (4) presenting the acknowledged word of God in such a way that the listener or observer senses the impulse of change or conversion in his or her own life; (5) forming Christians for and calling Christians to mission; (6) speaking what cannot be spoken, empowering and being silenced by those who have little voice and even less power; (7) keeping in touch with God; (8) disrupting life to create a space in which the Holy Spirit can work, the community can rethink, revisit, and receive; and (9) communicating faith.
What would you and the people in your congregation say is the purpose of preaching? Reflecting on the "experts'" list of preaching's purposes, and adding my own ideas to it, reminds me that, however we name its purpose, preaching ought to do what God is doing-in the text and in the world, but mostly in the gospel, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Pastor Timothy V. Olson, author of this set of Preaching Helps, reminds me of the old saying that the purpose of preaching is to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." But Pastor Olson takes things a step farther, highlighting for us that, in the readings assigned for the final Sundays after Epiphany and Lent, God turns everything upside down. He reminds us that "the pervasive theme of reversal runs throughout Luke. From Mary's song to the resurrection itself, Luke proclaims that not only are changes on the horizon of history but that the coming day will turn the world upside down. The 'real' world is actually inverted and will be righted in the end, by God."
As Christians, God confronts us, undoes our pretensions, gives us divine work to do, and then accompanies us into a world with a message that may or may not be welcome but is nevertheless a means of announcing God's reign. We are undone by the presence of God. Without the cross, the brilliant light of God's presence causes us to fall on our faces. Because of the cross, as Paul says, that light comes so close it is reflected in us. We are somehow cleansed, somehow made worthy, somehow selected to be God's messengers. Epiphany happens when we find ourselves living prematurely upside down.
Pastor Olson also turns the Lenten theme of repentance upside down--or perhaps restores it to right side up. Repentance is less about giving up, making amends, doing right, and changing our ways. Repentance is about turning around from our own way of being and living to see the new thing God is doing, the change that God is making, the reversal that God is bringing. Pastor Olson reminds us that only the repentant will be able to see how God will turn the devastation to new life. The Lenten call to repentance, then, is "an opportunity for each and every one of the people to reflect, turn, stand before the Lord in humility, and see what God will do."
Of course, it is not enough for preaching to do what God is doing, in this case turning everything upside down. Preaching ought to do what God is doing in the way that God does it. The invitation of these seasons is to preach in ways that help our people to look for God's epiphanies in themselves rather than on remote mountaintops and to repent in ways that lead them to look to God rather than concentrate on themselves.
Pastor Olson is Minister of Word and Sacrament at Christ Lutheran Church in Belvidere, Illinois. He is a graduate of Trinity Lutheran Seminary (M.Div., S.T.M.) and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (D.Min.). He serves as an adjunct faculty advisor in the ACTS Doctor of Ministry in Preaching program and an instructor in Christian Doctrine and Early Church History in the Diakonia Program of the Northern Illinois Synod.
I pray that preaching Epiphany and Lent finds you turning to see what God is doing as you lean into God's inverted reign!
Craig A. Satterlee, Editor of Preaching Helps
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| Author: | Satterlee, Craig A. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Currents in Theology and Mission |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUUE |
| Date: | Dec 1, 2006 |
| Words: | 944 |
| Previous Article: | Jesus the pray-er. |
| Next Article: | Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany: February 4, 2007. |
| Topics: | |