How to . . . ?

Preaching Psalms

/ Peter Mead / 10 Comments

The other day I preached a Psalm in a University Bible study. A young lady came up afterwards and said, “I always expect to get something from the Gospels or Epistles, but I don’t expect much from the Psalms, but you brought that to life!” Now obviously I didn’t “bring it to life” since the Word of God is very much alive without needing my medical attention, but it raised an issue in my mind. What are some key points to remember in preaching a psalm?

1. Don’t let the outline kill the sermon – Often the work in the study is brought into the pulpit in the form of an outline which dominates the message. This has a tendency to make an emotive piece of writing (almost all psalms) into a source of intellectual thought and didactic material. With the possible exception of some wisdom psalms, you are not preaching a carefully constructed and tightly argued piece of thought. You are preaching the outpouring of a writer’s heart with all the emotion, reaction to God and circumstances, as well as theological perspective and so on. (This does not deny that Psalms are usually extremely carefully constructed, just that they often go beyond reasoned arguments, cognitive understanding of facts and propositional thought.)

2. If possible, go with the flow – I’m amazed how quickly some preachers resort to rearranging material. There can be good reasons to do this, but the default approach should be to study the flow of thought and preach that flow. Many psalms, when studied with reference to flow, have an almost narrative quality to them. This is where the outline helps you as the preacher move effectively through the text.

3. Take advantage of the great asset of poetic literature…imagery! – Many psalms are full of powerful imagery. With a little clarification, imagination or description, the images built in to a psalm will often add vivid colour to a sermon. Be careful not to just explain imagery so that it remains sitting on the page before your congregation – words understood are not as effective as images felt or experienced. What was it like for Asaph to come to God’s sanctuary again in Psalm 73. The constant pursuit by goodness and mercy is a deeply moving truth in Psalm 23. The barren woman given children goes through intense extremes of emotion in the space of a few words in Psalm 113. It is easy to present analysis of imagery, but develop the skill to tell it so it is both felt and understood.

4. Recreate mood, not just meaning – Since Psalms are poetic or hymnic, they do not merely convey information, but also they stir feelings, they convey a mood. In fact, many Psalms are built around the shift in tone or mood between one section and the next. It is not fair to David to preach the desperation of Psalm 22 without the confident trust of the last dozen verses. Psalm 73 turns completely on one verse. Often we preach both parts of a psalm with the same “mood” or lack of it. Or we turn a psalm of celebratory praise into a serious exhortation to worship. Think about how to enter in to, and recreate in some way for your hearers, the mood inherent in the psalm. A psalm that is felt and understood will make a far deeper impression than a psalm that is merely analysed and understood. In fact, you have to question whether analysis alone can lead to understanding poetic literature.

5. Carefully present relevance continually – The literature is written in a form that is foreign to our understanding of poetry, in a culture that is several millennia away from our own. Be careful to relate the text to our own experience whenever appropriate. A study of David’s experience through a psalm, ending with brief points of application only at the end, is likely to be a flat sermon. It is better to share that experience through the psalm, moving back and forth between 1000BC and 2007AD throughout.

(Peter has also commented on this post)

Preaching OT – one more tip

/ Mike Roth / 2 Comments

Fantastic jump into a pool of muddy water Peter! It seems as though many preaching practitioners prefer the easy way out when it comes to communicating the Old Testament through homily. Short-cuts of allegorizing, spiritualizing, exhortation to imitate characters, moralizing or, with OT texts, jumping to Jesus is common and simultaneously disastrous. Your tips are a wonderful beginning point. They are helpful in assisting the preacher to think bigger and better!

Here is another tip that relates to preaching OT narrative and other biblical genres as well. Sidney Greidanus gives voice to this tip in his book, The Modern Preacher and The Ancient Text. In it, he introduces a theocentric versus anthropocentric hermeneutic for homiletics. Though this is nothing new, and has certainly been addressed in homiletic/literary circles before by Ryken, Von Rad and the like, the central idea is fundamental to consider when preaching OT narrative.

According to Greidanus, God is the central character and not any other – Saul, David, Elijah, Nehemiah are all secondary. More than this, Greidanus argues that narrative (to be clear, all of Scripture) is making a theocentric point not an anthropocentric point. Now, I am not convinced that this is the case all of the time, in every pericope of Scripture. However, it is fodder for thought.

When considering the point of narrative, it is not enough to simply consider the characters. It is not enough to consider plot – background, inciting incident, rising action, climax and denouement. All of these aspects of narrative are necessary to interpretation, however, without consideration of God, his role, interaction, characterization, etc. narrative becomes nothing more than human-driven moralizing. Certainly, we hold Scripture to a higher standard than this. It is why we refer to Scripture as Revelation, not Humanities 101.

So, enough pontificating in my first post! Here is a summary:

– When working at preaching an OT narrative, do not forget to consider God.
– Ask, what is being said about God?
– Think about how the narrative and its characters depict God.
– Wrestle with how the points being made about God within the narrative contour and give shape to what the secondary characters value and how they live.
– Finally, being that we are all characters similar to Saul, David, Elijah and Nehemiah – a part of the same biblical story, how do we relate to this God?

Missing in Action

/ Peter Mead / 1 Comment

Just a short post that might stimulate a different type of discussion. When I listen to preachers, or evaluate my own preaching, I find some things are often missing in the pulpit. For example, Robinson highlights the importance of the “Big Idea” and the “Sermon Purpose” in his book Biblical Preaching. This is essentially the same thing as Thomas Long’s two terms, “Focus” and “Function” – what a sermon intends to say and do. (Long, The Witness of Preaching, 2d ed.) These two things are often MIA – and how sermons suffer for it! While these two are two of the most important things that can go MIA, there are others too…

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One tip for preaching narrative (ok, two tips!)

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Have been thinking about the issue of preaching narratives (stories) from the Old Testament. Actually, much of this would also apply to preaching from the gospels or Acts as well. It is tempting to take the short-cuts of allegorizing, spiritualizing, exhortation to imitate characters, moralizing or, with OT texts, jumping to Jesus. Maybe each of these terms need to be considered on their own. But here’s a thought that is helpful to me. It is easy when studying a passage to focus entirely on the text itself (the characters, plot, tension, problem, resolution, etc.)

Tip one, study three contexts. To understand the author’s intention in a specific story, it is important to understand it in the context of the section and the context of the whole book. Biblical writers wove stories (and other forms of writing) together for a larger purpose, there is no random collection of narratives. So be sure to think about the writer’s purpose by considering the story itself, the section it’s in, and the whole book.

This leads to tip two, the one I was thinking of when I started this post! When thinking about how your audience relates to the text, don’t compare them primarily with the characters in the story (although that can be fruitful), but rather compare them with the original audience for the text. How much is your audience this Sunday like the original recipients of the biblical text and in need of the same message?

What to do with an Old Testament story?

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Last Sunday I preached in a small church not far from us. I was assigned a passage that I would never choose for myself, at least not as a one-off message. The raising of the Shunammite’s son by Elisha (2Kings 4:8-37). There are always short-cuts when preaching an Old Testament narrative, but I’m not comfortable with them. For example it is easy to tell a story and then jump to Jesus (and preach a New Testament message). But the story stood as inspired long before the New Testament was added. Or it is easy to tell the story, ignore the theological context/content and then draw out some human-level moral principle – “so let’s be like person X.” Again, that usually is not the point of the narrative. The challenge is to avoid the short-cuts and preach the intended truth of the passage in its context with the full theological implication, but to also be sure to apply the message specifically to the listener today. On one hand, it is easy to do a historical lecture, but leave your listeners untouched by the truth of the passage. On the other hand, it is easy to springboard from a story to all sorts of possible applications that do not honor the meaning and purpose of the passage. And if there can be a third hand, then it is also relatively easy to force Jesus and the New Testament back into the Old Testament and end up preaching a different passage. So how to avoid the easy options and instead preach the passage itself?