Preaching This Passage or That?

April 12, 2012April 10, 2012 / Peter Mead / 4 Comments

There is another subtle temptation all preachers face, potentially every time they preach. That is to preach a text other than the text they think they are preaching.

I saw this firsthand once when I listened to a series of lectures on the Pastoral Epistles from a lecturer who I could tell wished he had been given the more prestigious Romans class. Every chance he got, he was back to Romans. At the end of that series I didn’t feel like I knew the Pastorals much better than before, but maybe Romans!

There are several dangers in doing this sub-conscious leap from your passage to your preferred passage:

1. You will lack variety and richness in your ministry. That is, every passage will sound like the handful of your favourites that always trump the text before you. This does not make for a healthy and balanced diet for your church.

2. You will teach listeners that the Bible is very limited. They will start to copy you and soon be reading one thing and seeing their pet passages instead. Your people need the whole Bible for spiritual health.

3. You will lose integrity as a biblical interpreter. Your listeners will sub-consciously, if not consciously, start to recognize an inability to let the preaching passage mark your life and ministry. People typically have less respect for a pet passage preacher, or if not, they should.

4. You will miss out on the richness of the Bible. You will flatten it out into a 2-dimensional line drawing when actually there is a depth and richness throughout the canon. Even though you’re tempted to go elsewhere, study and preach the passage in front of you – it will be profitable!

Preaching What’s There But Not

April 11, 2012April 10, 2012 / Peter Mead / 1 Comment

I’ve mentioned it before, as have many others, but its worth another shot – don’t rush to “find a message” in your passage, be sure to find the message of the passage.

There are shortcuts that inevitably are attractive to busy and often tired preachers. Here are a few variations:

1. Harvesting Imperatives – you scan the passage and determine there are about three imperatives in the text. Bingo. Three point sermon. But what if those imperatives are all working together, but actually two-thirds of the passage has no imperative? There’s a lot more to making sense of a passage than just spotting terms that look like they might be imperatival.

2. Chunk Chopping – you scan the passage and determine a specific number of roughly equal chunks and chop the passage accordingly. Divide and conquer! Then each chunk becomes a point, and voila, a sermon! But what if there is an internal logic to the passage that isn’t simply about numbers of verses (there usually is something more going on!)

3. Highlight Spotlighting – you scan the passage for something “that will preach” and then you put the spotlight onto it. For instance, I heard a sermon where the preacher spent almost half the message extolling the virtues of getting out of financial debt, all because the passage made a passing transitional reference to having no debt except…well, except the one thing the passage actually was addressing (but that didn’t come through in the message, and nor did the actual message of the author).

4. Morals as Morales – you scan the passage, especially narratives, and identify a moral morale of the story, then preach that. Essentially you are using the text to make your “improving society” speech, but you are probably not actually preaching the text in its context. Certainly the Bible does address morality issues, but it does so in the context of a greater God-human framework than would lead to trite after-dinner morality speeches.

5. Shallow Starters – you say enough about a passage to look like you’ve said something about the passage, and then you get to say what it is you want to say. But this is preaching your own wisdom, why bother? I guarantee God’s content is better than yours.

There are other ways too, I’m sure, but it all boils down to this: do we believe that God is the greatest communicator? If so, then let’s do our best to actually preach the message of the passage, not just settle for a message from a passage.

Preaching Christ or His Benefits

April 10, 2012April 10, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

There are many subtle problems that can creep into our preaching. This week I’d like to highlight a few that could undermine preaching effectiveness.

Do we fall into preaching the benefits of a hidden Christ? That is, does Christ recede into the background as a “given” in our preaching, so that what we offer people is really all about them?

It is so easy to do this. It is not just the “you can be rich” preachers that do this. In Christ, after all, we are offered forgiveness, identity, status, hope, transformation, eternal life, heaven, etc. But these are all offered in Christ. They aren’t just handed over so that we can continue in our apparently blissful independence.

To see the danger here, I think we have to be much more alert to the shadows of Eden in which we live. We can easily think the Fall has left us with the propensity to do sins, but not realize just how pervasive and absolute that fallen state actually is.

Sometimes the gospel is presented along these lines: God’s perfect standard will not tolerate the slightest blemish. So because I stole a paperclip from work once, therefore my record is forever blighted unless I am forgiven by Christ. This “49/50 is still falling short of the glory of God” idea can convey a couple of false ideas. One is that God is petty. Another is that I only need a bit of help for salvation.

The truth is that all of us are at 0/50, since even our righteous deeds are as filthy rags. Even the good things we do are not good if they are done in fleshly independence from God.

Consequently if we preach the benefits of Christ and miss the greater matter of the relationship we were created for, then the fleshly impulse will drive listeners to make an expedient decision – i.e. trust Christ so that they can have the benefits of forgiveness, status, hope, etc. I sometimes refer to this as “get your ticket to heaven” preaching.

We have to see that this is still shot through with the sin of Genesis 3, rather than the wonder of a heart transforming gospel.

Let’s be careful when we preach not to make the subtle shift from preaching a gospel that draws people out of their self-love, to preaching a gospel that essentially reinforces that self-love.

Easter Saturday Convictions

April 7, 2012April 2, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

This week I have been reworking posts from previous years on the subject of Easter. Here is a post on the power of God for us to ponder on this Easter Saturday:

Let us be sure to preach the truth this Easter as preachers committed to preaching the crucified and risen Christ. We won’t tickle ears. We won’t manipulate responses. We won’t generate numbers. We won’t entertain. We won’t preach to please people who are not passionate about pleasing God. We won’t preach in the power of our own gifting, or enthusiasm, or natural abilities. We won’t preach to impress. We won’t preach to earn money. We won’t preach to fill time. We won’t preach because we feel we should, we will preach because we know we must.

We won’t preach to affirm people in their independence from God, nor to give hints for successful living, nor to recite historical fact alone. We won’t preach myth, or helpful tales with gentle morals, or strongly worded messages of morality. We won’t preach watered down niceties, nor implore people to try harder, nor settle for human level transformation.

We will preach the Word of God, we will preach fact. We will preach as those who know how little we bring to the salvation question, as those who know what an honour it is to represent God’s Word inspired and incarnate, as those who live in the shadow of the cross, and as those who live transformed by the Risen Christ.

We are not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for everyone who believes. So we bow before a God who would give everything on a horrifying Roman cross, and rise empowered by the Risen Christ to preach Him: Christ crucified, Christ risen, Christ alone.

Easter and Emotions

April 6, 2012April 2, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Easter is a season of emotion. Last year I posted under the title Easter as Restricted Emotions. Here are a couple of those paragraphs:

I remember being at a big Christian festival one easter years ago. For three days everyone milled around in their own separate worlds (as British people are prone to do, if we’re honest). Several thousand people avoiding and evading each other as if only the family unit or church group existed. Then on Easter Sunday morning everyone had a strange skip in their step, a smile on their face, a greeting for every passer by.

I know that Easter Sunday is an amazing day, but it did strike me as being a bit strange. How is it in your church? Is everyone super-sombre on Good Friday and then buzzing with joy on Easter Sunday morning? In one sense these emotions are appropriate, but isn’t the truth that emotions are massively mixed on both days?

Perhaps we should acknowledge the stirring of deep love and gratitude alongside the appropriate sombre feelings of Good Friday. Perhaps we should pause to remember why Christ had to rise from the dead, instead of simply celebrating as if Friday never happened.

The first followers had massively confused emotions on the first Easter Sunday. Fear mixed with delight and joy and sadness with celebration. Maybe some in our churches are wracked with guilt like Peter was that first Easter?

Just one other post from last year asks if we are actually going to preach the passage we read on Sunday. It is easy to read Luke or Mark and preach 1Corinthians 15. Click here to go there…

Easter and Apologetics

April 5, 2012April 2, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

As I trawl the archives for Easter posts from past years I find a few that speak of apologetics. Here is one I wrote after attending a conference focused on the resurrection in 2008:

Yesterday I attended a day conference about the resurrection held in Westminster Chapel. NT Wright and Gary Habermas were the speakers, along with a brief session with Antony Flew. He is the British philosopher who caused a real stir a few years ago by giving up his atheistic position to state that the evidence had convinced him of the existence of God. His position is essentially deist, but he was asked what it would take for him to accept the deity of Jesus. “Well, I suppose it would take something on the magnitude of what you’re talking about today, an otherwise impossible thing like a resurrection from the dead.” When asked the same question about the Holy Spirit, his response was the same – “If the resurrection is true then everything else would come with it.”

Here is a non-Christian thinking more clearly about Christianity than many Christians. How easy it is for us to slip into a very lazy apologetic, either directly or in testimony. It goes along the lines of, “Obviously I can’t prove my faith, it’s like a leap in the dark really, but you just believe and then you know it is true.”

This easter season, let’s be sure to clearly communicate that the Christian faith is founded very firmly on historical fact. The biblical record carries an unparalleled historicity. If Jesus rose from the dead, then the implications are massive, but if he didn’t really rise, then let’s give up and do something else with our lives. As preachers we are in the prime position to communicate the facts of easter and that the Christian message is not an invitation to take a leap into the dark. As preachers we may also need to sensitively follow up on a testimony given by someone else that both affirms them, but also clarifies that actually Christianity is based and built on fact.

Easter and Luther

April 4, 2012April 2, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

This week I’m relaxing slightly by trawling the archives for Easter posts from previous years. A couple of posts from 2009 included some of Luther on the subject of Easter. In The Aim of Preaching Easter I quoted Pasquarello’s comment on Luther’s preaching:

Luther’s homiletic aim was to demonstrate, by means of the Gospel, that the resurrection is more than an idle tale or a painted picture that evokes admiration and religious sentiment. . . . He hoped that in telling others the Easter story, the presence of the risen Christ might elicit faith’s true confession: “Christ is my Savior and King.”

Furthermore, it isn’t enough to preach Easter because it is Easter, we do it to change lives. Luther wrote,“Although Christians will identify themselves with Judas, Caiaphas, and Pilate – sinful, condemned actors in the Gospel story – there is another who took the sins of humanity on himself when they were hung around his neck. . . . And today, Easter Sunday, when we see him, they are gone; there is only righteousness and life, the Risen Christ who comes to share his gifts.” (Sermons, 125, cited in Pasquarello, 120)

What should our Easter preaching do for Christians? Again, same book,“Christians are now free to look away from their sins, from evil and death, and to fix their gaze upon Christ, which is the logic or grammar of faith.”

In The Power of Identification, also in 2009, I quoted Luther on the issue of who we naturally identify with in the Easter story:

“Although Christians will identify themselves with Judas, Caiaphas, and Pilate; sinful, condemned actors in the Gospel story – there is another who took the sins of humanity on himself when they were hung around his neck.”

Let me finish with my follow up comment from that post:

When it comes to the story of the crucifixion we find ourselves identifying with so many characters: Judas, Peter, fleeing disciples, Caiaphas, Pilate, Roman soldiers, Simon from Cyrene, mocking executioners, mocking crowds, mocking thief, repentant thief, followers standing at a distance, followers standing close by, even the Centurion. Yet the wonder of it all is that we are invited to identify with the perfect One hanging on that cross, for in that act He was most wondrously identifying with us.

Preaching Easter

April 3, 2012April 2, 2012 / Peter Mead / 2 Comments

Back in 2008 I blogged a series of four posts on Preaching Easter. Let me reiterate the points here with links back to the original series:

Part 1 – Back to Basics

Our regular listeners need to hear the basic Easter story. Jesus told his followers to share bread and wine, “in remembrance” of Him. In a sense the Easter story never grows old for Christ’s followers – it means too much to us. So as a preacher don’t feel pressure from somewhere to say something that is somehow clever or different.

Remember that irregular listeners need to hear the basic Easter story. At Easter time there is a higher likelihood of visitors. Maybe they feel they should go to church at Christmas and again at Easter. Maybe they are visiting family who go to your church and politely join their hosts. These people don’t need some kind of creatively opaque and nuanced message. They need Easter, crystal clear and applied.

Part 2 – Shock and Awe

It is tempting to take the hygienic out of Easter preaching, but overly graphic detail is unhelpful to some. I’ve heard some very effective presentations of the crucifixion that went into the medical details and the sickening truth of the event. I’ve also heard some where the “shock and awe” tactic backfired significantly. We must be aware of who will be listening and what will be most effective for them. Our goal is to present the biblical truth and call for response, not to repulse people with images that obscure the message.

Let’s try to find the right balance for our listeners this Easter. We need to tell the story well, we need to help people see and feel the reality of Calvary. But we also need to be careful to allow the Holy Spirit to stir the heart, rather than merely stirring the stomach by excessive shock and awe tactics.

Part 3 – Harmonization and the Gospels

Check all four gospels for accuracy in your preaching. If you are preaching from, say, Luke’s account, then it is helpful to check the other three. You wouldn’t want to undermine your preaching by telling the story in such a way that you make errors because you forgot to check the other gospels.

Preach the text rather than the event. Having checked the other gospels to make sure you are not presenting an error in your sermon, be sure to actually preach Luke’s account (or whichever you have as your preaching text). Seek to preach the emphasis of the text you are in.

Part 4 – Resurrection Implications

Before preaching the resurrection this Sunday, check your text for the implications that are present. For instance, in 1st Corinthians 15 we read that His resurrection gives us hope of our own (v16-20), the fear of death is removed (v26, 54-57), there are ethical implications (v32-34), motivation for ministry (v58), and even prompting to practical help for the poor (16:1, note Galatians 2:7-10).

Let’s preach the truth of the resurrection, let’s even allow our excitement to show, but let’s also try to be specifically clear in presenting the implications. It is easy in our excitement about the event to fall short in our relevance and application. Truly, everything is changed because Jesus rose from the dead. Part of our task is to help people see how that is true.

Easter Musings

April 2, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Today I have posted some reflections from yesterday’s sermon. Naturally with this week being Easter it is even more appropriate to focus on Christ crucified. So today I’ll link to the Cor Deo post, then the rest of the week I am going to re-work some Easter posts from previous years. What are your particular thoughts concerning Easter this year?

Saturday Short Thought: Profound Trust

March 31, 2012March 31, 2012 / Peter Mead / Leave a comment

This week I’ve been pondering the factors involved in preaching profoundly. That is, how do we pursue the kind of substantially transformative messages that are fitting for Christian pulpit ministry. I suspect we’ve barely scratched the surface. I’d like to add one more thought today.

Yesterday I enjoyed lunch with a good friend and we were talking about preaching among other things. We were thinking about how preaching can be part of how we define ourselves as a movement – for instance, in the past it might have been in reaction to Catholic theology, or more recently in reaction to Liberal theology. Consequently our preaching can carry a subtle desire to demonstrate that we take the Bible seriously. But then a mis-step can occur.

In our attempt to demonstrate a commitment to the Bible, we can create sermons that are actually an artificial structure placed on the passage. That is, we seek to show our approach to the Bible and end up transmitting our own cleverness in serious sermon construction. The Bible can almost become an exhibit for our trustworthy theology, or for our view of the Bible. There is a danger in this.

The danger is that we preach our own message from a passage, rather than preaching the message of the passage.

I am convinced that life-changingly profound preaching is not about a deep trust in a specific sermonic form, or even in conveying our system of theology, but rather in a profound trust in the Word of God. When we do everything we can to present the text God has given us, to re-present it to our listeners so that our message not only says what the text says, but does what the text was intended to do, then I think we are getting closer to profound preaching.

Its a good question to ask ourselves before we preach tomorrow: am I trusting in my system of theology, in the sermonic form I believe reflects “true preaching,” or even in the compelling illustrative material I’ve come up with? Or am I really trusting in the biblical passage to work deeply in our lives as we ponder the passage together?