A Lively, Living Word
Among the most fundamental lessons is the necessi¬ty for honest, truthful living in harmony with God’s actions as attested to by the Scriptures. A church council in a Masai village in Kenya purchased land on which they planned to build a church campus. They laid out the foundation, but before construction could progress any further a drought struck the area. The village council asked the church if they could take back the land in order to raise crops to feed the people. The church council agreed. As the villagers started planting seeds, their eld¬ers asked the church council why they had not asked for a refund of the money they paid for the land. The church replied that feeding and saving the people was more important than money. Led by the village council, the entire village became members of the church. What is the reputation of the church in which you preach? What is your reputation?
Lively preaching may evolve over many years to transform a given church’s reputation in a community. What took a few months in a newly evangelized Kenyan village may take a decade or even longer in a conservative suburb. Dedicated pastoral and congregational leader¬ship that produces real transformation takes an inner liveliness and thoroughgoing integrity. Transformation by a lively preaching of God’s Living Word is not in any sense cheap, easy grace.
Communities of complacent, apathetic people respond best to honest, real enactments of God’s truth. We tend to learn more from doing than from listening. Listening to the Word is how we come to take the Word seriously, as a matter of vital, lively concern to us. The text of a sermon should concern us personally. Preachers must be lively children at play. How can we change from readers of deadly dull essays to lively preachers of sermons? Certainly honesty — however inherently uncomfortable it might be — can enliven both preaching and the reac¬tion to the sermon.
I recall a teenager who preached a thought-provok¬ing Youth Sunday sermon. She asked us as the congrega¬tion to ask ourselves, “What are three things that come to mind when we think homeless people? And what three things come to mind when we think of race?” After her wonderful sermon, I asked children in the church to share their answers to her questions, and the range of their responses, however uncomfortable some of them might have been, built upon the vitality of the sermon. There was no cheap grace in this approach, either.
Lively, living proclamations of God’s actions provoke people out of apathy in response to the Biblical texts. One Sunday I preached the lesson in which Jesus called peo¬ple to leave everything and follow him. I gave an invita¬tion to discipleship at the conclusion of the sermon. A woman came forward to dedicate her life to Jesus. She wanted to follow him with her entire being. She had been provoked out her apathy and was ready to move toward concerted commitment.
For three months she came to see me almost every week. She devoured the spiritual classics, the daily Bible readings, and anything else I could give her that would enable her to form a living bond with God. Piece by piece, as the Spirit moved in her and she found a way to stop “just making a living” and to dramatically redirect her life to follow her genuine life’s desire — creating a safe haven for wild animals injured by encroachment. Lively preaching of the Word opens the door for some¬one to begin a lifelong journey of transformation by God. The sermon was only the tip of an iceberg: no easy, cheap grace, please.
Preaching is a craft with tools and technique. Using tools and practicing technique always feels strange at first, but as we get used to them, they become habitual, integrated parts of our natural personalities. Voice train¬ing, I recall, felt really strange. I had to breathe, form words in my mouth, project, and engage resonators, all of which felt unnatural. I remember a music teacher telling me, First, play the notes. Second, play the phrases. Third, interpret the phrases dynamically. Fourth, allow the music to play you. Preaching involves a very similar process.
While I was teaching homiletics, I taught the time-honored concept that every sermon should have the fol¬lowing four theological ingredients:
The action of God attested to by the text. There can¬not be a single, isolated instance of kerygma. God cannot be limited to just one action. The Bible attests to many divine actions. Our journey into Jesus Christ may start through a narrow opening, but inevitably becomes ever broader. If Jesus was the only door to God’s sheepfold, the door is open to all who come in. The text pointed beyond the translation toward an encounter with God, an enlivening epiphany.
Every time the Bible attests to an action of God, there is something that that action has to teach us. The instruc¬tion that we “take away” from Scripture is a result of what we bring to the encounter with God’s Word and the spe¬cific context — time, culture, and challenges — that sur¬round us. Contexts vary widely, but we have something we can learn to apply to our life from the actions of God. I call this the Didache, or teaching function of the Biblical text. The disagreements among Biblical books of the same historical periods arise from the various ways their communities and authors performed this task of extract¬ing the lessons of Scripture in their specific contexts. How a preacher allowed the Biblical authors and editors to disagree revealed his or her theological maturity. I always energized congregations by making them aware of the lively disagreements among the Biblical materials.
God’s actions change the people involved and they form a community around God’s action. That is Koinonia,or fellowship, and it is a very important aspect of any ser¬mon. If the only thing that we succeed in doing with our preaching is to encourage people to care for the same people they have known for three generations, what good have we done? {quotes align=right}Powerful preaching moves beyond the buddy-ship of complacency to a spirited fellowship of authentic people being transformed by God’s lively Word.{/quotes}
Such a fellowship reaches out to change the world. I call that part of the sermon, Diakonia, or service. Quite a few pastors have preached so movingly in the wake of the initial Hurricane Katrina disaster and the lingering suffering in that area that literally hundreds of congrega¬tions and church groups have been inspired to grow new flesh on old bones and go to New Orleans and Mississippi and help out directly.
Love is the liveliest living Word of all, and the uncon¬trollable liveliness of God involves us in the most passionate lovemaking of all. The Song of Solomon describes the sort of uncontrollable, loving passion a couple of lovers have for each other. The apostle Paul wrote that such passionate, uncontrollable love, an all-consuming flame, is the gift of the Holy Spirit that mandates that a couple marry one another. (1 Cor 7.9, 14, 36) God called us to love people.
Baptism binds everyone who receives the sacrament into a community of love. I taught a class for storefront preachers and other preachers with no formal training during my years in Atlanta. One night we discussed Jesus’ parable in which God said that when the blessed visited prisoners, they visited God. (Mt 25:39–40) One of the brothers said, “I visit the Atlanta city jail, the Fulton County jail, the Georgia state prison, and the fed¬eral penitentiary every week.” I asked why he did so much and he said, “Because someone visited me when I was in prison.”
What could preachers authentically bring to the privilege, task, and duty of proclaiming the living Word? Can authentic people enliven sermons and liturgies real¬istically? Could lively preachers serve God’s action by honestly enacting the truth of God’s action to provoke people out of apathy to enact God’s actions under the circumstances of Biblical texts and transform reality? Homilia, the Greek root of “homiletics,” means conversa¬tion; try engaging members of your worship team and congregation in lively conversations about the Word and discover how lively God’s Word can become. It will change everything.
