Preach the Word – The New Homiletic

Themes in Current Homiletical Theory

The New Homiletic

As Fred Craddock looked out at the American mainline church around 1970, he saw some major problems. People were not listening or attending church. People did not care about an inspired, authoritative Bible or about societal institutions—especially after the countercultural movements in the tumultuous 1960s. All this could not help but affect the American pulpit. This was the time when, according to the homiletical historian Hughes Oliphant Old, the great era of American preaching simply was coming to an end.1 The American pulpit needed something new. So Craddock helped launch this grand movement away from deductive, authoritative preaching. He was convinced preaching needed to be done in an inductive way much more sensitive to the hearer—as one without authority.

So began the New Homiletic.2 As with any movement, it is oversimplistic to credit one person or book with starting everything, but Craddock’s As One Without Authority—first published in 1971 and now in its fourth edition—was certainly formative. Craddock is critical of the deductive, theme-and-subparts style of preaching that was based on classical rhetoric and had long been part of Christian preaching. He laments that preachers have used this form for too long, “The sermons of our time have, with few exceptions, kept the same form. … Either preachers have access to a world that is neat, orderly, and unified, which gives their sermons their form, or they are out of date and out of touch with the way it is. In either case, they do not communicate.”3 Not only does deductive preaching not conform to the messy complexities of our modern world, but it also does not conform to educational theory, which is based on discussion and participation—not lectures.4 Expository preaching is “guilty of archaism,” the Scriptures “shackle the minister,” and the sermon still has the traditional view of “clearly discernible authoritarianism.”5 However, once preachers abandon the three-point, Aristotelian deductive method, they will stand “at the threshold of new pulpit power.”6 As with many New Homileticians, Craddock often does a good job of identifying problems. His proposed solutions could be questioned. No matter what you make of him, Craddock’s influence is indelible. As William Bronsend said when Craddock recently died, he “changed everything about preaching at a time when nothing less would do.”7

Basic Features of the New Homiletic

While the New Homiletic is a broad movement with differences within it, here are some basic features:

  1. the turn to the hearer
  2. the shift from deductive to inductive/narrative
  3. the sermon as an existential word event8

Now this might seem that all the New Homiletic is trying to accomplish is a better job of application. That is not the case. Much more is at work here. The New Homiletic arose from the New Hermeneutic and twentieth-century existential theology. That means the turn to the hearer is not so much meant to apply the text to the congregation but to allow the congregation to participate in the meaning of the text, as the text is recreated through the church’s continual experience and revelation. Craddock justifies this on the important role of the hearer in communication theory, in Luther’s theology of the priesthood of all believers, in the church’s role in canonizing Scripture, and in his own synergistic theology.9 Simply put, Craddock does not believe in forcing preconceived conclusions onto the text but in allowing the hearers to come to their own conclusions.10

I am concerned that confessional preachers will overreact to the New Homiletic.

So certainly, for us who are committed to the inspiration of Scriptures, who emphasize the Spirit’s work in creating and strengthening faith through the proclamation of the Word, who believe preaching comes with authority (Jer 23:29), I am by no means giving the New Homiletic a full endorsement. Even Craddock himself wondered later in his life if he moved too far away from textual content.11 So what to make of the New Homiletic? I am not concerned that confessional pastors will not be able to spot these considerable doctrinal differences. I am concerned that confessional pastors will overreact to the New Homiletic, throw the baby out with the bathwater, and miss out on some current homiletical insights that could really aid them in preaching to a culture that distrusts authority.

Inductive Preaching

To go back to the historical background of the origin of the New Homiletic, Craddock and others were on to something when they recognized two things: twentieth-century American culture had become resistant to deductive, authoritarian, propositional truth statements, and inductive or narrative communication is uniquely situated to bypass the barriers a tuned-out (or hardened) culture puts up to scriptural proclamation. (To allay the fears of confessional preachers, we will see in this series’ next article that narrative and inductive communication is affirmed in Scripture itself.) Many people within America’s diverse culture hear classic, deductive preaching and retort, “Who are you to assume that the norm for your truth claims is normative for everyone else?” If confessional preachers are not sensitive to this and their thunderous claim, “Thus says the Word of the Lord,” becomes perceived not just as an authoritative message but authoritarianism, then their audience is tuned out from the very beginning, and any hope they will actually pay attention is lost. Confessional preachers are rightfully concerned about preaching the text, but at the end of the day, we also want the text to be heard. Maybe the issue is not so much the message but the way in which the message is delivered. Here the New Homiletic has much to teach us, especially for those who use deductive preaching so much that we routinely say what we will say (introduction), say it (body), and say what we just said (conclusion). If that’s all people hear all the time, they rightfully start to get tired of it—and we preachers need to look in the mirror. To solve this problem, we need to find a way to pair an infallible Bible with the homiletical approaches of Craddock and Lowry.

Inductive or narrative communication is uniquely situated to bypass the barriers a tuned-out (or hardened) culture puts up to scriptural proclamation.

Fred Craddock’s Narrative Preaching

Fred Craddock goes down as the father of narrative preaching. This movement, so central to the New Homiletic, has now taken over the homiletical world. And that is, largely so, a good thing. As Old says, “There is something obviously true about this movement. One of the basic responsibilities of the preacher is to recount the story, the Heilsgeschichte, the history of salvation. … Narrative preaching does not exhaust the preaching vocation … but storytelling is of the essence of preaching.”12 It is not too much of an exaggeration to say a preacher is as good as his storytelling. Not to mention, the vast majority of Scripture is narrative. In particular, the entire OT is essentially a narrative of God’s action from creation up until he was about to send the Savior into the world. On Thanksgiving Eve in 2019, I custom designed the service around five psalms of thanksgiving. I preached on Psalm 136, which is unique in two ways: the antiphonal refrain (“His love endures forever”) repeats over and over, and the whole psalm is a narrative recounting Israel’s history. So my sermon employed Craddock’s concept of overhearing13 to layer the sermon with multiple communicative aspects:

  1. The introduction artfully sketched the scene as the Israelites gather for Passover and sing this psalm antiphonally in the temple (as we sung it in church).
  2. The exposition is framed from the perspective of an Israelite head of household, who tells his family the story of God’s love over the table.
  3. The application is framed from the perspective of an Israelite head of household, who shares what he would say to the people of America today.
  4. The conclusion alludes back to the introduction and sketches the scene as my congregation gathers with their families for Thanksgiving and then closes by asking them which stories they will tell.14

Now notice exactly what I’m doing. I’m crafting the sermon as if we were all a fly on the wall during the Jewish holiday of Passover thousands of years ago. For the majority of the sermon, I’m acting like I’m not even talking to my own congregation. I’m just talking in first person like an Israelite head of household. Everyone else is just listening in. I do not address them until the very end. That’s the whole point. I’m purposely inviting them to take their barriers down, but all along, they are indirectly hearing the gospel in story form.

Eugene Lowry’s Loop

Eugene Lowry studied under Craddock and is another New Homiletician. Since his approach is now part of senior homiletics at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary, I will focus on his book. Lowry’s approach is a five-part inductive form, often called a “Lowry Loop:”

  1. Upsetting the Equilibrium
  2. Analyzing the Discrepancy
  3. Disclosing the Key to Resolution
  4. Experiencing the Gospel
  5. Anticipating the Consequences15

At first glance, it might seem Lowry’s approach goes like this: problems–PROBLEM–SOLUTION–solutions. Or it might seem it is a classic Lutheran evangelistic presentation—a “God’s Great Exchange” of sorts—that goes from sin, to grace, to faith, to fruits of faith. That is an oversimplification of Lowry. Lowry’s loop is a highly disciplined, yet highly artful, communicative form that first embraces the hearers’ natural objections to the text, leads them to eventually see how their own assumptions will lead to dead ends, then exposes the hearers to something they had never considered before, then leads them to see how this something new is a richer and fuller understanding, and finally explores how all this will impact their lives.

There are two make-or-break parts of a Lowry Loop that are absolutely crucial: the first and the third. The opening is not meant to create interest in the subject matter in the audience, as in traditional forms of oratory. The congregation immediately needs to sense, “Oh, there’s a problem here.” More specifically, they need to sense, “There’s a problem with the text.” A Lowry Loop goes much more quickly to the text than traditional preaching, which may not quote the Bible until much later in the exposition/body. For example, here is the opening of my Thanksgiving Eve sermon from 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, preached as a Lowry Loop in 2020 in the height of COVID:

These unbearable words from Scripture seem so trite in their brevity and so offensive in their simplicity. Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. Seriously? Nothing more said than that? No caveats, no nuances, no exceptions? Always thankful? Even in the worst year ever? People are sick and dying, yet again. Hospitals are on the brink, yet again. PPP is running low, yet again. Students have been sent home, yet again. Churches are going virtual, yet again. A stay-at-home order has been issued, yet again. Restaurants are shuttered, yet again. Twelve million are set to lose unemployment benefits after Christmas unless another relief package somehow gets passed in a lame duck session. People don’t know where they’ll live, what they’ll eat, or how they’ll stay sane. Families are torn apart in an emotional back-and-forth between CDC guidelines and precious holiday traditions. … And God wants us to be thankful in a year like this? The only thing to be thankful for is New Year’s Eve, when we can kick the worst year ever to the curb and kiss it goodbye!

Now notice exactly what I’m doing. I’m embracing the hearer’s natural objection to the text and saying (at least for now), “You’re right. You’re right to be mad about this text. I agree with you, and I’m going to go along with you to see where this takes us.” So I find a Lowry Loop particularly useful, not only in preaching NT texts that are obviously inductive in form (like 1 Corinthians 15:12-22), but especially in preaching offensive OT texts that grind against Western sensibilities (like Isaiah 45:18-25).16 You need to nail a Lowry Loop in the opening few sentences, or else it’s doomed from the start.

We need to find a way to pair an infallible Bible with the homiletical approaches of Craddock and Lowry.

Another absolutely crucial part of a Lowry Loop is the third part. This is where the entire sermon, rhetorically speaking, turns. After embracing the hearer’s natural objections to the text, and then getting deeper and deeper into the mess along with them, this is the grand “aha!” moment. Here is where you say, “If A (your objection) is true, why is not B (what you sense is right) also true? Maybe your assumptions have been flawed from the get-go. Maybe you haven’t considered all the options. What about this?” Here is how my Thanksgiving Eve sermon continued:

Here’s the ultimate issue. This year it’s easy to create a long list of things we aren’t thankful for: death, sickness, unemployment, stress, virtual learning, curtailed freedom. If you take that approach, there’s always things you can find to not be thankful for. For argument’s sake, let’s even envision a normal year. The college graduate, instead of focusing on a diploma from a great university, focuses on how she doesn’t have a house. The busy parent, instead of focusing on the blessing of children, focuses on how they can’t behave. The successful person, instead of focusing on a very sufficient paycheck, focuses on how he doesn’t earn six figures. That’s the perpetual problem: focusing on things we don’t have, instead of focusing on what we do have. So if we can’t be thankful in difficult situations, we actually won’t be thankful in any situation! We’ll always find more things we don’t have, more things to complain about. You’ll be digging yourself a vicious hole that will result in stress, envy, and discontentment in the worst year ever and in the best year ever. What’s the one thing that can get us out of this hole? What is the one unchanging constant you can be thankful for—no matter what? That would make all the difference!17

This is the grand “aha!” moment—where the lightbulb goes off and the epiphany occurs. The exclamation point in your manuscript needs to be reflected in some drama and excitement in your delivery. You need to absolutely nail this part of a Lowry Loop, or else the sermon will just fizzle.

Inductive preaching does not give the preacher more freedom. It forces the preacher to be more constrained—to only give away certain things at certain times.

To be clear, inductive preaching is a nuanced facet of current homiletics. You have to know what you are doing. Inductive preaching does not give the preacher more freedom, as if he can just take the sermon in whatever direction he wants, because he’s bringing the hearers along for the ride, and the ride is what counts. Inductive preaching forces the preacher to be more constrained—to only give away certain things at certain times. If you are going to attempt a Lowry Loop, you need to follow it precisely and do it the way it is intended. Done poorly, a Lowry Loop becomes an incoherent mess that leaves hearers completely confused. Done well, a Lowry Loop becomes some of the most powerful preaching you will ever hear.

The New Homiletic has profoundly shaped homiletics in the last fifty years. To be conversant with current homiletical theory, one has to be familiar with the New Homiletic.18 This requires preachers to read widely and get outside the comfortable parameters of theologians who have a commitment to scriptural infallibility. If preachers in our circles can do the hard work of reading with discernment and sift the wheat from the chaff, they will come away with greater flexibility in preaching an authoritative Word in an intriguing, inductive way to a skeptical world.

Written by Jacob Haag

Rev. Dr. Haag serves at Redeemer Lutheran Church, Ann Arbor, MI. His doctorate is from Westminster Theological Seminary with research in New Testament and preaching. His research project was entitled “Evangelical Exhortation: Paraenesis in the Epistles as Rhetorical Model for Preaching Sanctification.” He also serves on the Michigan District Commission on Worship.


1 Hughes Oliphant Old, Our Own Time, vol. 7 of The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 1-2.
2 The term was coined in 1965 by David Randolph at the first meeting of the Academy of Homiletics.
3 Craddock, As One Without Authority, 4th ed. (St. Louis: Chalice, 2001), 13.
4 Craddock, As One Without Authority, 15.
5 Craddock, As One Without Authority, 17.
6 Craddock, As One Without Authority, 38.
7 William Brosend, “Something Else Is Lacking: Remembering Fred B. Craddock,” Anglican Theological Review 101, no. 1 (2019): 129.
8 O. Wesley Allen, “Introduction: The Pillars of the New Homiletic,” in The Renewed Homiletic, ed. O. Wesley Allen and David Buttrick (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 7-9.
9 Fred Craddock, Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1985), 28, 39, 86; Craddock, As One Without Authority, 18, 51, 96-97; Fred Craddock, “The Sermon and the Uses of Scripture,” Theology Today 42, no. 1 (April 1985): 9.
10 Craddock, “Inductive Preaching Renewed,” in The Renewed Homiletic, 44-45.
11 Craddock, “Inductive Preaching Renewed,” 50.
12 Old, Our Own Time, 30.
13 See Craddock, Overhearing the Gospel (St. Louis: Chalice, 2002).
14 The entire sermon is available on the Commission on Worship website: worship.welsrc.net/download-worship/preach-the-word-volume-28
15 Eugene L. Lowry, The Homiletical Plot: The Sermon as Narrative Art Form, Expanded ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000).
16 See my example sermons on the Commission on Worship website, endnote 14.
17 See my example sermon on the Commission on Worship website, endnote 14. (The two midweek Thanksgiving Eve sermons above are significantly shorter than my normal Sunday sermons.)
18 Bryan Chapell has a section on the New Homiletic in Christ-Centered Preaching, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 162–168.


For Further Study
  • For more on Fred Craddock and the theology of the New Homiletic, see my article in Wisconsin Lutheran Quarterly (117:3), “A New Look at the New Homiletic: An Evaluation of Fred Craddock’s Bibliology”
  • For more on alternate sermon styles, consider Prof. Jon Micheel’s Summer Quarter course, “Survey of Sermon Structures”

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Preach the Word – Redemptive-Historical Preaching

Themes in Current Homiletical Theory

Redemptive-Historical Preaching

Charles Spurgeon is one of the most famous preachers in homiletical history. In his massive seven-volume set on the history of preaching, Hughes Oliphant Old gives this nineteenth-century Reformed Baptist preacher from London high praise, “There was no voice in the Victorian pulpit as resonant, no preacher as beloved by the people, no orator as prodigious as Charles Haddon Spurgeon.”1 In his sermon entitled, “Christ Precious to Believers,” Spurgeon tells a story that compares Christ to the grand metropolis of London:

A young man had been preaching in the presence of a venerable divine, and after he had done he went to the old minister, and said, “What do you think of my sermon?” “A very poor sermon indeed,” said he. “A poor sermon?” said the young man, “it took me a long time to study it.” “Ay, no doubt of it.” “Why, did you not think my explanation of the text a very good one?” “Oh yes,” said the old preacher, “very good indeed.” “Well, then, why do you say it is a poor sermon? Didn’t you think the metaphors were appropriate and the arguments conclusive?” “Yes, they were very good as far as that goes, but still it was a very poor sermon.” “Will you tell me why you think it a poor sermon?” “Because,” said he, “there was no Christ in it.” “Well,” said the young man, “Christ was not in the text; we are not to be preaching Christ always, we must preach what is in the text.” So the old man said, “Don’t you know young man that from every town, and every village, and every little hamlet in England, wherever it may be, there is a road to London?” “Yes,” said the young man. “Ah!” said the old divine “and so from every text in Scripture, there is a road to the metropolis of the Scriptures, that is Christ. And my dear brother, your business is when you get to a text, to say, ‘Now what is the road to Christ?’ and then preach a sermon, running along the road towards the great metropolis—Christ. And,” said he, “I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it, and if I ever do find one that has not a road to Christ in it, I will make one; I will go over hedge and ditch but I would get at my Master, for the sermon cannot do any good unless there is a savour of Christ in it.”2

Christ is the center of all Scripture.

Spurgeon was convinced that the best preaching is focused on Christ. No matter the text, the sermon must lead people to Christ, because Christ is the center of all Scripture. As Jesus taught the Emmaus disciples “what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Lk 24:27, emphasis added), so redemptive-historical preachers who follow Spurgeon preach Christ from all Scripture. This is what the redemptive-historical, Christ-centered model of preaching is all about.3

Basic Features of Redemptive-Historical Preaching

Redemptive-historical preaching is based on redemptive-historical hermeneutics. Redemptive-historical hermeneutics (also called a biblical-theological approach)4 is a way of interpreting Scripture in its grand canonical context of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. This four-part drama5 of human history finds its grand climax in Christ. History is uniquely redemptive history, because God has been crafting the story all along to give hints of what the seed of the woman (Gen 3:15) would later do in his redemptive work. God is still crafting this story to lead to the day when all creation will be redeemed and restored in the new heavens and new earth (Rom 8:19-25). Particularly in its Vosian form,6 redemptive-historical hermeneutics emphasizes the covenantal structure of Scripture to argue for its organic unity and Christocentric nature in response to critical approaches of Scripture that divorce the OT from the NT and which relegate Christ to something other than the main character from cover to cover. Here are some basic features of redemptive-historical preaching:

  • Redemptive-historical preaching is Christocentric. It does not matter if the text is from the OT or NT—or if the genre is narrative, prophecy, wisdom literature, Gospel, epistles, or apocalyptic—in one way or another, the text is about Christ. All roads lead to him.
  • Redemptive-historical preaching is typological. It does not only emphasize prophecy about Christ, but it also emphasizes how historical persons and events foreshadow Christ.
  • Redemptive-historical preaching is textual, exegetical, and academic. Redemptive-historical preaching is not for the faint of heart. Sermons are usually thirty minutes or more. Preaching is robust, especially because it often features lectio continua. Sometimes redemptive-historical preaching feels like reading a popular commentary on the Bible.
  • Redemptive-historical preaching is artful. It does not simply exegete a word/theme in its immediate context. It then bridges to how that word/theme is used throughout Scripture. Finally, it demonstrates how that word/theme climaxes in Christ. When first exposed to this approach, hearers are often amazed at the artistry of redemptive-historical preaching.

The best preaching is focused on Christ.

To illustrate a redemptive-historical approach with a simple example, here are selections from my Advent 4B sermon from 2 Samuel 7:8-16, with the theme, “Build a Bigger, Better House!”

Think of it like a pit stop on a road trip. For example, my parents live in Wisconsin. You have to travel through Chicago to get to Wisconsin. Can I say, “I traveled to Chicago?” Sure. We traveled there and stopped to get gas, food, and take a break. But I don’t travel to Chicago for the exclusive purpose of filling up my car with gas and grabbing a bite to eat. Chicago’s not the ultimate destination. The ultimate destination is when I turn on Meadowbrook Lane to see family. In the same way, can we say, “Is this promise fulfilled in Solomon?” Sure. The promise has to get traced through him. But Solomon is like a pit stop for lunch and gas. As good as it is, it’s not the ultimate destination. The place this prophetic road finally ends is in Christ, when Gabriel announced to Mary that her son Jesus would sit on David’s throne. …

God promises to build us a bigger, better house—an eternal kingdom—through David’s messianic descendant. To the bigger, better Son of David God would ultimately say, with the deepest significance of the words, “I will be his father, and he will be my son.” On Christmas Day, God’s Son, begotten from all eternity, also became Mary’s son. To the bigger, better Son of David God would ultimately say, with the deepest significance of the words, “I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands.” On Good Friday, God’s Son was punished with Pilate’s flogging, not because he sinned, but because he took our sin on himself. To the bigger, better Son of David God would ultimately say, with the deepest significance of the words, “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever.” On Easter, God’s Son proved that he could destroy this temple and rebuild it in three days, because Solomon’s temple that manifested God’s presence on earth was manifest once and for all in Jesus’ body on earth (Jn 2:19). The living and reigning Christ would endure for all eternity. Jesus takes what Solomon did and makes it bigger and better.

Objections against Redemptive-Historical Preaching

To go back to Spurgeon’s analogy, redemptive-historical preaching begins with the text and finds a road to Christ. The first major objection to redemptive-historical preaching, therefore, revolves around the question, “When is building a road to Christ legitimate? Is that connection really there, or is it simply the preacher’s fanciful imagination?” That is not simply a homiletical question; that is a hermeneutical question.

On one side of this debate is the position that a connection to Christ is only legitimate if the NT explicitly makes the connection. For example, if the NT does not explicitly say this is fulfilled in Christ, it is illegitimate allegory. The problem with this view is that it is a reductionistic and oversimplified view of what is a very nuanced and complicated aspect of current biblical research, the NT usage of the OT. This view essentially denies the phenomenon of an allusion. Many biblical authors (and preachers) use words or themes in a sophisticated way to refer to something else, without necessarily saying, “This happened so that these words would be fulfilled.” They are implying that, but they don’t explicitly say that in such convenient terms. On the other side of this debate is the position that a preacher can use anything to make a legitimate connection to Christ. For example, any mention of the color red becomes a connection to Christ’s blood, any mention of water becomes a connection to Baptism, or any mention of bread becomes a connection to Communion. The problem with this view is that it ignores the immediate context, which in many cases has nothing to do with Christ’s blood, Baptism, or Communion. The limited scope of this article prevents us from dealing with specific examples, but simply put, in between those two sides of the debate is where we want to be. Preachers need to use every legitimate avenue possible to get to Christ. If Lutherans thought they have found them all, they will be challenged and enriched by reading redemptive-historical homileticians, even if they do not agree with every connection they make (as I do not). There are explicit prophetical connections to Christ where we are on sure ground (see my sermon above). There are allegorical connections to Christ where we are on shaky ground. In the middle are many cases where we use inter-canonical allusions to say (with various degrees of certainty) to what degree they connect to Christ. When we are in this messy middle, we can preach how general themes point to Christ, without saying we know for sure that specific details point to Christ. That requires a nuanced approach from preachers today.

To go back to the definition of redemptive-historical preaching, redemptive-historical preaching focuses on God’s action throughout redemptive history. The second major objection to redemptive-historical preaching, therefore, revolves around the question, “What about the people? Is preaching only this grand exposition of the biblical story? Isn’t it also supposed to encourage the congregation to actually do something on Monday morning?” That is not simply a homiletical question; that is a hermeneutical question.

When is building a road to Christ legitimate?

On one side of the debate is the position that the very purpose of Scriptural revelation is to record God’s action for us, not our action for God, and any focus on doing something for God by imitating biblical figures is contrary to the purpose of redemptive history. For example, sermons that urge people to be more like David as he fights Goliath are bound to lead to legalism.7 On the other side of the debate is the position that Scripture includes many exhortations to godly living, and an exclusive focus on redemptive history is contrary to the ultimate purpose of Scripture, which is that people would respond to the text by believing or doing something. For example, sermons that constantly use the four-part redemptive-historical context are bound to be this overly abstract, grand sweep of biblical history that has precious little to do with everyday life.8 So where do we want to be? We need to emphasize that the central character of all Scripture is God (specifically Christ), but Scripture’s many exhortations toward godly living show that the Holy Spirit was not only concerned about recording redemptive history. He was also concerned with how believers respond to redemptive history in their participation in the work of God’s kingdom. Preaching that focuses on doing something for God or imitating other saints can be moralistic, but it does not have to be moralistic.9 The motivation is crucial. We do so, not because we are trying to gain more favor before God or improve our standing with other people, but because we are responding in gratitude for what God has done for us and wanting to advance his kingdom for his glory, not our own. That requires a nuanced approach from preachers today.

What about the people?

To illustrate how to properly preach the imitation of Christ, while being sensitive to the complexities of the redemptive-historical/exemplaristic debates, here are selections from my Easter 4A sermon from 1 Peter 2:19–25, with the theme, “Be Like Your Slaughtered Shepherd.”

Christ knows exactly what it is like to suffer unjustly for something you did not deserve. To be clear, Christ is first and foremost your Savior, who did what you could not when he died in your place to take away all your sins. You can never be like him in taking away your sins, nor do you ever need to be, because he has already done that for you. But that does not negate that Christ is also your example. He does call you to follow him on a path of suffering, and he inspires you to do what he did. So be like your slaughtered Shepherd, because he calls you to it.

Still today, it’s easy to feel like slaughtered sheep. Yes, we all want a nice, easy life, where God paves this smooth four-lane highway with no traffic and no problems straight to heaven. But this is not the Christian life! This was not the path for Christ. Christ suffered all the unjust beatings during his passion to perfectly fulfill God’s law for all the times we have resented or avoided or complained about our suffering. Christ took up our guilt on the cross, where our sins died away and where our righteous lives spring to life. Here’s the key: sheep are not on a different path than their Shepherd. You are united to your Savior Jesus, which means you will suffer unjustly too. What do you do when you feel like slaughtered sheep? Remember that Christ calls you to it. For the children here, Christ calls you to simply walking away from the class bully who wants to rile you up and make fun of you and fight with you. For the university students here, Christ calls you to humbly admit your faults in a cut-throat academic environment that just wants to prove how much smarter you are than everyone else. For the young professionals here, Christ calls you to embrace biblical sexuality when all your friends are telling you to do whatever you want with your own body. For the families here, Christ calls you to carve out time in your evenings and on your weekends for church, catechism, and Sunday school. For the retirees here, Christ calls you to generously support his church financially at a time when people are concerned about how big a retirement account they can have or how big an inheritance they can pass to their children. Because Christ does that for you, wouldn’t you do this all the more? So be more and more like your slaughtered Shepherd.10

We benefit from being much more familiar with redemptive-historical preaching.

Redemptive-historical preaching is the dominant paradigm in confessional Reformed preaching. Unless Lutherans have read widely outside their circles, they may not be very familiar with the intricacies of this approach. By now it should be apparent that there is plenty within this model of interpreting and preaching Scripture that Lutherans can appreciate and use, especially when preaching from the OT. We benefit from being much more familiar with redemptive-historical preaching.

Written by Jacob Haag

Rev. Dr. Haag serves at Redeemer Lutheran Church, Ann Arbor, MI. His doctorate is from Westminster Theological Seminary with research in New Testament and preaching. His research project was entitled “Evangelical Exhortation: Paraenesis in the Epistles as Rhetorical Model for Preaching Sanctification.” He also serves on the Michigan District Commission on Worship.


1 Hughes Oliphant Old, The Modern Age, vol. 6 of The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 422.
2 C. H. Spurgeon, “Christ Precious to Believers,” vol. 5 of The New Park Street Pulpit Sermons (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1859), 140.
3 For redemptive-historical homiletics texts, start with Him We Proclaim by Dennis Johnson. Then consider also: Christ-Centered Preaching by Bryan Chapell, Preaching by Timothy Keller, The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text or Preaching Christ from the Old Testament by Sidney Greidanus, Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture by Graeme Goldsworthy, and Preaching and Biblical Theology by Edmund Clowney.
4 Outside of our circles, biblical theology is not simply defined as exegesis or isagogics. It has the more nuanced definition I am describing here.
5 The concept of a “drama” is based on Calvin’s comparison of Christ’s cross to a “magnificent theater” where “the inestimable goodness of God is displayed before the whole world.” Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel according to John 2:73.
6 Geerhardus Vos taught at Princeton and was a leading confessional Reformed voice in early America. He is to the Reformed world what C.F.W. Walther is to the Lutheran world. See “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, ed. Richard Gaffin, Jr. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2001), 234–267.
7 See Greidanus, The Modern Preacher and the Ancient Text (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 117–118, 163.
8 Watkins calls Krabbendam’s comparison of redemptive-historical preaching to an airplane that flies over the heads of people and the realities of life a “near infamous critique.” Watkins, The Drama of Preaching (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017), 7, fn. 22.
9 In his section on “be like,” “be good,” and “be disciplined” messages, Chapell writes, “There are many ‘be’ messages in Scripture, but they always reside in a redemptive context. . . . ‘Be’ messages are not wrong in themselves; they are wrong by themselves.” Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching, 294 (emphasis original).
10 Full versions of this sermon excerpt and the one above are available at worship.welsrc.net/download-worship/preach-the-word-volume-28/


For Further Reading
  • For more on preaching Christ from all Scripture, see my forthcoming review of Him We Proclaim in the Shepherd’s Study: www.wisluthsem.org/grow-in-grace/shepherds-study
  • For an extensive example of redemptive-historical exegesis, see my previous WLQ article (118:1), “The Indicative Behind the Imperative in James 2:1-13”
  • For more on preaching the imitation of Christ, see my forthcoming WLQ article (121:1), “Preaching Christ as Example? Paraenesis in 1 Peter 2:21-25”

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Preach the Word – Law-Gospel Model Revisited

Themes in Current Homiletical Theory

Law-Gospel Model Revisited

Law-gospel distinctions are widely recognized as a hallmark of Lutheranism. In its American confessional form, C. F. W. Walther has profoundly shaped this model through his lectures to seminary students in the nineteenth century. They remain widely read today, and in many ways Walther’s approach has influenced the approach of many Lutheran preachers today. Walther strongly emphasizes the law’s condemning role that exposes sin, leads people to despair of their self-righteousness, and leads them to see their need for Christ. He strongly emphasizes the gospel’s comforting role that announces the forgiveness of sins, proclaims Christ’s righteousness, and leads them to their Savior. This classic Lutheran law-gospel approach is summed up as follows:

Accordingly, we may not preach the Gospel, but must preach the Law to secure sinners. We must preach them into hell before we can preach them into heaven. By our preaching our hearers must be brought to the point of death before they can be restored to life by the Gospel. They must be made to realize that they are sick unto death before they can be restored to health by the Gospel. First their own righteousness must be laid bare to them, so that they may see of what filthy rags it consists, and then, by the preaching of the Gospel, they are to be robed in the garment of the righteousness of Christ. . . . They must first be reduced to nothing by the Law in order that they may be made to be something, to the praise of the glory of God, by the Gospel.1

This is the Lutheran model: first the law, then the gospel. Preach the law to expose sin. Preach the gospel to announce forgiveness. But that begs the question: for what goal?

But that begs the question: for what goal?

Law-gospel preaching has been so engrained in Lutheranism that often many do not even stop to ask that question. We expect the preacher to proclaim law and gospel because that is what we are accustomed to. And it is little wonder why so many Lutheran sermons, regardless of the unique text itself, are two-part sermons, where the first part exposes sin and the second part announces forgiveness. Preachers first ask the question of specific law, “How have my people sinned against this text?” Then they ask the question of specific gospel, “How can I announce forgiveness to my people?” This, then, is what application is. After all, Walther said that since the fall into sin, the law “has but a single function, viz., to lead men to the knowledge of their sin,” before he famously said, “The Word of God is not rightly divided when the person teaching it does not allow the Gospel to have a general predominance in his teaching.”2 But that begs the question: then what?

The Need for a Lutheran Philosophy of Preaching

This is what a philosophy of preaching answers. A philosophy speaks to “why we do what we do the way we do it.” In advanced studies of any discipline (especially at the doctoral level), students need to wrestle with their discipline’s philosophy. For example, there are philosophies of worship, education, and ministry, all of which explain why we take the approach we do and what we want our approach to accomplish. Lutherans have done a good job in articulating a philosophy of worship.3 I have found Lutherans have not done as good a job in articulating a philosophy of preaching. Certainly, we speak of the importance of law-gospel preaching within the liturgy. But many recent homiletical texts outside of Lutheran circles have chapters or sections on an explicit philosophy of preaching.4 Some entire books are devoted to a philosophy or theology of preaching.5 When I surveyed the Lutheran scene, there seemed to be little explicit treatment on a philosophy/theology of preaching in books, though there have been some advancements in journal articles.6

One hearer leaves comforted that her sins are forgiven; another hearer leaves clueless on what to do on Monday morning.

Now imagine what happens when we have no explicit philosophy of preaching—in other words, when we have not explicitly stated why we preach law and gospel and what we intend law and gospel to accomplish. Preaching becomes notoriously subjective and based on assumptions, both on the part of the preacher and the hearer. One preacher feels it is his duty to simply identify the specific sin and specific gospel; another preacher feels it is his duty to also identify ways the people can apply this text in their lives. One hearer leaves comforted that her sins are forgiven; another hearer leaves clueless on what to do on Monday morning. If a philosophy of preaching is at best assumed and at worst forgotten, it is little wonder that someone tells a pastor his sermon was great, while another tells him it was boring.

In current homiletical theory, it is incumbent on Lutheran homileticians to get up to speed on what is a distinctively Lutheran philosophy of preaching. Therefore, to make the implicit explicit, my philosophy of Lutheran homiletics is this: God’s called representative heralds God’s message of law and gospel that is specific to the exposition of the text, the lives of the hearers, and the place in the church year, in order to indict them of their idolatrous sin, comfort them with Christ’s unconditional forgiveness, and urge them to live the Christian life more fully under the cross. Let’s break this down.

We are preaching to people, not merely presenting doctrine.

First, the emphasis begins with God. The message is his inspired Word, and he is the one who calls preachers through the church to herald that faithfully, so that preachers can honestly say they are “Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us” (2 Cor 5:20, NIV). Next, law-gospel specificity is hierarchical: first the text, then the hearers, finally the church year. Law-gospel cannot simply be this oversimplified construct that mechanistically follows Walther by rearranging or re-emphasizing the text,7 no matter how convenient that may be for Lutheran preachers. Law-gospel proclamation needs to originate from a careful exegesis of the text, and the contours of that specific text need to be reflected in the contours of that specific sermon. Law-gospel proclamation also needs to be specific to the lives of the hearers, since we are preaching to people, not merely presenting doctrine. Law-gospel proclamation finally considers its place in the church year. Lutherans have often used the church year beneficially, but they cannot simply preach the lectionary for the sake of the lectionary.8

The key is that this philosophy of preaching includes three purposes or end goals. Law-gospel preaching is not only about indicting the hearers of their sin and comforting them with Christ’s forgiveness. Law-gospel preaching also needs to explore ramifications for living the Christian life more fully under the cross.

The key is that this philosophy of preaching includes three purposes or end goals.

Objections to a Wholistic Lutheran Philosophy of Preaching

I call this philosophy of preaching wholistic because it emphasizes wholistic application that includes sanctification. The stereotype that Lutheran preaching points out sin, announces forgiveness, and then quickly says “Amen!” is a stereotype, but all stereotypes come from somewhere. I am not contending every Lutheran sermon falls into this category, but I am contending that it is a danger for those of us whom Walther has influenced. Law-gospel preaching has a purpose, and the end goal is not merely to announce sin and grace for the sake of doing so.

One objection to this is that the law as mirror is primary. So the Lutheran thinking goes that when Paul says, “Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love” (Eph 5:1-2), the primary application ought to be that the hearers have not followed God’s example, have not lived as God’s dearly loved children, and have not walked in the way of love. They are forgiven of this, sure, but they leave church with little guidance or inspiration to actually do something. But consider authorial intent. One would wonder why Paul continues by motivating with the gospel, “just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God,” when really he is trying to expose sin by the law. One would wonder why he addresses his audience in such benevolent terms, “dearly loved children,” when he has already demonstrated how to address his audience in the scathing terms of the law (2:1-3). Those factors show that preachers ought to preach the law in this text the way it was intended, as a guide to sanctified living. What Walther has emphasized, therefore, is not wrong, but it is often incomplete and misleading.9

Paul’s solution was not to simply give up preaching sanctification but to motivate through the gospel, clear up confusions, and then fearlessly preach sanctification.

A related objection is that even if the law is preached as a guide, the law will still accuse the hearers of sin, and so it is impossible to preach sanctification, strictly speaking.10 So the Lutheran thinking goes that when a preacher encourages people to live according to Ephesians 5:1-2, some will still think of how they have not. Now all communication can be misunderstood. Above I focused on how the misunderstanding happens at the preacher’s level; here the misunderstanding happens at the congregation’s level. But they are related. If the preacher is preaching in line with authorial intent—addressing them as redeemed children of God, benevolently motivating them with the gospel, speaking to their new man as their true identity who wants to do God’s will—that can help the congregation too. But what if they still feel accused, even after that? Presumably this happened with Paul himself, and we can learn from how he preached sanctification. His solution was not to simply give up preaching sanctification, lest people misunderstand. His solution was to motivate through the gospel, clear up confusions as they arise, and then fearlessly preach sanctification regularly and explicitly. So the solution is more evangelical encouragement, not less.

If epistles were meant to be read aloud to congregations, they essentially functioned sermonically.

A final objection is that sanctification preaching could go against textual emphasis. Some texts emphasize appropriation—truths to believe, not actions to do. So the Lutheran thinking goes that, in order to be faithful to the text, the preacher should stick with law-gospel preaching that exposes sin and announces forgiveness, and leave it at that. On days like Christmas and Easter, do not the texts simply announce God’s saving acts, and preachers should not feel compelled to urge people to be like the shepherds or the women and spread the gospel? There are always dangers of forced applications, but the inconsistency of this approach is that we do not follow it when preaching on texts that are all law. To be faithful to the text, does this mean we do not consider the gospel? No, we find the gospel in the broader context. This should also hold true with sanctification, and this is confirmed by examining NT epistolary rhetoric. If epistles were meant to be read aloud to congregations (Col 4:16, 1 Thess 5:27), they essentially functioned sermonically, and we can learn from how NT authors shaped their messages theologically. Romans is a clear example of law-gospel preaching that indicts sin and announces forgiveness. But why did Paul structure Romans the way he did? He did not stop at chapter 11 for a reason. He continued on to the paraenetic chapters 12–14 because law-gospel proclamation was not meant simply for the Romans to believe something. That was a necessary foundation, but what Paul was really after was for the Romans to do something. Paul does not assume the Romans will automatically put law-gospel proclamation into practice, simply if they hear and believe it. Nor should we. We need to encourage our hearers to see how it will actually impact their actions. The basics of NT epistolary rhetoric is that the indicative is the foundation and empowerment for the imperative. If we are to model that in our preaching, we will always lead our congregations to see how God’s acts for us are the foundation and empowerment for our acts for God. Here is a selection from my Christmas Eve sermon on Luke 2 from 2021:

God has sent a Savior into our world, a Savior for you and for me, to give us peace. And that vertical peace between God and us now inspires horizontal peace between us and others. If the epic cosmic conflict between God and us is now pacified, then suddenly all the conflicts between us and others seem rather small. Now this church can be a place where people don’t constantly fight about masks and COVID. Now this church can be a place where life-long white Christians welcome people of different races, cultures, and backgrounds to sit next to them. Now this church can be a place where all of us first listen to each other before trying to express our opinions. That’s how the surprising peace with God gives us surprising peace with others.

The indicative is the foundation and empowerment for the imperative.

Lutheran preaching cannot simply be reduced down in toto to the law-gospel model; it is much more than that.11 In current homiletical scholarship, Lutheranism is not exactly known for its robust sanctification preaching. That need not be the case. By no means does the law-gospel model need to be rejected. It needs to be divested of its oversimplistic caricatures, embraced for all its beautiful richness, and preached with all its compelling appeal, so that God’s people are indicted of their idolatrous sin, comforted with Christ’s unconditional forgiveness, and urged to live their Christian lives more fully under the cross. All three purposes are vital.

Written by Jacob Haag

Rev. Dr. Haag serves at Redeemer Lutheran Church, Ann Arbor, MI. His doctorate is from Westminster Theological Seminary with research in New Testament and preaching. His research project was entitled “Evangelical Exhortation: Paraenesis in the Epistles as Rhetorical Model for Preaching Sanctification.” He also serves on the Michigan District Commission on Worship.


1 C. F. W. Walther, The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel (CPH, 1986), 118.
2 Walther, Law and Gospel, 236, 403.
3 See Peter Brunner, Worship in the Name of Jesus, tr. M. H. Bertram (CPH, 1968); Timothy Maschke, Gathered Guests, 2nd ed. (CPH, 2009).
4 See Part 3, “A Theology of Christ-Centered Messages” in Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994), and chap. 3, “Paul’s Theology of Preaching” in Dennis E. Johnson, Him We Proclaim (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007).
5 See A. Duane Litfin, Paul’s Theology of Preaching (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015); Jonathan I. Griffiths, Preaching in the New Testament, New Studies in Biblical Theology 42 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2017).
6 See Joel Gerlach and Richard Balge, Preach the Gospel (NPH, 1982); Paul Grime and Dean Nadasdy, eds., Liturgical Preaching (CPH, 2001); Mark W. Birkholz, Jacob Corzine, and Jonanthan Mumme, eds., Feasting in a Famine of the Word (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2016); Edward Grimenstein, A Lutheran Primer for Preaching (CPH, 2015); Richard Caemmerer, Preaching for the Church (CPH, 1959). The first half of Grimenstein’s book is an exception, but it is not very comprehensive, and there is little to no treatment of sanctification preaching within a law-gospel model. The closest I could find to a Lutheran philosophy of preaching is David Schmitt, “The Tapestry of Preaching,” Concordia Journal 37, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 107–129. See also Richard Lischer, A Theology of Preaching: The Dynamics of the Gospel, rev. ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2001); Richard Lischer, “Cross and Craft: Two Elements of a Lutheran Homiletic,” Concordia Journal 25, no. 1 (January 1999), 4–13; Richard Warneck, “Notes on Preaching Sanctification,” Concordia Journal 25, no. 1 (January 1999), 56–64. Regardless, there is a great need for a current, comprehensive confessional Lutheran homiletical textbook.
7 For example, gospel application must always follow law application, or a sermon’s last sentence must always declare the gospel and not exhort sanctification.
8 In current homiletics, much of the criticism against lectionary preaching (especially by those who favor lectio continua) is that lectionary preaching is atomistic in that the church year determines the meaning and focus of the text, not the text itself. Before we rush to defend lectionary preaching, we need to admit this can be a danger.
9 See footnote 2 above. Walther does say the law as mirror is the only (not merely primary) function after the fall, which implies that preaching should only use the law in that sense. Even the traditional view is prone to misunderstanding, because “primary” is not explicitly defined. It is primary in a logical sense within the order of salvation, such that sins need to be revealed if gospel proclamation is to mean anything at all. If primary is meant in terms of rank, it is unfortunate (and not surprising) that preaching on the third use of the law is denigrated or neglected in Lutheranism. See footnote 10.]
10 Certain voices, particularly in the LCMS, have minimized or essentially denied the third use of the law as a function unto itself. They emphasize lex semper accusat to mean the law only accuses. Preaching the third use then becomes the other uses applied to Christians, or preaching sanctification simply becomes a return to justification and confession/absolution. See Timothy J. Wengert, A Formula for Parish Practice, Lutheran Quarterly Books (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 98; Louis A. Smith, “A Third Use Is the First and Second Use,” Lutheran Forum 37, no. 3 (2003): 65–67; Walter Bartling’s position in Scott R. Murray, Law, Life, and the Living God (CPH, 2002), 109–11.
11 Thanks to Tim Bourman for this insight.


Indicative-Imperative Structure

The indicative-imperative structure is a common way of analyzing epistles. Simply put, they declare, “Here’s who you are in Christ.” Then they encourage, “Act according to who you are in Christ.” “Therefore” ties the two together. The indicative and imperative do not merge together, as if sanctification causes justification, but they are inseparably connected. If it’s a text that’s imperatives, preachers need to root the imperative to the corresponding indicative. If it’s a text that’s indicatives, preachers need to show how the indicative will naturally flow to the corresponding imperative.


WORSHIP

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Preach the Word – The lectionary: an enduring narrative

Free Text Series or Lectionary Preaching?

The lectionary: an enduring narrative

In the first two parts of this discussion of lectionary preaching vis-à-vis topical preaching, I argued that in many ways the topical paradigm has not grappled adequately with how contemporary culture has changed since the topical paradigm became popular in Evangelicalism. I also warned against several undesirable outcomes ranging from instrumentalizing Jesus to missing out on the creative strength of an established framework. I pointed to the ways in which the lectionary paradigm effectively keeps Christ as Savior at the center of the homiletical task while also providing the kind of framework that supports homiletical creativity and engagement by taking the burden of brainstorming off of the preacher.

Many of my colleagues who preach topically do, in fact, diligently seek to be thoughtful about what they plan and preach. The nature of my argument, though, is not about what preachers are able to do, but about the directions in which paradigms nudge preachers and their hearers. I see paradigms as a kind of intellectual and spiritual architecture whose designs invisibly—and often inexorably—move people toward certain ends. Such a phenomenon is not individual, but collective and cumulative.

Which leads to the third and final part of this series. Given the character of contemporary culture, it seems that lectionary preaching is perfectly poised to make a meaningful difference among God’s people because the lectionary is, at its heart, not so much a curriculum of topics as it is a comprehensive gospel narrative.

The corruption of narrative as a concept

The term narrative has, unfortunately, reversed polarity from positive to negative. Today narrative means something like dishonest spin. Political and social opponents accuse one another of perpetuating a narrative. “Your truth” competes with “my truth.” Or as The Dude put it in The Big Lebowski, “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

But narrative once meant a faithful account. Narrative was used in legal contexts to describe the facts of the case. A narrative is what St. Luke was talking about in the opening sentence of his gospel. To tell the story was to offer testimony to truths that had real-world implications.

The work of Lutheran preaching relies heavily on an understanding of narrative in the original sense.

The work of Lutheran preaching relies heavily on an understanding of narrative in the original sense, which is (thankfully) making an encouraging comeback these days. People are noticing what it’s like to live without narrative and are wondering if perhaps we might want to renew our narrative structures of sense-making.

Shared narrative vs. individual identity

Every preacher surely agrees that something in our social setting has gone horribly wrong. We appear to live in a time marked by a general dissolution of meaning and coherence. People no longer inhabit stories or contribute to institutions, they express identities and construct meaning by giving voice to a true self.

In a world where the primary catechetical truth is not that “I should be his own” but rather that “I should be my own,” the fundamental task in life becomes one of assembling the puzzle of personal identity from whatever material, values, and interests are available. This task is radically individualized. Indeed, that is the whole point. It is an expression of pure autonomy, of self-law.

Much has been said about this phenomenon, perhaps nowhere so thoroughly as in Carl Trueman’s recent work, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.” But that’s a long book. Taylor Swift captured the spirit of what Charles Taylor called expressive individualism in only two lines: “I know my love should be celebrated / But you tolerate it.”

This is not how it has always been and not how it must always be. People once sought to understand themselves not as isolated individuals but as part of a broader narrative. The shared story gave shape to the years and offered wisdom for different seasons of life. It helped them process sorrows and celebrate joys.

But such sense-making is far afield from our culture’s deepest convictions. Indeed, the late modern notion of freedom is to see oneself as a person who has no story. Today’s ideal protagonist is someone who yearns to discover who they really are, subsequently seeks to uncover an authentic self, and then throws off the expectations of family and society to chart their own path and construct their own meaning. The goal is to jettison existing narrative structures and to replace them with stories that are self-made.

Narrative as necessary counterculture

If this is an accurate description of the modern self and we agree that this not only makes society miserable but also contradicts broad tenets of biblical anthropology, then preachers must avoid acting as a chaplain to the culture of self-ownership. I have little doubt that many preachers have substantially addressed the phenomena described above, especially in recent years. But consider again the difference between what is said in the text of the sermon and what is communicated through the paradigm.

Topical sermons can, no doubt, make vigorous connections to the overall narrative of God’s work in the world. But it seems impossible to describe the paradigm itself as a narrative paradigm. The topical paradigm seems closer to a curriculum than to a story, which is in some ways the heart of my point about the paradigm’s interaction with contemporary culture: What is the story that seekers of true self are likely to discern from an idea-driven or concept-centric paradigm—especially ideas that are presented as useful for their practical benefits? One likely story will sound like this, “I am on a journey of self-discovery, self-actualization, and self-improvement, and God is my guide and ally in the process.”

To underestimate how much expressive individualism is imported into church is to be needlessly naïve. Those preachers who can discern the culture’s dominant influence on character formation even among Christians may wish to seek a preaching paradigm that aligns more closely with the countercultural nature of God’s Word.

What if the church had its own set of days tailor-made to accomplish its overarching goals over time?

The power of a calendar

A powerful way to address expressive individualism is to integrate people into a shared calendar. Indeed, the ability to set the calendar matters. What society celebrates as holidays says a great deal about what they value. The recent addition of Juneteenth to the calendar of federal holidays in the United States is an example of this phenomenon. Activists and marketers are also well-aware of the value of marking time by their own values. Our summers are now marked by huge commercial commemorations: Pride Month and Prime Day. The calendar is contested territory for a wide variety of competing values and commercial interests.

The big loser in all this has been, of course, the ecclesiastical calendar. This is unfortunate but also unsurprising considering the dominant cultural values of our time. In the past a liturgical calendar marked time in terms of the Christian story of God’s work in the world. But in an age when therapy and individuality are paramount cultural values, a church year calendar is seen as onerous. Why should a communal sense of what is important to all of us at all times impose on my sense of self-direction?

Now, I am not aware of anyone who has stopped observing Christmas and Easter, but for the most part the rest of the calendar appears to be fair game for revision. This is not to say that topical preachers do not sense the power of a calendar, it’s just that the calendar that sets the agenda is often the civic calendar.

I understand the rationale. “Preach on subjects that everyone’s attention is focused on that weekend anyway.” I suggest, though, that this tactic is not as effective as one might assume. Take Valentine’s Day, for example, and the perfectly understandable desire to preach about love on the adjacent weekend. That love sermon, good as it may be, is not likely to outpace the massive marketing complex devoted to selling billions of dollars’ worth of flowers, wine, and chocolate. To try to grab the microphone from the marketers and say that, actually, the holiday devoted to romance between lovers is a great time to consider the love of God may be an example of spitting in the wind. Chad Bird once noted that Christians already enjoy holidays far better suited for emphasizing the Christian idea of love. They are called Good Friday and Easter.1 So here’s a radical idea: Let people enjoy Independence Day or Memorial Day or Valentine’s Day without necessarily trying to capitalize on the opportunity to preach a religious spin on it.

Here’s an even more radical idea: What if the church had its own set of days tailor-made to accomplish its overarching goals over time, one that closely reflects the nature of its message and the story into which God is integrating us all? And what if this calendar were used in common among all the churches with the same set of ultimate ends? If Jeff Bezos can see the value of having his own holidays and spreading its influence as far as possible, then surely we can imagine that the ecclesiastical calendar might have some power to it, especially as it employs its narrative strength to engage people on a deeper level than the curricular presentation of ideas can.

Tapping into the mythical core

A narrative structure that repeats and reinforces itself taps into what the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski called the mythical core of how human beings think and act.

The mythical core refers to matters of human experience that are not revealed by scientific examination or standard investigative inquiry. The mythical core connects to those aspects of human experience that are undoubtedly real but not strictly empirical. Kołakowski contrasted the mythical with the technological. The technological core is that which is subject to human manipulation and therefore involves reason, science, and most forms of thinking and philosophy.

Love is a good example of where mythical and technological diverge. Even the most strident evolutionary biologist knows that explaining love in terms of species survival (technological core) is lame. Something more satisfying—more real—is required. Presenting ideas doesn’t cut it. We need a story.

I doubt I will encounter much pushback when I say that contemporary culture is almost entirely dominated by the quest to deploy human power to manipulate and control. This impulse has moved into church life in the form of what has been called spiritual technology, that is, technique-oriented tactics of leveraging spiritual practices to achieve measurable results. Name-and-claim prosperity gospel, glossolalia, and even decisional regeneration are all examples of pagan-style efforts to bring God under human control.

These are, of course, out-of-bounds for confessional Lutherans, but this does not mean that other forms of spiritual technology never appear. Subtle discernment is required here. Emphases on, say, right thinking or applications about how to manage one’s finances or maintain one’s physical health certainly gesture toward topics that arguably fall within the realm of Christian virtues, but the line between sanctification preaching and the uncritical introduction of spiritual technologies imported from cognitive behavioral therapy or modern-day Stoicism (to name two popular movements today) is a narrow one.

Here it may be helpful to repeat a point from a previous article, that there are some things that Lutheran congregations will address in their ministry, but not primarily through the main, public preaching voice of the congregation. Other avenues are better for such things, especially when so many people are missing out on the narrative component of reality that strikes them in deep, abiding ways. When all the people of God are together let preaching be primarily about the story that enfolds all of history and therefore all people present.

Let preaching be primarily about the story that enfolds all of history and therefore all people present.

The language of history and narrative is in many ways more truthful than the language of concepts. Only when a person fully enters the rhythms and contours of a narrative that sets the agenda week after week, season after season, year after year is the transmission of information able to produce transformation of character. Indeed, this issue has long been one of the legitimate criticisms of sermonizing that is too heavy on deductive points of doctrine. But the cure for sermons too heavy on deductive points of doctrine is not sermons too heavy on practical points of application. If anyone wants parishioners to encounter preaching that is more transformational than informational, then he will not present a series of concepts but will instead inculcate a long-term narrative structure.

We do not turn to the Scripture merely to look up correct answers or to find helpful information (though such things are surely there), we turn to the Scripture because there we find the Way—and not according the technological core, as if Jesus is the way to some other good, but in the sense of the mythical core, that is, every aspect of who we are—from our body to our personality to our mind to our behavior—must participate fully in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is the main protagonist of history. All of us are written into his story just as a branch is grafted into a vine.

Narrative as network good

Lutherans are familiar with the concept of antinomianism, that is, a person who rejects moral rules revealed in Scripture. A similar somethingnomianism has lately arrived: autonomianism, that is, the view that we are a law unto ourselves.

Autonomianism in ministry introduces a curious version of the old cuius regio, eius religio in which the principle is often expressed as something like, “This is what we like.” To be sure, there is little justification for blanket uniformity among churches of a denominational brotherhood, especially across broad geographical distances, but there are surely ways to reflect unity apart from uniformity. A shared ecclesiastical calendar and preaching lectionary is one such way. The narrative of the lectionary is a network good.

Note the distinction between a good and a network good. A good is something that is advantageous to have, like money. Having one dollar allows you to do very little. Having one million dollars allows you to do very much. An iPhone, on the other hand, is a different kind of good, a network good. The advantage comes not from owning many iPhones but from many people owning iPhones. The good is a network good.

I would like more and more to think in terms of the “we” in our shared story.

I see the narrative character of the lectionary and corresponding calendar in much the same way. If everyone charts their own path, then not only is the local effect of a consistent, long-term narrative structure lost, but so is the broader network amplification of the good. I would like more and more to think in terms of the “we” in our shared story, a “we” that includes not just the members of this or that congregation who heard this or that particular set of topical sermons, but also the other churches of the denomination 15 miles across town or 1500 miles across the country. I would enjoy learning how some of the most gifted communicators in our church body walk their people through the texts and themes of Lent each year. I would be glad to know that a young professional newly introduced to the gospel narrative in one place could move to another and pick up where he left off. I see great appeal in raising children to find meaning in the narrative points of God’s work in the world, especially in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And best of all, inhabiting the same narrative structure does not require rigid uniformity. Not everyone in a baseball lineup has a uniform batting stance, but they are united in the task of hitting the ball and for that reason they do all share a certain set of practices in common. In the same way, creative variety and local contextualization in preaching will actually be stronger when connected to a common core.

Free to tell the story

The vision I have sought to articulate in this series is one in which the core paradigm of preaching is narrative, cyclical, seasonal, and communal. Such a paradigm is built on a sturdy foundation of texts selected for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel in a way that is distinctively Lutheran in emphasis. It is also a framework that is more likely to produce creative and engaging results in contemporary culture, to say nothing of the massive potential for network good and refreshingly countercultural testimony.

The massive potential for network good and refreshingly countercultural testimony.

For many years I have served in a setting where I could freely preach according to almost any paradigm I might want to try. But I have continually returned to the lectionary not because I am compelled to do so but because of the rationale I have explained in this series. I believe that a careful analysis of the way culture has changed since the rise of the seeker-sensitive or attractional model of Christian cultural engagement reveals a compelling case that, for the most part, the topical paradigm is a paradigm better suited for the past. I’m not enough of a historian to know if lectionary preaching was always so well-suited to a contemporary task at hand, but as I look around me and ahead of me, I am hard pressed to come up with a better overall way to preach to people living in late modern culture than through the shared heritage, common good, and creative strength that the lectionary paradigm offers.

Written by Caleb Bassett

Caleb serves as pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fallbrook, CA. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the WELS Hymnal Project and chairman of the project’s Technology Subcommittee. He has been a frequent guest panelist on The White Horse Inn, a nationally syndicated radio program and podcast on theology and culture. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France and a member of the WELS Institute for Lutheran Apologetics.


1 Chad Bird, Upside-Down Spirituality (Baker Books, 2019), p. 137.


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Preach the Word – The lectionary can’t cover everything—but it can cover what matters

Free Text Series or Lectionary Preaching?

The lectionary can’t cover everything—but it can cover what matters

My previous article argued that the underlying logic of the topical series preaching paradigm popular in American Christian culture and somewhat influential in Lutheran homiletical thinking carries with it some unexamined weaknesses that are worth the attention of Lutheran preachers. I cautioned that the underlying logic of the paradigm can push the homiletical task toward making Jesus instrumental instead of essential, that is, a topic-first approach has inherent qualities that could either make it more laborious to accomplish gospel predominance or that might move Christ from the center of the sermon’s purpose and position the gospel as a footnote to what people otherwise sense is the primary goal: religious therapy, cultural commentary, intellectual inquiry, or spiritual motivation. I suggested, then, that a shared Lutheran lectionary, with its clear and consistent focus on the words and works of Jesus, makes gospel relevance and gospel predominance more natural—even easy—to accomplish.

Some readers suggested that the paradigmatic issues I described and conversations about them among preachers do not exist to the extent that I described them and therefore most if not all of my argument is spurious. I want to make clear that I do not consider this subject to be in the category of a roiling synodical controversy. I called it a simmering debate on purpose. I have observed it gently bubbling in circuits, conferences, and in the online spaces where pastors gather to talk shop. But by writing as if every reader was fully acquainted with the contours of the conversation, I opened my point to unwanted misunderstanding. The background I elided is this: contemporary Lutheran preachers have before them a significant choice between two fairly distinctive preaching paradigms. One is lectionary-driven, the other is topic-driven. The latter is quite influential, but I am arguing that such influence is not all that warranted and that the former is the better overall choice for Lutheran preachers in our time and place.

A more serious concern from some readers is that I have accused colleagues of ministerial malpractice. Therefore it is good to repeat what I said in the previous installment. I am not saying that someone who preaches topically fails to preach law and gospel, nor am I saying that topical preachers are automatically guilty of positioning Jesus as instrumental instead of essential. I set up the framework of analysis to be one of paradigms in general, not preachers in particular. I signaled this in several ways, especially in gesturing toward the famous dictum that a medium can communicate in a way that overrides or undermines the message or, to put it another way, sometimes style can overpower substance. I’m not talking about the presence or absence of law/gospel sentences but rather the characteristics of preaching paradigms.

Style can overpower substance.

My specific claim was that the paradigm of topical preaching runs an unnecessary risk of interacting with the characteristics of ambient culture in a way that pastoral perspectives might overlook. Preachers tend to think in categories like Christian freedom and efficacy of the Word, but people catechized by the ambient culture’s domineering emphasis on self-ownership and self-construction are prone to engage with sermonizing in radically different terms. We think we have said one thing, but in reality they hear another. The result can be a subtle shift from an objective message of good news to a message perceived as self-improvement. Such an outcome is surely not intentional, but that does not make it imaginary.

I am suggesting that Lutheran preachers think carefully about this phenomenon and adjust their approach accordingly because they are free to do so. Christian freedom is essential to my thinking on this. The fact that we don’t have a prescribed preaching paradigm is why discussing the merits and demerits of the available options is legitimate and worthwhile. That this is an adiaphoron is precisely why it deserves attention.

In this installment I give attention to the sentiment that the lectionary paradigm is too limited and that the topical paradigm is worth pursuing because it gives the preacher opportunity to cover things not covered in the lectionary. In this formulation it’s not that the lectionary paradigm is irrelevant, it’s that the lectionary paradigm is insufficient.

But first, we need to talk about books.

Books are an excellent contribution to preaching

I love to encounter thoughtful, engaging writing on theological subjects—and not just new writing either; reading old books is just as refreshing. C.S. Lewis once praised the salutary effects of the “clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”1

Reading broadly in popular literature is important for cultivating a well-rounded homiletical mind and for developing illustrations and examples. Reading widely in popular Christian commentary is a useful way to develop fresh idiom and expression. Reading deeply in professional literature is important for gaining new angles on familiar texts.

But you know this already. This is commonplace homiletical advice. Preachers know the benefit that comes from reading an expert author exposit a biblical theme. We all have favorite writers who resonate with us. Excellent writing can teach new skills, encourage fresh enthusiasm, offer timely support, increase emotional intelligence, and deepen knowledge. These are good things.

Books are an inadequate agenda for preaching

Sometimes, though, enthusiasm from reading a good book becomes a powerful desire to communicate the same content to the congregation. Thus the sermon-series-on-a-recent-book is born.

I identify with the preacher who wants to act as a kind of London Review of Books for the people he serves. The book review (not the book report) is a simple and flexible genre that offers writers and readers alike the opportunity to creatively interact with all sorts of ideas. If a preacher thinks of himself as a purveyor of engaging ideas (a communicator in contemporary parlance), then he will probably be the kind of preacher who enjoys digesting, synthesizing, and systematizing other people’s work. This is a tremendously useful skill and is valuable in ministry.

But I suggest that the Sunday service is not an ideal time for a book review. Such a practice relies too much on the personality and temperament of the pastor. The homiletical task offers generous opportunity for the preacher to speak naturally from his personality and to develop sermons in a way that suits his temperament, which is why it strikes me as unnecessary for the preacher to also claim control over the agenda of preaching.

Is the pastor’s bibliography an adequate pattern for congregational proclamation? I’m skeptical, but even if I’m wrong, the question remains: On what grounds does the preacher conclude that his reading list should set the every-Sunday agenda for what the people of God hear?

Answers might sound like this, “This book covers things not covered in the lectionary,” or its corollary, “This book covers things not covered with enough detail in the lectionary.” In this sense the topical preacher provides a vital service by selecting texts that plug critical gaps left open by the lectionary.

A framework for preaching that is creative, relevant, enduring, and engaging.

Sufficiency as acceptance of reality

Here I sense common ground between lectionary and topical preachers. A persistent challenge in ministry is to connect parishioners to diligent study and application of the Bible. We all agree that it is good for believers to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. I also understand why the Sunday sermon becomes the front line in the battle to get more people engaged with more biblical topics and their application. Preaching remains the most prominent public voice of the congregation. If a pastor is concerned that people need, say, an in-depth review of how to forgive one another, then the sermon seems like just about the only avenue available.

But here a dose of finitude might be helpful. It seems both self-evident and inevitable that no preaching paradigm could be so extensive that it covers every important subject in careful detail. There are parts of the Bible that the lectionary does not appoint for reading and preaching just as, I am sure, a random sampling of three years of topical series preaching would reveal whole swaths of the Bible and entire categories of teaching that received little to no attention in Sunday sermons.

This is not a problem, though. The point of an organized presentation of Scripture is that certain texts are better suited for certain purposes than others. No one complains that six funeral sermons last year missed out on opportunities to cover Paul’s missionary journeys.

“People won’t get this material otherwise,” when offered as a reason to set aside the lectionary, is a rationale that bolsters my point. If preaching really is the primary way most people connect with Christian teaching, then it is all the more important that the agenda for all that preaching be aligned as closely as possible with the main purpose of Lutheran preaching.

The Lutheran concept of sufficiency has long included the sense that something is sufficient for a given purpose. The purpose of Lutheran preaching is to announce the gospel of Jesus Christ for the salvation of mankind. If there is to be an agenda for the public voice among God’s people, then the person at the center must be Christ and him crucified. The lectionary paradigm excels at this and consistently nudges preachers in this direction. Yes, there will be a lot of otherwise good things that don’t get as much coverage, but some things really are more important to say than what the preacher might otherwise want to say. This is not a problem; it’s the whole point.

Brainstorming as a bad sign

I realize that not all topical series preaching is seeking to plug gaps. I agree that the metaphor has a certain haphazard, ad hoc feel to it. I know that many topical preachers take the task of long-range planning very seriously. I do not doubt that these men believe that what their congregation needs is not offered by seasonal texts from Epiphany or Advent and therefore they need to think thoroughly about what to offer instead. I admire the level of effort that goes into such work, but allow me to suggest that preachers keep one part of that process (the planning) and ditch the other (the inventing).

Consider the cognitive model of topical series planning. It necessarily begins with what amounts to a blank page. Of course, the page is not literally blank; there is, at the very least, a list of every Sunday. Next to these dates are blanks that must be filled. Several may be marked already with themes or events like Soccer Camp, National Back to Church Day, Christmas, and Easter. The task is then to fill in all the blanks with a year’s worth of themes, weekly topics, and biblical texts to support them. And so the brainstorming begins.

The topical preachers I know are usually open-minded men, certainly more amenable to creative innovation than some of their more conservative colleagues, which is why I see a certain irony in the fact that the planning model that undergirds topical preaching is, generally speaking, less likely to produce creative and innovative results. Looking at the year ahead as an empty calendar to be filled with new ideas might just be one of the worst ways to work. Brainstorming can be a bad sign.2

The black hole of the blank page

The typical planning process of the topical series takes the preacher back in time to the unsettling college experience of staring at a blank page that must eventually become a finished paper. The common composition advice in such a situation is to brainstorm. “Come up with as many ideas as you can. See what sticks.” But this advice only makes sense because the writer has nothing to work with. Brainstorming is the first step not because of the virtue of the process but because of the poverty of the situation. When you have nothing, then, yes, anything is better. But that’s a low standard to work with, couldn’t we agree?

A blank slate can be a black hole.

Could it be that the blank slate brainstorm is not ideal for delivering the kind of creative results and engaging communication that preachers want to deliver? Brainstorming prioritizes ideas that come easily. But easy does not equal relevant. Easy is simply a matter of our mind remembering what is most recent, has the most emotion attached to it, or what is most lively, novel, or practical.

Brainstorming is also susceptible to the human tendency to like our own ideas the best. People prefer to hold onto their own ideas whether they are optimal for the task at hand or not. Brainstorming can actually reduce relevance for others.

One might think that adding more people to a brainstorming session will help, but the opposite is usually the case. It instead reduces the quality of the ideas and meaningfully narrows the scope of thinking.

This is not to say that it is impossible to generate creative ideas, but it is to say that brainstorming isn’t as useful a tool as preachers might think it is. A blank slate can be a black hole. If a year of preaching began with a blank page brainstorm, then the odds are increased that the end result was not as creative and engaging as it could have been. There must be a better way.

Books to the rescue

The experience of blank page brainstorming may explain why some lectionary preachers react differently to the reading of books than topical series preachers do. Because the topical preacher has decided against following an overarching preaching agenda, he regularly faces the task of inventing one. It should be no surprise, then, that what a book offers will seem especially valuable: a systematic, carefully organized, and meticulously edited sequence of logic or narrative created by someone besides the preacher. The good book gives the topical series preacher what the lectionary would otherwise provide: a framework for preaching that is creative, relevant, enduring, and engaging.

The lectionary preacher, on the other hand, has a preaching agenda defined by the regular pattern of reviewing the words and works of Jesus Christ in an organized and narrative structure designed to repeat and reinforce itself over time. When the lectionary preacher reads a good book, he more naturally thinks of its benefits in terms of how elements from the book will fit into his preaching now and into the future. He thinks, “This insight will be really useful for my sermon on Lent 1,” or “This chapter will contribute to my approach in Epiphany.”

It is through the connection of new material and existing structures that creative thinking and original effort is most likely to occur.

It is through the connection of new material and existing structures that creative thinking and original effort are most likely to occur, especially if the structure is consistent over a long period of time. The preacher who sets aside invention in favor of integrating his thinking and reading to a lectionary framework over many years might discover that huge gains in creativity and engagement accrue at compound interest.

A different path is before you

The topical series preachers I know are men with tremendous skills at digesting, synthesizing, and systematizing the work of others, which is why I mean it sincerely when I suggest that they might become even better preachers if they migrated to the shared heritage, common good, and creative strength of our lectionary. The communication of important ideas is a skill that becomes all the more potent when connected to a long-term, external framework.

There are also a range of opportunities to engage people with the benefits of good writing apart from a book-driven sermon series. Reading groups, blogs, podcasts, classes, and newsletters are all better suited for the work of interacting with and applying ideas to strengthen and equip the saints for lives of faithful obedience, especially when the telos of such settings is more aligned with treating topics didactically and applying them within community accountability. Lean into such genres instead of trying to fit similar efforts into sermonizing.

To set aside the concept of sufficiency is to eschew a critical element of Lutheran preaching.

Topical preachers are right to remind colleagues of the many important matters that God’s people need to understand and apply, but to set aside the concept of sufficiency is to eschew a critical element of Lutheran preaching. It is good for preaching to be proclamation and it is good when the agenda of preaching is the news to be proclaimed: the person of Jesus Christ and the great works by which he has redeemed us. And when the overarching agenda is not a bibliography of theological miscellany but a framework designed to support the primary purpose of Lutheran preaching, the creative communicator will offer what the denizens of contemporary culture are desperate to hear: a total narrative in which to situate themselves. If believers have the story of Christ for them, then what they have will be more than sufficient.

Written by Caleb Bassett

Caleb serves as pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fallbrook, CA. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the WELS Hymnal Project and chairman of the project’s Technology Subcommittee. He has been a frequent guest panelist on The White Horse Inn, a nationally syndicated radio program and podcast on theology and culture. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France and a member of the WELS Institute for Lutheran Apologetics.


1 On the Reading of Old Books,” God in the Dock: Essays on God and Ethics, Ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harper, 1970), 201-202. Also HarperCollins, 2014.
2 For more detail consult the research presented in section 13.1 of “How to Take Smart Notes,” 2nd ed., by Söhnke Ahrens, pp. 130ff.


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Preach the Word – The essential element that makes preaching worth anyone’s attention

Free Text Series or Lectionary Preaching?

The essential element that makes preaching worth anyone’s attention

A common sentiment among my fellow preachers suggests that the lectionary-based approach to preaching has become unsuitable for contemporary ministry. The thinking is that an occasional, topical approach—typically called series preaching1—is better than following the liturgical church year with its one- or three-year cycle of pericopes used in common across an entire community of churches. This opinion appears to be particularly pronounced in missions to the unchurched and in parish settings self-consciously characterized as visionary or innovative.

This is the first part of a three-part essay in which I will enter this simmering debate. I will analyze and comment on three subtle but significant criticisms of lectionary preaching. I intend to offer meaningful resistance to what strikes me as a largely unexamined assumption: that series preaching is the way of the future because it somehow offers unique advantages for ministering to the kind of people shaped by contemporary American culture. I will work to carve out some much-needed common ground even as I make the case that lectionary preaching remains the best preaching paradigm for Lutherans in our time and place.

Perhaps I will be able to convince some of my fellow preachers to return to the shared heritage, common good, and creative strength of lectionary preaching. But if not, then the series preacher might at least rely less on unwarranted assumptions to justify the practice and become more sensitive to the realistic pitfalls in series preaching.

Effort isn’t the issue

Last year I participated in a conference discussion on how best to contextualize worship to today’s culture. The conversation inevitably turned to contextually relevant preaching. A clear sentiment emerged: lectionary preaching was said to be the easy way to preach because the lectionary has already been planned for you. The topical series, in contrast, was said to be the hard way to preach because a good series requires a significant amount of advance planning. The resulting benefit of all this hardness was said to be a corresponding increase in homiletical relevance. In other words, “The topical series is hard to do because relevance is hard to come by.” By the end of the discussion the matter was even cast in moral terms. One pastor called the lectionary not just the easy option, but the lazy option!

No doubt he was overstating the case. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the lectionary has acquired a reputation as little more than a time-saving table of texts instead of an atlas showing the way to the kind of seriously relevant preaching that ministers of the gospel are called to deliver. Many preachers are setting lectionary preaching aside on the grounds that it is simply too weak of a tool to till the fields where they have been called to gather a harvest.

I will wholeheartedly agree that series preaching takes more effort to do well than most lectionary preachers probably realize. I once had to plan and preach a brief, occasional series and I found the process to be quite unpleasant. Maybe the difficulty arose from working against the grain of so much training and so many years of practice. Regardless, my point is that, yes, it does take serious effort to do series preaching well. I hope any preacher who preaches serially always gives the job the full beans it requires.

Persistent misuse of a preaching paradigm does not prove the paradigm is faulty.

I will also agree that many preachers have used or continue to use the lectionary lazily. The point is well taken that the specific value of the lectionary is not that you can arbitrarily (and at the last minute) grab a text from a table of pericopes and preach as if every sermon is isolated from what has preceded it and what will follow it. But at the risk of offering what amounts to a playground retort—“I’m not lazy, you’re  lazy!”—what is the lectionary preacher to make of the many websites trafficking in ready-to-preach series kits? A clever programmer could probably code a bot to compare the social media feed of every WELS congregation to what’s trending on the most popular sources of series kits and find no small number of matches.

Both lectionary preaching and series preaching have well-known and well-worn ways of taking shortcuts, the habitual use of which should be unwelcome in a virtuous professional culture. Persistent misuse of a preaching paradigm does not prove the paradigm is faulty, rather it bears witness to an ethos short on rigor and lacking in integrity. Excellent preaching of any kind requires significant foresight, careful planning, and all-around effort. The lectionary is not the easy option because preaching is not the easy option. All preaching is hard when practiced seriously and sincerely.

I suggest that we settle on this common ground and focus on more fruitful ways to analyze and compare series preaching with lectionary preaching. We must still discern a credible path from the premise, “series preaching requires more planning than lectionary preaching,” to the conclusion, “therefore series preaching yields greater contextual relevance compared to lectionary preaching.” Is such a path possible or plausible?

Relevance is at stake

Differences over lectionary preaching vis-à-vis series preaching seem to arise most frequently in conversations about what makes preaching relevant to a particular cultural demographic or cultural moment. It seems that context and relevance, not ease or difficulty, are the real points of contention. This is significant for understanding and addressing the issue. The assumption appears to be that the lectionary cannot reliably engage the context of the congregation or the community in which the congregation operates. The question, then, is why anyone thinks this.

One commonly-held answer seems to be rooted in the static nature of the lectionary. The lectionary tells and retells the account of a God who promised (and subsequently accomplished) to become our human brother in order to decisively redeem mankind from its entanglement in the cords of death and to definitively raise us to new life in a God-owned identity and vocational purpose that stretches from this moment through eternity. And because these things happened in the past there can never be new things that happened “once for all,” as the writer to the Hebrews puts it. The core story in the lectionary is static in the same sense that history is static.

This means that the lectionary cannot know who was elected president or what progressives want to teach kids these days. The lectionary does not react to the latest ministry blogs, nor does it comprehend that superhero movies are a big deal. The lectionary hasn’t been imbibing the latest pop psychology and religious self-help. The lectionary doesn’t know any memes. The lectionary hasn’t reviewed the latest Barna studies. Therefore, the thinking goes, for preaching to be relevant to a contemporary setting (as opposed to flowing from a historical consciousness) there must be an intermediary individual or group, like a pastor, group of pastors, or a planning committee, who regularly surveys the surrounding culture anew to discern what topics need emphasizing for preaching to enjoy relevance in the coming months.

This is, to say the least, an extremely popular approach to preaching. Aside from the expository model in which a congregation will work through whole books of the Bible over lengthy periods of time, the entire Evangelical industrial complex appears to be geared toward the task of churning out series after series. Such an approach thrives in the theological framework governed by the presumption that if the church and her ministers will only just embrace the surrounding culture with gusto, then the surrounding culture and its denizens will be more open to the church’s message in return. In this dispensation it seems the concept of relevance is meant to mean the task of calibrating preaching to harness the most engaging subjects or styles of the times, even if it means making heroic leaps of logic to somehow connect intellectual fashions and cultural fads to biblical theology.

This is not the relevance that Lutheran preachers ought to seek.

I am unconvinced that this is best described as relevant. Predictable may be a better word for it—and not the good kind of predictable, like Christmas coming every year. The point at which the series approach as commonly practiced could be called innovative appears to be in the rear view mirror. Whether it’s the barely camouflaged fundraising effort (#generosity) or the soft-core commentary on sex (#intimacy), series preaching as a trend appears to have become a rote procedure by which a cultural product of some kind, like a fascinating book, hit movie, major event, or social trend becomes the catalyst for the question, “How can I preach a multi-week series on this subject?” Indeed, some such books come with twelve chapters, which—voila!—become twelve sermons.

This is not the relevance that Lutheran preachers ought to seek. Unless the goal is to communicate that the church’s message is a Christianized expression of the surrounding culture, it’s an awfully big assumption to think that what’s trending in culture or what’s on the pastor’s Kindle is also genuinely relevant to the actual predicament of particular people in the padded seats, to say nothing of relevance to the formation of thick, resilient, long-term Christian communities. In fact, a serious concern to consider is whether by focusing on cultural relevance the preacher is directing the eyes of his people away from where they need to be focused, that is, preachers can easily point people away from the Person in whom genuine relevance is found. To answer this concern with, “Jesus is in every one of my sermons,” is, frankly, inadequate. Jesus is in an awful lot of hip-hop tracks, too. The heart of the issue is what role Jesus plays in preaching.

Jesus is essential, not instrumental

The series paradigm too easily positions Jesus as instrumental instead of essential, that is, when a congregation’s preaching is presented as a species of cultural commentary, religious therapy, or intellectual inquiry, Jesus must inevitably come across as one of the many great minds that people could choose to follow for good advice. In this paradigm the preacher can really only recommend Jesus, and because he can only recommend Jesus he must go to great lengths to present Jesus as the best way to accomplish whatever the stated goal of the sermon series is. The preacher may say something quite biblical, like Jesus is the only way to salvation, but such a message, while technically true, is overwhelmed by what the medium says. Things soon start to sound less like preaching and more like motivational speaking or life coaching. After all, if this month isn’t “The Greatest Month of Generosity Ever,” then what was it all for?

Things soon start to sound less like preaching and more like motivational speaking or life coaching.

The underlying logic of an instrumental deployment of texts tends to create people who hear only way as better way—and even then, it’s only the better way for now, that is, until they discover an even better way. This underlying logic of instrumentality is subtly implied if not explicitly stated in the form of advice-centric series themes and topics. “Come to hear how Jesus makes blank better,” is the main message, even if a few sentences of gospel are sprinkled in to rescue the sermon from formal charges of legalism. The fact is that there are other great minds out there and many people who recommend them as the good, better, or even best way to get after your goals. Only Jesus asks his followers to bear a cross. At some point following Jesus does not make everything better, it makes many things quite a lot worse. If Jesus is offered to people as relevant insofar as he can be a means toward some other end—especially a self-directed end—then he is not relevant at all.

The psychological captivity of the church.

I file this entire tendency under a concept described as the psychological captivity of the church.2 The notion that the most relevant pastor is the one who looks to the world around him to determine where to head with his preaching has probably ceded any remaining position of strength against profoundly strong cultural currents. The church and her preachers are mired in a trade deficit of sorts; we import more ideas than we export.

None of this is to say that good preaching won’t engage with the cultural context of the congregation in significant and meaningful ways. It is to say, however, that it is too simplistic to think that the series paradigm is itself the engine of relevance. Quite often the result is literal irrelevance, especially if what’s on offer is merely a Christianized version of what others offer. People will go elsewhere to get the same practical benefits but without the Christian cross. Can we blame them?

The gospel is relevance incarnate

A helpful way to understand the issue of relevance is to analyze what kind of communication the gospel actually is. Christian doctrine is clear that salvation comes “from hearing” and what’s heard is a “message about Christ.” Here it is not pedantic to point out the plain meaning of the word gospel, that is, “good news.” Because the gospel is a report of an event or state of affairs, we must understand our preaching as the delivery of news. If we are not preaching news, then we are merely hosting a speaking event. Whether this event takes the form of a droning lecture or a trendy TED talk is immaterial. Both manifestations are the same—devoid of the distinctive power at our disposal to call lost souls from death in sin to life in Christ.

What does this have to do with the question of relevance? Everything. A sermon that offers commentary, advice, or application about the world that someone could, in principle, come upon elsewhere and apart from the Christian gospel is, by definition, irrelevant as news. It may be good and useful information that everyone is glad to have heard, but it is not, in the final analysis, news—and certainly not gospel.

Nothing ever will be as relevant as the words and works of Jesus Christ.

What animates the lectionary paradigm is the insight that nothing is or ever will be as relevant to as many people in as many situations as the words and works of Jesus Christ. The relevance people need most comes in the form news, an announcement of events that no one could come upon by any amount of their own thinking or choosing, events that happened “once for all,” but must be proclaimed again and again, generation after generation.

This is why I suggest that Lutheran preachers be less concerned about the quest to make their preaching relevant in culturally conditioned terms and to work instead at saying what is genuinely relevant to people living under the effects of sin and death. You can be sure that everyone will one day find themselves facing a deadly spiritual thirst (indeed, they face it already). Your task is to ensure that they have been drenched with words that point to the one who can and does quench their thirst. Aim your preaching at the moments when people will need to have heard good news, not endless therapeutic applications of biblical proof passages. Aim your preaching at relevance worthy of the word.

The lectionary does make one thing easier

I want to be clear that my claim is not that the series preacher never preaches the gospel, but that the series paradigm as a medium, with its reliance on a culturally-conditioned definition of relevance, makes genuine gospel proclamation either more difficult to accomplish or makes the gospel into an instrumental footnote attached to what people otherwise sense is the obvious goal: religious therapy, cultural commentary, intellectual inquiry, or spiritual motivation.

For example, one Sunday after Easter I was enjoying dinner at a neighbor’s house. Our host, knowing that I am a pastor, asked, “What was your sermon about today?” I briefly summarized the thrust of my sermon on the appointed gospel in which the recently-resurrected Jesus shows his wounds to Thomas. Then, knowing that our host attends one of San Diego County’s largest multi-site Evangelical churches, I asked, “What was your pastor’s sermon about today?” The answer: “How to lead like Moses.” I have little doubt that Jesus was mentioned in that sermon just as I have little doubt that the Lord was mentioned mainly as the means to a practical end.

I am not saying that everyone who follows the series approach to preaching does that, but I am saying that the lectionary makes it a whole lot harder to traffic in legalistic life lessons. It would take a monumental effort to somehow feed God’s people leadership training seven days after Easter while preaching the lectionary. If the lectionary makes one thing easier it’s this: maintaining focus on the words and works of Jesus and delivering the good news in a way that is—as I will argue in the following parts of this series—uniquely poised to matter most in our cultural moment.

There are almost limitless opportunities to engage contemporary culture within the lectionary preaching paradigm. It’s still hard work, too; but where it matters most the lectionary may really be the easy option.

Written by Caleb Bassett

Caleb serves as pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fallbrook, CA. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the WELS Hymnal Project and chairman of the project’s Technology Subcommittee. He has been a frequent guest panelist on The White Horse Inn, a nationally syndicated radio program and podcast on theology and culture. He is a fellow of the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights in Strasbourg, France and a member of the WELS Institute for Lutheran Apologetics.


1 This article is the first in a series of three that evaluates free text series preaching, not the kind of lectionary-based series featured in the new hymnal’s Commentary on the Propers and offered in The Foundation at welscongregationalservices.net/the-foundation.
2 This concept was coined by academic theologian L. Gregory Jones, former dean of Duke Divinity School and provost of Baylor University.


WORSHIP

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GIVE A GIFT

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Preach the Word – Insights from Being Open to Feedback

Preaching with Outsiders in Mind

Insights from Being Open to Feedback

Editor’s note: This issue concludes our series on preaching with those outside our church membership in mind. Since 2011 Pastor Caleb Kurbis has served at Living Savior Lutheran Church in Asheville and Hendersonville, NC. Living Savior has two locations as one church in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. In this mission setting there is never a shortage of opportunities to interact with numerous Sunday visitors and other outsiders. Living Savior’s ministry context includes a majority of members who have never been Lutheran in a region that is less and less Christian with hardly any Lutheran presence.

Introductory thoughts from Pastor Caleb Kurbis

“Pastor, did you know that A.I. could write your sermons for you?”

I had to smile and nod a bit even if my poker face hid the fact that it sounded stupid. Then again, should we be surprised when technology starts to do things that we thought were off the table? I guess I should be thankful that this kind 20-something didn’t tell me this on a Sunday morning. I could have inferred more: “Hey Pastor, maybe you should have artificial intelligence write your sermons.” (Or maybe he was saying that? Shoot!)

“Pastor, did you know that A.I. could write your sermons for you?”

If you want a rabbit hole, search “A.I. and sermon writing.” You’ll find everything from interesting to entertaining to absurd. We could enter some key words, the proper for the day, and some sources. Then we could read through to double check for heresy. Voila! And all that time saved could go toward more ministry and reaching more people. Right? Ha! Of course not. We would miss the benefits of wrestling with the Word. Worse yet, A.I. can’t process the people we’re thinking about and the souls sitting in God’s house. And what about the conversations we’ve had with prosects, considerations for reaching the searching, and wrestling with nuances for those who aren’t only new to our church but even new to the faith?

This series is about preaching with outreach and outsiders in mind. It probably goes without saying, but these articles on reaching the unchurched have some basic assumptions.

  • We want to preach to outsiders and the unchurched.
  • We are doing what we can to reach the unchurched to bring them closer to the Word.
  • We recognize that worship, although maybe trending less today than with previous generations, is a great avenue to bring people closer to the Word and to God’s people.
  • We want to make sure that they get “every good and perfect gift from above” as we ask God to help us communicate his truths clearly.

That last point is the basis for much struggle for me personally. Over the last couple of years, I have grown to feel dumber and dumber as I wrestle with this question: “Am I sure that these people, especially new people, are hearing what I want them to hear?” That’s not intended to sow self-doubt in every corner. It’s intended to encourage double-checking the sermon preparation and communication process. The more I think, the more I wrestle. And the more I wrestle, the more it makes me want to talk with people and work on the “stuff” that makes a sermon.

Am I sure that these people are hearing what I want them to hear?

Four ideas to help connect what we say with what they hear

  1. Speaking of “stuff,” there was a young couple with two little kids who wanted to talk about “church stuff” as they just started attending Living Savior. He was Catholic before he became “close to nothing.” She described herself as having an “eclectic denominational path.” It was the season of Easter. They kindly emailed a question ahead of time. “We heard you say that we have this ‘life’ right now and not just eventually in heaven. That doesn’t make sense. And this world? Ugh! We may have missed something. Can you please explain?”

Thank the Lord for people who ask. (And imagine the many who don’t!) I looked back at my sermon on Revelation 21. I was trying to make the point that this vision of heaven is not only for the future; the life found in and through the Lamb belongs to us right now. But what questions would newbies ask? My sermon draft might say “life” after hours of work. But do I think deeply enough about the questions they (might) have? The more we ask about what specific people might think, the better we become at speaking clearly. And whether we know or think that we know or don’t know at all, it’s always helpful to ask. If we ask what someone thinks about a challenging subject in our sermon, would they refuse to answer? Who says they have to be members of our church? I was once encouraged by a wiser, older pastor to ask for feedback from outsiders in order to make my sermons better for outsiders. That starts with me seeking them out. Whether they become prospects is irrelevant for my feedback goal. Then again, we may be given the blessing of new people who will ask us on their own. “Can you please explain?”

  1. I’m kind of a fast talker. I’ve slowed down over the years, but I need more work. Especially when I talk with sooomme of myyyy olllder suuuthrrn’ fooolks. Okay, not that bad. (Or fake!) But I remember many years ago when a very intelligent and emotionally sharp woman in my church told me, “You’ve been thinking about this a lot! Can you give us a little more time to think about it too?”

I had just preached on Luke 15 in the middle of Lent. Does it get any better? The challenge isn’t finding meat in that text. Rather, the challenge is to select and prepare small, choice cuts in a way that’s easy for God’s people to savor and digest. It seems that my sermon came across more as force-feeding. Yikes! She was right. Add that to the reasons that we pray with Luther, “… if you had left it all to me, I would have ruined it long ago” (Luther’s Sacristy Prayer). It gets better (read worse).

There was already an appointment on my calendar that week to grab coffee with a prospect that I had been working on for a long time. The conversation eventually got to the sermon the Sunday before. He said, “I need to go back and listen again.” The translation in my head sounded like this: That is a really nice way of validating what that lady said. You’ve got some work to do.

It reminds me of what a good pastor friend once said. “We slave over our sermon all week. Every sentence, logical structure, and sound. But the people? They have one second to get a thought, or they don’t.” Add to that listeners who don’t know context or terminology or Bible history or inside jokes or Lutheran-ese, etc.

Think about how new listeners process deep content, logical leaps, and a speedy pace. When we slave over what to say, we need to remember that how we say it happens quickly to the ear. That doesn’t just mean that we need to slow down. That leads to other questions. If I heard this for the first time, would I get it? If I summarized my last several paragraphs with one sentence each, is the logic simple and clear? What would I change if I had to explain this to a child?

We need not shy away or be distracted from saying the simple things.

  1. A young man in his early 30s had been an atheist. Now he’s more of an agnostic. He said that he relates to the Stoics quite a bit. He doesn’t want to come to church quite yet because he doesn’t know much. He doesn’t want to sit there and have things sail over his head even though he is intelligent. I assume that you, like me, start thinking about how simple and clear the gospel is and how hard we work (and we must) to keep it simple.

Our professors encouraged a serious and robust devotional life. One professor at the Seminary said, “If you don’t have a personal devotion first thing on Sunday morning, what are you doing? Truly, what are you doing?” True, wise, instructive, and beneficial. But one Sunday hit me upside the head.

The sermon was done. First things first, a devotion from Our Worth to Him by Mark Paustian.1 The one on Easter. He notes that maybe on Easter we could avoid getting into all the apologetical tidbits of the resurrection and simply focus on the true blessings and eternal benefits of Easter for God’s people. In short, it’s okay and maybe even often preferred to say the simple truths. It hit me because I read these words on the Third Sunday in Easter, and I had erred in the other direction.

Of course, Prof. Paustian isn’t suggesting an either/or scenario all the time. Anyone who has heard him speak or read his writing has witnessed the benefit of weaving together both clear biblical truth and apologetics. It is an art worth aspiring to. Rather, when it comes to the truths that matter most, we need not shy away or be distracted from saying the simple things.

It shouldn’t go without saying that simplifying our preaching is not just for newbies but also for those who have been in church almost every Sunday for their entire lives. (On this point Nathan Nass’s Preach the Word series is worth rereading.2)

We need to say the simple thing as clearly as possible. Of course, we want to give our people meat. We also want them to have milk. But nothing says we can’t communicate steak-like truths in a milky way. Truths that are out of this world can be shared on a rudimentary level. Sharing the simple truths leads to deeper applications. In other words, think not either/or but both/and. It will benefit regular members and certainly also outsiders.

Some further questions pertain to resources. What devotional resources do you use? How do you view yourself as a listener to the author/speaker? What resonates with you? Maybe you prefer deeper devotionals like The Daily Exercise of Piety by Johann Gerhard. Or maybe you like what fellow brothers write in NPH’s Meditations. Or you’ve found treasure in Paustian’s Our Worth to Him. What is there in the simplicity of our devotional resources and lives that can easily translate into our sermon preparation and even our preaching?

  1. I recently got back into officiating high school basketball. No, I don’t like getting yelled at and called names for fun, although there is something to be said for testing the thickness of our pastoral skin in some ways. But this outlet and pathway for connecting in my community can get serious. The supervisor provides critique. And it’s really interesting seeing how people receive it, or not. The supervisor confided in me about pushback from someone by saying, “Reffing is very subjective. Subjectivity is personal. So, people either take it personally or they improve.” Would you agree that preaching is highly subjective? Do we welcome constructive criticism to improve? Or do we take it personally or avoid it altogether?

A member in my church works in an economic realm of our world that is way beyond me. He works with elite people who exhibit the highest levels of professionalism. But you wouldn’t know if you met him because he’s a very gracious man. Years ago, he asked me who I’m trying to reach with my sermons. I said they’re for everyone. I waited, knowing he had more to share. He asked, “Pastor, do you pursue constructive criticism on your sermons?” I told him that I have a couple of guys whose feedback I seek. And sometimes I’ll hand members an anonymous feedback form. Notice he asked if I pursued it, and not just received it. Why? We’re always improving.

I don’t know of any line of work or any craft where someone can improve significantly without some form of criticism. That’s true for this man’s line of work with upper-crust business folks. That’s true for some bumpkin preacher in the mountains of Western North Carolina. And that’s true for you. Of course, the fact that you’re still reading this is one clear indication that you know this. Even so, when it comes to preaching with outreach and outsiders in mind, isn’t it worth pursuing feedback from fellow preachers and others whom we trust?

I wonder what it would be like if we started asking each other some of the following questions. If you brought your unchurched neighbor to my church, what is there about my recent sermons that I should keep doing? What would need improvement? Can you read/listen to/watch a couple of my latest sermons through the perspective of first-time guest and let me know what was clear, confusing, churchy, and/or comforting?

Don’t be afraid of criticism and feedback for the goal of improvement. In fact, be concerned if you resist it.

Applying the Word to people who are veterans and to those who are new or outsiders is worth our best efforts. We deeply desire for their hearts to gain clear insights from the Word. That’s not something A.I. can produce, much less bless. But that is certainly the area code where God works blessings and will produce growth for our good and for our people. He has and he will!

Don’t be afraid of criticism and feedback … be concerned if you resist it.

Timeless Reminders

Editor’s note: This issue’s timeless reminder comes Rev. Tom Jeske’s introductory article in Preach the Word: 8:1.

I like the advice of a classmate who endured a rough chapter of ministry. When I asked him how it was going, he said “Nothing I can’t handle with a good night’s sleep… and some devotion time in the morning.”

Lutheran Preacher, start your day by reading the Scripture! Set your alarm. Get by yourself. Graze like a sheep in the pasture of the Word. You can’t preach to anyone else if you are gasping for air. I try to read four chapters a day. I don’t always make it. (Especially for you younger pastors: Did you know that if you discipline yourself to read four chapters a day, you read through the whole Bible every year?) Isn’t that a worthy and reachable goal? No one has to be a great scholar or have outstanding gifts to do this. You put yourself before the living words of the Holy One of Israel. How can something not happen to you?

After I finish reading, then I pray. We all know that prayer is not a Means of Grace. First the preacher listens, then the preacher speaks. I made a little pattern to help me. Of course it’s not original with me—just ask Peter the Barber. And yes, I can actually pray without it. But I’m a person who easily loses his concentration. This little outline helps me in a way that I suppose is akin to how journaling helps some people think. I list four matters on my conscience and confess them. I list four specific gifts for which to thank God. I make myself write down ten names or initials. The last section is a hodgepodge of hopes, dreams, needs, and half-baked ideas. Brother, you do it your way and improve on my idea. But hear Luther:

“Whenever I happen to be prevented by the press of duties from observing my hour of [Word and] prayer, the entire day is bad for me. Prayer helps very much and gives us a cheerful heart, not on account of any merit in the work, but because we have spoken with God and found everything to be in order.”

You know that by “prayer” he meant “Word and prayer.” Preacher, your morning Word and prayer will serve you well as you present devotions in meetings of every type, hospital visits, confirmation Bible classes, unexpected phone counseling, difficult face-to-face conversations, and finding the love to make outreach a part of your week.

The best part of a morning devotion is the sweet experience of a clear conscience. “Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love,” (Ps 143). Battered and fearful hearts know no finer way to spend time. Perhaps the second-greatest benefit of a morning devotion is its cumulative value for your preaching. Your preparation, your product, and your confidence to step before God’s people to preach are going to grow steadily.

Written by Joel Russow


1 online.nph.net/our-worth-to-him-devotions-for-christian-worship.html
2 Vol. 23 at worship.welsrc.net


WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

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Preach the Word – Insights from a Pastor Reaching Unexpected Prospects

Preaching with Outsiders in Mind

Insights from a Pastor Reaching Unexpected Prospects

Editor’s note: This issue continues our series on preaching with those outside our church membership in mind. It provides insights from Pastor Ben Kuerth, from Divine Savior in Doral, Fla., a northwest suburb of Miami. Prior to his ministry in Florida, Kuerth started a mission church, Victory of the Lamb in Franklin, Wis., where he served for twelve years.

Divine Savior operates an academy with 1,150 students and a special needs school with 40 students. A unique challenge is preaching to 65 WELS called workers who are mostly from the Midwest while also connecting with many who have never heard the pure gospel. Doral is home to immigrants from Venezuela, Colombia, most of South America, and many other countries since those who want to do business in South or Latin America have offices in Miami. This presents opportunities to share the gospel with souls who have little Bible background and for whom English is often not their native language.

Ideas from Pastor Ben Kuerth

Four examples or thoughts on how outsiders have impacted your preaching preparation:

The first three examples are of people in suburban Wisconsin—one from the early days of renting a Polish beer hall, one from our days in a movie theater, and one from our new ministry center. The last example is from Florida.

A tough father. He did MMA fighting at a local gym—not a big guy, yet wiry and tough. I sat next to him at the closing picnic for our soccer Bible camp which his daughter had attended. I invited him to church. He smirked and said, “Nah, church is for wimps.” I ended up daring him to come to church for the sake of his daughter and prove to her that he was a tougher and better man than Jesus. He said, “Okay, you’re on!” To my surprise, he actually came that Sunday . . . and faithfully almost every Sunday after that. Baptizing him and his daughter was a special moment. He thanked me for making church feel like a place where guys like him who were rough around the edges could come and not feel weirded out. He helped me realize that a lot of guys deep down are craving someone to call them out and call them to something more, Someone bigger.

A lot of guys deep down are craving someone to call them out and call them to Someone bigger.

A tearful mother. One night the phone rang. The woman was in tears because her son had committed suicide the day before. The reason she called me was because three years earlier I had knocked on her door while canvassing and invited her to church. She never came. What I didn’t know is that she had been watching our services online for years. Even though I barely knew her, she knew me and considered me her pastor. On the phone she told me the previous night she had watched one of our services on repeat over and over from 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. God’s Word was the only thing that soothed her broken heart. She reminds me of something now whenever I see the camera at the back of church: somewhere at the other end of that camera lens’s tunnel is someone else just like her—a soul hungry for what only God’s Word can give, someone who at some point will likely look to me as their pastor.

She had been watching our services online for years.

A trembling woman. One Sunday I noticed a car I didn’t recognize. It was parked some distance from the doors of our ministry center. For 15 minutes it just sat there. No one got out. Worship was about to start. But I felt I needed to go out there. I introduced myself and said, “Can I walk you in?” The woman in the car was trembling. She said she’d been battling depression. She had prayed to God for a sign—either to get out and actually go inside or to go away for good. She had recently considered ending her life. She then said something I’ll never forget: “I came here thinking maybe I’ll first give church one last shot.” I think of her often on Sunday mornings even now as I pray, “Lord, help me today to speak and act as if someone here is giving church one last shot.” This has had a lasting impact on me.

A grieving son. Recently in Doral I’m grateful for Bruno who has started bringing his two daughters to church. A few years ago, his dad died of cancer, and it was brutal for him to watch. How his dad faced death without hope did a number on him. During the pandemic he began seeking God, thinking that there must be more than this material world. Thoughtfully he wondered, “There has to be a God since I have this desire to be a good person and want to make the world a better place.” So out of the blue, he came to our church. From his home office he can look out his window and see our “Divine Savior” sign—a sign from God he now calls it! I can still see Bruno leaning in, intensely listening as I preached that first Sunday. Over a strong cup of Colombian coffee two days later, Bruno shared what had hooked him: “It’s like you were saying, ‘Let’s get back to the basics . . . but in a good way.’” My sermon that previous Sunday was nothing special—except for the simple, clear law and gospel with Jesus at the center. But, of course, (silly me) that’s exactly why it was so special for him! God brought Bruno into my life at just the right time when I needed to be reminded that I don’t need to carry the burden of always being super creative or needing to come up with “new-to-me” content. What people need, more than anything, is the clear, Christ-centered truths of the Bible communicated simply and sincerely. That is sorely lacking in so many South Florida churches. Is it also by you?

I don’t need to carry the burden of always being super creative or needing to come up with “new-to-me” content.

Three encouragements to preachers for keeping outsiders in mind in sermon preparation:

  1. Clear beats clever. Sometimes I try and get too clever, and I end up confusing people. Clear and clever? That’s great when you can pull it off. Sometimes the occasion calls for it, perhaps. But if you’re trying to communicate with people whose first language is something other than English, or with people who are brand new to Christianity (or both!), being clear is the vital task. The more people I meet from other countries, the more I’m starting to realize this.
  2. “There’s a soul at the end of that tunnel.” I tell myself this whenever I look into the livestream camera lens. There are potential pitfalls to preaching when you’re aware of people “eavesdropping” anonymously from anywhere in the world. Yet over and over, for years now, I’ve met or interacted with people who’ve reached out to me as their pastor even though I had no clue I was pastoring them. This is simply because someone invited them to watch online, linked them to a particular message, or they stumbled onto our website where at some point the Spirit prompted them to take a next step. So, keep them in mind. Consider greeting those who are worshiping online. Invite them to reach out to you if and when they’re ready. Simply acknowledge their “presence” with gratitude whether or not you know if anyone is actually out there watching. With archived services and messages online, it’s virtually guaranteed that someone will be eventually. It’s also a great way to establish a culture that communicates, “We are a church that is always expecting guests.”
  3. Imagine someone present in person or online who is giving church one last shot. Between people disillusioned with some church experience and those doing the trendy thing of “deconstructing” their faith, this is a huge segment of people. When you prepare for a service imagining that such people will be present, it changes how you plan to greet people in the parking lot, host the service, conduct the liturgy, and communicate during the sermon. At least it has for me.

Consider greeting those who are worshiping online . . . to establish a culture that communicates, “We are a church that is always expecting guests.”

Two sermon excerpts of preaching with outsiders in mind:

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Kuerth’s sermon on 2 Thessalonians 1:3-10. You will hear his theme “Only Jesus Provides Eternal Home Security” echoing in the excerpt below.

The Thessalonians knew that ultimately only Jesus provides eternal home security. They knew that only in Jesus would they be kept safe from God’s judgment against sin. How about you?

There is a danger today, I think, that we would be so lulled into a false sense of earthly security that we forget about our real need for Jesus and his saving grace. There is a danger today facing everyone in Doral that if we just have enough money, or toys, or technology . . . and that if our earthly lives and houses feel safe . . . and we have the sense that we’re in control and if we keep our lives so busy that we don’t even really think about death or God’s judgment or wrath . . . then everything must be okay, and we just assume we’ll be safe forever and ever. There is a danger today specifically for Christians too that we would compromise the convictions of our faith and the teachings of the Bible in order not to experience conflict with the world. There is a danger that we would make our own personal comfort a higher priority than taking up our cross and following Jesus no matter the cost rather than be made fun of by our friends who don’t believe what we do.

But no matter what the cost, no matter how heavy the cross we have to carry in life or how much conflict we face, to those who cling to Jesus, he promises relief. Paul says, “He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well.” This is why the Christian church is the only place where you are perfectly safe. You’re safe here not because this earthly building is built impossibly strong. You’re safe here not because nothing bad could ever happen here. You’re safe here because only Jesus Christ provides eternal home security. Like Paul told the Thessalonians, “This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you.” . . .

Everything Jesus accomplished as the stand-in for sinful humanity, he did for you. When he died on the cross, those were your sins he was paying for. When he rose from the dead, that was your victory over the grave that he won. When he comes back in glory, he will come to bring you safely home and glorify you with him forever. It’s something we can look forward to. Only Jesus provides eternal home security until the day he says, “Welcome home.” Then we will be forever safe from all violence, selfishness, exploitation, and greed. Then we will be forever safe from all the consequences of sin and from endless ruin itself.

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Kuerth’s sermon on Matthew 1:18-25 with the theme, “Jesus Gives Us What We Need.”

So how could (Joseph) be sure (of what the angel told him and if he was equipped for the task of raising and protecting the Son of God)? Because he simply took God at his word. He went all in trusting God’s Word instead of his initial feelings. There’s a great lesson for us. That’s why months later Joseph followed through and named that little boy Jesus. Even after he had time to think things through, he was still sure. Even after the emotional high of a personal visit by an angel had long worn off, Joseph kept hanging on to God’s Word. He knew that God was with him.

And you can be sure of that too, no matter what you’re going through right now and no matter what surprises you will find in the future. For even though life often takes us by surprise, nothing takes God by surprise, and his presence in your life means you have nothing to fear. In our world there are lots of uncertain things. Pop up ads promise you too-good-to-be-true deals if you just click on them right now. Weather predictions are sometimes right and often not. The stock market is volatile and not even the experts seem to know whether it’ll go up or down. You might not be sure what the next year is going to hold for you and your family. You might not always be sure where you’re going to find the courage to deal with the different people and situations you face.

But you can be sure of Jesus. You can be sure he came to pay for your sins as the only one perfectly qualified to do so because he is both fully God and fully human. You can be sure that he lives to take you to be with him forever heaven. You can be sure that Jesus is your Savior God who is with you as you go forward into the future. Because he is Immanuel.

One preaching resource (besides the Bible and Confessions) in your library and why you have found it valuable:

I need to talk through the ideas in my head with others in order to sift out the wheat from the chaff, so for years now the most helpful resource in preaching preparation has been to meet regularly with other pastors to share key insights, applications, and ministry stories of the real people we’re thinking of as we prepare a sermon on the same text. I feel blessed to get to do that via Zoom with other Divine Savior campus pastors as part of our multi-site ministry.

A preaching book that I regularly consult is Stories with Intent by Klyne Snodgrass. Prof. Paul Wendland suggested this in a satellite summer quarter class on preaching parables. The book provides useful insights into story structure, historical context and interpretation, and relevant modern applications. I’ve realized that I could improve how I tell stories, so the book has been a help in thinking through the ways Jesus used stories.

Timeless Reminders

Editor’s note: This issue’s timeless reminder comes from Prof. Emeritus James Westendorf’s article, “Passionate Preaching for Impassioned Preachers.” You can read Prof. Westendorf’s article in its entirety in Preach the Word 4:1.

Know Your Text. Often when you go up to a person you didn’t know very well before and start asking him questions about himself, rather than simply listening to what other people have to say about him, you find out some very interesting things. You may get to know the person so well that you want to introduce him to your friends. The same thing can happen with texts. You begin a dialogue with a text, asking questions of it and listening for its unique answers, given in a way that perhaps no other text can give, and you start getting excited. The conviction begins to grow in mind and heart, “Wow, this text has some amazing things to say, and it says them so marvelously. I can’t wait to introduce it to my people next Sunday.”

Know Your Pulpit. The sermon is our chance to tell others what we have seen and heard from the mouth of God himself. I wonder with what feeling Philip spoke the words to Nathanael, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph”? I don’t think those words were said matter-of-factly because what they revealed was so mindboggling and amazing. You are in the same situation when you preach, only you don’t have to find the people first. They have come to you! Don’t hide the excitement. Let the enthusiasm that is in your heart show!

Know Your People. The impassioned preacher is not just a visiting pastor, he is also a listening one. He does the hard work of actually paying attention to what his people are saying. He makes mental notes of the fears, disappointments, doubts, and hopes which his parishioners describe. . . . When he is in the pulpit, all those conversations come flooding back into his memory. In his voice can be heard his unrestrained joy that says, “Boy, do I have something wonderful to tell you.”

Know Yourself. I’m sure you have been told more than once in your career, “Preach every sermon and apply every text to yourself before you take it to your people.” When that is done faithfully and regularly, the enthusiasm to share grows. . . . There are no magical formulas and no artificial contrivances that can keep the fires burning and the juices flowing, but that doesn’t mean there are no solutions to the absence of passion in our hearts and in our sermons. You are regularly working with the Spirit’s own instrument. Let it have free course in your heart. The passion will be there; passionate sermons will be the result. You and your people will reap the benefits.

Written by Joel Russow


 

WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

GIVE A GIFT

WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

 

Preach the Word – Insights from Multiple Ministry Settings

Preaching with Outsiders in Mind

Insights from Multiple Ministry Settings

Editor’s note: This issue continues our series on preaching with those outside our church membership in mind. This issue provides insights from Pastor Tom Engelbrecht, who has served in multiple ministry settings: six years at a mission restart called Amazing Grace in South Beloit, IL, then six years as assimilation pastor at Christ in Pewaukee, WI, a large congregation, where he also was involved in starting a second site. He currently serves at Christ Our Redeemer, Aurora, CO, which is a small to medium sized congregation with a Lutheran Elementary School. Pastor Engelbrecht is married to Jackie and together they have four children.

Ideas from Pastor Tom Engelbrecht

Four examples or thoughts on how outsiders have impacted your preaching preparation:

  • A caution to remain clearly biblical. I’ve always wondered, as have most pastors, I think: What would happen if you interviewed the members in my congregation on basic points of doctrine? How would that go? I try to keep that in mind when preparing sermons—perhaps many of the “insiders” are kind of “outsiders.” Because of that, my first example of an “outsider” impacting my preaching isn’t an outsider at all. I was at a large congregation and asked a retired pastor to offer feedback on a particular sermon that I knew I had tried to gear toward outsiders. He said something to the effect of “It didn’t sound very Lutheran.” I remember I had intentionally tried to avoid jargon and technical words. I wanted to be as simple and clear as possible. To this day, I’m not entirely sure if the pastor’s observation was positive or negative, but it sticks in my mind as a caution to remain clearly biblical (Lutheran) in my attempts to reach outsiders where they are at.

What would happen if you interviewed the members in my congregation on basic points of doctrine?

  • Specific law fully, yet wisely. I was preaching at the brand-new second site of our large church. We were trying to reach out to the families who sent their kids to the public school in which we were worshiping. There were about thirty people in attendance, and a couple of the families were from the school. I remember making a law application that had to do with online pornography. Following the service, one of the women, who was there with her 11-year-old son, said that she didn’t expect that her son would be exposed to talk about pornography at church. They didn’t return. I don’t think I would have preached the sermon any differently if given a second chance, but I think about that interaction as I seek to preach specific law fully, yet wisely, for the sake of the listeners.

She didn’t expect that her son would be exposed to talk about pornography at church.

  • Good news for the anxious. Have you seen the first-time guests that come in with the “deer in the headlights” look? We recently had a woman visit us for the first time with that look on her face. It made me wonder what was going through her mind. It also made me wonder if anything was getting through at all because of the stress of her unfamiliar surroundings. It impressed upon me the importance of the clear proclamation of law and gospel so that even those who may be anxious or distracted will hear the good news that their sins are forgiven in Jesus.
  • Share…no matter how people react. I was preaching for a funeral of a young girl. I didn’t dwell too much on the life of the girl, but rather on the hope that Jesus gives—especially through Baptism. I was a little surprised to see a woman frowning at me and shaking her head during the sermon. I didn’t have the chance to talk to the woman after the service and find out what was bothering her, but it sticks in my mind as an example of those who don’t appreciate the hope we have in Jesus. Funerals seem to be where I have the chance to address more outsiders than any other service. What a privilege we have to share the foolishness of the hope of the resurrection, no matter how people react! And what an opportunity for outsiders to confront death and hear about True Life.

Funerals seem to be where I have the chance to address more outsiders than any other service.

Three encouragements to preachers for keeping outsiders in mind in sermon preparation:

  • Smile. Yes, smile. And give people reason to smile. A mission counselor taught me that when he critiqued one of my services. One of the only critiques he gave was, “You should smile while you’re giving the Benediction.” It’s very simple but not always easy to do when we’re focused on leading a service. Smiling and giving people a reason to smile sets people at ease and draws them in to listen.

“You should smile while you’re giving the Benediction.”

  • Call, talk to, and spend time with your members and your prospects. I’ve had the privilege of serving at a mission restart, a very large congregation, and a smallish congregation with a school. I’ve always been able to find reasons to stay in my office. That’s when sermon writing has felt stale and out of touch. Spend time with people. Their joys, burdens, blessings, and challenges are the same things that outsiders are experiencing. If we listen, people will let us know what’s going on. We’ve got the message that addresses what’s going on.

I’ve always been able to find reasons to stay in my office. That’s when sermon writing has felt stale and out of touch.

  • The law and the gospel are the two main messages in the Bible. Through the law God crushes the self-righteous and through the gospel God heals the broken. We all know this, but not everyone knows this. A law/gospel sermon isn’t necessarily going to be simplistic. It might be exactly what that outsider needs. They almost certainly will not have heard a clear law/gospel message before. You get to be the one to share it with them.

Two sermon excerpts of preaching with outsiders in mind:

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Engelbrecht’s sermon on Romans 7:14-25, where he focuses the listener on our internal struggle against sin and then points hearts to the One who rescues sinners from themselves.

Why do you do what you do? How many times a day do you ask yourself that same question? You tell yourself you are going to be more positive today, but the first chance you get, you complain. Why do you do that? You want to keep your cool with your kids, but you fly off the handle. Why do you do that? You aren’t going to get online and visit those illicit websites tonight, but you grab your phone or computer and sink right back into the filth. Why do you do that? You are going to show love to your wife or respect to your husband, but you snap at them the first chance you get. Why do you do that? You are going to stop participating in gossip, but the moment you hear that juicy morsel you can’t help but pass it along. Why do you do that?

That’s exactly what Paul is talking about. Paul confessed that he didn’t do what he wanted to do. He did the very things he hated…. Paul puts a name to “myself,” the part of me that will not do what I want. He calls it the sinful nature. Every one of us is born with a sinful nature that we’re stuck with until we die. The old man in our lives is always catching up to us and crashing into us to ruin the things we want to do. The other night in Bible study someone gave a great example of the old man ruining the things we want to do. He said that he works downtown and occasionally he’ll see people begging for money on the street corner, so he’ll often give them whatever change he has. He said he does that simply out of faith in Jesus. But he said that almost every time he does it, there’s a part of him that hopes someone else saw him do what he did so that they think he’s a great guy. What was a selfless act turned into a selfish act. I appreciated his honesty and completely agree that when we want to do good, evil is right there with me! Myself is always against me….

The struggle between “me” and “myself” finally brings us to the “I.” I am wretched. I need to be rescued from myself. If you’re anything like me, my dear friends, that’s often where you stop. I am wretched. I don’t understand what I do. But we can’t stop there. Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! Jesus always wanted what God, his Father, wanted. He always knew what his Father wanted. He always did what his Father wanted. That doesn’t mean that Jesus didn’t struggle. He was tempted in every way, just as we are, but he was without sin. That means he was righteous. This is why Paul brings up Jesus Christ into the midst of the battle of me, myself, and I. We don’t know what we do, but Jesus knew exactly what he was doing. He knew exactly who he was doing it for. He did it in exactly the way it needed to be done to rescue us from us.

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Engelbrecht’s sermon on John 20:1-8, where he highlights the main character in our lives to explain the impact of the resurrection on insiders and outsiders alike.

When it comes to the account of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, I’ve always operated under the assumption that Jesus is the main character of the resurrection. What you’ll notice is something that surprised me…. We might go so far as to say that John makes the main character of Easter morning the empty tomb. We should begin by asking the question, “Why would John make the tomb the main character of the resurrection morning?”

Probably the best answer for why John makes the tomb the main character of resurrection morning is because everybody else made the tomb the main character that morning…. When (Mary) saw the tomb was opened, what did she assume? She didn’t assume that Jesus must be risen from the dead just like he said. Instead, knowing that he wasn’t in the tomb, she came to the conclusion that his body must have been moved to another tomb…. She ran and told this to Peter and (John). When they heard her story, they took off running. You have to admire their urgency, but where did they run. They ran to the tomb! Why did they run to the tomb? As far as they were concerned, Jesus was dead…. Their thoughts and lives were governed by death. So of course, they went to the tomb.

What is the main character in your life? Mary, Peter, and John probably thought their main character was still Jesus, but their thoughts were consumed by the stuff of death. Their footsteps that morning led to the place of death. You might think I’m overstating things, but when our thoughts are consumed by any other main character in our lives than Jesus, our footsteps are leading to a place of death.

Think about what types of things become the main characters in our lives. We get consumed by success at work or our children’s happiness or a healthy body or more material things in our lives. What is the inevitable destination if our footsteps lead down the path in pursuit of those things and other things like them? The destination is death. We don’t always think about it that way because those are good things in our lives. But they can’t be the main character in our lives because they end in death….

(Mary, Peter, and John) saw the stuff of death in the tomb. What didn’t they see? They didn’t see Jesus. Why didn’t they see him? Because he was alive…. The tomb is no longer the main character, because the tomb is changed as well. Now the tomb is the empty tomb. It’s not Jesus’ tomb anymore. It’s the empty tomb. Which means it’s never going to be the main character again. Jesus’ empty tomb is the promise and the proof of all our empty tombs. Jesus’ empty tomb is the promise of life for all those who have Jesus as the main character in our lives through faith. With Jesus as the main character in our lives, everything changes.

Jesus’ empty tomb is the promise and the proof of all our empty tombs.

One preaching resource (besides the Bible and Confessions) in your library and why you have found it valuable:

Early on in my ministry I very much appreciated Franzmann’s Bible History Commentary. It was valuable for helping me make sure that I didn’t go off track about a narrative text. Most recently, I was thankful for Michael Horton’s Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Reckless World. It was a helpful reminder that God continues to use the ordinary means that he’s always used to reach and strengthen people: the gospel in Word and Sacrament. As we do our best to use God’s ordinary means, he will bless it as he sees fit.

Timeless Reminders

Editor’s note: This issue’s timeless reminder comes Rev. John Vieth’s article, “The Value of the Four Divisions of Theology for Our Preaching.” You can read Pastor Vieth’s article its entirety in Preach the Word: 5:6.

Pastoral theology classes occupy an important place in our own seminary training. They do not, however, comprise the entire curriculum. Our well-balanced training in the disciplines of Biblical Theology, Historical Theology, Systematic Theology—as well as Practical Theology—prepares us for not only the general demands of pastoral life, but also for our pulpit work in particular…

Biblical Theology
We can’t share what we ourselves don’t have. If our purpose in preaching is to share with our congregations the words and promises of God, a thorough acquaintance with those words and promises on the part of the preacher is paramount. God did not call us to preach and then ask us to create interesting, comforting, or motivational messages of our own. He has called us to preach the interesting, comforting, and motivating message of his Holy Scriptures…

Historical Theology
While we do well to heed Harold Senkbeil’s warning, “…it’s always dangerous to run a church by archeology” (Dying to Live: The Power of Forgiveness, p. 78), our study and review of the controversies and heresies that troubled the Church in the past can prevent us from saying things we don’t want to say when we stand up to preach…

Systematic Theology
Since systematic studies equip us with a ready grasp of the great truths of the Bible and how they fit together, our training in dogmatics can help prevent us from developing novel interpretations of Bible texts that are contradictory to the rest of God’s word. Preachers with defective or deficient doctrine can unwittingly fall prey to pitting one text against the rest of God’s revelation.

A second advantage of thorough instruction in systematic theology is that it can alert us to preaching values in texts which serve as the sedes for certain Christian doctrines. When the Church has historically identified certain passages as key proofs of particular Christian teachings, those teachings deserve consideration in sermons based on those texts.

This is not an exhaustive listing of the value our theological training has for our preaching. Hopefully it reminds us to take up and dust off some parts of our training that we have let lie on the shelf for a while. Listen again to the encouragements of August Pieper:

In the parsonage, in the pastor’s study, in his little den are the sources of the church’s strength. If this little den becomes cold and empty, or if it is dedicated to the Old Adam and the spirit of this world, the church’s strength will evaporate, and the spirit of the world will overwhelm it. If, on the other hand, the Spirit’s fire burns in the pastor’s praying and studying, new streams of the Spirit will flow out daily to God’s people (WLQ, Vol. 84, No. 4, p. 276).

Written by Joel Russow


Prof. Russow at the National Conference on Lutheran Leadership

Preachers can enrich their preaching with non-members in mind by attending his session in January at the Chicago Hilton. Here’s the description of his session, but note that it’s not only for preachers!

St. Paul ask the believers in the church at Corinth to think about what they do if they are gathered for worship and “an unbeliever or an inquirer comes in…” (1 Corinthians 14:24). So, Paul tells those believers to expect that “non-members” will show up and to think through what happens in worship because of that fact.

In our WELS congregations, we hope to increasingly have “unbelievers and inquirers” visiting our worship at the invitation of a Christian friend. Over half of unchurched people say they would seriously consider accepting an invitation from a trusted friend to visit church. So, imagine WELS members take this all to heart and begin regularly inviting unchurched neighbors and family members to worship. Some of them actually show up! Now what?

What would you want the preacher to keep in mind as he preaches to these guests for the first time? Preachers, how should the presence of visitors impact your sermon preparation and proclamation? How deep can (or should?) a sermon go with listeners who know little about the Bible?

The reality is that our sermons will strive to keep two audiences in mind—church members and non-members. This presentation will especially wrestle with keeping the non-member audience in mind, but the encouragement shared will also edify the members too. Church members and preachers alike can benefit in this presentation as they seek to grow wise toward outsiders and make the most of every preaching opportunity.

Learn more at lutheranleadership.com.

 


 

WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

GIVE A GIFT

WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

 

Preach the Word – Insights from an Urban Setting

Preaching with Outsiders in Mind

Insights from an Urban Setting

Editor’s note: This issue continues our series on preaching with those outside our church membership in mind. The previous issue provided insights from a pastor serving in rural Nebraska. This issue provides insights from a pastor serving in the greater Seattle area.

Pastor Daniel Lange shares insights from his ministry at Light of Life Lutheran in Covington, WA, where he has served for twelve years. Pastor Lange also serves as the first vice president of the Pacific Northwest District.

Ideas from Pastor Daniel Lange

Four examples or thoughts on how outsiders have impacted your preaching preparation:

Preschool parents – Every week I see the moms and dads dropping their kids off at our preschool. They are outsiders who could visit church any given Sunday and sometimes do. In my conversations with them, I’m often reminded that they are busy, stressed, worried for their children, filled with questions or guilt about parenting, and looking for deeper peace and purpose in life than living the “American dream” in the suburbs of Seattle. (I confess as a parent living in the same community that I struggle with much of the same). What would I want to say if a family from our preschool stepped in this week? “God use these words for them. May they find the Savior who invites them to find rest for their weary souls.”

The conversation died when I said I was a pastor.

My neighbors – Last year, two young professionals moved in next door. As we greeted one another, the conversation died when I said I was a pastor. Since then, as I’ve poked around different topics, I would describe their worldview as many living on West Coast—atheist, humanist, and secularist, with a splash of anti-religion. They care deeply about social issues. While they haven’t come to church yet, my prayer and goal for them is that someday they will. When I see opportunities to touch on current events in my sermon, I ask myself, “How would I say it if I knew they were coming? Or how might I say it if we were talking to one another in the backyard?” When looking at issues in the world, we may not agree on the cause, but we can agree that the symptoms are ugly. I, too, see the devastating effects sin has on our society. How can I connect those problems to the Problem and finally to the Solution of Jesus?

The drug-addicted welder – I met a man in my community two years ago. He was more open with me than anybody I’ve ever met. After finding out I was a pastor, in the first five minutes he confessed to me he was addicted to drugs, alcohol, pornography, and sometimes slept with prostitutes. He said he had recently been trying to quit it all. With tears starting to run down his cheeks, he wondered if I had time for a question. He wanted to know if his baptism still meant anything. I was able to talk him into a Bible Information Class but still have not convinced him to come to church, although he has promised many times to show up. He is a reason I sometimes ask myself, “Is God’s grace clear in this message? If this is the Sunday he arrives, will he see the Jesus who forgives him still, loves him still, and, yes, whose baptism still promises eternal life?”

Many of them are burned out by heavy preaching which presents Christ only as example.

The drifting de-churched – The collapse of Mars Hill in Seattle left 10,000 Christians without a church home. A few of these families have made their way to our congregation, joining some others with a non-denominational background. Many of them are burned out by heavy preaching which presents Christ only as example. They remind me to preach the law with all its deadly force and the gospel with all its life-giving power.

Three encouragements to preachers for keeping outsiders in mind in sermon preparation:

  1. Regularly pray for first time visitors at your church. I live in an area where we don’t get walk-in visitors on a regular basis. When we do, one thought I don’t want to have is, “I wish I would have put more time into my sermon this week.” I’ve heard this from several others: the best outreach a pastor can do is to have a good sermon every week. Praying for regular visitors is an exciting pastoral practice. It’s exciting because God often says, “Yes,” to those prayers. It also helps me keep the outsider in mind when preparing the sermon.
  2. Trust your sermon preparation process. Sometimes when Easter, Christmas, or VBS Sunday is coming, I find myself falling into the trap of focusing on the audience before I have spent enough time in the Word. At some point, we do turn from gazing into the Word to gazing at our audience, but don’t make that turn too quickly. Stay glued to the text, soaked in the Word, and keep digging, just like any other week. When the speaker is captivated by what he has discovered, the audience (both insiders and outsiders) will be listening.
  3. We have THE STORY. In the age of information, where people are bombarded with disinformation, fake news, biased views, and thousands of stories every week, what comfort to know that we have THE STORY. Even though we may not know the personal story of every outsider who comes into our doors, we know that God’s STORY includes them. What a privilege to share, even if it’s just one time.

Two sermon excerpts of preaching with outsiders in mind:

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Lange’s sermon on Genesis 1, preached during the summer of 2020 when protests and riots gripped Seattle, Portland, and much of the nation. Lange comments that the sermon attempted to connect social issues people are passionate about to the greater problem of sin.

“Why is our world broken?” Be careful as you answer that question. Some might say, “Because of racism.” I wouldn’t disagree. Some might say “Because of lawlessness.” I wouldn’t disagree. “Because of selfishness, because of hatred, because of greed.” I wouldn’t disagree. But the reason I urged you to be careful in answering the question, “What is wrong with our world?” is this: everything we see happening right now is connected to a problem that runs much deeper than anything you see in the headlines. Like a river of pollution and filth THE PROBLEM runs its ugly course through every part of our existence. It’s source, the headwaters, begin flowing into our world just 2 chapters later.

I find myself falling into the trap of focusing on the audience before I have spent enough time in the Word.

Genesis 3. The tragic account of how God’s beautiful creation fell apart. Tempted by the devil at a tree, the first human beings reached for something they could never attain, they believed the serpent’s lie that they could become like God himself. And rebellion, evil, and sin went viral. Spreading like a cancer into all of God’s creation. Racism is an evil that flows from this event. Lawlessness is an evil that flows from this event. Injustice, violence, hatred, fear, greed, selfishness, apathy—all of it flows from what took place at that tree.

It’s very likely that because of your background and upbringing, one of these issues angers you more than another. And because of that, you are likely drawn to one side more than another. And if you are drawn to a side, you then have the target: the other side. To point out how they are so wrong and how your side is so right. And like blinders on a racehorse, our anger focuses our attention on the issue and against the other side and we forget something. We often can’t see it, but since the fall into sin there is not a single person living on earth who is completely right. Not even close to it. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). I’m not saying there isn’t a time to speak up and speak out and stand for justice and righteousness, but I fear we often do so without acknowledging and confessing something first—that wicked and evil river of pollution flowing from the tree in the Garden of Eden has flowed right into my own heart as well. As children of Adam and Eve, we were born with hearts of darkness. You were born with a heart of emptiness. We all enter this world with hearts filled with chaos, emptiness, and disorder. We are all guilty and deserve God’s righteous and true anger to come down upon us.

The scene is set again for one of the greatest demonstrations of God’s power and love. He looks at this mess of a world and he sends his Word again to bring peace, order, justice, and life. This time he didn’t just speak the Word, he sent the Word. The Word of God took on human flesh. Born of a woman and placed in a manger. The Word grew up and walked the earth. He, and only he, lived righteously and walked perfectly. He, and only he, was always in the right. He, and only he, was truly in a position to look down on everyone else in righteous anger, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked up to his Father and said, “Let it be me! Let your anger come down upon me! Not them. Let all this mess fall squarely upon my shoulders.” And so, we go to another tree. The tree where the innocent Son of God, took up all our pain and misery and suffered injustice for us once and for all.

Many guests would be used to preaching heavy on sanctification and light on justification.

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Lange’s Palm Sunday sermon on Philippians 2. This sermon was preached on a Sunday when many preschool guests would be in attendance. Lange comments that this sermon attempted to speak to the de-churched with a non-denominational background. Many guests would be used to preaching heavy on sanctification and light on justification.

Remember what was said at the beginning (of the text), “In your relationships with each other have the same mindset Jesus displayed.” God commands us to be humble just like Jesus. And if I said, “Amen,” right now and you left, you might be thinking this was the sermon summary: “1) Jesus was humble, 2) God commands us to be humble just like Jesus,” and you might be fine…for a while. You might go to IHOP and get your pancakes, go to Home Depot and buy your hanging flowerpots for the deck, but sooner or later this question would catch up with you today or this week, “Have I been humble like Jesus? Am I in my life being humble like Jesus? Can I ever be humble like Jesus?”

Why is it that my heart enjoys having the advantage over others? When people treated Jesus like nothing, he carried on in love without complaining? But why is it that when people dismiss me or treat me like nothing, I want to say, “Excuse me, don’t you know who I am? How significant I am? You can’t treat me like that!” And being a servant? Why is it that after a long day of work, the dishes get done, the house gets picked up, and finally a quiet hour for me, and right when we sit down, we hear from upstairs, “Mom, Dad, I need you.” Why is this heart of ours is so slow to serve? This is not a “Look at Jesus and be humble like him!” kind of sermon, this a “Look and first be humbled!” kind of sermon. Be humbled by the truth we haven’t loved this way. Be humbled that God commands us to love this way, but we can’t. We have broken his commands. Someone had to pay for our pride and our selfishness, someone had to pay for the times we haven’t loved others. Someone had to pay for all of our sins. That is what Jesus came to do. It was the reason he came to the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. To rescue us from sin. He didn’t bring an army. He would win victory over sin by surrendering himself. His humility is our hope!

There is no greater act of humble love. The exalted one, who by nature is God, allowed sinful humans to pin him to a crossbeam with nails. The most powerful being to ever walk the earth rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and offered himself to die. The one equal to God didn’t consider using that advantage for himself, even when the other crucified criminals mocked him telling him he should save himself. He stayed. He didn’t even think of saving himself, because all that was on his mind was saving you. The payment we owed God the Humble Servant has given.

One preaching resource (besides the Bible and Confessions) in your library and why you have found it valuable:

One resource is my blank sermon writing template page. Every week I open this document when it is time to begin a new sermon. It has prayers, reminders, tidbits from homiletics class, quotes from other preachers, sermon diagnostic questions, etc. Here is a sampling of what is on it right now:

  1. Begin with prayer. Remember: It is a privilege to stand in pulpit. Enjoy the process!
  2. Catch ME in the Gospel net this week!
  3. Holy Spirit, use this message despite me!
    • Text: Theme of Day: Prayer of Day: Lessons: Initial Ideas:
    • Law: “How can I preach the Law to the secure sinner?” (CFW Walther, Proper Distinction)
    • Gospel: “How can I preach the Gospel to the crushed sinner?” (Walther)
    • Other thoughts and questions:
      • Where is Christ in this text?
      • What lie is the devil telling? How does this portion of God’s Word expose that lie?
      • OT questions: What does the text reveal about God and his will, God’s acts, covenants, law, grace, etc?
      • What is the narrow and broad context of this text?
      • Don’t forget the “So What?” factor.
      • With this sermon I pray that the Holy Spirit will ____ my listeners to…
Timeless Reminders

Editor’s note: This issue’s timeless reminder comes from sainted Prof. Daniel Deuschlander’s article, “Preaching Old Testament Texts.” You can read Prof. Deutschlander’s article its entirety in Preach the Word 7:2.

Perhaps it will help if we start with the simple and so useful assumption: Every text is unique. It makes no difference whether the text is from the Old Testament or the New, keeping that assumption in mind may help to guard against preaching the same sermon every Sunday or from using the same application, no matter what the text: This is the Word of the Lord. Now let’s go out and share it with our neighbors and relatives. Just as the miracles of Jesus are all the same only different, so too are the Bible stories of the Old Testament. Jesus’ miracles all prove that he is the omnipotent Son of God who cares about our human condition. But each recorded miracle is at the same time unique, containing in its telling a lesson found nowhere else in quite the same way. So also the Bible history of the Old Testament. Each story makes the point that God is serious about his Word, both the law and the gospel.

The preacher is always looking for what makes these inspired words, this particular story, unique.

Each story illustrates the truth that grace is always undeserved, that we live by faith, and that we walk as pilgrims under the cross. And at the same time each story is unique and sharpens our understanding of those eternal truths just a little bit more. It is part of the art of the preacher of the Word that he is always looking for what makes these inspired words, this particular story, unique. He is always asking the text: What are you doing here? Of all the things that God could have said, could have told us about, why this?

Written by Joel Russow


The Foundation – Year A

The worship planning spreadsheet (and PDF version) for the entire year has been available since mid-August. Advent through Epiphany had been posted in early June. Some materials such as the Preacher Podcast and graphics are still being provided as they become available.

To receive earliest notice of such materials, be sure to sign up for email notification of new resources at welscongregationalservices.net/subscriptions/. Pastors might want to encourage musicians to sign up for the Hymnal Highlight series, which offers practical and helpful ways to introduce new hymns.

Are you just now considering The Foundation for the first time? Be sure to review the introductory video at welscongregationalservices.net/foundation-yr-a/ and also Worship the Lord #111. A link is just under the video. Note that you can use The Foundation even if you don’t have the new hymnal. You can easily adapt the worship plan for CW21 in the Year A Planner to CW93. The new lectionary is available in the free test drive version of CW Service Builder (builder.christianworship.com) and for purchase from Logos. Since the Gospel readings in the new lectionary are almost always identical to the old, you can still use Planning Christian Worship (worship.welsrc.net) for hymn suggestions if you’re still using CW93. Just watch for any hymns that focus on a First or Second Reading that might have changed in CW21.


 

WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

GIVE A GIFT

WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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Preach the Word – Insights from a Rural Setting

Preaching with Outsiders in Mind

Insights from a Rural Setting

Editor’s note: This issue continues our series on preaching with those outside our church membership in mind. The next two issues provide insights from pastors in differing settings—a pastor serving in a rural town and a pastor serving in a big city.

Pastor Frederic Berger shares insights from his ministry at St. Paul’s in Plymouth, NE and from preaching at Christ Lutheran in Beatrice, NE. Pastor Berger previously served at St. Paul’s in Livingston, MT and currently serves as the chairman of the Nebraska District Mission Board.

Ideas from Pastor Frederic Berger

“Funerals are one of our best forms of outreach.”

Four examples or thoughts on how outsiders have impacted your preaching preparation:

I come at this from the rural ministry perspective of a longtime established congregation. We live in a town of 400 people (Plymouth, NE). That means that on a typical Sunday we don’t have a lot of “outsiders” randomly coming for worship. But that also means that it becomes easier to key in on the types of services that we absolutely know there are going to be outsiders. Here are a few examples:

People are longing for these types of relationships, and they are in short supply among pastors in our country.

  1. Funerals – When I arrived in Plymouth, one of our elders commented, “Pastor, funerals are one of our best forms of outreach.” He wasn’t wrong. Everyone here knows everyone. People take time off to attend funerals. They bring food in abundance to share at the luncheon. They stay after for fellowship. They pay attention to the service, the building upkeep, the small details, and the sermon. Unlike other churches in our area, they have noticed in the sermon that the pastors have a close relationship with those who are now in heaven and with the family. The sermon is all about Jesus, but it’s always wonderful to share in the sermon how our church has connected the person who is now in heaven to the message of Jesus in immense proportions through Word and Sacrament over his/her life, while they were able to come to church, while a shut-in at home, and even in the last moments in the hospital. People are longing for these types of relationships, and they are in short supply among pastors in our country. Using relationships to connect people with the means of grace is our bread and butter in the WELS, and outsiders notice this.
  2. Weddings – At least in our area, and this is probably a widespread phenomenon, weddings even in churches have turned into a quasi-service, with officiants becoming ordained online for twenty bucks or acting like it. We have had several people take the Bible Information Class (BIC) who first came in contact with us as a guest at a wedding. And so even though I have found wedding sermons to be some of the most difficult to write, it gives an excellent opportunity to share law and gospel with many “outsiders.”
  3. Confirmations, Baptisms, Big Anniversaries, and Birthdays – Again, due to the strong family ties (often multi-generation families that stay in the area), when there is a family event, all the uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, etc. who are churched and unchurched attend the worship service. It might be for a special prayer or bouquet of flowers in the front for mom’s 80th, and 40 “outsiders” will be in attendance. I try to keep this in mind during sermon preparation. How can I take the truths of God’s Word and convey them in a simple, straightforward way? An introduction to catch their attention. A comment about Bible Information Class. A time in the sermon for them to actually ponder (and share with people sitting next to them) what this means for them. At this year’s confirmation service, one of the younger church council members commented to me, “That sermon was perfect for all the guests who were here today.”
  4. Christmas and Easter – These are Sundays for “outsiders” in all settings. I always think it is interesting to tailor your illustrations to your audience, which is quite easy when you are speaking to a congregation that understands farming and agriculture, because God often uses these illustrations.

Good preaching for “outsiders” is probably also good preaching for “insiders.”

Three encouragements to preachers for keeping outsiders in mind in sermon preparation:

  1. A good sermon is a good sermon. Good preaching for “outsiders” is probably also good preaching for “insiders.” As you spend time crafting a clear message, using pertinent illustrations, making applications to everyday life from God’s Word, sharing law and gospel, reviewing biblical accounts for the biblically illiterate and for the long time Bible reader who needs a refresher, defining terms such as justification, sanctification, repentance, redemption, etc., working on delivery, memorizing, it’s going to be a faithful sermon for all. Study the text. Write it. Memorize. Go and preach it like you mean it.
  2. Try to put yourself in their shoes. It is scary coming into a church for the first time, especially to an established one in a rural setting. People are going to notice you. So, from start (greeting) to finish (greeting) and everywhere in between (liturgy and sermon), do everything you can to make the service easy to follow and make them feel comfortable and welcome.
  3. In our setting, strong relationships and rapport already exist between members and non-members, which allows our members to easily invite non-members to worship, and, even better, to BIC. Take advantage of that. Sometimes our established rural congregations can be greatly benefited by using some of the same ideas that our new mission churches are using. Borrowing an idea from a mission church in our area, we offered a BIC at a brewery. This non-traditional idea especially sparks a lot of interest in a setting where only the traditional is expected. We had 125 various insiders and outsiders join us over the 18 weeks. In a rural setting, our members have an already established strong network for friendship evangelism.

We offered a BIC at a brewery.

Two sermon excerpts of preaching with outsiders in mind:

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Berger’s confirmation sermon. Times of celebration prove to be wonderful opportunities for outreach at St. Paul’s. Pastor Berger notes that his small rural congregation had 388 in attendance for this confirmation sermon on 2 Timothy 3:14-17.

I’m going to start by asking you a fairly ridiculous question, but I want an honest answer: If God told you to chew a piece of Trident original flavored gum every day, would you do it? It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? It takes us out of the hot topic of religious discussions and simply gets to the heart and core of this matter: If God tells you to do something, do you do it? Looking at a ridiculous question helps you to understand your attitude towards listening to God or not listening to God.

Which is so different than everything else in life, isn’t it? If you do not listen to someone’s good financial advice, you might not have as much money as you could have. If you do not listen to someone’s fashion advice, you might not look as stylish as you could have. If you do not listen to someone’s lawn advice, your grass might end up looking like mine—half dead. But if you do not listen to God, those stakes are so much higher. It finally ends up being heaven or hell for all eternity.

My guess is that you’re here today because you recognize that. My guess is that you do care what God has to say. Do you do it perfectly? No, none of us do. That’s why we confessed our sins at the beginning of the service. That’s why we need and why we have a Savior named Jesus. But my guess is that you’re here today because you care about what God says in his Word, and you’re here today because you want to encourage these confirmands to do the same.

The truth is, God doesn’t tell you to chew a piece of Trident original flavored gum everyday…. But God’s Word does tell you to do something…. God’s encouragement for each of us: CONTINUE IN WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED…

(Continuing in what you have learned involves having) a devotional plan. If you need one, talk to me or Pastor Dauck. We would love to be your personal devotional trainers. Make Sunday morning the priority. I know that stuff that can come up, that you can get sick, that you might have to be out of town. But make it the priority. And I’m talking the Sunday morning package—45 minutes in Bible Study, it’s awesome. An hour in worship. And if you have some hang up, some reason that is preventing you from coming, talk to me, Pastor Dauck, or the elders. If someone says that they aren’t coming because the pews are uncomfortable, let us know. We will remove a pew and put in a Lazy Boy for you…. That’s how much we want you to be here with your brothers and sisters, remembering your baptisms, hearing the Word, and receiving the Lord’s Supper.

(God tells us to continue in what you learned) for a really important reason. Because he says in verse 15 that the Holy Scriptures are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. (The Holy Scriptures) make us, who are born spiritually dead, spiritually alive. They share with us this incredible message—that because Jesus, God who took on human flesh, lived a perfect life, died on the cross, and rose from the dead, our sins are forgiven … and that when we die, we live with God for all eternity in a place he describes as Paradise….

We will remove a pew and put in a Lazy Boy for you.

And contrary to common thought, it’s not just for the future—not just for after death. No, God wants us to continue in what we have learned because, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

When you become the famous athlete, continuing in God’s Word prepares you for fame and what you’re going to do and say in your 30 seconds in the spotlight. When you’re diagnosed with a horrible disease, continuing in God’s Word prepares you for processing that difficult news. When you become extremely wealthy, continuing in God’s Word prepares you and helps you understand where it came from and how to use it faithfully. When you’re struggling in school, when you’re dating that special someone, when marriage gets tough, when family grows or doesn’t grow, when you’re struggling with an addiction, when your loved ones are being called Home, in every circumstance that you can ever think of in life, continuing in what you have learned prepares you for it.”

Here is an excerpt from one of Pastor Berger’s funeral sermons on Revelation 7. He exhibits what he commented on earlier—preaching Christ-centered funeral sermons as a pastor who has a close relationship with his people.

Your sins, the things you have done wrong in your life, the ways that you have disobeyed the Almighty God—they are forgiven! That secret something that you did in your younger years, that very few people know about, that burdens your conscience to this day and still you lose sleep because of it, Jesus tells you, “I suffered for that sin on the cross. It is finished. The price has been paid!” One day, on a day only God knows, you will stand before his judgment throne and you will hear the two most beautiful words, “NOT GUILTY!”…

This is a short summary of things Frank, Tudy, and I would talk about around their kitchen table. And Frank, when he’d hear that gospel message, that good news that heaven is secured for him not because of anything he could possibly do but because of what Jesus has already DONE, COMPLETED, and FINISHED, you’d see his face just light up. Because this meant that one day when he died, he would be with the Lord in paradise with 100% certainty because what was necessary for his salvation was already accomplished.

One day having talked about the Bible’s clear main message, the gospel, I gave Frank and Tudy bread, which Jesus says is his body. And then I gave Frank and Tudy wine, which Jesus says is his blood. And I told them, “Frank and Tudy have peace today knowing that your sins are forgiven, and heaven is won for you.” And Frank gave that Frank Imes’ laugh and said to me, “Pastor, that’s the best news in the world!”

Why did Frank say that? Because he knew his sin. Over his 80 years, he knew his thoughts, words, and actions did not always line up with God’s will. He knew that he fell far short of God’s standard, which is perfection. But this good news about what Jesus did for him—taking upon himself Frank’s sin and giving to Frank his perfect record…. Yes, that wonderful message of the gospel changed everything for Frank. It meant peace no matter what happened on this earth. The best news in the world meant that Wednesday was the best day of Frank’s life because God whispered in his ear, “Today you will be with me in paradise” and then peacefully took him there. And John in Revelation 7 gives us a glimpse of what Frank is experiencing right now.

“It’s good for the shepherd to smell like his sheep.”

One preaching resource (besides the Bible and Confessions) in your library and why you have found it valuable:

A longtime District President is a member in my congregation, and he often stops by the office and says, “I always worry about a pastor spending time in his office.” I usually respond back, “I find myself worrying about you a lot too,” mostly because I don’t know how else to respond to that. But I think he makes a good point. Or as another pastor once said, “It’s good for the shepherd to smell like his sheep.” Probably more than another book to read in our offices, my best preaching comes after spending time with those I’ve been Called to serve. The more I get to know them, the more I know in what ways the text I’m preaching on will apply to the joys and difficulties they are facing in their life. Not only will interacting with our members give good flavor to our sermons, it will also give them encouragement to be with the church family around Word and Sacrament on Sunday mornings.

But if you really want a book, Just Say the Word!: Writing for the Ear (by G. Robert Jacks, Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1996) is a good resource to transition seminarians from essay writing to sermon writing. But otherwise, put down the book, close Facebook, and spend time with your members and prospects.

Put down the book, close Facebook, and spend time with your members and prospects.

Timeless Reminders

Editor’s note: This issue’s timeless reminder comes from Rev. Daniel Leyrer, currently serving at St. Marcus in Milwaukee, WI. You can read Pastor Leyrer’s three articles, “Full Strength Law and Gospel Preaching” in their entirety in Preach the Word, Vol. 6:1-3. This excerpt comes from “The Pastor Preaches Full Strength Gospel” (Preach the Word 6:3). All back issues are available at worship.welsrc.net/downloads-worship/preach-the-word.

One of my favorite lessons on preaching comes from the story of the minister who was scheduled to conduct worship at the state penitentiary. The day before the service he walked around the chapel with the warden to “get the lay of the land.” As he viewed the seating arrangements, he noticed that one of the chairs was draped in black cloth. The preacher asked the warden about the chair. “The man who sits in that chair tomorrow morning will be executed tomorrow night,” the warden explained. “His chair is draped for death. Your sermon will be the last one he hears.”

Every time I mount the pulpit I may very well be preaching to someone sitting in a pew draped for death.

That story reminds me that every time I mount the pulpit I may very well be preaching to someone sitting in a pew draped for death. My pulpit might be draped for death for that matter. The point is we never know. We preachers never know if this is the last sermon a parishioner will hear or the last one we’ll have a chance to preach. Seen from that perspective, preaching a sermon is urgent business.

If you knew it was the last sermon for somebody, what approach would you take? It would be a good time to remember one of our titles: minister of the gospel. Given one last chance to preach a sermon, we would present the gospel as clearly and personally as we knew how. This is full strength gospel preaching—speaking not so much about Jesus’ word of forgiveness but becoming Jesus’ voice to speak that word of forgiveness.

Written by Joel Russow


 

WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

GIVE A GIFT

WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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Preach the Word – Insights from Unique Ministry Settings

Preaching with Outsiders in Mind

Insights from Unique Ministry Settings

Series Introduction

“I’m clearly not a part of their target audience.” After a busy day, I flipped through a few television channels one night. I settled on an old movie and soon the plot suspended for a brief commercial break. Over the next ninety seconds, advertisers tried to sell me adult diapers, fiber supplements, and a lifeline medical alert system. The commercials presumed a demographic audience other than a thirty-something pastor who was watching that night. I snickered to my wife, “I’m clearly not a part of their target audience.”

Would listeners snicker similar thoughts about our sermons? Dr. John Brug writes in The Ministry of the Word, “The church has not two ministries but one—to preach the gospel. This one gospel has two audiences—members of the church and nonmembers” (p. 61). Does our sermon preparation keep both audiences in mind? Or would the often easy-to-overlook nonmember audience snicker, “I’m clearly not a part of this preacher’s target audience?”

Reflecting on my own preaching, I tried to be mindful in preparation for major festival sermons of the visitors who would be listening to Lutheran preaching for perhaps the first time. But shouldn’t a Lutheran preacher keep that audience in mind in all his sermons? Different worship visitors informed me that before they ever came in person, they had been listening online “for months.” Pandemic preaching had its challenges, but it also opened up opportunities. Many preachers found themselves proclaiming to a wider audience through livestreamed services, recorded sermons, and printed messages. It forced this preacher to wrestle more zealously with important questions like: what can a preacher do in sermon preparation to communicate the one gospel to the two audiences? What encouragements would other preachers offer to proclaim the gospel with those outside the church?

“This one gospel has two audiences—members of the church and nonmembers.”

This series of Preach the Word articles will wrestle with preaching with those outside of our church membership in mind. Through interviews, sermon excerpts, and timeless reminders, we will aim to grow in being wise toward outsiders and seek to make the most of every preaching opportunity to them. I pray our conversations will be full of grace and seasoned with salt so that member and nonmember alike will recognize, “I’m clearly a part of this preacher’s audience!”

Ideas from Pastor Thomas Spiegelberg II

Editor’s note: Spiegelberg served as a preacher and an exploratory missionary in Boise, ID for five years. He then served as a preacher and missionary in a cross-cultural setting on the island of St. Lucia for sixteen years. He has been serving as a preacher in his current mission field of Mobile, AL for the past four years. He draws on his wide variety of ministry experience and sermon audiences to share the following thoughts. While the specific examples of his efforts to connect with those outside the church may not apply to your situation, I hope that you find his passion to do so inspiring.

My own council once tenderly criticized my sermons.

Four examples or thoughts on how outsiders have impacted your preaching preparation:

  1. In door-to-door canvassing, I met and kept conversing with an atheist in Boise. We came to a mutual agreement. I would read a book he suggested. In exchange, he would come to our Easter worship. The book he suggested was Why Christianity Must Change and Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile, by John Shelby Spong. It was one of the most painful books I ever had to read. (And no, I would not recommend it). But I understood what the man was looking for—he wanted me to look at Christianity from a perspective which he found noteworthy. He also followed through on his end of the agreement and attended Easter worship. I seized the opportunity that Sunday to preach on the credibility of the resurrection and its basis for our faith. The man didn’t come back, but he heard Christ crucified and risen.
  2. My barber in St. Lucia never went to church. No way! He explained that he didn’t even want to know or trust in Jesus. “That is white man’s religion,” he said. (St. Lucia is an island of predominantly African descent). But even with his aversion to Jesus, my barber wanted me to know that he prayed. Curious, I asked, “What do you say? Why do you pray? To whom do you pray?” Our conversation prompted a sermon on prayer and some reading up on books to address his understanding of prayer. My barber never came to church, but he did listen to what I had to say every time I got my hair cut.
  3. My own council once tenderly criticized my sermons. After a huge upswing in violent crime in the area, they asked why I never addressed or mentioned crime in my sermons. Interesting. In my mind I thought, “Because the pericope doesn’t line up with current social struggles. I will get to it, but not until after Pentecost.” As a result of our conversation, I did two things. I began reading the local newspaper and tried to incorporate one thing happening in either the application or introduction of the sermon.
  4. A reporter came to church, and I interviewed him. I asked him to make me a list of the top ten things on which his news station reports. He did and it was great! Sermon fodder flowed out of that list. One series was called, “Get a Job, Uh.” (Uh is a St. Lucian expression that they add to the end of a sentence to emphasize it). It was a series1 on work and Christian vocation addressed from a law/gospel perspective. It got so much attention, we actually were interviewed by the local news station on how we as a church were trying to help the unemployment and poverty problem in the country. We also had people show up in the following months thinking we were giving out jobs.

The sermons got so much attention, we actually were interviewed by the local news station.

Three encouragements to preachers for keeping outsiders in mind in sermon preparation:

  1. Talk to those outside the church and read with them. This is really hard and can be extremely painful, but it will give you a better understanding of where people are.
  2. Address the struggles people are going through and apply the Word of God to those struggles. Maybe the struggles addressed won’t resonate with everyone, but in the process, you are helping your congregation in how to dialogue with the unchurched. This can be extremely valuable especially if most of your church members’ lives are lived in the context of the church.
  3. Think of sermon preparation like writing your sermon for your homiletics professor first, but then rewriting it for your unchurched “Alabama fan neighbor.” The same points will be drawn out, but hopefully with a different delivery.

Two sermon excerpts of preaching with outsiders in mind:

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Spiegelberg’s sermon on Easter Sunday with the atheist in attendance. He acknowledges some of the “nonsense” that might be stirring around in his listeners’ minds and takes the listener back to the impact of the empty tomb and the sure and certain word of God:

… When we got to my grandfather’s funeral, I was never able to bring myself to look inside the casket as if looking at him would prove that he was really gone. There is just something so final about death that it is hard to accept. And if I didn’t look at him, maybe it wouldn’t be over. And then they closed the lid. Irreversible. Final. It’s a story that I bet every one of you can tell. The loss of a loved one. The quietness in the house the following weeks that they are gone. The rest of the world goes on with what they are doing, and yet the finality takes a long time to sink in.

Sometimes we celebrate Easter with such repetition and familiarity that I wonder if we fail to imagine what life would be like if it wasn’t true. We have grown up believing that there is a heaven and there is a resurrection for those who believe. It is the central belief in Christianity. Paul sums it up when he says in Corinthians, “If Christ is not arisen then you are still dead in your sins. Your faith is worthless.” If Christ is not risen, then it is all nonsense….

It is not difficult to understand why no one believed the women. At that time, women’s testimony was not even allowed in court, but a more obvious reason was the nature of death. Irreversible. Final. Who argues with those basic facts of life? It made no sense. People don’t come back from the dead…. So why do I believe? I know death. I’ve seen it before. It’s always the same. Why should I believe that Jesus conquered it?

… I have gotten to know God and how he works. Not because I have any deep insights into the divine, but because God wrote a book about himself and that tells me a lot of who he is. And from what I can see, that’s how God works. This is his style. He always works through the slow and difficult. He doesn’t just zap the evil away, but he allows the evil to exist, and then twists it for our good. He doesn’t remove evil, he transforms it. God allowed his Son to die that we might live!… I have gotten to know God in his autobiography, I know he is more than a powerful God but a God of love. I believe that he created me and genuinely wants me to be with him. I believe he created my loved ones too and he wants them in heaven with him too!

… There are two ways to see human history. One as a long list of violence and pain, difficulty and unpleasantness that we experience with Easter being a once-a-year fairy-tale exception—something with a happy ending. Just another Sunday in which we celebrate hopeful thinking that there is a heaven and one day we might be there.

But the other is this. Seeing Easter as the starting point in our lives. If God could conquer death which is irreversible, then just maybe he can take care of me in my life. Just maybe I will shake the hand of Rev. Ed Weiss, my grandfather, once again. Then maybe God can and does do everything he says he does. That’s what the empty grave is all about. Look into it and believe that God can and he does. I believe.

Here is an excerpt from Pastor Spiegelberg’s sermon on Luke 10:25-37 (the Gospel for Proper 10, July 10 this year). He implores his listeners to love the neighbors God placed into their lives:

We are planted with people in our neighborhoods, workplaces, families, schools and the question we have to ask ourselves is, so how do we show God’s love? Here is why neighboring is maybe a bigger question in our world today than ever before. The average American moves more than eleven times in their life. On average, 40 million of us move in any given year. Some of those moves are large. Some are small within cities, but that’s a lot of movement.

Bringing it closer to home, let’s talk about Alabama…. Baldwin County is one of the fastest growing counties in the state at a growth rate of 16% annually…. People move, and with every move, relationships are uprooted. If you are in the military, you know that full well. It takes work to develop new relationships. One of the sad side effects is that the cohesiveness and responsibility we feel toward our neighbors and our communities become fractured….

Notice, the lawyer asked who his neighbor was, and Jesus did not define it as what side of abortion you are on, your political orientation, or your color of skin. He doesn’t say it is people who look like you, who act like you, who talk like you. He doesn’t give us the option to be selective on the who. It is anyone we are planted around and who needs us….

There is no way that he or any of us can walk away saying, “Yeah, Jesus. I nailed that one.” Instead, what he wanted the lawyer to realize, what he wants us to realize is, “Lord, I need a perfect neighbor like that.” See, what Jesus was saying is that we are the man in the ditch that needs someone who recognizes our need. We need someone who is willing to give all for our good. We need to be healed. We need a perfect neighbor. And Christ is the one!…

“Can you name all your neighbors?”

I have just two applications for you this morning as we go from God’s house…. Take your bulletin insert this week and draw your street. Include a little box for all your neighbors. Can you name them all? Maybe you can. If you can’t, commit yourself this summer to figuring out who they are. Go introduce yourself. Bring them some cookies. Mow their lawn. Say hi to them when you drive by. Even the grumpy ones. And get to know your neighbor.

The next step. Give. Be the kind of neighbor you wish you had always had. Put yourselves in their shoes. There are more dispossessed people around us than we realize. God has planted us here at this time to be life where we live. Let’s share the love of Christ. If you want to know what to say, sit in on our Bible class over the next couple of weeks as we explore what to say. But as we live, love locally. Start with the State Farm mentality: Like a good neighbor, be there.

“Learn a lesson from the profound simplicity of Jesus’ sermons.”

One preaching resource (besides the Bible and the Confessions) in your library and why you have found it valuable:

They Like to Never Quit Praisin’ God: The Role of Celebration in Preaching, by Frank Thomas, United Church Press, 1997. When I got to St Lucia, one of my members always gave me a run down on whether my sermon was lively enough for St Lucians. It got me thinking that preaching to fit a cultural setting does make a difference. So, I started reading a couple of books on African-American preaching. Obviously, there are some theological discrepancies with this book, but in a celebratory preaching style, you are drawing a listener to the joy of salvation. You are leaving the listener with something to be joyful about. For a Lutheran pastor, that is an easy goal.

Timeless Reminders

Editor’s note: Each issue of this series will conclude with timeless reminders from the Preach the Word archives. This issue’s reminder comes from Rev. Herbert H. Prahl, who joined the saints triumphant earlier this year. You can read Prahl’s article, “From God’s Word…Through Your Heart…To Their Lives,” in its entirety in Preach the Word 3:5.

Sermon preparation is our top priority. We are entrusted with the task of proclaiming God’s holy Word, not ourselves. God’s people expect and deserve, our best and nothing less….

Don’t put yourself above your hearers or talk down to them. Talk at their level. Don’t get too technical. Learn a lesson from the profound simplicity of Jesus’ sermons. Love your hearers as Jesus loved them. Put your pastoral heart into your message to them….

Good application is probably the number one request of members when it comes to sermons. It might not quite be the way you as the exegete or homiletician view the text, but unless you “connect” with your hearers, they easily tune you out. Their plea is: “Show that you understand us, that you have us on your heart, and that you understand our day-to-day lives when you study the text and write your sermon.” One pastor has taped the words “So What?” in his pulpit, visible to his eyes above his Bible each time he preaches. He uses it as a reminder to keep the law and gospel relevant to his congregation.

Written by Joel Russow

A new series editor: Joel Russow began serving as professor of pastoral theology and systematic theology at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in January of 2022. Prior to that, he served as a parish pastor in Tallahassee, FL.


Thematic groups in the season after Pentecost

“[Jesus’] words establish our faith, transform our hearts and minds, and guide our lives in him. During the Sundays after Pentecost, we gather to let the Holy Spirit do the work Jesus promised he would do in the way Jesus promised he would do it.

“Because the season after Pentecost is quite long, it may be helpful to break these Sundays into thematic groups. The groups and individual themes suggested below seek to pick up on the cues given by the gospel writer Luke.”2

  • June 12-19. Jesus’ words possess Jesus’ power. (Due to the late date of Easter this year, Propers 3-6 are omitted.)
  • June 26-August 14. Jesus’ words focus Jesus’ followers.
  • August 21-October 2. Jesus’ words confront us with challenging truths.
  • October 9-23. Jesus’ words produce the faith he seeks at his return.

1 An occasional topical series apart from the lectionary can be useful. But it is also possible to craft a series from the lectionary. Examples are in The Foundation (welscongregationalservices.net) and in Commentary on the Propers, Year C on which The Foundation is based. See the sidebar.

2 Bauer, Jonathan. Christian Worship: Commentary on the Propers, Year C, 213. NPH 2021. The thematic groups from this book differ slightly from those in The Foundation.


WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

GIVE A GIFT

WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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Preach the Word – Taking Up the Challenge

Preaching on the First or Second Reading with the Day’s Gospel in Mind

4 – Taking Up the Challenge

Many Cultures, One Lord is Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary’s annual effort to observe the Martin Luther King holiday. I preached at the service in 2015 just as the Black Lives Matter movement was exploding. There is no official Proper for that service so I could choose my text without considering the other readings. I chose Acts 10 and 11 because I felt the early church’s prejudice over against Cornelius and the Gentiles and the Spirit’s response addressed the issue on our campus. I quoted passages from the entire event; the sermon had no formal theme. I concluded with this:

The story of planet earth since the fall is filled with battles between races and cultures and lifestyles. Today our nation stops for a moment to ponder solutions to these conflicts. In the end, only God’s solution works. The encounter with Cornelius was a critical moment in Peter’s life, and it is critical for us as well. As you remember this story, note the struggle in God’s men and note the power of God’s grace. Note the struggle and confess your sins. Note the power and trust the absolution. Right there is the solution for prejudice, there is the key to outreach and evangelism, and there is the path for your life and your ministry.

Four years later, in 2019, I encountered the Peter/Cornelius event again. Acts 11:1-18 is the First Reading for the Fifth Sunday of Easter in Year C (May 15 this year). Both this reading and the Second Reading, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, are new to the lectionary. It’s instantly obvious that the Second Reading was selected to match the theme of the Gospel, John 13:31-35.

As I thought about which text to preach on, I hesitated to let the Gospel go since Jesus’ command to love one another is so critical to the Christian life. The Acts 11 reading was intriguing because it addresses the issue of prejudice at a time when this is a contentious issue in our world. So I asked the question: Can I preach on the First Reading with the day’s Gospel in mind? It seemed that Peter’s defense to the Jerusalem congregation was a legitimate application of the principle Jesus set down on the night he was betrayed.

I began with Thursday and set the stage that existed at vs. 35. Then…

And then Jesus said this: A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.

With these words Jesus is giving us our mission and our task for life: Love one another. He invites us to see his love for us and believe his love for us—love so deep that he died for us—and then he invites us to imitate his love as we live for others. Loving one another is the greatest and the grandest and most glorious task that we believers have—and we love because he first loved us.

Easier said than done, right? Knowing Jesus’ command is one thing; we all know it. Doing Jesus’ command is another; we haven’t done what Jesus calls us to do, not nearly as often as we should. We admit it, we confess it, we ask for forgiveness, we try to do better. Sometimes. Maybe most of the time. But if we think a little, we might be willing to admit that there have been times when we aren’t so convinced we need to love one another. We’ve been wounded, slighted, ignored, insulted. Must we love those who did it? We’re better, superior, higher up on the morality chart. Must we love those below us? We’re Christian, conservative, Bible-believing, Lutheran. Must we love those who aren’t?

Those are exactly the questions a lot of first-century believers were asking in the First Reading for today from Acts chapter 11. Their struggle isn’t so different from ours. They knew what Jesus said and so do we: Love One Another! What they wanted to know and we what we want to know is this: Are There Exceptions?

I explained the standard Jewish mind set and concluded:

God commanded his people that they must have nothing to do with Gentiles. Don’t marry them, don’t visit them, don’t eat with them. Bottom line: Stay clear of Gentiles.

Of course, the Jews understood that Gentiles could be saved. The Old Testament was filled with promises that the nations would come to see the light of the gospel. Plenty of Gentiles living in Israel heard Jesus preach and believed his message. The Jewish Christians were happy to accept the Gentile Christians. But here’s where the problem came in. The Jews who followed Jesus were convinced that the Gentiles who followed Jesus had to obey the Old Testament laws. That’s the way it had always been, but it wasn’t going to be that way anymore. God had to set the Jewish Christians straight.

In two lengthy paragraphs I shared the main points of Peter’s explanation in Jerusalem. Then came the application.

This was a big hurdle for the Jewish Christians. They got it right this time, but the struggle didn’t end here. We have our own hurdles with this issue. We all know whom we love. But there are some people we have trouble loving. I love my family, but I have trouble loving my nephew who’s into drugs and punk rock. I love my neighbors, but I have trouble loving the ones who have trash all over their front yards and junk cars in the back yard. How about you? Who are the people you find hard to love, the people you might consider exceptions to Jesus’ command? The co-worker who insulted you or took advantage of you? The relative who abused his wife and made her life miserable? The parent who was always gone and never had time for you or the child who never checks in? The homeless man who won’t work, the black woman who has children with a variety of fathers, the addict who spends his welfare check on booze and pills, the Hispanics who try to enter America illegally? How about the acquaintance who brags that he’s an atheist, your neighbor’s gay son or lesbian daughter, the Catholic or the Baptist or the Mormon you were taught to dislike already when you were young? How about people in Vietnam who long to know Christian truth, the same people who tried to kill you 50 years ago? Yes, yes, yes, love one another, we say, but there have to be exceptions! Jesus says, Love one another—no exceptions.

How can we solve this problem that we all share? We solve it by looking to Jesus. As I have loved you, Jesus said. As I have loved you. The disciples had seen Jesus’ love for three years, love for them and love for others. They were about to see the pinnacle of his love, the love that proclaimed his glory and that brought glory to his Father. I quoted Philippians 2:5-8 …he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! Because he did, we have no conscience plagued by sin, no guilt over past mistakes, no weakness facing temptation, no worry about the future, no fear in sickness, no uncertainty at death. He did this all because he loves us.

Don’t look for flowers and candy. We’re not talking about that kind of love. We’re talking about the kind of love Peter had for Cornelius and his household, the kind of love Peter explained to the congregation in Jerusalem, the kind of love that led them to put away their objections, to praise God and say: So then, even to Gentiles God has granted repentance that leads to life. So now? Forgive and forget what’s in the past. Understand and sympathize with those who struggle in poverty or sin. Feel compassion and concern for those who have fallen into temptation and error. Open your eyes, open your hearts, and open your wallets to help people longing for the gospel. You can’t show your love to all, but you can show your love to all you can, and you can love them all in Christ—no exceptions!

The sermon I preached on Epiphany 6 was based on 2 Corinthians 12:7b-10, Paul’s struggle with and solution to his thorn in the flesh. In the former Christian Worship lectionary this text concludes a lectio continua from 2 Corinthians (Pentecost 7B, paired with Mark 6:1-6, Jesus’ rejection in Nazareth). So this is a new selection for Epiphany 6C to accompany Luke 6:17-26, Jesus’ words about blessings and woes. I was intrigued by the new selection and wondered about the connection to the day’s Gospel.

I didn’t work alone this time. Before the new CW lectionary was introduced in Advent 2021, I had access to Jonathan Bauer’s Commentary on the Propers Year C. This volume has provided all kinds of interesting insights. (Some of this work is adduced in the Year C Worship Plan from Congregational Services, but the commentary has a wider scope and is wisely purchased.) The commentary doesn’t directly promote the preaching approach I’ve taken in this series of articles, but its efforts to theme the day’s Proper and to demonstrate the connection between the three readings are helpful. For example, comments on 2 Corinthians 12 include this: “Thus Paul had learned the paradoxical principle on which life in Christ’s kingdom operates: strength is found in weakness. Paul knew that as he boasted in that weakness, he was seeking shelter in the tent of Christ’s power” (Commentary, p. 96).

Commentary on the Propers Year C … has provided all kinds of interesting insights.

I had to work at finding connections between the Gospel and the Second Reading. Paul’s thorn seemed to match the poor, the hungry, the weeping, and the hated noted in the Gospel: difficult and challenging aspects of life (does Matthew 5 explain Luke 6 more completely?). The strength and power of Christ which rest on Paul and τελεῖται in weakness seemed to match life in the kingdom of God, the satisfaction and joy that come with salvation, and the reward in heaven. Paul’s ability to boast and delight in his weaknesses seemed to reflect the blessedness that believers experience in their upside-down relationship with Christ. I themed the sermon: “Here’s to the Good Life.” I explored two truths: 1) the good life needs to be redefined and 2) the good life needs to be sought.

My introduction offered a few examples of the good life. I went on:

In one way or another we all want a slice of the good life. Good health, money in the bank, a close family—whatever. The slice I want might be different from the slice you want, but whatever makes us happy is the good life we want. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. Nothing wrong from God’s perspective, either. Truth is, God provides the good life in many ways. God loves to bless us, and he loves to make us happy.

The trouble comes when the good life doesn’t show up. And the trouble gets worse when the good life is the only life that makes us happy. That’s the problem Jesus was talking about in the Gospel today. Jesus was becoming a sensation in Israel. What he said was powerful and convincing. What he did was amazing; he healed diseases and exorcized demons again and again. People from all over the Holy Land were following him. They all wanted a slice of the good life, just as we do.

Jesus saw the hopeful faces of his followers. He looked into the eager eyes of his new apostles. He knew they wouldn’t find the good life they were hoping for, not if they stayed with him. The cross was coming for him and eventually for them. There would be no beaches, no cruises, and no job of their dreams. There would be suffering and persecution and death. The good life gone, vanished? No, not at all. Just different. And that’s what Jesus taught in today’s Gospel.

St. Paul wasn’t there when Jesus spoke to his followers that day, and he certainly wasn’t one of Jesus’ followers, not then. Decades passed before Paul wrote the words of the Second Reading for today. But what he wrote gives us a concrete example of what Jesus was saying in the Gospel. Despite all his troubles, Paul was enjoying the good life to the max. And so can we. So we’ll listen to Paul this morning, and we’ll all say be able to say: Here’s to the Good Life!

In exposition I summarized Paul’s experience with suffering and examined his thorn in the flesh. I concluded:

Paul certainly realized the good life was probably beyond him, but he was praying at least for a better life, a life that would let him work and sleep and live without this pain or this distraction.

Jesus said no. Paul wrote, But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” So the thorn wasn’t going away; no good life, not even a better life. But Jesus didn’t really take the good life away; he just redefined it, he gave it a different meaning. The key to the good life, the key to completeness and contentment and happiness wasn’t to pull out Paul’s thorn but to fill Paul with Christ. The grace that covered Paul’s sins and the power that moved Paul’s ministry was better than being thornless. The Savior’s grace and the Savior’s power—that was the good life. And that’s the good life that Jesus gave to Paul. And so Paul wrote: Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me…

Application came naturally:

Does life disappoint and frustrate and sour us then? Is the joy of living gone? Life doesn’t have to be like that. No way! We still have the good life, but we have to redefine it, we have to explain it as Jesus did in the Gospel. The good life is to live in the kingdom of God where Jesus’ grace forgives our sins and where his power guides our lives. The good life is to be filled and overfilled with Jesus’ love. When Jesus serves us, we’re always satisfied. The good life is to anticipate the laughter of heaven where we’ll grin from ear to ear and giggle in grace forever. With Jesus, we sit back and smile and we say, “Here’s to the good life.” Happy, content, at peace with God. In the Gospel today, Jesus says that people who have this good life are blessed. He said, Blessed are you.

The second point of the sermon was to encourage the faith-filled euphoria Paul felt (I will boast… I delight) when he realized the purpose of his weaknesses. After explaining Paul, I summarized Jesus:

poor—not poverty stricken or destitute but… being hungry—not fasting or starving but… weeping—not with forced tears or fake tears but… insults: People who live in their own good life can’t stand people who live in the good life of Christ.

The conclusion followed:

This good life in Christ—this is the good life we want. If the Lord sees fit to remove our thorns or if he spares us the insults or the difficulties, great. We’ll be happy. But the happiness we really want, that inner joy, that deeper contentment, that lasting peace is a happiness that comes only with the good life in Christ. Only there do we find grace and power. So we seek the good life and we pursue it, and we find it by boasting and delighting in our weaknesses. We confess our sins, we long for forgiveness, we sorrow over our failings, we endure the insults. Like Paul, we live with our thorns—the pain, the humility, the regret, the enemies. But also like Paul, we believe that we are strong when we are weak and Christ’s power rests on us. So here’s to the good life, the good life in Christ.

The new Christian Worship lectionary presents an interesting and intriguing challenge.

The concept of preaching on the First and Second Readings with the day’s Gospel in mind isn’t for every text or every preacher. Gospel texts, of course, and other texts, too, beg for an independent approach. Some preachers love the challenge of finding every sparkling gem in a single text. The new Christian Worship lectionary, however, unlike any lectionary before it, presents an interesting and intriguing challenge: to preach on texts which have been specifically and thoughtfully chosen to match the focus of the day’s Gospel in a way that proclaims the unique truth of the text in light of the words and works of Jesus. I’ve enjoyed the challenge; perhaps you will as well.

 

Written by James Tiefel

Prof. Tiefel, now Pastor Tiefel, serves two small congregations in Mequon, WI, in semi-retirement. Over a 35-year career at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary he taught classes in worship and preaching. As an every-Sunday preacher once again, he is able to combine many of the concepts he taught in the classroom with practical experience.

 


WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

GIVE A GIFT

WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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Preach the Word – Preparing the Sermon

Preaching on the First or Second Reading with the Day’s Gospel in Mind

3 – Preparing the Sermon

When my dad died in 2008, I decided to contact the four congregations he had served during his ministry. I asked the local pastors if they might announce his passing in case someone remembered. At least one did. A member in her 90s walked out of church and told her pastor, “I remember Pastor Tiefel’s first sermon.” The young pastor was eager to know what she remembered. “I don’t remember much of anything,” she said, “except the text. He preached on the draught of fishes.” I’ve retold that story many times over the years and invariably end the same way: That’s the highest compliment a pastor can receive.

“Preach the text” is the imperative the homiletics professor lays before student preachers—and then obligates them to do it in class sermons. The sermon, as we learned it and as we teach it, exposits a text, it explains and applies a passage of Scripture. On the basis of that exposition, the sermon proposes a truth. The sermon can take on a variety of forms—didactic, inductive, homily, narrative, or expositional1—but the best Lutheran preaching in all cases exposits a text and proposes a truth as it proclaims law and gospel.

Is the writer backing away from this “preach the text” allegiance?

Those who have read the first two articles in this series may have wondered if the writer is backing away from this “preach the text” allegiance. If the preacher preaches on the First or Second Reading with the day’s Gospel in mind, does the new imperative actually become “preach the texts”? Does the preacher end up preaching on two texts instead of one? Does such a sermon compromise the unique setting and message of the alternate reading?

Those are legitimate questions, especially when asked by men with our homiletical training and exegetical sensitivities. Rest easy. The preacher who takes on this idea must still preach the text. He lets the text say what the Spirit wants it to say and does not manipulate the Spirit’s intention. He preaches the text in its historical context and allows the text’s proposal to guide the sermon. The goal of this kind of preaching is to maintain textual independence even as we understand the preeminence of the day’s Gospel and the inter-dependency of the Sunday Proper.

At the same time we realize that preaching styles are not static. We preach the same truths (often based on the same texts) our grandfathers preached, but we preach them in different ways. Sermons today are less oratorical and more conversational. They often contain inductive approaches even if they announce a theme and several parts. Our fathers would not have dreamed of leaving the pulpit to preach (nor would some of their sons), but this is common in our circles. As someone who has observed the evolution of the lectionary and its propers over the span of almost 50 years, I sense the Christian Worship resources provide an excellent opportunity to place both the chosen text and the day’s Gospel in clear view in the sermon.

The preacher can expect that this approach takes a little additional work and time. Following are some steps which can make the effort manageable and rewarding. Illustrations are based on the Proper for Advent 4C scheduled for December 19, 2021.

Choose the Text

Preachers select their sermon text in a variety of ways. Some follow a specific pattern; some simply choose the text they want to preach on. I belong to the latter group, but there is a reason for my choice. During this past Advent season I had preached on three Luke texts in a row; it seemed time for a prophetic or epistle text on Advent 4. I copied the Prayer of the Day and the three readings and spent some time reading and thinking about them: Micah 5:2-5a, Hebrews 10:5-10, and Luke 1:39-55. A phrase in the Prayer of the Day caught my eye: “Take away the burden of our sins” and that phrase made me look more carefully at the Hebrews reading. I had never preached on that text before and preaching on Hebrews on Advent 4 seemed intriguing.

Veteran preachers who have preached through the ILCW/CW lectionary will notice many new texts in the new lectionary especially during the Epiphany and Pentecost seasons. While the Gospel selections remain very much the same, the First and Second Readings are often new.

Begin with the Gospel

I begin with a study of the day’s Gospel, obviously if that’s my chosen text but also if I’ve decided to preach on one of the other readings. I know these Gospels pretty well, but a new look is important. In our new resources the Gospel invariably guides the theme or focus for the day and sets the course for the rest of the Proper.

The Gospel for Advent 4 in Year C is Luke 1:39-55 and relates two themes: Elizabeth’s reaction to Mary’s pregnancy (the Visitation) and Mary’s Magnificat. Neither Luke 1:39-45 nor Luke 1:46-55 appeared in the historic series nor in CW’s One Year Series. The Roman Lectionary selected the Visitation but not the Magnificat for Advent 4. The ILCW lectionary selected both accounts for the Gospel reading on Advent 4C but placed 46-55 in parentheses suggesting it to be optional. All the other Lutheran lectionaries since then follow that pattern. Only the Christian Worship resources, past and present, select the entire pericope for Advent 4. I’m glad both sections are there.

The Song of Mary can’t be ignored, of course. It’s one of the four great Lukan Christmas canticles. It puts into picture language the work of Christ and includes Mary’s wonderful confession, “My spirit rejoices in God, my Savior.”

The proposal of the text might be: Two believing women, both chosen for their mothering roles by the Lord, confess the blessings of the coming King.

With a solid understanding of the day’s Gospel, the preacher moves ahead to his text.

Study the Text

It’s not necessary to review all the points of a Hebrews 10 text study here; a few points are enough. The proposal of the text is that Christ identifies himself as the perfect sacrifice for sin and as the one pointed to by the Old Testament temple sacrifices. It was important to notice vv. 1-4 and especially v. 4: “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” If not the blood of bulls and goats, then what will take away sins?

The answer is in the text. In vv. 5-7 the writer places the words of David in Psalm 40 into the mouth of Christ. In vv. 8-10 the writer comments on the words of Christ. In both sections we note the truth that God does not accept the temple sacrifices as the final payment for sin. Christ through David makes three points concerning what does serve as the final payment for sin:

The body you have given me

My status as the one chosen and promised one (written about in the scroll)

I have come to do your will, my God

The writer’s comments review the statements of Christ and then he concludes: “By that will we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

What is striking here is the Savior’s coming to do God’s will by sacrificing his body cannot be limited to the Incarnation. His work is completed at the cross. I wondered how I could get Good Friday into a sermon preached six days before Christmas!

Observe the Points of Comparison

With both the Gospel and the Second Reading in front of me, I began to look for links and comparisons.

The most obvious was that Mary was carrying the body to be sacrificed. Another was that both Mary and Elizabeth were aware of the will of God and of the child’s place in the Old Testament Scriptures. The third was that both women understood this child to be bringing relief from sin and shame. I was not sure, however, that either woman understood at this point that the birth and body they were rejoicing in would eventually end up in a bloody death on a cruel cross. Finally, I considered that I could hardly overlook the Magnificat in this sermon.

It all happened, not just with a baby’s cry in a manger but with the Savior’s cry from the cross: It is finished.

Create the Structure and Write the Sermon

I decided to lead off with Mary and focus on the little body that was alive and growing inside her. I made the point that the incarnation needed to lead to the crucifixion. The theme is “Sing Your Christmas Carols at the Cross.”

You can’t ask a man what it’s like to be pregnant. He can tell you what his wife tells him about being pregnant, but that’s not the same. So I can’t tell you what Mary was thinking or feeling those first weeks after Gabriel’s visit. It seems like she needed to talk. The Gospel for today tells us that she went to see Elizabeth. It seems to have been a good choice. Elizabeth was an older relative, probably a confidant, and the news was that Elizabeth was pregnant too. So Mary headed south a hundred miles to spend time with Elizabeth. Was she more tired than usual? Did she have morning sickness? Feel a heartbeat? Was she showing? We don’t know. We do know this: This baby inside her was her baby, but he was also God’s baby, God’s Son. So we can be pretty sure that this baby was the center of Mary’s world.

Right now, this baby is the center of our world too. We’re six days from Christmas and Christmas is about a baby. Page through the Christmas hymns in the hymnal, new one or old one. The baby is everywhere. Look at the manger scenes in churches; the baby is always in the middle. You come to church on Christmas Eve and the focus is on a baby lying in a manger. This is the way it needs to be. We need to remember who the baby Jesus is. At the instant of his conception in Mary’s womb this baby already was God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. And from exactly the same instant he was also truly and fully human. On Christmas Day St. John will remind us that the divine Word became flesh—incarnate: in the flesh—and made his dwelling among us. And that’s why this baby is the center of Christmas.

So Mary went to see Elizabeth and sang a song about her baby. We call it the Magnificat, a word that means to magnify or to glorify. Mary sang, My soul glorifies the Lord. But she didn’t stop there; she kept singing, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. To Mary, there was more here than a pregnancy, more than a birth, more than a baby. Mary understood that the incarnation wouldn’t end in Bethlehem. In her body Mary felt a baby; with her faith Mary saw a Savior. And that’s why this baby was the center of her world. And that’s why this baby is also the center of our faith.

Just like Mary, we sing Christmas songs at this time of the year and we all have our favorites. The Second Reading for today, from the letter to the Hebrews, reminds us that there is more to Christmas than the birth of a baby. We are all looking ahead to Christmas today, but we also need to look beyond Christmas. So I say:

“Sing Your Christmas Carols at the Cross.”

The first part of the sermon was a pretty standard exposition of the Hebrews text. I explained the context of the letter, the problems which caused the author to write it, and the remedy to the problem he put forward. I explained the text verse by verse. I concluded: Whether you’re an Old Testament believer or a New Testament believer, obeying God’s law never solves the problem of sin. Obedience can’t earn you forgiveness. Neither animal sacrifices nor personal sacrifices ever get rid of hell.

So what did get rid of sin and hell? Christ speaking through David again: A body you prepared for me. That’s what would do it. So here’s the baby Jesus! The Son of God who was in the beginning, who was with God, who was God, this divine being wrapped himself in a human body: First a fertilized egg, then an embryo, then blood and veins and bones and skin. Then emotions and intelligence, then the sense of pleasure and pain. This is the baby born in Bethlehem. This is the incarnation: God took on flesh and blood. God became a baby. And his parents named him Jesus.

But he didn’t stay a baby or a boy or teenager. Then I said—Christ speaking again—Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll. The Old Testament scrolls were filled with promises that a Messiah would come from God. This boy named Jesus was God’s choice. Then I said, I have come to do your will, my God. The writer repeats this to make the point: Then he said, Here I am. I have come to do your will.

I explained that the will of God is to save the world from sin. I said, The Son of God took on a body to do what God willed and what God wanted. I detailed the need for Jesus to be a human being and then repeated the point: Jesus did what God wanted; he carried out God’s will. And so his incarnation led to his crucifixion. And now the writer concludes: And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

Application followed. This body came for each of you sitting in these pews. This body for each child, each grandchild, each neighbor, each friend. This body stood in place of all bodies everywhere on the globe. Holy? Yes, holy! Your sins cleansed, your slate clean, your guilt abolished, your condemnation dismissed, the devil defeated, and his hell destroyed. Holy? Yes, holy! Your prayers heard, your sadness lifted, your sickness explained, your lives empowered, your future secure, your heaven guaranteed. And all because the Son of God became a baby in a body. And now you know why Mary sang: My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

When Mary went to visit Elizabeth, she didn’t know the details. She couldn’t have foreseen the shepherds at the stable or the gifts of the magi. She probably wondered what old Simeon meant when he told her that a sword would pierce her soul. She couldn’t have imagined a crucifixion; she couldn’t have handled the thought of seeing her baby die. But she certainly saw the victory. And so Mary sang with a mother’s heart, but she also sang with a believer’s heart. (Here I quoted vv. 50-54.) The baby she was carrying would be the central figure of history and what he would do would be the turning of history. Nothing would ever be the same. And it all happened, not just with a baby’s cry in a manger but with the Savior’s cry from the cross: It is finished.

And that’s why we sing our Christmas carols at the cross. The crucifixion comes along with the incarnation. The Son of God took on a human body to become the Savior of the world. And so, he took away your sins, too. The man who wrote to the Hebrews had to remind them of this. And he needs to remind us, too. So when we sing sweet carols like “Away in a Manger” or “Silent Night” or “Angels We Have Heard on High,” we must see the whole story. We must look beyond the ox and the ass and the swaddling clothes; we must see the cross and the nails and crown of thorns. We must see the life he lived for us and the death he died for us. And then we will see what Mary is seeing now: Her son as the risen and reigning Savior who hears her sing with all the saints and angels of heaven. And those songs sound forever.

If the reader is interested in trying this concept, look ahead to the Proper for Easter 5 in Year C. The sermon is based on Acts 11:1-18. The Gospel for that day is John 13:31-34. That’s the Proper I’ll be writing about in the next article of this series.

 

Written by James Tiefel

Prof. Tiefel, now Pastor Tiefel, serves two small congregations in Mequon, WI, in semi-retirement. Over a 35-year career at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary he taught classes in worship and preaching. As an every-Sunday preacher once again, he is able to combine many of the concepts he taught in the classroom with practical experience.


1 Expositional preaching, as I use the term in this group of preaching styles, has a more specific definition than I use in this paragraph. It is popular among conservative Evangelicals whose worship patterns do not include the guidance of the church year, the Proper, and the lectionary. The usual approach is to take a longer section of Scripture (perhaps even an entire book in a series of sermons) and work through it verse by verse as one might in a Bible class. Expositional preaching certainly can exposit a text and propose a theme. How well it fits in the liturgical rite is another question. I did not add topical preaching to my list. While it may propose a truth, it does not exposit a text.

 


WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

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WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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Preach the Word – The Sermon and the Proper

Preaching on the First or Second Reading with the Day’s Gospel in Mind

2 – The Sermon and the Proper

Law and gospel. These two teachings, the most important truths of the Bible, must form the heart and core of the preacher’s sermon, and of the two, the gospel must predominate. The good news that sins are forgiven finds its source in the words and works of Jesus recorded in the four Gospels.

Of course, the good news is also announced in Isaiah 53 and Romans 3. The preacher who selects his sermon text from the books of the Old Testament or the Epistles is able (actually obligated) to preach the gospel. But this series of articles raises this question: Can the preacher remain faithful to legitimate homiletical principles of exposition and proposition and yet enable the Old Testament or Epistle text to focus also on the words and works of Jesus? Can the preacher find a legitimate connection between the First or Second Reading and the day’s Gospel and can he include in his sermon both the focus of the alternate text and that of the day’s Gospel?

The Proper

Finding an answer to these questions begins with an understanding of the Proper, a set of readings, prayers, psalms, and hymns selected for each Sunday and festival of the church year and also for minor festivals and parish occasions which a congregation might observe. As it developed in the western church (but not in the eastern church), the Proper changes from week to week while the Ordinary, a set of five song texts, repeats each week in some way. The Proper is most obvious in The Word section of the Lutheran order of service.

Tracing the history of the formation of the Proper isn’t easy. The first Christians relied on the apostles to relate and explain the words and works of Jesus, although Jewish Christians often retained their custom of reading from the Old Testament and singing the psalms. Eventually, copies of the Gospels and epistles became available and ministers read those scriptures in worship in a lectio continua pattern.1 The Gospel received special honor and was the last of the readings to be read.2 When believers began to pay special attention to the great events of Jesus’ ministry, the Gospel accounts which related those events were read as pericopal readings, i.e., cut out sections of the lectio continua manuscript. On these festivals, readings, prayers, and psalms complimented the Gospel account. As the church year formed, churchmen imitated this practice on other days as well. These variables, called propria, were generally established by Luther’s time and were adopted by most Lutheran churches. With the day’s Gospel setting the focus, the variables provide what we call the Proper.3 Historically, the Proper consisted of the introit, collect, Epistle, gradual, Gospel, and communio (sung before the preface). Christian Worship considers the Proper to be the Prayer of the Day, First Reading, Psalm of the Day, Second Reading, Gospel Acclamation, Gospel, Hymn of the Day, and Sermon. The lectionary serves the Proper in that it lists the readings selected for the various days and festivals. Christian Worship Altar Book lists all the parts of the Proper for Sundays, festivals of both the three-year and historic lectionaries, as well as for the minor festivals and occasions.

Unity of the Proper and the Unified Service

No one knows how the variables were chosen in antiquity. The theologians who made the decisions undoubtedly worked with wisdom and piety, but often as not were influenced by calendar changes, local circumstances, and even medieval heresies.4 Reformation theologians assembled a slightly revised version of the so-called historic lectionary and its matching set of introits, collects, and graduals, and these propers guided Lutheran worship for centuries.

How well the readings, prayers, and psalms of the historic series matched is open to debate. The interconnection is obvious in the Proper for the Transfiguration of Our Lord but not as clear for the Third Sunday in Lent. The propers of the later Epiphany Sundays and the Sundays after Trinity have even less unity. Some have tried to find a unity in the historic propers,5 but Preach the Gospel was wary. Understanding the Proper does not mean, the authors stated, that the preacher “strains to discover and elaborate points of contact between the sermon text and the other propers [sic] where such points of contact do not really exist.”6 Trying to preach on an Epistle text with the day’s Gospel in mind was often a challenge at best and often impossible.

How well the readings, prayers, and psalms of the historic series matched is open to debate.

The three-year lectionary, created by Vatican scholars in 1967 to replace the historic series and then revised and published by the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship in 1973, expanded the selection of Gospels and Epistles and added a reading from the Old Testament. “In almost every instance,” ILCW commissioners stated, “the Old Testament passage was chosen because it relates to the Gospel.”7

In a major change from existing patterns, however, the three-year lectionary reclaimed the ancient custom of lectio continua. Creators selected readings from one particular epistle to be read over a span of weeks notably during the Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost seasons. The ILCW followed the Vatican’s lead. While pointing out the value of the plan, framers recognized that the idea of a unified service was usually impossible. “It must be remembered, however, that such semicontinuous use of an epistle is somewhat isolated…the epistle provides a band of blue week by week; the Gospel has a red thread connecting its readings. But they do not necessarily mix to form purple.”8

The ILCW lectionary was approved and began to experience wide-spread use in WELS in the early 1970s. After several liturgy committee debates, the lectionary published in Christian Worship resources (1993 and following) was virtually unchanged. The volumes of the text studies in Sermon Studies9 (based primarily on the ILCW readings) included contributors’ efforts to find a thematic thread in the readings, but the efforts were often cumbersome. At that point the idea of preaching on Epistle texts in light of the day’s Gospel had no cause for discussion. (CW93’s limited set of prayers, psalms, and verses of the day also rendered a unified proper difficult.)

Efforts toward enhancing the unified Proper

The committees which worked on Christian Worship Supplement (2008) sensed a weakness with the lectio continua approach and worked to introduce unity to the three-year cycle. Authors created an entirely new set of Epistle selections designed to match the themes of the appointed Gospels and also replaced many prophetic readings chosen by ILCW with Old Testament narratives. The Christian Worship Supplemental Lectionary provided an impetus for a serious discussion of the unity of the Proper and aroused some interest in the concept of preaching on the First and Second Readings with the day’s Gospel in mind.

A major effort of lectionary revision began in 2014 with the appointment of the Scripture Committee of the WELS Hymnal Project.

A major effort of lectionary revision began in 2014 with the appointment of the Scripture Committee of the WELS Hymnal Project. One of the committee’s primary goals was to restore the unity of the Proper for each Sunday and festival of the three-year cycle and promote the idea of a unified service. They identified a theme or focus from the day’s Gospel and selected First and Second Readings which supplemented and complimented the day’s Gospel. The following comparisons indicate the difference in approach:

ILCW Pentecost 10B
Exodus 24:3-11 – The Lord confirms his covenant with Israel
Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16 – Unity and maturity in the body of Christ (lectio continua from Ephesians)
John 6:1-5 – Jesus feeds 5,000

CW Proper 12B: God provides earthly bread
Exodus 16:1-15 – The Lord sends bread to sustain Israel
2 Corinthians 9:8-11 – The promise and use of earthly bread
Mark 6:35-44 – Jesus feeds 5,000 (the Mark account replaces John’s account)

The preacher might see how the Lord’s actions in Exodus and his promises in 2 Corinthians blend with the miracle of supplying bread to 5,000—in fact, more than enough.

ILCW Pentecost 15A
Exodus 6:2-8 – The Lord’s identifies himself to Moses
Romans 11:33-36 – The depth of the riches of God (lectio continua from Romans)
Matthew 16:13-20 – Jesus sought, received, and blessed the confession of his disciples

Proper 16A: Who do they say I am?
Exodus 34:5-9 – The Lord identifies himself and Moses acknowledges the Lord
Romans 10:5-13 – Everyone who believes and confesses will be saved
Matthew 16:13-20 – Jesus sought, received, and blessed the confession of his disciples

The preacher might connect the believing confession noted in Exodus and Romans with Peter’s confession in the Gospel. A confession of the name of the Lord is the password to life with God.

You have to deal not only with the bride but also with the rest of the family.

Preach the gospel by preaching the Gospels?

Our homiletical heritage exalts the independence of the sermon text and our seminary training exhorted us to “preach the text.” As a preacher and a teacher of preachers I agree wholeheartedly. One of our best preachers, Prof. Daniel Deutschlander, often noted, however, that preaching on a text is like getting married: You have to deal not only with the bride but also with the rest of the family. The Western Rite and its inclusion of the Proper obligates this consideration. The question is: How does one deal with the family without harming the bride? We respond that CW21’s new unified Proper enables us to preach on the First and Second Readings with the day’s Gospel in mind.

Written by James Tiefel

Prof. Tiefel, now Pastor Tiefel, serves two small congregations in Mequon, WI, in semi-retirement. Over a 35-year career at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary he taught classes in worship and preaching. As an every-Sunday preacher once again, he is able to combine many of the concepts he taught in the classroom with practical experience.


In the previous issue of this series, we adduced portions of a sermon based on 1 Kings 3:5-12, the conversation between the LORD and Solomon. In that sermon, the Gospel, Matthew 13:44-52, set the pace; it introduced the text. The sermon underscored the truth Jesus emphasized in the two parables. The basic outline:

“What We Want Is What Matters”
So what matters?
So how much does it matter?

The exposition seems to have been faithful to the text. It included the historic connections and messianic implications. The text was predominant, but not dominant. It complemented the point Jesus was making in the Gospel.

The sermon segment that follows illustrates another way to preach on the First Reading with the day’s Gospel in mind. Prof. Brad Wordell of Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary preached on Elijah and the prophets of Baal at the seminary’s opening service in August 2021. He used Proper 19B – Spiritual warfare:

1 Kings 18:21-39 – Elijah and the prophets of Baal
Ephesians 6:10-18 – Spiritual warfare
Mark 9:14-27 – Jesus heals a boy possessed by a spirit

The theme of the sermon was “The Home Team Loses” and he addressed three points in the exposition of 1 Kings 18: the nature of the battle, how the war is fought, and how the battle ends.

Third and finally, how the battle ends. How dramatic! The LORD does more than is needed, expected, or imagined. He often does. The LORD sends fire from heaven just minutes after Elijah begins praying—not just the sacrifice, but the altar, even the rocks, the ground, and the water are consumed, and everyone falls down and acknowledges that the LORD is God. Baal is proven to be a lie, an invention of the father of lies, and the false prophets are put to death in the Kishon Valley. The newspaper the next morning would have had this headline: The Home Team Loses. This in spite of everything being in their favor. It was their mountain! He had 450 prophets to one! And Baal was supposed to be the god of rain and lighting. But Baal couldn’t light one fire.

We weren’t there to see this victory on Mt. Carmel and such victories don’t come along very often. But this dramatic defeat of the home team and the ministries of Elijah and Elisha at this time were the LORD’S ways of promising that his plan of salvation was still on track: his eternal Son would come to destroy the work of the devil, to set the captives free, and to open the way to eternal life. On Mt. Carmel the home team lost because in the “eternal” battle the home team loses! And that is exactly what we heard in the Gospel tonight! Jesus, the eternal Son of God, came onto the devil’s turf. He could say to demons, “I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” By offering himself for our sins on the cross, Jesus has broken the devil’s hold on us too. He can no longer accuse us, not because we haven’t sinned but because those sins have been paid for. And if Jesus’ victory over the devil in this world wasn’t enough, our Savior did more than we would have asked or imagined: the Savior rose from the dead and announced his eternal victory in the devil’s headquarters, in hell itself—another nail in the home team’s coffin.

The final nail will come, when the Lord Jesus returns in glory with all his holy angels and raises all the dead and judges all mankind. The LORD who sent fire on Mt. Carmel will send fire on the whole universe. He will destroy it and create for us and all believers a new and perfect world. Everything will be new there. No sin or sickness or hatred or favoritism or oppression or racism or death—none of those things. There will be no enemies there, no battle to be fought. Everything will be new. We will be the new home team and our joy will have no end in the presence of the LORD our God.


The Psalms, the Sermon, and the Proper

A decision was made when Christian Worship: A Lutheran Hymnal and its supporting resources were published to list the selected Psalm of the Day in juxtaposition with the three lessons. That decision led many to the impression that the Psalm of the Day was a fourth lesson and a potential sermon text. The practice eventually appeared wherever the lectionary was published. The Sermon Studies series include two volumes of text studies on the psalms.

Decades have passed since decisions were made for the 1993 hymnal, but this member of the Liturgy Committee does not recall a decision to list the psalms with the readings. Project Director Kurt Eggert called the psalm selections “liturgical songs” and most were edited (some severely, e.g., Psalm 73) to promote a specific theme and/or to fit on a page! Christian Worship Manual mentions nothing about using the psalms as sermon texts. For some reason CW Manual lists the other parts of the Proper separately, the prayer, verse, and hymn of the day, but not the psalm.

The new Christian Worship and its resources eliminate this format. Where the lectionary is included (e.g., in Christian Worship Hymnal) only the three readings are included. Where the entire Proper is listed (e.g., in Christian Worship Altar Book), the prayer, psalm, verse, and hymn of the day are noted apart from the readings.

There is nothing wrong with preaching on the psalms. The preacher should not assume, however, that the selected Psalm of the Day is a suggested text.


1 Justin Martyr, First Apology, chapter 67: “…the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.”
2 Philip Pfatteicher, Commentary on the Lutheran Book of Worship, p. 141 (Minneapolis: Augsburg) 1990.
3 The set for each Sunday or festival is the Proper for the day. Both the Proper and the Ordinary are a set of parts; our resources do not speak about the Propers for the day any more than they speak about the Ordinaries. The plural is used only for a set of propers, e.g., the propers for the Sundays in Lent.
4 Luther complained that many of the ancient Epistles “seem to have been chosen by a singularly unlearned and superstitious advocate of works.” (LW, AE, Vol. 53, p. 24).
5 Fred Lindemann in The Sermon and the Propers, and Ralph Gehrke in Planning the Service made valiant efforts to find such a unity. (Both are Concordia Publications, and both are available at Amazon.)
6 Joel Gerlach and Richard Balge, Preach the Gospel, p. 159 (Milwaukee: Northwestern, 1982).
7 Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship, The Church Year Calendar and Lectionary, p. 22 (St. Louis: Concordia, et al., 1973).
8 Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship, p. 22.
9 Eleven volumes of Sermon Studies, all published by Northwestern Publishing House between 1982 and 2002, are identified in the online library catalog of Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary.

 


WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

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WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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Preach the Word – The Gospels: The Center of the Gospel

Preaching on the First or Second Reading with the Day’s Gospel in Mind

1 – The Gospels: The Center of the Gospel

The gospel is the good news that God forgives sins and saves sinners. This is good news because without this news the news is bad: God condemns sin and destroys sinners. Lutheran preachers make the gospel the priority of their preaching because the good news is the best news a sinner could ever hear.

The Bible communicates the good news in a variety of pictures. The good news is that God and sinners are reconciled; sinners are at one with God. The good news is that sinners are redeemed; they are bought back from the slavery of sin and the dungeon of destruction and restored as God’s children. The good news is that sinners are justified; God declares that sinners have a new status in his sight, a status in which he sees them as holy and blameless. Lutheran preachers use these and dozens of other Bible pictures to announce the good news.

The gospel is more than news, however. It is also power. In a way that we preachers cannot grasp, the Holy Spirit employs the good news to lead sinners to believe the good news. By the power of the gospel sinners come to trust what they have no right or reason to believe. As the gospel invades their minds and hearts, believers begin to understand the depth of God’s love. They gain courage in trouble, strength in weakness, confidence in prayer, joy in obedience, and hope for a life with God that never ends. As they preach the good news, Lutheran preachers provide the Spirit an opportunity to change the lives of sinners as he wishes and wills.

Lutheran preachers also preach the bad news, the law. The bad news clarifies the realities of sin. The law is not what the sinner wants, but what God wills. Obedience to the law is not a maybe but a must. Condemnation for sin is not a possibility but an absolute. The law does not coddle but warns. Without the preaching of the law, the gospel is ho hum and so what. The gospel will not be sweet until the law becomes putrid in the sinner’s soul.

Law and gospel. These two teachings, the most important truths of the Bible, must form the heart and core of the preacher’s sermon. Jesus, Paul, and Luther exemplified law and gospel preaching. C.F.W. Walther wrote a book about it.1 The absolute goal of Lutheran preaching is to announce and apply the law and let it do its work and to announce and apply the gospel and let the Spirit do his work. No greater epitaph can placed on a preacher’s headstone than this: He preached the law and the gospel.

The center of the gospel is Jesus, the Son of God from all eternity and then, in time, even this time, the son of Mary. The righteous God cannot forgive, reconcile, redeem, or justify without Jesus. The God-man stands at center of the Bible: everything before him foretold his coming; everything after him explained his coming. What the serpent first heard after Eden, Moses, David, and the prophets anticipated and announced. The Alpha and the Omega John saw in his vision of the future is he who walked with the apostles in time. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So what did Jesus do and what did Jesus say that qualifies him to be center of the Scriptures and the central character of human history? The Spirit tells us this in the Gospels. What the apostles proclaimed in the days following Pentecost, four men, guided by the Spirit, wrote down some years later. Each man’s central character was Jesus, although each man, guided by the Spirit, told the story from a different perspective. Together these four, two apostles and two apostolic co-workers, presented the life and times of Jesus so that we are able to see how reconciliation, atonement, redemption, and justification were achieved. They present to us the Savior in his dual nature as divine and human. They assert that he was the one God had promised in the past. They point out his perfect obedience to the law in the place of sinners. They describe his desired use of baptism and his institution of the holy meal. With extraordinary detail they note the innocence of his suffering and the stark reality of his death as payment for sin. All proclaim his resurrection and the final days of his time on earth. Besides recording his deeds, each Gospel writer added thousands of words from the Savior’s own lips which announced the realities of sin and the good news of forgiveness. John alludes to all these words and works of Jesus when he writes at the end of his Gospel: “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30-31).

Of course, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are not the only Bible writers who knew the Savior’s words and works. Moses promised a prophet, David could envision a king, Isaiah described the suffering servant and his ultimate sacrifice. Zechariah could see the donkey, Micah knew about Bethlehem, and Malachi saw the Baptizer, but everything they saw and heard described the God-man who would work and teach in Palestine for 33 years. Peter proclaimed the universality of his Savior’s kingdom, Paul explained justification by grace and faith alone, and John described love as the essential feature of fellowship with God, but they all based their words and their faith on what Jesus said and did. And what Jesus said and did is recorded in the Gospels.

Much of Christian and Lutheran preaching over the centuries has proclaimed the gospel on the basis of accounts from the Gospels.

It does not surprise, therefore, that much of Christian and Lutheran preaching over the centuries has proclaimed the gospel on the basis of accounts from the Gospels. The first Christians replaced the betrayer with a man who had been with the apostles “the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection” (Acts 1:21-22). The same believers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42). Peter’s sermons after Pentecost inevitably led to the words and works of Jesus; Paul’s sermons do, too (the notable exception being the Areopagus mission sermon). The early church fathers, including Ambrose and Augustine, regularly preached on the Gospel appointed for Sundays and the great festivals.2 Almost all of Luther’s published sermons, at least in the American Edition, are based on Gospel texts, although much of his preaching took place within the context of the Sunday Gottesdienst where it was expected that the historic Gospel would serve as the day’s text. This expectation remained in place at least in Europe until 19th century, often dictated by provincial consistories. Good Lutheran preachers even in WELS seem not to have hesitated to preach on the historic Gospel every Sunday. One gets the impression from personal conversations that many of today’s WELS preachers still preach on the appointed Gospel texts more often than on Old Testament and Epistle selections.

For hundreds of years, the choice of the Gospel text was as much pragmatic as it was principled. At least on Sundays, the historic Epistle was the only other possibility.3 In an effort to relieve some of the monotony, Lutheran churchmen offered alternate series of preaching texts with the claim, however, that these were intended to match the historic Gospels. Old Testament texts chosen to accompany the historic Epistles and Gospels were generally buried in small print (cf. The Lutheran Hymnal, pp. 159-161) or reference works (cf. The Lutheran Liturgy, p. 459 ff.4). In most cases, Old Testament texts were reserved for occasional services.

The introduction of the three-year series, offered by Roman Catholics in 1967 and then in revision by the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship in 1973, suggested a new pattern. The liturgical rites created in that era included three readings on Sunday, one from the Old Testament, a second from one of the Epistles (or Acts during the Easter Season), and the third from one of the Gospels. Perhaps with more intensity than previously, our professors encouraged their students to rotate the three texts in preaching. Rotate we did in a variety of ways. The most efficient rotators preached equally on all three selections, e.g., Old Testament texts in Advent, Epistles over Christmas, Gospels during Epiphany, etc. Others followed the same sequence Sunday by Sunday. In many cases the believers in the pew heard as many sermons based on prophetic texts and teaching texts as sermons based on the words and works of Jesus.

Of course, there was value in this. Preachers were able to proclaim law and gospel to their hearers by means of Old Testament history and prophecies. They explained Old Testament history and its messianic implications. Preachers used Epistle texts to detail theological intricacies and applied them to the Christian life. The lectio continua nature of the initial set of Epistles enabled preachers to work through a single letter over a series of Sundays and highlight its content as they might do in a Bible class. The selected Gospels offered more of the words and works of Christ than the historic series had.

Much of preaching was unaffected by this change in mood. Preachers still based their text studies on the original languages and relied on the historical-grammatical method of textual interpretation as they had been taught at the seminary. The preacher proclaimed law and gospel through Isaiah’s pen and Paul’s writing as well as he had when preaching the words and works of Jesus. Preaching remained expositional and propositional as it had always been. In some cases, however, what came to be missing were the words and works of Jesus. Not on the festivals, of course. One can hardly preach on Jonah’s prayer from Jonah 2 on Easter without a focus on the resurrected Christ. The preacher simply can’t focus on the messenger who brought good news to Jerusalem (Isaiah 52) on Christmas Day without including the messenger who is Christ. But other Sundays don’t force such a connection. Ruth’s decision to follow Naomi’s God doesn’t require comparison with the leper’s decision return to give thanks and confess his faith. One can preach on Paul’s storm experience in Acts 27 without mentioning the storm on the Sea of Galilee which Jesus calmed.

Perhaps with more intensity than previously, our professors encouraged their students to rotate the three texts in preaching.

As the years passed as a regular preacher and as I taught seminary Middlers how to preach on Old Testament and Epistle texts, I began to wonder if it is possible to preach on the First or Second Readings assigned to a Sunday and connect them to the Gospels appointed for the day. In other words, can the preacher remain faithful to legitimate homiletical principles of exposition and proposition and yet enable the text to focus also on the words and works of Jesus? When the three readings are carefully chosen, can the preacher find a legitimate connection between the First or Second Reading and the day’s Gospel and can he include both the focus of the preaching text and the day’s Gospel in the sermon? I have no desire to compromise the truths or the settings of the readings; I do sense a desire to connect them to the words and works of Jesus. As an every-Sunday preacher again, I have opportunities to test this concept.

Can the preacher find a legitimate connection between the First or Second Reading and the day’s Gospel and can he include both the focus of the preaching text and the day’s Gospel in the sermon?

The Preach the Word articles which follow this introduction will explore this idea. Sections of a sermon based on 1 Kings 3:5-12, appointed to accompany the Gospel from Matthew 13:44-52 (Proper 12 of Year A in the new hymnal lectionary), provide an example of what this series means to explore.

 

Written by James Tiefel

Prof. Tiefel, now Pastor Tiefel, serves two small congregations in Mequon, WI, in semi-retirement. Over a 35-year career at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary he taught classes in worship and preaching. As an every-Sunday preacher once again, he is able to combine many of the concepts he taught in the classroom with practical experience.


I want to tell you a story you’ve all heard before. There was this guy and he was out for a walk, just looking around at the trees and the flowers and the big blue sky. All of the sudden he tripped and almost fell on his face. He figured it was a root or a stone, but when he looked it was a box, an old, beat up wooden box. He bent down and opened the cover—the lock had rusted away a long ago—and what he saw he couldn’t believe. He’d been in plenty of jewelry stores, but he’d never seen anything like this. What to do. He couldn’t offer to buy the stuff; it was obviously priceless. He wasn’t going to steal it, although the box was way too old to belong to the young farmer who owned the land. He was going to do this legally. He raced into town, got together every dime and dollar he owned, made an offer, bought the field and he got the treasure. You know why. The treasure mattered. It changed his life.

Here’s another story; you heard this one, too. He was a purveyor of pearls, those creamy white oval stones you find inside oyster shells. This guy knew pearls backwards and forwards; he knew the difference between fake and genuine and even between low quality and high quality. So one day, he found a pearl like he had never seen before. It had uncommon luster, brilliant color, and perfect shape. The price tag was outlandish, but he got together every dime and dollar he owned, made an offer, and he got the pearl. And you know why. The pearl mattered. It changed his life.

You know both of these stories because you heard Jesus tell them in today’s Gospel. The parable of the hidden treasure and the pearl of great price are two of the seven parables Jesus told his followers in one fairly long sermon. Jesus made the same simple point in both parables: Search for what really matters in life and then do what needs to be done to own it and keep it.

So what really matters in life? Well, we all know the answer. We’re Christians and faith tells us what matters. The trouble is that our brains and our emotions don’t always follow faith. The line between what matters and what doesn’t matter gets blurred. Health matters, relaxation matters, possessions matter, education matters. And even if we know in our hearts what really matters, we struggle to pay the price to gain it and guard it.

The man in the field, the man in the jewelry store, and a man in Gibeon all teach us the same truth. You know the man in Gibeon, too, because you heard about him in the First Reading. The man is Solomon, the king of Israel, and his story isn’t a parable. It’s an actual event that took place at the very beginning of his reign. The story begins when God comes to the new king and says, Ask for whatever you want me to give you. Solomon’s response reminds us of this truth:

What We Want Is What Matters

1. Solomon almost didn’t get to be king. Even before his father David died there were palace intrigues and military coups that could have kept Solomon off the throne and maybe even left him dead. But Solomon was David’s choice and even more he was God’s choice and that settled it. Solomon proved himself the be the right choice. He showed his love for the Lord by following David’s instructions and by honoring God with his obedience and respect.

But he was young, probably only 20, when he became king. He had almost no experience. The nation of Israel was an emerging empire and surrounded by jealous monarchies. And ruling over 5,000,000 people—about the population of Wisconsin—who were notorious for being surly and stubborn would have intimidated anyone. So when the Lord invited Solomon to ask for whatever he wanted, this is what Solomon said, Now, Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?

1 C.F.W. Walther, The Proper Distinction between Law and Gospel, W.H.T. Dau, translator (St. Louis: Concordia, 1927).
2 M. F. Toal, The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000).
3 A stack of sermon outlines created by noted WELS pastor Carl Gausewitz indicates Gausewitz preached on the historic Epistles and Gospels throughout the entire year in alternating years, apparently with the same outline.
4 Luther Reed’s classic study of Lutheran worship was published by Fortress Press, Philadelphia, in 1947.


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Preach the Word – Movements in Sermon Writing

I find that writing isn’t difficult. Sitting down to write—that’s difficult. The good lurking within my procrastination, fueling the fear at the edges of my work, is that it matters to me profoundly, this business of writing Word-saturated, Christ-obsessed sermons.

At last, I dare to step past the basics of preaching1 and to take up the writing task itself. As a message begins to emerge from the scribbles on my legal pad, the essential question becomes one of movement. Where to begin? Where am I heading? How will I get there?

As I take up these questions with you, I find myself entwined in the great homiletical debate between deductive and inductive styles. To tease out the differences, let’s consider two sermons based on Hebrew 5:7-10.

Sermon Introduction #1

What if I told you a story about a young pastor, early in his days of planting a church, carrying the weight of the world? He answers the phone, listens for a few moments, hangs up, walks down the basement stairs, closes the door behind him…and cries. What if I cried a little just telling you about it?

I can imagine two reactions. One: you’re embarrassed for me, put off by the show of weakness, rolling your eyes. You think, “Man, keep it together.”

But I can imagine another reaction. You think, “Of all the times I’ve heard him speak, now he has my attention. Maybe he’s like me. Maybe I could tell him things. I think he’d understand. Maybe he could help.”

The very thing that repels one person draws another. You might even wonder what was going on down there? What do they mean, those sounds coming up through the basement door?

It is just this way with Jesus. He scandalizes many—this weakness of God on display in the lowly Jesus carrying the weight of the world, God the Son crying and crying in the Garden. It is the very thing that has our attention and draws us in.

What’s going on, not down the basement stairs, but a stone’s throw away? What is the meaning of the “loud cries and tears” of Gethsemane.

Answer? The Son of God is being qualified to be the Savior of the world and the saving of you.

Deductive Preaching – Arguing from a Conclusion

A message that starts that way is on the deductive end of the continuum between deductive and inductive movement. I reached a conclusion in solitude about the telic note of Hebrews 5:7-10. My 60-second introduction was designed to prepare a compelling announcement of that day’s whole point. I left no one in suspense about what it was. In the “loud cries and tears” our Jesus is being qualified to be our Savior. I would not have hesitated to announce this theme in advance.

By “arguing from a conclusion” I only mean that it was a joy to spend the remainder and bulk of my time playing on my theme and sharing the rewards of my study, unpacking the big thought and establishing it by means of the assigned Word.

It seemed to me at the time to be the way that particular text was asking to be treated. I elected to offer that sort of clarity right up front given that there was plenty left to challenge my listeners. Our Jesus “learned obedience?” When was he ever not obedient? “Once made perfect?” Was he ever anything but perfect? I pulled out all the homiletical stops I know of in the form of illustration—of willingness made complete in the act—and application—we are being qualified by suffering, too, you know. Lord, we are learning, too.

And I dare to hope, under the blessing of Christ, that people walked away appropriating the deep beauty and consolation of that text.

There is no one who understands you like the lowly Jesus. No one who knows you the way he knows you. No one cares the way he cares. No one who could ever have saved you the way this one has saved you. That’s what you’re hearing from a stone’s throw away.

Sermon Introduction #2

Hebrews 5 has challenged me. I have feared that something is lost on me, whatever it was that caused Psalm 110 to be the most often quoted Psalm in the New Testament. The writer to the Hebrews thrills at the thought of Jesus as “priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.” To think that we have a king who is also a priest.

Um. Okay.

I have heard of priests and I know what kings are, but for most of my life I have felt no heart connection. The thrill doesn’t easily reach me.

I find I can’t go directly for the heart when I handle Hebrews 5. I need to drill down toward the heart through the head. There are things to study and grapple with, things to understand though they elude us until the Spirit lights them up.

To begin, let’s imagine the skyline of ancient Jerusalem dominated by two structures. The royal palace where the king sat amidst the trappings of royalty, power, and providence—here is one worthy of all your hopes. The holy temple where the priest serves in the aura of mystery, grace, and sacrifice—when he smiles at you, unworthy though you are, it is the smile of God.

The thing is, a man could be one or the other. Not both.

Was King David reflecting on that as he read the story of father Abraham and Melchizedek in the Torah? Did he think, “I can’t be both…but there was one once. There was a king who was also priest. There was a priest who was also a king.” Then the Spirit fell. Then true inspiration hit: “And there will be again!”

Inductive Preaching – Arguing to a Conclusion

I was, of course, just getting warmed up. There was more work to be done in Genesis 14 and Psalm 110. There was further still to go in the “uphill climb of understanding” before we could arrive at the “smooth downhill of revealing.”

That’s one way to think of inductive preaching, simplistic though it may be. Inductive movement may involve communicating both the challenge of the text as it first confronted us, as well as the way that challenge resolves, one way or another, in a fresh view of Christ crucified and raised. We share the part that perplexed or disturbed us on our way to a conclusion in which all that was dark is light, questions find answers, and the restless may rest.

That sense of missing something in the name Melchizedek—something that ought to have me leaping—is absolutely what challenged me about that portion of Hebrews 5. And because it was real, it was what I found most interesting.

It sounds cliché, but inductive preaching is intentional about leading hearers on a journey of discovery. I create an itch that needs scratching. I propose an honest dilemma, and then, well, I write my way out.

Inductive preaching is intentional about leading hearers on a journey of discovery.

Why Not Go Full-on Inductive?

The extreme arguments you encounter for inductive preaching would have us take a risk we are not willing to take, namely, that for all our cleverness, our listeners may not arrive at the truth at all. There is a radical position that smacks of Erasmus in his debate with Luther, namely, in his preferring questions over answers. To this Luther insisted that the Christian heart loves and lives off the assertions of God’s Word and its crystal-clear propositions. The predictableness of preaching that always comes around to Christ and him crucified is a good thing. No, it is the best thing.

Early in my days as a preacher, there is no doubt that when I ditched deductive preaching, I turned instead to a method I must now refer to as the “hot mess.”

Ultimately, the extreme version of the argument that takes inductive preaching to be the only preaching that shows respect for a modern audience does not honestly account for the deductive style of some of the most gifted and influential preachers of our time.

Settle on Deductive Preaching and Call It a Day?

An extreme argument for deductive preaching will be hard pressed to justify why it takes so few cues from the communication in the Bible itself with its absolutely stunning array of communication forms. There is a wildness to biblical revelation that we would only domesticate and diminish when room is not given for its prophets and poets to speak the way they speak—in love song and rescue story, smoky ritual and visions by the river. There is nothing obvious about a Burning Bush.

The exaggerated “deductive-only” rant could cause a preacher to deliver a theological treatise and say contentedly within himself, “I told them, so now they know.” He may give so much away in his published theme and parts that people feel little reason to listen.

He may casually assume that all come hungry to hear what he has to say. That hunger may need to be awakened, such as by that itch that begs for scratching, a puzzle that needs solving, a story that demands an ending, a song that disturbs for the way you hold back the final note.

A radical position prefers questions over answers.

A False Dichotomy

We need not huddle on the two ends of the continuum. Combining deductive and inductive elements keeps preaching fresh. Any time we aren’t saying something in the most straightforward way we possibly could—by penetrating questions, in narratives we don’t immediately explain, through images we hope to hang in the basement gallery of people’s hearts—we are being inductive. We’re leaving room for our listeners to complete the meanings we intend and be part of their own persuasion, making things more fully their own.

There can be entangling moments of induction within a deductive style that has no lack of clarity or authority. There can be resolution at the end of a measured time of disorientation.

None of us want our preaching to be vanilla. There is a sweet spot between numbing ambiguity and spoon-feeding. Perhaps we are not helping people on toward further outposts in Christian thinking and living when they know what we’re going to say before we say it.

The challenge, then, is that audiences are diverse with the need for both straightforwardness and discovery, what is unambiguous blended with what makes for that interesting car ride home.

There is a sweet spot between numbing ambiguity and spoon-feeding.

Genre Can Help

If my sermon text is a gorgeous psalm, I try to write elements of beauty into my message. Like a novel by Flannery O’Connor, my preaching may set grace against the blood and dead bodies of the Old Testament such as to make evil recognizable. If my text is an ancient story, I might bring it into conversation with a story of now. A provocative text asks for a provocative sermon. To say nothing of a visual text. A somber text. An ironic one.

If, on the other hand, my text is theologically dense and tightly constructed, an expository approach has wonderful possibilities. Why deconstruct and then reconstruct a text like that? Instead, set the context. Walk through verse by verse. Draw law and gospel to the surface and Christ into the frame, if he isn’t there already. Insert pictures and encouragements as the moment requires. Why not adhere to the agenda the Spirit has set?

Combining deductive and inductive elements keeps preaching fresh.

Might as Well Preach It

A kind reader of Preach the Word offered me this advice. I was unsure of where to go next on the topic of sermon writing. He suggested I include a longer excerpt of a sermon as a way to communicate indirectly what I’ve been trying to say all along.

So, if you’ll indulge me, where were we? Ah.

Melchizedek.

We were drilling down through the head and toward the heart.

I can be as foolish as the pagans for whom it’s all about the question: what do I have to do to get the deity to care? I can carry the weight of the world, but the Word reaches me again: “Cast all your care on him.” Toss ‘em like a backpack tossed across your dorm room. Throw them on the one with the scars in his palms.

He cares for you.

Or think of Isaiah mocking the pagans for the gods they fashioned from wood and stone and then had to carry around on their own backs—heavy things hunching them over. I can be that foolish and that exhausted, trusting in things I have to carry around myself. But the News reaches me again.

There is one who carries me.

We haven’t seen the last of anxiety and shame. But I can welcome them when I see how strongly they play in my bondedness to Jesus—in the fact that I will always need him.

What I need is a king.

I require a king to adore, a king who can subdue me, carry on his rule of peace in this busy mind and this troubled heart. I need the king who will consummate his kingdom, the new Jerusalem descending from the sky.

What I need is a priest.

I am capable of so much shame, the great self-inflicted wounding. Sometimes I don’t want to show my face. It is just then he shows me his. He smiles on me with the smile of God, honors me, clothes me in beauty, covers my disgrace with a righteousness that is all him and none of me. I see it now.

I need a king who is also a priest. I need my priest to also be my king.

I need to know that wherever I am and whatever I am doing, the one who prays for me is the one at the center of all things, holding all things together by his powerful Word. And when I stand before him on that day, the King of the universe, the Lord of all there is, I will be standing before the one who laid his body down.

(Long pause.)

This will sound strange, but I walked through the cemetery near my house early this morning and threw a rock as far as I could. I actually did that. That was me naively wondering just exactly how far is “a stone’s throw away.” I don’t have a great arm…but it’s pretty far. I wanted to see for myself.

Can you picture it? Have you ever been able to hear someone not only crying from that far away, but you were even able to make out the words? Imagine. The loud cries and tears go on and on. At last it gets quiet. For the moment, he’s all prayed out.

Abba, your will be done.”

Here prays a king for all your fears, a priest for all your shame. A lone cross juts up from the landscape of human history. It dominates our horizon. Here the blood of royalty mingles with the tears of a priest.

Melchizedek! (I say this with a fist against my chest. You see it, right?)

Melchizedek!

Here is the name for the heart’s greatest affection. There is no one who understands you like the lowly Jesus. No one who knows you the way he knows. No one who cares the way he cares. None other could have saved you the way he has saved you. Blessed be the name. Amen.

The Moment the Preacher Dies

Guru of adult education, Jane Vella, steals a thought from Paolo Freire about “the moment the teacher dies.” They disagree only about whether both student and teacher recognize it when it arrives. It’s about what happens when the teacher truly joins those she means to serve in the task of learning, a student among students.

By “the moment the preacher dies,” I mean something else. Someone asked me what I pray for as I bow my head before reading my text. There are several variations on the theme. But whatever else I say to my God in that moment, I always also say what I learned in a garden:

“Not my will but yours be done.”

I know what I want to happen next. What do you want to happen, Abba? Honestly, preaching you still thoroughly humbles me. And so, because ultimately there’s my way and there’s your way, let it go your way.

As for me, let me die in this moment to all self-concern and to every doomed identity. Let me die outright to the hunger to be well thought of. But this—this preaching Christ crucified—it still scares me because of how much it matters.

I am willing to be disturbed, yearning, and unfinished until you, Lord, release the final note.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

As I lift my head, as I stand here, it is enough to take a good long look at the faces turned toward me and love them, even as I am loved. It is enough to be forgiven and to be, even now, on my way home.

Written by Mark Paustian

Dr. Paustian is a professor of communication and biblical Hebrew at Martin Luther College where he teaches “Advanced Christian Rhetoric” which combines an introduction to homiletics and an introduction to apologetics in one course. He holds a PhD in Communication from Regent University.

1 The previous five articles in this series were titled “Joy and Confidence from the Basics.”


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Preach the Word – Joy and Confidence from the Basics – Part 5

You’ve heard that communication is 93% nonverbal. What does this say about sermon delivery? Clearly, we ought to spend way more time than we do in front of our mirrors, and we ought to endure way more agony watching recordings of ourselves. We ought to stop fussing so much over the careful crafting of words.

Why? Because everybody knows that only 7% of communication is verbal, while 38% is vocal, and 55% is facial—this famous breakdown still appears in graduate-level communication textbooks.

Nonsense!

Albert Mehrabian’s study from over fifty years ago was about the interpretation of the emotional state of other people. That’s a crucial distinction. “How are you?” I ask, and in that moment, the language of groans or laughter takes over. If I mean to communicate caring, what I say has to make sense within the total richness of my nonverbal display. Of course.

Our words will not tend to be convincing when our nonverbal cues are pulling in a different direction entirely. Do you believe someone who shouts, “Alright! I’m sorry!” as he slams the door? Not a chance. How about a friend who sighs, “I’m fine,” with her wet eyes glued to the floor?

Somewhere within these commonsense observations hides the fact that sermon delivery is not irrelevant. My preaching is not all it can be if I say that there is joy in knowing Jesus but you never see it in me. Surely, we want to avoid the “performative contradiction” of speaking vital things while the entirety of our person is loudly saying something else. By the help of God, we can do better than that.

Ideals of Sermon Delivery

I once conducted an experiment in which I quoted John 3:16 in six straight sermons. There wasn’t much premeditation. I was just wondering how many Sundays it would take for the words to start to feel tired and overworked. How long before someone would comment, “Really, pastor? Again with John 3:16?” That day never came.

It was something I read in The Normal Christian Life, by Watchman Nee1 and which I have seen since in Kierkegaard’s notion of an “existence communication.” The idea is simply to “be in the words as you say them”—to exist in them. No going on automatic pilot. No having the words just sort of roll off the tongue in a thoughtless recitation. Speak slowly and think deeply about what you are saying.

“For God…so loved…the world…”

This takes a little practice, that is, handling something so familiar in this way. So practice I did.

“…his One and Only Son…that whoever believes in him…will not perish…”

It turns out I overdid it. On Sunday #6, I tried to speak but was completely overwhelmed.

“…but will have eternal life.”

That wasn’t the point. We aren’t going for drama here, nor are we trying to manufacture an affecting display of feeling. All the sincerity in the world adds nothing to the inherent power of the Spirit married to his Word. No, all we are after is simply a genuine communication. I find that being in the words as I say them, for the most part, lets delivery take care of itself.

Being in the words as I say them, for the most part, lets delivery take care of itself.

About sermon delivery in general, Bryan Chapell writes, “Congregations ask no more and expect no less of a preacher than truth expressed in a manner consistent with the personality of the preacher and reflective of the import of the message.”2 Let’s unpack that.

Chapell argues that the “elocution movement,” with its standards for how every speaker should gesture, stand, and sound, has been dead for over a century. The rhetorical style that has long won the day is to “sound like ourselves when we are deeply interested in a subject.”3

I agree. As you deliver your message, work within your own personality—“you do you”—but show us the man who is captivated by the cross. Show us that version of you, the one who is entirely invested in what you are saying, transparently affected by it. It means the world to you. As I wrote earlier, we can tell that you are being put back together by the News you deliver.

“For God…so loved…the world…”

I tell my eager students in their introduction to homiletics: “Show me that guy!” And they do. Brothers, you would be delighted to see it.

I remember one of my favorite preachers, a beloved seminary professor, who would scarcely move a muscle when he preached. He worked within a personality that was both brilliant and unassuming. He quite simply let the words do all the work. There is much to commend that.

However, that may be overstated. Just as you “cannot not communicate,”4 a preacher cannot not have a delivery. The content of his sermons was so rich and pitched so steeply that it required expert inflection to make his meaning transparently clear and the pausing of a seasoned veteran to give his words room to play on our minds. If you knew the man, you would not want him to do it any other way.

The best delivery calls little attention to itself. What we hope for is that, as the power of Christ rests on faithful proclamation, people are hanging on the words. Whatever spell we may cast in our preaching can be broken by a distracting mannerism or unnatural modulation as people wake up to the fact that, “Oh that’s right, I’m listening to a sermon.” Pray God they hardly notice us at all.

The best delivery calls little attention to itself.

“Working within our own personalities” will have as many looks as there are preachers, and I can think of plenty of good men for whom “not moving a muscle” in their delivery would itself be a strange attention-arresting choice.

At any rate, the small attention we are here paying to issues in communication can, I hope, be justified by an observation our fathers made. People don’t only receive the Word of God spiritually, that is, through the ministrations of the Spirit working through his Word. People also receive the Word of God psychologically. That is to say: a whole array of human processes is involved with all communication, and those don’t somehow cease to function because we happen to be communicating God’s Word.5

Our preaching needs to be heard, understood, attended to, and held. And we can certainly stand in the way by violating the expectations of the moment or by contradicting the what of our communication by our how.

People also receive the Word of God psychologically.

After all, the fact that we “cannot not communicate” means that our nonverbal communication flows in a steady, unstoppable stream, one you cannot be thinking about all the time. We make more or less constant commentary on who and what matters, and it is mostly unintentional. This means that “communication leakage” is likely happening. In other words, we may need to do a gut check. What do we actually feel about the people we speak to, about the undeserved privilege of the moment, and about the things that we trying to put into words? Because, so goes the theory, all this will leak out of us.

People will see us. In the long run, people will know.

I hope that one humble article in Preach the Word is not too much emphasis to place on striving to have our delivery pulling in the same direction as our content—“For God so loved the world…”—and to have our whole person contribute a loud “Amen!”

So say my face, my eyes, my voice, my very body:

“This matters! And so, people of God, do you.”

How to Read the Written Word

The Church has a stewardship of the spoken Word. We Christians still attend to sacred words on a page that are allowed to animate a human voice and are given room to charge with holiness the physical spaces in which we gather. It is a seminal moment, this opening of a Bible, this “Hear, now, the Word of the Lord.” It is one of those key features in the life of a congregation when our hard-won means of grace theology becomes actual in our midst.

That happens as we bring our whole selves to the act, and when we linger over the assigned readings for the day. The thought and care we give to the public reading of the Scriptures—or don’t—is revealing us.

If people are pretty sure they are seeing us read a biblical excerpt for the first time as we stand before them, what does that say? What communication would be leaking out of us if we start our sermons by reading our text out of a Bible and then ceremoniously tuck the thing away? Holy Scripture was the prelude; now for the main event? Here’s another gut check: how, in our heart of hearts, do we really feel about the words of God versus our own? Are our words—are we?—the bright star on the homiletical stage? God forbid. What a humble, glorious activity it is:

“Devote yourselves to the public reading of Scripture…” (1 Timothy 4:13).

Be in the words as you read them, and you will not say without inflection or pause: “Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will deceive many people” (Matthew 24:5). Have a downward sentence-ending inflection on the word “Christ” and then a healthy pause, or you risk distorting the meaning entirely.6

Be in the words as you say them, and you will perhaps not emphasize the word “and” when you speak the invocation—“…AND of the Son, AND of the Holy Spirit”—but instead the thrice-holy name of the Triune God.7

Think of what you are saying—here’s a pet peeve—and we won’t suffer the annoyance of, “On the third day, Christ rose AGAIN.”

Let’s return to the positive, better, to the joy. Take a closer look at that gorgeous paragraph from Jesus that begins, “In my Father’s house are many rooms…” (John 14:2) Sense the fresh way it can strike the heart when, on the basis of close reading and a robust understanding, you realize you want to change up the inflection and pace in ways you haven’t heard done before.

Which word or words will you inflect in the phrase, “In my Father’s house?” A weighty question, don’t you think? Can you make a good decision on the fly? I don’t think so. With a little preparation you will know to have Jesus answer the question of Thomas, “How can we follow when we do not know the way?” with a well-inflected “I” as in, “I am the Way (long pause) and the TRUTH (inflect this as a new thought and pause) and the LIFE (inflect and pause)” (John 14:6).

Which words will we inflect? Well, which words are being contrasted, such as “flesh” and “spirit” in Romans 8? What new thought is being introduced? What wordings, such as “and IF I go and prepare a place for you,” are a repetition and therefore can be read more quickly so as to get to the reason for the sentence?

I. Will. Come. Back.

Think about those words as you lock eyes with the weary and the anxious. I dare you.

The Particulars

I mentioned earlier that delivery can, for the most part, take care of itself. When we are in command of our message, preaching can be an authentic communication that is to die for. If the first time we preached we saw before us only that unpleasant phenomenon of a sea of “resting faces,” you have learned with experience how much more than that is going on. Beautiful, honest, urgent things pass between the under-shepherd and his flock if he can only be enough in the moment to receive them.

The reason I say “for the most part” is that a little further study of sermon delivery may reveal areas in which our instincts are not perfectly informed. We can still grow.

I recently had Jason Teteak, author of Rule the Room, in the class in which I introduce homiletics to future pastors. To say the least, he raised the bar. I recommend his book. It emerged out of his analysis of thousands of speeches. Having given little thought to my own delivery for decades, the experience was good for me.

Can you make a good decision on the fly? I don’t think so.

I learned that I need to close my mouth when not speaking. Didn’t know that. I learned that to raise my voice to unnatural levels is not as effective as speaking with quiet intensity (as much as a sound system allows). I learned that inflecting upward conveys excitement, but at the end of a sentence, it can convey far less credibility and conviction than a downward inflection does. I’ve learned that the whole range of vocal variety—thoughtful changes in tone, pace, volume, inflection—can be part of the ways I hold attention or regain it for the highest moments in my sermon. These are non-discursive symbols that do not translate into words but, instead, are felt as qualities. I’m learning not to fill in my pregnant pauses with vocal noises—I’m trying to empty them of “ums” and “ahs.” Again, good things happen in the silent spaces we create.

I learned that there are four rhetorical styles that can characterize a preacher—his sweet spot—and that there are risks involved with emulating someone if it’s just not who we are.8

I’ve learned to ask myself, “What do I want my listeners to feel in this moment?” Rather than merely perform that emotion, the thing is to actually feel and display that very thing on my face. I’ve learned what to do with my hands if I am not a “hand talker.” I’ll find a comfortable default position in which to rest my hands, and then I’ll scour my manuscript to create a few meaningful gestures to go with various wordings and which will enhance a few of my most important thoughts. Less is more.

I’ll scour my manuscript to create a few meaningful gestures to go with various wordings.

I’ve learned about “targeted” movements, gestures, and facial expressions that are an additional way to bring attention to specific words or phrases. I’ve learned about dividing the space into which I’m speaking into a grid of nine quadrants and randomly spread my attention around with a few seconds in each at a time. I try not to leave any part of the room out so that I am not saying, ‘The love of God is for all of you…especially those of you on my right where I am always turned.” I’m learning to meet eyes in a Goldilocks moment of a little under a second—not too little, not too much.

I think about these things a bit as I write and prepare. Then I set them aside.

Lord, help me forget myself.

A Rare Both/And

Some of us are gentle. Some of us are bold. We tend to lean one way or another. In a term from Timothy Keller’s book, Preaching, we strive to preach with “warmth and force” as qualities that combine uniquely in the character of Jesus.

We do not hide that we are weak or decorate our jars of clay. We have taken the disappointing journey inside. This informs our gentle humility and fuels all our compassion. We know what sin is—people can tell that, too. We can dare to be sinners.

And we rise with power and authority on loan from God. We stand up with things to say before which queens and kings ought to bend their knees. We pour our treasure out.

Conclusion

I am fascinated by the way nonverbals cues and channels intersect with spoken words. What if we heard Jesus say, “No servant is greater than his Master,” but never saw him on his knees washing the feet of his friends? Would we understand? John comments, “He now showed them the full extent of his love” (John 13:2).

He showed them.

“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me!” (Luke 22:42) What if you only heard the words but did not see him fall. Meanings leak out of him like great drops of blood.

Later on, he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27).

My Lord, how you speak with your hands! My God, the body language of the Word made flesh!

The Gospel writers saw significance in dozens of nonverbal cues in the life of Christ: the touching of the leper, the drawing in the sand, the loud cry from the cross, the frying of fish on the shore—all the beautiful ways he delivers his lines. He came to join with us in the full richness of human connection and to fully share in our human stuff.

These cues accumulate in a thing we find convincing, by the grace of God. They accent the words that overwhelm.

“For God so loved the world…”

 

Written by Mark Paustian

Dr. Paustian is a professor of communication and biblical Hebrew at Martin Luther College where he teaches “Advanced Christian Rhetoric” which combines an introduction to homiletics and an introduction to apologetics in one course. He holds a PhD in Communication from Regent University.

1 Watchman Nee was a prominent figure in the house-church movement in China.
2 Christ-Centered Preaching. Baker, 2005, 329.
3 ibid.
4 This is a famous contribution from Paul Watzlawick.
5 On this point see Jon Hein, “Treasures in Jars of Clay: The Synergy Between the Instrumental and Ministerial Causes in God’s Plan of Salvation” at essays.wisluthsem.org.
6 See How to Speak the Written Word by Nedra Newkirk Lamar (Revell, 1967) for guidance on pause and inflection as an aid to understanding the spoken Word.
7 This is a soft example. It is not to suggest that the “and” is not meaningful. Try it both ways and see if you don’t agree.
8 See Jason Teteak’s Rule the Room (Morgan James, 2014) for more information.


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Preach the Word – Joy and Confidence from the Basics – Part 4

A drill sergeant is giving an order to a cadet.

Sergeant: “There is no talking during drill.”

Cadet: “Yes, sir. The fellas were just explaining that to me.”

Sergeant: “Be quiet, cadet! There is no talking during drill!”

Cadet: “Sergeant. I know all about that. Like I was saying….”1

On it goes. The cadet takes the sergeant’s words as a communication of information. What is he missing? Only what the words have to do with him.

What we have here is a failure of application.

The Scriptures communicate the costliest information that can be thought of: preeminently who Jesus is and what he has done. But the Word is not a communication of information alone, but of capability as well—to repent, to speak, to persevere. As Paul instructed (Titus 2), the grace of God is teaching us how to live as we wait on Jesus’ return.

They hunger not to become walking encyclopedias of religious information.

The people of God daily hunger for the external Word to come to them from the outside, telling them that they are sinners and telling them they are saved. And they hunger for this, too—not to become walking encyclopedias of religious information, but to take up into an actual life even the smallest part of what they know.

Appropriation and Application

Let’s distinguish appropriation and application.

Appropriation is about people not only having the truth, but being had by it. It is about taking to heart the things of God so as to be renewed and transformed by them. We want people to see some essential piece of divine revelation more clearly than when they first walked in the door. We would have them delight in some aspect of the grace of God as it is revealed in Jesus—the glory of his self-sacrifice and his astonishing resurrection. Appropriation grabs hold of the big facts and celebrates those two words Martin Luther held dear: For you.

Appropriation celebrates those two words Martin Luther held dear: For you.

Application depends entirely on appropriation. The “Now what?” follows on the heels of the “So what?” and draws on its strength. Application is about our changed situation—how life can now be lived, now that Christ is revealed to our hearts again by Word and Sacrament. Whether we include explicit directives for life depends on the telos of our text. If we say with John, “Little children, love one another,” but are a little short on the details, it is to leave intact the marvelous freedom of the Christian “to do or not do” (Luther).

An example

As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him (Psalm 103:13).

I was disciplining one of my daughters in her bedroom. Her spirit was a fist balled up. She was seeing a side of me she hadn’t seen before. I became gradually harsher, needing only to see some glimmer of sorrow over her sin.

I broke her. Contrition poured out in a wail: “I’m sorry! I can’t help it!”

Now I broke, too. I know a thing or two about that. Now everything changes.

“O, sweetheart…” I say and crush her to my chest, searching for words and taking my time, all to overwhelm her with God’s love and with mine.

I talked about this with my grown daughters the other day (to get permission to share). They didn’t remember the episode and demanded to know which of them was in the story. I’m not telling.

I talked to them about how a father’s heart goes out to a child, how it bursts from his chest. How he rushes to her side, chasing all the space away. It happened from the time they were little. It happened at first words and first steps, at sporting events and musical performances, at graduations and weddings, at times my God let them shine. But, as I tried to put into words, none of that can touch that day in my little girl’s bedroom.

Do you think you understand how a father runs to his child in her struggle against sin? How he is with her? How he is for her and on her side in the fight against this thing she hates? She has gotten to him. She is his. He is hers.

Let’s be in no hurry to move on. In your struggle with sin, think about this with me. Think about how a father loves a child.

You live all these decades in a room called grace only to discover that one of the walls is an accordion door. You push it back to discover there is more yet than you had seen. What is it like to be reconciled to God? What have I yet to grasp about this relationship, this love—how wide, how long, how high, how deep? I find that the furniture in my mind is still being rearranged.

“As a father has compassion on his children.”

This is application. We search out the implications of salvation—what it has to do with me and what can be different about today.

What do you notice?

You notice that what we are discussing takes time. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

You notice that my example is heavy on appropriation. It leaves the application mostly unstated. It wouldn’t need to be so. Application of the phrase “those who fear him” would fit nicely in my exposition of the text earlier in the sermon. But I take the accent here to be on something we are supposed to know in our bones about the sort of compassion God-fearers will always find in God.

Notice that this example has a modest goal. This is not “the whole counsel of God” packed into one sermon. I am not trying to do everything. Rather, I have concerned myself with a single thought that a child can know. You learn that to speak with understanding the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer is not so modest a goal after all.

Finally, the example above happens to blend illustration with application (a term that includes appropriation in its broad sense). Those components of preaching play well together, especially if I mean to go beyond conveying the information packed into that single verse, “As a father has compassion on his children,” costly as it is. I am taking pains to close the loop. Everything this magnificent psalm has ever meant—to its original hearers and all those across time—it means for you.

Appropriation in particular

One of the axioms of education is to take people from the known to the unknown. You understand the periodic table in basic chemistry? Good. Let’s see what happens when these elements combine.

Now think about taking people from the appropriated to the unappropriated. We address people who prize the death and resurrection of Jesus. They don’t doubt that they are reconciled to God. This is good. Why, then, are many of them so anxious? How do you close that loop? That’s a good question.

It helps to know our people as well as we can. Audience-centeredness is critical. Take the time to ask good questions, listen well, and reflect deeply on what you’ve heard. Perhaps recycled sermons fall flat not because they were poorly written but because we had entirely different faces before us as we wrote them.

Might we ever be content with appropriation alone and have no application at all? I think so.

The people you preach to are living lives no one has ever lived before or will again, with their particular gifts, confronted by the particular obligations of their vocations and the needs of their particular neighbors. This goes to the freedom of the Christian to look around, and in the peace of forgiveness, to do “whatever comes into their minds to do” (Luther).

The third use of the law slides so easily into the first. The voice of conscience wakes up as cruel as ever.

A colleague has said that “the law is no puppy that only does what you want it to do.” I may intend by the imperatives and cohortatives in my sermon to guide the grateful lives of people. “How can you express this thankfulness you feel, this wonder at so great a Savior? Here’s how.” But as we know, “lex semper accusat” (the law always accuses). The third use of the law slides so easily into the first. The voice of conscience wakes up as cruel as ever, though it was never our intention to leave people there.

With clarity about what the gospel alone does for people and what the law never can, I sometimes elect to emphasize appropriation and take care not to overwrite my applications. This I do to cultivate gospel predominance as C. F. W. Walther taught us.

Good Friday is one day I want “It is finished” to echo through every world there is and ring in every ear. Let this and only this carry them out the door. Not, “I’ve really got to do better!” Not, “I had better get my act together.” Just, “It is finished!”

This is about so much more than sinning less, to put it bluntly. The death and resurrection of Jesus into which we are baptized remains a matter of perpetual appropriation as we learn to daily die and rise with Jesus.

Application in particular

Sermon application takes careful thought.

Until the eternal gospel of our Lord is heard above the sound of a nagging conscience and the complaints of offended reason, we cannot ask in the right way what God would have us do. We risk either tying on burdens or waking up the pharisee if our applications are not built on a robust presentation of law and gospel.

I want my applications to be “aha moments.”

I want my applications to be “aha moments.” In the spirit of the law, we sweat and strain to produce the qualities of heart we know should be there—we should be more compassionate, more patient, more fearless. Good luck with that. Think instead of the good things that come to us simply because we see. Think of the fruit that grow spontaneously on our branches simply because we have taken in the person and work of our Savior with clearer sight. “In view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1).

“In view of God’s mercy.” Aha!

And I hope that deeply rooted Christian optimism characterizes our applications.

When I preached Romans 12 not long ago— “Love must be sincere…” —I told a story of my best friend in high school. During a midnight heart-to-heart he confessed, “I don’t know if I’ve ever really loved anyone.” Next I looked into the faces of hundreds of college students and asked, “Do we love each other? I mean it. Do we?” I let the question hang in the air for some time. (Good things happen in the pauses, don’t you agree?) Students told me they talked about that all through lunch. They didn’t know what I would say next, and they wondered, “How could we not have known?”

Students told me they talked about that all through lunch.

In my message, I reminisced about the quality of the friendship that tenth grader offered me—it still takes my breath away. No, we do not love to our own satisfaction. We are not love’s definition. You don’t look at the likes of us to know what love is. But we do, indeed, love because God, in Christ, loved us first. We love because Jesus did not fail in his quest, not only to rescue us in every way a person can be rescued, but also to teach us brotherly love and to create a people eager to do what is good.

“And in fact, you do love all of God’s family…. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more” (1 Thessalonians 4:10). This is how we talk to the bride of Christ.

Given everything we are led to understand about this sinful flesh of ours, as good theology teaches us to call things as they are—given what we are led to expect of fallen people in a fallen world—is it not a wonder when God’s people love? What a few words and a little bit of water can do!

It goes to a question I often raise with my students: how does one properly speak to the bride of Christ? We can preach the law to powerful effect without needing to say things to the Church that are simply not true. For example, her works done in faith are not the “filthy rags” Isaiah spoke about. There are lifelong believers who think that! How refreshing it will be for them to find out that the smallest act of Christian love is the Lord Christ celebrating his victory over sin, death, and devil. The moment came from him, as did the impulse, and the strength. These acts are his even as they are ours, and in them, in grace, he positively delights.

Aha!

There is more we can teach our people as we depict the life of freedom that busts out in good works. For example, I love the picture a brother has offered: a father holds the hand of a toddler as she takes her first steps. She cannot walk a single step apart from his grip on her. But don’t think she is not the one doing the walking. Just watch those little feet go. Now take a look at his face—how a father loves a child.

Just look at his face as the people of God, his masks, offer up their holy vocations in service to their neighbor—a subject we will never tire of, nor will they. There’s an aha moment in the thought that my sanctification is for the people who experience me, those whom God wants loved.

Lastly, when we understand that we are nothing without Christ and can do nothing without him, our references in preaching to the means of grace will not be obligatory. We know no other way of sermonizing than that, in our applications, we perpetually call our people to remain in Christ. How? We drag ourselves in our poor half-heartedness to Word and sacrament in hopeful expectation of being wakened and warmed. We let the Word of Christ live richly within us, as God gives us the strength.

“Thinking must be turned a new direction; Christ must be thought of if you are to say Christ lives in you” (Luther).

The habitus practicus

In the twin arts of appropriation and application, our own credibility is implicated. By the earnestness of our appropriations and the realism of our applications, we demonstrate that we know what we are talking about. We show that we “share in human stuff” with the people in the pew. The pulpit is not our private confessional, but they can tell that we know something about living as sinner and saint in this actual world of simple pleasures and broken shoestrings—that our preaching is an extension of our very lives.

It will be obvious at the end of our lives that we did not become who we so badly wanted to become. Instead, we learned to never let the cross out of our sight. That cross is dear and what we learn through tentatio and Anfechtung (trial and struggle) we will teach to others and call it all blessed. Luther: “For as soon as God’s Word becomes known through you, the devil will inflict you, will make a real theologian of you.”

There is no escaping the struggle of Christian living. Instead, there is the promise of Jesus to meet us there by his Word. We display to our people what we have learned in the Spirit’s school: that God allows us to be battered by devil, world, and flesh so as to learn to hang on for dear life to the gospel. In the end, we wage everything on Jesus.

To grow in “the practical habit of the theologian” is not only the task of the pastor. He will urge on his people that gaining the knowledge of Christ is a way of life. It happens, for example, when some in the body of Christ are offended by others and are making motions of leaving. You plead, “The first time someone hurts you, you want to leave? Really? You will miss it. Now is when theology becomes life. Now is when we find out what all this has been about from the start, when you forgive freely from the heart for Jesus sake.” This is application.

God allows us to be battered by devil, world, and flesh so as to learn to hang on for dear life to the gospel.

We are not drill sergeants whipping cadets into shape. We are pastors seeing to the care of souls. They are not “brains on sticks” (James K. A. Smith), empty receptacles in which to pour Bible trivia (if there is such a thing). In a nod to C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man), they are people “with chests,” capable, in Christ, of responding to Christian truth in whole-hearted Christian living.

Their capability is Christ. By the Spirit, his every gospel imperative—to trust and not be troubled, to hope and be glad—will ring true in them.

What a pleasure to guide God’s people in what it means to linger and live in God’s thought—how a father loves a child.

Written by Mark Paustian

Dr. Paustian is a professor of communication and biblical Hebrew at Martin Luther College where he teaches “Advanced Christian Rhetoric” which combines an introduction to homiletics and an introduction to apologetics in one course. He holds a PhD in Communication from Regent University.

1 From The Parables of Kierkegaard.


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Preach the Word – Joy and Confidence from the Basics – Part 3

I watch a pastor from three rows behind and a little to the left. He is celebrating 25 years in the ministry. He is listening to a sermon with his face in his hands. His bride puts her hand on his shoulder and steals a glance. A big thing is happening right beside her.

The preacher up front is performing a great kindness by the picture he paints. He is depicting the Lord Christ as he walks among the lampstands that are the Good News churches, keeping them lit. His saving face is revealed in their soft, flickering light. But there is more. See, he is holding the stars of the churches—their pastors—in the palms of his hands.

What greater kindness is there than to search all possible means of communication, beginning with the images that sparkle and the narratives that unfold within the sermon text itself, all to inscribe the thing deeper, deeper in the bottom of a soul.

Reconciled to God. Kept. Held.

Why illustrate?

The pastor longs to show his people things—not just to tell them—and to have the truths of any given Sunday bore down through the head and into the heart. He would have those truths be all the more available for life by means of that high homiletical art we call illustration.

A good story—the truth-telling that disturbs, the ending that makes it worthwhile—is like good art. It creates a conversation for the car ride home. It leaves you with more to say than just, “My, wasn’t that nice.” It gives you something memorable on which to hang that day’s whole point.

And so, having expounded the meaning of our text, having captured the truth in clear and dramatic doctrinal assertions, the sort that Christians love, now we want to let this truth get up and walk around. We want to give it a human face. We want to set things beside it to say, “This is what it’s like. This is how it looks. This is how it feels.”

Why tell stories?

The guru of narrative communication is named Walter Fisher (1931-2018). He happened to be a gentleman scholar of some Christian depth. He liked to say that people are fundamentally “storytelling creatures” [homo narrans] with brains hard-wired for narrative. Story is the form of communication that is most like life for the way it meets us in a steady sequence of events and ambiguities.

Fisher pushes back on what he calls the “rational world paradigm,” the view that the world meets us in a series of logical problems, and that being educated means being trained in the kind of critical thinking that can help us succeed in navigating such a world.

In contrast, children are enculturated from little on in what Fisher terms “narrative rationality,” the ability to think in stories. He saw all human communication as narration so that even greeting someone in the hallway is a story—it settles in our minds as an episode. Long after we may have forgotten every word our favorite teacher ever said to us—when all that content has long drained from our busy brains—what remains in episodic memory, perhaps for a lifetime, is how she made us feel. That we may take to our graves.

This goes to the profound “stickiness” of stories, especially those that draw on deep currents of feeling. Episodic memory—how we easily retain dozens of details in a well-told story—is vastly more powerful than eidetic memory—retrieving, say, a random seven-digit number.

Stories lodge like seeds in the soil of people’s thoughts.

Think of Jesus’ parables. Stories lodge like seeds in the soil of people’s thoughts—even if they do not immediately understand the meaning that hides curled up and green inside the shell, perhaps one day, by the Spirit, they will.

Incidentally, please don’t hear, “Once upon a time…” when I use the word “story” throughout this article. This is no small thing. At our insistence that the divinely inspired history recorded in the pages of the Bible is true, worlds hang in the balance.

And Fisher, too, was no postmodern. He had a correspondence view of truth—there are good stories and there are bad stories in terms of their claims on reality. He noticed competing stories about the way things are within the Bible itself—“‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). Fisher understood that devil, world, and flesh persuade more by the slippery stories they tell than by anything remotely rational. He trusted the meta-narrative of Scripture, the grand story from garden to garden that reveals to us and to our children everything we really need to know: who God is, who we are, what’s wrong with everything, where our redemption and hope are found.

They are found in Christ. Nothing else will do.

What makes a story work—what explains its influence—is when it has “narrative fidelity” and “narrative coherence.” That is, it “rings true” and it “hangs together.” With these qualities in place, stories carry within them what Fisher calls “good reasons”—to trust, to serve, to wait, to hope. For a fuller accounting of these ideas, Walter Fisher’s groundbreaking book, Human Communication as Narration, is fascinating and accessible.

A good story doesn’t need to be explained. Doing so may only break the spell. Good stories heal the rift between mind and emotion. The best stories leave no part of the prodigal untouched. As C. S. Lewis believed, they lower our defenses and “sneak past those watchful dragons” to deliver truth home. Lewis described that the subsequent events in a narrative—this happened, then this, then this—are like a net in which something may be caught that “is not subsequent”—what grace is and, more ineffably, what it is like.

Good stories heal the rift between mind and emotion.

Of course the true story of Christ crucified and raised for us all is the soul of preaching. It is the soul of worship itself.

Where will our best stories come from?

“I will open my mouth in parables and utter things hidden from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35). Our best stories are found within the Scriptures themselves and in the teaching of the Rabbi from Nazareth.

These are the stories to which the Spirit has married himself. Without needing to pry open the mind of the Spirit to know why he communicates as he does, his love for stories is evident across the entire scope of the Bible. The Word has the ultimate stamp of “narrative coherence”—it all hangs together in Christ—and “narrative fidelity”—by the Spirit it rings true. The “good reasons” it provides are to die for.

Let me mention two of the narrative strategies that the Scriptures model in particular. “Narrative transportation” names the way the Scriptures steal us away, for example, to a mountainside in the Sinai Peninsula where a bush burns but does not burn up. The whole atmosphere of the place is the infinitive qualitative difference between God and us.

“Identification” is the way we come to “share human stuff” with Moses on our knees, feeling with him the enormity of his calling and the overlap of our identities as men who some days want to cry out, “Who am I that I should lead these people?” Similarly, the inspired writer of the book of Ruth wrote high theology into the mouth of a woman who struggles with grief and loss.

In an earlier issue, I mentioned the “epidemiological approach” to the Scriptures, or, catching the mood of these texts like a contagion. When Alexander Pope wrote, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” he was commenting on the seldom recognized problem of talkativeness on the subject of God. He means those who prattle on about the deep mysteries of God with scholarly detachment as if talking about a strange bird or a shiny rock.

Not Naomi. We grieve with her so as to arrive where she does at the first mention of her redeemer, “Yahweh has not abandoned his loving kindness to me!” (Ruth 2:20)

We do not want to excavate the meaning of our text and then discard the form, as if the story itself didn’t matter, or as if there’s no compelling reason divine revelation has come to us in the way it has. We would do violence to the parables of Jesus by bogging down in an academic study of what sort of corn the prodigal fed to what sort of pigs. Let the story be the story.

One of our fathers, you may know, made it his practice to begin a sermon on a New Testament text by drawing on the well of inspired accounts found in the Old Testament, and vice versa. I can’t imagine your search would ever end in disappointment when you go looking for an account from the other testament, so to speak, that is asking to be brought into conversation with your text.

Is preaching to become story time?

To paraphrase E. M. Forster:

“The queen died. The king died. Those are facts.
The queen died, and the king died of a broken heart. That’s a story.

Notice from this example that we are not necessarily thinking of long, rambling narratives. Some people who study narrative communication advise us to think instead about the disproportionate power of a two-minute story wrapped around a compelling image.

The disproportionate power of a two-minute story wrapped around a compelling image.

The LORD speaks through Isaiah about a vineyard set on a fertile hill. He cleared the stones and built a tower. He planted it with choice vines. He hewed a winepress to hold the good grapes this vineyard would surely produce for him. But what he found was reason enough to destroy the whole thing outright. And then we find out.

“Israel is the vineyard.”

A two-minute story wrapped around an image.

If there’s any chance that Walter Fisher is right about our being “hard-wired for narrative,” I don’t think we need to resist what is palpable in preaching. It is natural that the attention of our listeners waxes and wanes across the span of twenty minutes. And we may need to risk taxing their ability to hang with us when crucial doctrinal content takes some time to expound. But when the first few words of a story leave our mouths—“So my dad used to take me fishing…”—we can feel our people perking up and coming back to us. Or is it just me? I don’t think so.

Rather than turning preaching into story time, we are not wrong to notice the features of the story form that allow it to do what it does as a communicative event, for example, the way a baked-in conflict or obstacle or tension entangle its hearers. We cannot not listen for how the thing can possibly be resolved. That observation about the structure of narrative can inform the way we introduce a sermon in an attention-arresting way without overtly using narrative at all.

No, preaching isn’t story time. But there is time for a good story. Whenever I divide my communication classroom into four corners according to four personalities that you’ll find in any group, I ask students in each corner, “What would you like to tell the rest of us about how to communicate with you?” Inevitably, one particular corner of the room will say, “Tell us a story. That’s how we get it.” Then another corner will chime in, “And it needs to touch our hearts. We won’t learn if you leave that part of us out.”

“Lose the autobiography?”

I told a story of my Aunt Marie in a sermon one time. A colleague I revere complimented my message, but then said, “Preaching is proclamation. So lose the autobiography.”

I’ll admit that I struggle with that counsel when it comes to drawing on our own life experiences as preachers. I made that adjustment for more than a year and received the feedback from someone close to me, “You’ve changed what you do in the pulpit. And for me, something is missing.”

Episodic memory is vastly more powerful than eidetic memory.

There are some obvious pitfalls to avoid. The pulpit is not our personal confessional. On the other hand, God forbid we make ourselves the hero in our own stories, when that position belongs to another. And the truth is, our wives and children should not cringe or live in dread of what may come out of our mouths that is private and theirs alone.

How much we value transparency may be a generational thing. This is a generalization, but it seems to me that the college students I serve would say, “Show me some glimmer of understanding that life is hard, and that you know what struggle is. That’s when you have my attention.”

How we feel about our lives makes sense within the way we tell our story. So there’s something we can model as we tell our stories with more true Christian optimism and less of a grumble for having Jesus drawn into our frame, even as he has drawn us into his.

So, while I personally conclude that “less is more” when it comes to what we share from the pulpit, I have been blessed by those brief, scattered glimpses into the lives of the preachers who have served me well. I say this in the spirit of the letter to the Hebrews: “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith” (Hebrews 13:7).

Why use imagery?

Illustration is not confined to the story form. Our use of images can be brief but impactful.

Jonathan Edwards once spoke of the futility of saving ourselves through good works. This he captured with the image of a spiderweb that cannot even slow a falling rock. He had a gift for tying a truth to a sensory experience as a way to impress it indelibly on his hearers.

The Scriptures themselves are a saturation of mental pictures.

That is an original image. But notice again that the Scriptures themselves are a saturation of mental pictures. Kenneth Burke relishes the “this-ness of that and the that-ness of this” to explain how images work. How is the mercy of God like an ocean? How is an ocean like the mercy of God? We are getting to the essence of things as we come to see the one in the light of the other.

What imagery has in common with story is that both are maieutic. That is, they leave work for the listener to do. We leave room for the listener to complete the meaning, such as when we pray, “Keep me as (literally) the little man of your eye” (Psalm 17:8). Look close into the eye of God. What do you see there? What does it mean? David doesn’t say.

Likewise, we want to allow people to linger over an image like that, to let it hang in the air a bit. Why? Because we know that truth can be made more fully one’s own for that moment we have prepared of, “Ooh! I get that!”

This doesn’t mean leaving things to chance. The listener’s effort must be rewarded. One approach would be that early in our message we let the story be the story, as I say, or let the image be the image, but then we can come back to it in the end to be sure we’ve left no one scratching their heads.

The apple of God’s eye. The beauty there is an aspect of the meaning. The incandescent moments in Scripture are not merely a way to say more impressively what could have just as well been said another way. They bring us into closer contact with what we already know. They help us not only to know what we know, but to love what we know as well.

The incandescent moments in Scripture … bring us into closer contact with what we already know.

Where do illustrations come from?

My Dad used to say, “You can tell a pastor who reads from one who does not.” He was referring to the quality of the man’s words and the freshness of his thoughts. They will not be what they could be if he impoverishes himself to the narrow confines of his own thinking or experience.

To “the pastor who reads” we can add: the pastor who tunes in to the world when it is telling its best stories, such as they are, revealing its rebellion, its idolatries, its hunger, and its need. We can add: the pastor who is curious—who engages in history and art, fiction and non-fiction, movies, music, and all the rest of popular culture. Out comes an introduction based on the Isak Dinesen’s story, “Babette’s Feast” or the poignant chorus of Jason Isbel’s, “If We Were Vampires.” Talk about packing a wallop.

Above all, to the pastor who reads, we add: the pastor who inhabits the biblical world, immersing in and absorbing its stories, images, poems, and songs.

What does it look like when Truth gets up and walks around? When it wears a human face? Look there. It is the Lord Christ strolling among the lampstands and holding their stars in the palms of his hands.

Written by Mark Paustian

Dr. Paustian is a professor of communication and biblical Hebrew at Martin Luther College where he teaches “Advanced Christian Rhetoric” which combines an introduction to homiletics and an introduction to apologetics in one course. He holds a PhD in Communication from Regent University.


 

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Preach the Word – Joy and Confidence from the Basics – Part 2

If there were such a thing as “Paustian’s Famous Home-Cooked Chili,” I imagine creating each new batch by some combination of habit, instinct, and muscle memory. A handful of this. A dash of that. But the messier and more ill-defined the process, the more I need to lift a ladle of the stuff to my mouth before serving it up for my friends. “Hmm. It’s missing something. But what?”

What is my process, you wonder? If you watched me cooking up the next sermon, what would you see? I’m afraid I can only describe it in broad strokes as others have before me: I study myself full. I think myself empty. I write myself clear.

But the more ill-defined my procedure, the more important is that final tasting of the homiletical chili. Having written a sermon for my friends, these are the questions I ask as I preach to myself: “What have I missed? Is some element under-developed? Is something too overpowering? Is some quality lacking?”

With your indulgence, I’d like to plow some of the old ground from the last issue before pressing further down on my list of ingredients.

Is my sermon truly textual?

If every sermon text is like a town in England having a “Main Street” that is the inspired writer’s flow of thought, then we want to walk this street often in our preparation so as to know it intimately.

A thousand windows each have a clear view of Main Street.

I suppose when we think about the old cliché about the “thousand sermons in every text” we can extend the analogy to a thousand windows that each have a clear view of that Main Street. It is not as though we can ever speak the last decisive word about Psalm 23 or close down all the meanings at the Pool of Siloam. The waters are too deep.

But there’s an important caution here. We need to ask ourselves what the Spirit of God is intending to say and do in the lives of people by means of a given portion of his Word. What is the telos—the purpose—that throbs like a beating heart within our chosen Scripture? We answer this question on the basis of a robust study of our text which we undertake with every tool at our disposal.

A “thousand sermons” does not mean “anything goes.”

The point is that the “thousand sermons” bit does not mean “anything goes.” Simply put, when it comes to what we have casually taken to be the point of our text, we can be wrong.

We brought our own agenda or our minds missed a crucial element of context. On the basis of something that immediately caught our eye in the lesson, our thoughts ran ahead to a favorite story or clever insight…and the sermon starts to write itself. But we may have missed entirely the driving thought of Isaiah or John or Paul that caused them to write as they did. (I’ve often found that a good commentary can call me back.)

To multiply our analogies, we’ve been taught to “marry our text” in just the sort of intimate familiarity and steady commitment we’ve been describing. Personally, I’ve come to prefer the “arranged marriage” of preaching on a text that has been assigned to me or that I’ve chosen from the lectionary in a systematic way. I’ve come to appreciate that early period of warming up to a portion of Scripture I would never have chosen. I meet it as an awkward stranger. It resists me at first, then begins to release its secrets. An affection stirs. We become close. And I will need no reminder to keep in constant contact with my text as I write.

One more? I appreciate Kierkegaard’s “epidemiological approach” to the Bible. This is a call to catch the mood of the Scriptures like a contagion, like a disease, and to not be content with an exposition that gets the words right but that remains on the outside of the prodigal’s shame, the Father’s longing, or the joy of the Coming Home. I ask not only, “What does this Word teach?” but also, “What does it do to me?” for an engagement with the text that is not an intellectual one alone.

John 10 furnished our example of the tension in the room that you could cut with a knife as our Lord thundered—yes thundered—“I am the Good Shepherd!”

Does my text stand behind some touchstone of Lutheran theology?

This issue isn’t mentioned on my original list of criteria, and so it’s possible that in my early years in the pulpit I left this too much to chance. My practice now is to always check the index to Pieper’s Dogmatics to determine whether my text has served as a doctrinal sedes.

For example, I recently preached on Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares. It struck me how relevant the Donatist Controversy still is to both the flawed pastor and the watching flock and to any of us who have our radar tuned for hypocrisy, that is, if we are each still to thrill to our baptism or come eagerly to the Table.

“Master, should we pull up the weeds?”

“No. You’ll only get it wrong.”

In connection with John 10, we could reflect in our sermon about the person of Jesus or of the perichoresis of the Trinity in all of eternity, both of which inform and beautifully complicate that stunning moment: “The reason the Father loves me is that I lay down my life…”

Speaking of which, a recent study by Pew Research shows that 78% of evangelical Christians side with Arias in the Arian Controversy naming Jesus as the first of God’s creative acts. Millions of people are poorly served. Even having the Nicene Creed as a regular part of liturgical worship would rescue them—“light from light, true God from God.”

78% of evangelical Christians side with Arias in the Arian Controversy.

My point is that the lectionary provides people with a regular catechesis in the great doctrines of Scripture such as keep the soul alive to God. We do not want to emulate the doctrinal indifference of modern Christendom. Just imagine, for example, if you were 58 years old (like me) and it were 45 years since you last heard a serious treatment of the person of Jesus.

Imagine no longer being sharp on the truth that what happened to Jesus happened to God himself or the fact that Jesus, our true brother, is the very one who rules all things for the sake of his Church. What does Christian living become then?

The lectionary provides people with a regular catechesis in the great doctrines of Scripture.

I expect we would live under the common illusion in Christendom. We would think that the true heart and core of Christianity is our living for God, instead of what it really is, namely, that God, in Christ, lives for us.

Does the law in my hands disturb?

Good things happen to me when I take up residence in that textual town and walk its Main Street, not that they are easy. I am implicated, unmasked, revealed. Always. It no longer comes as a surprise. Like you, I have learned in the Spirit’s school to be suspicious of myself and to remain alert to the plank in my own eyes.

I am implicated, unmasked, revealed.

If the Scripture on which I will preach is nothing but a gush of Good News, there is likely to be something in the immediate context that confronts me with my fallenness. We may have to walk the side streets of our little textual “town” or even take a quick stroll in the countryside that is the wider context of the book.

Our example in John 10 was brutal. We were compelled to ask ourselves whether we are the “hired hands who care nothing for the sheep,” and we withered before a Savior who calls things as they are.

As far as just how harsh we will be, we will take our cues from the divinely inspired words in which we have immersed ourselves. It is, of course, no fun being the prophet, so to speak, the one who sees the maladies in our midst, all those impulses and qualities that have no place in family of God. There are a range of ways in which we may confront these things so as to make the Good News of Jesus, in a word, necessary.

We may draw people into that surgical light in which no sinner looks good.

We may hold up the mirror of God’s holy will or draw people into that surgical light in which no sinner looks good. Or we may take some seemingly trivial human foible or some common observation about the way we are or the things we do, and ask over and over, “But why?” so as to expose the ugliness at the root.

Ask that question often enough and what begins, for example, with the mundane fact that we lie or pretend may take us in the end to the way we worship at the altar of other people’s opinions. There the cruel deity howls, “You need me! Don’t you know what I can do to you!” There lies the bleeding idolatry, the blasphemy, the inward curve of soul, the thing fit for crucifixion.

The law is always present in our minds. That means that sometimes, as our text guides us, it is enough to peel back the bandage and expose the wound that is the sinner’s predicament, the problem of which we are in no way the solution, and to gently draw into conscious awareness that this need that is always with us—whatever it may seem to be—is our need for Jesus.

“Have you examined yourself and found yourself wanting? The Scriptures call you a sinner—have you proved it already today? Does unworthiness overwhelm you and put you on your knees? It is a good place to be. Let me tell you why….”

However we choose to apply the law, we do it in compassion over the common pain and familiar shame of the sinner. We know something about that, do we not? All struggles overlap. It is a kindness that we help people over and over to walk right up to Sinai, touch it, and die.

Good Lord, what a relief!

Did I gain a fresh hearing for the gospel?

If each sermon text is a town in England with its own Main Street, you will recall that there is also a “Road to Oxford” leading out from that little town. There is a natural, unforced path to our true subject, Christ crucified and raised for the world. We hope to find a road that we pray the Spirit would approve. To our robust understanding of the human condition and of the Word of God we have taken up in our private study, we add a robust understanding of Jesus and what he means in this moment. Right here. Right now.

Again we take our cues from the Word of God as we strive to gain a fresh hearing for this gospel, and to have it once again be heard above the nagging of a terrified conscience or the complaints of offended reason. A whole menu of ways to communicate the grace of God is already on extravagant display across the pages of our Bibles, its stories, poems, and images. There is a full repertoire for us to gain across a lifetime of scriptural study that is already there in the mouths of the biblical characters and still hot off the pens of the ancient writers.

Understandably, the “Road to Oxford” may be more difficult to spot when we preach on the Old Testament. Finding it has well been described as an instinct.

In the book of Ruth, for example, the character of Boaz is saying, “There is a Redeemer who shares your own flesh and blood, who takes your disaster and makes it his own. I am not him. I only point to him.” “There is an affection, a bond, and an enjoyment of Another,” so says the marriage of Ruth and Boaz and every Christian marriage, “But I am not it. I only point to it.” The ancestral land of Israel says, “There is a place for you that will not be taken from you, and a name that will not be cut off. I am not it. I only point to it.” There is a true and better Obed, the baby redeemer whose name means “Servant” and who, just by being born, revived the hopes of his whole human family.

There is more being said in that book than, “Be like Boaz. Be like Ruth.” There are Old Testament texts that, to borrow from Martin Luther, are true “John the Baptists” pointing beyond themselves.

Further, Christian eyes read the Old Testament as Luther did, always tuned in to the struggle between faith and unbelief including as they battle within a single heart. Witness the war on every page between the striving and calculations of men and the redeeming grace of God. There is a true Israel within Israel that waited in hope for Messiah to come, as does the true heart within my heart.

As to proclaiming Christ on the basis of the New Testament, our text might be a little “Oxford” itself, leaving no doubt what expression of the gospel will animate our sermon or what feature of the gospel we will wear on our faces.

What grace that among us there is no talk of “theories of the atonement!” We absolutely do not choose among supposedly competing ideas about this God on a cross. Is he our sacrifice of atonement? Is he the Second Adam in whom we hide ourselves in faith? Is this Christus Victor whose whole heart goes out to us poor victims of sin, death, and devil? Yes, yes, and yes. And more still than this.

When the devil stirred in the hearts of the “hired hands” to do their worst, death claimed a victim that did not deserve to die. So it was that sin, death, and devil fell right into his hands, our Noble Substitute, our Champion, our Real Life, and our So Much More.

Is my sermon coherent?

Prof. John Jeske taught my generation of preachers to ask, “What does the Spirit mean to accomplish in the hearts and lives of my listeners on the basis of this text?” We must have clarity about the “What?” and “So What?” and “Now What” of our text. Ideally, we get these down in words so as to guide the process of writing and inform the hard decisions about what to leave in and what to take out. This will have no one who heard our sermon wondering, “Why did he tell me all that?” And with God’s help and to his glory, we’ll leave no listener behind.

I strive to express in one unambiguous sentence the burden of my message. Let no one walk away unable to answer the question, “What was that all about?” Our example from a text in John 10: The Father prizes the act of the Son laying down his life, only to take it up again, and he prizes all those who prize it with him, by grace, through faith.

I am learning to thank God that writing doesn’t come easily to me. And this piece is as hard as it gets. But there’s a sermon in there. I can taste it. There’s a coherent message already taking shape, one I can write in the stream of this single grand idea.

My introduction involves the moments in life we prize or fail to. My exposition will observe how the “hired hands” missed the joy of the moment when a blind man received his sight. As a law application I could tease out the ugly reasons why according to Jesus’ own diagnosis. This prepares the moment lit up by the words of Jesus when I will give my coherent center (above) room to breathe and spread its wings. I’ll conclude with an echo of my introduction about the moments we prize, and ask: “Why not this one? Why not now, when Christ is again revealed to that ‘true heart within your heart?’”

I study myself full. I think myself empty. I write myself clear.

Yes, it takes time. We have two more matters to take up in the next issue: how to illustrate and how to apply the Word of God. For now, an encouragement.

There are sounds of birth pains coming from your private study. As August Pieper wrote long ago, for there to be a new Springtime of the Spirit among us, it must begin with a Pentecost in the “pastor’s little prayer cell.”

It puts a man on his knees before his Audience of One.

It is as high a privilege as can be thought of: to inhabit the Scriptures, to breathe deep the atmosphere of a particular text, to gather up its colors, to climb the steep hill of understanding, and to capture in writing the mind of Christ for the sake of people who arouse all your compassion. It puts a man on his knees before his Audience of One.

It is a good place to be.

Written by Mark Paustian

Dr. Paustian is a professor of communication and biblical Hebrew at Martin Luther College where he teaches “Advanced Christian Rhetoric” which combines an introduction to homiletics and an introduction to apologetics in one course. He holds a PhD in Communication from Regent University.


 

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Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

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WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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Preach the Word – Joy and Confidence from the Basics

What a thing it is to be someone’s pastor. A young woman lies in her hospital bed lost in a fog of bad news. You walk in the door. And so associated are you with the gospel, so married in her mind with this one essential thing, that it is as if the gospel itself has just walked in the door.

You are her personal Good News Man. They said no one could understand a single thought of Martin Luther unless they understood it first as a thought about the forgiveness of sins. This is your obsession, too, Lutheran pastor. Forgiveness is the only sun in your sky.

Forgiveness is the only sun in your sky.

Yours is the simple eloquence that is born of love for the gospel. And this love for the gospel is born in desperate need. This explains you. And it explains the wonderful, warm thing I see come over you as you arrive, in the moment of preaching, at your true subject. In a certain sense, it is the only thing you really know. You portray Jesus, the Son of God, on his cross. Then, with a Word from God, you unleash a power like none other in the world.

“Take this,” you say. “This is for you.”

You never forget that the man in the back, looking just fine, may be barely holding it together for want of an unambiguous Word of Christ-for-us. You need no reminder—no “note to self”—to fix your spotlight on Christ crucified and raised. Every. Single. Time. You know no other way.

To borrow from Tim Keller, there’s something rare and special about preaching that combines such warmth with such force, such transparent humility with such borrowed, towering authority. It is good and right that we know—we can just tell—that the preacher is himself put back together by the things he is saying.

My Jesus does not squander men like this. They do not just come along. They do not make themselves. Praise God, my pastors have more than 45-seconds of things to say about the cross. They live in the Spirit’s hard school. Translating the theology of grace and redemption into real life is what they are about.

That’s why they are “gospel predominant” preachers, but “gospel predominance” doesn’t necessarily reduce to word count. It is even more about the way the preacher handles with words the mystery of God’s grace revealed in Jesus. He exercises at this spot, as no other, all eloquence, vividness, provocation, and creativity that already reside in the Scriptures he holds in trembling hands. And why? If only to gain a fresh hearing for the gospel, this thing Jesus has done, and to have it be, in the Spirit, as though his listeners had never really heard it before.

“Gospel predominance” doesn’t necessarily reduce to word count.

And as he takes all the risen Christ is and all he has won and pours it freely out, let him take his time. If he needs a moment to regain his composure, we’ll wait. Because when this man speaks, he speaks for Jesus. The Lord Christ is intervening all over again in the affairs of people.

It is a good day whenever it happens.

Planning to Teach the Basics

In my thirtieth year in public ministry, I was sent back to the basics of preaching in a quite decisive way. I was privileged to create and champion an introduction to preaching as half of a capstone course in the pastor track at Martin Luther College. This subject shares the stage in the class with Christian Apologetics. The bulk of our time has young men on their feet.

But along the way, of course, I do have opportunity to articulate one man’s opinion about what preaching ought to be. You can imagine that when I take my turn in the morning chapel rotation, I know the boys are watching closely. The pressure I feel to get it right, so to speak, is the good kind. Yes, I think it has been good to immerse myself in the basics of preaching. I pray it will be good for you, brothers, to be reminded of these things.

Let’s get to it. Are there other criteria, besides explicit gospel content, that characterizes good preaching? Are there other things that, although they may appear in different proportions week by week, should happen virtually every single time?

In my exploratory mission, when preaching dominated my weekly schedule, I had created a list for myself. I didn’t use it to guide my writing in cookie-cutter fashion. Instead, I turned to my list (with a silly acronym you don’t want to know) just to ask myself, is this sermon ready? Or is some vital element missing or under-developed?

Here’s that list. Next, we’ll draw things out by way of an extended example.

Faithfulness to the Text
Crucifying Law
Fresh, Explicit Gospel
Impactful Illustration
“Aha” Application
Clarity & Coherence
Warmth & Force in Delivery

In this issue of Preach the Word, we’ll expand on the first two issues listed here. We’ll take up the rest in the issues to follow. Before we do, let’s load up our minds with a text from John chapter 10 and use it to put flesh on the criteria we will be considering.

“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

Faithfulness to the Text

There’s something special I hope to do with the particular Scripture that I expound for God’s people. I want it to be for them never the same—in the better stories they have to tell themselves, the better images to linger over, or what human stuff they share with a Joseph or a John.

Will my listeners, in the course of my preaching, gain an affection for this particular spot in Holy Scriptures? If I were to read my text again at the end of the sermon, would it feel awkward because, well, that wasn’t what the thing was about at all? Or will it resound with, “Yes, yes. I know this place well. I see that it has everything to do with Jesus. And now that I see that, I will never unsee it.”

To that end, was my study of the text in the “pastor’s private study” the true starting point of all my thinking as I imagined my way deep into that wide world of the Old and New Testaments and took in its horizon? Was this particular Word the true star of the moment rather than my own precious thoughts? Did the Spirit set the agenda?

Tim Keller has a useful analogy in Preaching. A sermon text is like a town in England. Every town has a Main Street, the flow of the inspired writer’s thought. Can I walk that Main Street in my sleep? Do I understand how one element follows on another? Likewise, there is a “road to London” from every sermon text to the preaching of Christ crucified, a path that is natural and unforced.

I’ll be calling it the “road to Oxford”—it’s a much more beautiful city than London. The point is that if I can’t see clearly from one end of Main Street to the other, or find that broader highway, I’m not ready to preach.

It’s an axiom in communication that context always matters. If I walk by the front desk at MLC and say to the receptionist, “You look hot today!” would it matter if you noticed that the air conditioner blew out? Better, would it matter if you knew that she is my bride?

Or say I stood up beside a man on the stage and announced, “This man is my friend!” How does the communication event change if the man is being celebrated for a lifetime of achievement, or if he is, instead, being universally vilified?

Context always matters. Asking, “Where do I stand in this text?” can be just the trigger we need for illustrations that are organically connected with the Word of God and applications that shine with the ways life can now be lived in our text’s special light. Also, when a particular text lacks law or gospel, the immediate context is the first place we might look.

How might John 10 (above) be “never the same” for those who hear me preach? It might happen if they’ve never heard how ferocious are the words, “I am the Good Shepherd,” when taken in context. They are fighting words addressed to spiritual tyrants. They are fiercely protective of the once-blind man who is there in the same room. My Jesus stirs the blood! I know where I stand in the story. It is with the one who can only say, “I was blind. Now I see.”

In the end, being textual is precisely what helps me paint the unforgettable gospel, my true subject, in the fresh colors of a particular Scripture.

Being textual is precisely what helps me paint the unforgettable gospel.

Crucifying Law

It is possible, as David Schmitt writes1, to see only Law and Gospel in a text to the neglect of its unique atmosphere. Preaching can, as we all know, become something far more formulaic and predictable than the thing itself, the gospel, as it animates the Bible. We have more ways to interrogate a text than to only ask, “Where is the law?” and “Where is the gospel?”

Yet, we would all agree that neglecting Law and Gospel would be the graver problem. I will save some thunder to keep Law and Gospel in front of us in subsequent articles. I only introduce here the familiar matter of preaching Law as if there were no Gospel, and Gospel as if there were no Law. Questions of interest include: what is the range of ways the Law can perform its function, from the brutal to the tender? How can the familiar gospel be, as the mercies of God are, “new every morning?” None of us tire of these age-old challenges.

I often find my young students over-writing a Law portion of their chapel devotions. They can create a lot of inches of text filled with “How many times don’t we…?” My boredom tells me something is wrong. Yes, probably with me. Yet it remains that I am not well served. But I remember a gifted student who had, essentially, one condemning sentence followed by a dreadfully long pause. “Brothers, you come to me and show me my sin, and I will kill you in my heart.” In that case, less is more…and devastating.

I use the example from John 10 with my students and find my heart pounding as I do. It is not easy. I remind them that they know of dangers their own younger brothers are in—the way some play with fire—and they may think, “What is that to me? What would I gain by making this my problem? Being a pastor will make you hip and cool. It will get you admired. You can be someone.” So, I raise my voice quite uncharacteristically, and I look them in the eye and shout, “Hired hands!”

Preaching cannot heal deeply enough if it does not wound deeply enough.

It’s brutal. And the compassion it comes with is not, in that moment, self-evident. Preaching cannot heal deeply enough if it does not wound deeply enough. We cannot have people saying, “Yes, yes. We know already. Next comes the Gospel so get on with it.” We need to crucify and kill the flesh. We need, as good Lutheran theologians, to call things as they are.

Fresh, Explicit Gospel

“The reason my father loves me . . .”—strange to hear Jesus start a sentence that way. We think, “What? He needs a reason?” The reason is that Jesus lays down his life voluntarily. There was no coercion in it to spoil the unspeakable beauty of the act. The Father prizes the act. And he prizes all those who prize with him—all who see it, too—by Word and Spirit.

This is the answer to the one who howls at me in bed. “Satan, when you can find something here that is not perfect, exquisite, and complete, Christ’s free laying down his life only to take it up again, then you can come to me. Until that day, this is the act I prize. This is the reason I love him.”

We add nothing to the power to the Word of God, naked and unadorned by our own personalities or rhetorical prowess. But we do love to speak the eternal Gospel in the unique terms of a particular text for which no other text can substitute. For this we endure our private birth pains, the sweet agony of writing another sermon.

What’s Coming Next Time?

Our sweep of the basics is only begun. By Impactful Illustration I mean that we want to put a human face on, or bring into now, whatever became the most significant burden of the sermon. We would like it to pack a wallop and not leave the heart unaffected.

By an “Aha” Application I mean that we search out the implications of the text before us for our changed situation as grace opens it up. Life is different “in view of God’s mercy.” It’s what we see in a way we hadn’t seen it before that makes the difference.

By Clarity & Coherence I mean that we have an instinct for when in our writing we may be taxing our listener’s comprehension by our own lack of clarity or their attention by the density of our content.

By Warmth & Force in Delivery I mean that we work within our own personalities at the same time as we display the version of ourselves that is captivated by the cross. Our preaching flows from our own faith. We have learned and translate into life what the gospel means, and we long to love it much better than we do.

Who Is Competent?

I look at the faces of the boys in Preaching 101 after laying out these criteria. They look back at me overwhelmed. I always say, “Then my work here is done.” “Who is competent for such a task?” If that’s how Paul felt, then we are in good company in the way we make our resort to Christ from down here on our knees.

The answer to the “who is competent” question was not “Well, no one.” The answer was that Jesus is our competence by the means of grace and by the Spirit who lets his power rest on the nothingness of the man and the apparent nothingness of his messages. His grace is sufficient for our need. When we are weak, we are strong.

Kierkegaard wrote about the beautiful tapestry of Christian theology, “What good would it do me to construct a world in which I did not live but only held up to the view of others?” I borrow from him to remind you, brothers, to live in that world of grace, the real one, that you display it to others week after week. I remind you of what can come as a surprise to the pastor. The Good News you are so eager to bring to the broken is first for you. We “comfort with the comfort we have received.”

The prerequisite is a full heart. You are forgiven. This is not information for you to store up for some future day’s use. This is Now. You are forgiven. What would Jesus have you do, preacher? He would have you be glad.

(By the way, I’ll be quoting diverse voices in the year of articles ahead. I do not quote them as authorities. It will be because I like what a certain writer caught in skillful or compelling words. Craddock can be dangerous. Keller can be “close but not quite.” Such as I am, I have tested everything and have prayerfully kept what is good.)

Bottom line: if our job as preachers were to promote ourselves, then we had better be all about that. No chinks in the armor, please. But if our high and holy task is to elevate Christ—who he is and what he has done—then we can dare to be sinners. We can dare to be ourselves. We can be, as J. P. Koehler wrote, “ever more deeply absorbed in the gospel—not letting go until it blesses.”

We can be Good News Men.

Written by Mark Paustian

Dr. Paustian is a professor of communication and biblical Hebrew at Martin Luther College where he teaches “Advanced Christian Rhetoric” which combines an introduction to homiletics and an introduction to apologetics in one course. He holds a PhD in Communication from Regent University.


1 “Law and Gospel in Sermon and Service” from Liturgical Preaching. Paul Grime and Dean Nadasdy, eds. CPH 2001. Reissued in 2011 with the title Preaching is Worship: The Sermon in Context. Schmitt teaches practical theology at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

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Preach the Word – Delivery Matters

Delivery Matters

I can still remember my first real “preaching” opportunity—evening chapel at MLC during my senior year. I triumphantly finished writing my manuscript. It felt so good to be done! I even told my dad that I had my chapel ready. Do you know what he asked? “So have you memorized it?”

Huh. Memorizing that devotion hadn’t crossed my mind for even a second. In fact, I remember being a little flustered. “Memorize it? What do you mean? I’ve got it all written out!” I hadn’t given the slightest thought about how to deliver my message. I had finished writing. I was ready! I wonder if that’s why attendance at evening chapel was often light at MLC. Delivery matters!

I’ve seen that in a powerful way during the coronavirus pandemic. I bet you have too. I’ve gotten to watch myself preach more in the past two months than I had in all the rest of my ministry combined. Have you liked that? For me, it’s been eye-opening. My kids can ask me right on the couch, “Is it over yet?” I can see how my sermons seem to drag on. And all the little things…

Why am I waving my one arm all the time?
Why am I grinning with only half my face?
Why am I not smiling as I say those words?
Why am I talking so fast?
Why am I talking so slow?
Why am I looking up at the ceiling?

For me, it’s been painful to watch. It’s made me think, “How do people put up with this?” It’s not just what you say that’s important, it’s how you say it. Delivery matters!

That’s a very biblical idea. In his Word, our God doesn’t just focus on the what. He also focuses a lot of attention on how his Word is shared. Remember how God delivered his Law to his people on Mt. Sinai? He didn’t just rattle off ten commands. Listen:

On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled. Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, the whole mountain trembled violently, and the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder. Then Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him. (Ex 19:16-19)

Thunder and lightning and smoke… The delivery mattered!

But remember how Jesus delivered God’s Word to the woman caught in adultery? The Pharisees wanted fire and smoke! All they got was a finger drawing on the ground and a gentle voice:

Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.” (Jn 8:6-11)

The delivery mattered! It wasn’t just what Jesus said. It was how he said it.

Think of John the Baptist. The Gospels go into detail to describe his delivery of God’s message:

In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”… John’s clothes were made of camel’s hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey. (Mt 3:1-2,4)

What a sight—and delivery! Now compare that with the apostle John in his epistles: “My dear children” (1 Jn 2:1), “Dear friends” (1 Jn 2:7), “Dear children” (1 Jn 2:12). Not quite the same delivery, huh? For each, the way they delivered God’s message mattered. In God’s inspired Word, it’s amazing to see how God chose lots of different ways for his Word to be delivered.

So, delivery matters. As I say that, here’s one caution: I’m not trying to tell you exactly how you should preach. I don’t know you. I don’t know your people. I’m also not telling you to preach like me. In fact, please don’t preach like me. Don’t preach like your neighboring pastor either. Please preach with the gifts God’s given you. Here’s what I am saying: As you preach, don’t just think about what you say. Think about how you say it. How you deliver God’s Word matters.

Let’s start with this: Every sermon has a form or structure. Long before you deliver your sermon, you decide what pattern it will follow. So here’s my question: Does each of your sermons follow the same pattern? Does each message follow the same template? Maybe you start with a story, dive into the text, share law, share gospel, then end with an illustration. Maybe you start with an introduction, state your theme and parts, explain part one (usually law), explain part two (usually gospel), and end by restating your theme and parts. That’s your template. It’s basically the same week to week. Your hearers expect it. In fact, it’s predictable. They know what’s coming next.

God’s Word isn’t predictable.

Here’s the problem: God’s Word isn’t predictable. Not every text has the same form. In fact, biblical texts have very different forms and structures. How often do you find yourself jumping around in the text? Sharing the message in a very different order than how it’s laid out in Scripture? Could it be we’re determined to make God’s Word fit our neat templates? It doesn’t.

God sent Nathan to preach his Word to David. So Nathan told a story—a parable—that initially seemed to have nothing to do with the sin in David’s life (2 Sam 12). God enabled Stephen to preach his Word to the Sanhedrin. Stephen retold the history of God’s people, from Abraham to Moses to Joshua (Ac 7). God sent Paul to preach his Word to the Athenians. Paul didn’t tell stories. He pointed to the natural knowledge of God (Ac 17). Three very different forms. Three different sermons. Three powerful calls to repentance (2 Sam 12:7; Ac 7:52; Ac 17:30).

If divinely inspired texts come in different forms, shouldn’t our sermons come in a variety of forms and formats too? In some texts, there is clear law followed by clear gospel with a very clear division between the two. In other texts, the author carefully weaves back and forth from law to gospel to law to gospel. In some texts, a story dominates, with a short, powerful summary at the end. In other texts, Christian doctrine is expounded point by point. Our wise God chose to share his Word in an incredible variety of ways. There’s nothing predictable about God’s Word!

Does the form of your sermons reflect that? I was blessed by a WLS summer quarter class called “Imitating Scriptural Variety in Sermonic Form and Structure.” Professor Rich Gurgel opened our eyes to the different genres of Scripture. There’s historical narrative, poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, parables, epistles, apocalyptic… Far from following one template, wouldn’t it make sense that sermons written on different genres of Scripture will sound different?

Think of it like this: Each genre of Scripture is a little like a different musical instrument. There are low and somber texts. There are bright and joyful texts. There are deep and profound texts. There are light and repetitive texts. Let the genre of Scripture guide not just the words, but also the form of your sermon. Are you preaching on a story? Tell the story! Are you preaching on a deep doctrine from the epistles? Explain it point by point. Are you preaching on a psalm? Speak beautifully with metaphors and similes. What form is suggested by the text? What instrument?

My first sermon after taking that class was on 1 Corinthians 10: “Be careful that you don’t fall!” There’s gospel in that text—“God is faithful!”—but the somber warnings from Israel’s history sound like the low tones of a trombone. I told my people, “This isn’t a joyful section of God’s Word. Today’s sermon is going to sound like a somber trombone. But it’s what we need!” On another occasion, I preached on Jeremiah 31:31-34. What beautiful words! I told my associate that I was struggling to find more law to bring into the sermon. He said, “Why? This is gospel! Preach the gospel!” Forcing God’s text into my template isn’t biblical preaching. Preach the text!

I encourage you to think about the form of your sermons. Predictable sermons tempt our hearers to tune out. May our sermons reflect the richness and variety of God’s inspired Word! Whatever form your sermon takes, don’t give it all away at the start. Nathan didn’t walk in and say to David, “Today I’m going to tell you how guilty you are…” Not at all! He started with a story. Peter didn’t stand up on Pentecost and start with: “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.” No, that’s how he finished! Don’t give it all away at the start. Help me see my sin as if there were no Savior. Then amaze me with God’s unexpected grace in Jesus.

But even after you’ve thoughtfully decided on the form of your sermon, even after it’s been carefully written, remember you’re still not done. Delivery matters! I know you’re a busy pastor. I know that practicing a sermon feels like an extra burden after you’ve spent so much time preparing it. But a sermon read off the page isn’t the same as a sermon preached to the eyes. Beautiful words written on a page benefit no one when our wandering minds forget them.

A sermon read off the page isn’t the same as a sermon preached to the eyes.

So memorization is key. After my debacle as an MLC senior, I’m grateful that my homiletics professor at the Seminary insisted we preach our first sermons without a manuscript. I bet I spent at least 10 hours memorizing that first sermon, but it was worth it! Thankfully, memorization has gotten quicker with practice. People appreciate it when their pastor looks them in the eyes. The time you spend memorizing your manuscript or rehearsing your outline is well worth it.

Here’s an added encouragement: Don’t just memorize your words. Memorize God’s words too. At first, I would look down and read the Bible passages in my sermons. One day, a man asked me, “How come you memorize your words, but you don’t bother to memorize God’s words?” He had a point! Since that day, I’ve memorized God’s words too. It’s been a blessing to have more Bible passages memorized, and it’s a joy to look people in the eyes when I share God’s Word.

But as you look them in the eye, what’s the expression on your face? Do you know? My 5-year-old son is at the age when he loves to have his parents watch him do everything. Recently, he climbed up the slide all by himself. When he made it to the top, he proudly turned to me and said, “Did you see that?” I said, “Yes, I saw you!” He said, “How come you don’t have a happy face? Make your happy face!” People notice what’s on your face. Does it match your message?

“How come you don’t have a happy face?”

I know a kind pastor who preached very Christ-centered sermons. Do you know what his wife often told him? “You look angry when you preach.” He did! Do you? He had to keep one thing on his mind: Smile! Is that you? Maybe the opposite’s true. A brother took notes on a sermon I preached at a pastor’s conference. One of his comments was, “Why do you smile when you preach the law?” Huh. I didn’t know that. Does your face match your message? People notice!

But it’s not just your face. Preaching involves your whole body. Are you communicating distance or intimacy? Excitement or boredom? Urgency or monotony? All I ask is that you think about it. Are you going to stand or sit? Pulpit or not? These are important decisions! We can’t be dogmatic about this. Jesus preached reclining at a table (Mt 26:20), sitting in a synagogue (Lk 4:20), sitting on a mountain (Mt 5:1), and from a boat (Lk 5:3). Why do you do what you do? Have you thought it through? Is your body communicating what you want to communicate?

There are so many elements of delivery. Do you ask rhetorical questions in your sermons? If not, try it. Asking questions draws people in. When you ask a rhetorical question, however, make sure you pause. Give time for people to ponder. I know it’s awkward, but it’s okay for there to be empty space in your sermons. Often, nothing recaptures people’s attention more than a well-timed pause. If people were daydreaming, they will wonder what they missed!

All of this emphasizes the need to practice before we preach. When you know your sermon well, you can to control the speed at which you preach. Slow down to draw people’s attention to an important phrase. At other times, purposefully speak quickly and build to a climax. Think of Romans 8:38-39. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers…” Paul builds and builds and builds!

But “if you cannot speak like angels, if you cannot preach like Paul, you can tell the love of Jesus; you can say he died for all.” In everything, exude Christ’s love and concern for your people. They notice! They want you to preach like you as you tell them about the love of Jesus.

This means that all WELS pastors aren’t going to preach the same way. That’s okay! The how is going to be different, because we’re each in different settings. I have the unique opportunity to preach to two large services of 100+ people in English, one small service of 10-15 people in Spanish, and another service of 20 people in English. That’s three totally different settings. The message is the same, but it can’t be delivered in the same way. Different settings call for a different delivery, because delivery matters!

Our God has shared his Word in so many ways: thunder and lightning, a burning bush, a gentle whisper, a Man who had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him. God’s focused a lot of attention on how his Word is shared. We can too. So even when the pandemic ends, don’t stop watching yourself preach. Keep growing in how you share God’s message.

I’m thankful for the opportunity to write for Preach the Word over this past year. I pray these articles have encouraged you to preach simply. As Luther said,

Cursed be every preacher who aims at lofty topics in the church, looking for his own glory and selfishly desiring to please one individual or another. When I preach here I adapt myself to the circumstances of the common people. I don’t look at the doctors and masters, of whom scarcely forty are present, but at the hundred or the thousand young people and children. It’s to them that I preach, to them that I devote myself, for they, too, need to understand.1

Simple preaching is Lutheran preaching!

In my research, I came across an interesting comment about Luther. One blogger wrote, “Many think of Martin Luther primarily as a reformer. However, he thought of himself first and foremost, as a preacher.”2 It is a blessing to preach the Word of God, isn’t it? By God’s grace, you are a preacher, like Luther was, and I am too. Love it. Practice it. Grow in it!

Your identity isn’t tied to any sermon. It’s tied to Jesus.

But that quote isn’t right. Luther wasn’t first and foremost a preacher. You aren’t either. Luther was a redeemed child of God bought with Jesus’ blood. That’s who you are too! Your identity isn’t tied to any sermon. It’s tied to Jesus. Whether people listen or fail to listen, Jesus is your comfort, and Jesus is your strength. You are a forgiven child of God who can’t keep the grace of God to yourself, who can’t hold the love of Jesus inside. That’s who you are! It’s that simple. Don’t make it complicated. Show people Jesus! May Jesus bless you as you do.

Written by Nathan Nass

Nathan Nass serves as pastor at St. Paul / San Pablo Lutheran Church in Green Bay, WI. You can read his sermons and daily devotions on his blog at upsidedownsavior.home.blog.


1 LW 54:235-236
2 Ingino, Steven. “Six Lessons from Luther’s preaching.” https://thecripplegate.com/six-lessons-from-luthers-preaching/

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Preach the Word – Go Deep

Go Deep

As you know by now, I’m a fan of simple preaching. I love Luther’s assessment of a good preacher: “He’s the best preacher who can teach in a plain, childlike, popular, and simple way” (AE 54:384). A good preacher refuses to talk in secret pastor code language. He understands the reality of biblical illiteracy and meets his people where they are in their life of faith. He focuses his hearers on a central truth in his sermons, instead of wandering all over the map. Above all, he points people to Jesus with clear law and gospel again and again. I’m a fan of simple preaching!

But I’m afraid that phrase—“simple preaching”—can be easily misunderstood. It might sound like “simple preaching” means preaching simplistic sermons without much meat or depth. It might sound like “simple preaching” means sticking to easy sections of Scripture and simply rehashing the plan of salvation week after week. It might sound like “simple preaching” means avoiding anything that challenges our hearers’ understanding. If I’ve given you that impression, Jesus has other ideas. Jesus sends us out to “teach them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Mt 28:20). Jesus wants us to preach and teach everything in his Word.

“Simple preaching”—can be easily misunderstood.

A brother pastor asked me this perceptive question: “What about the sections of Scripture that are not simple? It’s good that you began here with Jesus’ parables and Paul’s simple preaching. But Peter noted that Paul is often difficult to understand…. What if the text is not so simple?”

Here’s the reality in Scripture: Some texts aren’t so simple! As our brother mentioned, Peter noted that Paul can be difficult to understand: “His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Pt 3:16). So here’s how Peter ended his letter just two verses later: “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen” (2 Pt 3:18). It’s true that some sections of Scripture are hard to understand. So what does God want? He wants every Christian—from a new convert to a long-time pastor—to keep growing in the grace and knowledge of Christ. God wants us to go deep!

Paul—who wrote things that are hard to understand—emphasized that same truth: “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready” (1 Cor 3:1-2). Paul longed for his hearers to grow spiritually. In fact, Christ has given pastors and teachers to his church so that “we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ” (Eph 4:14-15). Jesus wants his people to grow!

The book of Hebrews includes a striking lament. “We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food!” (Hb 5:11-12). Can you sense the frustration in the author’s voice? “I want to say more, but I can’t because of your spiritual immaturity.” Wow! Strong words. Every pastor can relate to the feeling of having to teach the same basic truths over and over again to people who ought to have matured further in their faith. “I want to say so much more, but…”

Here is the author of Hebrews’ encouragement: “Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And God permitting, we will do so” (Hb 6:1-3). The author certainly wasn’t encouraging his hearers to abandon core teachings about Christ. But he was challenging them to take their understanding of Christ to a deeper level. Isn’t that also our goal as preachers? We want to challenge our hearers to grow. We want to go deep!

It sounds counterintuitive, but simple preachers lead people to go deep.

But here’s a caution: This encouragement to “go deep” doesn’t nullify anything I’ve written about “simple preaching.” Don’t challenge your people with your theological vocabulary or stuffy grammar. Don’t challenge your people with a convoluted outline or a myriad of disconnected biblical references. That’s not “going deep.” Do challenge your people with the deep truths of God. “From everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Ps 90:2). Simple words. Deep thoughts! “He chose us in him before the creation of the world” (Eph 1:4). Simple words. Deep thoughts! It sounds counterintuitive, but simple preachers lead people to go deep.

These Bible verses have led me to examine my own preaching. I want it to be simple and clear. But I also want to go deep! Am I? Every one of us has had the experience of sitting through a disappointing conference presentation. The topic had excited you. You had eagerly anticipated impacts on your life and ministry. But then the presenter spent an hour saying the same thing over and over again. You left deflated—maybe even angry! No depth. No value. How often is that me? Do people walk away from my sermons thinking, “I was expecting a whole lot more…”

There’s evidence that I haven’t been challenging my people as much as I think I have. How often am I surprised that my members don’t know what God says about important teachings? I moan, “How do they not get that sex before marriage is wrong? They act like it’s normal!” But then I realize that I hardly ever preach about sexuality. What else? Unfortunately, I can think of lots of examples. “How come they are not concerned about homosexuality?” “Why do they keep bringing up millennialism?” “How do they not know what the Bible says about predestination?” Well, have I preached about any of those doctrines lately—or ever? Maybe I need to go deeper!

Lazy mouths can lead to lazy ears.

There’s an interesting phrase in the Hebrews passage I quoted above. “We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn” (Hb 5:11). The phrase “slow to learn” is literally “lazy in respect to ears” (νωθροὶ γεγόνατε ταῖς ἀκοαῖς). Isn’t that a clever phrase? How often are our people “lazy in respect to ears”? But now here’s the catch: How often aren’t we preachers “lazy in respect to mouths”? Do you think there’s a connection? If my people sense that I’m preaching the same thing every week, that I haven’t gone deep, that I’m not willing to challenge them…. Do you think lazy mouths can lead to lazy ears?

Often our reasoning—or excuse—is to say, “That topic is better for Bible class.” Sure, it’s easier to explain something with an hour in a class. It’s much more challenging to craft a sermon on the same topic. But you know the problem. In my congregation, less than 15% of adults attend Bible class. How about yours? If diving deep is reserved for Bible class, we shouldn’t be surprised when 85% of our members think that Lutherans and Catholics believe the same thing. We need to preach—not just teach—on the deep truths of the Bible. I wonder if our people don’t have a greater desire to go deeper into God’s Word than we give them credit for. That’s why they bring up predestination and muse about the Trinity and ask for more Revelation… People want meat!

People want meat!

This means that you, preacher, have a big job! To challenge and motivate the 75-year-old elder who’s been a member his whole life. To convict and forgive the 44-year-old straying member who happened to show up for the first time in years. To connect with the 27-year-old who hasn’t ever stepped in a church before. To keep the attention of the 13-year-old who is supposed to be filling out a sermon summary. All while keeping the central focus on Jesus’ work of redemption.

Does this mean that every word of your sermon is going to be understood by every person there? No. Does it mean that every application should hit home for every person? Impossible. But if I’m preaching on the deep truth of predestination, I want the 13-year-old to walk away knowing that she is loved. I want the 27-year-old to go home trusting that his life has purpose. I want the 44-year-old to be amazed at God’s grace. I want the 75-year-old to have peace when he thinks of death. Going deep into doctrines has practical applications for every one of God’s people.

Here’s where to start: Give yourself time to pray and mature for yourself. Luther wrote, “You should completely despair of your own sense and reason, for by these you will not attain the goal…. Rather kneel down in your private little room and with sincere humility and earnestness pray God through his dear Son, graciously to grant you his Holy Spirit to enlighten and guide you and give you understanding.”1 When was the last time you “went deep” into a biblical doctrine apart from your sermon prep? In our circuit, a brother recently suggested we read the recent translation of Walther’s “Church and Ministry.” It’s deep. And long! It’s made me realize how rarely I go deep into God’s Word to grow personally in my knowledge and understanding.

Give yourself time to pray and mature for yourself.

Then, think carefully about how you go about choosing which text to preach on each week. As you choose a text, there are lots of factors to consider. What texts have I preached on before? Which has the clearest message for me to communicate? Which hits at a particular need in our congregation right now? Add these to the list of things to consider: Which text presents the greatest challenge to my sinful nature? Which text pushes my biblical understanding to a deeper level? Which has truths from God that my people probably haven’t heard for a while—or ever?

As you consciously look to challenge your people to grow in their spiritual maturity, here’s a caution: We’re not talking about randomly mentioning hot-button issues from the pulpit. In a recent devotion for a group of non-members studying English at our church, I mentioned abortion in passing as an example of sin in our world. The shaken looks on many of the women’s faces immediately convicted me of a serious pastoral mistake. If you’re going to go deep, go deep. Preach a whole sermon—or two or three—on abortion: why it’s sinful, what hope and forgiveness Christ offers, what godly options exist for those with unplanned pregnancies.

This might be a place for a sermon series at an appropriate time of year. In my previous congregation, we took a survey of our membership. We had a huge response—over 175 completed surveys. One unexpected blessing was the opportunity to see which biblical teachings our members were struggling with, including some deep doctrines like the roles of men and women, hell, fellowship, and the Lord’s Supper. In response, we designed a summer sermon series called “Clearing the Roadblocks.”2 We dove into each of those doctrines. Our people genuinely enjoyed “going deep.” Members asked, “I’m going to be gone next week, but I really want to hear what the Bible has to say about _________. Can you share your sermon with me?”

I remember one particular Thursday evening worship service. In a very liberal, ELCA-dominated small town in Minnesota, I got to preach on the roles of men and women. That evening, one of our faithful male members finally convinced his wife—a very committed ELCA member—to join him for worship. I saw her and thought, “Oh, boy.” The idea flashed through my mind to preach on something totally different. Thankfully, I didn’t. After the service, she said she had never heard what the Bible actually says. Going deep into a challenging doctrine was a blessing for her—and me too! I had nothing to fear, because God’s Word is true. People need all of it!

Into what areas of Christian doctrine would it be beneficial for your people to go deep? In an election year, God has a lot to say about government. Are your people going to hear it? Identity—it’s on everybody’s minds. Will you dive deep into what it really means to be a child of God? The Trinity: “Are all gods really the same?” Church fellowship: “Why are there so many Christian churches?” Nobody gets it, but the Bible explains it. Go deep!

As you do, remember the deepest, most challenging doctrine of Scripture. Do you know what it is? Here’s how Luther explained Peter’s words about the difficult teachings in Paul’s writings: “He saw that many frivolous spirits were jumbling and twisting St. Paul’s words and teaching, because some things in the latter’s epistles are difficult to understand, as, for example, when he says that ‘man is justified by faith apart from works’ (Rom. 3:28)” (AE 30:198). What’s the most challenging doctrine of all for our sinful natures? Justification by faith. We better make sure we clearly teach that difficult, deep doctrine of salvation by faith in Jesus!

As I write this, concern over the coronavirus is spreading. This week, WELS churches were forced to suspend in-person worship services. I pray that by the time you read this, those fears have subsided. Here’s what I’ve learned from the pandemic so far: Each time you preach, you are preparing your people for the day when you and your church will no longer be there. Preach the gospel in every sermon like it’s the last time your people will be in a church, and go deep into God’s Word to prepare your people to study the Bible on their own when you and your worship services are no longer available. Give them the gospel and challenge them to go deep.

That’s what Paul did. While he didn’t face a pandemic, he was often forced to leave the churches he served on a moment’s notice. A notable example is his stay in Thessalonica. A mob forced Paul to flee after a short stay. Yet, his letters to the Thessalonians reveal a depth of teaching on matters like the end of the world and the antichrist. Paul got deep with those people quickly. Even Paul’s long stay in Ephesus only amounted to two and a half years. Yet, Paul could confidently say, “I have not hesitated to proclaim to you the whole will of God” (Acts 20:27).

In every sermon, consciously or not, you are teaching your people how to read and understand God’s Word. In other words, every sermon is a sermon on hermeneutics. Only please don’t use that word in your sermons! Every sermon you preach is an opportunity to teach your people how to search for answers in the Scriptures, how to use context to aid understanding, how to let Scripture interpret Scripture. Every sermon you preach is an opportunity to teach your people how to dive deeply into God’s Word, so that when the day comes that their preacher is gone or their church is shuttered, God’s people are equipped to continue digging deep into his truth.

Brothers, in your simple preaching, go deep.

Isn’t this exciting? Week after week we preachers get to open up God’s Word for God’s people, “like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Mt 13:53). There’s urgency for us preachers. Each week, we look at a portion of God’s Word and realize, “This is so important. This is so applicable. This is just what my hearers need to hear!” Then, the very next week, we look at a completely different portion of God’s Word and realize, “This is so important. This is so applicable. This is just what my hearers need to hear!” That joy and urgency is what led Luther to say, “If I today could become king or emperor, I would not give up my office as preacher.”3 Brothers, in your simple preaching, go deep.

Written by Nathan Nass

Nathan Nass serves as pastor at St. Paul / San Pablo Lutheran Church in Green Bay, WI. You can read his sermons and daily devotions on his blog at upsidedownsavior.home.blog.


1 What Luther Says (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1959), Volume 3, p. 1359.
2 If you’re interested, you can find an overview of our “Clearing the Roadblocks” sermon series at worship.welsrc.net/download-worship/preach-the-word-volume-23/
3 Meuser, F. W. Luther the Preacher. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1983, p. 39.

 

WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

GIVE A GIFT

WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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Preach the Word – What’s the Point?

What’s the Point?

I have a confession to make. I once attended Joel Osteen’s church. Okay, twice. I went twice. My wife and I lived in Houston, TX for a year, and we went to Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church twice. I can tell you firsthand that much of what you hear about Osteen and his messages is true. In the first sermon, Osteen didn’t mention God a single time. In the second, Osteen brazenly twisted Scripture to support his prosperity gospel. Don’t do that! Don’t preach like Joel Osteen.

But I have another confession to make. It’s been nine years since I heard them, but I can still remember each of those two sermons almost word for word. The first had the theme, “Who’s Packing Your Parachute?” Osteen told the story of a U.S. Navy pilot in Vietnam whose plane was shot out of the sky. He ejected from his plane and was saved by his parachute. Years later, he unexpectedly met the man who had packed his parachute on that fateful morning. Like him, we can be eternally grateful for all the people behind the scenes who are packing our parachutes.

The second sermon had the theme, “It’s Under Your Feet!” Osteen took the verse, “He has put everything under his feet” (1 Cor 15:27) and applied it to you and me instead of to Christ. Everything is under your feet! No matter what you face in life—from cancer to bad bosses to financial struggles—you can look that struggle in the eye and say, “It’s under my feet!” Heresy!

A central theme is vital for a memorable message.

I heard each sermon over nine years ago, but I can still precisely remember each one. Why? Each message had a carefully crafted point. There was a central theme that connected the entire message together. It stuck. No one walked away from those sermons asking, “What’s the point?” I remember thinking to myself: “What if this man with such obvious public speaking gifts were to actually preach the truth of God’s Word?” Can I admit I learned something from Joel Osteen? A central theme is vital for a memorable message. When you preach, ask, “What’s the point?”

Compare that with some feedback I received from my first article on “Simple Preaching.” I got a kind letter from a retired WELS pastor. He described his concerns about preaching in the WELS. He wrote, “I sat next to my friend at a lecture given by one of our profs a couple years ago. When he was done, I leaned over to him and said: ‘I didn’t get a thing out of that.’ He replied: ‘Neither did I.’ Well, it just so happened that this past Sunday our new pastor was installed and he had a friend of his preach the sermon. My friend was sitting next to me for this event, and I said to him: ‘I didn’t get anything out of his sermon.’ His response: ‘Neither did I.’” Ouch.

“I didn’t get it.” Aren’t those the most painful words a preacher can hear? If the retired pastor in our pews doesn’t get it when we preach, how many others are asking, “What’s the point?”

Let’s be honest. How many times have you preached a sermon, sat back down in your chair, and wondered to yourself, “What was the point?” I have! How often have you written a sermon because you had to write a sermon? God’s Word was there. True! God uses stumbling, fumbling sermons to accomplish his will. Praise be to God for that! But God’s Word is not pointless. If you and I struggle to know what our point was, our people probably don’t know it either.

That’s a problem. Perhaps there was a time when people went to church simply to hear God’s Word. They felt they needed to. That’s often not the mindset today. If people are going to come, there’s got to be a reason for them to be there. How many people sit in our pews, asking, “What’s the point?” How many people sit at home, asking, “What’s the point?” Pointless preaching makes it seem pointless to attend. Are you willing to ask with me, “What’s the point?”

God’s Word is not pointless.

Because God’s Word isn’t pointless. You know that. There is one, central theme to all of God’s Word. The Bible is one, united story of God’s grace to us in Jesus. Contrary to popular belief, the Bible doesn’t just ramble on and on. It isn’t a disconnected mishmash of stories and songs and proverbs. “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:31). Jesus is our Savior. That’s the point!

Beyond that central theme of justification, there are many other clear truths that God preaches to his people over and over again. When God speaks, he always has a point!

  • A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Gen 2:24; Mt 19:5; Mk 10:7-8; 1 Cor 6:16; Eph 5:31).
  • Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One” (Dt 6:4; Dt 4:35; Neh 9:6; Ps 86:10; Is 43:11; Is 44:6; Zec 14:9; Mk 12:29; 1 Cor 8:4; Eph 4:6).
  • The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” (Ex 34:6,7; Num 14:18; Neh 9:17; Ps 86:15; Ps 103:8; Ps 145:8; Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2).

Many biblical books have clear themes that resonate throughout the book. Luke builds his beautiful narrative of lost and found until Jesus finally declares: “The Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost” (Lk 19:10). What a point! No one who reads Galatians could possibly miss the central truth: “We … know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ” (Gal 2:15-16). Why is Psalm 23 so beloved? It’s so clear! “The LORD is my shepherd.” There’s no doubt about the point! God’s Word is not pointless.

It’s our joy as preachers to share that “point” with God’s people. Note how Ezra’s preaching is described: “They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read” (Neh 8:8). Here’s the result: “Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been made known to them” (Neh 8:12).

Contrary to the mindless chatter we hear around us, God’s Word really matters.

There is great joy in getting the point of God’s Word! Contrary to the mindless chatter we hear around us, God’s Word really matters. It’s really written for you and me. It has a message that’s truly a matter of life and death. Like Ezra, we strive to make God’s Word clear and give the meaning so that God’s people can understand. A clear central theme in our sermons is important for that to happen. There is a very powerful, applicable point to every section of God’s Word.

Luther would agree. Here’s an example from his Table Talk:

“Only a fool thinks he should say everything that occurs to him. A preacher should see to it that he sticks to the subject and performs his task in such a way that people understand what he says. Preachers who try to say everything that occurs to them remind me of the maidservant who is on her way to market. When she meets another maid she stops to chat with her for a while. Then she meets another maid and talks with her. She does the same with a third and a fourth and so gets to market very slowly. This is what preachers do who wander too far from their subject. They try to say everything all at once, but it won’t do.”1

Luther once simply said, “In my preaching I take pains to treat a verse [of the Scriptures], to stick to it, and so to instruct the people that they can say, ‘That’s what the sermon was about.’”2

Another author puts it like this:

“One common sermonic flaw is the preacher’s failure clearly to define the thrust of the message. Without some definition, some clarity on the issue tackled, the sermon rambles from one idea to the next like a bumper car with an eight-year-old behind the wheel.”

“Try this test: If you can’t identify what you’re saying in one, clear sentence, it means that you probably aren’t clear yourself. You may say some good things, but don’t be surprised when no one seems to grasp the thrust of your message. Think about it: When you’re uncertain as to what you’re saying, you don’t know when to stop, do you? How many times have you heard a message like a plane circling the airport, trying to find a place to land? Just when you think the plane is finally making its descent, the pilot takes it back up again for some more circling. A word to the wise: Know what you want to say and say just enough for your listeners to want more.”3

“… like a bumper car with an eight-year-old behind the wheel.”

I bet you get the point. People need to know, “What’s the point?” But here’s the challenge: How do you find the point?

Let’s remember this first: Having a strong central theme isn’t a matter of sermon style. Maybe you preach deductively. You have your theme and parts printed out in the bulletin. Good! But then you hardly mention them in the sermon. You share lots of doctrinal knowledge, but your people may still walk away saying, “What’s the point?” Maybe you preach inductively. You build suspense through the sermon. You take your hearers on a journey. Great! But then you stop before you reach a clear destination. Your people may still walk away saying, “What’s the point?

A brother pastor put it like this: “What if the listeners come away scratching their heads? I think this is rude! … If a deductive form or inductive form or if a narrative style or non-narrative style leaves listeners without a clear, ‘Ah! God has spoken to me today through his Word and his messenger and has drawn me closer to his love and empowered me on my path,’ then 1 Cor 13:1 and 14:8-9,16-17 come to mind.”4 No matter your style, you’ve got to have a point!

So how do you find the point? I know this isn’t easy. We’re sinful, flawed preachers attempting to communicate perfect truths. God help us! He does! Start with a prayer. “Dear Holy Spirit, as I study your Word, lead me to see the truth that you want me and your people to hear this week.”

Then, commit yourself to finding your central truth in the text itself. Far too often, I’ve been guilty of deciding what my theme is before actually studying the text. What audacity! I see the assigned text. Ideas flow. This… That… It’s going to be a great sermon! Then I actually study the text. I almost always realize my initial thoughts were not what the text is about. You too? What should we do? Throw away our thoughts and preach God’s central truth from the text!

But what’s that truth? On the one hand, it’s reassuring to know that each text of God’s Word contains many applications for God’s people. As I search for the main point, I sometimes put far too much pressure on myself. “I’ve got to find just the right thing to preach. I’ve got to phrase it in just the right way. I… I… I…” Relax. Finding a main point in a text from the Bible is not like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s like finding a Super Bowl trophy at Lambeau Field. They are all over the place! In a mine full of jewels, you get to ask, “Which gem is best for my people?”

On the other hand, we guard against making a text say what we want it to say. As you study, ask what question the text is addressing and what answer God is giving. Often, Jesus’ teachings—like the writings of the prophets and apostles—were in response to very specific situations. There was a very specific point. Sometimes that main point is salvation by faith in Jesus. Sometimes it’s God’s truth about marriage, money, or Christian living. While every sermon will contain law and gospel, justification won’t be the main point of every sermon, because not every text focuses on justification. As you constantly point people to the big picture truth of salvation in Jesus, let the main point of the sermon be the main point of the text.

Do you still do text studies in the original languages? Use your Greek and Hebrew skills. Distinguish between main clauses and subordinate clauses, indicative verbs and supporting participles. Greek and Hebrew grammar often highlights the main point in ways that aren’t reflected in English translations. Let the Spirit-given languages guide you to the central truth.

This is why sermon prep is so important. When I feel rushed in my sermon preparation, it’s tempting to begin writing before I know where I’m going. That leads to a stressful writing process and a meandering sermon that loses my hearers along the way. God’s truths don’t come intuitively to us. They are gifts of God’s Spirit through the Word. We often miss a lot on our first glance at a text. It takes time to understand God’s truth and what it means for us.

Once you decide on the point of your text, express it in two different ways. First, write a one-sentence proposition statement that captures your central truth. Then think of a short, memorable theme that can help your hearers remember God’s message. Here’s a simple example:

Luke 1:46-55
Proposition Statement: While I foolishly magnify myself and other people, Mary found joy in magnifying the great things her God had done for her.
Theme: “My Soul Magnifies the Lord”

I know this all takes time, but it’s worth it! Haddon Robinson remarked, “Someone suffers every time you preach. Either you suffer in preparing it or the listener suffers in hearing it.”5

This is something I appreciated about the chance to do children’s devotions in my previous congregation. You talk about honing in on the point! There were Sundays when I lamented, “It’s too hard to condense my sermon into something kids can understand.” Huh. That’s a problem, isn’t it? It was good to learn to share my sermon in a concise way with little kids.

When you’ve arrived at your central truth from God’s Word, here’s my last bit of advice: Use it! I’ve seen sermon themes listed in the bulletin but never actually mentioned in the sermon itself. If the Spirit has convinced you of the central truth of your text, say it. Repeat it. Preach that truth into your people’s hearts. A member recently had an interesting request. He said, “When you have a sermon theme, could you repeat it more than once during the sermon? Sometimes I miss it.” This is what John does over and over again, isn’t it? He comes back to the same themes. In easy Greek. So we can remember them. The Word. I am…. I guess Jesus preached like that!

I’m thankful for it. I’m thankful for every preacher who has pointedly preached God’s Word into my heart. One spring at the Seminary, Professor Brug preached a sermon on Annunciation Day. I could still tell it all back to you, after just hearing it one time. The theme was, “When did the devil know it was over?” The devil knew it was over when the Son of God became the Son of Man inside Mary’s womb. That was the dagger for the devil! That’s when he knew it was over. I walked into chapel that day wondering why we were having a special service for Annunciation Day. What’s the point? I walked out rejoicing in our victory through our God made flesh.

One Ash Wednesday at the Seminary, Professor Cherney preached about David’s sin with Bathsheba. He looked us in the eye and said, “You are the man! Let’s be honest, the reason you and I haven’t committed adultery like David did was because nobody’s wanted to commit adultery with us.” That cut. Then he healed us with God’s grace. Nobody walked out saying, “What’s the point?” I walked into that service focused on classes and deadlines. I walked out convicted and restored by God’s grace. I was blessed. Because God’s Word has a point.

Written by Nathan Nass

Nathan Nass serves as pastor at St. Paul / San Pablo Lutheran Church in Green Bay, WI.


1 LW 54:428.
2 LW 54:160.
3 Johnston, Graham. Preaching to a Postmodern World: A Guide to Reaching Twenty-first-Century Listeners. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001, p. 172.
4 Pastor James Huebner posted this comment in an online class, “Preaching in a Postmodern World.”
5 Johnston, Preaching to a Postmodern World, 172.

 

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Preach the Word – Preaching to the Biblically Illiterate

Preaching to the Choir Biblically Illiterate

In March 2018, The Wall Street Journal had to issue a correction. The previous day, a journalist had quoted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that Moses had brought water from Iraq. As it turns out, Mr. Netanyahu actually said that Moses brought water from a rock.1 Who’d have thought? That same week, National Public Radio had to make a correction too. An NPR blog on Good Friday stated, “Easter—the day celebrating the idea that Jesus did not die and go to hell or purgatory or anywhere at all, but rather arose into heaven—is on Sunday.” As the corrected blog later noted, Easter is actually “the day Christians celebrate Jesus’ Resurrection.”2

There’s a term for this lack of Bible knowledge: biblical illiteracy. Less than half of adults can name the four gospels. 60% percent of Americans can’t name five of the Ten Commandments. 81% of born-again Christians think that “God helps those who help themselves” is a Bible verse. Over 50% of high school seniors think that Sodom and Gomorrah were a husband and wife….3

And then a guest walks into your church and hears your sermon…. Would they understand it?

Actually, don’t even think about that guest for a moment. Think about the members of your church choir. Over the past year, I’ve had member visits with spiritually mature members of our congregation—like your typical choir members. For a devotion, I’ve read the story of Zacchaeus. I assumed it would be a familiar story. Everybody knows about the wee little man, right? Wrong! When I’ve asked, “Can you remember anything about Zacchaeus?” less than 50% have had any recollection of Zacchaeus at all. Even if we just “preach to the choir” in our churches, we’re preaching to people who are less familiar with the Bible than we’d like to think.

Far from being comical or simply surprising, biblical illiteracy presents a huge challenge to the preacher. Consider these words from Jesus’ “sermons”: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up” (John 3:14). “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). “Before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58). “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:37).

What did Jesus assume? That his hearers knew about Moses, Jonah, Abraham, and Noah (and many others!). How can we preach what Jesus preached if our hearers don’t know what Jesus’ hearers knew? Biblical illiteracy isn’t just a matter of Bible trivia. The less our hearers know the people, places, and stories of the Bible, the less they can appreciate God’s plan of salvation in Jesus. Paul reminds us that “Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us” (Romans 15:4). We want to lead our people to an ever deeper knowledge of God’s Word.

A caution is needed. Biblical illiteracy certainly can’t be solved by preaching alone. That’s more pressure than any preacher can or should bear. We need the Word in our homes, not just in our churches. But preaching does matter. Our sermons do make a difference. So how can we preach when even preaching to the choir means preaching to people who might be biblically illiterate?

To start, we need to understand what biblical illiteracy is. At its simplest level, biblical illiteracy is a lack of knowledge about biblical names and places, like my members’ ignorance about Zacchaeus. In our small Spanish services, I routinely ask if my hearers have heard of people in our Bible lessons. Moses? Blank stares. Abraham? No clue. The apostle Paul? Nope. I’ve come to assume that every character in every story is unknown to my hearers, except for maybe Jesus. People simply don’t know who people in the Bible are. That’s biblical illiteracy.

But it’s been helpful for me to realize that biblical illiteracy goes much deeper. Biblical illiteracy is also missing the context of the words of Scripture. Albert Molher comments, “Our people can know so much, and yet know nothing, all at the same time. They can have a deep repository of biblical facts and stories, and yet know absolutely nothing about how any of it fits together, or why any of it matters beyond the wee little ‘moral of the story.’”4

How many of our people struggle with that? There is danger in “Facebook-meme Christianity.” How often aren’t single Bible verses pulled out of context and used independently from the rest of Scripture? Think of how misquoted this verse is: “I can do everything through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:13). It’s talking about contentment, not winning the Super Bowl!

To be biblically literate doesn’t just mean knowing that Zacchaeus was a wee little man. Jesus’ love for tax collectors and sinners is at the heart Luke’s gospel, from the Calling of Levi (Luke 5) to the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) to the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16) to the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18). The story of Zacchaeus leads to a marvelous conclusion: “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost” (Luke 19:10). Every text has a context.

So does the Bible itself. Every “little” story like Zacchaeus is part of God’s “big” story. Biblical illiteracy is also failing to grasp how each story of the Bible fits into God’s grand plan of salvation. Professor Paul Wendland likes to quote this phrase from Luther: “If you don’t understand the subject matter, you won’t be able to make sense of the words.” You can learn all sorts of stuff about Zacchaeus, but if you don’t know God’s plan of salvation from creation to the fall to Christ’s cross to God’s promises of heaven, you still won’t get it. How many of our people grasp the little stories (like Zacchaeus) but miss how they fit into the big story of salvation?

That leads us to the deepest, most hidden level of biblical illiteracy. Biblical illiteracy is failing to realize that every text of Scripture points me to my Savior Jesus. “These are the Scriptures that testify about me,” Jesus asserts (John 5:39). It’s all about Jesus! Every part of God’s Word—from Genesis to Revelation—was written to point you to your Savior Jesus. To miss that truth is the worst kind of darkness. You can be a biblical expert and lecture on the grand metanarrative of the Bible, but if you miss the truth that Jesus came to save you, you’re still biblically illiterate.

So where do we start? How do we preach to people struggling with different levels of biblical illiteracy? I know where I need to start: with me. The biblical illiteracy that’s most concerning is my own. Would you agree? I often feel embarrassed to read Luther. He quotes the Bible left and right. In contrast, how many of us have a Google (or a Logos) knowledge of the Bible? I can remember bits and pieces from Bible verses. So, I Google the phrase, and Google tells me where it’s from. Easy! I don’t have to memorize anything. I don’t really have to know anything. Can you relate? Biblical illiteracy in my ministry starts with me.

So I appreciate the encouragement that WELS pastors receive to keep learning and growing. There are lots of conferences. Lots of presentations. Lots of suggestions. “Read Luther. Read current events. Read philosophy and science and history. Read apologetics.” Those are all great suggestions, but do you know what I don’t hear very often? “Read the Bible.” I wonder if our job description as pastors has become so broad that we inadvertently spend less time in the Word than previous generations of pastors. Do we sometimes “run ahead” of the Word (2 John 9)?

Here’s my confession: I don’t know the Word as well as I think I do. I bet you don’t either. So I’m going to give you the encouragement that I need you to give me: Read the Bible! God’s promise is true: “Blessed is the man…whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:1-2). Read the Bible. If you read just one thing today, read the Bible. In fact, don’t worry about reading anything else until you’ve spent time in God’s Word.

Let’s be men of the Word. Biblical literacy starts with us.

In a recent seminary satellite course, “Preaching on the Parables,” Professor Paul Wendland shared two Latin phrases that have stuck in my mind. He encouraged us to preach todo in illis—“everything in these things.” Fill yourself so full of God’s Word that your sermon is todo in illis—“everything in the things of God’s Word.” Then he reminded us that we are the vox Dei—the “voice of God.” What a privilege! We stand before God’s people and share his Word as if God himself were speaking through us. Let’s be men of the Word. Biblical literacy starts with us.

But it doesn’t stop there. We want to raise up people who are people of the Word too. To do that, we need to know people. Where are people at? Which level of biblical illiteracy do they struggle with? Dear pastor, have you planned visits in people’s homes on your calendar yet? There’s no substitute for time with people. Listen to the 13-year-old girl cry hysterically because she’s terrified of death. Watch that hard-working man struggle to find Genesis in the Bible. Preaching to a biblically illiterate society starts with knowing the Word and knowing people.

Here are suggestions for preaching the Word to biblically illiterate people. Assume your hearers will be hearing your text for the first time. Before you dive into your text study, read the text in English, just like people will hear it. Ask yourself this question: What biblical knowledge is assumed in this text? Since we can’t assume that our hearers are familiar with any text, be proactive about anticipating their questions.

Asking that question before you dive into your text study is key. You don’t want to forget what it was like to hear the text for the first time. Don’t start your sermon where you are at on Sunday morning. Your people aren’t there yet! You need to start where you were. In your sermon, take people on a journey. Instead of downloading information, lead them to discover God’s truth, just as you did as you studied your text. Start with the questions that popped into your mind. How did God’s Word answer them? In each sermon, take your people on a journey.

Along the way, tell the context of your text. Don’t just jump into Ezekiel or Mark or Romans. Walk your people into the biblical world of the author. When?… Where?… Why?… It doesn’t have to be long. Often a paragraph or two is enough. Show your hearers your text’s biblical context.

One of the best ways to do so is to not be afraid to preach on biblical narratives. Jesus did! He preached on Moses, Noah, Abraham, Jonah, and many others. If we want our people to know the stories of the Bible, let’s preach on them! When was the last time you preached on creation? How about David and Goliath? Sodom and Gomorrah? If we don’t preach on Bible stories, we shouldn’t be surprised when people don’t know them. Consider using Hebrews 11 as a guide to help you see which heroes of faith to include in your preaching.5

Once you decide which text to preach on, don’t jump away from your text. Before referencing biblical stories or verses from outside your text, ask yourself, “Can biblically illiterate people understand this verse without its wider context?” Don’t say, “Just like Noah in the ark,” unless you plan on telling the story of Noah and his ark. You’ll lose your hearers. Proof texts work great in doctrinal essays, but they can make it hard for our hearers to follow. This isn’t “dumbing down” the sermon. Our hearers aren’t stupid. They just haven’t had the opportunity to study the Scriptures like we have. Instead of jumping around the Bible, let’s help our hearers appreciate the rich ways our sermon text plumbs the depth of sin and the fullness of God’s grace.

Our hearers aren’t stupid. They just haven’t had the opportunity to study the Scriptures like we have.

As you do, tell the big story over and over again. Every little story of God’s Word is an intricate part of the big story of God’s plan of salvation. Zacchaeus wasn’t just a wee little man. He’s Exhibit A of how Jesus came to seek and to save the lost. Biblical illiteracy clouds the unity of Scripture. This is where a thorough text study comes in. How does this specific text in its specific context connect to God’s plan of salvation? That’s what the Scriptures are meant to do, right? They “make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15).

That means that we want to get to Jesus in every sermon, like Jesus did on the way to Emmaus. “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Since the Scriptures from beginning to end testify about Jesus, every text contains its own unique path to Jesus. Charles Spurgeon is known for saying, “I take my text and make a beeline to the cross.” Instead of thrusting the same gospel paragraphs into every sermon, mine your text to discover that text’s own connection to Christ.

That’s especially relevant, because our biblically illiterate culture desperately needs to hear law and gospel in every sermon. At the heart of biblical illiteracy is failing to see Jesus as my Savior from sin. Not every text reveals God’s plan of salvation with the same clarity. That’s true. Some texts emphasize Christian living more than justification. That’s true. Yet, in hundreds of texts and in hundreds of ways, Scripture was written to say to us, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Our people won’t hear that anywhere else.

Our biblically illiterate culture desperately needs to hear law and gospel.

Your sermon matters. From the choir in the balcony to the guest in back, there is a great need for biblical preaching. So here’s a final encouragement: Give yourself time to preach. At times, I stand up to preach already 30 minutes into the service, and we still have the offering to collect, prayers to be said, the Lord’s Supper to celebrate. There are many good things that can be included in worship. Make sure there’s time for the preaching of the Word. Our people are not overfed with God’s Word. In a biblically illiterate world, your sermon matters. Sermonettes can make Christianettes. We need to give our preachers time to preach the Word.

Just remember your goal. I once talked with my dad about how little my confirmation students knew about the Bible. I’ve never forgotten how my dad responded about his time teaching confirmation class in the 1980s. He said, “My goal for my confirmation students by the end of the year was to have them believe in Jesus as their Savior.” That’s our goal as Christian preachers, isn’t it? Our ultimate goal is not people who know lots about the Bible. Our goal is people who believe in Jesus as their Savior through the power of God’s Word.

But think of the names the Bible gives to our Savior: Son of David (Matthew 21:9), Lamb of God (John 1:29), the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), Lion of the tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5), and the Root of Jesse (Isaiah 11:10). What’s striking about those names? They intimately connect Jesus with the people and places of the Bible. Biblical knowledge draws me closer to Jesus. The more I know God’s Word, the more I appreciate God’s plan of salvation for me. So to the choir… To the guests… Preach the Word! Don’t give up. Don’t give in. “Know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).

Written by Nathan Nass


1 For more, read this article from the Washington Post: “You Should Read the Bible” (March 30, 2018) at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/even-atheists-should-read-the-bible/2018/03/30/98a1133c-3444-11e8-94fa-32d48460b955_story.html.
2 To read NPR’s own description of the mistake, check out “NPR Catches Hell Over Easter Mistake” (April 2, 2018) at https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2018/04/02/598029102/npr-catches-hell-over-easter-mistake.
3 These statistics were compiled by Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. See “The Scandal of Biblical Illiteracy: It’s Our Problem” (January 20, 2016) at https://albertmohler.com/2016/01/20/the-scandal-of-biblical-illiteracy-its-our-problem-4.
4 Mohler Jr., R. Albert. He Is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2008.
5 As I wrote this article, I preached on Jacob wrestling with God (https://upsidedownsavior.home.blog/2019/10/20/wrestling-with-god/) and the end of Hebrews 11 (https://upsidedownsavior.home.blog/2019/11/03/the-world-was-not-worthy-of-them/). Here’s also a link to a sermon series that I’ve used on the Heroes of Faith: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2eid4j28jeam0c3/2016%20Series%20Schedule%20-%20OT%20Heroes%20of%20Faith.pdf?dl=0.
Easy click links are at the online version of this article: https://worship.welsrc.net/downloads-worship/preach-the-word/.

 

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Preach The Word – The Blessing of Knowledge

Simple Preaching: In our last issue, we were encouraged to preach simply for the benefit of all of our hearers. We heard from Luther, “He’s the best preacher who can teach in a plain, childlike, popular, and simple way.” One reader shared this feedback, “[Your article] reminded me of a remark made by one of my parishioners at St. Paul’s in Douglas, Arizona back in the 1950’s. Her comment was, ‘Put the feed down low where the lambs can reach it. It won’t hurt the sheep to stoop a little.’”1 What a great encouragement to simple preaching from a sister in Christ!


The Curse Blessing of Knowledge

I have a sister and a sister-in-law who are both nurses. I love them both dearly, except when they start to talk together about nursing. Then the acronyms start to fly around. Those are followed by unpronounceable medical conditions that I’ve never heard of. Then a lot of abbreviations and shared experiences that only a nurse can understand. If you’ve been part of a conversation like that, how do you feel? Invisible. Frustrated. I don’t get it! It’s like they’re talking another language. I know that what they’re talking about is important. I’m glad they know about it. But it has nothing to do with me. I’d almost prefer not to listen. Have you experienced that feeling?

It’s not just nurses. We could list any number of examples of people who have their own “language.” I love talking to family members in the military, but when they start talking to each other, they lose me. NCOs and IEDs and 24-hour clocks…. I love talking with Hispanic immigrants. It’s fascinating to learn about their lives, until dairy workers start talking together about their work. Then they lose me. There’s only so much about the cow reproductive system that I can handle. I can’t picture it. I don’t want to picture it! I know it’s important. I’m glad there are people who know that stuff. But it’s not for me. I don’t get it. I’d prefer not to listen.

This communication-killing phenomenon has a name. It’s called the “Curse of Knowledge.” You can Google it! The curse of knowledge happens when people unknowingly assume that their hearers have the background to understand what they are saying, even though they really don’t. We often don’t realize the gap between our knowledge and the knowledge of the people around us, and that knowledge gap can be a great barrier to communication.

In 1990, a Stanford student named Elizabeth Newton proved the curse of knowledge through a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tapper” or “listener.” Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to guess the song. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Of those 120 songs, can you guess how many the listeners correctly identified? It sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? Well, the listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly. There’s more. Before the listeners guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict how many of the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%. The reality was just 2.5%.

Why? When a tapper taps, it’s impossible for her to avoid hearing the tune playing along to her taps. In contrast, all the listener can hear is a kind of bizarre Morse code. Yet, the tappers were surprised by how hard it was for the listeners to guess the tune. The problem is that once we know something, it’s hard to imagine not knowing it. In a way, our knowledge has “cursed” us. We have difficulty sharing that knowledge with others, because we can’t relate to their state of mind. In fact, we get frustrated when others can’t seem to understand what’s so obvious so us. Can you see the damage done to effective communication? That’s the curse of knowledge!2

Do you think this curse of knowledge can affect us as pastors?

Do you think this curse of knowledge can affect us as pastors? I do! By God’s grace, you have a deeper knowledge of God’s Word than most people do. You’ve spent years of your life studying the Bible, even in Hebrew and Greek. You’ve made reading God’s Word a daily part of your life. Before you preach a sermon, you spend hours studying the text and carefully thinking through different possible interpretations. But then you stand up and preach to people who haven’t had many—or any—of those blessings. Do we unknowingly assume our hearers understand more than they do? Can you see how this curse of knowledge could be a barrier in our preaching?

This hit home for me on a recent evening with my kids. I was reading to my 8- and 4-year old boys from a children’s Bible before bed. That evening, the story showed a picture of heaven. I asked my 4-year old son, “Remember how we get to heaven?” He said, “No. I don’t know.” “What?” I said. “Come on, you know how we get to heaven.” He said, “No, you never told me.” Huh. I bet he’s right. I can’t remember ever specifically telling my boys how we get to heaven. I assume they know. How could they not? I know how to get to heaven, so I assume my boys do too, even without telling them. What a dangerous assumption! That’s the curse of knowledge.

I’ve had the blessing of taking an online course from Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary called “Preaching in a Postmodern World.” I appreciated these comments from Professor Rich Gurgel:

Basic assumptions we may make about knowledge possessed as we preach would be utterly wrong. If all growth in knowledge progresses from the known to the unknown, how easily our presumed starting point with our hearers could leave people hopelessly in our dust!

If we are not careful about our assumptions as we stand up to preach, we could unwittingly leave our hearers in the dust already from the first sentence of our sermon!

This lesson is urging us to check our assumptions about what our hearers know, lest we leave more and more of them clueless in our preaching because we will seem to be preaching to someone else somewhere else living in some other time.

So what do our hearers know? Each is a unique individual, but all live right in the middle of our postmodern culture. Have you had the chance to study what our postmodern culture is like? Here are four basic characteristics of postmodernism that were mentioned in our course:

  1. There’s no absolute truth. “What’s true for me isn’t true for you.” Truth is subjective and can be different for every individual and society.
  2. Words and texts have no meaning apart from the reader. “That’s just your interpretation.” Readers and listeners have the right to find their own meaning in a text, even if it involves twisting or changing the author’s original intent.
  3. Morality is relative. There is no objective right and wrong. Each individual decides what is right and good for them.
  4. Skepticism is good. It’s wise to be skeptical of authority, institutions, and anyone who claims to have the truth.

How many of those statements match your worldview? More importantly, how many of those fit a biblical worldview? After being immersed throughout the week in postmodernism, people step into our churches—praise the Lord!—and we expect them to think as biblically as we do. Can you see how that assumption could hinder communication?

  1. Not recognizing significant deficits in hearers’ basic Bible history knowledge.
  2. Not discerning where misunderstanding is masquerading as familiarity with biblical truth.
  3. Not seeing where hearers’ biblical knowledge has become disconnected bits of “Bible trivia” divorced from grasping the grand themes of biblical revelation.
  4. Not grasping the need to translate when speaking theologically to a culture that thinks more and more therapeutically.

That’s quite a list! How many of these assumptions affect our preaching, without us even knowing?

Let’s think about that last assumption—not grasping the need to translate when speaking theologically. Isn’t it true that the longer you serve as a pastor, the more knowledgeable and comfortable you are with theological vocabulary? At the same time, as the years pass, the less knowledgeable and comfortable the average person is with theological vocabulary. That means that the knowledge gap is constantly growing! The list of words that need translating is growing rapidly too. Redemption, reconciliation, atonement, sacrament, Lamb of God, justification, sanctification, divine call, absolution, vicarious…. Of course, none of those words is bad. They are rich and deep and beautiful. But to many people, it’s like we’re speaking another language.

You can even add words like “sin” and “eternal life” to that list too. About 30 families attend a monthly food pantry at our church. I give a short devotion to small groups of people as they wait for their food. This past month, I used “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Simple, right? No! When I talked about sin, I got blank stares. “Sin? What’s that?” It was like I was speaking another language. Eternal life? That wasn’t a comfort to anyone. My first reaction was frustration: “Come on! Why don’t you get it? Everybody knows about sin and grace.” No, they don’t. I assume they do, but they don’t.

On that day, I’m afraid I made those people feel like I feel when my nurse relatives start to talk about nursing stuff. “I know that what you’re talking about is important. I’m glad you know about it. But it has nothing to do with me. I’d prefer not to listen.” May that never be what our hearers say about God’s Word! When we don’t realize the gap between our knowledge and the knowledge of the people to whom we preach, our unfounded assumptions can keep people from growing closer to Jesus. That’s the curse of knowledge.

Of course, there’s a problem with that phrase. Knowledge about Christ isn’t really a curse. No way! It’s a blessing. What grace God has showered on us, that “from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:15)! If so many people today have so little knowledge of Christ, why do we have so much? We say with Paul, “By the grace of God I am what I am…” (1 Corinthians 15:10). By grace we, like Ezekiel, have gotten to taste the Word and know how sweet it is. “He said to me, ‘Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.’ So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth” (Ezekiel 3:3). Knowledge of the Word isn’t a curse. It’s really a blessing!

Our goal as preachers is to take the biblical knowledge that so easily separates us from our hearers and use that very knowledge to be a tremendous blessing to their faith in Jesus. Isn’t this what Jesus was talking about when he said, “Every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matthew 13:52)?

It’s daunting to think about all the gaps between what the Bible says and what people think. But I hope you’re willing to use another word to describe that challenge: Exciting! Can you see the opportunity God has placed before us? It’s no fun preaching to know-it-alls, and that’s not our audience. In grace, God fills us with his Word and provides us with endless opportunities to share the treasures of Jesus with people who desperately need it.

Look for ways to talk to people outside your church.

So how do we do that? It’s hard for many of us to remember what it’s like to not have all the theological training we’ve received. But there are a lot of people who can teach us that. Look for opportunities to talk with people outside the mature Christian members of your congregations. I’m blessed in doing Hispanic outreach to spend a lot of time around a lot of people who know very little about the Bible. I need to listen to them to learn how they think and to hear how they talk. Look for ways to talk to people outside your church. Not for their benefit—for yours. To learn. To listen. To see what people are like. To be prepared to share the Word in their language.

As you talk with people, note gaps between what people know and what we assume they know. The first step to breaking assumptions is to be aware of them. Maybe you could start by scanning the liturgies you use at your church. What are theological words that we assume people understand? I found these in the Service of Word and Sacrament: fellowship, penitent, atoning sacrifice, called servant, eternally begotten, incarnate, sacrament, redeem, heavenly realms, kingdom of our God, Lamb, institution…. These are good words. Words rich in meaning! But we can’t assume people know them. If we’re going to use them, we need to preach about them often with concrete definitions and clear illustrations to plant these words into people’s hearts.

I tried that recently. I preached a sermon with the simple theme “Grace.”3 When I saw Hosea 3 come up in our lectionary, I was amazed by the concrete, visible way God describes grace. What’s grace? Grace is a husband loving an adulterous wife over and over again. After she runs off with another man, grace is paying the full price to bring her home. Grace is loving the unlovable, the undeserving, the adulterous. That’s grace. That’s God’s grace for us! When you preach, take your people from the theoretical and theological to the concrete and visible. God does!

Take your people from the theoretical and theological to the concrete and visible.

As you take people into God’s Word, check to see whether they are following you along the way. Ask questions in your sermon. Say, “Got it?” or “Make sense?” or “Can you see what God is saying?” and see if heads nod. Have one central theme and a clear flow for people to follow. One of our members talked with me after a recent service. She seemed happy, so I was expecting a “Great sermon, Pastor!” Know what she said? “Pastor, I could actually follow you the whole sermon.” She meant it as a compliment. That was a good day. God’s Word was preached. She could follow what was said. Her heart was filled with Jesus. That’s the blessing of knowledge.

“Pastor, I could actually follow you the whole sermon.”

Doesn’t that make you excited to preach? I hope you look forward to writing that next sermon. You’re not sharing old news. You have knowledge to share that everyone absolutely needs. There’s one characteristic of postmodernism that I didn’t mention above. People today are searching for identity and meaning in the emptiness of life. You are blessed with knowledge of both of those things! Tell them about our glorious identity as the children of God by faith in Jesus. Tell them how much they and their lives mean to God. He made us. He saved us. He’s got a spot for us in his house. You get to open eyes and change lives and save people through the Word of Christ. That’s the blessing of knowledge. Doesn’t that make you excited to preach?

Just please, by all means, in every way, in every sermon, remember to point them to Jesus. May there never be little boys waiting for their dads to tell them about heaven or people waiting to be told where there is hope and peace and joy. You know. It’s in Jesus! Don’t ever assume that people know how much Jesus loves them. Don’t ever assume that they know the way to heaven. Don’t ever assume that their hearts are sufficiently filled up with the grace of God in Christ.

Like my little boys, they won’t ever get it on their own. They need someone to tell them. To share the blessing of the knowledge of the forgiveness of sins. To share the blessing of the knowledge of a Father’s gracious love. To share the blessing of the knowledge of eternal life in heaven. Over and over again. We get to share it! The blessing of knowledge. How has God been so good to us? May God bless you as you share the blessing of the knowledge of Christ!

Written by Nathan Nass

Nathan Nass has served at St. Paul / San Pablo Lutheran Church in Green Bay, WI since 2018. He previously served at St. Peter Lutheran Church in St. Peter, MN from 2013-2018. You can read his devotions and sermons at his blog: www.upsidedownsavior.home.blog.


1 This is from retired pastor Joel Gerlach, who taught homiletics at Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary from 1971-1981.
2 This description of Newton’s study at Stanford can be found in “The Curse of Knowledge.” Harvard Business Journal (December 2006). https://hbr.org/2006/12/the-curse-of-knowledge. Accessed May 9, 2019.
3 If you’re interested, you can read it at https://upsidedownsavior.home.blog/2019/09/15/grace/.


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Preach The Word – Simple Preaching

Welcome a new writer: Nathan Nass has served at St. Paul / San Pablo Lutheran Church in Green Bay, WI since 2018. After graduating from Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in 2013, he served at St. Peter Lutheran Church in St. Peter, MN from 2013-2018. In this new series of Preach the Word, he will encourage us to preach simply and clearly for the benefit of all our hearers.

Simple Preaching

“Preach to the milkmaids, and the doctors will be edified.” When I first heard that comment by Martin Luther, it instantly became one of my favorites. Let’s preach the Word so simply and clearly that even the humblest of our hearers understands, and the most intelligent will benefit too. “Preach to the milkmaids, and the doctors will be edified.” I was happy when I was asked to write for a new series of Preach the Word with a focus on the idea of Luther’s axiom: Simple preaching.

Then I tried to find where Luther said it. I don’t think he did! That quote is nowhere in the American Edition of Luther’s Works. It’s nowhere online either. I googled the phrase, and the only occurrence is in the July-August 2013 edition of…Preach the Word! Sorry folks, but it doesn’t sound like Martin Luther ever said, “Preach to the milkmaids, and the doctors will be edified.”

“He’s the best preacher who can teach in a plain, childlike, popular, and simple way.”

But here’s what Luther did say: “He’s the best preacher who can teach in a plain, childlike, popular, and simple way” (AE 54:384). It should come as no surprise to hear those words from the man whose love for God’s Word and love for God’s people led him to translate the Bible into his people’s language and to write a simple catechism for every family to use in their homes. Despite the fact that Martin Luther is credited with an IQ of 170 and is often included on lists of the most intelligent people in world history, he valued simple preaching that everyone could understand. Here was his philosophy:

“We preach publicly for the sake of plain people. Christ could have taught in a profound way but he wished to deliver his message with the utmost simplicity in order that the common people might understand. Good God, there are sixteen-year-old girls, women, old men, and farmers in church, and they don’t understand lofty matters! … Accordingly he’s the best preacher who can teach in a plain, childlike, popular, and simple way” (AE 54:383-384).

Luther encouraged simple preaching.

In fact, Luther had strong words for those who aimed their preaching at theologians and neglected the common people:

“Cursed be every preacher who aims at lofty topics in the church, looking for his own glory and selfishly desiring to please one individual or another. When I preach here [Wittenberg] I adapt myself to the circumstances of the common people. I don’t look at the doctors and masters, of whom scarcely forty are present, but at the hundred or the thousand young people and children. It’s to them that I preach, to them that I devote myself, for they, too, need to understand. If the others don’t want to listen they can leave. Therefore, my dear Bernard, take pains to be simple and direct; don’t consider those who claim to be learned but be a preacher to unschooled youth and sucklings” (AE 54:235-236).

Of course, simple preaching isn’t a matter of dumbing things down. It’s not about avoiding difficult subjects. It’s striving to teach deep scriptural truths in simple ways. It’s unpacking difficult subjects so that everyone from sixteen-year-old girls to old men, from first-time visitors to life-long members can understand them. Far from being easier or less time consuming, simple preaching is hard! That’s why Luther said, “He’s the best preacher who can teach in a plain, childlike, popular, and simple way.”

So that everyone from sixteen-year-old girls to old men, from first-time visitors to life-long members can understand.

In my congregation, we offer English as a Second Language (ESL) classes to everyone who is interested. On the first day of each new session, we have a full house of students with all different levels of English—from beginners who don’t speak a word of English to advanced students who speak English as well as I do. Here’s our struggle: We can’t possibly tailor the classes to every individual’s need, so for whom do we plan the bulk of the material—advanced students or beginner students?

Here’s what we’ve found: If we plan materials for advanced students, they love it, but beginner students are completely lost and never come back to our classes. We lose them after the very first night. But if we plan materials for beginner students, even the advanced students gain valuable practice, and everyone benefits. The truth is, it’s way easier for our teachers to prepare materials for advanced students. But despite the extra effort required, it’s way more beneficial to everyone involved to have simple materials that everyone can benefit from.

Does that hold true for our sermons as well? I’m convinced that it does. I once went with a group of WELS men to a men’s conference. I particularly enjoyed one thought-provoking presentation. Afterward, I asked the men in our group what they thought of that presentation. Three of the men said, “It was awesome! I loved hearing that man speak.” Six of the men said, “I didn’t get it. I couldn’t follow him from the very start.” Do you think that presenter’s goal was to have one-third of his hearers walk away blessed? Or to have all of his hearers walk away blessed? Whoever made up that quote, “Preach to the milkmaids, and the doctors will be edified,” had a point. If you preach to pastors, the pastors and a few others will benefit greatly. If you preach to the simplest people in the pew, everyone can grow in God’s Word.

How often do people walk away from our worship services—and especially our sermons—with the same feeling those six men had at that conference? Excitement over God’s Word is quickly replaced by, “I couldn’t follow what he was saying.” Or, “I get more out of the children’s sermon than the actual sermon.” There are so many reasons people neglect God’s Word. I don’t like the thought, but is it sometimes because my or your preaching goes over their heads? When I don’t put the time or thought into making my preaching of God’s Word clear and simple for all, the sad result is that people walk away without understanding as they might. Should I be surprised (granting also other factors) when guests don’t return? When people don’t invite? When teens don’t come?

Am I a simple preacher? Are you? I don’t know how you preach. But I do know me, and I could benefit from thinking more about preaching simply and clearly for all of God’s people. I have to admit that on the same evening when I read Luther’s quote above about sixteen-year-old girls understanding his sermons, I had just preached a sermon with two sixteen-year-old girls in the front pew. My sermon that night wasn’t written for them—at all! It was written for the mature adults behind them. It’s one thing for our listeners to walk out of church and say, “I didn’t like it.” Like or dislike is often beyond my control. It’s a whole different thing for our hearers to walk out of church and say, “I didn’t get it.” That’s crushing. God’s Word is meant to be understood. I just want you to ask yourself: Do I preach God’s Word simply and clearly so that everyone can understand, or are my sermons geared for the mature Christians I expect to see in my pews?

Luther took great pains to preach simply, but simple preaching wasn’t Luther’s idea. He picked it up from Jesus. “Christ could have taught in a profound way but he wished to deliver his message with the utmost simplicity in order that the common people might understand” (AE 54:383). “In my preaching I take pains to treat a verse, to stick to it, and so to instruct the people that they can say, ‘That’s what the sermon was about.’ When Christ preached he proceeded quickly to a parable and spoke about sheep, shepherds, wolves, vineyards, fig trees, seeds, fields, plowing. The poor lay people were able to comprehend these things” (AE 54:160). Luther saw in Jesus a purposefully simple preaching so that the commonest people could understand.

The Gospels are filled with the simple preaching of Jesus. Think of the short, clear illustrations that peppered Jesus’ teaching: “You are salt” (Matthew 5:13). “You are light” (Matthew 5:14). “Look at the birds…” (Matthew 6:26). “See the flowers…” (Matthew 6:28). Even visual aids! Jesus’ “I am” statements in John are perfect examples. “I am the bread of life” (6:35). “I am the light of the world” (8:12). “I am the gate for the sheep” (10:7). “I am the good shepherd” (10:11). “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25). “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (14:6). “I am the true vine” (15:1). Simple, clear truths for God’s people.

Jesus certainly didn’t ignore difficult topics, and he certainly didn’t dumb down God’s message, but he most certainly explained difficult concepts in simple, clear language. Jesus never delivered a doctrinal treatise on grace. Instead, he told the parable of the lost son. Jesus didn’t give us any essays on justification. Instead, he told a simple story about a Pharisee and a tax collector. As incomprehensible as the doctrine of the Trinity is, Jesus found the simplest ways to talk about his relationship with the Father, “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him” (John 5:23). Whole books are written on the topic of neighboring. Jesus? The parable of the good Samaritan. Sanctification? Big topic! “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Simple explanation.

It’s not that doctrinal discourses are bad. We have them in the Bible, especially in the Epistles. When Jesus preached to people, however, he preached to them on their level. He preached clearly. He gave illustrations. He told helpful stories. He used visual aids. He took great pains to preach the deep truths of God’s Word in simple ways, because he wanted all people to be saved. Now let’s be clear: Not everybody loved Jesus. Not everybody got it. Some still walked away without understanding his teaching, including his parables. It took a special out-pouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost for even his own disciples to really catch on. His simple preaching style wasn’t a magic bullet. But Jesus went out of his way to make the message of salvation so clear and simple that even the smallest child can grasp it by faith. Simple preaching.

I can’t help but add how the apostle Paul talks about his preaching in his letters. Note these statements:

“For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. 4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power” (1 Corinthians 2:2-5 NIV).

“Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. 2 Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Corinthians 4:1-2 NIV).

“I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. 19 But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue” (1 Corinthians 14:18-19 NIV).

A Christian preacher’s goal is to set forth the truth plainly, using understandable words, so that every hearer’s heart can be pointed straight to Jesus Christ and him crucified.

I hope you’re willing to grow with me in simple preaching. Let’s start with this: Whom do we have in mind when we write our sermons? Think about that. It really matters! Here’s whom Luther had in mind: “I will not consider Drs. Pomeranus, Jonas, and Philipp while I am preaching; for they know what I am presenting better than I do. Nor do I preach to them, but to my little Hans and Elizabeth…. Therefore see to it that you preach purely and simply and have regard for the unlearned people, and do not address only one or the other” (What Luther Says, § 3610; see also Lockwood’s CPH commentary on 1 Corinthians 14:19). I have to admit that sometimes I have only mature Christians in mind when I write sermons. Is it any surprise when it’s mostly mature Christians who attend? One neighboring pastor told me he often thinks of a 19-year-old, fresh out of high school. Another pastor thinks of his soccer teammates who have no connection to a church.

Here’s another evaluation tool: Did you know that Microsoft Word will tell you what reading level you’ve written for? It’s a rather impersonal but helpful gauge of how simple your sermon might be. In Word, go to “File,” then “Options,” then “Proofing,” then make sure the box “Show Readability Statistics” is checked. Then exit the file menu and run a spelling and grammar check of your document. Ignore all the suggestions, and a little box will show up at the end with your readability score. My last four sermons have averaged a 3.5 on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale. What about yours? In comparison, this Preach the Word article registers a 7.0 on that same scale. I hope it makes sense to use bigger words and longer sentences when writing to pastors than when preaching to a congregation.

Microsoft Word will tell you what reading level you’ve written for.

Finally, practice simple speaking and writing, and then ask for feedback from others. Over the past six months, I’ve been writing short devotions three or four times a week. Writing simple, clear devotional thoughts on God’s Word has helped me write simple, clear thoughts in my sermons. I’ve also begun posting my sermons and devotions on a blog—upsidedownsavior.home.blog. Feel free to check it out and share your feedback with me. Then find a way to get feedback on your own writing and preaching. Whom can you trust to tell you the truth about your sermons?

Whom can you trust to tell you the truth about your sermons?

This advice about preaching has always stuck in my head: Know God’s Word. Know God’s people. Know how to get God’s Word to God’s people. Simple—but so hard! When people hear God’s Word in our churches, I hope they go home and say, “That was written for me.” Because it was! God’s Word—every part of it—wasn’t written just for doctors and theologians, it was written for milkmaids—and for you and me. Jesus took great pains to communicate God’s life-saving Word simply and clearly to us. May God use our simple preaching of his Word to point people—all people!—to Jesus and his cross. Because that cross was meant for every one of us.

Here’s a preview of what’s coming in this series: We’ll consider the curse—and blessing—of knowledge. We’ll tackle the challenge of biblical illiteracy in our society and how it affects our preaching. We’ll look at some practical sermon-writing suggestions like having a strong central theme and a clear outline. Please share your comments and suggestions on simple preaching with me at [email protected].

May Jesus bless you as you set forth his truth plainly!

Written by Nathan Nass


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Preach The Word – You Have to Do Something with This Jesus Character

Apologetics in Preaching

You Have to Do Something with This Jesus Character

God or bad man? This ancient dilemma has faced skeptics for centuries. If Jesus is not true God, then he is a liar for claiming divinity and therefore a bad man. C.S. Lewis made the dilemma famous as a “Trilemma: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.” We will add one more and call it “The Four L’s: Legend, Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.” When we look at the evidence of Christ, only a few options emerge. Jesus of Nazareth is either a legend, liar, lunatic, or who he says he is, Lord Almighty.

The dilemma turned argument poses a striking challenge: You have to do something with this Jesus character. Ambivalence is not an option for the thinking human. It seems Jesus had this in mind when he said, “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me, scatters” (Lk 11:23). A reasonable and thoughtful person will have an opinion about Abraham Lincoln, Joseph Stalin, current politicians, and many other famous people. A man cannot expect to be taken seriously if he says, “Stalin? I don’t know. I guess I don’t have an opinion about him.” How much more for the man who has been written about more than any other person, Jesus of Nazareth?

The burden of proof is on the skeptic.

First, the argument. Can we come to a reasonable conclusion that Jesus is a legend? No respected historian believes that the carpenter’s Son did not exist. There is too much biblical and extra biblical evidence. He is not a myth. Of course, the claim that Jesus performed miracles and rose from the dead is another matter. These claims are bolstered by the historical reliability of the New Testament texts and the fact that the earliest Christians risked martyrdom for their belief in his divinity. We encountered these arguments in previous issues. The challenge to the skeptic is to make a decision, legend or not? If the skeptic comes down on the side of legend, then he must back this up with more than an a priori stance against the existence of a divine being. The burden of proof is on the skeptic when it comes to the most famous person in the history of the world.

Can we come to a reasonable conclusion that Jesus is a liar? We humans are experienced liars but we almost always have a selfish motive. So what is the motive? What did Jesus gain for his so-called deception? Did he gain power, revenge, sex, or money (the reasons why we humans lie)? He only gained death by crucifixion. My Old Adam will take a lie a long way but the gig is up when they bring out the cross and nails! Why would Jesus lie? Again the burden is on the skeptic to prove that Jesus lied. There is no plausible motive for such a deception.

Can we come to a reasonable conclusion that Jesus was a lunatic? We do not live in an era or place, thankfully, in which an accusation of insanity automatically gets a person institutionalized. The burden of proof is most definitely on the accuser in this case. Can we find evidence of a certain pathology in the writings about Christ? This is not an obscure topic. Albert Schweitzer famously wrote his doctoral thesis on the sanity of Jesus. Can we find any indication from the ancient texts that the man from Nazareth had a mental disorder besides the a priori insistence that there is no God and therefore Jesus is crazy for thinking he is divine? No credible case has been made for this conviction. There is no evidence that Jesus was a lunatic.

This leaves us with only one option left: Lord Almighty.

The argument is not without its critics1 but it still serves a valuable apologetic purpose. The argument places an intellectual decision before the skeptic without making it a spiritual decision (decision theology). The skeptic cannot simply brush aside Jesus of Nazareth so easily. He or she is forced to think through this rejection. Is it because I don’t want to believe it, or do I have solid intellectual reasons for disbelieving in the divinity of Christ?

The argument is also particularly valuable in today’s cultural climate which I would describe as heavily moralistic. Righteous indignation seems to be at an all-time high. It is less and less acceptable to be indifferent about any matter. Nor is it good enough to simply have an opinion. Your righteous indignation, if it is to be taken seriously, must be active. We are tripping over ourselves to be more righteous than the next person. From straws to balloons to black lives matter to blue lives matter to all lives matter, we are activists in constant search for a cause. The higher moral ground is not a place of humility but a place of pride, and the race to get there first is fiercely competitive.2

The Four L’s are not the end of the conversation but only the beginning.

Here we find an apologetic opportunity to push the issue. You have to do something with this Jesus character. It deserves some thought. It deserves an open-mind. You cannot be indifferent. I do believe that there will be a time, if not already here, when we will get tired of these attempts at self-righteousness. It’s exhausting. I am sure the warriors will still fight but there will be (and are) better angels who yearn for a more thoughtful political discourse and robust discussion of religion, philosophy, and culture. The Four L’s are a good place to start a conversation. It’s not the end of the conversation but only the beginning. The goal is to have thoughtful conversation about the real Jesus and let the Spirit do his work.

There is a uniqueness about this particular moment, as there is about every particular historical moment. There is a strong desire for authenticity, thoughtfulness, and moral understanding as we emerge from the plastic, often shallow, and material-driven era of late modernity. Along with this comes a heightened awareness of the past, diversity, and the connection between the physical and the spiritual. Who are we? Where did we come from? Is the body all there is? How should we act? These are, of course, the same questions we have always asked. The difference is that we now live with the unfilled promise of modern progress.

We cannot escape the big questions of life. But why is that the case? Why are we not indifferent about the environmental impact of straws or human trafficking? Could it be that we are something different than just the material? We are not just a pile of molecules arranged differently than the soil. We are alive. But, then again, so are plants. We are different. We are aware of our surroundings and interact with the world in a more sophisticated way than the dandelion. But so do the animals. Yet we are different than the animals too, aren’t we? We are self-aware. We interact with language on a higher level. We strive for something more than squirreling away nuts for the winter. We seek beauty, morality, and progress. We are often overcome with a sense of wonderment. We also seek justification, that is, we desire value. We want our existence and our actions justified. We want to be just, right, righteous. Who doesn’t want to be seen as valuable, just, and right? We are, in short, created in the image of God, though damaged by the Fall. We know that we are important. Yet the greatest distinction is found in Christ. God became one of us to redeem us. This is what ultimately separates us from the dirt, dandelions, and squirrels.

We are right to push the skeptic’s worldview to its ultimate conclusions.

We are also confessors. We have opinions, right and wrong. We speak our minds, wisely and foolishly. As apologists we are right to force the issue: So what do you say about this? We are right to push the skeptic’s worldview to its ultimate conclusions. Can a material only view really explain the love I have for my children or the wonderment I feel looking up into the night sky or the rush I experience when I discover something new or accomplish a seemingly impossible task? Can a moral relativist justify her righteous anger towards the racist or the pedophile, let alone a capitalist economy? Can human rights survive in a worldview that sees no difference between a human and a chicken? The apologist is right to ask the skeptic, “What do you say?”

Have I inspired the people in the pews to be thinkers and confessors?

For the Christian preacher the question becomes this: Can I both present apologetical arguments such as the reliability of the New Testament texts and display the fullness of a Christian worldview? Can I offer something more than “Jesus, my friend” or “Jesus, my copilot?” Have I missed an opportunity to be profound? Have I missed an opportunity to have a real conversation about the real Jesus? Have I inspired the people in the pews to be thinkers and confessors? Can we send out evangelists (the people in the pews) armed with more than trite one-liners but with a deep understanding of the big questions? Can we send out confessors?

We see an example of Jesus asking a similar question of Peter in the readings for Pentecost 5 (July 14, 2019). In the Gospel for the day Jesus famously asks his apostle, “But what about you, who do you say I am?” (Lk 9:18-24). Zechariah speaks about the remnant which is refined in fire. God will declare, “They are my people” and the faithful will respond, “The Lord is our God” (Ze 13:7-9). God declares grace and his people confess. Our identity (the people of God) is made personal in baptism, a theme we encounter in the Second Reading (Ga 3:23-29). After Peter answers his Lord’s questions correctly, “The Christ of God,” Jesus explains who the Christ is and what he does: “The Son of Man must suffer many things.” This fits with the Psalm selection for the day, Psalm 22.

Here is an attempt to preach the good news of who Jesus is and arouse the listener to think deeply and, when called upon, confess Jesus as the Christ.

I think that there are as many Jesuses as there are people in the world. What I mean is this: Everybody has an opinion about Christ. There is a republican Jesus, a Marxist Jesus, a self-help Jesus, a life-coach Jesus, a moral crusader Jesus. You name it and you will find somebody who has that particular image of Jesus. Those images look remarkably like what the person wants Jesus to be. But Jesus is the ultimate iconoclast, breaking the image we have created of him.

Your Jesus often looks like he was made in your image instead of the other way around.

You too have an image of Jesus. You do. If you are honest, you will admit that this Jesus often looks like he was made in your image instead of the other way around. Such is the constant battle of being a sinner-saint. This is another reason to stay in the Scriptures. That’s where the real Jesus is revealed, shattering our images of him. And that’s a good thing because our image of God is only as good as our imaginations. I need a better God than that and so do you.

In the Gospel Reading we heard Jesus ask this question, “Who do people say I am?” The answer came from his disciples, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and still others, that one of the prophets long ago has come back to life.” All fine and reasonable answers, better than life-coach! But all those answers were incorrect.

Jesus then asked Peter, “But what about you?”

Peter got it right, “The Christ of God.”

Then Jesus explains Peter’s answer (I wonder if Peter’s answer was a catechism class answer, the right words but without full understanding). “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

A God who dies? Not exactly the image Peter or anybody else had in mind. Jesus really is the ultimate iconoclast, shattering the image we have of the divine. He is the God on the cross displaying a love our imaginations could never invent. He is the Psalm 22 God of whom we just chanted moments ago. “I am a worm and not a man,” he says, carrying our sins in our place. “But you, O Lord, be not far off,” he cries in sure hope of his resurrection and ours.

So I challenge you today as Jesus did Peter, “Who do you say Jesus is?” Is he merely your personal guide in life? You know, the guy you rely on for advice. Or is he the eternal creator who made you and this world, the reason up is up and 1+1=2, the one who knew you before creation and has set up good deeds for you to accomplish until the day he takes your tired soul to an eternal Sabbath rest?

Is he simply a motivational speaker or is he the one you are crucified with in daily repentance and resurrected with so that every day is a new day for you, forgetting the past as you stare into eternal freedom?

Is he only your moral guide, an example to follow, or is he the God-man who comes crashing into our world with words of absolution and a heavenly meal as medicine for your sinful soul?

Is he the rabbi who only tells you how to live or the one who lives in your place? Is he only there for you when times are good or does he give you permission to enter the darkness as he lays a cross before you?

Now consider what your friends and acquaintances say about Jesus. Who does the world say Jesus is? And how about this question: who are you? Who are the people you meet? Are we simply a pile of material or are we souls created by God himself, people so valuable to him that he died for them? What does the world say about Jesus and about humanity? I bet it is different than what we find in Scripture. Can you help them? Can you confess?

Can you confess the real Jesus, the cross Jesus, the Psalm 22 Jesus, to these precious souls? It’s not always easy to shatter someone’s image, is it? But Christ will give you the faith and the words. He will. You will fail at times. That’s okay. Keep confessing. And for every failure there is refinement, whether you feel it or not. Did you hear God through the prophet Zechariah today? The shepherd is struck and the sheep scatter, but there remain those he refines in fire, those he tests like gold.

That’s you. “These are my people,” God says about you, “My people.” Here is your identity: baptized into Christ, clothed in his righteousness, justified, not by your own actions but by his. Declared valuable, made perfect, dearly loved. “My people,” he declares. You are his people. And his people confess. “Who do you say I am?” Jesus asks you. And the answer comes every week, “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.” This is who you are. This is who the refiner made you to be.

So, when the time is right you will be able to say, “Oh, no, my dear friend! Jesus is so much more than law giver, so much deeper than mere story, more real than myth, so much more important than teacher, friend, or guide, he is your everything. He is your beginning, your end, and everything in between. This is the Christ of God, lover of you, the sinner, giver of life to the dead, and consolation for the broken hearted. Oh, dear friend, here is Jesus, the Christ of God.”

Written by Michael Berg


1 Some objections are easily dispelled by someone with an average knowledge of the Gospels. One example is the claim that Jesus never thought of himself divine because he never claimed divinity. Other objections are more subtle. One example is that Jesus thought he was divine but that didn’t make him insane but rather a zealous Jew of his day. In this case a modern person can still appreciate his teachings without having to come to a conclusion that he is divine.
2 The tragedy of this situation is that legitimate causes are often obscured.


Books for Further Study:

The Psychiatric Study of Jesus: Exposition and Criticism by Albert Schweitzer
Tactics by Gregory Koukl
Prepared to Answer and More Prepared to Answer by Mark Paustian
Theologia et Apologia edited by Adam Francisco, Korey Mass, and Steven Mueller
Scientism and Secularism by JP Moreland
The Reason I Believe by Allen Quist
The Heresy of Orthodoxy by Andreas Köstenberger and Michael Kruger


 

WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

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WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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Preach The Word – Not without Testimony

Apologetics in Preaching

Not without Testimony

We are not left without testimony (Ac 14:17). This is true in every aspect of life. Imagine waking up to a world without any knowledge passed down to you. No set language to imitate. No wisdom to ponder. No technologies invented. I am thankful that I didn’t have to learn, discover, or invent all the agricultural, mechanical, or technological advancements I take for granted every day. We are not left without testimony.

Nor are we left without theological testimony. Not even the Gentiles Paul encountered, whether in cosmopolitan Rome (Rm 1:20) or backwater Galatia (Ac 14:17), were left without testimony. Natural law is common to all. Every human has enough information to conclude that there is a something out there beyond this world. Paul therefore states that Gentiles are “without excuse” (Rm 1:20).

Paul based his conclusion on evidence that we might categorize as the classical arguments for the existence of God.1 Consider a form of the cosmological argument: All things are contingent; nothing pops into existence by itself but rather depends on something or someone else for its existence (e.g. the carpenter made the table from wood). Since the universe is the sum total of all contingent things, then the universe is contingent. This requires a necessary being outside the universe which caused the universe. The universe could not pop into existence by itself.2

The cosmological argument not only points to the existence of a noncontingent being, it also points to certain attributes of this being. This being would have to be a free agent and outside of time and space. If this being created the universe, it would also be powerful and intelligent. This being would also be a person (philosophically) which means it has consciousness and rationality.

Love is conspicuously absent in the classical arguments.

The classical arguments, although debated, are powerful. Yet they don’t bring the skeptic to Christ. They may point to the existence of a divine being but not the Christian God. Notice also that love is conspicuously absent in the classical arguments. The gospel is nowhere to be found. If we are left with only natural law, we are left with only law. We can only conclude that the “god” of nature seems angry and doesn’t discriminate between the good and the evil of humanity.

Thankfully, we are also not left without testimony about Christ. Testimony about the existence of God is evident with a use of reason, but gospel testimony is only revealed. And revelation means words. Whether spoken, written, signed, or pictured, these words are always preached.3 The truth of the gospel must be preached, that is, revealed. And to be revealed it must be hidden, that is, clothed in word.

So words matter. Therefore, we are concerned not only with words but also with attacks on words. Today we encounter two attacks on words. The first is an attack on words themselves. The second is an attack on the texts of Scripture. Both are ultimately an attack on the Word. Jacques Derrida’s attack on logo-centrism4 is an attack on Christo-centricism (since Christ is the Logos). Yet we should not ignore the main point of his critique: Do words help us know truth, or do they get in the way of knowing truth? Practically speaking the answer is “yes” to both. Words are our best tool in discovering and transmitting truth. Yet who of us has not struggled to communicate a thought because words have failed us? Here we realize that the problem is not with words but with misuse of words and our failure to articulate truth with imperfect language.

Postmodern language games [bring] two apologetic opportunities.

While the Lutheran preacher is worried by these postmodern language games, he should also see two apologetic opportunities. The first is the recognition that we, as sinful language speakers, are limited in our ability to know truth and are weary of people who speak truth not to power but for power. The second is the urge to know is still engrained in all humans, even in those who claim “we cannot know.”

Do not Lutherans understand the bound will better than anybody? Are we not dismayed at the misuse of words by politicians and advertisers? We should be the least surprised people on the planet when sin is exposed. With a certain calmness (as opposed to the hysteria we experience in the contemporary world), we can slow down the anger and build a solid epistemology. Sparing ourselves (and our people) from technical language, we can simply argue that we humans are capable of knowledge. I suppose someone could always protest “Couldn’t this all be a dream?” But we don’t live our lives like that. We have basic beliefs upon which we build a view of the world.

Secondly we have a desire to know. More than that, we have a desire for joy, drama, importance, and wonder. We were made for something great and we know it. Nobody would describe as admirable the person who shrugs his shoulders and mutters “Who cares?” Lutherans are able to balance this very somber attitude of “We can’t know fully and it’s out fault” with the revelation of the Logos who fulfills our natural desire to know. True, we sinners cannot fully know anything, let alone God, but God provides everything we need in Christ. He is the Logos.

Heraclitus’ famous river analogy about a person unable to step into the same river twice5 seems to imply that change is so constant that meaning is illusive. But Heraclitus also said, “Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.”6 Heraclitus understood that there was something outside which regulates all things. Heraclitus said “Listen to the Logos,” and John said “Here is the Logos dwelling among us.” Jesus is the Logos. He is what we are looking for but cannot see because of the blindness of sin. The urge to know is there in all. The way to know is in Christ. So we preach Christ.

The urge to know is there in all. The way to know is in Christ. So we preach Christ.

The second attack on words is an attack on the texts of Scripture. There is a general cynicism to the accuracy of the Gospel accounts. Once again, the apologist does not want to engage in circular logic (the Bible is accurate because it says so). Nor does the apologist want to cede the field to the skeptic. Instead the apologist wants to level the playing field so that the same criteria used to examine other ancient texts are used on the New Testament manuscripts.

A basic outline of such criteria can be found in countless books on apologetics. A quick summary will suffice here. Three tests determine the accuracy of ancient documents. First, the biographical test examines the autograph and manuscript evidence. How close to the events were the autographs written? How many manuscripts are there, and how early are those manuscripts? Second, the internal test concerns itself with the coherence of the text, the ability of the writers to be accurate (means, motive, and opportunity), and the text’s claims about itself. Finally, the external test asks if there is extratextual evidence to back up the claims of the texts.

The New Testament texts pass all three tests. We have good reason to believe in an early dating of the Gospels. The amount of manuscript evidence and the gap between the autographs and the manuscripts are by far the best of any document of the era (biographical test). The New Testament writers had the opportunity and means to record this data. They also had pure motives (they gained nothing for their testimony but martyrdom). The New Testament claims inerrancy and lays out a coherent message (internal test). We also have what amounts to a chain of custody of the evidence. We have insight into the vetting process of the books of the canon (e.g. John taught Polycarp who taught Irenaeus who taught Hippolytus). Add to this extra-biblical accounts of Christ (e.g. Tacitus and Pliny the Younger) along with archaeological evidence, and the texts pass the external test.

The Sixth Sunday after Easter (May 26, 2019) has much to do with testimony. The First Reading (Acts 14:8-18) is the story of Barnabas and Paul in Lystra and Derbe. The two missionaries are mistakenly identified as gods. In response Paul states that they work for the true God who had not left the Galatians “without testimony” of a supreme being who sends “rain from heaven and crops in their seasons” (Ac 14:17). Psalm 65 is an example of praise for such providence.

The Sixth Sunday after Easter has much to do with testimony.

The Second Reading (Rv 21:10-14, 22, 23) highlights the foundation of the apostles’ testimony. In Jesus Christ’s revelation to John, the church is pictured as the New Jerusalem. Written on the city’s foundations are the “names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Rv 21:14). The apostles are equated to foundations because the church’s ministry is built on their testimony.

Finally, the Gospel (Jn 14:23-29) is Jesus’ own words about his relationship to the Father and his sending of the Spirit to the apostles. “These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me. All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (Jn 14:24b-26).

Here is an example of how a preacher might include apologetic concerns about words, texts, and reliability into a sermon.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” What a lie. It doesn’t take us too long in life to realize that wounds inflicted by words heal slower than broken bones. Words matter. Words are powerful.

This makes perfect sense because we are people of words. Better yet, we are people of the Word. The world was created by words. God wants to deal with us with words. We deal with each other with words. He wants us to take him at his word. The whole story of the Bible is about people not taking God at his word and then God coming with his Word to save them. Finally Jesus is the Word. Now, you might say “But Pastor, I dream in color!” Or “I think in pictures.” Good for you, but how will you explain it to me? With words. For lack of a better way to say it, we are people of words.

We have more reliable historical data for Jesus than any other person of that era.

So we are very sensitive when people attack the Word. Maybe you have heard it said that the New Testament is unreliable history. “We don’t really know what Jesus said or did.” This is simply not true. We have more reliable historical data for Jesus than for any other person of that era, and it’s not even close. I won’t bore you will all the details, but just consider this one fact: We have more copies of the New Testament which verify the events of Jesus’ life than any document describing the most important people of ancient Greece or Rome. We have around 5,600 manuscript fragments of the New Testament. Most famous writings of the time have less than a dozen. A dozen! By far the largest manuscript collection of one book is Homer’s Illiad which boasts 643. It’s not even close to the evidence of the New Testament. All I am saying is don’t fall apart when you hear that the New Testament is fraudulent. It’s simply not true.

But there is another more subtle attack on words. It’s an attack on the ability of words to even transmit meaning. It goes like this: every word is spoken by an author who then loses control of the word. The word is just floating out there detached from what the original author meant by that word. Even the original author is using words that come with their own baggage. For example, when a poor kid on the tough streets of Philadelphia hears the word “run” he thinks of something different than what the long-distance runner thinks when she hears the word “run.” Fair enough. There are shades of meaning. But does that really mean that we cannot communicate with each other or even know anything for sure? The fact that we are using words right now disproves that theory. We are able to match reality with words.

Yet we all have experienced a time when words didn’t do the trick. “I’m at a loss of words,” we might say about an extraordinary event. It’s not that words have necessarily failed us but rather that we sinful users of words have failed. We’re the problem. And God knows this. He knows that we are so deeply flawed that we cannot wrap our heads around divine things and in fact, fight against them. Every single day I grow in appreciation of this passage from 1 Corinthians: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cr 13:12). God knows our flaws. He knows us better than we know us. And one day I will know. One day.

So God is very concerned with words. It is through the Word transmitted through preached words that you and I know salvation. Think about what we heard today. Jesus revealed to St. John the Golden Jerusalem, heaven. It’s pictured with twelve foundations with the names of the apostles on those foundations. Why such respect for the Twelve? Because of their bravery, wisdom, and integrity? Hardly. The Twelve are most important because of their testimony. They were the first to see and hear Jesus. Their greatest honor was to pass down this testimony.

In fact, this is what Jesus was talking about in today’s Gospel. These words of the Father were given to the Son and the Spirit. It is the Spirit who then comes to these eyewitnessing apostles. The Spirit inspired them to write, record, speak, and preach this message to others. Why? Why are all three persons of the Trinity involved in words? Why do they acknowledge this on the foundations of the Golden Jerusalem? Why is this the highest honor? Because of you, that’s why. Because of you.

Words matter. God’s words matter. They matter because this is how God deals with us. This is how he is revealed to us. This is how the Spirit comes to us. This is how you have faith. And these words have power, the power to save. They have power to cut through all the confusion of our modern world. We hear all sorts of stories, all sorts of words, all sorts of reports. We don’t know which words to believe anymore. But the gospel cuts through all of that and declares forgiveness for you. This is truth, for this Word is Christ and Christ is the truth.

We need this specific word. It is true that every person has been given testimony from God. Nature tells us that there is a designer of some sorts. Our consciences tell us that the designer is a moral being. There is a right and wrong. “He has not left himself without testimony,” as we heard Paul say today. But none of this tells me what I really need to know. A tree can tell me that there is a God. But it can’t tell me that Christ died on its distant relative for my salvation. I need to know Christ and him crucified for me. Only the Word tells me that.

God has gone to great lengths for your salvation. He sent his Son who lived, died, rose, and ascended for you. He has also gone to great lengths to give you words, and in fact the Word. The Twelve preached it and even died for it. The New Testament writers recorded it. The church copied it. Your ancestors confessed it. Your parents, biological or spiritual, taught it to you. And now it is preached to you. So that you would know. So that you would have peace. Words matter, don’t they? So here is the preached Word to you today, “You are forgiven!”

Written by Michael Berg


1 The four classical arguments for the existence of God are the cosmological, teleological, ontological, and anthropological arguments.
2 One important question in cosmology is the finitude of the universe. If the universe is infinite then no creative being is needed to explain the universe. The Kalam Cosmological Argument makes the case that time cannot be infinite. If the universe (and therefore time) is infinite then the time between when you started reading this sentence and the time you stopped would include an infinite amount of moments. But how could you traverse an infinite amount of moments? The fact that you have reached this present moment proves that the universe is not infinite.
3 See Luther’s distinction in The Bondage of the Will between the preached God and the unpreached God. We are to seek God where he intends to be sought, hidden but paradoxically revealed in word. Seeking an unpreached God, that is without word, ends with law not gospel.
4 Derrida attacks the idea that language is a fundamental expression of reality.
5 Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments, G.S. Kirk, 1954 Cambridge University Press, 366 -367.
6 The History of Philosophy Vol. 1, W.K.C. Guthrie, 1967 Cambridge University Press, 424-425.


Books for Further Study:

Can Science Explain Everything? by John Lennox
Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter Williams
Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospel by J. Warner Wallace
Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft & Ronald K. Tacelli
History, Law and Christianity by John Warwick Montgomery
The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists by Ravi Zacharias


 

WORSHIP

Learn about how WELS is assisting congregations by encouraging worship that glorifies God and proclaims Christ’s love.

GIVE A GIFT

WELS Commission on Worship provides resources for individuals and families nationwide. Consider supporting these ministries with your prayers and gifts.

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