|
Incarnational Preaching
Dr. Paul Brandt was a medical
doctor who once served in the Christian Medical College in Vellore, India.
On one occasion he was visited by Abbé Pierre, portrayed in the video
above, a French monk who had started a work among the beggars in Paris
after World War II. The college had a custom of allowing visitors to speak
for a few minutes to the medical students during lunch — but only for a
few minutes. The students, like students everywhere, were not known for
their attentiveness or kindness to visitors.
Abbé Pierre spoke in French
through an interpreter. As he did so, he began to speak so rapidly and
earnestly that the translators could not keep up with him and gave up.
Yet, the passion of the man continued to captivate his listeners. In the
end, they gave him a tremendous ovation, although they did not understand
most of his message.
Dr. Brand asked a student, "How did you
understand? No one here speaks French." The answer he received was, "We
did not need a language. We felt the presence of God and the presence of
love" (from
Paul Brand and
Philip Yancey, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, pages 54-55).
What is incarnational preaching?
It is preaching out of the encounter with God that we live out in our
lives.
Bishop William A. Quayle once said that preaching is
not the art of making a sermon ... it is the art of making a
preacher.
Phillips Brooks taught that
preaching is truth
speaking through personality.
Haddon W. Robinson, in defining
expository preaching, mentions its incarnational aspects:
Expository preaching is
the communication of a biblical concept, derived from and transmitted
through a historical, grammatical, and literary study of a passage in its
context, which the Holy Spirit first applies to the personality and
experience of the preacher, then through him to his hearers.
From Haddon W. Robinson,
Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages
A sermon is a Word that lives in
our hearts. It speaks through our whole personality. It is a Word event in
our lives, an oral encounter. The Old Testament prophets used the word na’um,
“oracle” or “burden,” to describe the messages they received from
God, messages that weighed heavily on their hearts (cf. Numbers 23:7,
Psalm 36:1, Isaiah 13:1, Jeremiah 23:33-38, Ezekiel 12:10).
The rationalism of the modern era made many of our sermons seem
so emotionless and detached from life. We dispensed truth as if we were dishing out food,
instead of being prophets and sages. Postmodern preaching ought to be
heart-felt. We want to speak out of our personal encounters with the
living God.
I have a friend, from the African
American tradition, whom I greatly respect. He serves in a small
inner-city Baptist church founded by his father. The work is discouraging
and difficult and the church barely survives. He and his wife have to work
other jobs.
One day, I invited my friend to
preach in my church, not because of his fame or connections, but because
of his suffering. I knew he could say things I never could have.
Toward the end of his sermon, as
he slipped into the rhythmic call and response exhortation of the African
American sermon, when the main point is driven home, I could sense him
touching lives. His whole personality and his heart-felt emotion spoke
to a whole class of people who never responded to me before. It was
his life lived before God that was speaking.
Postmodern society is filled with
plastic voices. These are the advertisements of our age that call out to
people for attention, like painted ladies from corners. The danger we face is to
become just another plastic voice. It happens when our message is not backed by our authenticity and our private
suffering for God. We become just counterfeit bills floating around the
neighborhood stores, until someone finally spots us.
When we allow truth to speak
through our whole personality, it means that our greatest moments
may come when we least expect them, when our genuineness and immediacy are
just there, at a time when people need them, in a way we can never plan.
Those times may not be smooth and elegant. There might be raw moments,
when spirits fight for dominance. We won't be able to control ourselves
then. Every gesture, every eye glance, every nuance will reveal our
authenticity, or lack thereof.
If preaching is
truth
speaking through personality, we
will expect our preaching to
reflect our full personality.
The development of narrative and inductive
sermons in recent decades has been a needed step. We are rediscovering
emotion, and story and song and drama and metaphor as we seek to teach the
faith. The postmodern
sermon is
sensitive to the significance of non-logical
arguments.
Jeremiah smashed clay vessels as
he preached. Elijah laid down for months beside a little mud city he
built. For three years Isaiah preached stark naked! In the New
Testament, Jesus
preached parables. From tales about sheep and weeds he drew illogical
conclusions about the kingdom of God. Who cares if his reasoning style
would be thrown out of a logic classroom — it worked! And when signs
and wonders accompanied the early preaching, people responded — not
because the power of an argument convinced them, but because the power of
God had.
Manuscripts and Incarnational
Preaching
Preaching has to be more than
reading a manuscript. It is a Voice, nestled in our hearts, that
we feel comes from God and that we know we must communicate as we live before
God. Paper alone is insufficient to hold a Word like that. Only the human
heart can.
The greatest hindrance to
whole-personality preaching may be our own preparation.
We should prepare for the
preaching moment,
but we deceive ourselves if we think we can, through preparation,
capture the moment in advance. Preparation
does, indeed, heighten our readiness for the preaching event, but preaching
is a real-time event. That's what makes it so unpredictable. When we
preach, we engage in live theater of the highest drama, with the fate of
the lonely, the lost and the listless at stake.
I have spent hundreds of Sundays
straining myself in front of a crowd as I tried to pry words off paper —
words I carefully glued there in my Thursday study.
Then, one Sunday I decided to go
into the pulpit without weight of manuscript or note. I felt like the
prophet Isaiah without a stitch! "It's just you and me, now, Lord," I
quickly prayed as I left my office for that worship service. Preaching for
me was about to become a real-time event.
When I preach without manuscript
or with little, I sometimes pause longer than
normal. While speaking, sometimes I have no idea why I change course
in mid-stream, but then I learn why in the end. Sometimes I'm not
as literary-sounding as I would like, but then again, my voice never broke
with emotion before. I never found myself speaking words that got the
better of me. Once I just talked about God. Now, once in a while, I
find God speaking through me.
TOP |