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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.
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