Preaching got boring

Poor preaching inevitably abounds.   As long as preachers are taught to engage in uniform processes of exegesis and then spit their product out in four-point sermon fashion onto the heads and shoulders of their unprivileged listeners, as long as preachers consider themselves “preachers” and not teachers, MOST OF ALL, as long as preachers find their selected passage as boring as their congregation does, sermons will suffer, invective and hymn-sermon alike will pass in and out of memory, and I will get more and more mad.  It makes me mad enough and guilty enough as it is (for feeling so mad), that I will probably find myself rounding about on the madness every really bad sermon in a month or so, finding myself just as mad as before, just as inexplicably, just as stupidly.  Certainly, my main concern, my primary criterion for good-sermon manufacture should be truth, right?  Shouldn’t orthodoxy pump me up with as much good feeling as any Shakespeare sonnet?  Why should I feel a profound sense of rupture and disconnect every time I hear Hebrew poetry read in lisped, affected English?  Why should I bridle every time I read YHWH and hear Lord?  Why should I find myself stung at these re-appropriations, this way of referring to God and thinking about God that has become dead and hollow?  Why should I feel jaded after I see eyes behind the pulpit follow their English translation and look up to greet onlookers with a mouth full of clichés about said passage, clichéd ways of talking, clichéd ways of thinking, clichéd ways of feeling?

If listeners greeted pastors’ sermons in the same manner that they might a commentary, we would have a more valuable way of dealing with and thinking about the preacher.   Preaching is teaching.  So let the preacher’s words be hailed as teaching.  The few examples we have of preaching in the NT (I will make the claim that the idea barely exists in the OT), always occur in the context of the spread of the good news, the euangelion.   The listeners are most frequently non-converted individuals, or at the very least, individuals that remain non-converted with respect to a specific action, like dealing with Judaizers in the later parts of Acts.  --- The preaching of Jesus is a kind that I have never heard from the pulpit, one that fattens the ears and makes sluggish the eyes and heart.  It batters up the understanding, and prevents truth from making an entrance.  It’s told parabolically, a word that has its backing in the foregrounding Hebrew the word mashal, which makes it a likening or a tokening.  

I suppose someone might also suggest any of the epistles, especially those titled hortatory, as something resembling what an ideal preacher might attain to.  But what variety we have!  Even among Paul, the difference in style from passage to passage (and book to book) is extraordinary.  Contrasting Romans 1 with Romans 8 or Ephesians 1 with the long, beautiful close of Romans should produce many poor attempts.  Rhetoricians  SHOULD want to aspire to such models.  How about Hebrews?  Highly cryptic, radically different in its conceptualization of Christ as great high priest, written in a high style, and with a fair amount of allusiveness and quoting.  James is a book of fire, and only a theologian could find it an epistle of straw.  Its style is gorgeous, its tropes memorable, and its thinking is new and old (new in all the best ways – new troping, new style – and old in all the best ways – plum full of ancient truth, like the dangers of the tongue bits).   

But of course, even if these writers had been taken as models by the modern preacher, even if they had aspired to their rhetorical fireworks, we should have only more anxious failure and probably, even quite frequently, disastrous failure out of their mouth.  The problem would be the same, though perhaps less urgent and clear.  What is the problem again?  Poor sermons that seem like the boiled down channelings of a Sibyl who spent all her days poring over the blandest of Bible commentaries. 

So, what, then, is the solution?  The solution is for the Sibyl to channel the matter of her heart, the pulse of her interest, to the congregation.  Now the sermonizer is paid, so hopefully the matter will not stray inordinately far from the passage at hand.  The Sibyl is paid to be interested in the passage, let’s hope, more interested than her congregation.  The Sibyl should devise the sermon around her interests, her fixations, her doubts, her hopes, her aspirations, in all their disgusting and puny particularity.  The more pecuniary and embarrassing, the better.  The more fundamentally the personality of the speaker is received, the more easily the sermon is judged.   If this type of sermon-casting abounded, orthodoxy or truth would be the only standard by which one would need to judge a sermon.  All sermons would be listenable, and those that would find themselves less memorable and less listenable, would merely find themselves that much less pleasing and memorable.  Not all personalities are equally well-received by all.  One person deems one speaker a petulant bore, while another sees the makings and foundation of a dry, delightfully caustic spirit.  Another finds in a demurred girl a right model of a caring and sympathetic individual, while another sees in the same quiet figure, an individual empty of thought and controversy.  This is not to say that there must of necessity be some sort of relativity in these personalities.  By no means are all personalities equal. 

I suppose I am also setting up a model for a preacher full of individualized sentiments, who says things like, and I have never heard this and most certainly regret never having heard this, “Well, I’m really not actually that fond of verse 7 of psalm 118, but I have tried to get myself into the spirit of it.  It presents moist difficulties to my heart.  My heart wants to cut and moan, but this verse blandly presents me with the love of God.  I will channel .  I will tap into its natural reserves…etc. etc.”  This individual might speak quite faithfully with respect to his disposition, but quite pointlessly to a congregation that shares none of his sentiments.  The truth is that even in a situation like this, with such an individualized, selfish speaker, we have at our behest an individual, IN THE FLESH!  He has not been translated for us.  He has not been taken from his natural habitat, force-fed acai-berry juice, and planted in a cage with occupants of suspicious species relation.  So, and I do not think this thought is that radical (but I do not know how to explain it), the individual will find individuals.   There is more sympathy in the 4D instantiation of a female mind then in an internet, pixilated caricature.  Mind has been bodied forth carnally.  Let us take a sip of that carnality.  Let the children take a sip.  Let us have the whole pot, scrape the grub and fur from the bottom and put it in the cup! - the solidity will only add texture to the vintage. 

What I suppose I am preaching is, let the teacher channel his inner Emerson and let the congregation do the review of the personality.  Let the congregation judge the character of the preacher.  I look forward to a day when it could be said about a particular preacher, that his deceitfulness has ruined his sermons.   His deceitfulness will be so much all up in the congregants’ grill that they will grow tired of this old sinner and send out to the farm for a better hand. 

I was going to end this with a quote from Emerson’s Self-Reliance, but it’s easy enough to find online legally, so I feel no need to quote tidbits from that gorgeous prose-poem to satisfy any lingering sense of duty.  Go read it yourself.  Especially if you happen to preach.  Especially.