My Personal Heresy

July 22, 2008 by djackson.

Well, heresies are always personal, aren’t they? Actually, that might be a pretty good definition of heresy: a private theology not available to the Church at large. (It would also be a good definition of the key selling-point behind much of what passes for Christian preaching and writing these days - all those books about finding the “secret” to this or that. But that’s a rant for another day.) If, then, heresy is simply private or personal theology, perhaps we can better understand our inveterate tendency toward the smaller, or venial heresies that arise from our human limitations. Because no one person can encompass all that it is to be human (let alone all of God), we inevitably tend to favor one or another element of theology or practice - the classic divide of the preacher/pastor, scholar/practitioner, theologian/activist, boxer/puncher. This would explain why our sermonic trinities tend to go scalene - one steroid-enhanced leg dwarfing two stunted ones.

In a series of blogs reaching back across this summer, I have attempted to analyze preaching on the analogy of the doctrine of the trinity. (To repeat my disclaimer: the emphasis rests on the word “analogy.” I do not argue that the Idea, or “father” element of a sermon comes from God the Father alone, at which point Christ the Son goes to work on the “son,” or structure, of the message. Neither do I claim that one whose preaching lacks Energy, the “spirit” limb of the triad, is in fact unspiritual or not filled with the Spirit. I am simply positing that a sermon is a triunity that reflects certain realities seen in the actual Trinity. I do not even attempt, as Dorothy Sayers does in The Mind of the Maker, to adduce from this analogy an apology for the doctrine of the Trinity itself. That might be possible but it would require a better theologian and a better poet than I am. No; I’m just trying to construct a helpful rubric to analyze one’s preaching.)

In the initial blog I wrote that “at the end, if I’m feeling particularly bold, I will offer my view of my personal preaching heresy.” Well, I’m not feeling all that bold, but the statement reads almost like a promise so I feel somewhat obligated. A self-evaluation of something as personal as one’s sermons is always dangerous: confession tends to be left-handed boasting and outright boasting is so sickening. Still, I think I’ll run those risks because of the potential payoff. If I can do this with some validity, maybe I can provide a way that other preachers can use my “scalene sermonics” as a tool for self-critique and thus improvement. In fact, the more valuable approach might be to ask people who regularly endure my sermons how they would draw my triangle, but I’m not feeling THAT bold.

So (insert drum roll here), I believe my own sermonic heresy is in the direction of the over-sonned sermon. By this I mean that I tend to be too fluid (not to say facile) when it comes to manipulating the elements of sermonic form: outlines, images, word-play, that sort of thing. In keeping (I believe) with my Baptist heritage, I tend to gravitate toward the individual text more than any overall theological structure. I’m not saying we Baptists have no systematic theology; we do. I am saying that we (and most of us in the free church) have such a concern to draw truth from Scripture rather than reversing the process that we run the risk of letting any given passage speak too loudly. C. S. Lewis says that the talking dogs of Narnia share at least one trait with dogs in our world: they believe that whatever they are doing at the moment is extremely important. In the same way, I tend to hear as absolute whatever passage I have before me and sometimes fail to insist that it sing in harmony with the rest of the biblical choir. (Or bay in harmony with the rest of the biblical pack or something of that sort. I seem to have blundered into an under-sonned metaphor here and have no linguistic machete with which to hack my way out. There - a third metaphor! I’d better just pull my ripcord and . . . agh!)

I must admit that I now feel more vulnerable to this weakness than ever - now that most of my preaching is done as a guest speaker at many different churches. There’s nothing wrong, as far as I can tell, with this sort of “pulpit supply,” but it isn’t ideal because it deprives the son-element of sermons of one of their most important balancing father-features: an abiding, and even entangling relationship with a particular congregation. When a pastor stands to preach to his own people, he knows them and they know him. As she ponders what to preach, she has the opportunity to consider who these people are, what they need, and how they are likely to hear what she feels called to say. She must also deal with the fact that if her preaching outstrips her own practice (and it should, at least some of the time or as Browning asked, “what’s a heaven for?”) she must honestly admit the fact or her hypocrisy short-circuits the current of the discourse. He cannot preach prophetically without counting the cost because he has to keep living in this community. This relationship keeps her on the right side of the border between bravery and mere bravado.

Since the Lord (at least I’d like to think it was the Lord; he plays his cards pretty close to the vest) demoted me from being a pastor to being a professor (that’s not a slap at my current area of ministry; everything is a demotion from the pastorate), the closest I ever come to this is when my pastor invites me to preach at my home church. The rest of the time I am reduced to the role of a guest. Marva Dawn, in her book A Royal Waste of Time, makes this point eloquently. After pointing out that “any sermon depends on our relationship with God,” she observes that “second most important for our sermons is our partnership with the congregation, which is integrally related to their intimacy with God.” Speaking of her own role as a frequent guest preacher, she admits that “often a guest preacher can be a voice from outside the underscore the theology of the community’s leaders. But always there is less of a relationship, adn thus my sermons can only be second best. They are monstrous if God does not inhabit them.” Dawn attempts to counteract this liability by inviting those to whom she preaches to engage with her in the liturgical refrain of “The Lord is with you/And also with you.” Such a simple act can at least stand as a brief covenant of preacher and people to be, for the next half hour or so, a community.

Terry York, in his book Worship Wars, offers similar insights. He targets the phenomenon of television preachers and the whole blight of pulpit celebrityhood but his comments still apply.

When a congregation becomes an audience, the relationship between pastor and congregation is damaged. . . .However gifted the pastor may be in the pulpit, he or she will not be able to sustain the pastoral role of preaching, the heart of preaching, if it is performance only. The congregation will detect the absence of “something.” The pastor will not be fulfilled, nor energized by congregational rapport. There will be no ministry of the week to inform and enrich the preaching of the morning. Planning a show is not the same as preparing for worship. When the congregation is seen as an audience, the pastor will soon be working from personal talent alone. Exceptional and honed as the talent may be, preaching to an audience will deplete the pastor’s spiritual, emotional, and physical energy. The pastor will know the sermon preparation process. He or she will remember the “timing” and “word-smithing” that have made the delivery so engaging in the past, but he poetry of it all will be gone. Entertaining an audience is not the same as engaging a congregation.

Note York’s son-rich language: talent, process, timing, word-smithing. These are all Energy or Activity aspects of preaching. But notice, when he speaks of the weakness of such sermons, his emphasis on the spirit-elements: an indefinable “something,” a lack of fulfillment and energy, of “congregational rapport,” the need for an ineffable “poetry” that means more than the rhyming little ditty after the third point.

I preach in a lot of different churches these days, usually when the pastor is on vacation or something, but sometimes when the church is between pastors. People always (or almost always) say nice things - usually about a humorous illustration; almost no one ever enthuses over a Greek word-study. It feels good. They even joke sometimes about wanting me to submit a resume to the pulpit committee. And that’s just the point: a single sermon placed in the context of seeking a pastor is the equivalent of a falsified resume, like a secular job applicant saying he has an MBA from Harvard or something. It isn’t that I mean to lie; I don’t. It’s just that they are hearing a sermon from someone who has never made them angry, never had to say a hard word or deliver a necessary “no.” A sermon in that setting can be a triumph of sonship, a technical masterpiece whose eloquence can, for a single Sunday or so, masquerade as this week’s expression of a well-fathered theology. Aptly chosen, affective illustrations and well-crafted phrases can find their target and seem to do the work of the sermon-spirit as long as they only have to do it on a given Sunday.

One of my favorite stories concerns the novelist John Steinbeck. As an aspiring young writer he had the chance to meet one of his idols, James Branch Cabell. He refused, supposedly explaining that, after having read the great man’s prose, he would probably only be disappionted to encounter him in person. Cabell, much amused when friends relayed the story to him, sent Steinbeck a note which said, “Dear Mr. Steinbeck - I, too, often wish that I did not know the undersigned.” If we preach better than we are - and, as I said, we’d better - then meeting the actual preacher will always be a disappointment, just as marrying the actual girl or getting the actual job or buying the actual car will always be. But preaching operates in that disappointment, or it is nothing but a scalene, son-skewed heresy.

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