Notes on preaching

Detail of historiated initial 'P', Paul preaching (13th c., France)

Thinking about preaching recently, I returned to a paper I wrote for preaching class in divinity school in which the assignment was to develop a theology of preaching.  I found the exercise clarifying, so I thought I would share it here, with the caveat that the course textbook, Richard Lischer's The Company of Preachers, largely determined the figures with whom I engaged.

What is preaching?  To answer this question with a normative, theological account of the practice of preaching, it is clarifying to first look at how we use the word and then to see what theological claims follow.  The word “preach” entered the English lexicon through Middle English, deriving ultimately from the Latin praedicare (“proclaim”), a compound of prae- (“before”) and dicare (“declare”).  In ecclesiastical Latin, praedicare means “preach” and can carry connotations of praise, commendation, foretelling, and warning.  In Greek, the words most often translated as “preach”—kēryssō (“herald, proclaim”) and euangelizō (“gospelize”, “announce good news”)—carry the same connotation.  Etymologically, to preach is to declare before, both in the sense of saying beforehand and in the sense of announcing before others: preaching is public and preparatory.  Furthermore, that “declare” derives from declarare, from the combination of de- (“thoroughly”) and clarare (“make clear”), suggests that preaching involves making lucid what was once unclear.  This sense is that of the commonplace response to preaching in African-American congregations: “Make it plain!”  To preach, then, is a public and preparatory speech act of making something plain.

What Christian preaching makes plain is the gospel, the good news that the One who called light out of darkness and brought Israel out of Egypt has raised Jesus Christ from the dead.  To preach is to clearly proclaim the good news of God’s saving works, preeminently in the person and work of Jesus the Christ.  It is difficult to improve upon Luther’s succinct summary of the gospel as “a discourse about Christ, that he is the Son of God and became man for us, that he died and was raised, that he has been established as a Lord over all things.” [1]  Preaching is proclaiming this gospel.  Put differently, the task of preaching is to steadily point to the risen Lord Jesus, and by so doing to point to the Triune Lord, to direct our gaze toward the only source of life and salvation.

That preaching points to the risen Lord does not mean that every instance of preaching, every sermon or homily, needs to explicitly articulate the entirety of the gospel or to unpack every element of the mystery of faith: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”  However, every instance of preaching should fundamentally be about the Triune Lord.  Whatever else preaching does (e.g., encourage, convict, remind, lament) will be secondary to and derivative from what it says about God and God’s actions.  Preaching does all that it does by making plain God for us.  Luther made this point provocatively when he wrote, “…the preaching of the gospel is nothing else than Christ coming to us, or we being brought to him.” [2]  Carl Michalson offers a helpful gloss when he writes that in preaching, “time is telescoped in such a way as to make the event of God’s turning to us in Christ a reality of the present moment.” [3]  Of course, the preacher’s words are not sufficient in and of themselves to make present the risen Lord.  But this Lutheran, sacramental conception of preaching does underscore preaching’s fundamental task to bring home, to make tangible and concrete for us today, the significance of God coming to us in Christ Jesus.

More concretely, preaching seeks to make plain the Word of God, proclaimed in the public reading of the Scriptures.  Rowan Williams puts it very simply:  “When the leaders of the congregation deliver sermons, their main purpose is, or should be, to help believers understand the unity and harmony of the texts that have been read at an act of worship; and then to encourage them to live lives worthy of the good news that they have received." [4]   Preaching, then, necessarily involves exegesis of the biblical text.  Karl Barth described well the type of exegesis preaching calls for, when he wrote, 

We should not try to master the text.  The Bible will become more and more mysterious to real exegetes.  They will see all the depths and distances.  They will constantly run up against the mystery before which theology is like trying to drain the ocean with a spoon.  The True exegete will face the text like an astonished child in a wonderful garden, not like an advocate of God who has seen all his files. [5]

Preaching comes out of being mastered by the Word of God, and excellent preaching evinces the astonishment of a child at its wonders and depth.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther Preaching, Altarpiece in Luther's parish church, Wittenberg, 1547.

Preaching’s public is primarily the Church constituted in the local worshipping community.  That preaching’s primary audience is the Church has important implications.  First, as Geoffrey Wainwright makes wonderfully clear, preaching is a liturgical act, [6] which is to say that preaching is properly part of the Church’s act of worship.  Preaching, like all liturgical actions, aims at both “the glory of God” and “the upbuilding of the church.” [7] Not all liturgical actions are identical, however.  Sam Wells helpfully distinguishes between the parts of the liturgy when the Celebrant is “speaking to God on behalf of the people” and when she is “speaking for God to the people,” classifying preaching as one of the latter.  In the Anglican tradition, the common practice of the preacher beginning or ending with the words, “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” clearly delineates the sermon or homily as speech on behalf of God to the people.  To invoke the Name of the Living God is to recognize not only the proper directionality of preaching, but also its weighty responsibility.

The weightiness of preaching points to the second implication of preaching’s public being the Church, namely, preaching is governed by the regula fidei, the rule of faith of the holy, catholic and apostolic Church.  C.H. Dodd put this in terms of the requirement that Christian preaching remain true to the apostolic kerygma, lest it cease to be truly Christian. [8]  In the Episcopal Church, preaching is often immediately followed by the recitation of the Nicene Creed, which serves as a sort of rule against which the sermon or homily can be judged.  While obviously insufficient to guarantee apostolic faithfulness, such juxtaposition—and, even more importantly, episcopal oversight—at least indicates the logic of preaching in the Church.  

Another important implication of preaching’s public being the gathered Christian community is that preaching is properly addressed to a particular congregation, in a particular place, and at a particular time.  Preaching is necessarily occasional and, because of its orality, ephemeral.  Accordingly, preachers must take their task both very seriously (because it may be this may be the last opportunity to preach) and lightly (because any lasting value of preaching comes as the gift of God).  

The staying value of preaching depends on God, because our words are inadequate: 

…Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. [9]

Because our words do not stay still, it is only by God’s grace that preaching produces fruit, fulfills its twin end of glorifying God and building up the Church.  Preaching proclaims the gospel, but only God makes the proclamation effective.  As Augustine put it, “the Holy Spirit makes men teach.” [10]

The corollary to the Holy Spirit’s making preaching effective is the humility of the preacher.  The preacher must remember that he or she is called by God to obedient service.  The preacher must seek to become conformed to the kenotic love of Christ.  The preacher must be above all one who prays.  Only thus will preaching be iconic, pointing beyond itself to the One who gives all good gifts.

Finally, preaching prepares for the coming of the Lord.  If preaching points to the crucified, risen, and ascended Christ, it also necessarily points to the Christ who comes “to judge the quick and the dead.”  Preaching prepares for Christ’s coming by proclaiming the truth.  Preaching is an oral fulfillment of the Church’s vocation to be a people who “proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet 2:9).  God’s light is marvelous to those who, by God’s gracious gift, have turned to God in faith.  God’s light also exposes, in the searing flame of love, all that remains in darkness, all that remains opposes to God.  Preaching urges auditors, as Jesus himself did, “Keep watch!” [11]  Preaching exhorts the Church to “lay aside the works of darkness” and to prepare for the coming dawn (Rom 13:12).

[1] Martin Luther, A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels, in Richard Lischer, ed., “Martin Luther: Proclamation versus Moralism,” The Company of Preachers: Wisdom on Preaching: Augustine to the Present (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 116.

[2] Quoted in Lischer, Company of Preachers, 115.

[3] Carl Michalson, “Communicating the Gospel,” in Lischer, Company of Preachers, 44.

[4] Rowan Williams, "What is Christianity?" Lecture given at Islamabad University, 2005.

[5] Karl Barth, Homiletics, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Donald E. Daniels (Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox, 1991), 128.

[6] See Geoffrey Wainwright, “Preaching as Worship,” in Lischer, ed., “Geoffrey Wainwright: Preaching and Eucharist,” Company of Preachers, 443–452.

[7] John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood, quoted in Wainwright, op. cit., 445.

[8] See C.H. Dodd, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments, in Lischer, “C.H. Dodd: The Primitive Preaching,” Company of Preachers, 23–30.

[9] T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” The Four Quartets.

[10] Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 4.16.33.

[11] See Mark 13:37.