Relevance in preaching 1

Preaching isn’t about making Bible texts relevant. Of the things I say in attempting to convince my fellow preachers that our task is vital memory work in this amnesic age, that sentence about relevance is the one that troubles people most. 'Surely our job above all others,' they say, 'is to make the Bible relevant?' As strange as it obviously sounds, I’m convinced that it isn’t. Indeed I suspect that relevance as a first priority in sermon design and delivery actually undermines scripture. I’ll try to justify that conviction through this blog and a few that will follow it, as time allows.

Book cover WJK Press

Let’s begin with the work of that great scholar of the Hebrew Bible, Walter Brueggemann, since he exemplifies a determination to connect the text and the world. Brueggemann conceives the biblical text as always challenging and critiquing commonplace understandings of experience and reality, which means those commonplace understandings cannot be the interpreter’s beginning.

Interestingly, the word ‘relevance’ is a term he studiously avoids in his consideration of how preaching properly works.  Indeed, in a recent article he asserts ‘the text is not directly addressed to us, and we should not work too hard at making it immediately relevant’ (The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word, page 39).  As an alternative he uses the term ‘resonates’ as a way of indicating that the preacher’s task is to enable a word to be heard that comes ‘from outside our closed system of reality’ (ibid, page 4).  Preaching, he insists, must always be subversive (Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, page 6) and he means that literally: it offers a version of faith lived in reality that gets under the dominant versions and opens new ways of existing.  He writes:

My theme is alternative, sub-version to version, the sermon a moment of alternative imagination, the preacher exposed as point man, point woman, to make up out of nothing more than our memory and our hope and our faith a radical option to the normalcy of deathliness. (ibid, page 9)

Preaching here is a creative activity in which each generation of faith reworks the tradition so as to maintain its liveliness:

We now know (or we think we know) that human transformation (the way people change) does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality. (The Word Militant ... page 26)

This is a radical understanding of faith’s collective memory in that it lays the emphasis on tradition’s continuity being found in the telling and retelling which is properly productive of changes and shifts in tradition’s content.  Here, the maintenance of a living tradition is clearly paramount; but processes of that maintenance are acknowledged as continually bringing to birth new ways of understanding how that tradition is experienced as living.  The ways collective memories change are an aspect of how tradition functions effectively rather than being seen as a threat to the preservation of tradition.  Brueggemann’s use of tradition works towards the creation of world-views in the anthropological sense; it is an insistence on an epistemology that shuns a too strident and dominating objectivism.   As he puts it:

Reality is not fixed and settled … it cannot be described objectively.  We do not simply respond to a world that is here, but we engage in constituting that world by our participation, or action, and our speech.  As participants in the constitutive act, we do not describe what is there, but we evoke what is not fully there until we act or speak. (Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology, page 12)

The preacher’s task is to call forth a sermonic language that can construe the world in new ways.  Thus Brueggemann’s definition of imagination is:

The God-given, emancipated capacity to picture (or image) reality — God, world, self — in alternative ways outside conventional, commonly accepted givens.  Imagination is attentiveness to what is ‘otherwise,’ other than our taken-for-granted world. (Testimony to Otherwise: The Witness of Elijah and Elisha, page 27)

This imaginative ability allows new insights and understandings to develop from within tradition.  Processes of displacement and forgetting may indeed be at work in this, as collective memory theory suggests; but that does not necessarily mean that previous memories are just abandoned.  Rather, imagination enables a reviewing incorporation of new perspectives that are beyond the easy conventions previously assumed. What is called forth goes beyond the strictures of relevance. What we take for granted shouldn’t be a determining factor in how sermons are designed and presented.

Clint Eastwood and learning to notice

Films are a great distraction. And I mean than in the most positive of ways. Nothing draws my attention quite like a good film. The big screen, even if mediated through a large TV, totally engages my thoughts, my emotions and my senses. Films are a great way 'taking your mind off things.' A chance to escape into another world. An ideal way to relax when your mind has been full of complex or troublesome thoughts.

There are some film stars whose films I know I can rely on to achieve that welcome break. One such is Clint Eastwood. I know he will provide a strong narrative, powerful characterisation, and action - often plenty of action! Real entertainment, but I can't remember ever having quoted a Clint Eastwood film in a sermon. I have just taken them at face value - a fun way to pass a couple of hours.


Book cover copyright Eerdmans

Then through my letterbox today came the cover in the picture and a blurb from a publisher seeking a review. I'm told that in the book the theologian Sara Anson Vaux traces the development of Eastwood's unfolding moral vision. That's a new one on me. I've simply never thought of seriously examining the star's films in this way, but why not?

On reflection I realise that they deal with some hefty themes: justice, confession, obsession, war and peace, gender, achievement, individualism, nobility, and the search for perfectability - to cite but a few. My consideration of those things has been obscured by the dominant idea of entertaining escapism is my viewing of Eastwood's films. I should have taken them more seriously - though no less entertainly! Vaux's book will be published here in November; I look forward to learning much from what she has to say.

In the meantime I need to take to heart again the preacher's task of working with people so that they can notice things that otherwise go unnoticed. Too often preaching is a restatement of the all too obvious, instead of the surprising disclosure of God it's meant to be. Revealing hidden depths and and signalling otherwise overlooked grace are crucial parts of what it's about. Thinking about Clint in a new way calls me back to something I too easily forget.

Preaching in an amnesic society

eds D. Doyle & E Hill, New City Press

For Saint Augustine (354-430), wisdom and truthfulness always had to come before eloquence. Nevertheless he remodelled Cicero’s (106-43 BC) ideas of rhetoric so that they might be used in the service of the Gospel. According to Cicero the orator must teach, delight, and persuade. Augustine in his preaching added a conscious effort to get the listener’s attention and maintain the listener’s’ active interest. These rhetorical skills, however, were always subservient to Christ the ‘interior teacher’ who speaks to the heart of the believer. As Augustine put it ‘We preach, but God instructs’ (sermon 153.1).

In an effort to think through how rhetorical skills might serve contemporary preaching I've produced a kind of amalgamation of Maurice Halbwachs and some of the wisdom of Saint Augustine on the PreacherRhetorica website. Suggestions and comments welcome. 

Personalisation or personal-isolation

BBC report http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13873028

I first noticed it when searching for a particular theological book on a well-known shopping site. A prominent ad appeared on the bottom of the page encouraging me to attend a church not too far from where I live. Using the page again a few days the ad appeared again, along with others with a similar locality focus or for products and services somehow related to the product for which what I was actually searching. My web use has been 'personalised.' Without having done any deliberate thing to request these add-ons (!) my use of the web has been automatically analysed and content directed into my view that that matches my likes, interests, prejudices, and values. More and more personalisation is promised for my web experience. I will be directed towards things that will interest me. This is to my advantage in a world awash with information and choice, so I'm told. But I'm not so sure.

Sometimes personalisation produces simply daft connections. I was reading a story about a serious crime. When the word 'visit' came up in the report a pop-box appeared telling me the advantages of joining the National Trust! The clash with the content of what I was reading was so severe as to be completely off-putting.

The more serious worry about my Internet use being personalised in a web bubble is the way it limits what I'm doing. I may think I've got a world of choices and options to explore but actually that world is being limited by what the search anlyser considers to be me. What seemed wide open space is being contrained by boundaries I know little about. In place of the world-wide web there is a supposedly 'me-shaped' web bubble that I've have no direct way of influencing.

Yes, I know the adverts directed to me by personalisation help to keep the web free of charges. And yes, I know I can tweek the analysis of me a search engines makes. Nevertheless I don't want to be constrained in a bubble.

It reminds me of the way that faith is too often constrained by the things of prejudice and cultural outlook.  By the grace of God the believer, a person of a particular time, place and experience, is freed into a new community that is the people of God which knows no boundaries of time, place, and culture. The believer remains rooted in the particular, for that is what it is to be human, but also has a foretaste of eternity where those things no longer bind. Day by day we strive to let eternity touch the ordinary - and that's not living in a bubble.

Pegwell Bay, Kent - A Recollection of October 5th 1858

I once owned a painting by Scottish artist William Dyce (1806-1864). It wasn't that I personally owned it but that the office I held brought with it the custodian trusteeship of the painting. Anyway, the connection has made me alert to any mention of Dyce. Consequently when I came across Dyce's Pegwell Bay as an example of Victorian 'wistful atheism' in David Fergusson's brilliant little book 'Faith and Its Critics' (OUP paperback 2011) I was bound to consider the painting again.

Pegwell Bay, Kent - A Recollection of October 5th 1858 by William Dyce

I'm not sure Fergusson has got it right. As I understand it the painting evokes for him the mood of a kind of reluctant atheism that admits the changing perspective brought by geological study and Darwin's new theories but somehow struggles to admit the consequences of the earth now known to be so much older than previously thought. Perhaps that was the mood of the age, but I don't think Dyce shared it - after all his paintings of biblical scenes are wondrously lively.

What then might the picture be saying?

It's usually analysed in terms of the various kinds of time portrayed: the ancient geological time in the detailed rock strata, fossils and chalk cliffs; the fleeting life-time of beloved people (Dyce's family members collecting shells in the foreground); earth-time as portrayed by the dying light and the receding tide; and astronomical time in Donati's comet just visible in the sky. These aspects coupled to the muted, fading light colours are, it is suggested, Dyce's way of stating human frailty in comparison to the immensely aged and vast universe.

I wonder whether that's actually it, or whether that is a reading back into the mid-nineteenth century something of our contemporary worries. The figure standing at the right, near the cliff, is Dyce himself with artist's equipment under his arm. He is staring at the comet. A brilliant view against the fading sunlight, no doubt. He and his family were on holiday. That the others in the party are so engaged in shell collecting could be a very positive sign of enjoyment. Certainly the colour of their clothing in comparison to the mute shades of the natural forms around them draws attention to them. The final clue may be the title Dyce himself gave the picture. Might not 'a recollection' mean exactly that? Could it be that far from being a statement about humanity and an uncaring universe, the painting is a recollection of family and belonging where the universe is the playground of enjoyment, appreciation and a sense of at-one-ment? Collective memory certainly works via such recollections.

I'd love to hear the opinions of anyone who knows more about Dyce.

Powering memory

'She spoke on a verse from the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi isn't it? Chapter 3 verse 10.' So said my colleague Sandra during the office lunch break yesterday. She was recalling a sermon she heard 46 years earlier! Not only was she able to name the verse of scripture, she also told us the sermon was about bringing your complete tithe into God's storehouse and the blessings that follow. A remarkable piece of remembering, or so most people would think. And that it was a sermon that was being recalled makes it all the more extraordinary; most people assume sermons are instantly forgettable!
Sandra may well have a very good memory but I don't think she'd mind me suggesting that her remembering of this particular sermon isn't actually so extraordinary. Several important aspects of the way collective memory works are illustrated by our lunchtime conversation:

Gladys Alyward

First, the lunch time gathering was chatting about TV and films. Somehow the movie star Ingrid Bergman came up in the conversation. From there it was an easy step to her starring role in the 1958 movie Inn of the Sixth Happiness as the inspirational Gladys Alyward (1902-1970), the Cockney domestic who became a missionary in China. It was Alyward who was the preacher of the sermon Sandra mentioned (Alyward did a speaking tour in the UK in the mid 1960s). The memory is therefore well provided with readily remembered associations in terms of popular cultural forms. This is one way it is located, and social location is vital to remembering.

Second, Sandra heard the sermon at an event she attended with her mother, and remembers exactly how old she was at the time. The memory is therefore located in another way as well - it carries with it associations of a particular and significant time of life and the sense of belonging to a special social environment that went with it.

Third, the memory carries with it a very strong recollection of feelings. The deep emotions raised were clear in the way Sandra told of the incident and how touched by it those who listened were. This provides yet another kind of location in the sense that the personal significance of the memory remains lively and pertinent.

Fourth, Alyward as the speaker that day spoke with a sincerity of intention that was tangible. Sandra says that afterwards there was so much she wanted to say to Alyward but she was so overcome by the tenor of the occasion and the impact of the speaker that she found herself tongue-tied. Sandra felt that Alyward sensed that and she responded to the youngster by giving her a warm hug. That physical contact adds weight to the memorability of the sermon.

As it happens a recording of Alyward's sermon has recently been found (access it here). The venue and exact date of the recording isn't clear, but its style and content is almost certainly something Alyward repeatedly used during her speaking tours. She speaks straightforwardly and biographically without many rhetorical flourishes, but returns repeatedly to Malachi 3.10. Her conviction is compellingly but undramatically communicated at every point. Interestingly Alyward does not herself described her address as a sermon.

I think every preacher has things to learn from Sandra's remembering. Do we make memory location easy for our hearers? Are we sensitive enough to their current life experiences? Are we connecting to feelings and making what we say emotionally memorable? Are we deliberate enough when it comes to communicating conviction? I suspect if we paid more attention to these things Sandra's remembering wouldn't seem quite so remarkable.

What is preaching?

Here's my attempt to define that speech event that happens in Christian congregations:

Preaching is an authoritative and authorized voice in a congregation giving expression to the Christian tradition in such a way as to encourage and enable it to be applicable in some measure in the lives of the hearers.

I realize there is also evangelistic preaching that takes place outside the congregation, but here I want to focus exclusively on preaching within the church for this is the preaching that directly serves the maintenance of the Christian collective memory. (You can find this kind of memory work in the New Testament, for example in 1 Corinthians 4.7; 2 Peter 1.12; Jude 5; Titus 3.10; and 2 Timothy 2.14).

My definition has ten distinct aspects to it:

1. Preaching is something spoken.
2. It generally uses one voice addressed to a number of people.
3. That one voice has usually been given authrority to so speak (sometimes by an authorizing institution other than those immediately gathered, and sometimes from within the congregation)
4. Preaching normatively takes place within a specialized gathering called a congregation, whose purpose is more than just hearing the sermon.
5. Preaching's subject matter is more or less controlled by its relationship to an inherited tradition that principally consists of the Bible.
6. The social purposes of preaching are determined by the needs of the congregation, at least theoretically, and the inherently missiological character of the New Testament.
7. Preaching is expressive in the sense that it gives voice to the tradition in such a way that it impacts on the hearers' emotional, cognitive, intellectual and practical needs and understandings.
8. It enables the hearers to link within their thoughts what is experienced with the congregation and what they experience in other aspects of their living.
9. Preaching is to some degree authoritative in itself in that the hearers are willing to receive it with generally only indirect ways available to them to offer meliorating feedback (that said, the contractual-like nature of preaching means the preacher is aware that there are boundaries of style and content that may not be crossed).
10. Preaching is performative in the sense that the preacher is expected to do more than simply read a text.

Is that fair enough? Or have I missed out something vital or otherwise misrepresented what we preachers do?