Here begins my hardest series of posts because here the telling begins to reveal past weakness, loss of easy honor and innocence for the sake of heightened purity, a necessary tapping heavily of the grace and mercy of God.
I chatted with a friend about Christian literature this morning. She asked, "Have you ever been in a season where you just wanted to be a sponge and soak in as much as you could, but you didn't want to waste it on anything shallow? And you didn't want to soak it in just for the sake of being a heavy wet sponge?" What followed that comment for me was a newly congealed idea, one that beautifully complemented something I'd been reading. My response to her was: "The more I read, and the further I go in my walk with God, the more I require a certain spirit to be in the text. Even more than the actual information being conveyed, I need to absorb the spirit."
That observation made me think of Christ's sermons. So often laced with parables that even his close, traveling companions didn't understand them--stories he would clarify privately later, how did these sermons nevertheless have the power to captivate crowds? If the information wasn't meticulously laid out in topic and sub-topic format, in three-point presentation with introduction and thorough recap, followed by appropriately-related closing prayer, then how did it draw so many common people to sit and listen--people who would even go hungry so as not to miss a single word? Was it merely the miracles?
I don't think so--or at least, not just the miracles. A spirit surely thrummed over every word He spoke, and that spirit touched people on another level entirely, one that was more than just a brushing of their intellects.
So now, more than usual, more than even yesterday--these words of Christ have a nuance, a richer shading than they carried before: It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life. (John 6:63.)
Likewise, the words of the very author my friend and I were discussing this morning, his words begin to gong loudly in my ears, playing the same song:
We, the professional faithful, the preachers so earnest for our responsibilities, have measured the arena of God's activity by our own; and the people, glad to be led in definitions, have allowed us to noose the mighty God and to remand him to a tiny space. To a tiny space, a discrete time, and a handful of particular, prescribed exercises...Moreover...our preaching is largely teaching, explaining and instructing, so the people may assume that God is a matter of the mind (or the heart in more emotional deliveries), but not of the whole human in all its parts. We say, of a text, "This is what it means." And we imply that God comes present in the understanding of meanings, even though these meanings be pointing to events! Our manner communicates more than the matter we deliver, because it is subliminal and qualifies every word we say...
Abstraction, the removing of God from experiential life and permitting him truly to dwell in the analysis alone, is a present-day problem...We pretend God's presence in the whole of our lives, and we believe the pretence, though in fact we honor understanding...the shape of preaching most shapes our God. And what is the shape of so much preaching today? Why, it is the shape of the classroom: teaching. And teaching is always (in our consideration) one step removed from experience and from the "real." It is an activity of the mind. It prepares for what will be; or it interprets what has been; it is separated from both. The God who is met in doctrines, who is apprehended in the catechises, who is true so long as our statements ABOUT him are truly stated, who is communicated in propositions, premise-premise-conclusion, who leaps not from the streets, nor even from scriptural texts, but from the interpretation of the scriptural texts--that God is an abstraction, has been abstracted from the Christian's experience.
O Priests, by the will of the people!
O Preachers, by the patterns of this age!
O Teachers, by thine own choosing--you have severely belittled the Deity! Though your intent was kind and holy, your manner was mousy. Though you brought extraordinary intelligence, a fine education, and assiduous study to your office, you reduced that office to intelligence, its training and its application alone, and this you made the temple of the Lord.
But the providence of God is all creation, all space and time, all things and all events, all the actions of humankind, and all the whole human himself!
What shall we do that the people's perception of God not be so much less than God himself? Make something more of our preaching. Allow the preaching itself a human--and then a divine--wholeness: that the whole of the preacher be presently active in proclamation, the whole of the hearer invited to attend, and God will be seen as God of the Whole.
Or, to rush the point: tell stories.
--Preaching, by Walter Wangerin, from Ragman and Other Cries of Faith (pp.72-76)
But this is easier said than done. It sounds good, when it's someone else's wholeness that is laid bare. Much harder when it is your own. But that is where the authenticity serves, foundational to anything of value that might climb above it , after all.
So I shall try...
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