"Where grammar cracks, grace erupts"

"Sometimes preachers cannot help but envy other users of words in our culture. News anchors, analysts, comics, pundits, and savants: They are so smooth. They have  but to open their mouths and out flows the spirit of the age.  They are so professional that they are able to deliver gut-wrenching information without a hint of emotional investment, and all with an air of effortless familiarity. Next to them, the preacher often appears to be fighting off a swarm of bees. Why? Because preachers are speaking from the embedded position. Because their language emerges from pastoral participation in the life and death struggles of the baptized. Speaking of the apostle Paul, who by any account we have of him was not a smooth man, Joseph Sittler said: 'Where grammar cracks, grace erupts.' He adds a stern warning to preachers: 'What God has riven asunder, let no preacher too suavely join together.'"

Richard Lischer, The End of Words, 41-42.

Limping in the Pulpit

"The first time I preached a proper sermon, my mentor gave me some good advice: your praying and your preaching should be of the same length. You don't want to find yourself limping, with one leg shorter than the other. God works as a result of prayer and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness."

N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 226.

At least one of us will give our life to Christ

"I go out to preach with two propositions in mind. First, every person ought to give his life to Christ. Second, whether or not anyone else gives him his life, I will give him mine."
 
- Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

How to orphan a sermon

"A sermon that is not directly drawn from Scripture is orphaned, however bright or clever it may be."

- Fred Craddock

Preaching as the Packaging of Truth

"Surely an inelegant expression of truth is better than a beautifully expressed falsehood, and even a beautifully expressed truth can be diminished, subtly, if the style upstages the substance. Even so, great truth can be enhanced by its packaging. Otherwise, would we be so deeply affected by insightful poetry, penetrating novels, and great drama?"

J. Philip Wogaman, Speaking the Truth in Love: Prophetic Preaching to a Broken World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 74.  Buy at Faith Village; Amazon.

Preaching the mystery

"The pastor, however, can only reveal as much about God as the Scriptures do. There is a part of the Holy One that will always remain a mysterious, untamable whirlwind. This means we pastors should spend more time with who than why. Revealing a mysterious, holy lover is hard work, and for that reason the pastor is always tempted to revert back to being a friend of Job with lots of explanations and arguments. If we can prove why some things happen in the lives of parishioners, the thinking goes, then we can get a leash around God. But whatever it is that we've leashed, it certainly isn't God."

-Craig Barnes, "Three Temptations of the Pastor," 17-18 in Best Advice: Wisdom on Ministry from 30 Leading Pastors and Preachers

Gain enough!

"For preachers, preaching is a no-win situation. We can never greet opposition as sure evidence of sin without first examining our own thoroughly mixed motivations, our lack of love, and our strident self-aggrandizements; and we can never bask in praise as if we are anything more than mediators, the servants of grace. Though we can take no credit and, indeed, must accept our share of blame, there are compensations. Because we are preachers, we are afforded the gladness of exploring the gospel week after week and thus coming to know the Mystery of God through Jesus Christ. Gain enough!"

David Buttrick, Homiletic: Moves and Structures (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 456.

Are you well acquainted with the subject?

I was looking over some notes from last year's Preaching Practicum at Wilshire Baptist Church and came across this gem of a quote from Dr. George Mason.

"When people come to church to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, they have the right to hear it from someone well acquainted with the subject."

Quote of the Week: Conducting a Text

"The sermon is not an act of reporting on an old text, but it is an act of making a new text visible and available. This new text in part is the old text, and in part is the imaginative construction of the preacher, which did not exist until the moment of utterance by the preacher. Like a conductor 'rendering' Beethoven so that that particular music exists only in that occasion, so the preacher renders a text so that it only exists in that particular form in that particular occasion of speaking."

- Walter Brueggemann, The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word (Fortress, 2007), p. 85.

Quote of the week: The proper response to biblical preaching

"The proper response to biblical preaching does not lie in pronouncing the pastor a skilled communicator but rather in determining whether God has spoken and whether or not He will be trusted and obeyed."

- Haddon Robinson, Making a Difference in Preaching, 71.

Quote of the week - the scandal of Friday, the rumor of Sunday

"In a culture that has learned well how to imagine - how to make sense - of the world without reference to the God of the Bible, it is the preacher's primal responsibility to invite and empower and equip the community to reimagine the world as though Yahweh were a key and a decisive player . . .

"We are forever reimagining and retelling and reliving our lives throuh the scandal of Friday and the rumor of Sunday"

- Walter Brueggemann, Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, 2, 10.

Quote of the Week: Countercultural preaching

"I think that there is nothing more powerful than a person who loves other people, standing under the power of the Spirit and telling the truth about something. As a matter of fact, it's so shockingly countercultural that it has the ability, when it is done with passion, to create an attentive listener."

Thomas Long, from an interview in Ten Great Preachers: Messages and Interviews edited by Bill Turpie

Quote of the week: Calvin Miller

"Becoming a great preacher, like becoming a great artist, requires a life commitment."

- Calvin Miller, The Empowered Communicator

Quote of the week: Defining the faith vs. Proclaiming the gospel

"Definers and defenders of the faith are always needed, but it is bad for a church when its ministers count it their true work to define and defend the faith rather than to preach the gospel."

- Phillips Brooks

Preaching Quote of the Week

"Preaching that is boring is preaching that talks first about us and then only tangentially about God.  Preaching that is faithful is preaching that talks first about God and then only secondarily and derivatively talks about us.  The God of Scripture is so much more interestingly than we are."

Will Willimon from "My Advice for Preachers" in Best Advice: Wisdom on Ministry from 30 Leading Pastors and Preachers (edited by William J. Carl, III)

No need to make Jesus relevant

Challenging thoughts from Dr. Richard Lischer, especially as we conclude our advent preaching.  Does your preaching primarily move backward to the historical Jesus or forward to the risen Christ? 

"Because the risen Christ is alive and moving toward us from his own future, the preacher is not constrained to make him relevant as if Jesus were only a figure in the distant past. We do not have to prove that he is real because he is already here. We do not have to dig him up from his Sitz im Leben, for the movement of preaching is not backward to the historical Jesus but forward to the risen Christ."

Richard Lischer, The End of Words, 37-38.

Quote of the Week

"There is a homiletics so obsessed with form, or what rhetoric called arrangement - points, steps, blocks, moves, illustrations - that it loses touch with the New Testament's rhetoric, which is characterized by astonishment and self-abandonment to God's future." - Richard Lischer, The End of Words, p. 118.

The cure for boring preaching

"The cure for pulpit dullness is not brilliance but reality" - P.T. Forsyth

Does the Bible teach us how to preach?

"The new Testament contains an implicit theology of preaching but no operating instructions or tips for effective preaching."

Richard Lischer, The End of Words, 10.

Preaching Quote of the Week

"The supreme work of the Christian minister is the work of preaching. This is a day in which one of our great perils is that of doing a thousand little things to the neglect of the one thing, which is preaching."

G. Campbell Morgan, Preaching (published in 1937)