hermeneutics

Far too many sermons are boring. If a sermon is boring, it means that nothing important has been said – at least, nothing important enough to disturb, rattle, excite, irritate or inspire. The listeners go out exactly the same as they came in, except, perhaps, even further inoculated against transformation.. It may not stop them coming to church – indeed, most committed churchgoers demonstrate admirable resilience, if not an unusually high boredom threshold – but they will be more deeply confirmed in their despair that there is no genuinely Good News to be heard. There is no Living Word, no meeting with God, no alternative to what the papers say or the television shows.

For the most part, preachers pass on their own experience of the text. If they have found nothing transformatory for themselves, they will pass that absence on. If they have been startled, excited, puzzled or renewed, they will pass that on, too. Note that I am not talking about obscure or fascinating textual facts. I am talking about the sense in which the biblical texts operate sacramentally to mediate an encounter with God. Encountering God is the purpose of reading the bible and preaching, and it is the presence or absence of such an encounter that the preacher passes on. Boring sermons mean almost inevitably that the preacher has had a God-free encounter with text – an experience which is faithfully passed on to the listeners.

One problem is the size of our comfort zone. Those of us who have lived long with and preached often on the biblical texts have become too familiar with them to hear the Word freshly. Our capacity for surprise and disturbance is drastically reduced. When we are too comfortable with God, we shut God out. We do that by domesticating God. God is enclosed in our box. It may be a very large box, but it is our box. And, as we preach over the years, we reach the sides of the boxes of our own construction and then we have nothing new to say. By “new”, I don’t mean “novel”. I mean fresh, disturbing, liberating and transforming. We discover that, by boxing God in, we shut God out, because, of course, God cannot be contained in our boxes.

I operate a rule of thumb that says that I am going to be disturbed by the texts. This is particularly true of the gospels. I assume that the first word that I am going to hear is a word of opposition – a word that disturbs, shocks, offends or upsets me. In other words, I look actively to be jolted outside of my comfort zone; to be taken out of the familiar and into the alien territory of the world of the Gospel. It is alien because it is God-infused and I habitually experience the world as mediated to me by friends, family, society, the media – the collective experience, in other words, of making a world without God. I read to find the Jesus who I assume will be a stranger to me. That isn’t easy. But Jesus is strange and unexpected. He doesn’t behave as he ought. And so I read for dissonance and disturbance, precisely in order to create the necessary space in my comfortable familiarity for God to break in with a new word that is genuinely Gospel. Two reading strategies help.

The first is to assume that I (as part of the Christian Church) will find Jesus every bit as offensive and unchristian (in terms of conventional churchianity) as the Jewish religious leaders found Jesus to be. I operate on the assumption that Jesus will not automatically bless our endeavours, but would, if he were living and ministering today in Windermere, attend Church under sufferance, tearing himself away from his circle of friends and acquaintances among the local people I never meet or have anything to do with, but who are all on first-name terms with Jesus. I read the gospels and try to see the life of the Church as it would be reflected in Jesus’ eyes – eyes which see so much more of the rest of the world than my own church-induced myopia.

The second strategy is to try and explain the gospel passages to someone who knows nothing of the story or the bible. That is when passages suddenly become difficult, obscure, puzzling or downright offensive. That is when I discover the Jesus who is truly human, as opposed to the divine ghost I am in constant danger of constructing, albeit unconsciously.

So, for example, as I was preparing to preach on the Canaanite woman (Matt 15: 21ff), I noticed something startling. The incident – a conversation – follows immediately on the heels of Jesus’ declaration that it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles, not what goes in. What comes out shows what is in the heart. We are then presented with a conversation – words coming out of mouths. And it is Jesus who is defiled! What comes out of his mouth is rude, boorish, sexist, racist and prejudiced. It is what comes out of the Canaanite woman’s mouth that converts Jesus! Jesus is forced to confront his own inherited prejudices. His Jewish-centric world is shaken to its core. He is shown the new world of God’s grace – the grace that embraces the whole world. And so, in the very next pericope, Jesus looks at his Gentile audience who have not eaten for three days and has compassion on them (v32) in marked contrast to his reaction to the Canaanite woman.

Dissonance and disturbance create the space for God to break into our self-enclosed world. Some Christian traditions speak of preaching as “breaking open the Word”. A primary task of preaching is to allow the Word to break open our world – to make the crack through which the Light can begin to pour in.