The preacher as gracious antagonist
Guest column
Object:
As a young pastor fresh from seminary in my first call, I preached carefully exegeted, well thought out sermons on the weekly texts, which I thought, in my hubris, were pretty good. The president of our little congregation, however, didn't seem to share my obvious enthusiasm for these homiletic gems. After ten minutes he would begin to look at his watch. That didn't bother me. But when, after fifteen minutes, he would take his watch off and shake it to see if it was still working, that bothered me! A few years ago, I read some of those sermons and wondered why it took him fifteen minutes to shake his watch in dismay! I realized it was not his watch that was broken but my sermons.
The church is only as strong as its proclamation and my sense is that we need to take a new look, not only at our homiletic function, but also at how we regard the language of the gospel. So often we miss the verbal dynamite that the gospel places before us and substitute what can only be received as a nice speech full of slurped chicken soup that leaves our inner and outer worlds unchanged. Robert Funk years ago claimed that "the preaching of the gospel has taken on the character of prattle. The vital nerve of the hermeneutical problem ... is therefore the failure of language. The failure of language, as it relates to preaching, is correlative with deafness, with insensibility to the word which God has spoken in Christ."1
For example, the story of the lost sheep in Luke 15 is often presented as a nice little story about what is normative behavior for a caring shepherd. Jesus justifies his action of welcoming outcasts and sinners by an appeal to animal husbandry that has inspired stained glass windows too numerous to mention. While I love those windows and this nice little declamatory example, that is precisely what Jesus is not doing here! He is doing something so atypical in welcoming this group of moral riff-raff into his presence that it requires a parable that shatters our conception of what is normative behavior.
At a rostered leaders' event in North Carolina in the fall of 2000, Dr. Will Willimon said something that forever changed my way of looking at texts like this one. "Look for the weird in the text," he said. The weird in Luke 15 comes in its introduction when Jesus says, "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?" (Luke 15:4) The answer is plainly, "None of us would do that! That is crazy! Who leaves 99 hapless sheep, prone to wandering off, alone in the wilderness to search for just 1 sheep? Cut your losses, folks. You win some, you lose some. Tough luck, lost sheep! Have a nice day!"2
The Gospel of Thomas knows this and invents a reason for such idiocy. It makes this sheep into the Rolls Royce of the fleet, the biggest and most valuable of the bunch! But that is manifestly not the case in Jesus' telling. In fact, if the sheep were to correspond to the tax-gatherers and sinners in Luke 15:1-3, this wooly wanderer might be the scrawniest and sickest of the flock.3
Think of the audience! Jesus is not speaking here to the Union of Amalgamated Shepherds, Local 103! Shepherds are precisely the kind of folks Jesus is grumbled against for hanging out with! Truth is we might consider Jesus as looking at the shocked looks on the faces of his hearers and saying, "Now that I have your attention...." And this is so often precisely what we do not have. I did not have the attention of the congregational president in that first parish, other than for him to look at his watch and wonder if we were going to get out in time to beat the Presbyterians to breakfast at Eggs-Are-Us!
Jesus' word is not just informative, it is transformative. He comes to set fire to the earth (Luke 12:49), not simply to give an after dinner speech. He tells outrageous stories about a
crazy shepherd, a ridiculous woman who unsettles her whole house to find one lousy coin, an indulgent father who welcomes his reprobate son home and decks him out in tux 'n' tails for the coming home party -- much to the understandable chagrin of the older brother, and -- in the next chapter -- an Enronesque businessman who gets caught cooking the books and is celebrated for his shrewdness!4
These are the kind of images that can get you killed in polite society ... and they did!
Amos Wilder, in The Language of the Gospel, writes:
... the personal dramatic character of the Gospel itself necessarily involves confrontation, not instruction in the ordinary sense but the living encounter of heart and heart, voice and voice, and ... this has inevitably registered itself in the ongoing story of the Christ and in the style of the New Testament ... It is as though God says to men one by one: 'Look me in the eye.' Jesus' message and call therefore presuppose response, not mere memorization and transcription.5
I would argue that the preacher must take a new stance toward the congregation, a stance as a "gracious antagonist." We need to be gracious because the gospel is gracious and the Jesus we preach is grace incarnate. We need to be antagonists, not in the sense of thundering down upon people, but rather challenging their worlds and our own with the shattering world of gospel speech. Stories in sermons need to be more than illustrations of some general truth. They need to walk us through the coats in the wardrobe until we find the doorknob to the kingdom world and, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, are able to enter into a new way of seeing. At the end of the sermon we come back through the coats into our Monday worlds with the gift of Easter eyes. The goal is not to shock but to change; not to stand over the congregation, but to stand with them as Jesus' graceful antagonistic word addresses us. It will bring fresh energy and excitement to what has become, for some -- both in the pulpit and the pew -- mundane. We will know when this occurs, for watches will not only not be shaken ... they will be forgotten.
Terry L. Morgan is a writer and pastor who presently serves as an Assistant to the Bishop in the Southern Ohio Synod of the ELCA. © Copyright Terry L. Morgan 2007.
The church is only as strong as its proclamation and my sense is that we need to take a new look, not only at our homiletic function, but also at how we regard the language of the gospel. So often we miss the verbal dynamite that the gospel places before us and substitute what can only be received as a nice speech full of slurped chicken soup that leaves our inner and outer worlds unchanged. Robert Funk years ago claimed that "the preaching of the gospel has taken on the character of prattle. The vital nerve of the hermeneutical problem ... is therefore the failure of language. The failure of language, as it relates to preaching, is correlative with deafness, with insensibility to the word which God has spoken in Christ."1
For example, the story of the lost sheep in Luke 15 is often presented as a nice little story about what is normative behavior for a caring shepherd. Jesus justifies his action of welcoming outcasts and sinners by an appeal to animal husbandry that has inspired stained glass windows too numerous to mention. While I love those windows and this nice little declamatory example, that is precisely what Jesus is not doing here! He is doing something so atypical in welcoming this group of moral riff-raff into his presence that it requires a parable that shatters our conception of what is normative behavior.
At a rostered leaders' event in North Carolina in the fall of 2000, Dr. Will Willimon said something that forever changed my way of looking at texts like this one. "Look for the weird in the text," he said. The weird in Luke 15 comes in its introduction when Jesus says, "Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?" (Luke 15:4) The answer is plainly, "None of us would do that! That is crazy! Who leaves 99 hapless sheep, prone to wandering off, alone in the wilderness to search for just 1 sheep? Cut your losses, folks. You win some, you lose some. Tough luck, lost sheep! Have a nice day!"2
The Gospel of Thomas knows this and invents a reason for such idiocy. It makes this sheep into the Rolls Royce of the fleet, the biggest and most valuable of the bunch! But that is manifestly not the case in Jesus' telling. In fact, if the sheep were to correspond to the tax-gatherers and sinners in Luke 15:1-3, this wooly wanderer might be the scrawniest and sickest of the flock.3
Think of the audience! Jesus is not speaking here to the Union of Amalgamated Shepherds, Local 103! Shepherds are precisely the kind of folks Jesus is grumbled against for hanging out with! Truth is we might consider Jesus as looking at the shocked looks on the faces of his hearers and saying, "Now that I have your attention...." And this is so often precisely what we do not have. I did not have the attention of the congregational president in that first parish, other than for him to look at his watch and wonder if we were going to get out in time to beat the Presbyterians to breakfast at Eggs-Are-Us!
Jesus' word is not just informative, it is transformative. He comes to set fire to the earth (Luke 12:49), not simply to give an after dinner speech. He tells outrageous stories about a
crazy shepherd, a ridiculous woman who unsettles her whole house to find one lousy coin, an indulgent father who welcomes his reprobate son home and decks him out in tux 'n' tails for the coming home party -- much to the understandable chagrin of the older brother, and -- in the next chapter -- an Enronesque businessman who gets caught cooking the books and is celebrated for his shrewdness!4
These are the kind of images that can get you killed in polite society ... and they did!
Amos Wilder, in The Language of the Gospel, writes:
... the personal dramatic character of the Gospel itself necessarily involves confrontation, not instruction in the ordinary sense but the living encounter of heart and heart, voice and voice, and ... this has inevitably registered itself in the ongoing story of the Christ and in the style of the New Testament ... It is as though God says to men one by one: 'Look me in the eye.' Jesus' message and call therefore presuppose response, not mere memorization and transcription.5
I would argue that the preacher must take a new stance toward the congregation, a stance as a "gracious antagonist." We need to be gracious because the gospel is gracious and the Jesus we preach is grace incarnate. We need to be antagonists, not in the sense of thundering down upon people, but rather challenging their worlds and our own with the shattering world of gospel speech. Stories in sermons need to be more than illustrations of some general truth. They need to walk us through the coats in the wardrobe until we find the doorknob to the kingdom world and, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, are able to enter into a new way of seeing. At the end of the sermon we come back through the coats into our Monday worlds with the gift of Easter eyes. The goal is not to shock but to change; not to stand over the congregation, but to stand with them as Jesus' graceful antagonistic word addresses us. It will bring fresh energy and excitement to what has become, for some -- both in the pulpit and the pew -- mundane. We will know when this occurs, for watches will not only not be shaken ... they will be forgotten.
Terry L. Morgan is a writer and pastor who presently serves as an Assistant to the Bishop in the Southern Ohio Synod of the ELCA. © Copyright Terry L. Morgan 2007.
