Preach the Word

I have been stimulated by reading By the Word Worked: Encountering the Power of Biblical Preaching by Fleming Rutledge, which are the edited versions of her Parchman Lectures on preaching delivered at Truett Seminary in 2019. The date is significant for being the year before Covid.

I am glad these lectures have been published because it has dropped a few seeds of thought into my mind.

In the first lecture Rutledge asks what the preacher is trying to do in a sermon and what a congregation is expecting to happen in a sermon.

“As I have travelled around, I get the impression that most congregations don’t seem to have a sense of the biblical doctrine of the Word of God. They don’t expect anything life-changing from the sermon. There is no excitement about the sermon, no anticipation.”

Rutledge speaks about her experience post-retirement of sitting in the pews and listening to sermons and watching congregations in the USA. Yet I think we could make the same observations about the church in the UK.

What is the problem? Rutledge suggests that it is a lack of confidence in God being at the heart of the preaching event.

“God is the animating agency inhabiting the written text as the preacher is, by the Holy Spirit, speaking words that effect what God intends.”

Rutledge suggests that sermons are not sufficiently theological. This is not to suggest that sermons should be so laden with doctrine that they hardly get off the ground. Rather, she has in mind that preaching should have as its primary focus God himself: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Scripture does act as a mirror that helps us to see the truth about ourselves, but this only happens when we have looked through Scripture’s window to see the truth about God first.

Preachers need to take care that their sermons do not operate exclusively on the horizontal level alone but also with engage with the vertical perspective of who God is, and what he is saying and doing.

Preaching is not primarily a sociology lesson. It is about theology. Preachers are in the business of talking about God so that the hearers can come to know God personally.

Preaching is not primarily a group therapy session, where we sit around in a circle looking at how we can be fixed. Preaching can help to fix people, but it must learn how to move from what is broken to the God who can mend the broken heart.

This reminds me of what a tightrope walk good preaching is.

Take the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus. Many sermons will spend a lot of time talking about the failure of the disciples to understand what is going on but fail to focus on the centrality of Jesus which the disciples, and we, often miss.

I have preached sermons on the Transfiguration of Jesus though the eyes of Peter but have focused less on his supposed mistakes and more on the magnificence of Jesus.

True preaching always helps us to look at him.

Focus on what is central.

Get in the theological groove of the passage.

Guide people to a place where they see “always, only Jesus.”

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