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| Preach Like Your Hair’s on Fire It’s been my habit once a year to take a look at some of the posts we’ve put up on the Homiletics blog site from the previous year (http://tmerril.blogs.com) and share a couple of them that were interesting, important, funny, provocative or a combination of all of the above. This time, I’ve taken a thematic approach. The following posts have preaching as the focus, and I offer them here, sort of like reheated leftovers from the fridge. Sometimes, as you know, sampling the stuff in the fridge can be tastier the second time around. Robert McAfee Brown on Preaching: 6/9/08 I ran across this blurb about preaching from the lectionary by Robert McAfee Brown, and thought I would share it with you. It’s an excerpt from a longer piece: “My three-and-a-half years with the lectionary taught me a number of things about the faith and its proclamation. First, I was always reminded that my task in the pulpit was not to give a little talk that might be called ‘Bob Brown looks at life,’ and might be characterized by an opening phrase like, ‘Here are some things I’ve been thinking about this week.’ No, I was called to wrestle with two apparently unlikely realities, the world of the Bible and the world of the here and now. No matter where one started, the sermon was not a sermon until those two worlds finally came together, each illuminating the other until they could not be separated. … One has to be very skillful to keep the two stories from overlapping. One also has to take in the whole sweep of a passage, not just the ‘nice’ parts. I was impressed during Advent each year with how easily we let the words of the last portion of the Magnificat (Luke 1:51-54) wash over us, so that we don’t have to take it seriously: that the monarchs will be cast down, the poor lifted up, the hungry fed and the rich denied everything. That doesn’t fly very well with our middle-class congregations; we have wonderful ways of deflecting its sting. But the words are still there, and will come back year after year until sometime, somewhere, somebody insists that we confront them. “Using the lectionary means that we can’t confine our preaching to the ‘canon within the canon’ that each of us erects with his or her favorite texts. … My own penchant in this regard has been to tilt toward social-justice issues. But if I take the lectionary seriously, I can’t get away with concentrating only on those themes, for the same people come back Sunday after Sunday, and they will yearn for and finally demand more. By looking into people’s faces, I discovered that I’m not faithful to the gospel if I preach only judgment and social concern week after week. Not only do members of any congregation need to be roused out of complacency; most of them are hurting and need support and comfort, not an unwavering diet of chastisement. Time in the pulpit sensitized me to the lives of those who are not in the pulpit. A rousing denunciation of the Gulf War isn’t necessarily what a couple needs when they’ve just learned that their daughter has cancer. Every week some worshipers are hurting and some are exultant; some have just lost their jobs and some are aflame with the need for justice in the workplace. …” Preaching Is Like Firing a Gun: 7/2/08 Hey! I’m in Boston, and stopped to rest at Copley Square in the shadow of Trinity Church, where rector and famed preacher Phillips Brooks held forth in the latter part of the 19th century. He was a powerful figure in Boston in those days. A graduate of Harvard, it’s said that when he died, “They buried him like a king. Harvard students carried his body on their shoulders. All barriers of denomination were down. Roman Catholics and Unitarians felt that a great man had fallen in Israel.” … In 1877, he delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectureship on Preaching. I perused the contents of this lecture again, and came across this interesting metaphor he uses in his address on the “Making of a Sermon”: “The elements which determine the make of any particular sermon are three: the preacher, the material and the audience; just as the character of any battle is determined by three elements, the gun (including the gunner), the ammunition and the fortress against which the attack is made. The reason why a sermon preached in the Church of St. John Lateran in Rome differed from the sermon preached in the First Congregational Church of New Haven must have been partly that the preacher was a different sort of man, partly that the truth which he wanted to preach was different, partly that the man he wished to touch and influence was different, at least in his conception. Make these three elements exactly alike, and all sermons must be perfectly identical.” The preacher as a gunner in an attack upon a fortress, is a metaphor with which I was not familiar. Not sure the metaphor works for us today. But perhaps there’s something in the ramblings here that you can chew on. Chewing … it’s an important part of the preaching task. Preach Like Your Hair Is on Fire: 8/31/08 My wife’s a teacher and so it’s natural that I run across some books in her field. One such resource is Rafe Esquith’s book Teach Like Your Hair Is on Fire. Here’s what NPR had to say about Esquith in a January 2007 broadcast: “Rafe Esquith is a trail-blazing, fast-talking, fifth-grade teacher who has racked up a slew of awards for his work at a public school in Los Angeles. Ninety-two percent of the children at the school live in households below the poverty level, but Esquith’s students have reached the pinnacle of academic and artistic success. His fifth-graders are already tackling high-school fare: algebra, philosophy and Shakespeare.” So what’s his secret? As Thomas Sowell says, the only secret is that there’s no secret. It’s simply hard work, which Sowell calls an unmentionable dirty word. Work. But Esquith himself calls his style, “teaching with total abandon!” He’s the first one to tell you that not all teachers have the time, freedom and energy to teach the way he does. Every teacher has a ton of different kinds of responsibilities that tug and pull in many directions. Esquith puts in 11-hour days just at his school and then there are more hours of preparation at home. I was thinking this could be the title of a book for us preachers: Preach Like Your Hair’s on Fire. What’s that like? It’s preaching with total abandon. It’s fearless preaching. It’s preaching that elevates core biblical content and theologies. It’s preaching that informs and persuades. It’s preaching that takes lots of work, emotion and energy. Esquith says, “I do the same job as thousands of other dedicated teachers who try to make a difference. Like all real teachers, I fail constantly. I don’t get enough sleep. I lie awake in the early-morning hours, agonizing over a kid I was unable to reach. Being a teacher can be painful.” Now, let’s use preachers instead of teachers in the same quotation: “I do the same job as thousands of other dedicated preachers who try to make a difference. Like all real preachers, I fail constantly. I don’t get enough sleep. I lie awake in the early-morning hours, agonizing over [someone] I was unable to reach. Being a preacher can be painful.” Me? I’d love to preach like my hair’s on fire. In fact, I’d just love to have some hair.
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