Preaching an Alternative Worldview
Six and half years ago, I sat in a homelitics classroom: skeptical, cynical, and scared about the prospect of preaching. I was that seminary student – you know, the one that never imagined herself in a pulpit, much less could understand the profit of preaching for anyone. I was tired of three-point sermons beginning with the same letter; fatigued of feel-good messages without food-for-thought; and frankly, I thought the Bible had enough for us to chew on without added interpretations, especially ones that had caused so much hurt and harm throughout Christendom.
And yet, preaching was required for the Master of Divinity degree (which I thought I would use for campus ministry sans semonizing), and so to preaching I went, albeit reluctantly. Looking back on preparing for my first in-class sermon, I just laugh. I didn’t sleep, literally, the night before, and I decided to quote anyone who had ever published anything about the troubling story of Hagar and Ishmael. It was a disaster; and it only confirmed my assumptions that preaching was pointless and that I was definitely not called to preaching ministry.
And God works in mischievous ways. The well beloved and gifted preacher, the Rev. Dr. Brad Braxton was my professor. And through the course of a semester, he demonstrated in this teaching and in his pastoral approach to his students, the beautiful art of the sermon. I suppose I had a conversion experience, so to speak, and I began to see the power of a sermon, not just for a congregation, but especially for a preacher.
I guess God is the one laughing now, as I just entered my fifth year of ordained ministry, my fifth year of weekly preaching where I am continually challenged, transformed, humbled and spiritually fed. I love the discipline of preaching and the delight of knowing that God still works through unlikely candidates to communicate the power of the gospel of the Risen Lord.
So in appreciation for Brad’s mentorship to students and in honor of his recent installation as the pastor of one of the most esteemed pulpits in the country at Riverside Church in New York City, I have revisited part of a final exam that I wrote for him. This celebrates his preaching artistry and serendipitously celebrates my love of the art of sermon.
In the midst of our fragmented and hurting world, where death is the pervasive if not the final answer, the Christian preacher has the awesome privilege and distinct responsibility to offer an alternative worldview – a worldview not based on shallow superstition or ethereal escapism but a worldview that is centered in the real hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Instead of the resounding message that our world is beyond hope, where the nightly news report of violence and tragedy becomes expected and normative, the Christian preacher offers the good and unexpected news that redemption is possible, hope is tangible and life is – contrary to popular belief – meaningful.
But in order to do this, in order to deliver this radical message of hope against hope, the preacher must employ speech that overpowers the deafening cries of a defeated world, where its inhabitants live out of a posture of fear and an assumption of death. Thus, the preacher must find language that communicates the possibility of hope and transformation, demanding the attention of even the most hardened hearts not only to envision but also to embrace the fresh vista of transformation in God.
Accordingly, Walter Brueggemann advocates “preaching as a poetic construal of an alternative world,” where
the task and possibility of preaching is to open out the good news of the gospel with alternative modes of speech – speech that is dramatic, artistic, capable of inviting persons to join in another conversation, free of the reason of technique, unencumbered by ontologies that grow abstract, unembarrassed about concreteness. Such speech, when heard in freedom, assaults imagination and pushes out the presumed world in which most of us are trapped.1
Indeed, it is the preacher’s task to point to a reality beyond this one, to remind people of God’s purposes and intentions for this world.
For example, in a world where justice equates “justified” retribution and vengeance, the Christian preacher offers an alternative vision of forgiveness and hope. It is not a naïve or world-denying hope but a transcendent hope that is only possible through divine love and freedom. Hence, humans cannot attain it by their own merit or strength but must depend on the “all-surpassing and transforming power of God” (II Corinthians 4:7). In fact, God’s alternative vision – of strength that comes from humility and service instead of power and prestige – stands in direct contrast to “normative” ways of being in the world.
As preaching is a serious endeavor, what becomes dangerous is when contemporary culture and Christianity are merged without distinction. When the Christian proclamation and the cultural barrage of sound bites sounds the same, authentic Christianity has comprised its very integrity that we are created for more than support of status-quo. When our political banners of conservative and liberal are lifted so high that the cross of the crucified and risen Jesus becomes nothing more than a shadow or a platform for our political agenda, we have missed the Christocentric message of the gospel. When we use the Bile to support our preaching, picking and choosing which Scriptures support our agenda or ideology, we refuse to let the Spirit loose to work in and among us as the primary agent of transformation. Ultimately, our arrogance is mistrust of God and a blatant manipulation of church as another vehicle to condone our humanist worldview. This is not the alternative that Jesus graciously offers us.
Preaching, then, should not be another expected element in our week (“an old habit among us”2) where the stories of Jesus become docile and domesticated. Though our Easter ears may become immune to the true power of the sorry because we have heard it so many times before, it is the preacher’s job to open up the biblical text and breathe new life into it. The responsible preacher sees beyond trite explanations of difficult passages (as if trying to dilute them) and, instead, wrestles with ambiguity, earnestly asking how the Christian messages actually affects our worldview and the way we conduct our lives. Does the gospel change how we manage our budget and our mutual funds? Does the gospel affect how we feel about racism or capital punishment? Does the gospel influence where we live and what jobs we take? The preacher brings these questions, often subversively, to the consciousness of the hearer, not for inducing guilt trips or promoting self-righteousness, but so that new horizons of life-giving possibilities are available and accessible. Essentially, effective preaching creates (and expects!) a space for people to be changed, for listeners to walk away with the full knowledge that God in Christ is working for the reconciliation of all creation – both through suffering and in celebration.
Preaching at its best awakens the hearers to hear a new sound that is cacophonous with the dominant worldview. Consequently, it requires utmost integrity and serious courage to proclaim that a life of praying for one’s enemies and being obedient to God truly brings about the kingdom of God on earth. It demands thoughtful creativity to present age-old Bible stories in fresh angles with contemporary relevance. It calls for a radical rediscovery of seemingly familiar and innocuous message that offers horizons of transformation never imagined. This kind of preaching shapes and forms communities to live into hope in the life of God.
This is accomplished primarily through storytelling, where a preacher tells a different story, offers an alternative worldview, over against the prevalent story of self-sufficiency and despair. Additionally, the preacher tells the story of salvation in a way that invites the hearer to see how his/her own story intersects with the divine narrative so that preaching is not a one-sided lecture but a two-way dialogue between the speaker and the listeners. Thomas Long affirms that sermons that encourage collective meaning-making are superior: “Sermons aimed explicitly at involving the listeners in the active and mutual creation of meaning are not only communicationally and psychologically more effective, but they are also theologically and exegetically more faithful to the character of the gospel itself.”3 That is, the mutual creation of an alternative worldview affirms its reality and relevance in the daily lives of the congregation.
The preacher and the congregation participate in the possibilities of an Easter perspective by imaging that the gospel is what it says it is. Therefore, as residents in a Good Friday world, Christians must “pray for reconciliation as yet unrealized, hope for liberation even as people lie captive, water the seeds of forgiveness where there is still enmity, apply the oil of healing while pain and death yet rage, and pray with all our might, ‘Come, Lord Jesus.’” 4 The biblical possibilities of transformation must be proclaimed in our preaching and simultaneously in our living. Thus, good preaching stimulates real living.
Preaching should not be the bland repetition of empty slogans or the subtle sanctioning of the world-as-we-know-it. No, the gospel should surprise us with its radical claims of an alternative vision that challenge the prevailing and ubiquitous attitudes of meaninglessness and indifference. It is daring and risky in a hostile and skeptical worlds, but it is, at the same time, rewarding and life-giving for those that have ears to hear and those who desire transformation and wholeness.
Finally, we remember that this alternative worldview is not a human creation of a feel-good mirage, but the alternative worldview that should be proclaimed in our pulpits is something that God alone creates and initiates. We are called to be the faithful heralds and the active participants of a divine Story that transcends this world yet breaks into it. Thus, preaching, just as the alternative worldview, is not something we can create ourselves, but it is something that God does through us as we bring instruction, exhortation, healing and transformation5 in a world in desperate need of hope. Preaching reminds listeners of God’s faithfulness, engenders worship of the creating and sustaining God, and inspires the hearers to respond to and actualize an alternative community of Christian wholeness. It’s most of all an art that allows God to speak through a beautiful and broad canvas of hope.
1 Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1990), 3, 4.
2 Brueggemann, 1.
3 Thomas G. Long, “And How Shall They Hear? The Listener in Contemporary Preaching,: Listening to the Word: Studies in Honor of Fred B. Craddock, Gail R. O’Day and Thomas G. Long, eds. (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1993) 172.
4 Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989) 171. 5 Brad Braxton, Homeletics Class Lecture, Spring 2002.
