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    Speaking the Truth: Preaching in a diverse culture
    Speaking the Truth: Preaching in a diverse culture
    Speaking the Truth: Preaching in a diverse culture
    Ebook371 pages7 hours

    Speaking the Truth: Preaching in a diverse culture

    By Samuel Wells

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    ‘Truth’ is a difficult subject in a pluralistic culture. Yet the preacher’s call is to be a speaker of truth – the truth of God in Jesus Christ. Samuel Wells reflects on the practice of speaking about God, faith, the Bible, discipleship, resurrection, salvation, politics and truth, and on preaching that resonates in particular contexts.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCanterbury Press
    Release dateJan 30, 2019
    ISBN9781786221254
    Speaking the Truth: Preaching in a diverse culture
    Author

    Samuel Wells

    Samuel Wells is Vicar of St Martin in the Fields, London and a renowned public theologian. He is well-known for his broadcasting and writing, and is the author of more than thirty books.

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      Book preview

      Speaking the Truth - Samuel Wells

      Dedicated to John Inge, teacher,

      pastor, preacher, friend,

      who has shown me what it means

      to speak the truth.

      Contents

      Title

      Dedication

      Preface

      Introduction

      Prologue: Speaking the Truth about Preaching

      Part 1    Speaking the Truth

      1  Speaking the Truth about God

      2  Speaking the Truth about Faith

      3  Speaking the Truth about the Bible

      4  Speaking the Truth about Discipleship

      5  Speaking the Truth about Resurrection

      6  Speaking the Truth about Salvation

      7  Speaking the Truth about Politics

      8  Speaking the Truth about Truth

      Part 2    Speaking the Truth in Context

      9  Speaking the Truth in America

      10  Speaking the Truth about a University

      Copyright

      Preface

      Much of this book is shaped by my first two years as Dean of the Chapel at Duke University, from 2005 to 2007, and is indebted to my key colleagues and conversation partners during that time. Among my colleagues were Craig Kocher, Nancy Ferree-Clark, Keith Daniel, Gaston Warner, Abby Kocher, Meghan Feldmeyer, Lucy Worth, Oscar Dantzler, Rodney Wynkoop, David Arcus, Allan Friedman and Bob Parkins. My most frequent conversation partners were Stanley Hauerwas, Greg Jones, Richard Brodhead, John Kiess and Jo Wells.

      I’m also grateful to friends who during that time were influential in the shaping of ideas, including Ched Myers, Walter Brueggeman, Marcia Owen, Ellen Davis, Richard Hays, Trygve Johnson, Elizabeth Kiss, Brent Waters, David Warbrick and Ben Wayman, and in the shaping of heart and soul, including John Sharon, Ana Kiess, Judy Hays, Neville Black, Ira Mueller, Jim Kelly, Marty Gagliano, Bruce Mueller, Dwayne Huebner, Dick White and Jenny Warbrick. As I think back to those years I’m especially grateful to those who were not Christians, but challenged me to work out what being a Christian meant, especially Noah Pickus and Michael Goldman.

      As I reflect on the material new to the 2018 edition, I remain indebted to many of those named above, who have not ceased, simply on account of distance, to be shapers of my heart, soul and mind. I am additionally grateful to many new colleagues, including Richard Carter, Katherine Hedderly, Jonathan Evens, Will Morris and Andrew Earis, and new conversation partners, among them Ray Barfield, Rebekah Eklund, Robert Pfeiffer, Russ Rook, Tim Thornton, Justin Welby, Frances Stratton, Douglas Board, Chris Russell, Lucy Winkett, Christine Smith, Piers le Marchant, Ben Quash, Alan Buckle, Chris Braganza, Silvia le Marchant, and Maureen Knudsen Langdoc.

      Introduction

      My aim in this introduction is to explain how this book came about, what it is trying to achieve, and how and why this new edition differs from the original 2008 edition.

      Duke

      I always thought I’d be a parish priest in the Church of England who spent most of his time in areas of urban deprivation but did one or two other things as well. And I was, for 14 years. But then I got a letter inviting me to look at moving to North Carolina to become Dean of Duke University Chapel and Research Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School.

      Just the week before I’d told a friend I’d never live in America. But this invitation was special for three reasons. I had realized that I was interested in many things, but the place where my gifts, my calling, my training and my joy most fully converged was in preaching. And Duke University Chapel offered one of the dozen most celebrated pulpits in America – and, in a university setting, the most visible. Meanwhile, Duke Divinity School was the key institution in relation to my research interests, including on the faculty the scholar whose writing had been most influential on my theological development and the subject of my doctoral dissertation, and being widely regarded, at that time, as the foremost divinity school in the country. Moreover, the institution was offering my wife a fascinating job of her own, challenging and innovative in equal measure. We couldn’t say no.

      This book is my best attempt to describe what I discovered on arriving in North Carolina, and how I went about my work in the light of what I learned. First I learned about Duke University. I liked the fact that Duke was a young university. You’d never guess it from the architecture: everything about its magnificent West Campus is designed to make you think it’s been there since the 1450s. The architecture gives everything at Duke a feeling of dignity, a sense that we stand in a great tradition of scholars and seekers after truth that goes at least back to medieval Europe and in many ways much longer than that. Having spent much of my adult life among such buildings in Oxford, Edinburgh, Durham, and Cambridge, I relished the opportunity to be in a community that took for granted it was only at the beginning, and that its future was bigger than its past. Duke offered me all the resources, character and vision of a global university but with one precious extra dimension: the spirit and the vigour and the humility that says, ‘We’ve only just begun.’ It was a place where one person with energy and ideas could play a significant role in defining the nature of a whole institution’s emerging identity.

      Seventy years ago Duke was a provincial university. During my first couple of years there I talked with as many people as I could about how, in the subsequent thirty years, Duke was transformed from a provincial college into a truly national university. The answers came down to two. On the one hand, the civil rights movement made the South a less foreign place to the rest of the country. It was not just that African Americans could for the first time enrich the institution with their wisdom, talent and grace. It was that a university like Duke ceased to be a place where privileged elites sought to maintain their stranglehold on power and prestige and routes to political influence, but instead became a theatre where a whole new society could be imagined, a laboratory where previously unthought ideas could be tested, a crucible where diverse people, faiths, convictions and identities could be forged into exciting new configurations.

      On the other hand, there was the most important invention in the history of the American South: air conditioning. I love hot weather, but North Carolina in summer can get beyond hot. Civil rights made it possible for the rest of America to identify with a place like Duke. Air conditioning made it possible for the rest of America actually to live there. The combination of the two helped to make Duke a truly national university. And my years at Duke, 2005–12, marked the beginning of a similar transformation. Duke was a truly national university that was beginning to be transformed into a truly global university. And what made Duke light on its feet was that it hadn’t had a chance to put down deep and unshiftable roots as a national university because it had only been a national university for a relatively short time. It was invigorating to be part of an institution that was so well positioned and eager to take advantage of these enormous social and cultural transformations.

      The same was true of the university’s religious life and identity. Religious life was thriving at Duke. The Chapel had around a thousand people attending its Sunday morning worship services, and around a third of the student body played some kind of a role in one or more of the 25 religious life groups active at Duke, ranging from Muslims to Mormons to Methodists, from Buddhists to Campus Crusade to the Eastern Orthodox. Duke is in a unique geographical and cultural position because it’s on the longitude of the Ivy League and on the latitude of the Bible Belt. What that means is that it is an elite research university, but in a place where religion is almost always a legitimate part of the conversation.

      When I became Dean of Duke Chapel in 2005 I was aware of two kinds of expectations. One was that I would be fervently trying to drag Duke back to an earlier era of Protestant cultural dominance. Another was that I would become a self-styled champion of minority causes, much as many chaplains were during the heyday of the sixties. What instead I tried to do was to help Duke become a model of what America in general and its universities in particular might seek to become. That is, a place where it was assumed that everyone needed faith to live each day and what was interesting about meeting a person different in some respect from oneself was not getting cross about what they didn’t believe but becoming intrigued and fascinated by what they did; a place where it was clear how respectfully and generously faith enriched and broadened and deepened the life of the intellect, and where it was equally obvious how the life of the intellect challenged, refined and, in the end, strengthened faith.

      Duke University’s motto is the Latin phrase eruditio et religio. It comes from a line of a hymn written by the great eighteenth century Methodist Charles Wesley, which goes, ‘Unite the two so long disjoin’d, Knowledge and vital piety.’ What Wesley was talking about was the combination of faith and works, wisdom and service, knowing and doing. The Duke motto isn’t harking back to an outmoded notion of a Christian college – it’s a perennial and ever-new appeal to faculty, staff and students to make sure what we think is never just words and ideas, but becomes actions and relationships, and meanwhile what we do is never just activity, but is always material for reflection and analysis and better living.

      I went to Duke because the Chapel, and also the Divinity School and the School of Public Policy where I also taught, and the whole university, represented to me a remarkable combination of wisdom from the past, energy in the present and vision for the future. Duke had had real social and cultural issues to face in the past; and it was set in a real-life city with genuine and challenging issues to address in the present. That made it especially well equipped to look towards the extraordinary, daunting and exhilarating questions of the future. The one further element that made the role I played satisfying and influential was that, despite being a community of over 20,000 faculty - graduates students and undergraduates - it was an unusually cohesive and centrifugal institution: more like an enormous Oxbridge college than a small version of a soulless, sprawling multidisciplinary leviathan. Everyone talked about basketball, everyone read the campus newspaper, and everyone knew about the Chapel, which was the most visible, recognizable, and central symbol of the university.

      Truth

      In 2005 I was installed as Dean of Duke Chapel by the president of the university with the words, ‘Be among us as one who speaks the truth.’ Each word of the phrase ‘speaking the truth’ is worth pondering.

      The heart of this book lies in the ambivalence of the word truth. On the one hand, it means an ingenuous, candid, thoughtful interjection of sometimes uncomfortable, disruptive, and disconcerting - but nonetheless lifegiving - wisdom. The boy says to the king, ‘You have no clothes.’ The prophet says to David, ‘You are the man.’ In a culture of sophistication and ambition, the truth is a word of simplicity and transparency. But on the other hand, when spoken within the church, truth means Christ, the image of the invisible God. Speaking the truth means perceiving how the transformation brought about in Christ permeates and overturns every detail of human existence. This is truth with a capital T.

      If contemporary culture is sceptical about the word ‘truth’, it is even more deeply suspicious about the word ‘the’. For much of the church’s history, and for much of American history, the word ‘the’ has been brought into disrepute by people who spoke of ‘the truth’ and meanwhile backed it up by force of arms or methods of social control. This book is written in the conviction that the church is better off without the forms of social control but shouldn’t give up on the word ‘the’. In Chapter 9, I narrate how the social control and the ‘the’ came to seem inseparable. But it may be that only in a church with fewer evidences of social influence can the word ‘the’ once again come to be used without reserve. The claims about Jesus really do re-describe the world, but when spoken from a location of obvious social advantage they become very hard to hear.

      For all the misgivings in university culture about ‘the’ and ‘truth’, speaking is still in fashion. My principal role at Duke was to ensure that on the many occasions I had the opportunity to speak to very large numbers of people, I had something to say. There was an irony in my role, because I gained a reputation as a preacher because (presumably) I was thought to have something to say about Jesus; but as a speaker I was frequently asked to refrain from identifying Jesus as the source of my reflections. Colleges and universities in America affirm and assert their identity at grand public occasions such as convocations and baccalaureates. Such occasions are marked by two contrasting characteristics. One is a sense of expectation, that the speaker or speakers will capture the significance of the moment and place it in the larger context of the lives of the university, its members, its values and the wider culture. Another is a sense of suspicion, that any speaker is coming from a particular social location and, particularly if the speaker holds a religious (often Christian) office like I did, their words doubtless have little to offer a culture of plural spirituality. This tension creates a paradox: Something Must Be Said – but nothing can be. This volume strives to offer theory and example to explore the nature of that tension and to propose some paths through it.

      Speaking the Truth

      This book is designed to be read in three ways. It is, first, an assessment of the current and historical aspects that make Christianity in America distinctive, as seen through the eyes of a relative newcomer from Europe. Chapter 9 identifies the challenge and the opportunity of being part of the church, particularly in a research university setting, in the United States today. Much of the book offers worked examples of how to address the context outlined in Chapter 9, and Chapter 10 addresses the issue specifically.

      However, the book is also a series of ad hoc attempts to name the activity of the Holy Spirit in the life of a particular community over the course of my first couple of years there. The material in this book falls fairly neatly into a number of themes, but each address arose in response to the needs and events of a moment in time that was both unique – in the sense that every moment is – and very ordinary. In this sense each sermon stands alone in its own right.

      Finally, the book recognizes that the Duke Chapel pulpit is a highly visible one, and that those who occupy it regularly have a duty not only to pay attention to the way their words will be heard, but to make their approach available for imitation. Hence each address is prefaced by some words of introduction, not only setting the scene, but inviting the reader to share in the theological, exegetical and rhetorical issues being evaluated as the sermon took shape. And a prologue discusses how one may seek to preach the very best sermon of which one is capable.

      Duke University, at its best, is a young institution energized and inspired by high standards, high ideals, and no fear. Duke Chapel, at its best, is an institution seeking to harmonize a generous but orthodox quest for truth and a compassionate and profound longing for justice, each focused on a detailed and exuberant attention to worship. Duke Divinity School, at its best, articulates, practises and teaches the ethos of what, in Chapter 9, I describe as ‘chapter three’. America, at its best, combines energy, excellence, compassion, justice, beauty and faith. But I hope my attempts to engage the culture in which I lived will have something to offer those who have little specific knowledge or interest in Duke University, its Chapel, its Divinity School, or even America. I have arranged the contents of the book so that those who wish to consider preaching and the specific theological and exegetical questions I raise, without dwelling on the American context, may simply ignore Part 2. Those who regard the American context as vital may wish to read Part 2 first.

      I seldom used to write sermons down. I always thought, if I want my congregation to remember what I’ve said, I should be able to remember what I’ve said. Once I started preaching at Duke Chapel I invariably wrote sermons down. It was partly because it took a while to get used to speaking to a thousand people on a regular basis, and I sensed it would be a little awkward if I forgot what I was going to say. It was partly because I worked as part of a wonderful team, and the liturgy was greatly enhanced if my colleagues knew what was coming from the pulpit and I could give them a copy a few days in advance to prepare their spoken, musical and other contributions. But it was mostly because I learned that countless people interacted with the sermons in written form. They provoked and catalysed and facilitated playful and earnest conversations between people of assured faith, troubled faith and no faith, between students, faculty and staff, between physicians and their patients, lawyers and their partners, postal workers and residents, cleaning staff and tourists. And it was in encouraging such conversations, and in enjoying the Spirit’s work in them, that I came to understand the value of written sermons.

      Speaking the Truth Again

      In 2008 I published a book entitled Speaking the Truth: Preaching in a Pluralistic Culture with Abingdon, a United Methodist publishing house based in Nashville, Tennessee. It was never published in the UK. Ten years later it seems appropriate to produce a second edition, for several reasons.

      The first is that this became the first of a series of books about preaching, which included a large number of sermons, including Be Not Afraid: Facing Fear with Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2011), Learning to Dream Again: Rediscovering the Heart of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2013; UK edition, with substantial alterations, Norwich: Canterbury Press 2013), and How Then Shall We Live? Christian Engagement with Contemporary Issues (Norwich: Canterbury Press 2016; US edition, with significant alterations, New York: Church Publishing 2017). It seems that a good number of people like to read these sermons, and they still have something to say several years on. The introductory paragraphs before each sermon are intended not just as a guide to the original context but as an aid to developing the craft of preaching.

      Second, to UK observers, the American setting is if anything even more baffling in the age of Trump than it was before. I frequently find that people in the church in England regard sustained experience of the church in the United States at best irrelevant, at worst the entering of some kind of self-indulgent fantasy bubble. Chapter 9 was originally addressed to American readers to tell their story back to them, as seen by a critical friend; but, with minor alterations, it still seems to have value as addressed to a largely UK audience, to place American religious culture in a more considered light than it is generally regarded in Britain, where guns and tele-evangelists and sheer size and controversial issues tend to distract attention from what is really going on. I believe I’m a better preacher, pastor, and person for having lived for several years in America, and Chapter 9 of this book is designed to explore part of what it means to say that. Chapter 10 includes a series of sermons that address the ‘heart of the university’: while inevitably they address a particular context, the details of which are unknown to many readers, they perhaps embody the spirit of Chapter 9 more explicitly than the other sermons in this book.

      Third, the opportunity to consider the material again in a new context has encouraged me to make a number of changes that I hope improve or at least update the book. I have omitted the last two chapters of the original book (although one of the sermons in the penultimate chapter now appears earlier in this book) because they no longer seemed especially helpful or relevant, and in one respect because the issues in question have moved on in the culture and in my mind and heart. I have replaced them with two new chapters made up of sermons from my present context of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London’s Trafalgar Square. While this context is very different in a number of obvious ways, I have included these sermons because they are in the same spirit as the earlier sermons, and because the two chapters address themes that very much belong with the argument and themes of the book as a whole. This is a book about truth, preaching, America, politics and the university, and I’m glad that this second edition now includes attempts to address those five elements directly rather than simply by illustration.

      As for more detailed changes, some time ago I ceased using gender-specific language for the Trinity when spoken of, together, as God, and have altered the text accordingly. Meanwhile, I find I can no longer speak of church with a capital C, both because the argument of this book is that one only gets to speak the truth if one sets aside any sense of social entitlement, and because the flaws and failures of the church, particularly in relation to its representatives’ crimes towards children, have become so evident I want it to practise corresponding humility as a form of repentance. I used to use a capital letter for church to indicate its identity as the body of Christ: that conviction remains unchanged, even as the spelling is slightly amended. The last change is to include a prologue on preaching itself. I’m wary of giving counsel on preaching because I learned by listening to others, making my own list of things to imitate and avoid, and by trying to harmonize my theological commitments with my character so as to communicate authenticity: and these are not matters for generalized advice. But people continue to ask the same questions, so the prologue is my best attempt at some answers.

      Prologue: Speaking the Truth about Preaching

      I want to describe four stages in the life of a sermon: I’ll call them before preparing; preparing; writing and revising; and delivering.

      Before Preparing

      There are broadly four moments of receiving a sermon. One is the live experience in the midst of liturgy, embedded in the hearer’s personal circumstances, the community’s events, and wider national and international dramas. The second is the memory of that sermon as it plays in the listener’s heart later that day, week, year, decade, lifetime, as they read that scriptural text again, as they face that crisis of which you spoke, as they hear another sermon on that text. The third is the preacher’s ongoing relationship with the listener, as they hear others of your sermons, as they compare them to the sermon in life of your pastoral example and practice, as they measure up their notion of God and the church and the kingdom with the one you portrayed that day. The last is a relatively new phenomenon – it’s the experience of the person who wasn’t there on the day but comes across your sermon on a YouTube video, on a podcast recording, as a text on a website or blog, or even just possibly a hard copy lovingly sent by their affectionate but anxious grandmother.

      Here’s the first question. What do I want the congregation to experience as they listen, remember, digest, or as they engage third-hand? I suggest you want them to remember the interplay of two things. On the one hand, there’s the intimacy of God. God is talking to me, knows my struggles, understands who I am, and loves me. The siren calls of Albinoni or Mendelssohn are really God calling to me; my tussles in desire and longing and frustration and grief are really tussles with the angel of the Lord; God is as close to me as my heart is to my soul; and God loves me in a way I never will love myself. Put clumsily – in cliché, platitude or heartless theodicy – these truths are worse than useless. Whispered gently across the pillow of trust and tenderness these are life-changing discoveries, all the more so because a horrifyingly high percentage of Christians have somehow been inculcated with a very different message from pastor or parent.

      On the other hand, there’s the awesomeness of God. God is Lord of the universe, God’s story encompasses every story, God is beyond, beneath and above. It’s lovely to believe God knows us and loves us immeasurably better than we know or love ourselves, but it’s just as important to remember that this one who knows and loves us is the creator and redeemer of the universe. Christianity is the place where these two convictions meet. And here’s the crucial part. The intimacy increases the awe, not the opposite. With film stars, Nobel Prize winners or former princesses you tend to find that the greater the intimacy, the less the awe. You just don’t want to know about the tawdriness of their real, complex lives. But with God, the awe and the intimacy go together. God is completely intimate and completely cosmic. Preaching is about communicating both and their interplay with one another in thrilling terms.

      Afterwards you want an intimate silence and an awed hush. You want people to be saying things like, ‘I never realized.’ When I was 19 I went to Yellowstone Park. I didn’t really know much about it except the famous geyser Old Faithful. So when I followed a sign that said Scenic Viewpoint and walked round a rocky outcrop and saw the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen, I had this most amazing sense of grace, because I hadn’t realized there was such a thing as the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, but I’d stumbled into it and I knew I’d never forget it. ‘I had no idea.’ That’s what you want your congregation to say. That’s the awe.

      But what about the intimacy? I recently spent some time with a doctor friend who works in a Malawian government hospital. She described one ward round of three hours seeing 56 patients sharing 32 beds; three-quarters of the patients were HIV-positive. This is what she said:

      The first call was to the diarrhoea side room, a sobering array of wasted bodies and sunken eyes. The floor was wet with poorly mopped spills from bed pans. The first bay was reserved for patients with meningitis, strokes, or paraplegia. I crawled half under a bed with the house officer to show him the sensory level of a man with paraplegia. Urine seeped from the mattress on to our knees. Relatives were leaning in through the windows, anxious, listening, watching, commenting. One called across, asking me to treat his cough. I told him where to find the clinic. As we passed the nurse on her drug round, a man from the other half of the ward pulled at my coat sleeve: ‘Help me.’ The nurse told him that someone would see him later. The second bay was pneumonia, tuberculosis, jaundice. Another patient was tapping my shoulder and demanding that I help with his stomach pains. We hastened through several cases of chronic cough in the last bay and were done.

      I issued a closing pep talk and turned to leave. Passing the noisy relatives, I felt an insistent tug on my coat hem. Not again! I whipped round, suddenly angry and impatient to get out. It was one of the patients on the floor in the second bay. Could he not see how hard we had worked? I didn’t bother to conceal my irritation and said, ‘I have already heard your problem. What do you want now?’ He looked up at me earnestly. ‘Nothing, doctor. You look tired. I think you can share my beans.’ He pushed his watery hospital meal on its plastic plate across the concrete floor towards me. I had seen the face of Christ. ¹

      That’s the intimacy. It should choke you up with the intimacy and grace of God.

      How do you get that interplay of awe and intimacy, for which the official word is revelation? By talking about the Bible. ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ say the disciples on the road to Emmaus. By opening the scriptures you are saying the Bible is God’s limitless gift. You (i.e. the whole church) can receive it. It’s not just for theology professors, for pious people with daily two-hour quiet times and leather-bound dog-eared tomes, for charismatic people who see God’s healing hand 17 times a day. It’s for every Christian. And part of the way you say that is to preach on the Old Testament. The great thing about the Old Testament is that it really is news to most of our congregations and, if truth be told, to most of us preachers. So you’re all the more likely to get people saying, ‘I never realized.’ ‘I had no idea.’ And if you’re sitting thinking ‘But I don’t know the Old Testament very well’ then I’m saying you’ve got preaching completely wrong. Preaching isn’t telling people what you’ve long known, it’s inviting people into the mystery of what you’re in the process of discovering.

      I truly believe God has given us everything we need to be disciples, ministers and missionaries. Our problem is not that God hasn’t given enough but that we choose not to use what God has given us. If you’ve never preached a sermon on the book of Ezekiel then I rest my case.

      Preparing

      So the first principle of preaching is you want to communicate the awesomeness and yet the intimacy of God. And the second principle is that the Bible seems small and far away but turns out to reveal to us everything we need. Now it’s time to turn to the readings for the day. Gently, tenderly and prayerfully you read through the three or four readings assigned for a conventional Sunday or festival service, and deep in your heart you listen to the things that give you a jolt, because they surprise you, delight you, confuse you or trouble you. What is it, reading this, that bothers me, that I can’t wriggle out of, that moves my soul, that maybe in half a dozen words says it all? You have the beginning of a powerful sermon if you have the courage to stay in that place till revelation comes.

      Scriptural commentaries will usually focus and drill down those gut reactions, and they may evoke new points of joy, dread, wonder or fascination. I usually try to read between five and ten commentaries on every passage on which I’m planning to preach. Sooner or later something will go ping and I know I have to explore it, dig into it, relish it, ponder it, shake it till it gives up its gold coin. Then I’ll usually go in one of two directions. Either I’ll focus in on just a handful of words that seem to demand exploration, or I’ll look at a whole story or episode to examine its structure and what shape that may give that’s of larger significance.

      From then I start to build a plan for a sermon that develops an argument. It’s not a sermon unless it has an argument. Most of my arguments come in one of two forms. Either they establish a problem and by stages resolve it, or they identify a mystery and gradually enter and enjoy it.

      It should go without saying that the sermon goes with the

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