Preaching the Story
This week I am spending most of my time reveling in the annual preaching conference hosted at Luther Seminary (where – full disclosure J – I teach! 🙂 ) called the Celebration of Biblical Preaching. And it is a celebration – full of lively plenary presentations, great workshops, and inspiring worship.
This year’s theme is “Preaching the Story.” It invites us to take seriously the character of the Christian faith as a story, a story that doesn’t just tell us information but, like all great stories, invites us to adopt it as our story, even to enter into its narrative that we might make sense of our lives on its terms.
Why is it important to think of Christianity as a story? Because we are, I would argue, not simply homo sapiens (that is, “thinking beings”), but also, and in important ways even more, homo narrans (narrative, or story-telling, beings). That is, we make sense of our lives in and through stories – the big stories, certainly, that deal with our religious and political life, for instance, but also all the little stories we tell all day long as we share our lives by referencing a television show, or something that happened at home, or a current event, or a movie we’ve seen or book we’ve just read.
When you come to think of it, it’s actually surprisingly hard to get very far in a conversation without sharing stories. Why? Because stories have this way of taking big, somewhat abstract, even amorphous thoughts, feelings, and beliefs and making them concrete, accessible, and – perhaps most importantly – share-able. (All of this may explain, by the way, why Jesus’ primary mode of teaching in the gospels in through parables – that is, stories!)
Which is why it’s so helpful to imagine the heart of preaching as an invitation to tell the Christian story – as a grand story that runs from creation to new creation, certainly, but also as a collection of small stories that invite us to use them to make sense of our lives. As we open up these stories we invite people to take them seriously and to imagine life in light of the values and beliefs they share. Moreover, we invite them to imagine themselves as one of the characters in this story, a story that begins in the very beginning with Genesis and ends only at the very end in Revelation. Which means that this story continues, and we are invited into it.
I’ll share more about what I’m learning as the week goes on, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear about some of the stories that you find most helpful, most compelling, and most true.
I love the book of Hosea and wish it were preached on more often!For me, it speaks of God’s mystery (take back your unfaithful wife isn’t intuitive in our culture), and grace (How can I abandon you…I am the Holy one among you). It speaks to the people of its time with references to raisin cakes, and to all us with the inclusion and grace. Hosea presents some challenges and hard truths too that seem on target for both eras and cultures. It’s “earthy” and real by acknowledging the reality that humans are sexual beings. It speaks of forgetting and abandoning God, which I know I do all too frequently. It’s a very real story, yet resonates too with the metaphor of marriage–commitment, love–between God and humanity, even when it’s rough.
This is a story I keep coming back to again and again because of the poetry, the grace, the forgiveness–and the challenge to go out there and live God’s mission.
Being one of those sharing in the week at Luther, I can say this is some of the best of many conferences over 35 years of ministry. The telling a different story in relationship to Stewardship this afternoon was a great new look at this important ministry. Thank you
A story that I have found very helpful is the Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis. I am reading it now for the second time and finding more and more to think about.