HAVING THE COURAGE TO PREACH

DO YOU HAVE THAT COURAGE TO BE A GOOD PREACHER?

By. Don. J.B. Nyamunga

The word is always communicated personally in one to one dialogue and it has to create and focus towards the proclamation of the word in a public way, and has to be set in the context of worship of the revealed God. Preaching to produce the quality and depth of Christian discipleship in the congregation that depends heavily upon the weight of preaching. This will depend exclusively on what investments we have put into homiletics (from homileo, “to speak, converse, address someone”). Homiletics is the study of the process and act of listening to the Spirit speak through Scripture so as to engender an appropriate here and now witness to God.

We proclaim about the coming of the kingdom of God as Jesus preached: on mountains, on plains, form a boat, near the temple, in the market place. The apostles were sent out, two by two, they assigned them the responsibility. St. Paul too reminds us of the necessity of preaching: faith comes by hearing and hearing comes through the word of God. And how do you hear this word of God unless you have somebody to declare it, and how do you do that without a preacher? (Rom.10:11-15).

Preaching (kērugma) means proclamation of the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord. Preaching is a continuous and public testimony which the church is constantly seeking to make to all who would hear it, most conspicuously in the context of worship, witnessing to the church’s faith in Christ. Preaching consists substantially in the clarification, exposition, interpretation and re-appropriation of the written word that witnesses to the revealed word. It’s a public exposition and to all who would hear it. In the contemporary language we say that God is addressing us personally through Christ in history as revealed word. The proclaimed word is witnesses to the revealed word. (Cf. Luther, WLS, vol.3, 1125). Before it became a written word, the proclaimed word was first and foremost an oral tradition. In time, a written tradition of apostolic teaching emerged that subsequently became universally recognized as canon to which the church could constantly became universally recognized as canon to which the church could constantly return for the nurture of its continuing oral witness (Cf. Tertullian, ANF, vol.3, 610).

The revealed word, the preached word and written word all cohere in mutual interdependence. The revealed word of God is communicated through speech, expressed through ordinary human languages, spoken, written, remembered, translated, and respoken. The gospel itself is thought to be a word (logos) an address to us from God Himself. The notion of logos can be translated not only “word”, but “reason”. It is by means of words, through ordinary language, that reason is expressed. As a struggle for words, I struggle to express reasoning. Preaching seeks to clarify that self-revealing word of God in the pulsating contemporary, local, here and now situation. (Luther, WWL, 79).

The Christian worship contains both prophetic and priestly dimensions. The prophetic aspect deals essentially with God’s address to us. The priestly aspect focusses on the gathered community addressing God responsively in prayer, praise and intercession. Preaching emphases the prophetic side. Ordinarily, Christian preaching does not, like Old Testament prophecy, says directly: “Thus saith the Lord” as if the revealed word were coming immediately through our preaching. But we have a more modest task of saying “Let us listen to the Scripture together. We will talk about the way in which the word of God the Father through the liberating son meets us with help of Spirit through the Scripture.”

Preaching has to lead towards inviting persons to Christ as evangelization agents. Sometimes leads to seeking comfort, encouragement and inspiration, devotion, dedication, loyalty and discipleship to Christ on the pastoral level, imparting clear, understanding Christian teaching we find in the doctrinal dimension and then building moral sensitivity and awareness and elicit changed behaviours, which comes with morally formative dimension. The preached word addresses the whole community, yet by this means hopes to penetrate the heart of each individual in community as if alone before God.

Preaching, to be complete, requires hearing. Yet each act of hearing in highly individual, even though addressed to many. Preaching speaks from experience to experience. One’s own personal story is the lens through which the larger Christian story is seen. The Holy Spirit is at work to bring the preached word home to the hearer. The best preaching prays earnestly that the Holy Spirit will illumine the hearer through our frail attempts to speak God’s own word through human language. One is dully authorized officer of the church. You are appointed to the office of preaching. This is the reason why vestments in preaching have had much historical significance (Clement of Alexandria, ANF, vol.2, 453).

The liturgical vestments point beyond all temporal powers to the ground and end of temporal power. The office of preaching needs the imprint of personality, without being reduced to it. As a preacher, one has to risk telling his own story, not as an end in itself, but rather as a sharply focused lens through which the whole Christian story is refracted. This will require delicate balance, a creative tension, a dialectic that can easily become imbalanced. It will test your insight and ability as a preacher of the word to hold person and office together in fine balance. There is no easy formula. It requires an intuitive wisdom that has on it the stamp of your personality and sense of vocation.

God preaching is in touch with specific hungers, the current aspirations, the sociocultural presuppositions of the contemporary audience. Preaching must come through with a vital recollection of historical Christian memory so as to illuminate and challenge the alienated present by means of Scripture and tradition. Preaching is not simply fixated on the now archaic language of the first century A.D. or the sixth century B.C. It is by definition essentially contemporary, a here and now event. How are we to make clear the seemingly remote connection between a text written twenty-five hundred years ago and this here and now audience? God’s spirit work cooperatively with our intelligence and attentiveness to make that otherwise improbable connection.

Preaching is therefore concerned with both the widening of the community through evangelical witness and the deepening of the community through spiritual formation. Homilia, from which our word homily comes, points more often toward the pastoral nurturing, and didactic side of congregational preaching. When the good news is announced, it is often perceived as a profound challenge to our idolatries, and so we may fight it or be offended by it. The best preachers have always sought to penetrate the self-deceptions of their hearers and work their way skillfully through hardened layers of defense. Christians preaching tries to announce the judgment and grace of God to those who may not want to hear its full force. Preaching tries to get through these obstacles, not in coercive or overbearing ways, but through skillful persuasion under the guidance of Scripture and Spirit.

A preacher has a delicate task analogous to that of an ambassador delegated to an embassy in a remote, perhaps hostile, area who tries to get across the message of the home government in whatever ways possible. The preaching today has to be addressed to all and the people have to believe and respond. The poor and unlearned were crucial contributors to the primitive Christian mission. This has to be done in the language of the common people, rather than in a special technical language or an academic jargon.

The church celebrates good preaching as a gift of the Spirit (1 Cor.12). It’s not an easy to do this task well, to take hearers deeply into the meanings and claims of scripture and to bring ancient wisdoms into contemporary context in good humour and spirit, and in such a way that not only the least educated persons in the congregation can understand, but the wisest also be moved and edified. Preaching is not only a gift but a studied and improved upon. It involves cooperative relation between the spirit’s awakening guidance and our best human efforts. It’s God’s address through our fragile, distortable language. God the Spirit cooperates with our human competencies, talents, languages, abilities, and imagination to enable our speaking and hearing.

When preaching dwindles into philosophical speculation, literary criticism, free verse, political manipulation, or lathered sentimentalism, the laity know that the commission of ordination has somehow been misplaced. To some we give milk and others, meat (1 Cor. 3:2). To preach “in wisdom”

 Is to draw out of the fund of scriptural wisdom the particular insight that applies most clearly to this circumstances here and now (1 Cor. 2:6). Preaching involves a personally grasped, experienced affirmation of these meanings, a clarification of what they signify in our times and how they address our own situation. The pastor is called upon to make accessible the wider range of the wisdom of Scripture. The lectionary will always help prevent subjective, biased selections of texts.

To pretend to know everything and cover all subjects as encyclopedic manner will be disaster to the hearers. There is much of which we should never speak in the pulpit, yet which we do well to know. A man who understands his subject and his work can speak to the ignorant in a manner interesting and instructive to the wise. Depth and simplicity meet at the same point. Have you an audience composed of forty-nine wise and one ignorant? Speak for the ignorant one (Vinet, 1853, 206). The best preaching is wise in its simplicity, nor its complexity (Kierkegaard, 1851-52, Bonhoeffer, 1948).

Through ordination, the minister is authorized to preach, assigned in the formal sense and does not make it subjectively appropriated, in the consciousness of either the preacher or the hearer. The preacher has to say something right, to utter something worthy of belief. The hearer must be conscious of the rightness of that word. Only then does the circle of authority completed. Then you have to speak with something significant to say and those who hear will be prepared by experience to trust what that person has to say. Authority is diminished when the divine self-disclosure is ignored or overlooked in the interest of personal opinion-making. Humble submission to the authority of the word is central to the authority of preaching. One cannot make up for absence by personal charm or rhetorical flair.

Preaching is closely connected with duty of reproof: correction, discipline and admonition. The teaching must be correct; otherwise, false assumptions may be reinforced. The pastor must reprove with authority. (Titus 2:15). Christian teaching stands in continuity with the prophetic tradition. This calls for pastoral courage to identify accurately the particular deficit or injustice or lack of awareness in the flock at a given time. But if you are going to offend the flock, offend them with the truth. You have it turned around if you yourself are the offense. Let the gospel be the offense; let the word be the scandal; let the truth be the offense. That is good preaching in the prophetic tradition. Prophetic preaching addresses human need not just on the individual scale, but on terms of ingrained social injustice (Amos 5:7, Isaiah 3:13-15) The preacher should have the courage to stand up as the conscience of the community, as an unintimidated critic of the corrupted society.

One must grasp inwardly the depth and relevance of those truths that elicits in other the same emotive qualities felt in oneself. “The anointing which received from him abides in you and you have no need that any one should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything, and it is true, and is no lie, just as it has taught you, abide in him”. We know good preaching when we hear it. It touches us viscerally. It is profound, subtle mode of communication that somehow makes the transcendence of Yahweh appear palpably imminent. It mixes courage and comfort, candor and sympathy, strength and vulnerability, in the kind of delicate blend achieved by excellent cook. Most worshippers know that there have been rare and beautiful times when they have been privileged to hear such a word. When it happens it is a remarkable event. It is a treasure in earthen vessels.

 

© Don J.B. Nyamunga’20