Tag: preaching

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Why I Need to Hear a Black Preacher Regularly

The church I co-pastor has been rotating between three preachers of different ethnicities for a year. But it was only last week that I began to realize how hearing only one preacher voice at at time affects how we view God.

Our ears naturally come to hear Jesus talk like our preacher — their voice stands in for his. Jesus’ words come through the preacher’s language and tone. If we hear it every week, we start to assume that Jesus, two thousand years ago, preached in English. Our head knows Jesus spoke Aramaic, but your heart hears Jesus whisper in English.

This starves our theology. If Jesus speaks like a white person, he must be white.

The power of language can override our visual assumptions. Most American movies and pictures depict Jesus with pale skin and blue eyes, something the black church has never bought because most black congregants hear Jesus speak through the cadence of the black preacher. When I hear a sermon from a Korean pastor, Jesus suddenly speaks in Korean, and I see him teaching the Sermon on the Mount sitting lotus position and wearing a Korean dopo. When we speak a language, we breathe in all its assumptions.

The first few times I heard Elder Gerald preach at our church, the way he had Jesus speak to Peter as “my man,” to the disciples as “his homies,” and reprimand the Pharisees with, “ain’t that the truth,” I laughed — the language was novel and unexpected…

(please continue to read at Sojourner)

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Gangnam-Style and Gospel-Style, Psy and Pentecost

Remember “Oppa Gangnam-Style” the surprising phenomenal hit? It was a Korean dance song that became an international hit and first to get one billion views!

And it was all Korean words – except for the “you know what I am saying” hip-hop phrase a side-splitting incongruity of a Korean nerd with no street cred flicking his wrist as if he grew up from the hood. English would have been the way to go if Psy sought international fame. But Turks flash-mobbed the dance and Australians horse-galloped to the song though they did not know a single Korean word!

People caught the spirit of the words and they danced without understanding many of the jokes in the lyric. Many wanted to the get the inside scoop and began asking any Korean they could get their hands on. Ian’s 2nd grade classmates asked him if he could translate what Psy was singing. This changed Ian into a fervent student of his mother’s language,  for two months, good while it lasted.

The spirit in the Gospel-Language is far different than what thumps in Gangnam-Style. But we should imitate the courage to simply speak one’s own language. Christian apologetics has too often become what it sounds like, an apology. We lose courage and in translating to sound eloquent or cool to the modern critics, we lose the meaning.

This past week, I invited a person to our new church plant saying, “we have a great child care program!” I was trying to sell the church as a drop-off child care center. What I should have said was, “God wants to renew your life so come worship with me this Sunday” even if it might have gone over his head or make him fidget. At certain point, a medicine diluted by water and honey to make it palatable is made ineffective.

At Pentecost, Peter preached in Aramaic. The crowd, however, understood it in their own language. It wasn’t because the apostles were speaking their language but because the Spirit was doing the translation. Trust the Spirit to do the translation and speak the Gospel-Language. They will want to first join you in the dance, then ask you what it all means.

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Theology needs Poetry

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“I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.” – from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I have not found a more emotive, and clearer description of the relationship between eternity and our temporal life than the quoted passage above.

Theology is limited because of its language set; it is philosophical and/or dogmatic. The logic of such language set is helpful, but that very demand for logic is its rigidity. And it gets us into dead ends, as in trying to unfurl the relationship between eternity and the temporal.

Eternity, as the perfection of the creation in an unending relationship with the Creator, seems to completely overshadow our life now. Why trudge through this life when the next life is so much better?

But art, in this case the novel Gilead, helps me not only to see but feel the connection between now and eternity, that the songs and stories of eternity are our lives today. Of course this life matters, for it is the source for the songs of eternity — the way we hear the saints sing of the story of the lamb of God in the book of Revelations.

I think theology, but most certainly preaching, has to know the language of art if we are to be better theologians, in our writings and in our speech. This is why all the prophets spoke in poetry and not in proposition. You can’t just speak of God in prepositions and adjectives. You have to speak of God in the clashes of nouns and verbs, in metaphors that rip apart old associations and spark new associations, and in the fissures see God, and in that fusion see new possibilities.

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Why Preachers Procrastinate.

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The homiletic process never gets easier. Talk about writer’s block! How about the homiletician’s obstruction! The writer worries about the fall into the imperfection of words the realm of perfect thought. He worries that the description he imagined will keep degrading to a farce with every word he chooses. That is what words are, ever narrowing funnels, in one sense, as each word limits the next word you can choose, grammatically and conceptually. But this specification is not necessarily clarity as words, by nature, are ambiguous, which, paradoxically allows for communication. If it is too specific and clear then it has a one-on-one identification and thus cannot communicate. It needs to refer to many things for it to mean something. This also means that it will mean many things to others. This is the inherent struggle with words that faces every writer.

 As a homiletician, it is the same battle but add upon it the claim that the words will be the Words of God. Not only do you have the confusion of words, but you also have the ambiguity of the preacher. Every homiletician is ambiguous, that is, he is not perfect. He is a conglomeration of selfishness and self-giving, desire for God’s glory and ambition, of wanting to speak the truth but hungry for applause, a prophet challenging the status quo and a priest who encourages stability, a servant and a paid CEO, a God-child and child of the devil as he still has tendency towards fibbing.

That is why though I sometimes think, jot notes, organize, and think again before I ever pen a single word. I dread the moment of typing the first word, and how it sets me on a path and ambiguity. Procrastination is a bastard of perfection.
Perhaps desiring perfection is the greater danger. Incarnation is the deity somehow mixed with the warts of humanity, and preaching is the full force of the Truth through stumbling human words that always has some hidden deception.
Grace is the antidote to perfection and so procrastination. Grace gives us confidence to take risks, the risk of loving in midst of need for love, the risk of preaching God’s Word with my own inflections and imperfections.