A POX ON INFORMATIVE PREACHING
Henry S. Coffin spoke of the difference between guides who are pathetic and those who are truly in touch with what they are guides in and to. I'd like to say something about that with regard to preaching and teaching. Hand on my heart, I don't profess to preach well but I know down into my bones when I hear it done well and for the reason God willed it into being.
There are guides who take visitors around the great Continental cathedrals or magnificent buildings, to look at a much-talked-about statue or famed art gallery or any great historic site or to some marvelous place from which you can see half the world.
One kind is filled with patter, he’s rarely silent and for the 1000th time reels of the information he has read in a book and tells us what this or that expert or art critic has said. He regurgitates the facts, the dates, the places, the measurements and you come away overwhelmed with bits and pieces of information—and a very temporary recollection of some of the jumble of things he has said.
The other is in tune with the grandeur, mystery and mystique of it all—he experiences it, has entered into the heart of it, or at least he has us convinced that he has because it's more than "interesting" tidbits of geography, history and psych stuff he has rattled off. He says something, enough, but he does more than that; he brings us to that “place” and “draws back the curtain” and we’re confronted with the “thing” itself. He steps aside, so to speak, and leaves us there to be stunned by someone or something directly from the hand of a master instead of a stream of someone else’s "considered opinion" or judgment. With this guide we’re not deafened to the “real thing” by the “noise” of a prepared spiel, well-prepared chatter or bored and speedy lecturing on something too familiar.
There’s so much religious talk from too many pulpits, a lot of verses are thrown in that give it a biblical coloration but in the end it’s all a substitute for biblical preaching; it's the same old shell game. No one ever [ever!] goes away stunned--least of all the preacher. We’re rarely confronted with “the master”. We hear lots of opinions from this commentator or that, this exegete or that, this theologian or that but it’s so much hearsay and allegedly interesting information about events or persons who lived thousands of years ago--most of them unknown to us and unmissed by us. The Modernist preacher Fosdick was right when some years back he said something like this: "People who go to church now aren't interested in what happened to the Hittites."
When you hear the kind of regurgitated patter that pours out of so many pulpits you might think of Christ’s words to Pilate. The Roman governor, whose head was swimming, grunted something like, "So, you're a king then." Jesus shot back, “You saying this out of your own mind or are you quoting somebody else?” At least the Roman was on target about the subject.
Edward Thomas Taylor preached a lot and preached a lot to sailors. One of them said: “When a man is preachin’ at me I want him to take something hot out of his heart and shove it into mine. That’s what I call preachin’.”
A pox on “delightful,” “interesting” and “informative” preaching!
No comments:
Post a Comment