I recently attended a festival of preaching in Nashville, Tenn. I know for most people, the words “festival” and “preaching” may seem an oxymoron.
The event was four days of at least four sermons or lectures on preaching a day. Some might consider that a form of punishment, but it was a feast for the ears.
And even more because all of it was surrounded by great music, as only could happen in Nashville.
The theme of the festival was “preaching that matters.”
Who still thinks it does?
There were more than 1,700 people from numerous Christian denominations, preachers and teachers and other leaders, who think or at least hope preaching still matters.
Why? It depends in part on what we understand or have experienced preaching to be.
You may have heard or even used the expression “Don’t preach to me!”
This clearly negative portrayal of preaching assumes it involves telling another person what to do or not, what is right or not. Preaching is judgment.
While this sadly may be many people’s experience of preaching, and you can still find that kind of preaching today, it is a stereotype that isn’t most common in my experience.
Speaking specifically from my Lutheran Christian tradition, preaching is proclaiming the word of God for our time and place. That may seem presumptuous, claiming we can know and say what God has to say to our human condition.
But, bold as it is, it is based on the hope that as we honestly wrestle with the words of the Bible and with the circumstances of our lives and world, God has something to say. And what God says both challenges us and comforts us. I think that is good news and is needed in our world.
One of the presenters at the festival was Walter Brueggemann. A scholar of the Hebrew scriptures, author of numerous books and now in his 80s, he still preaches with great power.
The image from his sermon the first evening was Ministry in the Asylum. He spoke about the insanity of the economic and social circumstances of our world of growing disparity between rich and poor, privileged and confined, and based on two stories of the Bible, the desperate need for us to “come to ourselves” as human beings, and in forgiveness and hope return to lives of compassion and justice and care for one another and the earth as God intended.
I think hearing that matters. It reminds me and returns me again and again to living a more gracious and humble way, the way, I believe, Jesus lived.
Maybe preaching matters only to those who gather in religious communities to hear a sermon, and even then, only for some, some of the time.
I can live with that. But I suspect its reach goes beyond that.
Through the interaction of the hearers with the sermon and the preacher, in the spirit of what Brueggemann called in one of his early books that still influences me today The Prophetic Imagination, we can be changed and the world can change, in small and large ways, for good.
There are sermons and preachers who have done that in the past. And it is still my hope for the future.
Rev. Lyle McKenzie is pastor of Lutheran Church of the Cross of Victoria and part-time chaplain in Multifaith Services at the University of Victoria.
