on reflecting on my preaching

“Our homilies are rarely heretical. They fail rather because they are stale and flat, vapid and insipid, dreadfully dry and boringly barren.” - Walter J. Burghardt

It's sad how true that feels right now.

Preaching in "Community"

Rocky: Brother, borrow at will 'cause after hearing you preach last month I borrowed your verbiage liberally for about two weeks.

That's what this whole thing is for, in my view.

Landon: I've hit a point in my relatively short preaching career that I never thought I would hit: I'm finding myself wanting to quote extensively from your sermon from last week. I'm struggling with my self-described "crass American individualism."

The deal is, I think that you made some very nice homelitical moves last week - especially the jaunt regarding what a mother must do for her children - that I'm wanting to borrow. Now, I know the deal about permission and making sure who said what, and all that. What I'm dealing with is the reality of the ferment of the communal act and how strange it is that I'm resisting it.

I know you've reflected on it before, but it's weird for me.

Taking It Personally

Landon: I'm totally with you on this. If nothing else, to preach this subject must mean to preach with the recognition that something is actually at stake. To steal your phrase from the other night at IHOP, eschatological preaching must be a "lived onomatopoeia."

Rocky: Driving home tonight something occurred to me about our project here, about the task of preaching itself, and about the nature of God. I will be brief.

Preaching eschatology must be an engagement with the future itself, a personal rendezvous with the end of time on a personal and cosmic level, and not merely a peddling with ideas about the future and the end of time. C.S. Lewis' image of children playing with chemistry sets and Annie Dillard's quip about the need for church ushers to issue signal flares instead of programs come to mind.

My challenge is going to be engaging personally and seriously with this eschatology stuff, and not simply learning and talking about it. But, like I said, that's the challenge of faith itself, no?

What we're doing

A few weeks ago two preachers had a pint at the local pub, and talk turned to the future. I mean, the fuuuuture. One of us was planning a study of The Revelation of John for an adult Sunday School class, and was seeking the counsel of his friend and colleague. The conversation carried on for a long while, and what emerged through the smoke and Smithwicks was a collaborative seven-week sermon series on eschatology, that branch of systematic theology concerned with the future, particularly with God's future and God's purposes for it.

We agreed to start this week, January 7th, 2007, with the opening of Revelation. After that, we'll each alternate in selecting a text, until there are six total, sort of like a draft. Some of these texts, like the one from Revelation 1, will be apocalyptic; others won't. Because eschatology is a fairly wide river with a number of tributaries running into it, only one of which is apocalyptic literature like that found in Revelation and Daniel.

Ablogalypto will be a space for our week-to-week conversation about this project. We'll discuss exegesis and sermon preparation, and hopefully post audio for each sermon. We're hoping to generate a conversation between friends, which is what started this thing to begin with. But we also are hoping that the conversation spreads to not-yet friends, even to never-gonna-be friends, so that some kind of growth and transformation may be generated.

Welcome to the conversation.