Leadership Journal

Every preacher knows the moment. The music has faded, the congregation is seated and becoming still, the text has been read, the prayer finished, and the amen uttered. Then, for a brief moment, the preacher in silence looks into the faces of the congregation, as they return the gaze. The avalanche of words, which will tumble from pulpit to pew, has yet to begin.

In that sacred, compressed, expectant, momentary silence are many things, and not least this hope: that what is about to occur, especially if the sermon is a good one, will be foolishness from start to finish.

This is what I mean.

Good preaching is foolishness (1 Cor. 1:21) first because of its conviction that God exists. The preacher's foolish passion describes and depicts that before we human beings dance or weep, construct or deconstruct, self-actualize or empower, will or suffer, God is.

Little could be more audacious in a postmodern world than to assume, as the biblical preacher must, that the universe is not empty and meaningless, that reality is not our own making, that we are not free agents of self-will, and that our language does not constitute the universe.

Without such conviction, and even more, without such divine reality behind it, the preacher should never enter the pulpit. For unless God is, the preacher—well, forget the preacher.

The biblical premise for reality is named in Scripture's fourth word: "In the beginning God … " Change that fourth word to biochemistry, to power, to language, to culture, to spirituality, to economics, to sexuality, to intentions, to feelings, or simply eliminate God entirely, and there would be no word to speak to anyone, for there would be no world. In humble confidence, the biblical preacher shatters that pre-sermon silence with a pronouncement of Good News, the Word by which all those present live, move, and have their being.

When the congregation faces the preacher in that momentary silence, they long to know whether their lives truly matter. Bad preaching leaves the impression that the answer is "yes" because the preacher makes it so. Foolish preaching affirms that the answer is "yes" because God has made us so.

We come to worship as human meaning makers. As the preacher and the congregation carry on their daily lives, we discover and craft explanations. We assemble perceptions and construct paradigms. This meaning making is primary, and distinctly human work.

But the anxious longing in our world is whether human meaning is all we have. Is life just us? Contemporary western culture declares that human meaning making is and can be only about us. For, the argument goes, whoever and whatever we are as human beings, that's all we've got.

If preaching can only be about us, the congregation instinctively knows it would be better served by silence than by speech. What we long for, however, is the assurance that somewhere there is much more beyond our meaning making. We know what we make of our lives. The question is whether ...