In this new column, Montana pastor Dave Hansen reflects on how reading pastors from the past can mentor us today.
The congregation had recently endured a bitter fight. It fractured every which way, the ecclesiastical equivalent of a California fault zone. I paid one of my first pastoral visits to an octogenarian teacher and church saint. She was dying. She gathered her strength, sat up straight in bed, fixed her eyes on mine, and spoke a warning I would rue ignoring: “Be careful; this town kills teachers and ministers.”
She laid her burden down, and it came and rested on my shoulders. It was a lot for a first-timer to hear.
What do you preach when every conceivable stance involves taking sides with people you don’t agree with and against people you desperately want to pastor? It’s one thing to stand up for what you believe. But what heals? What redeems? What unites?
A few sentences from Dietrich Bonhoeffer provided me with perhaps my only option: “Upon Christ, however, who is the proclaimed Word, should fall all of the need, the sin, and death of the congregation.”
There was need, sin, and death aplenty. Somehow, practically, I had to give it to Christ. Could this really happen in preaching?
Bonhoeffer’s answer: “The proclaimed word is the incarnate Christ himself. … Therefore the proclaimed word of God is not a medium of expression for something else, something which lies behind it, but rather it is the Christ himself walking through his congregation as the Word.”
I conflated the sentences into my own vision of preaching. I saw Christ, during the sermon, walking up and down the aisles of the church forgiving sins, healing, challenging, defeating the Devil. Not in my words or ideas, but in the proclaimed Word, in the fusion of Holy Scripture and Holy Spirit in human words that is somehow, miraculously, the divine, creative Word of God.
Bonhoeffer’s theology of the Word was intellectually exhilarating, but would it work? Was the preached Word actually the ministering presence of Christ? I knew the people would never unite around ideas or causes. Given the number of pastors they’d gone through in the last fifty years, I would certainly not be the catalyst. But Christ? If Christ was preached, would they rally around him? I decided to give it a shot.
The decision forced me to shift the critical mass of my homiletics from creating an effect in the congregation to bringing Christ to the congregation. This changed my ministry forever. And I believe it is the critical distinction for all preaching.
“Only where Christ is preached,” said Bonhoeffer, “is God present. Without him the sermon is at best nothing more than empty doctrine.”
The crucial instruction I needed for this shift came from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s lectures on preaching, delivered to his students at the Confessing Church Seminary at Finkenwalde, Germany, from 1935 to 1939. Clyde E. Fant edited and translated them, and appended them to Bonhoeffer’s Worldly Preaching: Lectures on Homiletics (Crossroad, 1991). The lectures are packed with practical instruction on the preparation and delivery of expository sermons.
Bonhoeffer teaches that preaching Christ comes with confident, expository preaching: “The preacher should be assured that Christ enters the congregation through those words which he proclaims from Scripture. …
“When we ask ourselves `What shall I say today to the congregation?’ we are lost. But when we ask, `What does this text say to the congregation?’ we find ample support and abundant confidence.”
Abundant confidence sounded good, but there was a price to pay. Never one to shirk his duty to detail the cost of discipleship, Bonhoeffer tells why expository preaching is so painfully difficult; his answer is spiritual.
“When the sermon is regarded as an interpretation,” he says, “then the involvement of the preacher is that of a man who puts himself to death for the sake of the Word, who dies to his own will and only wishes to be the handservant to God.”
These lectures are blatant about spiritual warfare in preaching. They had to be. Bonhoeffer’s students preached in a land possessed by Nazi hate. He knew what was at stake then and forever when Christ is preached. He wrote: “As a witness to Christ, the sermon is a struggle with demons. Every sermon must overcome Satan. Every sermon fights a battle. But this does not occur through the dramatic efforts of the preacher. It happens only through the proclamation of the One who has trodden upon the head of the Devil. We usually do not recognize Satan anyway. We do not find him, Christ finds him. The Devil departs from him. Satan waits nowhere so for his prey as where the congregation gathers itself. Nothing is more important to him than to hinder Christ’s coming to the congregation. Therefore, Christ must be preached.”
I realize that all this sounds rather highfalutin’ and hyperspiritual, but the result is quite the reverse. In upholding the radical distinction between what we do and what Christ does, we are freed to be ourselves. As Bonhoeffer says, “In the service of Jesus I become natural. I stand at the altar and at the pulpit as the person that I really am. And I imitate no one and nothing.”
Consequently I love Bonhoeffer’s advice on announcements in worship. “The announcements from the pulpit,” he says, “should include those things which are of significance for the entire congregation. Much effort should be devoted to these announcements. They are the life of the congregation as the body of Christ.”
Ultimately, it was during the announcement period that I sensed the first signs of spring. Announcements increased as ministries bloomed. They became buoyant and convincing as our congregational life became a sweet affair. There were droughts and deaths and disasters yet to come. But we were no longer alone. Christ preached had become Christ present and Christ alive, Christ the center, Christ the Lord of our life together.
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Dave Hansen is pastor of Belgrade Community Church in Belgrade, Montana.
HIGHLIGHTS OF BONHOEFFER’S WORLDLY PREACHING
“I preach because the church is there–and, I preach that the church might be there.”
“The sinister thing is that one can use the Word in a demonically suggestive way without knowing it. Dangerous, destructive powers surround the pulpit orator. Anyone who consciously works with his psychological capabilities can, with the help of the Devil, become a great ‘evangelistic’ preacher. If the preacher wants to be certain about the truth of his preaching he should devote himself exclusively to the text.”
“The text gives the sermon its form. Artificial organizational schemes and sermon forms produce pulpit orators. We don’t need model sermons; sermons that are according to the text are model sermons.”
“The basis of preaching is not flesh and blood, customs and culture … and its form is not one of cultural unity, but rather its basis is the Word and its form is obedience. To attempt to get close to the culture of the people and to the contemporary scene is actually to get separated from both the contemporary and the people.”
“The form of the preached word is different from every other form of speech. Other speeches are structured so that they have some truth which they wish to communicate either behind them or beneath them or over them, or else they are arranged so as to express an emotion or teach a concept. These human words communicate something else besides what they are of themselves. They become a means to an end.
“The meaning of the proclaimed word, however, does not lie outside itself; it is the thing itself. It does not transmit anything else, it does not express anything else, it has no external objectives–rather, it communicates that it is itself: the historical Jesus Christ, who bears humanity upon himself with all its sorrows and its guilt.”
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
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Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
