In practice, we tend to preach the terrors by making them less terrible. But what is lost is the very real terror of obeying God without the least idea how things will turn out in the end—which is, after all, the human situation.
—Barbara Brown Taylor
Not too long ago, I was invited to address a senior citizens’ group on “Women in the Old Testament.” They had been studying various biblical characters and wanted me to introduce them to some of Israel’s heroines; so I did.
I told them about Jael, “most blessed of women” (Judg. 5:24 niv), who drove a tent peg through Sisera’s temple with a mallet.
I told them about Judith (whose exploits, mentioned in the Apocrypha, parallel Jael’s), who seduced Holofernes and then paused to pray—”Give me strength today, O Lord God of Israel!”—before taking the man’s own sword and plunging it into his neck (Judith 13:7 nrsv).
I told them about Esther, who won permission for the Jews of her husband’s Persian empire “to destroy, kill and annihilate” 75,000 of their enemies (Est. 8:11 niv).
By the end of my talk, my audience’s eyes were very large, and I was feeling a little queasy myself. They thanked me very much and have never asked me back.
Granted, I could just as easily have talked about Sarah, Ruth, and the widow of Zarephath, but there comes a time in every preacher’s life when the queasy-making parts of the Bible can no longer be ignored, when it is time to admit that the Bible is not a book about admirable people or even about a conventionally admirable God.
It is instead a book about a sovereign God’s covenant with a chosen people, as full of holy terrors as it is of holy wonders, none of which we may avoid without avoiding part of the truth.
On the whole, we do not do so well with the terror part. It does not fit the image of the God we wish to publish; it goes against the good news we want to proclaim. In these days of dwindling numbers, who is eager to remind the congregation how the prophet Elisha cursed a crowd of jeering boys in the name of the Lord and how two she-bears trundled obediently out of the woods to maul forty-two of them (2 Kings 2:23-25)? Or how Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead for withholding a portion of their cash from the early Christian community (Acts 5:1-11)?
Fortunately or unfortunately, there is little reason to tangle with such peripheral texts of terror when we have much more central texts of terror readily at hand. In the Old Testament, God asks Abraham to roast his only son; in the New Testament, obedience to God’s will puts another only son on a cross. In these two worst-case scenarios, and all their derivatives, the issue for us remains the same: How do we preach a loving God who does such unloving things? How do we preach the terrors?
Terror at the center
Because I am addressing biblical texts in this article, I am taking the biblical view, which is that God’s will is at work in all the events of our lives. While there are good theological reasons and even better pastoral ones to approach the terrors as stray bullets outside God’s plan, the Bible leans the other way. “I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things” (Isa. 45:7 nrsv).
In practice, we tend to preach the terrors by making them less terrible. Of course God sent a ram to take Isaac’s place at the last moment, we say; of course God raised Jesus from the dead and made him Lord of all. Thus the first story becomes one about how obedience results in rescue and the second one a story about how obedience results in resurrection.
But what is lost while such morals are being made is the very real terror of obeying God without the least idea of how things will turn out in the end—which is, after all, the human situation. Things will turn out according to God’s will, certainly, and in faith we confess that to be enough for us. But insofar as God’s will is so radically different from our own, there is plenty of room left for terror in our lives.
Every preacher has his or her own canon of terror. My own includes three kinds of texts: first, those in which God sanctions violence—killing every firstborn in the land of Egypt (Exod. 11:5) or ordering Saul to slaughter the Amalekites down to the last woman, child, and donkey (1 Sam. 15:3); second, those in which God aims to separate me from my stuff—suggesting that I surrender my last handful of meal (1 Kings 17:11-13) or sell all that I own to follow (Mark 10:21); third, those texts in which God exercises final judgment—refusing to open the door to the foolish bridesmaids (Matt. 25:12) or banishing the ill-clad wedding guest to outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 22:13).
They are terrible to me because they expose my vulnerability. If God can condemn Amalekite babies for the sins of their parents, then there is no hope for me. Nor can I find safety in following Jesus, if selling all that I own is the way. So, of course, I will find myself on the wrong side of the door when the time comes, hearing my muffled sentence pronounced through the latch: “I tell you the truth, I don’t know you” (Matt. 25:12 niv).
These terrible texts remind me how helpless I am, how frail and not in charge I am. While there are clearly things I can do to improve my life and things I can do to cheapen it, my fate is ultimately out of my hands. I cannot control God’s disposition toward me, and that is terrifying.
One way to hide from such knowledge is to take refuge in righteousness, suggesting that those who behave properly are terror-exempt. Obey God and avoid the sword. Give generously and prevent misfortune. Be good sheep and dodge the outer darkness. Congregations are relieved to hear sermons like these, and preachers are glad to preach them because they offer some leverage in an otherwise frightening universe, but they finally fail to meet the test either of human experience or biblical witness. Job stands on one side of the pulpit shaking his head and Jesus on the other, both of them confirming our fear that righteousness does nothing to dissuade God from trying the faithful by fire and by ice.
Jesus’ own death is the chief terror of the gospel. Here is God’s beloved, who has done nothing but right all his life, and what is his reward? Not ripe old age with grandchildren hanging on his sleeves but early, violent death on a cross. This death ruins all our efforts to turn the Bible into a manual for the good life.
No one who has heard the story of Jesus Christ can mistake where following him will lead, which makes the gospel itself a text of terror for all who wish to avoid suffering and death. The good news of God in Christ is heard loudest and best by those who stand on the far side of a fresh grave.
That, finally, is what makes a text terrible to me: not what it exposes about me but what it exposes about God—a sovereign God who is radically different from me, whose mind I cannot read, whose decisions I cannot predict, whose actions I cannot control.
“It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” writes the author of the letter to the Hebrews (10:31 niv). But it is not as if we had a choice. That is whose hands we are in; our only choice is how we will handle our fear.
Hidden consolations
As preachers we have an additional choice, and that is how we will address the fear of those who listen to us. Jonathan Edwards, the great eighteenth-century American pastor and theologian, was one of the most frightening preachers of all time. In his book Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, he rose to the defense of those who were being blamed for “speaking terror to them that are already under great terrors.” It was, he said, a matter of saving those who were drowning in full sight of land:
A person that sees himself ready to sink into hell is ready to strive, some way or other, to lay God under some obligation to him; but his is to be beat off from every thing of that nature, though it greatly increases his terror to see himself wholly destitute, on every side, of any refuge, or any thing of his own to lay hold of; as a man that sees himself in danger of drowning is in terror and endeavors to catch hold on every twig within his reach, and he that pulls away those twigs from him increases his terror; yet if they are insufficient to save him, and by being in his way prevent his looking to that which will save him, to pull them away is necessary to save his life … (from Theories of Preaching, Richard Lischer, ed., Labyrinth Press).
It is an alarming image, and yet it is what texts of terror do. They pry our fingers away from our own ideas about who God should be and how God should act so that there are only two things left for us to do with our fear: use it to propel us toward the God who is or let it sink us like a stone.
Preaching texts of terror calls for the same kind of choice. We may try to protect ourselves and our congregations from them by tossing out inflatable bits of comfort and advice, or we may find the courage to forsake those twigs and swim for our lives toward the living God. As fearful as that may be, it is finally less fearful than the alternative.
In a paradoxical way, texts of terror carry their own consolation inside of them. Several nights ago, a friend and I watched Laurence Olivier in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Neither of us had ever seen the play before, so we were unprepared for the relentless tragedy of it, with fathers rejecting children, children betraying parents, brothers plotting against brothers, and sisters poisoning sisters. By the end of the last scene, the stage was littered with bodies—Lear, Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, Edmund—all dead.
As the lights went down and the credits rolled, my friend turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, “What could be more wonderful than that?”
When I asked him to explain himself, he could not, except to say that he recognized his own life in the play, and that it helped him somehow to see his worst fears acted out. It was real—that was the best he could do—and it was redemptive for him to witness real pain suffered in a way that seemed true to him.
In the same way, I believe, texts of terror are recognizable to us. Judgment, violence, rejection, death—they are all present in our world, if not in our lives, and there is some crazy kind of consolation in the fact that they are present in the Bible as well. They remind us that the Bible is not all lambs and rainbows. If it were, it would not be our book. Our book has everything in it—wonders and terrors, worst fears and best hopes—both for ourselves and for our relationship with God.
The best hope of all is that because the terrors are included here, as part of the covenant story, they may turn out to be redemptive in the end, when we see dimly no more but are face to face at last. That is the fundamental hope all texts of terror drive us to: that however wrong they may seem to us, however misbegotten and needlessly cruel, God may yet be present in them, working redemption in ways we are not equipped to discern.
Our fear of God’s method may turn out to be like our fear of the surgeon’s knife, which must wound before it can heal. While we would prefer to forego the pain altogether—or at the very least to perform our own surgery, thank you very much—our survival of the terrors depends on our trust in the surgeon’s skill. If we believe the one to whom we surrender ourselves is competent, then “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” (Julian of Norwich).
If we are open to this possibility in our interpretation of Scripture, then we open the possibility of its being true in the interpretation of our lives as well. Whether the terror is heard on Sunday or lived on Monday, the hermeneutical question remains the same: Do we trust God to act in all the events of our lives, or only in the ones that meet with our approval?
Several summers ago, I spent three days on a barrier island where loggerhead turtles were laying their eggs. One night while the tide was out, I watched a huge female heave herself up onto the beach to dig her nest and empty herself into it while slow salt tears ran from her eyes. Afraid of disturbing her, I left before she had finished her work but returned the next morning to see if I could find the spot where her eggs lay hidden in the sand. What I found were her tracks, only they led in the wrong direction. Instead of heading back out to sea, she had wandered into the dunes, which were already hot as asphalt in the morning sun.
A little ways inland I found her, exhausted and all but baked, her head and flippers caked with dried sand. After pouring water on her and covering her with sea oats, I fetched a park ranger, who returned with a jeep to rescue her. As I watched in horror, he flipped her over on her back, wrapped tire chains around her front legs, and hooked the chains to the trailer hitch on his jeep. Then he took off, yanking her body forward so fast that her open mouth filled with sand and then disappeared underneath her as her neck bent so far I feared it would break.
The ranger hauled her over the dunes and down onto the beach; I followed the path that the prow of her shell cut in the sand. At ocean’s edge, he unhooked her and turned her right side up again. She lay motionless in the surf as the water lapped at her body, washing the sand from her eyes and making her skin shine again.
Then a particularly large wave broke over her, and she lifted her head slightly, moving her back legs as she did. As I watched, she revived. Every fresh wave brought her life back to her until one of them made her light enough to find a foothold and push off, back into the water that was her home.
Watching her swim slowly away and remembering her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or being saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.
Wrestling out the blessing
Our hope, through all our own terrors, is that we are being saved. Whatever we believe about why things happen the way they do, we are united by our hope that God is present in them, working redemption in light and darkness, weal and woe.
To hope this does not mean we lie down before the terrors, however. For as long as we have strength to fight, it is both our nature and our privilege to do so. Sometimes God’s blessing does not come until daybreak, after a full night of wrestling angels, and sometimes it takes much longer than that. As preachers and as believers, it is our job to struggle with the terrors, refusing to let go of them until they have yielded their blessings. If we are tempted to draw back from this task and seek an easier way, we are not alone. The world is full of former disciples. “Do you also wish to go away?” Jesus asks the handful who are left with him at one point. “Lord,” Simon Peter answers him, “to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:67-68 nrsv).
Expanding the Mind
Study waits quietly, almost helplessly, like a doctor who can’t get near a victim because of the frantic activity surrounding the scene of the accident.
—Don McCullough
There was a time when pastors worked in studies; now we work in offices. This reflects, at least in part, a change in perceptions about the pastoral role. Jonathan Edwards and his eighteen hours of daily study may still be mentioned in reverent tones by seminary professors seeking to inspire scholarly excellence, but today’s pastor will likely find a more congenial model in Lee Iacocca.
The modern church, with its plethora of programs, seems to want administrators more than theologians. Successful pastors’ conferences don’t offer theological lectures; they provide training in management techniques.
So why study?
It’s an important question considering the contemporary expectations heaped on pastors. Why study when you could be developing strategies to attract newcomers? Why study when you could be creating flow charts for more effective congregational communication? Why study when you could be defining goals and honing objectives?
How can you justify sitting alone at your desk to work through a section of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics when Mrs. Brown lies in a hospital bed, terrified of her upcoming surgery? How can you possibly luxuriate on an island of solitude when all around rages a stormy sea of human misery?
Why study?
Simply put, we have no choice: if we’ve been ordained to the ministry of the Word, we must work to understand both God’s Word and the world to which we proclaim it.
John Stott has developed the metaphor of bridge building: “If we are to build bridges into the real world, and seek to relate the Word of God to the major themes of life and the major issues of the day, then we have to take seriously both the biblical text and the contemporary scene. We cannot afford to remain on either side of the cultural divide … it is our responsibility to explore the territories on both sides of the ravine until we become thoroughly familiar with them.” Only then shall we discern the connections between them and be able to speak the divine Word to the human situation with any degree of sensitivity and accuracy.
Our study of these diverse worlds doesn’t simply provide a file of facts for spicing up a dull sermon. Study changes us; it provides a broad context, delivering us from the narrow dimensions of personal experience.
A popular myth holds that personal experience is the only adequate teacher. Fred Craddock points out the fallacy of this notion:
A soldier in the trenches of the Civil War came to understand war in ways unavailable to noncombatants. However, that experience was also limiting; so limiting, in fact, that the soldier could hardly interpret that war to the nation and to subsequent generations. That task calls for another perspective, that is, another experience. Getting distance from an event and reflecting on it is experience as surely as being plunged into its swirling currents. Study is not an alternative to experience but is itself a form of experience that grants understanding, even expertise, on a range of subjects.
As valuable as my own experiences are, they are too small, too cramped for my ministry. But through Augustine’s Confessions, I enter into the spaciousness of one of the greatest minds of the ancient world; through Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, I have my understanding of God stretched and ordered beyond my own natural abilities; through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, I discover the ecstasy and terrible pain of adultery; through The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I become a black man, and have kindled within me the fires of anger over racism. Study lifts me to a higher and wider plane.
Billy Graham addressed a gathering of clergy in London in 1979. He said that if he had his ministry to do over again, he would study three times as much as he had and would take on fewer engagements.
“I’ve preached too much,” said Graham, “and studied too little.”
This is a regret we don’t want to discover near the end of our own ministries. We want to sink deeply the pylons of the bridge in both the soil of God and the soil of humanity.
Time search
I’ve pastored both a small church and a large church, and I’ve discovered little difference: there never seems enough time for study. Opportunities for reading are as scarce as pine trees on southern California beaches. But if you know where to look, the occasional Torrey Pine can be seen; time for study can be found.
When we pastors get together, complaints about our busy schedules surface immediately. Clergy magazines are filled with themes of weariness, burnout, stress. Yes, pastors are busy. But we sometimes forget we have been given a wonderful gift—the gift of time. When we were installed as pastors, most of us were released from the burden of having to earn an income and given great freedom (in general) to invest ourselves in the tasks we deem important.
During the French Revolution, political prisoners were incarcerated in dingy dungeons. There is a story about a state’s prisoner who possessed a Bible. His cellmates were eager to hear him read, but the darkness prohibited him from seeing the words. The only shaft of light fell through a tiny window near the ceiling, and this for only a few minutes each day. The prisoners, then, would lift the owner of the Bible onto their shoulders and into the sunlight. There, in that position, he would study. Then they would bring him down and say, “Tell us now, what did you read while you were in the light?”
The church, through ordination, has lifted pastors onto its shoulders and commissioned them to study on its behalf. If we fail in this task, it’s not because we don’t have the time; it’s because we’ve not made good use of the time we’ve been given. For me, the real problem has been lack of discipline.
When I started my Ph.D. work at the University of Edinburgh, I was forced to face some uncomfortable tendencies in myself. The first few months were heaven. I had just completed four years as pastor of a church in a challenging setting, and now to do nothing but read and write felt like a wonderful vacation.
But then the Scottish winter rolled in, and it paralleled the gloom in my soul. Study was all I had to do—no preaching, no committee meetings, no lunches with elders, no hospital calls. Suddenly I realized the pastorate had not prepared me for disciplined study.
If the slightest feeling of boredom came over me, I had always had an escape: if reading a chapter of theology began to feel like slogging through knee-deep mud, well, there was always Mr. Smith to visit or a phone call to make or a luncheon to schedule. I discovered that as a pastor I could be busy in an undisciplined, even irresponsible way.
Yet discipline is required for all great endeavors. Louis Nizer, still a practicing attorney in his eighties, was asked if luck existed in trial law. He said yes, but added, “It only comes in the library at three o’clock in the morning. That holds true for me to this day. You’ll find me in the library looking for luck at three o’clock in the morning.” And that’s probably where a lot of inspiration for ministry is found too.
The movie Field of Dreams is a whimsical story about a young Iowa farmer who hears a voice in the cornfield say, “If you build it, he will come.”
“Build what?” the farmer wants to know. A ballpark, he learns. Who will come? Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Chicago White Sox legend. More important, another player will also come: the farmer’s deceased father. So the farmer plows his corn under and marks out a diamond in the field. Sure enough, Shoeless Joe Jackson appears, along with seven other White Sox players and a few old New York Giants—and his father.
“If you build it, he will come.” That’s also true for the pastor. If we create the right conditions in our lives, our Father will more likely visit with the truth and inspiration needed to speak in his name.
It’s not easy to plow an open space in the busyness of parish life. But here are two ways that have helped me.
Establish a routine of time and place. Unless study is made a regular, habitual part of my schedule, it will constantly be postponed for lack of time. Study makes no imperious claims on me; it never importunes with pleas of desperation. Hospital calls, committee meetings, counseling sessions, staff problems, correspondence, telephone calls—these things elbow their way to the front of the line, extorting time by threatening to make me appear uncaring or irresponsible if I don’t give way to their demands.
But study waits quietly, almost helplessly, like a doctor who can’t get near a victim because of the frantic activity surrounding the scene of the accident. So when I’m wise, I clear a way for study, protecting it in every way possible.
The rhythm of my week has a predictable pattern: the first half is heavily administrative, with time given to staff and committees, and the latter half is reflective, with time for reading, writing, and sermon preparation. I find it helps to be specific on my calendar by writing phrases such as “Read von Balthasar on prayer” or “Get caught up on journals.”
Then, when faced with requests for my time, I can say, “I’m sorry, I already have a commitment scheduled. May I see you next Monday afternoon?” It also helps me to think of study not as time alone—for that seems so selfish when purchased at the expense of saying no to individuals—but as time in company with my whole congregation. I imagine their faces, expectant with anticipation, waiting to hear what I’ve learned. And I remind myself that I won’t be able to offer them anything of substance if I don’t study.
Many pastors enjoy the benefit of annual study leaves. My own denomination requires congregations to grant at least two weeks a year (cumulative up to six weeks) for this purpose. In addition, some pastors are given extended sabbaticals after several years of service. I seize these opportunities for expanding mind and spirit whenever offered so that I can participate in conferences, continuing education courses at seminaries, travel, and more in-depth research.
But study leaves and sabbaticals are extraordinary events, only frosting on the cake of regular, disciplined study. My ministry must depend upon more frequent feedings of the mind.
Teach the congregation. Once a routine is established, it should be made known. We’ve all heard the gibe about pastors working only one day a week. Before dismissing such nonsense, we ought to listen to it: it may indicate a genuine lack of understanding about what we do. If we were more intentional about telling our congregations how we organize our time—especially our study time—we might find them more supportive of our efforts.
I periodically mention from the pulpit my need to study; I make certain the staff understands I’m more available earlier in the week than later; I tell those who want to see me that Thursday and Friday are not good days because of sermon preparation. By now most of the congregation know they dare not call me on Friday unless it’s a serious emergency.
God’s side of the ravine
John Stott’s metaphor of bridge building offers me a helpful way to organize my study time: on the one side, God, and on the other, humanity. I learn from both. Here’s how I deepen my understanding of God.
Both forest and trees. To communicate the Word of God to the world of humanity, I begin with the biblical text. To organize my time for this task, I remember the so-called hermeneutical circle: the whole Scripture interprets its various parts, and the various parts reveal its whole. I want my study, therefore, to be both general and particular; I plan for reflection on the forest and for detailed study of individual trees.
To keep myself thinking about the broad sweep of God’s revelation, I try to read four chapters in the Bible each day. Now, parts of it, I admit, bore me. So to keep from getting lost in the genealogies of Genesis or drowning in the blood sacrifices of Leviticus, I read in four different places. A pattern I have used with profit is Robert Murray McCheyne’s Bible Reading Calendar, introduced to his Scottish congregation in 1842. The calendar begins the year at Genesis, Ezra, Matthew, and Acts (the four great beginnings), so at the end of the year, I’ve read the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice.
Staying with it every day can sometimes be difficult (especially if I skip a day because of an early morning breakfast and have to read eight chapters the next day). I feel it’s necessary, though, for a clear view of the forest. I’m surprised continually how the various passages interact with each other and with my upcoming sermons; connections I would have never made jump out at me through this daily discipline.
In addition, I set aside a few hours each week (two to four) for theological reading not connected in any obvious way with sermon preparation. To study only for next Sunday leaves me wading in shallow waters, so to stay fit I swim in the depths by working through a volume of systematic theology.
Early in my ministry, I made a choice I haven’t regretted, though it would probably cause despair for my seminary language professors: with study time so limited, I decided to spend it with Karl Barth rather than Hebrew vocabulary lists. Consequently, my reading knowledge of Hebrew rapidly died, and my Greek isn’t too healthy (actually, it’s in the intensive care unit). But I believe a growing ability to think theologically (with breadth and depth) has more than compensated for the deficiency.
Earl Palmer remembers a senior class dinner at Princeton Seminary in which George Buttrick challenged the future pastors by saying, “When you are at Coney Island, don’t tell the people of the concession on the boardwalk about which they know; tell them of the mystery of the sea, about which they don’t know.” Palmer went on: “Don’t read only what your people are reading.… Read what your people are not reading.”
The books that deserve our attention, I believe, are primary sources; leave secondary sources to others. The best books are often not carried by the average Christian bookstore, but most merchants happily order them.
Having a panoramic view of the forest isn’t enough; I don’t really see its wonder until I’ve closely examined individual trees. For me, study of the particulars of Scripture happens as I prepare for sermons. I dissect the text, sentence by sentence, word by word, asking a thousand questions and trying to answer them myself before reading the commentaries. I often find myself impatient, not wanting to stay with the text long enough. But I’ve learned that the best expositors, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, won’t let it go until they get the blessing (and often a pain in the thigh too).
Freeman Patterson, a professional photographer, has described the way he approaches his art: “On those frosty mornings when I grab my camera and tripod and head out into the meadow behind the house, I quickly forget about me. I stop thinking about what I’d do with the photographs, or about self-fulfillment, and lose myself in the sheer magic of rainbows in the grass.”
The way Patterson surrenders himself to his subject is the way I like to become wholly captivated by a text. I find this difficult, however. Many things distract me before I’m finished seeing the text itself: possible sermon outlines, an idea to comfort the disturbed or to disturb the comfortable, a great story I’ve been saving for a dramatic illustration. These things—and a hundred more—can seize my attention as rabbits distract a hunting dog. But when I manage to keep my eyes focused on the pheasant, as it were, I end up with more to feed my people.
Only after I’ve spent time with the text itself do I let myself wander through the commentaries. And I mean wander. I don’t feel compelled to read every word of every commentary in my library; I meander through them, checking my own exegesis to make sure I’m not being dishonest with the text and watching for ideas I might have missed. I try to read at least one historical/critical commentary and a couple of expositional/homiletical commentaries.
Dailies to quarterlies. For the task of getting grounded on God’s side of the ravine, there are many periodicals available to update us on recent theological trends, practical advice, book reviews, and news of the Christian world. These can be important resources stimulating our thinking and pointing to what God is doing in our world.
But I’m cautious with periodicals. They can consume a great deal of time, piling up and burying me in a truckload of guilt. So I scan periodicals, occasionally using the last half-hour at the office to get through the accumulated stack. When an article interests me, I slow down, perhaps copying it for my files.
Humanity’s side of the ravine
My first task in study is to sink one side of the bridge deeply into the soil of God, the Word of God. But the bridge building isn’t complete until the other pylon has been sunk deeply into the soil of humanity, the world. Here’s how I do that.
Pay attention to people. Exegeting Scripture isn’t enough; I must also exegete human life. Often the people who drain my emotions and distract my thinking are important resources for study. I want to know those with whom I minister, not in the way a salesman knows a client well enough to make a sale but rather in the way a husband knows his wife, with a participatory knowledge that transforms him as much as it transforms her. I don’t want my knowledge to be simply utilitarian, for that leads to manipulation; it must be incarnational, for that leads to transformation. I’ve found the best way to know people is to listen to them.
When Frank and John told me they both had AIDS, I found it difficult to silence my inner voices—judgmental voices, I’m sorry to admit—long enough to hear them. But I tried. I began to hear two stories of anguish. Frank had an identical twin brother who was also homosexual. Both Frank and John said they couldn’t remember deliberately choosing this themselves. They lamented their impending deaths. And they spoke of their love for each other. Though I disagree with their life style, that conversation moved me to compassion as I recognized the human dimension to the issue of homosexuality.
Reading to know our world. Thankfully, my knowledge of humanity need not be limited by my circle of friends and parishioners. Through books I can enter into the lives of others. Because reading time is precious, I’m careful about what I read. (I sometimes think I take as much time choosing what to read as I spend reading.) Every year publishers dump 50,000 new books on the market, and even if 49,000 aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, that still leaves a good many crying for my attention.
In selecting books, I pay careful attention to reviews (my favorite weekly source is the New York Times Book Review) and recommendations from people I trust. Also, if I find an especially challenging and inspiring author, I read her other works, and then I read the thinkers who have influenced her. Good books, then, lead me to other good books.
My goal is to finish at least one book a week. This seems necessary to me, since I’m faced with the weekly task of preaching. I usually juggle four different books at once. In addition to the volume of theology I’ve already mentioned, I’m always in a novel and a biography. The fourth book shifts between different categories—most often social and political commentaries, religious works (not strictly theology), and psychology.
The daily newspaper consumes large amounts of time, and for me it’s rarely worth it, even though I receive one of the nation’s finest. I limit my newspaper reading to the front page, occasional editorials, and a quick scan of the sports and arts sections. Most news develops over several days, so a weekly news magazine like Time or Newsweek offers a good summary. (For many years I’ve read Time cover to cover.)
The electronic media. The people in our congregations, however, do not spend most of their time reading. Electronic media influence them far more than the printed page. The average American spends four and a half hours each day watching television—an increase of 80 percent in the past fifteen years. If we’re not watching some television, we’re out of touch with an important part of today’s world.
As for radio, I don’t follow my natural inclinations and turn to the classical music station when I jump into the car. Many of my parishioners—perhaps most—prefer light rock to the music of Bach. So I have my dial set on a popular “top-forty” station and keep it there as long as my aesthetic sensibilities can take it. As with television, popular music reveals much about our contemporary culture. And besides, I’ve grown to like the beat.
Cultural events. Most communities offer opportunities to experience movies, drama, concerts, and visual arts. Nowadays, even those in rural areas enjoy traveling performances; few pastors are completely cut off from these things. Time and money, of course, may limit taking full advantage of what’s available. But when I do see a movie or watch a play or listen to a concert or visit a gallery, I often find my mind stretched and my emotions touched.
Study record
Unless a pastor has a perfect memory, storing and retrieving the fruit of our study will be necessary. Filing systems, I suppose, merit the comment C. S. Lewis made about the devil: the two great errors we make are to think too much or too little about them.
An elaborate system, complete with codes and cross references and computer programs, can create a methodological legalism, causing me to join with the apostle Paul in crying, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:24 nkjv).
But the stories, quotations, and images need to be recorded to be remembered. I keep with me at all times (except in the shower) a small hand-held recorder. It uses a microcassette, which can store 120 minutes of dictation. Many reasonably priced models are on the market, and I would consider myself horribly deprived without one. If the proverbial push came to shove, I would probably trade my entire set of Kittel or maybe even the Church Dogmatics for one.
When I come across something in my reading or have a thought I don’t want to forget or think of an interesting image, I simply reach for my recorder and speak to my secretary, “Susie, a quotation card …” She will then type whatever I tell her on a four-by-six-inch card and add the appropriate bibliographic references I may want to keep.
Before using this method, I might have found something worth remembering, but an argument would immediately ensue: I really should get up, get a piece of paper, and write this down; on the other hand, my shoes are off, my feet are up, and a tired man deserves to relax. The treasure would never get recorded. Now I simply reach for my recorder, push a button, and in seconds it’s accomplished.
What do I do with the cards? I do not file them, at least not immediately. I keep a pile growing for about a year, because a good quotation or illustration can almost always be used in a variety of contexts. Just after I’ve written a bare-bones sermon outline, during the brainstorming part of the preaching process, I shuffle through the stack. This doesn’t take much time; after a few weeks, a card is so familiar that one glance reminds me of its content.
About once a year I force myself to categorize each card and file it according to a specific subject. Through the years the file boxes have accumulated. In the event of a fire, I would probably risk my life to carry them to safety before anything else.
Building the bridge between God and humanity requires disciplined study. The work isn’t always easy, but we have no choice. The Lord deserves our minds as well as our hearts in his great enterprise.
Leonardo da Vinci was once hard at work on a great painting. It was nearly complete when suddenly he called a student to him, gave him the brush, and said, “You finish it.”
The student protested, feeling unworthy.
But da Vinci said, “Will not what I have done inspire you to do your best?”
God’s masterful work of creation and redemption through Jesus Christ inspires me to excel in the difficult task of enlarging the mind to expand the ministry.
Copyright © 1996 by Christianity Today/Leadership
