If you preach a series on the Psalms and every sermon has three points, you may be suffering from acute hardening of the outlines. A cure can be found in Jeffrey Arthurs's new book Preaching with Variety. He notes the variety of ways God communicates in Scripture—poetry, parables, proverbs, epistles, narratives, and more. He points out the varied effects those genres have on recipients and how our preaching can be more powerful if we link sermon form to text form.
The more I learn about nature, the more amazed I am at God's creativity and variety. Just the other night, studying with my seventh grade son, I learned that the Amazon rainforest hosts 20 million species of insects! That's species, not individual bugs. This world bursts with an inventive and sometimes wry display of God's power and glory, and variety is part of that glory.
God communicates with variety. Consider, for instance, the Bible's cornucopia of literary forms—poetry, law, parable, to name a few. Because the Great Communicator communicates with variety in the Bible, shouldn't we mirror that variety in our sermons?
Furthermore, God's preachers—that is, the prophets and witnesses—employed variety. In some cases, they did so under direct instruction, as when God ordered Isaiah to go around barefoot for three years to communicate that Sargon would take Egypt and Cush captive (Isa. 20:1–6). Similarly, God ordered Ezekiel to use object lessons such as miniature siege works, body positions, bread, and a shaved head (Ezek. 4–5).
God the Son certainly communicated with variety. Dialogue, parables, visuals, and "lecture" were common in his teaching. He defined concepts by example more than by creed.
God clearly uses great variety in communication. The question is, Why? The answer is twofold: because God is both artist and persuader.
He expresses himself with skill, and he moves audiences with purpose. The writer of Ecclesiastes speaks for all the writers of the Bible: "The Teacher searched to find just the right [or 'pleasing'] words" (12:10). While individual biblical texts can be placed along a continuum from more aesthetic to less aesthetic, there is in general, as Leland Ryken observes, "a preoccupation among biblical writers with artistry, verbal craftsmanship, and aesthetic beauty."
Their verbal artistry reflects the Artist, and it creates delight and enjoyment for the reader. Such artistry also intensifies impact. God's purposes flow out of his character just as artistry does. He is active as well as beautiful. He is building his kingdom, so the verbal artistry of the Bible is not simply art for art's sake; it is art that accomplishes his purposes.
Jesus certainly moved his listeners toward these destinations. When asked by an expert in the law to define "neighbor," Jesus told a story (Luke 10:25–37). Why? To accomplish something that would have been difficult to accomplish with another form.
He wanted to reframe the discussion, gradually reveal the truth, instruct the lawyer, lead him to understand his own heart, convict him of his values, cause him to ponder the truth, and lead him to faith and repentance. The form of Jesus' communication (parable) was an indispensable component in achieving those goals.
For the Great Communicator, form is not simply the husk surrounding the seed, superfluous and cumbersome; it is more like the architectural design of the Vietnam Memorial, inseparable from meaning and impact.
We know intuitively, of course, that form and content go together. Instead of sending an e-mail, send, for instance, a singing telegram, and you'll see the difference in the receiver's response. Instead of shouting at your kids, whisper. The content may be identical, but the impact will be different.
Form determines the level of participation demanded of the listener. Riddles and parables induce thought—their brevity and laconic quality cause us to ponder. The sports page, on the other hand, with its endless statistics, multiple stories, and breezy style, lends itself to scanning. Advertising jingles work almost subliminally, sticking in our minds like super glue because they hypnotically repeat simple tunes and simple words. Puritan sermons demand concentration lest they numb us by their length and complexity. Readers are sometimes unaware that form prompts their participation, but participate they do, and often without realizing it.
Form's influence may, in fact, be most powerful when it is subtle. When form prompts participation, we are more likely to accept the ideas associated with the form.
Because form shapes meaning, when preachers pay attention to the form of the text, their sermons benefit. We need not slavishly and minutely copy the exact genre of the text. Besides being impossible—for no single sermon can replicate all the dynamics of a text—doing so might also be ill advised, because we stand between two worlds. We communicate with a different audience than the original audience, and sermons must take into account the needs of the current listeners.
The key to genre-sensitive preaching is to replicate the impact of the text, not its exact techniques, although that is the best place to start. A narrative text naturally lends itself to a narrative sermon; a poetic text structured with parallelism naturally lends itself to restatement. But no law tells us that we must use narrative or restatement. We have freedom.
As preachers, we want to say what the text says and do what the text does. What follows are some ideas for how to replicate the impact of five biblical genres.
In exploring these genres, we see there is no such thing as the sermon form. Sermon form can adapt to the form and rhetorical effect of the text, whether the genre be poetry, parable, proverb, narrative, epistle, or even apocalyptic. We have freedom, and the variety that biblical preachers used suggests that we should use that freedom in order to, like God, move audiences with purpose.
Jeffrey Arthurs is associate professor of preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.
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