#homilectics

[ache-of-saint-vick]

Seriously though I'm all *for* more lay preachers, because becoming one entails catechesis, Biblical literacy, Christian formation, involvement, and generally being comfortable with proclamation. (And we need it desperately.)

But there’s a very big difference between that and amateur preaching, and if I wanted that I’d go to my mom’s UU service when the minister is on vacation.

[ache-of-saint-vick]

public service announcement

Dear seminary/ordained/priestly/discerning peoples:

When you preach about the news,

never assume madness when depravity would suffice

never assume madness when depravity would suffice

never assume madness when depravity would suffice

especially not when a white man with a body count is involved.

Be not led into temptation

please refrain from making psychological judgments

make moral judgments instead

you’re better equipped for that

This has been an important announcement.

[ache-of-saint-vick]

And what is preaching for? The answer comes without hesitation. It is for men's salvation. But the idea of what salvation is has never been entirely uniform or certain; and all through the history of preaching we can see that the character of preaching varied continually, rose or fell, enlarged or narrowed, with the constant variation of... ideas as to what it was to be saved. If salvation was here and now, salvation became a direct appeal to man's present life. If salvation was something future and far away, preaching died into remote whispers and only made itself graphic and forcible by the vivid pictures of torture addressed to the senses whose pain men most easily understood. If to be saved was to be saved from sin, preaching became spiritual. If to be saved was to be saved from punishment, preaching became forensic and economical. If salvation was the elevation of society, preaching became a lecture upon social science.... To the absence of any clear answer to that question, to the entire vagueness as to what [our] danger is, we owe the vagueness to which so many of our preachers preach.

Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching, pp. 32-33

[ache-of-saint-vick]

Doctrine means this,-- truth considered with reference to its being taught. The reason why many men dislike the word "doctrine" is from their dislike of the whole notion of docility which is attached to it. Just as a citizen who is preparing himself for public office considers the law and character of the State not abstractly, but with reference to their application to the people whom he aspires to govern; juts as the student in a normal school learns everything with an under-consciousness that he is going to teach that same thing one day, influencing all the methods of his learning; so the student preparing to be a preacher cannot learn truth as the mere student of theology for its own sake might do. He always feels it reaching out through him to the people to whom he is some day to carry it.... We can see that it must have its dangers. It will threaten the impartiality with which he will seek truth. It will tempt him to prefer those forms of truth which most easily lend themselves to didactic uses, rather than those which bring evidence of being most simply and purely true. That is the danger of all prachers. Against that danger the man meaning to be a preacher must be upon his guard, but he cannot avoid the danger by sacrificing the habit out of which the danger springs.

Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching, pp. 45-46

[ache-of-saint-vick]

[A] result of this conception of preaching as the telling of a message is that it puts us into right relations with all of historic Christianity. The message never can be told as if we were the first to tell it. He who tells it to-day is backed by all the multitude who have told it in the past. He is companied by all those who are telling it now.... The identity of the Church in all times consists in the identity of the message which she has always had to carry from her Lord to men. All outward utterances of the perpetual identity of the Church are valuable only as they assert this real identity. There is the real meaning of the perpetuation of old ceremonies, the use of ancient liturgies, and the clinging to what seems to be apostolic types of government.

Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching (1877), p. 18-19

[ache-of-saint-vick]

I cannot help begging you, in the ministry which is before you, to beware of excusing your own failures by foolish talk about the obstinate aversion which the age has to the preaching of the Gospel. It is the meanest and shallowest kind of excuse. The age has no aversion to preaching as such. If that prove to be the case, look for the fault first in your preaching, and not in your age.

Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching (1877), p. 13

[ache-of-saint-vick]

Also, related to tonight

In case of religious vocation, I am absolutely going to do something about the quality of preaching.