Stick with the story

EVERY DAY, Christians are sorting through their narrative options and claiming an identity as followers of Jesus Christ. On Sunday the preacher helps them in this task by means of a poetic activity. The preacher makes (poiein) words, approximately 1,500 of them on a Sunday morning, 3 million in a career, and over the long haul of ministry speaks into existence an alternative world.

Theologian John Snow says the pastoral counselor helps fashion a world in which Christian symbols make sense. This is also true of the preacher, who Sunday after Sunday patiently and often unspectacularly crafts a world in which the personages, events and radical claims of the gospel ring true, a world in which the risen Christ is a genuine factor in the daily lives of his followers. The sermon's narrative runs continuously like the old serial matinees at the movies, but the preacher experiences the sermon as an artistic and religious endeavor that must be repeated every week.

Generations ago, G. K. Chesterton was promoting the gospel to an industrial age that conceived of the world as a self-sustaining machine. In a delightful passage in Orthodoxy Chesterton insists that even if life does proceed with a predictable pattern, that does hot mean that God is not active as a creator:

   It might be true that the sun
   rises regularly because he never
   gets tired of rising. His routine
   might be due, not to a lifelessness,
   but to a rush of life. The thing I
   mean can be seen ... in children,
   when they find some game or joke
   that they specially enjoy. A child
   kicks his legs rhythmically through
   excess, not absence, of life. Because
   children have abounding vitality,
   because they are in spirit
   fierce and free, therefore they want
   things repeated and unchanged.
   They always say, "Do it again"; and
   the grown-up person does it again
   until he is nearly dead. For grown-up
   people are not strong enough to
   exult in monotony. But perhaps
   God is strong enough to exult in
   monotony. It is possible that God
   says every morning, "Do it again" to
   the sun; and every evening, "Do it
   again" to the moon. It may not be
   automatic necessity that makes all
   daisies alike; it may be that God
   makes every daisy separately, but
   has never got tired of making them.
   It may be that He has the eternal
   appetite of infancy.

Preaching is one of God's "do it again" activities. The sermon is a repetitive practice that has changed little in 20 centuries, but it is also a new creation that no one could produce on a weekly basis were it not for the Almighty's "eternal appetite of infancy."

When the adopted child repeatedly asks her parents to recount the events surrounding her adoption, the story must remain the same. And woe to the one who introduces omissions or changes in the sacred formula. "And then of all the babies in the orphanage, you chose me, right?"

Could parents ever tire of telling that story? Would they ever dare substitute another for it? If telling God's story strikes us as repetitious, that is because it is. It is repetitious the way the Eucharist is repetitious, the way a favorite melody or gestures of love are repetitious, the way the mercies of God that come unbidden every day are repetitious.

When the community gathers around its table, one of its representatives narrates a particular story, either of deliverance from Egypt or of a Passover meal laden with the solemn promise of a new covenant. The community does not substitute a new formula or a better story for the sake of innovation but recites this story as faithfully as possible. "Then of all the peoples on earth," say the Jews every Sabbath, "you chose us, right?"

Such stories do not entertain, they do something far better. They sustain. They do not inform, they form those who hear and share them for a life of faithfulness.

Preaching participates in this age-old chain of repetition, sustenance and formation. How is it then that we claim the sermon as a work of art, given the unoriginality of its basic components and the conventionality of its expression? If one's notion of art is limited to what is new, preaching the old story is not art. If the idea of art is restricted to poetic self-expression, then preaching the church's gospel in public does not qualify. If art means inspirational stories and pretty metaphors, there is so much in the Bible that is neither inspirational nor pretty that biblical preaching, at least, will probably not be mistaken for art.

But if your idea of art is something the creature, who knows she is a creature, sings back to the Creator with something of the Creator's own pizzazz (as Annie Dillard put it), then preaching has the potential, at least, to be more like art and less like an endowed lecture series. The preacher makes a small, shaped offering of truth back to the Truth itself. If you think of art as part discipline, part craft and part mystery, we may be on to something.