A Plea for Contrarian Preachers (and Listeners)
I, yet not I, but Christ.
—Paul
During my seminary years, I worked as a Young Life leader to finance my education and develop skill in relational ministry. I quickly realized that my introverted temperament (let’s face it, I was dull) was not typical for Young Life leaders. My first day on the job, another male leader and I walked into a high school cafeteria during lunch hour. A bevy of sophomore girls soon flocked around him. Indicating me, he said, “Oh, this is Rich, one of our new leaders.” A few girls shot me quick, sidelong glances before turning back to him. That day I knew this was not going to be easy! At my first Young Life club meeting, hosted in a home later that week, I planned to fade into the background until I felt more comfortable. In a living room packed with kids, I was sitting out of the way on a windowsill and leaned back so far that I shattered the windowpane! The splintering crash riveted all eyes on me: “Oh, this is Rich, one of our new leaders.”
Trying not to appear awkward as I felt nothing but awkward, I spent that first year slowly and painfully learning the art of meeting kids on their own turf. My fellow leaders thought I was cute in a bumbling sort of way, the Phil Dunphy (Modern Family) or Don Knotts (Andy Griffith Show) of Young Life leaders!
My second year brought a new assignment that would have challenged a veteran. All by myself, I would pioneer a new club in an Episcopalian college-prep high school that catered to the social upper crust across a large metropolitan area. The students were very bright, very rich, and very self-assured. I plunged in, however, and after a few months actually organized a functioning club which some kids attended regularly. One was Greg, a lanky, sensitive boy who, like lots of others at this prestigious school, had parents whose other priorities outdistanced their sixteen-year-old. One Saturday night in January while his parents were away, Greg hanged himself from a basement water pipe.
A few days later, I found myself speaking about Greg’s suicide to the entire student body. Chapel services functioned mostly as assemblies; explicitly Christian content was closely monitored so as not to offend students of other faiths. As I drove to school that cold morning, I wondered what in the world had possessed me to volunteer to speak. What I thought would be a strategic opportunity to offer a witness for Christ now looked like social suicide. Some of the faculty were already skeptical, if not hostile, toward Christianity in general and my presence on campus in particular. I was there only because a few wealthy families too influential to refuse wanted the school exposed to Young Life. I had no experience in speaking before large groups. I wondered if anything I planned to say even made sense. The moment came and, rubbing my sweaty palms together, I walked to the center of the chapel platform without my notes. I talked about how life can peel us like an onion until we get to the very center. Somehow Greg’s center did not hold. None of us would ever know why. It remained for us to think about the center of our own lives. For me, I went on, I had discovered that Jesus Christ offers the center I needed.
As I spoke to the students, they sat attentively. After chapel, student after student came up to thank me for my “great talk.” Faculty members smiled and complimented me as well. The affirmation continued in the cafeteria during lunch hour, often from students I didn’t know. If only for a moment, a nerve had been touched. The gospel had penetrated many who would normally not give the gospel, or me, the time of day. Yet as clearly as I have ever known anything in my life, I knew it was “I, yet not I, but Christ.”
My spine still tingles as I recall this experience thirty-five years ago in that high school auditorium. God spoke through my words. I have felt it many times since, whenever God has encountered others through my preaching. But seldom, if ever, has the distance been so vast between the inadequacy I felt and the reaction I witnessed.
The Paradox of Preaching
Most preachers will tell a similar story. “They were my words, yet people heard Jesus through them!” This is the paradox of preaching. It is the wild territory of “I, yet not I, but Christ.” Preaching that is only my words is dead on arrival in the ears of my people. Yet I must not disparage my words, because they are the only words Jesus has to use. If God’s Word is going to be proclaimed on that particular day in that particular place, it will be through the words my mind and heart create and my voice articulates.
Preaching is a paradox. A preacher with ugly thoughts about a contentious elder in the third row can step up to a pulpit and find his or her stumbling words transformed into the word of God, the same word thundered from Mount Sinai or whispered in a still, small voice, the same word proclaimed by prophets and apostles, the same word revealed incarnate in Jesus Christ. The Second Helvetic Confession proclaims, “Preaching the Word of God is the Word of God.”1 I vividly remember the shock, actually something closer to panic, that this confessional statement first prompted in me. I did not mind if God zapped my sermons to give them extra punch. In fact, I prayed regularly for this to happen. However, to consider that every time I stand up to preach, the very word of God might somehow come forth from my mouth was (and still is) a dizzying proposition!
What we have in view is preaching, not individual sermons. Even this lofty a view of preaching is not carte blanche. While I believe preaching is indeed incarnational, it is not transubstantiation. No assurance is given that every word becomes the word of God. No formulas or procedures, no fail-safe methods of preparation, no techniques followed with scrupulous intensity guarantee it will happen. Preaching remains a mystery, perhaps most of all to its practitioners. Formulas can produce entertaining talks which keep people smiling and appreciative; the word of God is beyond any human control. “The wind blows wherever it pleases” (John 3:8).
Scottish theologian Donald Baillie, in his monumental God Was in Christ, writes about a similar paradox. Christian people give credit to God for the good they do, yet ascribing all to God in no way abrogates personal responsibility: “Never is human action more truly and fully personal, never does the agent feel more perfectly free, than in those moments of which he can say as a Christian that whatever good was in them was not his but God’s.”2
Many of us have witnessed this paradox. We expend enormous effort, yet feel a profound sense that we deserve no credit: “I, yet not I, but Christ.” Baillie moves on to analyze how an action can simultaneously be the result of human effort and divine grace: “It is not as though we could divide the honours between God and ourselves, God doing his part and we doing ours. It is false to this paradox to think of the area of God’s action and the area of human action being delimited, each by the other, and distinguished from each other by a boundary, so that the more of God’s grace there is in my action, the less there is of my own personal action.”3
A Pentecostal preacher once told me that he never worked on his sermons in advance because it quenched the Spirit. As I understood him, his human thoughts would get in the way of the pure word conveyed by the Spirit. For him, Donald Baillie’s boundary between what we do and what God does was clear: he had little to do but let his mouth be God’s vessel. Such a view seems to give the Lord all the credit but actually diminishes God’s power and majesty. The Holy Spirit is reduced to a Western Union operator, transmitting his message over fragile wires that can barely be trusted. This hardly squares with the God of the Bible, who never “channeled” his messages but spoke to the secret hearts of prophets and apostles and, in the mystery of divine grace, trusted these fallible, earthen vessels to deliver his word with power and authority.
Too often, however, our working theology becomes, “I do my part and hope God does his part.” But where does my part end and God’s part begin? Is it the moment when I am delivering the sermon? Receiving insight while grappling with a biblical text in the study? Saving a germinal idea gleaned from a newspaper article? Or is it even earlier, perhaps a youthful experience that set the stage for a significant sermon many years later? Perhaps God was working on my sermons long before I knew I would be a preacher. Preaching is rife with paradox and mystery.
Bill Gates’s Sunday Morning
The key question skeptics used to ask about Christianity was, Is it true? The question asked from many quarters today is, Does it work? When asked why he does not attend a church, Bill Gates replied, “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”4 Churches everywhere promise consumer-minded prospects like Bill Gates big dividends for their time investment: “Join Us This Sunday and Your Life Will Never Be the Same!”
Preachers become vendors in this spiritual street market, each hawking their wares to shoppers who pause for just a moment before strolling on to the next booth. With such a small window of opportunity, sermons must hit felt needs quickly. They must cut to the chase, get down to basics, offer spiritual principles and practical handles that match people’s expectations.
I certainly have done my share of catering to the marketplace. But when will I tackle the large chunks of life of little interest to the market? When will I speak to issues that are not practical? When will I address needs that are not felt? Can I raise questions that have no answers (at least, no easy answers)? But who wants to hear about those confusing, contradictory, or incomprehensible parts of faith most of us wish to ignore or forget? And what preacher in his or her right mind raises more thorny issues to consumers looking for ways to remove the burrs already under their saddles?
Describing the anti-intellectualism of American revivalism, historian John Jefferson Davis writes, “A pragmatic America and a frenetic frontier asked of the sermon only that it work.”5 Pragmatism is often our byword today. Truth is important, of course, but please let it be practical truth that works in my daily life.
I wooed people with practical answers to felt needs for years before I realized I was not really helping them with their basic need: to know God. To my chagrin, just the opposite happened! The pressure to have all the answers not only shrinks the spiritual imagination of both communicators and listeners but stifles wholesome faith. I was peddling a God who was too small, a problem-solving God instead of the awesomely mysterious God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God whom Moses meets in thunder and fire on Mount Sinai is too quickly replaced by a golden calf, “a god without mystery, a god who was there when they needed it.”6
Of course, becoming a disciple of Jesus has positive lifestyle implications. (God does meet our felt needs.) But the biblical goal is never to improve people’s lives. It is, rather, “that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3, emphasis added). “Obviously Christ’s teaching is therapeutic and restorative,” evangelist Ravi Zacharias notes. “But Christ’s teaching is therapeutic because it’s true.”7
While sermons addressing biblical paradox do not “work” in a pragmatic, results-oriented sense, I have argued that paradox does contribute to a maturing life of faith. It offers a reality check, reminding us that God is greater than we will ever comprehend (Isa. 55:8–9). We tend to forget this in a culture where the highest good is getting things done, with God too often just another technology to make our lives a little better. As the stock market has contrarian investors who invest against the direction the market is trending, today the spiritual marketplace in contemporary America calls for contrarian preachers.
The Need for Contrarian Preachers (and Listeners)
My journey as a developing preacher can be described as carving a home in the wilderness. At first, all was new and exotic, a great adventure. An adrenaline-pumping immediacy of staying alive from one Sunday to the next was itself a challenge. New discoveries were around every bend in the trail. Portions of wilderness that looked forbidding when I first arrived were cleared. Habits of study and preparation were formed, styles of delivery developed. While I retained the memory of what this land was like when I first arrived—all wild and menacing and unknown—I had settled in and built a homestead.
This itself is a paradox, for those most alive to the nuances and potentialities of preaching are at home, yet not at home. They know the lay of the land, how to maneuver and get around; yet they have not lost their thirst for the unknown. They dwell in the security of the homestead yet get away when they can to tramp the still-unexplored hills and valleys.
Why is this? Perhaps they realize there is so much, both dangerous and glorious, still out there waiting for them. Perhaps they realize that it is all still wilderness, even the cultivated, built-up parts, in the sense that they cannot control or subdue or package any of it. All they can do is live in it. Living there is a wonderful, holy privilege.
Here is my contention: human life, Christian faith, and honest preaching are all shot through with paradox, not in a way that makes them meaningless but in a way that gives them meaning beyond our comprehension and control. We started this exploration into paradox with Roger Hazelton’s contention: “Faith is like a forest which urges us on and deepens, even as it corrects and satisfies, our thought. By its means we never know God and ourselves wholly, yet we know nevertheless truly. We may see in a glass darkly, but we really do see.”8 This is a manifesto for contrarian preachers!
When we preach into the wilder regions of faith, listeners will rejoice that their preacher is wrestling with issues that deeply perplex them; even if through a glass darkly, they really do see. Preachers will rejoice that they are leading their people deeper into the mystery of knowing God and themselves better—truly, if not wholly.
Contrarian preachers (and listeners) must push back against the pervasive, if often unconscious, desire for a pragmatic god who meets our needs. Contrarian preachers (and listeners) must defend the rationality of their faith but reject any reductionism that drains their faith of its inherent mystery. Contrarian preachers must equip contrarian listeners to discern between absurdity and mystery, confident that genuine mystery lingers on, like glittering crystals after the liquid has evaporated. Contrarian preachers and listeners must stimulate each other’s imagination, hoping that their biblical worldview will grow as well.
We are not adequate for these tasks by ourselves. Contrarian preachers and contrarian listeners need to find one another and encourage one another. Together, they can occasionally leave the familiar homestead behind and take field trips to where their spiritual ancestors encountered God’s mystery.
Reflection Questions
1. Have you ever had an experience, as when the author spoke to the high school students, where you absolutely knew that God was at work?
2. Do you agree that preaching is a paradox? Why or why not?
3. If you are a preacher or teacher, what in this book might be useful as you proclaim the whole counsel of God?
4. If you listen to sermons, what in this book might help you to listen better (or to encourage your preacher)?