mgpcpastor's blog

The substance of preaching does not address a vacuum, speaking information into an impartial void. The prophetic voice of preaching is a counter-narrative to an entrenched conviction that has embraced a false narrative as true, and any other narratives as threats. The body of the sermon is not simply a point of view. It is light that dispels darkness, it is life that contrasts with the living death of the world.
From Preaching Jeremiah by Walter Brueggemann:

… the sermonic “meat” of Jeremiah is truth-telling that voids a fraudulent, death-embracing world. In this particular presentation, we being with the claim of Jeremiah about truth-telling and move to the derivative conviction that faithful preaching consists in truth-telling that anticipates and effects the relinquishment of what is fraudulent and filled with pretence. Preaching does so with their awareness that fraudulent pretence is the key characteristic of the world around us. Such a characteristic is a fraud that is subject to abolition by the overriding truth of God’s steadfast love, mercy, and righteousness, or alternatively, by the cruciform truth of Christ’s foolishness, weakness, and poverty.

Preaching Jeremiah, Walter Brueggemann, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2020, pg 85.

A sermon conclusion that gives the impression that engagement with the text has been completed and implies that all that remains is a series of steps which the preacher has discerned and provided doesn’t invite ongoing engagement with the text.
A conclusion is not the end of the conversation with the text, it is the beginning point that invites and directs the hearers to an ongoing exchange.
From Preaching Jeremiah by Walter Brueggemann:

… the wonderment of every sermon conclusion is how to permit the sermon to continue its work after the preacher has finished talking. At its best, the sermon is a rhetorical offer that continues to reverberate, giving the listening congregation room and motivation for ongoing processing, but with enough “meat” to suggest a direction for that ongoing process of reimagining, redescrbiing, and redeciding.

Preaching Jeremiah, Walter Brueggemann, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2020, pg 38.

In Preaching Jeremiah Walter Brueggemann seeks to ground preaching in the context of Biblical communication.
This is not so much stylistic, but rather a recognition that relying on literary artifice to build a bridge between speaker and hearers softens the reality that the proclamation of God’s kingdom is a “word from beyond”.

…sermons do not begin upon the moment of utterance. They have been under preparation long and deep, slow and hard, all a collage of long living mobilised in a moment.
I am aware that this is all quite remote from the preaching that is possible in most preaching venues among us. We are so “horizontal” that a word from the divine council strikes us as odd. We are so democratic that authorised words sound odd and irregular. Truth to power is risky, and who wants to be the one to say, “Until the exile”? Perhaps, then, none of this can count among us. Or perhaps, conversely, it is a trace of recover, of a way of utterance that is as strange and new as the Bible itself.
There is in preaching of a textual kind a burden of truth that refuses denial, a burden of hope that refuses despair. A society deeply inured to denial and despair is not hospitable to such utterance.

Preaching Jeremiah, Walter Brueggemann, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2020, pgs. 34-35.