426 - Preaching the Christ-Life Story

Preaching the Christ-Life Story
By Thomas H. Troeger

WE all bring certain values, assumptions, associations, and personal predilections to the listening and reading of sermons. Between our childhood experience and our adult theology, we formulate, consciously or unconsciously, an expectation of what a sermon should or should not be.

With this in mind, let me comment on one or two major features of a contemporary preacher with a flair for dramatizing in words and visual images familiar episodes in the life of Jesus. I'm referring to Fred Speakman's new book of sermons, privately printed but worthy of public commendation.*

If your taste runs to doctrinal or expository preaching, or a style that engages primarily the rational faculties of the listener, then you may be put off by these poetic, imaginative narratives that embroider the central events of Christ's life with metaphor and fictional characters. But if you are taken with the storyteller's art, with the eye alert to the details of human interaction and the play of light and shadow across the landscape, then this may be a volume that can enrich your faith and give you a new glimpse of the ancient gospel witness.

I am personally one who relishes the poetic approach, and that inevitably slants my response to this book. I delight in a preacher who can employ the sympathetic fallacy of a poet to evoke the mood of Good Friday evening ". . . the storm was passing, the gloom was thinning overhead, and the sunset sky showed an apricot hue, patch-worked by shreds of refugee clouds running before the wind that soon would sweep it clean" (p. 81).

Some readers would find this poetic embroidery superfluous to the Gospel. But where it serves to heighten the sense of drama and pull us into the power of the narrative, as it does here, I think it is an effective sermonic device. Furthermore, it witnesses to the fact that Christ redeems all of creation. By including the sky and other natural phenomena, the preacher suggests the cosmic dimension of salvation without simply gabbing about it at an abstract level.

Even more effective than this lively descriptive writing are those passages in which Speakman lets the narrative line of the characters break into a simple but searching exploration of life's ultimate meanings. For example, Jesse Benhadad, the narrator of the opening sermon

Thomas H. Troeger is Associate Professor of Preaching and Parish, Colgate Rochester Divinity School. A graduate of Yale and Colgate Rochester, he is the author of Creating Fresh Images for Preaching (1982). Active in the Academy of Homiletics and the North American Academy of Liturgy, Dr. Troeger will be publishing in March, with a colleague, Carol Doran, a new book on worship, Open to Glory.
* He Dwelt Among Us, by Frederick B. Speakman. Published by the Third Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15232. Pp. 102; 1982; $ 10.00.

427 - Preaching the Christ-Life Story

entitled, "Yes, I Remember Bethlehem," probes that overworked phrase, "There was no room for them in the inn," without using it and without stooping to cliché. "How are you ever going to know life's moments when they come, Luke? The great hours, the shining hours, the ones that, later, can mean much-they come walking up looking like any other hour. And always when you're busy. Always when you're so convinced that something else you're doing is so important. And you let them go on and never know" (p. 4).

Here is Jesus, in a later sermon, speaking to that seeker of the night who is in all of us: "Is your faith in God or in yourself, Nicodemus? Did you want the gifts of mystery and wonder, or the small change of explanations? Do you need God to save you as he knows you to be, or do you want to confine God to what you want him to be" (p. 54)? In this and many other passages the narrative of the sermon moves out of the pulpit into our own lives and addresses us with the great questions of faith, and there is not much more that one can ask of any preacher.

Despite my appreciation for these moments of revelation, I have a deep reservation about the book. The very poetic style that gives these sermons power sometimes obscures the Gospel by creating a nimbus of golden speech around the raw truth of the ancient witness. This is particularly apparent in Speakman's romanticized description of Christ.

At one level, the author disavows glamorizing the appearance of Jesus. A character says of another: "'I cannot hear him describe our Lord as if he were some shining godlet like the Greek's Apollo, dropped to earth to walk among us, never quite a mortal, always a God incognito" (p. 44). Yet in that same sermon we are given a Hollywood type version of Jesus, a twentieth century American "godlet" "I have never, nor do I expect again to see, as handsome a man. Much taller than most Jews. And powerfully built. Where you Greeks get the notion he was slender, I'll never know. He had hair so dark an auburn shade, you hardly noticed the auburn except out of doors, a color of hair legend tells us that King David himself had. Nor shall I understand how anyone could have characterized him as a Man of Sorrows, aquainted with grief. Later, perhaps, yes, but much later" (p. 46). The last sentence might preserve the tradition that Christ as the suffering servant "had no comeliness nor beauty . . ." except that even the sermons dealing with the crucifixion insist on making a heroic, epic figure of the tortured and broken Jesus.

A soldier, present at the end, says of Jesus: "He had good shoulders too, didn't he. Good forearms too. I'd never have guessed him that powerfully built until they stripped [him] . . ." (p. 82). And we are told that Jesus was flogged, "He'd shake his head as if shaking off the pain and turn and look at Proclus - but never a tear, never a glare, never a curse, as if wondering how many others Proclus had flogged this brutally" (p. 85).

This sounds gnostic to me. For if Christ is fully human-and the rest

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of Speakman's words strive to concretize the human reality of Christ's age-then this picture makes no sense. Surely a man who nearly sweat blood praying over the prospect of his death the night before would be less than stoical when the lash ripped into his back. This is no mere quibble about dramatizing the Gospel. I accept the validity of an imaginative approach in sermons, and I praise Speakman when he brings it off with literary and homiletical skill. But he lessens the power of his preaching by insisting on a tall, handsome, muscular Jesus, as if the values of our popular culture held a clue to the mysterious power of God's redeeming us.

As I said at the beginning, we all bring certain preferences to the listening of sermons. Mine are showing clearly in my critique of Speakman's vision of Christ. Perhaps other readers will find the Savior they know and love in these pages. I closed the book feeling an appreciation for the glimpses of truth that flashed here and there, but disappointed that the preacher's poetic gifts did not sustain a vision of Christ closer to the muscle and bone of the broken humanity he came to save.