6. Skeletons in the Pulpit, Cadavers in the Pews
Skeletons in the Pulpit, Cadavers in the Pews
Grandma Thatcher was in church Sunday morning in her usual place on the aisle, fifth pew back, piano side of the sanctuary, the place that’s been hers for over thirty years. She had smiled at everybody as she hobbled in; and when they asked her how she was, she said, “Oh, fine—just fine!”
But she wasn’t fine. As usual, her unsaved husband, George, had sent her off to church with curses ringing in her ears. Before slamming the front door, he had uttered his standard Lord’s Day malediction: “Why don’t you just move down there!” But that wasn’t all. Grandma Thatcher’s body hurt in some new places that day, and she was hoping that her visit to the doctor on Wednesday would help bring relief. She dreaded the arrival of winter and was praying that fuel prices wouldn’t go up again. If it weren’t for her Lord, her large-print Bible, and her Christian friends, Grandma Thatcher would have given up a long time ago.
When Pastor Bowers stepped into the pulpit to preach, Grandma Thatcher silently prayed, “Father, give him something special for me. I need it!” The text was Genesis 9, and the message was the twenty-second in a series on Genesis that Pastor Bowers called “Beginning at the Beginnings.” (Some of the members were wishing he would start thinking about ending at the endings.) The sermon was entitled, “God Talks to Noah.” Pastor Bowers read the chapter and then, rather proud of his wordsmanship, gave the congregation his main points:
As some of the saints dutifully wrote the outhne in the space provided on the back page of their worship folders, Grandma Thatcher breathed a disappointed sigh, “Last week it was all S’s. Today it’s all CP’s.” She settled back in the pew, turned the preacher off and began meditating on the psalm she’d read early that morning before George had gotten up to menace her day.
A few weeks later, Pastor Bowers was away at District Conference; and the guest preacher was a retired missionary who had served many years in the Andean mountains of South America. Oddly enough—or providentially—his text was from Genesis 9, and the title in the worship folder was “Always Look for the Rainbow.” Grandma Thatcher hoped the sermon would be as interesting as the title.
The speaker began his sermon by describing a rainstorm he’d experienced while on a missionary trip in the mountains. The congregation chuckled when he said, “I wish Noah had been with us. We could have used him!”
Then he started talking about the storms in human lives, and the compassion in his voice convinced the congregation that he’d been through more than one storm himself. “Storms are a part of life; God made it that way,” he said. “But I’ve learned a secret that’s helped me all these years, and it’s still helping me: Always look for the rainbow. The world looks for the silver lining and sings ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow,’ but we Christians have something far better than that. Did you ever meet the three men in the Bible who saw rainbows?”
He talked about Noah who saw the rainbow after the storm. “Maybe you’re going through a storm right now and you’re wondering if the Lord even cares about you. Trust Him! The day will come when you’ll see the rainbow and know that He’s been faithful to work out His purposes for you.”
Then he had them turn in their Bibles to Ezekiel 1, and he spoke about how Ezekiel saw the rainbow in the midst of the storm. It was a difficult day. Ezekiel had been exiled to Babylon, and the city of Jerusalem and the temple were about to be destroyed, but God was still on the throne. “You can’t close your eyes to the storm and pretend it’s not there,” said the preacher, “but you can look for the rainbow in the storm. It’s there!”
His third example was from Revelation 4:1-3, where he read to them of the Apostle John’s experience. “Noah saw the rainbow after the storm, Ezekiel saw it in the midst of the storm, but John saw it before the storm. And John saw a complete circle, not just a bow. He saw that God was on His throne, and that meant that everything was under control.” Then the speaker turned to Revelation 6 and showed them Jesus Christ at the throne, and he preached the Gospel to them.
He closed his Bible, smiled at the listening congregation, and said: “Dear friends, you and I will experience storms until we are called to heaven; and then all storms will cease. Expect the storms and don’t be afraid of them, because God is always faithful. Just remember God’s message to us today: Always look for the rainbow. Depend on the faithfulness of God. Sometimes He’ll show you the rainbow after the storm, sometimes during the storm, and sometimes before the storm. But He will never fail you.”
As Grandma Thatcher limped home, she asked herself, “Why do I feel so nourished and satisfied down inside? Why is my heart so calm and joyful? I’m not even afraid to meet George when I get home, and the doctor’s appointment doesn’t bother me now. What has happened to me?”
What had happened to her and to other members of the congregation, including the young people, who left the sanctuary that morning sensing that God had met with them? True, their minds had been instructed; but Pastor Bowers always gave them plenty of Bible facts to think about, sometimes using Hebrew and Greek. True, their wills had been challenged; but this time they really wanted to practice what the preacher challenged them to do. Trusting the faithfulness of God seemed the most natural thing to do. What was different about the guest speaker’s sermon? He had fed their imaginations.
Starved Imaginations and Disobedience
In his preaching ministry, Pastor Bowers took skeletons into the pulpit and ended up with cadavers in the pews—undernourished saints who had nothing to chew on but outhnes. The guest missionary speaker took both concepts and images into the pulpit and wove them together in such a way that his listeners’ ears became eyes and they saw the truth. In seeing the truth, their imagination was cleansed and nourished; and they were spiritually satisfied and encouraged within.
I can’t prove it statistically, but I have a feeling that many, if not most, of the people in our churches suffer from starved imaginations. In fact, most people outside the church are also afflicted; and the evidences of this malady in our society aren’t difficult to discover. The most glaring evidence that something is wrong in our churches is the great gulf that exists between what the church preaches and what the church practices. “Religious sin” and starved imaginations go together.
In recent years, the media have been having a heyday exposing the sins of religious leaders; and they aren’t finished yet. Reporters have uncovered everything from embezzlement and outright lying to extramarital affairs and child sexual abuse. But what the media people may not realize is that their discoveries are just the tip of the iceberg. Local congregations are having their share of quiet scandals among Bible-studying church members who have professed to be Christians for a long time. In one evangelical church after another, men and women who have listened to biblical sermons since childhood are admitting to filthy sins that they’ve covered up for years. One youth leader said to me, “The kids I work with claim to be saved; but if they’re saved at all, it’s only from the waist up.”
Why is it that professed Christians dutifully sit in church and listen to Bible sermons and then go out and live like pagans? Pastors grieve over this dilemma and wonder if it’s really worthwhile to study, pray, and preach. There may be no one simple answer to this complex problem, but I have a suspicion that one factor is the starved imagination of congregations. These people have studied the Bible and listened to sermons, but the truths of Scripture have never penetrated their imaginations. They’ve packed a lot of Bible facts into their heads and are able to regurgitate these facts on demand, but the truths about God and the Christian life have never affected their imaginations. While the responsibility for their disobedience is totally their own, the responsibility for making the proclamation of God’s truth exciting and personal rests with those of us who preach. The “hearers of the Word” can’t easily become “doers” if their “hearing” doesn’t become “seeing.”
“When you stop to think about it,” wrote Northrop Frye in The Educated Imagination, “you soon realize that our imagination is what our whole social life is really based on. . . . In practically everything we do, it’s the combination of emotion and intellect that we call imagination that goes to work.”[1] Scripture compares the imagination to a womb in which we give birth to the images that direct our lives. When we yield to temptation, it’s because we hunger for “the bait” and imagine what it would be like to enjoy it. “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:15).
It’s possible to be “pregnant with evil” (Ps. 7:14), and the womb is the imagination that is impregnated by temptation. “They conceive trouble and give birth to evil,” said Job’s friend Eliphaz; “their womb fashions deceit” (Job 15:35). The Prophet Isaiah echoed these words in Isaiah 59:4. But it’s also possible for the imagination to be “impregnated” with the holy and the beautiful! When the truth of God’s Word penetrates our listeners’ imaginations so they can see it and feel it, then the Holy Spirit can use our sermons to bring about the inner changes necessary for the development of spiritual character.
Balanced Preaching and Balanced Spiritual Growth
In her fascinating book, Metaphor and Meaning in Psychotherapy, Ellen Y. Siegelman explores the connection between metaphors and psychological healing. She maintains that the inner life can’t be changed unless feeling (“affect”) and understanding (“cognition”) are connected. My conviction is that this connection involves the use of the imagination and metaphorical images. Dr. Siegelman writes: “Cognition without affect is simply an intellectualization that will not hold; affect without cognition is just a feeling-state without a home.”[2]
Let’s examine that statement and see how it applies to preaching. If a person’s life is to be manageable and meaningful, the intellect and the emotions must be united; and this union is formed partly by the imagination. Religion that’s all feeling is shallow and extremely unpredictable, “a feeling-state without a home.” The person lives on a roller coaster and is spiritually “high” one day and down in the depths the next day, and the depths keep getting deeper. However, religion that’s all cognition is cold and calculating and lacks the excitement and enjoyment that ought to accompany faith in the living God.
Right-brain religion generates a lot of heat, and left-brain religion generates a lot of light; and it’s through the imagination that the twain can meet. Preaching that involves the imagination as well as the mind and the emotions will encourage balanced spiritual growth. Grandma Thatcher understood the Grand Canyon of difference between reading an outhne on the back of the bulletin and seeing the rainbow in the storm.
Further, we must not separate personal morality from the image-making faculty within us that we call imagination. No Christian rises any higher than the beauty and quality of the pictures that hang in the gallery of his or her mind. I agree with Philip Keane that “we need a moral theology for the right side of the brain (visual imagination) as well as for the left side of the brain (logical principles).”[3] It’s significant that the reasonable lectures people are giving about sexual promiscuity and AIDS are doing very little to change attitudes or habits. When it comes to these matters, many people think with their glands and not with their brains. Imagination is on the throne and reason is in the dungeon.
During the “Pearly Gate” scandals, I heard a television reporter say about a media preacher, “I guess it’s Elmer Gantry all over again.” He was referring to the 1927 Sinclair Lewis novel about a hypocritical preacher who lived a scandalous life and used religion as the cover-up. “You’ve picked the wrong book,” I said to my TV set. “Sure, there’s some of Elmer Gantry involved, but the real explanation of the scandals is in The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
Dorian Gray was a handsome, wealthy, young Londoner who sold his soul to the devil provided the evil one would keep him young and handsome. As he became more and more wicked, Dorian Gray noted that a beautiful portrait of himself was gradually becoming ugly, so he hung it in an attic room and locked the door. As his diabolical life brought defilement and death to several innocent people, the hidden portrait became even more repulsive, his face revealing a record of the hideous condition of his own soul. Dorian Gray decided that the portrait must be destroyed, so he plunged a knife into it. When he did, the face in the portrait lost its ugliness and became the face of a handsome youth. But Dorian Gray was found dead on the floor, a withered and ugly old man with a knife in his heart.
People see different messages in Oscar Wilde’s novel, but to me, among other things, it’s an allegory about the imagination, the picture gallery of the mind. It dramatically illustrates the warning in 1 John 1: Don’t claim to be obedient to God if you’re walking in the darkness. The longer we pretend, the uglier our true character becomes and the more the light becomes darkness. But the truth will come out. The picture hanging in the attic is what we really are, and one day that locked door will be opened.
We cannot emphasize too much the power of metaphor to affect personal morality. In her insightful article, “The Moral Necessity of Metaphor,” novelist Cynthia Ozick reminds us that “metaphor is one of the chief agents of our moral nature, and . . . the more serious we are in life, the less we can do without it.”[4] Harvey Cox writes, “The picturing, symbolizing, world-view-making faculty of human beings appears to interact with an individual’s moral reasoning at every stage of human growth. People tend to make moral choices on the basis of what are often vague, precognitive images of what the world is like and how they fit into it.”[5]
Our preaching must help people put into the gallery of their minds pictures that reveal “the beauty of holiness” (Ps. 29:2, KJV). We must help them see the glory of God’s truth and the beauty of the Savior who is the standard of holiness for all of us. It isn’t enough that we explain the Bible and exhort people to obey it. Remember what Halford Luccock said? “The purpose of preaching is not to make people see reasons, but visions.”[6]
Walter Brueggemann speaks for all of us when he says, “I have found myself discovering that mostly I do not need more advice, but strength. I do not need new information, but the courage, freedom and authorization to act on what I already have been given in the gospel.”[7] Telling people what they ought to do without motivating them to do it is only to add to their burdens. That was the approach of the scribes and Pharisees; it was not the approach of Jesus (Matt. 23:1-4).
Then Brueggemann adds: “The deep places in our lives—places of resistance and embrace—are not ultimately reached by instruction. Those places of resistance and embrace are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.”[8] That explains why Jesus so often said, “The kingdom of heaven is like. . . .” It also explains why the common people heard Him gladly and why so many lives were transformed when He preached the Word of God.
“Television is chewing gum for the eyes.”
“In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.”
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.”