18. Taking Things Apart and Putting Things Together

18. Taking Things Apart and Putting Things Together

Chapter Eighteen

Taking Things Apart and Putting Things Together

As important as outhnes are to preaching, we must remember that an outhne isn’t necessarily a sermon. Of course, I can’t criticize outhning too much because I’ve published outhnes on every chapter in the New Testament, as well as most of the chapters in the Old Testament.[1] I’m grateful for the excellent instruction I received in seminary on how to analyze and exegete a text and then develop an outhne. But now I realize that a message doesn’t result just because I’ve outhned a text, added an introduction and conclusion, and given the whole thing a clever title. I’m sure somebody told me this when I was a student; but for some reason, I didn’t grab it or it didn’t grab me. Exegesis and analysis are important preliminary steps in the process of giving birth to a sermon. Bypass them and you have nothing worth saying; depend only on them and you won’t know how to say it effectively. Exegesis and analysis are launching pads, not parking lots; and it’s imagination that fuels the rocket.

Preachers who depend on outhnes to change people’s lives need to face several arresting facts.

1. The Bible wasn’t written that way. Some parts of the Bible, such as Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, are an outhner’s delight. But what about Ecclesiastes, with its seemingly meandering observations on life? Or Proverbs, with its many changing topics? Or 1 John, with its cyclical development of several repeated themes?[2] The Lord does all things decently and in order, but there’s no evidence that the Holy Spirit gave the biblical writers outhnes to follow as they wrote the inspired Scriptures.[3]

Nor is there evidence that the sermons recorded in the Bible all fit a common inspired homiletical pattern. Five preachers analyzing Peter’s sermon at Pentecost would probably produce five different outhnes. If preaching is “truth through personality,” then the same truths will be “packaged” differently by different preachers. Jeremiah doesn’t preach like Isaiah, nor Paul like Peter; and no preacher in Scripture presents the truth exactly the way Jesus did.[4]

I fear that the current profusion of “study Bibles” may give people two erroneous ideas: first, that God can’t speak to us from His Word unless we get “professional help”; and second, that the most important thing you can do with the Scripture is to outhne it. While marginal notes and textual outhnes may help us grasp some of the basic facts of Scripture and thus better understand them, there is more to studying the Bible than amassing facts. T.S. Eliot reminded us “that a study of anatomy will not teach you how to make a hen lay eggs.”[5] Exegesis empties language and enriches us with facts; but imagination fills language and yields nourishing truths. If we’re going to preach effectively, it isn’t enough to take things apart; we must also put them back together with meaning and creativity. Analysis and exegesis are important, and good outhnes can be very useful; but we must beware lest (to use Wordsworth’s phrase) we “murder to dissect.” We must also beware lest we impose upon the text our own artificial design that imprisons the truth instead of liberates it. Finally, we must remember that our people’s understanding of an outhne is no guarantee that they have grasped the spiritual truth of the Word or been changed by the Spirit of God.[6] I discussed this in the first section of this book, so there’s no reason to go over the territory again.

2. Truth isn’t always discovered that way. “Homiletics is the science, of which preaching is the art, of which the sermon is the product.” I heard Dr. Lloyd M. Perry make that statement often in his homiletics classes in seminary, and I agree with it. As with most skills, preaching is both a science and an art; and woe unto the preacher who forgets this fact! It takes both information and imagination, analysis and synthesis, logic and intuition, to discover God’s truth and give birth to a message.

It comes as a surprise to some people to learn that the scientist depends on intuition and imagination as well as on experimental investigation. “To try to deal with all matters by logico-scientific language is as self-defeating as to try to capture water in a net, or a breeze in a bag,” wrote Philip Wheelwright.[7] On Sept. 5, 1851, Thoreau wrote in his journal: “All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.”[8] Investigation amasses the factual data, but imagination and intuition discover the pattern that gives meaning to the data. Walt Whitman’s “learn’d astronomer” forgot this truth and lost at least one listener.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.[9]

I must confess that I have occasionally been tempted to steal out of the sanctuary-turned-lecture-room, where the greatness and glory of God were being concealed by biblical facts that had become blinders instead of lenses.[10] “The highest truths are not reached by analysis,” said Hugh Black. “The deepest appeal is not made to logic but to imagination, not to intellect but to heart. . . . When science has done its best, or its worst, we need the poet, the prophet, the seer to interpret nature to us, not by analysis but by constructive imagination.”[11]

Again, let me assure you that I’m not suggesting we abandon exegesis and analysis, but only that we stop preaching our learned notes and logical outhnes and stop calling them sermons. People can get very hungry while we’re reading them the list of ingredients on the cereal box or the recipes in the cookbook.

Professor and poet Marvin Bell, in giving advice to writers, also gives some good advice to preachers: “The difficulty of writing [substitute “preaching”] lies in turning from our reasonable, pragmatic selves long enough to idle our way into the imagination.”[12] Also true of some sermons is what novelist and short-story writer Nancy Hale wrote about novels: “The dead hand of research lies heavy on too many novels. The part most alive in them comes out of imagination.”[13]

It’s not a question of investigation vs. imagination, as though these two approaches to discovering truth were adversaries. All honest investigation includes imagination, including the investigations now going on in scientific laboratories. The creative scientist uses “models” to help him manipulate abstract concepts and discover things that might otherwise elude him. “These models,” writes Eva Feder Kittay, “must be understood as extended metaphors—not literally true, but useful representations of the phenomena which often lead to fruitful theoretic conceptions and new empirical discoveries.”[14]

I’ve touched on two difficulties connected with limiting messages to “logical outhnes”: the Bible wasn’t written that way, and truth isn’t always discovered that way. There’s a third difficulty:

3. Life is rarely lived that way. In the November 1884 issue of Longman’s Magazine, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculated.”[15] In contrasting “real life” with a work of art, Stevenson may have exaggerated a bit to make his point, but the point is well-taken. The drama of life is difficult, and we don’t always get to choose the scenery or write the script.

When our people assemble to worship, they move out of the confusion, ugliness, and disarray of everyday life into the order and beauty of liturgy, which includes a sermon, carefully organized and outhned. But for too many people, the experience of worship is an escape from reality instead of an encounter with reality, an encounter that might give them a deeper understanding of God and His will for their lives. You’ll recall that I suggested earlier in this book that fantasy escapes reality in an alternate world, while imagination penetrates reality and helps us better understand God, ourselves, and the world around us. Worship that is built on fantasy is only religious entertainment and provides only temporary escape from the world we live in. Worship built on the sanctified imagination is enrichment and leads to changed lives that can cope with today’s world.

Certainly our sermons must be organized, for God is not the author of confusion. But if we fabricate every text into a tidy homiletical package, even if the passage isn’t that tidy, we may end up giving our people a false impression about the life of faith. They may start believing that the people who wrote the Bible, or who lived what’s written in the Bible, experienced life as “a work of art” and somehow escaped the “illogical, abrupt and poignant” experiences that people face today.

“The strange thing about Scripture is that it does not aim to make us understand doctrines in a systematic way,” wrote Watchman Nee. “Perhaps it would have been better if Paul and the others had got together to provide a detailed handbook of Christian doctrines. But God did not permit this. How easily He could have settled some of our theological arguments, but it seems He loves to confuse those who only approach the Bible intellectually. He wants to prevent men from merely getting hold of doctrines. He wants truth to get hold of them.”[16]

Life is filled with contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities; and an intellectual and analytical approach to preaching simply won’t meet the needs of the people. This is where metaphor comes in. People feel isolated when we deal with abstract concepts, but they feel right at home when we paint pictures and they find themselves in those pictures. Terence Hawkes explains it this way:

Classical art is concerned to point out the balanced harmony existing in a well-ordered nature. Its basic principle is one of decorum, whereby elements are fitted to their proper classes and types, which are carefully distinguished. . . . The Romantic concern is the depiction of a unity that lies underneath surface distinctions, and which ignores clear-cut boundaries.[17]

Like life itself, metaphors aren’t tidy or logical; but they help us grasp that “underlying unity” that helps give meaning to life. “As for metaphor,” writes Northrop Frye, “where you’re really saying ‘this is that,’ you’re turning your back on logic and reason completely, because logically two things can never be the same thing and still remain two things.”[18]

So, when we use biblical metaphors in our preaching, we’re admitting that life isn’t always orderly and logical, obedient to “clear-cut boundaries.” But we’re also telling people that there’s an underlying unity revealed by the metaphor, and that they can “put themselves into the picture” and receive God’s help.

Our Lord saw the people of His day “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36); and He presented Himself to them as “the good shepherd” who would love them to the extent of dying for them (John 10). The people who identified with the “sheep metaphor” were able to identify also with the “shepherd metaphor” and thus trust the Lord for salvation and security. “Metaphor uses the language of sense experience to lead us into the world of the unseen: faith, guilt, mind, God,” says Eugene Peterson. “The visible and invisible, put asunder by sin, are joined by metaphor.”[19]

When I was pastoring in Chicago, I received a phone call one evening from a young lady who was threatening to commit suicide. She kept saying, “I did everything he told me to do and it didn’t work!” After much patient listening, I finally discovered that she had attended a seminar on Christian living where she had learned some “sure-fire formulas” for solving life’s problems. She put the formulas into practice, but nothing came out right; so she concluded that the trouble lay with her and that nothing would ever go right for her. The logical thing to do was to end it all. We who minister to broken people sometimes wish that life were a tidy little package and that life’s problems could all be solved with our neat little “sermon formulas,” but such desires are only a mirage. In our preaching, we must give our people something more than well-groomed outhnes that suggest that life is simple and we have the answers. “The mind craves nothing so much as a closed system,” wrote John Peale Bishop, “and the writer’s [preacher’s] mind is no exception; and yet he should, at whatever cost of violence, constantly set against any system . . . the spontaneity and variety of life.”[20]

4. Communication rarely works that way. It takes a great deal of naivete for us to believe that what we say always conveys what we mean, or that our listeners receive our words whole and undamaged, like newly minted coins. Words are not coins. Words are not even arbitrary signs that never change their meaning or value. “[Words] are animals, alive and with a will of their own,” wrote Guy Davenport. “Put together, they are invariably less or more than their sum . . . asked to be neutral, they display allegiances and stubborn propensities. They assume the color of their new surroundings, like chameleons; they perversely develop echoes.”[21]

In other words, language is dynamic; and therefore, language is sometimes ambiguous. Apart from the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the preacher and the listener, there can be no valid communication of spiritual truth from the Word.[22] When the Spirit is at work, there is an imperceptible bond between speaker and listener that makes for powerful communication and changed lives. In outhning the message, we must be careful not to grieve the Spirit by handling the text in a manner that makes us the author of truth instead of the interpreter of truth.

In preparing a message, we need two different kinds of outhnes: the homiletical/hermeneutical analysis, and the poetical/imaginative synthesis. The first is “left brain” and informational, closely following the development of the passage; while the second is “right brain” and intuitive, arranging spiritual truths in imaginative ways. For example, look at Matthew 14:22-33:

But preaching is more than a recitation of facts, no matter how dramatically we might present them to our people. Preaching involves the interpretation of the facts and the investigation and application of the truths that grow out of the facts. Without much effort, the unimaginative minister could make the above analysis into a preachable outhne:

But isn’t there much more in the passage than three alliterated platitudes? This is where your sanctified imagination goes to work. Imagination searches for relationships, because relationships produce patterns, and patterns reveal new truths for us to share. Apart from imagination, the text is only past history and not present reality.

Let’s start with the storm, a metaphor that speaks of trials and testings in life. “The storms of life” is a familiar phrase, and Longfellow reminded us that “Into each life some rain must fall.” As we allow our imagination to “play over” the Scriptures, we jot down ideas that come to us:

Jonah was in a storm because of disobedience; the disciples, because of obedience.

Obeying God’s will is no guarantee the way will be easy.

The last time they were in a storm, Jesus was with them in the ship (Matt. 8:23-27). Now He was absent.

Storms don’t hinder Jesus from coming to help us.

Storms must obey His will.

Storms can teach us important lessons about ourselves and about Jesus.

Storms are a test of faith and an opportunity to grow.

Now, let’s change our perspective and look at Peter. It’s significant that Peter had three “boat experiences” with Jesus: the great catch of fish (Luke 5:1-11), the first stilling of the storm (Matt. 8:23-27), and the second stilling of the storm (our text).[23] What is the connection here? Is there a pattern that will reveal spiritual truths to us?

It appears that Jesus was giving Peter and the other disciples lessons on how to exercise faith. The first lesson took place in calm water in the morning, with Jesus in the ship (Luke 5:1-11). The second occurred in stormy weather at night with Jesus asleep in the ship (Matt. 8:23-27). The third experience was at night, in stormy weather, with Jesus not in the ship! Each new test required more faith on their part: Jesus present, Jesus asleep, Jesus absent. Our Lord’s purpose was to encourage the disciples to trust Him whether or not He was in the ship or whether or not they were in the ship! It must have delighted His heart when He saw that Peter had the faith to walk on the water.[24]

But my imagination tells me that something else is involved; for as I review Peter’s life, I note that this wasn’t the first time Peter took his “eyes of faith” off of Jesus (Heb. 12:1-2), nor would it be the last. In Luke 5:8, he got his eyes on himself; and in John 21:20-22, he got his eyes on another believer, in this case, the Apostle John. Maybe we can work this into our message, or perhaps it should be a message all its own. We could preach on “the distractions of life” that lead to defeat in our walk of faith: looking at self, looking at circumstances, and looking at other people.

But, back to Matthew 14:22-33. Perhaps we can take this approach:

A faith that can’t be tested can’t be trusted. Whether we like it or not, our faith in Jesus Christ will be tested in the storms of life. How do you respond to these storms?

From the experience of the apostles, let’s work out a “statement of faith for the storms of life.” When you find yourself in a storm, turn to these affirmations of faith and remind yourself:

The analytical outhne is past tense and records what Jesus did for the disciples; but the homiletical outhne is present tense and explains what Jesus does for all His people today, if they will trust Him. Each of the above “affirmations of faith” can be documented from the text and substantiated from other passages of Scripture.

But this isn’t the only approach. We can see in this episode our Lord teaching His disciples some of “the lessons of life”: a lesson in love, for He sent them into the storm because it was good for them; a lesson in faith, for they learned to trust Him; and a lesson in hope, for when their plight was at its worst, Jesus came to rescue them. The whole event illustrates our situation today as we wait for our Lord to come to take us out of the storms of life. This second approach is of a more devotional nature and doesn’t offer as much opportunity for expository fullness as the first approach does.

So, as the example demonstrates, after you’ve done your exegetical homework, and you have the analytical outhne and the factual data before you, don’t immediately write an outhne that “fits” the passage.[25] First, decide on the overriding metaphor that will control the development of the message. Will it be the storms of life, or life as a school in which we learn the lessons of faith? Maybe we should emphasize the distractions of life? Will our focus be on the disciples or on Jesus, what He did for them or what they did with Him? Will we examine the process or the results of the process? Once you’ve settled on the metaphor and the approach, then you can sift through your notes and select the material that fits.[26] The resulting outhne won’t be something you manufacture for the occasion by organizing a stack of notes, like writing a term paper or doing your income tax. The outhne will “grow” out of the passage in a way that “fits,” and you’ll know intuitively which items of factual data belong in the message.

Preparing a message is something like engaging in an athletic contest or playing a musical instrument: you have to work at it; some of the things you do will come from habit or native intuition; and the more you do it, the better you’ll understand what “works.” But you have to know the rules. Every celebrated concert pianist got his or her start like every other pianist, by practicing the scales. You are free to break the rules once the rules have broken you. “I believe in rules,” said Leo Durocher. “If there weren’t any rules, how could you break them?”

When I was teaching homiletics, I would occasionally meet students who resisted submitting to the “basic training” that’s involved in preaching. “That’s not the way Dr. Ironside did it,” they would argue, “or Campbell Morgan or Charles Spurgeon.” Then they’d remind me that not one of those three homiletical heroes ever studied in a Bible school or seminary!

My response was: “If any of you is a Spurgeon, a Campbell Morgan, or a Harry Ironside, we’ll soon find it out. And please remember that Spurgeon founded a school for training pastors, and Morgan and Ironside each sat on faculties in schools that trained Christian workers. Now, about last week’s assignment. . . !”

This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter: fear God and do your homework. But after you’ve done your homework, put your imagination to work by asking yourself: (1) How does this text relate to other passages that involve the same semantic domains (storms, boats, Peter, etc.)? (2) What patterns do I see? (3) What truths emerge from these patterns? (4) What pictures (metaphors) are in the text? (5) What metaphor will best convey the message of this passage?[27] (6) As the people hear the development of the outhne, will they see something?

Let’s try another illustration. I once preached from Romans 5:1-11 and took this approach:

Let me run some names past you; see how many you can recognize: Junias—Julia—Rufus—Olympus—Phoebe—Urbanus.

Recognize them? Well, they were all friends of the Apostle Paul, and you’ll find him greeting them, along with several other friends, in the last chapter of his Letter to the Romans. They were ordinary people, not theologians or scholars, because Paul wrote Romans for everyday garden-variety Christians like you and me.

Just imagine how thrilled these Christians in Rome must have been when they heard read in their Lord’s Day assembly the words we identify as Romans 5:1-11. We take these verses for granted, but what Paul wrote here is doctrinal dynamite. In these verses, Paul explains what really happens when the sinner trusts Jesus Christ and receives the gift of salvation.

My outhne for the passage in the sermon follows:

Working from such a suggested outhne, our task is to weave in all the doctrine our congregation can assimilate from one message, but to do this in a pictorial way that transforms a theological lecture into a warm-hearted message that will make listeners want to praise God and share the Gospel with others.

It isn’t enough for us to write an outhne that “takes things apart.” We must go a step further and develop from this analysis an outhne that “puts things together” so that our listeners can see the truth. Most biblical passages have an inherent metaphor (or perhaps several metaphors) that can be used to help us picture the truth. When things start to come together in the text, and you begin to get excited about the patterns you see, then you’ll know you’ve discovered the picture(s) you can use to make the truth alive in your message. Your outhne then becomes the “frame” for the picture(s). One word of caution: be sure the “frame” doesn’t detract from the picture(s) or your message won’t get through. Samuel Johnson advised young writers, “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”[28] The outhne of the message should be so simple and clear that the worshiper might say to himself or herself, “Why, what’s so difficult about preaching? I could have said the same thing!”

I once listened to a church pianist generate brilliant keyboard pyrotechnics during the offering, after which the congregation applauded enthusiastically; but somehow I felt cheated. His “performance” only called attention to his skill and distracted from the meaning of the offering and the glory due to God alone. A sensitive hymn interpretation instead would have added to our worship experience. We must remind ourselves that the preacher often makes the same mistake in his preaching.

Donald Coggan relates the story of a bishop who gave a masterful oration that drew the ecstatic applause of the people when he finished. He then noticed that Francis de Sales was in the congregation, and he asked the spiritual leader what he thought of the sermon. After a long silence, St. Francis replied, “You pleased all but One.”[29]

Some preachers are gifted wordsmiths. With the help of a thesaurus and a dictionary of synonyms, they can construct outhnes that are so verbally ingenious you find yourself admiring the menu instead of eating the meal, if there is a meal to eat. Their particular homiletical sin is an overdose of alliteration.

Now, if a simple alliterative outhne grows naturally out of the text, the preacher may be wise to use it; but he is unwise to waste precious hours searching through the dictionary for another word that starts with M and means “confidence.” Some preachers alliterate every main point and sub-point until you find yourself second-guessing them and predicting what the next point will be. Excessive alliteration can lead to obliteration and wipe out the message. People get distracted from the sermon itself, and anything that distracts from God’s truth is suspect if not sinful. “Apt Alliteration’s artful aid” is what Charles Churchill wrote in his 1763 satire Prophecy of Famine, and there may be times when alliteration helps people grasp and remember some statement of truth. But the warning spoken by one of my professors keeps echoing in the homiletical lobe of my brain: “Gentlemen, alliteration will sell you short every time.”[30]

I manufactured the following outhne to illustrate the oppressive extent to which alliteration can kill a text. As they say in the detective novels, any resemblance between this outhne and outhnes preached by any other preacher is purely coincidental. The text is Psalm 23. If you get desperate some day and actually preach this outhne, please don’t mention my name.

I confess that this is a caricature of a sermon outhne, and I apologize. But at least it illustrates some of the major weaknesses of using overly alliterated outhnes: distracting the preacher from the main message; using words without precise definition;[31] straining to impress instead of express; and disregarding the “flow” of the text. To say the least, it’s artificial; and sermons are supposed to be authentic and alive. They are born, not manufactured.

“Imagination is the eye of the soul.”

—Joseph Joubert

“When one discovers a living truth, one has great difficulty in putting it into words. Every artist suffers from the contrast between his finished work and the infinitely more complex reality which he first experienced in his inner being.”

—Paul Tournier

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