Fairly often, when a major news story breaks, I see a variation of this comment make the rounds on social media: If we as preachers are not responding to this in our sermon, we are not being faithful to our calling.
Preaching, we are taught, is meant to be prophetic. Back in seminary, I took a lot of preaching classes. One, I was convinced, was going to be of immense help to my future work: Preaching Social Crisis. In the course, we talked about all sorts of homiletical approaches to the challenges of the day. We reviewed various socio-political challenges—income inequality, structural racism, poverty, political issues—the list was fairly exhaustive.
We delighted in attempting to “out-prophetic” each other in our sermons. As a result, I reasoned that I would be well prepared to walk into the church as a pastor and preach prophetic sermons that would respond to the crisis of the day, bringing people to rethink their view of the world.
Then I was appointed to a small, rural church. In the buildup to the 2016 election, I was reminded by friends near and far that I needed to speak out, to share how the Gospel was leading me to live faithfully in the world. After one such sermon, a parishioner came up to me and said, “You keep using this word justice. What does that even mean?”
I noticed that my sermons, more often than not, were not aimed at the people of my congregation; they were aimed at my friends on social media, who would check to see if I was adequately saying something about our societal ills.
The other formational course I took was one on preaching lament. We began in a place that I was not expecting: the spirituals of the American Slaves. The spirituals, we recognized, were songs of lament, but also prophetic witnesses to the world around them. Consider:
There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul.
On the surface, one could easily make this into some sort of evangelical riff. But imagine listening to it in the midst of a mother being separated from her child, forced to work beyond exhaustion. It is a voice of hope, but it also a call to repentance to the slave owner’s “sin sick soul.” The God who heals is also the God that calls for repentance.
It is not the sort of prophetic speech that gets shared all over social media. And yet, we still reach for those words in moments of pain and weariness.
My preaching professor used to say, “Being prophetic was simply asking people to live into the implications of the gospel.” What I learned as a parish pastor was that being prophetic meant speaking to the hidden wounds of my parishioner’s soul. My job, on Sunday morning, was to preach a balm from Gilead that would find the wound and begin the process of healing, a bit of rubbing alcohol on an open cut.
There is a danger, I think, in confusing “prophetic preaching” with “political preaching.” Our politics, after all, is a manifestation of our broken world. It cannot be a solution to it. Too often, our attempts at prophetic preaching ignore the wounds of the people in our pews, the wounds that are both self-inflicted and inflicted by others, and instead offers a cheap salve to a generic problem.
A few years ago, I went with my sister to church. It was a conservative church, not unlike the church I grew up in. The sermon touched on a variety of societal problems the preacher had identified: societal laziness, welfare, transgenderism. “I’m going to get in trouble for this,” he said, as the people around me all nodded in their support of his words.
The next week, I was in a more progressive church. The pastor’s sermon touched on a variety of societal problems the pastor had identified: xenophobic policies, racism, classism, sexism. “It’s ok if I get in trouble for this,” they said, as the people around me all nodded in support of their words.
I thought about the similarities of the sermons — attempts at faithful responses to the social issues of the day, delivered to a room of people who already voted in the same way. And I wondered, where was the balm that stings and demands the wound be healed?
One of the most prophetic texts in recent history is the Barmen Declaration, a statement of German Reformed Churches that effectively placed church leadership in contrast to Nazi Germany. When I reread the text, though, I am struck by how little is said about the political affairs of Germany. Hitler is never mentioned, nor are Nazis. The closest it comes to singling out any person is to say, “We reject the false teaching that the church could and should appoint apart from this ministry, could and were permitted to give itself, or allow to be given to it, special leaders (Führer) vested with ruling powers.”
Instead, the Barmen Declaration calls the people of the church back to a reality that was easy to forget: That dominion of this world belongs only to Christ, that the church belongs only to Christ, and that Church cannot be subordinated to the state, nor can the political rulers do the work of the church.
It hardly seems prophetic, but it was dangerous enough that many of the authors were imprisoned and executed.
Why? Because it preached the authority of Christ. And in doing so, it poured a balm on an open wound, burning as it began the slow process of healing.
We need more prophetic preaching, but we should not confuse that with preaching a reactionary politic. Being prophetic is much simpler, and much harder: it is calling the people to submit to the Lordship of Christ, asking them, “What does it mean to follow Jesus?”
One of the most prophetic moments in the Gospels, I think, is when Jesus is asked to condemn the woman caught in adultery. Rather than begin a sermon, Jesus tells them that whoever is blameless can condemn, and draws in the sand. It is a moment in which Jesus highlights the absurdity of the legal system, the misunderstanding of the grace afforded to us, and calls onlookers to repentance. Jesus pours a balm, and it begins to heal.
To preach Jesus is to preach against the absurdities of the world, because preaching Jesus stands in stark contrast to all of our self-inflicted wounds. It speaks brazenly to the political leaders of the day by reminding them, “You have no power here.” And, it releases us from the temptation to become people in service to a political agenda ourselves.
We need prophetic preaching. We should preach all the realities of the Kingdom of God: justice, peace, life, redemption, and healing. That preaching doesn’t start as our own op-ed pieces against the headlines of the day. It starts in the wounds of the people listening to our words.
