Strong words. . .

The worst thing we have done to the Scriptures is to make this a book of weak and superficial words, words that require something from us and have no power to address us with something.  The worst thing we have done to preaching is to echo this with respect to the words of the preacher and his task in preaching.  When we removed miracles from the Bible and when we began to distract from the historicity of the great and mighty works of God (creation, parting of the sea, etc...), we made Scripture a book of ideas and we gave ourselves the power over those ideas by either adopting them as our own or rejecting them.  The whole idea that something could be true without being historic or factual is a modern invention and one that has done catastrophic harm over Scripture and in particular the preaching task.

The miracles of Scripture and the mighty acts of God's deliverance are precisely ordinary facts which have extraordinary status even bigger than their context.  When we preach them, we are not trying to distill the fact into a moral of the story or a principle drawn from this fact but applying the facts themselves to God's people because these facts still have consequences and effects.  Nowhere is this more true than in the Sacrament of the Altar.  We do not imagine Christ in the sacrament but actually receive Him in this bread and wine.  We do not make this sacrament but Christ is the sacrament.  As Richard Stuckwisch says, "Baptism puts us in Christ and the Eucharist puts Christ in us."  They are not the same even though both are sacraments.  These are not ideas nor is the language symbolic but real and true and factual.  For this reason we treat the elements of the Sacrament of the Altar as we honor Christ for they are the same and in the funeral rite we begin with the fact of the baptism that says this end is not the end.

For preaching this has meant an emphasis less on the Word of God preached and more on the skill and ability of the preacher.  Technique has become at least as important as content.  While this is true for those teaching preaching and for the preacher preaching, it is even more true of those who hear the sermon.  They evaluate the sermon less upon the objective criteria of what it says than of how well it was communicated.  I am not at all suggesting here that we should be indifferent toward the technique but rather that the technique conveys nothing without the content.  Furthermore, the hearer should regard the words of the faithful preacher as words of God, hearing them and being edified by them not because of how well they were said but because of the Word in the words.  I fear, however, that this is not how most sermons are received.  Instead, they are the inspirational, motivational, and devotional thoughts of the preacher.  However good these might be, it is the Word of God that imparts life and salvation to us.  Those in the pews should expect nothing less than this and receive the words of the preacher as the Word proclaimed into their ears, minds, and hearts.  In short, I fear that preaching has become about weak words instead of Thy Strong Word and so people expect and therefore receive something less than preaching should be.

God's Word is true in every sense of that word.  The Word in elements of water, bread, and wine is true in every sense of the word.  The Word preached is sacramental and true as well.  It preaches the real Word that has the power to do what it says and convey what it promises.  But when we build walls between fact and truth, we diminish the Scriptures and we diminish also the visible Word of the Sacraments and we diminish the preached Word, ending up with less that God means for us to have and we learn to settle for it.