Preaching Truth through Personality

Preaching Truth through personality, 

You will know I’m sure that the title above comes from Phillips Brooks, the great American Preacher- but I want to use this title as a kind of foil. 

I want to begin to unpack what we might mean, when consider our identity as a preacher- and use Brooks idea of ‘Personality’ to help us do this. 

Preaching Truth through personality– I want to begin with a conundrum. Despite saying this and meaning it- Brooks very rarely talked about himself in his preaching, but his preaching certainly revealed something of who he was. His particularity. His Personality. His identity.

Phillips Brooks is said to have been very shy, he couldn’t hold eye contact, his physical presence was large and expansive and his delivery was said to be stiff, and he revealed little of his personal life.  And yet he drew crowds of thousands, gave lectures on preaching and is remembered as one of the greatest preachers of all time. What was his secret? 

In his lectures on preaching given at Yale in 1877, he said preaching has two essential elements, truth and personality. It is primarily a testimony to faith. He said preaching has to be face to face- person to person, heart to heart, and if preaching in any way applauds the preacher, rather than God, it is not preaching either. 

Preaching is pre-eminently personal. Brooks said that however much the Gospel is capable of being packaged in dogmatic form, its truest statement is not in dogma but in personal life. And yet, he was also encouraging a kind of self-effacement in preaching, or could I put it more theologically- a self-emptying? What might it mean to be a kenotic preacher?

I think I want to say that preaching exposes us. It exposes our faith, our theology, it exposes us as who we are, and it exposes our God-given ‘personality’. We are made vulnerable and naked when we preach, and therefore we should all approach the pulpit in fear and trembling. 

There is no identity that we can hide behind when we attempt to preach the truth through personality. The truth, Phillips Brooks said, must come through the person, not merely over his lips, not merely into his understanding and out through his pen….

…It must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being. It must come genuinely through him. 

Therefore, preaching must reflect not only our identity but our integrity and our authenticity.  In common parlance, we might summarise this as something the Church is not always very good at: practising what we preach. 

For over seven years I was fortunate enough to teach ordinands, readers and laity, a short course which introduced them to the ‘craft’ and ‘nature’ of preaching. As part of that course, every year- I had the privilege of marking 12-15 video’d sermons, which the students submitted at the end of the module. 

Of course I had my guidelines and marking criteria to follow- but I have to admit I was always looking for a quality in their preaching which is rather difficult to quantitate, I call it the ‘sparkle’ – a technical term you understand- or the ‘X-factor’! 

That something which hits you right between the eyes and straight in the heart- that ‘something’ which communicates and at some level makes me laugh or cry or get up from my desk somehow transformed and eager to change the world for Christ’s sake, something which stirs the soul. 

This is very much an anecdotal observation, but sometimes the most eager (and loudest) students in class were the most nervous and ineffective preachers and the shy reticent types fielded a surprisingly confident pulpit persona- that’s a crude analysis which probably means nothing, but this leads me to conclude that we need to be careful about how we, today, in our ‘personality’ driven world, define preaching through personality. Maybe we would nuance this maxim for today in our celebrity driven culture and some would say celebrity driven church.

Not until I read Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule did I realize there could be a comparison here to the likes of Isaiah- confident in his request that God might send him– and Jeremiah, the reluctant prophet who claims, rather like Moses that his immature speech will not make him the best choice for the job in hand. How are we ‘commissioned’ and ‘called’ to preach? 

Gregory comments that irrespective of the pathway to preaching, the end result is dependent it seems, not on skill, or confidence or even experience, nor dare I say it, on personality! 

The power of their words, is rather dependent on the fact that the voices of both Isaiah and Jeremiah, flowed from the fountain of love, Isaiah’s love of his neighbour, Jeremiah’s love of God. They inhabited the role of messenger…not only with their words but with their whole life.

So, I want to say, our primary identity as a preacher, has to come from our love of God and the truth that God loves us as we truly are, as preachers we inhabit a calling. 

Of course, these qualities were not represented in the learning outcomes or objectives of the course on which I taught- but for my own learning experience as a teacher and preacher, this is the element of preaching I am most interested in: 

The undefinable mystery at the heart of the minister of the word. The mystery which made thousands flock to hear Phillips Brooks. I want to think about the mystery and ontology of the preacher herself.

I am also looking, for some interpretive or imaginative framework which helps me connect the word of God to the context I am in, the culture I am in. Implicitly or explicitly, some kind of theological, cultural, ecclesial, spiritual hermeneutic, or way of seeing, which allows both a response from me the listener and a connection to both the living tradition of the church and the realities of the world. Preaching truth, is therefore relational as well as personal. 

What about the ecclesial identity of the preacher? Though many say that preaching is outmoded- and irrelevant- I have to say I think it is still a medium to be reckoned with and I believe it is still a medium which, is part of the process of transformation which with God’s grace, happens in every act of worship. Preaching has to be embedded within an ecclesial community and therefore the preacher emerges, is brought forth from that gathering to share a truth, their truth, the truth. 

Rowan Williams argues that preaching is not ‘something extraneous to the identity and integrity of the church’. It’s not in that sense ‘outdated’ or ‘irrelevant’. In the same way that prayer and sacrament are vital- so is preaching. Preaching is part of our ecclesial identity. The preacher is also preaching a truth greater than their own, they stand for the Church, they are in a position of power and authority, so how is this handled and shaped accordingly, and held lovingly and humbly? 

Williams says that though the word ‘preach’ may have negative connotations, it nevertheless should be part of the same enterprise to which the Church is ultimately committed- that is, to transform the human world by communicating to it in word and act, a truthfulness that exposes the deepest human fear and evasions and makes possible a new kind of existence that can pass beyond these fears to a new liberty. Preaching Truth, through personality. 

Is the sermon through the preacher an embodied place of interpretation and a place from where culture can be changed? Can sermons, can preachers, really change the world as Rowan Williams would hope? Or at the very least can they change the attitude or direction of our worshipping communities? Can we as preachers ever hope for more than- ‘nice sermon vicar’ as we shake hands at the door? 

Phillips Brooks offers that a primary foundation for preaching truth through personality is preparation. I think this is important, because aren’t we sliding into danger if preaching is purely experiential? We need to be grounded. Brooks seems to balance out this risk by being attentive to study and prayer and the broader missional and pastoral agendas of ministry. 

I soon discovered that in parish life, rightly or wrongly, the act of writing a sermon became in general the locus for my own reading and theological reflection- it became the place of interpretation, translation and sometimes the foundation of prayer, the place where I for one try to make sense of scripture, the church and the world. A place, where week by week, and year by year, I as a Preacher, found my identity. 

The sermon, for very practical reasons, has not become an end in itself but an event which bubbles up from, if you will, my own ‘lived’ theology- my own Christian response to God- which is embedded at this time in the concerns, contexts and lived theologies of those I minister to. 

Obviously the sermon is influenced by the pastoral milieu of my context- but it is also influenced by scripture, theology, culture, liturgy and missiology. Arrogant as it may seem, I pray that what I say will somehow be a transformative event- yes didactic, to some extent with an element of teaching, yes, prayerful, as it hopefully arises from the life of prayer but also evangelical and in the vein of Henry Mitchell, American Homiltician, ultimately ‘celebratory’ an Easter Word for the world. 

Brooks encourages the preacher to aspire to breadth and depth and expansiveness, to articulate a largeness of movement and great truths in order that our work grows freer, bolder, and broader: He calls these great truths: God’s sovereignity, Christ’s redemption, our hope in the Spirit, the privilege of duty, the love of humanity in the saviour. These should be, he argues, the strong music that our souls should try to catch through preaching.

I pray that through me the words that come out of my mouth may somehow point always and only to wonder of God, the good news, liberty, justice and peace. 

So for all the tricks that I can teach on a preaching course, the exercises in exposition, and work on delivery, content and structure, and I think all of these things are really, really important and worth teaching, what I really want to say, is that preaching is an event which arises out of a personal relationship and response to the living God. Brooks says ‘Be yourself by all means, but let it be by winning a true self, full of your own faith and love. 

Somewhere in that mix, is where the primary identity of the preacher might lie.  Preaching truth through personality.

We might say that preaching is an ‘event’ which arises from the lived out faith of the preacher. It is first and foremost an expression of our faith.  As a preacher we are not just the stand up mouth pieces for someone elses words. We’re not just reading machines churning out texts which we have downloaded from Saturdaynightsermon.com. We are messengers of God. 

And we are who we are – and there is a sense that the words of our sermons are intimately connected to who we are, personally, before God and who we are in the midst of the Christian Community. 

Just in case our personality, or dare I say, ‘identity’ becomes more the focus of the sermon than God, it might be necessary to inject St Gregory’s discipline of humility into the act and art of preaching- this isn’t about the cleverness of the preacher- but the truth that they are gifted to impart, not by their own strength but by the strength of God. They can use fine words or powerpoint presentations, they can make people laugh and cheer, but these things alone will not be enough.

Remember Isaiah in his eagerness had a hot coal stuffed in his mouth to purge him of too much self-reliance. Brooks talks about the best sermons being a message from God delivered from one person to others. The best preachers in his opinion are those who don’t get in the way of the message, so as you listen, you forget the preacher altogether. That is as it should be.

As we’ve touched on already, preaching is more than a personal expression- it is part of the identity of the church. We anticipate and hope that our preaching leads to something- perhaps a change in attitude or even, affirm some conviction in those who are listening. 

But perhaps most of all, every preacher prays that their divinely inspired words might ignite a movement of action in the world beyond the church doors, or a change of heart in the listener. That the message we have been given has a life of its own beyond our power or intention. That it is truth, beyond personality. 

In that sense the sermon is always straddling the convergence of church and world, personal and public, making sense of the church to the world, and making sense of the world to the church. 

William Willimon, the American Preacher, in dialogue with the writings of Karl Barth on Preaching, uses two images to understand the Preacher. 

The first is a representation of John the Baptist by Peter Brueghel. It is called the Preaching of John the Baptist, and you might find it difficult to locate the Preacher in this representation, so embedded is he in the crowd to whom he is preaching.  

The second image is the altar piece by Grünewald, John the Baptist. Here we see another facet of the identity of the preacher.

In this interpretation the preacher, stands off to one side of the Crucified Christ and dares merely to point. Willimon calls these “two Barthian tests for faithful preaching”. The first: “hint, pointing toward, inclination” and the second: “distance, detachment”. 

I wonder how our ideas about ‘identity’ fit into this ontology of the preacher? 

This leads me to my final point really, whoever we are, of whatever denomination, whether lay or ordained, I feel there is an urgent need within the church to explore the ontology of the preacher, the vocation of the preacher, the witness of the preacher, and the sacramental act of preaching. 

And I feel that if we are able to begin thinking of the preacher in this light- we might understand a little more of what it means to preach with identity, and preach truth with personality.