Now I have several blog posts in my head that haven't made it onto disk yet, so I will try and get through them one at a time. First, on preaching.
When did the sermon become the primary focus of the service? I suspect it has something to do with Thomas Aquinas.
In the New Testament church, a sermon was almost always something occasioned by a need to explain a dramatic work of God. The pattern was almost invariably the following: God does something spectacular (a healing, driving away a demon); people react against this, and either attack or turn in wonder towards the Christians present; the Christians give a sermon explaining what just happened.
There are a couple of exceptions: Paul is wandering around and sees something in Athens which occasions a sermon; at Troas, he preaches an unoccasioned sermon which kills someone. But on the whole, the sermon is occasioned rather than the occasion.
Why has it become the occasion now? Because as Protestants the way we experience God is not through the liturgy nor through the community of the church nor through the direct experience of the Holy Spirit but through our intellect. I guess it goes back to Thomas Aquinas who placed the intellect above the will and incorrupted - if it's incorrupted, it can truly meet God - and then the viewpoint got filtered through the rationalism of the Enlightenment which championed the faculties of reason above all. In short, the centrality of the sermon is based on placing undue trust in our own brains, which we can summarise in the word "idolatry".
The other big problem with the sermon is that it is unsustainable, particularly in the Japanese church. The Japanese love beautiful sermons! And a beautiful sermon is one which has done its exegesis, has understood the Greek or Hebrew, has situated the passage in context, has refered to the commentaries and scholars, and has tied it all in to cultural philosophies, literature or idioms to produce a clever and, above all, beautiful message.
And here I have to put my hand up and say that I am more guilty than anyone else of snobbery against sermons which do not do this. I suck and I freely admit it.
Because the upshot of such a view of a sermon is that a sermon is something which can only be constructed by a professional and/or an intellectual. We model a sermon that nobody can attain by their own efforts; to continue and replicate the model requires two to three years at Bible college, with experience of the culture and grasp of the literature, and a gift for public speaking and for the construction of polished prose. A beautiful sermon cannot, it appears, be delivered by a "simple" man equipped only with a Bible and the power of the Holy Spirit speaking from his heart directly to your heart. By making the beautiful sermon the center of our service we have established and perpetrated the clergy/laity divide in our traditional Japanese churches.
Now I do not know whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. That is the subject of the other blog post I have in my head, and I am trying very hard not to let the two overlap. But that is how it is in the Japanese church. Religious life should involve wabi (the beauty of poverty, a quiet refinement, a subdued solitude) and sabi (the rust of age, an elegant simplicity, a well-trained voice) - Japanese aestheticism for the Japanese religiosity; is that not good and right? Should not Christians respond to this with wabi and sabi sermons? Or is this again a form of idolatry, a reliance on our own talents instead of the weakness and humility that characterises a disciple of the weak and humble Christ?
All this by way of long and self-deprecating introduction to the fact that, well, even though I do say so myself, I preached a blinder last week. I threw everything I had at this sermon, and it all came back to me.
You can read it here in English or here in Japanese.
(And yes, though it was the hottest day of the year, I thought I would be a good little Japanese preacher and turn up in a suit. Imagine my horror when the pastor turned up in a short-sleeve shirt, and the deputy pastor in a polo shirt.)
Afterwards Morinaga-sensei called me oomono (a bigshot) and the sermon meisekkyo (a masterpiece sermon). Now there is an easy explanation for this: combine the usual Christian politeness and encouragement with the usual Japanese politeness and encouragement and you get the feeling that I could have got up and preached anything and it would have been a meisekkyo. But in reality there was a more obvious explanation why Morinaga-sensei was so taken with the sermon: because I designed it that way.
As I hinted at above, the way people get into preaching is to follow the example and the model of preachers who have inspired them. If those inspiring preachers have been polished performers, then the novice will conclude that they need to know how to polish a sermon. In my case, I have been eager to learn how to give a good Japanese sermon, and at the same time I have been attending London JCF for a year and been inspired, challenged and amused in equal parts by Morinaga-sensei's sermons. (I was so challenged by one that I translated it into English, specifically for you to be challenged by too.)
So the process of constructing this particular sermon was interesting because I both implicitly and explicitly stole some of Morinaga-sensei's ideas of sermon construction. I also tried to make this sermon as Japanese as possible. Actually I wrote it in Japanese first and back-translated it into English for the purpose of editing. I tried to get into a Japanese frame of mind and look at the issues. But we'll get to that in a moment. First, how did I implicitly and explicitly steal Morinaga-sensei's style?
Explicitly, there is the idea that the sermon should start off by "situating things in context". Now this is something that we are taught at college, but the sense here is much wider: first you set the preacher in the context of the church, then the passage in the context of the church, then the passage in the context of the preacher, then the passage in its own historical context, and then you are ready to proceed. So you recap who you are, who the church is, what we've been studying recently, what we learnt last week, what we learnt the week before, and so on.
Then the next explicit point I stole was that, once you've situated things in context, it's good to focus on one point of exegetical detail. (I chose the location of the passage, Mark 5: "Gerasa" versus "Gadara" versus "Gergesa".) The reason for doing this is not actually to show off but to demonstrate to the congregation that you've done your homework, and therefore to establish yourself as a trustworthy expositor of the word. Yeah, I know, but I don't set the rules.
These two things, the extended contextual introduction and the exegetical detail, go together to form my rule of thumb for Japanese sermons: Ignore the first twenty minutes, it's all window-dressing. A traditional church will feel short-changed if your sermon is less than forty minutes, and preachers know this, so the first twenty minutes is padding. After that it gets exciting.
So I explicitly stole a couple of bits of format. I implicitly stole another piece of format. In the Western sermon, you choose one, two or three points, hopefully beginning with the same letter, and you labour each point in turn, and then you produce a clever conclusion tying all one-two-or-three together. That's what we're taught in our various homiletical classes.
In the Japanese conciousness, all that is way too analytical and logical. To expound God as "three steps to heaven" is to turn Him into a machine, and to lose the sense of mystery that Japanese people intrisically know is at work. (That's yet another blog post I'm trying to avoid crossing the streams on.) The Japanese sermon, like the Jewish rabbinical teaching, takes the listener on a journey. It doesn't wind its way to a comfortable conclusion. It stops mid-flow, a break to catch up and implement in the anticipation of yet another journey to follow. That is what I tried to achieve.
This is why detailed exposition works so well in Japanese churches; the aim of the sermon is not to supplant the passage but to walk alongside it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, pointing out interesting points of practical application along the way. There is no main point. There is no clever conclusion. Whatever happens, happens alongside whatever God is doing, and He doesn't always work in the neat problem-solution-application boxes that we draw for Him.
So that was my idea as I walked my congregation through Mark 5. I freely admit to having stolen some concepts from a New Wine Em-Church sermon three years ago, which related the lack-of-metanarrative apatheia of the Gerasene demonaic with the lack-of-metanarrative postmodern society. I tried to think how a Japanese person would relate to this passage. Without being a Japanese person, that's pretty tricky to achieve. But a few ideas came together and it seemed to work: the idea of being "violently busy" (which I did steal from a Japanese person) and the idea of shalom and its focus on the individual's relationship with community. I don't know where that came from. But, you know, it went down well.
Of course the problem with all this is that all Japan is not Morinaga-sensei's church. (At least, not yet.) Japanese churches which are not used to this style of exposition will not appreciate my style of exposition. Hopefully, by stealing one preacher's style, all I've shown is that I can steal a preacher's style. But isn't that just confirming all I've said above - that we base our own performance on the performances we've heard before? Again, is that a bad thing? That will, hopefully, be the subject of my next rant.
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