Where Everybody's Crazy

And they'd be shorter sermons too.

See, then they'd put the funny anecdotes and opinions that they feel they have to tell the world onto the blog, and maybe they'd put stuff about what the Bible says into the sermon.

I am not arguing against relevant and helpful illustrations, although I will admit that I am not a fan of illustrations for the sake of holding the congregation's interest. If you can't hold their interest with what you've got out of the Bible, you probably need to get some more out of the Bible.

I have, however, heard too many sermons which were a string of anecdotes in dire search for a biblical text to hang from. Put that stuff in the blog. When you're sitting down to write your sermon, start from what the Bible says.

This may be a little too honest for some people.

Working as a full-time religious professional is a blessing and a curse.

It's a blessing because it gives you a role, a social contract that identifies who you are and what you are doing. Not just for other people to understand you, but for you to understand yourself.

For example, I really don't like evangelism. I used to find it embarrassing for both parties. But actually since becoming a missionary, it's now my job. And other people know it's my job, so they expect it of me. That makes it so much easier.

The curse is that where volunteers do things out of love when they feel like it, professionals have to do things out of duty when they don't feel like it. And to be sure, there are times when they don't feel like it. Everyone has off days, whether they're preachers, or programmers, or brain surgeons. Everyone has days when they wake up and think "What the hell am I doing this for?" - it's just that the true believers are better at hiding and denying it.

There have been occasions when I've known that, come next Sunday, I'm getting up to the pulpit and giving a sermon whether I like or it not. And this is the scary bit - whether I hear God or not. I can't just turn up and say "Sorry, no sermon this week, it didn't happen for me." It has to happen for me. I just has to. It would be a lot more honest if I could get up and saying something like that, but I can't. (Actually, I did do this once. I don't know if I could get away with it again though.) The downside of having a social contract is that you have to uphold your part of it.

I have to come up with something, week in, week out. Whether I hear God or not. Whether I even believe what I'm saying or not. Now that sounds hypocritical, but I try very very hard to acknowledge my own weaknesses in my sermons. I will say "I think this is true but I struggle with it myself." And I believe that God is gracious enough to speak to people even through stuff I personally can't accept. But I can't really say "I think we should all believe this, but right now I don't."

I have to come up with something meaningful. Every week, the show must go on.

Maybe I'm overemphasising this. This is not something which is particular to preachers, even though there is an added responsibility for those who are carrying out a public job of teaching others. Actually, at some point everyone has to face the reality of having to do stuff that they sometimes don't feel like. It's called growing up.

Familiarity with the Gospels can so often rob us of their revolutionary nature. We know by now that Jesus is the good guy and the Pharisees are the bad guys, and we adjust our expectations of the text accordingly. We don't, on the whole, recognise Jesus' behaviour as radical and socially extraordinary, because the point of the story is that he comes out on top. But at the time, the people watching Jesus really did see "remarkable things".

And actually it makes it very difficult to preach the Gospel - not if you lose a sense of the revolutionary nature of Jesus' work, but if you gain it. Luke and Mark particularly are dangerous books. They turn upside down a lot of ideas that we, through familiarity, can take for granted.

For instance, the Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were good folks, devoting their lives to helping the people find their way to God and ushering in the Messiah. They were precisely the kind of people who, in our day, are pastors and missionaries and preachers. When we see the Pharisees in the Bible, we need to stop thinking "them" and start thinking "us".

I'm preparing a sermon on Jesus' healing the paralysed man who comes down through the roof. This is hardly socially acceptable behaviour. We don't want this kind of behaviour in our church. But the reason these guys had to resort to violence and defacing of property in order to get to Jesus was because the room was full of pastors and preachers who'd come from all over the country to sit at Jesus' feet, having a nice cosy weekend retreat drinking deep from the well of God's love, and they were in the bloody way of real, hurting people who needed to get healed. The inference is clear: the pastors who were trying to help people get to God were actually, despite their best intentions, stopping people getting to God. The religious professionals, throughout the gospels, were far more often part of the problem than part of the solution, and mainly because they don't like the way that Jesus goes around messing stuff up. See why I feel a bit uncomfortable preaching this?

Then a bit before that there's the part when Jesus touches a man with leprosy and heals him. I've mentioned before that there's quite a Puritan streak in the church in Japan, particularly around what you do and where you go and who you associate with. Hang around unholy places and you'll get defiled. Jesus does exactly the opposite; he involves himself with defiled people and places and they get purified. His behaviour basically turns the "Holiness Movement" understanding of holiness upside down. ("The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look at him, a glutton and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'") Again, I have to preach this?

It's uncomfortable but at the same time, the point of reading the Bible is that it changes us and challenges. If all it does is reinforce our existing prejudices there's just no point to it at all. So I will preach an unsafe and an uncomfortable sermon, hopefully in a subtle enough way not to get myself in trouble, but hopefully with enough in there that the inference is unambiguous: Jesus was a revolutionary. His ministry was messy and socially obnoxious and the worst nightmare of the pastor who wants to maintain control, organisation and decorum.

Adrian Plass wrote a book called "Jesus: Safe, Tender, Extreme." I hate that title. Jesus was by no means safe. He's only safe if we manage to domesticate him by shrinking in fear or familiarity from the revolutionary nature of his message, and the sheer chaotic wonder of all that happened around him. Preaching a safe Jesus is a lot easier, and a lot more socially acceptable, but it doesn't do justice to the Jesus of the Bible.

It's been a busy few weeks; as I mentioned in my latest newsletter, it's our camp season here, and so I've spent seven days out of the last two weeks at our camp site. I was actually due to spend the next three days there as well, but I remembered the whole stress thing and excused myself from it.

The camps went well, although yesterday was a little traumatic. I came back from camp early on Sunday afternoon to be ready to preach at the English service at 4pm and then again at the Spanish service at 7pm. This is why there was no way I could manage another three days of camp straight after. I need to rest. I'm resting in the "change is as good as a" way, by doing some programming instead...

But anyway, I preached a sermon about holiness and then one about gentleness. The holiness one was actually a bit more controversial than I intended; I didn't intend it to be an attack on Puritanism but that's how it came out.

I say "that's how it came out" because when I start writing a sermon I have no idea what's going to happen. I do my exegesis of the passage that we're looking at and I see where it takes me. I think, and I hope, this is the best way to do Biblical preaching; I have to try to be open to the Bible saying new things to me, not just things that I already know. If it's just telling me what I already know, there's not much point studying it. (That said, it's hardly a coincidence that I've been moaning about Puritanism here and then it "just happened to pop out" of the exegesis I did. Of course my thoughts leak. I'd be crazy to pretend that they don't.)

So I did not sit down with the idea of writing a sermon about the concept of holiness; I looked at the passage and drew some connections, and maybe God helped inspire me but I can't say for sure.

Basically, I preach in a completely different way to what was recommended at Bible college. I don't have three main points; I have no main points, not a single one. Instead I try to preach in quite a narrative way, walking the congregation through the Biblical text and "annotating" it as the sermon goes along, and then trying to pull all the annotations together into a pattern at the end. I've been inspired a lot by the theocentric preaching movement, so much so that I often put off the application altogether, and leave people with stories about Jesus.

There's a danger here that I can end up light on doctrine, but to be honest I find the Bible more of a collection of stories about Jesus than a handbook of doctrine. And given my doctrinal eccentricities from time to time, frankly it's better for everyone that I try to stick closely to the Bible.

This has been particularly pronounced as we're going through Mark. I'm going through the book systematically so as to force myself to preach on bits that I would otherwise avoid. There's a lot of miracle stories in Mark, and they're actually really tricky to preach. You can take the lazy way out and say "Jesus has the power to heal you, let's all get healed from our illnesses", but the Gospel isn't a book about you, it's a book about Jesus. There were lots of people Jesus didn't heal. So you have to look at the pericopes and say "what is this story actually saying about him?".

The other one was about gentleness. Again, I had no idea that gentleness is God's tool for handling problems within the church until I sat down and found all the passages that mention it and did the exegesis. So I learn a lot from doing these sermons too. In that sermon, I concluded that it wasn't a sin to disagree with the pastor. (to a Latin American audience, the pastor seems to have almost a magical connection with God, so I wanted to bring that down a notch.) I'm sure that if there are any glaring problems with how I've handled these passages, you guys out there will let me know about it. I give you my permission and encouragement to do so!

When I preach, I try to believe that God is going to speak to people through what I'm going to say. But I'm always surprised when it actually happens. Sermons are like sausages: (and laws) if you like them, you don't want to see them being produced. At least, they always seem a lot less uplifting for the producer than they're supposed to be for the consumer. In short, I find it hard to get excited about my own sermons. I'm forever picking holes in them. So it was good to hear this story today.

I've been preaching recently at the Nagahama English service, which happens on the first and third Sundays. It's a bit of a mixed bag, since it serves the English-speaking community but also acts an outreach to Japanese people who want to practice their English a bit. Two weeks ago I started writing a sermon and it just didn't feel right. It's a sermon for another day, but not that occasion. Instead I felt I ought to preach this sermon which I wrote as part of a module at Bible school. It's about finding God in the midst of suffering. Simon Ponsonby fans will recognise it as a cheap knock-off of one of his sermons.

I didn't actually notice the young Japanese man while I was preaching. There's only about ten or fifteen people at the service, but I didn't get a chance to speak to all of them. But apparently he's been coming along for a while because his girlfriend is a Christian and he wants to know more about what she believes. In the discussion afterwards, it turns out that he was actually going through a time of great suffering; a close family member was very seriously ill and the family was falling into chaos. He heard my sermon about finding God in the midst of suffering - and he went back to his girlfriend and said "can you teach me how to pray?" For the first time, they prayed together.

This week, I preached on contentment. As usual, I can see a load of holes in it already. But who can tell what effect it had on people there?

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.