Experience First, Express Second: Making Theology Understood in Preaching
Pop Quiz!
Define “grace.”
Describe “mercy.”
Explain “forgiveness” to a ten-year old.
Compare and contrast faith and trust.
How did you do?
These are words we use a lot when we preach.
By themselves they are abstract concepts.
The abstract doesn’t become real or become incorporated into our beings until we experience them.
You might be able to define these concepts according to the dictionary or your tradition’s catechism, but that won’t be enough to preach in such a way that listeners understand them.
Not until we see, hear, touch, and feel the emotions of an idea do they take up residence in our spirits and do their work of transformation.
This is the power of movies and tv shows and books and Ted Talks: They help us experience abstract concepts so we feel and therefore understand their meaning.
Compelling sermons do the same.
They assume unfamiliarity so no understanding is taken for granted. And then they bring a concept to life.
Imagine needing to convince your listeners they MUST try a rainbow grilled cheese sandwich. You know one bite will be absolutely life-changing.
But what is a rainbow grilled cheese sandwich? How can you explain it so your listeners trust it’s worth the risk to try one? You’ll need to draw on other experiences and familiar concepts to explain what it is—and what it isn’t—so they have a clear sense of what they’re committing to.
Explaining a concept requires talking about it in multiple ways.
These traditional and nontraditional sources will increase your own understanding of theological words so you can better help your listeners understand them in your sermons.
I’ll use the word “mercy” to demonstrate what can be gleaned from looking at diverse resources.
Explore traditional Dictionaries
Just like it’s helpful to refresh our memories about the history and narrative of a book in the bible when we haven’t preached from it for a while, it’s best to refresh our memories about the definition of a word.
There are multiple kinds of dictionaries.
Consider these options that are already on your bookshelves, hard drive, or the internet.
Standard Dictionaries
Think Oxford Deluxe or the dictionary sites that pop up in an internet search. For example:
Mercy: compassion or forgiveness shown towards someone whom it is within one's power to punish or harm: the boy was screaming and begging for mercy; the mercies of God. (Oxford Deluxe Dictionary)
Capturing dictionary phrases is also helpful to see how a word is used.
For instance:
at the mercy of: completely in the power of (consumers were at the mercy of every rogue in the marketplace); be thankful or grateful for small mercies: be relieved that an unpleasant situation is alleviated by minor advantages.
Theological Dictionaries
I still regularly turn to my Dictionary of Theology by Karl Rahner Karl and Herbert Vorgrimler (Crossroad, 1990).
The articles can be long, so grab just the sections that speak to you in the moment. You can always go back to the article later.
Mercy: “Readiness to help those in need. The OT expresses God’s mercy chiefly by the verbs meaning ‘motherly’ and to ‘bend down.’ Assurances of God’s mercy, graciousness, and fidelity to his covenant outbalances all references (frequently anthropomorphic) to the wrath of God. It does not abrogate God’s justice because it makes even the sinner just before God so that God simultaneously satisfies his mercy and his justice” (pp 304-305).
Bible Dictionaries
In print and online, many choices are available. Again, articles can be long, so copy and paste what sparks interest.
Mercy: Several Hebrew and Greek terms lie behind the English term "mercy." The chief Hebrew term is hesed [d,s,j], God's covenant "lovingkindness." In both the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the LXX) and the New Testament, the term behind "mercy" is most often eleos [[eleo"] in one form or another, but oiktirmos/oiktiro [oijktirmov"/oijkteivrw] (compassion, pity, to show mercy) and splanchna/splagchnizomai [splagcNIVzomai] (to show mercy, to feel sympathy for) also play roles (www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/mercy).
Etymological Dictionaries
Understanding the origins of words helps understand their backstories.
Some dictionaries, like the Oxford Deluxe, include etymologies, but they are also easily searched online.
Mercy: “Middle English: from Old French merci ‘pity’ or ‘thanks’, from Latin merces, merced- ‘reward’, in Christian Latin ‘pity, favour, heavenly reward’” (Oxford Deluxe Dictionary).
Particularly interesting for me to learn is that the origin of the word “mercy” includes giving thanks.
Discover Nontraditional Dictionaries for Preaching
For example, Frederick Buechner’s classic Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (Harper, 1973) and Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead Books, 1993).
Nontraditional dictionaries often offer metaphors or anecdotes that spark our preaching imaginations.
Here is part of Buechner’s description of mercy:
“Christ’s love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one” (p. 58).
Seek Meanings: Similar & Opposite
What meanings and words are related to the word? It can be helpful to identify a spectrum of related meanings.
Consider meanings that are close to or synonyms of the term.
Consider also meanings that are far removed or the opposite.
Seeing words that are much alike and not at all alike helps us define and describe what a concept is and what it isn’t.
Oneword.com is a great website where you’ll discover a fascinating array of near-, mid-, and far-meanings.
Near and Far definitions for “Mercy”
Here’s a sample of what I categorized as “near” ideas for mercy from this website:
Clemency: The gentle or kind exercise of power; leniency, mercy; compassion in judging or punishing.
(law) A pardon, commutation, or similar reduction, removal, or postponement of legal penalties by an executive officer of a state.
Unconditionality: “‘Unconditionality’ points to the accessibility of all to the basic income, without any means tests. —Basic income around the world
The equality of cause and effect defines and interprets the unconditionality of causation. —Logic: Deductive and Inductive by Carveth Read
Wideness
Unbounding
Unbinding
Desperateness: “But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.” —Colette
Here are a couple of “far” concepts for mercy, also from oneword.com:
Unrepentant
Heartlessness
near and far theologies for “Mercy”
Some of these I found via oneword.com, and others were spurred by all of the sources above and my own experiences.
Near
Grace
Compassion
Justice
Forgiveness
Connection
Integration
Far
Forgive and forget
Disintegrate
Shun
Ban
Apostate
No need to apologize; it’s okay.
Other “near and Far” Sources
You can also find near and far meanings by searching online poetry and quotes.
For instance when I searched “poems about mercy” I found these (and more) on the discoverpoetry.com site.
I copied the words or phrases I found interesting and paraphrased one of the poems, paying particular attention to what I felt in my body when I read them:
“Mercy” by William Shakespeare:
“not strained”
“sit the dread and fear of kings”
“The Lion and the Mouse” by Jeffries Taylor:
This is the story of a (female) mouse who disturbed a (male) lion’s sleep, and just as the lion was about the crush the mouse, she implored the lion’s clemency, who then offered “his little prisoner a reprieve.”
I noted the power differentials between the strength and mass of a lion compared to the relative weakness and mass of a mouse, and male and female.
Avoid the burden of “all the things all the time”
You don’t have to refer to all of these sources every time.
Instead, start a file on each word and add to them each time it comes up in the text.
Ultimately, the purpose is to have such a nuanced vocabulary and conceptual bank for a term or concept that you can readily illustrate the idea in your sermon—concretely, emotionally, and thus, compellingly.
As your knowledge base grows, you’ll be able to move your sermons beyond abstract and boring definitions. You’ll be able to check your assumptions that “everyone knows” what you’re talking about and bring theology—that is, God’s characteristics—into everyone’s daily life.
When you do, God will cease to be a theory and instead become incarnate.
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