MINISTRY LEADERSHIP
Preaching that Educates
If the Text is Written This Way: Educating for Bible Study
by Lawanda Smith
It was just after church one Sunday morning, and I was greeting the congregation as they walked from the sanctuary to the fellowship hall for a snack lunch. My text that morning had been from Mark, and at one point in the sermon, I commented, “If Mark sandwiches a story between two pieces of another story, there’s a reason. Mark is trying to tell us something.”
“You know,” someone remarked as she shook my hand, “I’ve never thought about those stories being put together that way. That really makes sense!”
She was right. It does make sense, and it was something I’d been thinking about a long time.
Early in my ministry, when I was assistant campus minister at a university, one of my tasks was to teach students how to lead Bible studies. Basically, we gave students the lessons to present, and for the most part it was good curriculum material. But it occurred to me later on that while I might have facilitated a class, I hadn’t really taught anyone how to study the Bible. What I needed to give them was the tools, tips to help them interpret Scripture.
Today, I’m still convinced that adults in faith congregations need these tools. And I’m even more convinced that pastors can give people these tools as we educate through the sermon. Specifically, pastors can challenge their congregation to Bible Study by incorporating into their sermons methods of interpreting Scripture. But we need to know what to look for ourselves as we study in preparation for our sermons.
Stories, of course, are crafted. When we tell our stories, we tell them a certain way because we want to get a point across. The biblical writers were no different, especially the Gospel writers. They crafted their stories in certain ways because they wanted to get their point across. And we can interpret the meaning of these stories more fully when we investigate how they are crafted. For instance, we might want to consider things such as these:
The placement of the story itself
- A story which interrupts a larger story.
- Two stories told together, stories that have common elements.
- Two similar stories sandwiching a third story.
The details of the story (or what happens in the story)
- Repeated words or images
- Characters in the story
- Paradoxes
And then, after we’ve done our own study and preparation, we craft the sermon to incorporate what we’ve found out. Take, for instance, Luke’s parable about a rich man and his dishonest manager, told in Luke 16.
This rich man hears by way of the grapevine that his chief manager is mismanaging his property. So he asks the manager to give him an account of his activities. In other words, he demands that his manager show him the books. And then, this rich man tells his manager he is going to fire him.
Stripped of his power, position, and prestige, the manager is at a loss. He’s not strong enough for manual labor, and he is too proud to beg. He is nowhere close to prepared for his future.
So he makes the same decisions he’s always made. He hatches a scheme. He tries to take care of himself by cheating his boss out of money. He plans to have people obligated to him so he will have a place to live when he doesn’t have a job.
He calls in the people indebted to his employer, one at a time, and he slashes their debt. To one who owes a hundred jars of oil, he says, “Make it fifty.” To one who owes a hundred containers of wheat, he says, “Make it eighty.”
And here the story gets a little confusing. The manager’s boss, once again, finds out about his scheming. But this time, he commends the manager for acting shrewdly, even though he’s been cheated again. Just what are we to make of this story?
Luke’s parables are intertwined, one picking up the strands of another and moving on ahead to yet another. And if Luke sandwiches a parable between two other stories, you can bet there’s a point in there somewhere. And here, this parable of the rich man and the dishonest manager comes between the story of the prodigal son–or the extravagant father—and the story of a rich man and the poor man Lazarus.
There’s a rich man in both of these stories. We may overlook that little detail when we focus on the return of the prodigal son, but his father has money. After all, he’s given this son his portion of the inheritance—early—and there’s still enough left over to throw an extravagant party when the boy returns home. But he’s still sharing it with the one who has less. He puts the best robe on his wayward son, puts a big ring on his finger. The boy may have been greedy, but his father was genuinely not. Maybe these stories—and the one they bookend–have something to say about grace.
Stories can be interpreted different ways, though. So what if we look at things from the perspective of the minor characters—the debtors? It’s not the perspective usually taken, and that just may be the point. Jesus hardly ever takes the usual perspective. Just look at who he hangs out with—tax collectors and sinners, fishermen, common people and outcasts, not the elite, not even the religious elite. So what about these debtors? The text doesn’t say they know their manager is being dishonest, that he’s just buttering up to them so they will come to his rescue later, that he’s actually cheating his boss out of money. They just know that part of their debt has been wiped out. Why, their manager’s actions might have just looked like grace to them. In fact, they had so little, and their master had so much, maybe...his action looked like justice, too.
This example illustrates one way pastors can educate through the sermon. Storytelling is the key: telling the Gospel story and, as we explored last month, connecting it with our own stories. But there are other stories that connect with the Gospel story as well. For instance, there are stories from church history, and next month we’ll explore how using these faces and places of the past also helps us educate.
Dr. Lawanda Smith is Instructor of English and Religion at Louisiana State University Alexandria. She resides in Alexandria, Louisiana, where she is a member of Emmanuel Baptist Church. She also preaches regularly at other churches in the area. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, writing, water skiing, and entertaining her cats.
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