Witnessing to God in the Midst of Life: Old Testament Preaching

Preaching Biblical Characters

The best justification for preaching Old Testament characters is simply that we know a lot about them – the major characters and many of the minor ones – because they are drawn with such striking clarity. I know of no better place to begin than with Moses, who is of course the most developed, and his representation shapes those of other characters to follow, including Elijah, Jeremiah, and Jesus. One reason I preach on Moses to my divinity school students is that his story gives much needed theological content to our understanding of “leadership.” Yet Moses is for everyone; probably no other story has so much to teach us about what an intimate, long-term relationship with God may look like, for better and for worse. In other words, his story speaks about the long road to spiritual maturity.

A baby floating in a basket on a river sounds to us like a fairy tale; in its own ancient Near Eastern setting, it echoes the birth story of the legendary Mesopotamian king Sargon the Great, from the third millennium bce, a story already ancient by the time the Bible was written. Characters in fairy tales and royal legends are generally static; we might derive a “lesson” from their two-dimensional stories, but we are not drawn into them in any deep way. Royal legends do not preach. It is different with Moses’ story; many of the events are on a larger-than-life scale, yet because his character is recognizable to us, we can enter into the ways he struggles with God, members of his own community, and with his own weaknesses.

The very first scene of the young man Moses reveals a crucial aspect of his character: he sees (the Hebrew word ra’ah, “see,” is extremely common in these first few chapters of Exodus) what others do not see, and especially the suffering of others. As we shall learn at the Burning Bush, the ability to see what others suffer and the inability to ignore it is the single most important characteristic that Moses shares with God (cf. Ex. 3:7). On his first reported excursion outside Pharaoh’s palace, Moses “looks upon” (ra’ah b-) the burdens of the Hebrew slaves (Ex. 2:11); the verbal phrase denotes an experience of seeing that is deep enough to have consequences. Thus, when he “sees” an Egyptian beating one of his “brothers” (whether or not Moses knows of their kinship), he strikes and kills – and that marks the end of the Prince of Egypt. Moses has “fallen,” we might say, out of the realm of royal legend and into the world of anguish, hardship, and rejection, the real world which biblical narrative treats.

If there is any one thing that definitively stamps Moses’ life-story with the feeling of reality rather than legend, it is his failure to enter the Promised Land with the people for whom he has spent himself over forty years, interceding for them time and again, sometimes arguing with God as two parents might argue over their deeply disappointing children. Exactly why Moses has to die short of the Land is not as clear as we might like – and that in itself is part of the aura of reality here; that sad outcome is not quickly moralized. The Deuteronomic tradition says that it was on account of Israel’s sin that Moses was held back (Deut. 4:21), making this the first biblical instance of vicarious suffering unto death on behalf of the people. There may even be some truth to Kafka’s observation that Moses suffers this most bitter disappointment simply because he is human, and to be human is to inhabit a world which does not match our dreams and desires. ⁴

Yet the Priestly account of Moses’ action at Kadesh suggests a different reason, one that seems to me critical for understanding the temptations and the costs that attend leadership in any religious community. In that waterless place, God commanded Moses and Aaron to speak to a certain rock before the people, and it would yield its water. However, the only speech recorded is when Moses says to the people, “Shall we bring forth water for you from this rock?” (Num. 20:10). As the great rabbinic commentator Rashi observes, he was just one letter off; he should have said, “He” – God – not “we.” ⁵ Is it possible that after all this time, Moses has come to think, at least in this moment of extreme pressure, that the people’s survival depends ultimately upon him? God’s response is swift and unyielding: “Because you did not show faith in Me so as to sanctify Me in the eyes of the Israelites, therefore you shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them” (v. 12). By “speaking rashly” out of an embittered spirit, as the Psalmist describes this moment (Ps. 106:33), Moses becomes an obstruction and danger to the people he is meant to bring not just to the land of Canaan, but to God. With that, his own fate is sealed, although Moses’ work and words continue; his death outside the land does not occur for some fifty more chapters (Deut. 34:4-5).

Living closely enough with Moses’ story to preach and teach it faithfully, all the way to the sobering yet not hopeless end, would be a significant step toward realism and maturity in the life of any worshipping community, including its leadership. “The church cannot make the difficulty of reality less difficult,” states Stanley Hauerwas. “What I hope…the church can do is help us bear the difficulty without engaging in false hopes.” ⁶ Patient, truthful engagement with the biblical story may well be the single best way for Christians to gain that kind of spiritual strength, and some of the most helpful parts of the story may well be those that are not obviously encouraging.

I once preached on the prophet Jeremiah at an ordination. While Jeremiah’s call narrative is specifically given as an option for ordinations in the American Book of Common Prayer, it is in some ways an odd choice, since Jeremiah had probably the least enviable ministry of any prophet: forty years of futile warnings and summons to repentance, of intercessions for the people and laments over his own desperate situation, and all that ending in the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah. Nonetheless, the choice is justified, because more explicitly than anyone else in the Bible except Jesus, Jeremiah shows us what it is to live solely on the strength of God’s word. God says to him, “Look, I put my words in your mouth” (Jer. 1:9). And Jeremiah tells us just how that feels: like swallowing fire and feeling it burn until he can no longer hold it in (20:9), or swallowing a hammer that pounds inside, hard enough to shatter rock (23:29). Yet for all that, Jeremiah remains the true friend of God, never growing cold or indifferent. On the contrary, he burns hot, even against God, yet he never burns out. What distinguishes Jeremiah from the masses of burnt-out ministers, lay and ordained, in the church, is that he never tries to fuel his ministry with his own vision, enthusiasm and creativity, with the clever answers he has devised to the conundrums of life. God’s word is the only source of power behind every word the prophet utters and everything he does, and his spiritual courage is demonstrated as he opens himself repeatedly to that word, through decades of unimaginably difficult ministry.

After I had preached, a priest expressed disappointment in a message he took to be dispiriting: “I just wish you had spoken about Jesus.” Someone else had a different response: “I was ordained earlier this year. If you had preached that at my ordination, I would have had no idea what you were talking about. But now I can tell you it is the most helpful thing I have heard in these nine months.” If listening deeply to Jeremiah comes as a relief to some Christians, perhaps that is because he models what it is to hold together in one “heart” (one of Jeremiah’s own favorite words) acute suffering, outrage over undeserved suffering, and unshakable faith in God. Indeed, in him we glimpse the truth that faithful suffering is itself participation in the life of God in this world. “Sharing in God’s suffering in the worldly life” is what “makes someone a Christian,” declares Bonhoeffer, whose own sense of vocation was profoundly shaped by Jeremiah’s witness. ⁷ “That is metanoia” – a profound change of mind. ⁸

Recently I saw Jeremiah’s prophetic witness work a change of mind in one accomplished and highly successful preacher. I had spoken about his “art of lament” to a group of experienced clergy, suggesting that it is our responsibility as preachers and teachers to help other Christians become more adept at a mode of speech that is common in the Bible, though not in contemporary church culture. One of them, the senior pastor of a church with some 19,000 members, protested that people in his church find it a relief to get away from their troubles for a little while, via worship at 97 decibels. I did not attempt to persuade him otherwise, so I was surprised when he took the initiative to reopen the subject before the whole class the next day: “I thought and blogged about it last night, and I realize that I have been withholding something from my people, because I didn’t want to deal with their pain, or even my own. But I am depriving us all of genuine comfort. So this has to change.” It took courage to say that before a group of peers to whom he would be accountable over a period of two years or more. It was the witness of Scripture that exerted coercion on this biblically centered preacher, pressuring him to change his mind.

Preaching the Psalms

Turning now to a second aspect of Old Testament preaching, I confess my bias at the outset: were I to be confined to a desert-island pulpit with only one book of the Bible, it would be the Psalms. I preach from it more often than from any other book, and not only because psalms are recited in virtually every worship service I attend. That only points to the deeper reason to preach them frequently, namely that as a resource of theology, prayer, and pastoral care, the Psalter is inexhaustible; not for nothing did Martin Luther speak of it as a Bible in miniature. Yet psalms do something that other biblical texts do not: they speak directly for us in the presence of God. As prayers (or in some cases, calls to prayer and meditations on prayer) which are themselves scriptural, they instruct us when we do not know how to pray as we ought. Luther describes their distinctive witness thus:

Thus the Psalter lays before us…[the saints’] very hearts and the inmost treasure of their souls, so we can look down to the foundation and source of their words and deeds. We can look into their hearts and see what kind of thoughts they had, how their hearts were disposed, and how they acted in all kinds of situations, in danger and in need. ⁹

Even for contemporary preachers who may not share Luther’s view that many of the psalms were written by David and other biblical “saints,” they make accessible to us the world of thought and feeling that is the biblical story. They lend themselves to preaching, just because so many psalms are formulated as first-person speech and thus make a ready connection with our experience. John Calvin, one of the greatest pastoral preachers of the Psalter, treasured it as “An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul,” drawn “to the life” by the Holy Spirit and revealing “all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities” – in short, every disposition of the heart, with the blessed exception of hypocrisy! ¹⁰

Great preachers of virtually every age – among them Augustine, Chrysostom, John Donne, and Bonhoeffer, as well as Luther and Calvin – have often expressed a particular affinity for the Psalter, and many of their sermons on this favorite book survive. Yet my experience is that people are often surprised, even mildly shocked, when I choose a psalm as a preaching text. So what has changed to make preaching psalms a foreign practice? I would suggest that the core of the problem may well be that they are poems. As schoolchildren, many of us had negative experiences with poetry – or more accurately, with the tortuous way poetry was taught, so its energy was lost in pitiless examinations of rhyme and rhythm and expressions that seemed so indirect as to be deliberately antagonizing.

But the psalmist’s expression is anything but indirect; this should be heartening to those who might once have been put off by a teacher who would, in Billy Collins’ memorable image, beat a poem “with a hose//to find out what it really means.” ¹¹ Rather than dwelling on rhythmic patterns, which are obscured by translation anyway, the prospective preacher is well advised to focus on what Murray Lichtenstein insightfully identifies as the “peculiar genius” of biblical poetry, its capacity “for effecting the direct, immediate involvement of its audience in a kind of emotional dialogue….” Biblical poetry is essentially “a relational phenomenon. It both derives from interaction and has the marked capacity to generate more of the same.” ¹² This genius for interaction is most fully evidenced as psalms speak for us, like someone with the gift for prayer, and also to us, like a good pastor or teacher:

When I call out, answer me, my righteous God.

 In the straits, you set me free.

  Have mercy upon me and hear my prayer.

…

In peace, all whole, let me lie down and sleep.

 For You, Lord, alone, do set me down safely. (Ps. 4:2, 9)

Near is the Lord to the broken-hearted,

 and the crushed in spirit He rescues.

…

The Lord ransoms His servants’ lives,

 they will bear no guilt, all who shelter in Him. (Ps. 34:19, 23)

Do not fling me from Your presence,

 and Your holy spirit take not from me.

Give me back the gladness of Your rescue

 and with a noble spirit sustain me. (Ps. 51:13-14)

Lord, save my life from lying lips,

 from a tongue of deceit.

What can it give you, what can it add,

 a tongue of deceit? (Ps. 120:2-3)

Any pastor or preacher will instantly recognize that there is a drama, or a trauma, underlying each of these passages, which are chosen nearly at random. Taken as a whole, the Psalter bespeaks intense and fluctuating emotions, and many individual psalms testify to the important truth that we can feel and think different things at one time, especially about the things that matter most. “Part of the spiritual greatness of Psalms,” as Robert Alter observes, “part of the source of its enduring appeal through the ages, is that it profoundly recognizes the bleakness, the dark terrors, the long nights of despair that shadow most lives, and against all this, evokes the notion of a caring presence that can reach out to the broken-hearted.” ¹³ The verses here I cite from Alter’s indispensable recent translation, which renders at exactly the right pitch the Psalter’s characteristic emotional vibrancy, yet without loss of dignity and control.

In order to bring hearers fully into the drama in the short space of a sermon, my most frequent approach to a psalm is to focus on a guiding image or emotion, sometimes a single line or phrase, which becomes a point of orientation as I trace through the psalm its shifting moods and developing thought. Psalms are characteristically dynamic – another aspect of their relationality, since no genuine relationship is static. Therefore I always preach a whole psalm (Psalm 119 being the one exception!), not the fragments that are often presented in lectionaries and liturgies. I usually request that it be read as a lection, by a skilled reader, so the congregation has a chance to hear the text in a way they likely have not done before.

The first lines of Psalm 27 are very familiar. Taken out of context, as they generally are, they would seem to dismiss the elemental terror to which Alter points:

The Lord is my light and my salvation: of whom would I be afraid?

The Lord is my life’s strength; whom would I dread? (v. 1) ¹⁴

But read in context, those questions do not seem to be merely rhetorical; the next verse suggests that the psalmist is not dismissing anxiety but rather actively battling against it. Surrounded as she is by enemies ready “to eat my flesh” (v. 2), the psalmist takes a stand:

If a battalion encamps against me, my heart will not fear.

If war breaks out against me, in this I am secure. (v. 3)

In just a few lines the psalmist sums up the faith dynamic of the whole Bible and of every person who tries to believe: Either we see God as “my life’s strength,” or we are defeated by a host of fears, until we are finally undone by the fear of death itself. There is no third possibility.

Yet taking a position in battle is not the same as holding it, and if we follow the movement of the psalm we see just how precarious this position is. In one moment, the psalmist is sure that “[God] will hide me in the shelter of his tent” (v. 5); in the next, he pleads:

Do not hide your face from me!

…Do not forsake me nor abandon me, o God of my deliverance! (v. 9)

That sudden shift from confidence to abject pleading has prompted some modern commentators to propose that two originally separate prayers, a strident lament and a psalm of thanksgiving, have been somewhat awkwardly joined together here. However, a much more plausible perspective comes from Luther’s insight into the First Commandment, which, he observes, “claims the two parts of your heart: fear God and trust him.” ¹⁵ So fear is finally indivisible from faith; certainly this is one of the core spiritual insights of the Old Testament altogether, where “fear of the Lord” is the ordinary term for faith. Our psalmist speaks from both parts of the heart.

Firm faith comes only through battling with our deepest fears, subjecting them and ourselves to rigorous examination: “Do I really need what I am so afraid of losing?” Engaging in that most difficult spiritual task is what brings the psalmist to the point of utter clarity, to naming the one thing that must not be lost – and therefore (as Luther sees) the one thing we can trust God to give us:

One thing I ask of the Lord; it is what I seek:

that I may dwell in the Lord’s house all the days of my life,

to gaze upon the loveliness of the Lord and to frequent his sanctuary. (v. 4)

The spiritual sight of God’s “face” (v. 8) is the one vision that can lift us out of our small frightened selves, hold us up and give us a life with a view. “On a rock he will lift me high” (v. 5). Whenever any psalmist speaks of “rock,” it is likely that “the Rock of Israel,” God’s protective Presence (see Isa. 30:29 and 2 Sam. 23:3, cf. 22:2-3 = Ps. 18:3,), is in view. During the Epiphany season, in which this psalm appears in the Revised Common Lectionary, one might see Christ as the Rock on which we are lifted high (cf. 1 Cor. 10:4); he is God’s strong protective Presence revealed to all the world.

I never hear Psalm 27 without remembering my student who chose it for an exegetical essay, now many years ago, because he had been sexually abused by both his parents. A line most of us would take as hyperbole – “Though my father and my mother abandon me, the Lord takes me in” (v. 10) – was for him a lifeline, pulling him out of the total horror of the past, every time it threatened to overwhelm him. I see him, gentle yet intent, especially as I repeat the penultimate line:

If I were not sure of looking upon the Lord’s goodness in the land of the living… (v.13)

The thought remains incomplete; the psalmist draws back from imagining even for an instant what it would be to lose the hope of seeing God in the land of the living, ending with a forceful imperative addressed to himself as much as to us:

Hope in the Lord; be strong and let your heart take courage, and hope in the Lord! (v. 14)

The aim of Old Testament preaching, as I understand and try to practice it, is to enter into the biblical story – not just the twists and turns of plot, but also the thoughts and feelings, the kind of faith that informs its manifold witness. The aim is to enter in such a way that both preacher and hearers are sobered or comforted, as the need may be, and all of us are strengthened in our life with God. That does not happen if the preacher merely sets forth ideals with the exhortation to live into them. Such an approach distances preacher from hearers, at the same time as it obscures the bracing yet expansive moral vision of Scripture. Entering into the story world of the Bible is a matter not of resolve but rather of seeing, differently and more deeply, and that is why idealistic or moralistic exhortations do not work. Yet we may acquire the habit of this different and consequential way of seeing as we seek out and indeed befriend the deeply human characters of the Old Testament. We may become, as medieval theologians put it, capax Dei – capacious enough to receive something of God – as we persistently and even courageously take on our own lips and into our hearts the words of psalmists, words both revealing and revelatory, in such a way as to allow our relationship to God to be changed.