Imaginative Preaching Part 2: Noticing the Unnoticed

Written by Rev. Dr. Heather Henson, Director of Quest

 

We’re continuing our series on imaginative preaching. In the last post, I shared a little about what imaginative preaching is and what it isn’t. Over the next few blog posts, we’re going to walk through a few exercises we can use to cultivate imaginative preaching. When doing these exercises, our goal is not to find the perfect way to outline our sermons. Rather, we are focusing on how we approach the text. So today, we kick it off with Exercise #1: Noticing the Unnoticed.

Have you ever walked into your favorite coffee house or restaurant only to find that you can’t sit in your favorite spot? Someone has taken your seat! (This never happens in church, right?)

Or…how about disagreeing with your spouse about which roads to take to get to your daughter’s swim team practice? Oh wait, maybe that’s just me. But it’s a perfect illustration. I like going a specific way, and when we end up taking a different route, I don’t like it. It can be so disconcerting.

Or it can be refreshing.

Wait, refreshing?

Yes. It’s refreshing because sitting in a new seat, driving a different route, or focusing on something you don’t normally focus on can give you a whole new perspective. The change of view shows you something you wouldn’t have seen or known before.

It’s easy in life to stay in the safe, known places. We have our favorite routes to work, our favorite habits, and our favorite ways to navigate a store. We fall into patterns. These patterns are great sometimes, but they can also limit us. When we stay in our familiar patterns and habits, we can miss new and fresh perspectives. What if we also do this with Scripture? What if, when we read Scripture, we find ourselves always asking the obvious questions and sitting with the obvious characters in each passage? It means that we see things, but we don’t see everything.

One of the first things we can do to become imaginative preachers is to enter the passage of Scripture from the perspective of an unlikely, unnoticed, or even unnamed character. When you open a passage of Scripture, consider who is present and speaking. Then ask yourself who else is there. Who else is in this passage who is unseen? Maybe they don’t speak, but they are there. Then ask yourself: What did they see, hear, and experience? What questions did they ask?

Here, I’ll give you an example. If we were looking at a passage where Jesus is interacting with the Pharisees, there are the obvious people: Jesus, the Pharisees, and the disciples. But there would have also been the crowd. In that crowd, were there women? Children? Men? Who would have been listening? What did they hear? What about Roman guards? Were they nearby? Walking through that Scripture and thinking about the unnamed people who are present gives us a whole new perspective.

When presenting this concept in a workshop recently, I had a pastor ask me if this concept only worked with narrative parts of Scripture. I thought it was a wonderful question because the answer is that it actually works with all Scripture.

Don’t believe me? Let’s think about it.

In the Epistles, we have authors sending letters to churches. Who are the obvious people? The writer (e.g., Paul, Peter, or someone else), and the church members who will hear this letter read in their congregation. These letters were also passed around from church to church. What did a neighboring congregation do with this letter? There may have also been a scribe with the author. Did the scribe hear Paul changing his mind about his wording? And if Paul was speaking out loud, were there guards with him? He was often guarded while he wrote. What did those guards hear and think?

Okay, maybe this works. But what about the Psalms?

Well, we know that Psalms were written for use in the congregation. What was it like to speak these Psalms or to sing these songs as part of worship? How did the leaders lead them, read them, and meditate on them?

Or the beautiful book of Proverbs?

Proverbs are given from a wise person to help bring up and share wisdom with someone else. Many of the Proverbs feel very personal. Did the targeted person react like my son reacts when I ask him to do the dishes?

What does all this do?

When we enter a passage of Scripture from a new angle, when we see who is there and who is not, and when we think about the passage from that vantage point, we gain a fresh perspective. Regardless of whether we preach a narrative sermon or a four-point sermon, we will have studied the text from a new angle. It will stimulate creativity within us.

Give it a try this week. Spend a little of your study time in your passage asking these questions:

Who is also here? What did they see, hear, learn, know, and experience?

What should I see here, Lord, that is not obvious to me? Where are you working in the lives of those who are standing at the edges of this world, but whom you see front and center?