The Wailing to Dancing Factor (Preaching Point #10)

Over the years I’ve taught preaching in university courses and mentored a number of preaching apprentices and preachers-in-training.  This series summarizes some of the most basic yet most useful preaching points I’ve emphasized in these settings.

Preaching Point #10: The Wailing to Dancing Factor – Preaching tells the best story when it moves between bad news and good news.

Factors within contemporary culture and within the Gospel prompt this kind of sermon structure and content.  Within culture, we once again recognize the experiential-bent of contemporary listeners and the reality that many of their experiences today are “bad news” experiences.  Dominic Strinati writes that, “The loss of a sense of history as a continuous, linear narrative, a clear sequence of events, is indicative of the argument that meta-narratives are in decline in the postmodern world…Meta-narratives are ideas such as religion, science, art, modernism and Marxism which make absolute, universal and all-embracing claims to knowledge and truth.  Postmodern theory is highly skeptical about these meta-narratives, and argues that they are disintegrating, losing their validity and legitimacy and increasingly prone to criticism.  It is argued that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to organize and interpret their lives in the light of meta-narratives of whatever kind.”[i]

This loss of meta-narrative creates the potential for anxiety, frustration, and fear—if there is no grand story which makes sense of my story what is my purpose? For many in the postmodern and post -Christian world, therefore, “bad news” is a constant experience.  Farhat Iftekharuddin states that “…life in the last half of the twentieth century seems restless and disjointed, at least as reflected in contemporary American literature.  The dejection and cynicism of the moderns appears to have culminated in the fatalism and brokenness of the postmodern era: fragmentation, alienation, and inescapable isolation permeate the characters of fiction.”[ii]  There is a sense in which many in this postmodern culture experience a brokenness, a pain, and a fragmented life.  They are all too familiar with the “bad news” of life.

But not only is “bad news” (and the corresponding need for “good news”) inherent in our culture, it is inherent in the Gospel.  The story of the Bible and the Gospel moves from bad news to good news.  Discussing the theme of judgment and grace seen in Genesis 1-11 William LaSor writes: “The primeval prologue prepares the way for the history of redemption.  The relationship is that of problem and solution.  Its chapters carry utmost importance for understanding all of Scripture.”[iii]  That is, the theme of judgment and grace, problem and solution is sounded in Scripture’s earliest pages and sounded thereafter.

Paul Scott Wilson has made a particularly important contribution to sermonic form in this regard.[iv]  Wilson argues that trouble and grace are the “grammar of the Gospel.”  The gospel has a “polar quality to it: sin and redemption, judgment and atonement, trouble and grace, cross and empty tomb, old age and new creation.  The movement from one to the other is the signature movement of the gospel.”

This common ground between Gospel and culture provides a way to further reflect upon sermon structure.  Not only are inductive narrative structures helpful, especially those which reflect both upon text and upon contemporary life; but these structures may be particularly productive if they attempt to reflect the brokenness of the postmodern narrative/life, the judgment and law of Scripture and the Gospel/grace/good news of Scripture.

Once again, Paul Scott Wilson’s work provides an effective way to consider these issues.[v]  Wilson suggests that sermons ought to contain bad news and good news, trouble and grace, law and gospel.   The sermon can thus take the form of 1) moving into trouble in the biblical text, 2) showing that trouble in life, 3) moving into grace in the biblical text, and 4) showing that grace in life.  The narrative and inductive structure is maintained by withholding the “good news” until the sermon’s end (diagram below).