For the final day of the mid-winter gathering of the Iowa Preachers Project in Memphis at St. John’s Episcopal Church, I offered this synthesis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Lectures on Homiletics.”
If you’re a preacher and are interested in the cohort for next year (or if you know a gospel-centered preacher who might enjoy finding a cross-denominational community), let me know! The applications will open up this spring.
I. Preachers Ought to be Students of the Bible
Almost exactly five years ago, just after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Fleming Rutledge, my homiletical muse, sent me a text message, “If this is not a moment of status confessionis, a circumstance in which the true church can take only one position, I don’t know what one would be,” her first text read.
She then quickly followed with another message:
“If this is not a time of status confessionis, I don’t know what is. If this is not a time for courage in the pulpit, I can’t imagine what that time would be. From the sermons I’ve watched online, all I have found is studious avoidance of the Big Lie. Jason, you must risk not being liked and take seriously your responsibility to the LORD to preach and teach the truth in this Empire of Lies. If we continue to live in an Empire of Lies and never speak out, never bear witness to the kingdom, never dare to live the difference Christ makes, we simply give lie to Paul’s promise of the Spirit’s presence with us.”
After the term status confessionis, by way of explanation, Fleming put Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s name in parentheses. In hindsight I am far from certain that my sermons met the bar she set for preachers. I am also not quite sure I agree with her assessment of the situation or what it demanded of the church.
I have always thought Bonhoeffer suffered from being overly famous yet selectively read. And to an extent this was true of me as well. Fleming’s texts spurred me to dive deeper into his voluminous works where I discovered a surprise. In full, Bonhoeffer was neither an activist nor a prophet (he himself recoiled at the label martyr). He was not, primarily, a theologian.
Bonhoeffer was one of us, a preacher and a student of the Bible.
This is especially on display in his “Lectures on Homiletics,” which he delivered in 1935 upon taking up the role of director for the Confessing Church’s “Emergency Pastors’ Seminary” at Finkenwalde. Contemporary observers noted that these lectures bore little resemblance to the dominant homiletical texts of the period.
Charles Marsh quotes a student at Finkewalde’s recollection:
“We found his lectures at Finkenwalde a revelation. We understood we were not there to learn techniques of preaching but to be initiated into a new way of being Christian.”
Crucially, these lectures are not an attempt to improve preaching but to save it. Bonhoeffer does not ask how preaching might become more compelling, effective, or relevant in a “world come of age.” He asks instead whether preaching can still be true— whether the sermon can still be the Word of God— when the church itself is collapsing into ideology, fear, accommodation, and spiritual evasions of obedience. To read these lectures as a contribution to contemporary “practical theology” is already to misread them, for Bonhoeffer offers no advice about techniques.
What Bonhoeffer undertakes is the reconstruction of the conditions of possibility for preaching after the church has lost its nerve. The crisis he addresses is not rhetorical or psychological but christological and ecclesiological.
His question—sometimes implicit, sometimes brutally explicit—is simple:
If Christ himself is to speak, what must a sermon be?
If Jesus is going to say a word, what is the nature of the sermon?
The question is anything but abstract. Bonhoeffer had seen preaching that was powerful, biblical, and utterly false. Under Nazification, scripture was not denied but commandeered. Jesus was not rejected but refashioned—as Aryan hero, ethical teacher, or symbol of national destiny. Preaching had not vanished; it had been perverted.
At the same time, an opposite temptation pressed in. Faced with such corruption, many concluded that words themselves were the problem. Sermons seemed cheap in a world rushing toward concentration camps. What mattered now, it was argued, was action: resistance, courage, concrete deeds of love. Christianity needed fewer sermons and more saints. Bonhoeffer understands this temptation intimately— and rejects it without hesitation. A retreat from Word to deed is not faithfulness but cowardice. It evades the preacher’s calling to stand under God’s command and speak the Word of the LORD.
This double pressure—ideological preaching on the one hand and anti-preaching moralism on the other—forms the crucible of Bonhoeffer’s homiletics. The result is a vision of preaching as austere as it is daring. Preaching is not one activity among others in the church’s life. The sermon is the event in which Christ himself encounters his congregation as the Living Word by whom all things were made. If this claim is false, then proclamation should indeed be abandoned. But if it is true, then no political emergency excuses those called to preach. To remove the Word in favor of deeds is not to purify the church but to dismember it.
Without preaching, the church does not become faithful.
Without preaching, the church becomes mute.
This is why Bonhoeffer rejects every attempt to replace preaching with “life,” “love,” or “action.” Such proposals sound radical but are, in his judgment, deeply conservative: they protect the self. They spare the preacher the risk of speech, the exposure of standing publicly under God’s judgment. Preaching is dangerous not because it is powerful but because it places the preacher under a command she cannot control. To abandon preaching is to reclaim mastery.
The same logic governs Bonhoeffer’s account of vocation and ordination. One of his most striking claims is that the call to preach is irrevocable. A pastor may leave a parish; a denomination may disappear; listeners may reject you. None of this releases the preacher from God’s call. “One is called to preaching,” Bonhoeffer insists, “This call is irrevocable; we cannot get out from under God’s command.” Ordination bears a promise and places the preacher under command. This is why grasping after the office is sacrilege and fleeing it when it becomes costly is disobedience. The call to preach is neither validated by success nor nullified by failure. The call is a burden— one that becomes judgment or blessing, depending on whether it is borne in faith.
This severity reaches its peak in Bonhoeffer’s reflections on vocatio interna. Without inner certainty of God’s call, preaching becomes a curse. God may still speak through the sermon—divine faithfulness is not hostage to human sincerity—but the preacher herself is judged by the Word she speaks. Here Bonhoeffer invokes Judas. Judas preached. Judas healed. Judas cast out demons. And yet his commission became his condemnation because it was not received in obedience.
Preaching is never neutral.
It always places the preacher under grace or judgment.
Preaching is justified not by its effects but by its source and its goal. Its source is Christ’s commission through the church. Its goal is not improvement, education, or even conversion in the modern sense.
The goal of preaching is for Jesus to have himself a Bride.
The aim of preaching is the church.
With this claim, Bonhoeffer breaks decisively with both liberal and evangelical homiletics. Against liberalism, he denies that sermons cultivate religious consciousness or ethical ideals. Against pragmatism, he denies that sermons exist to produce measurable results. Preaching exists because the church exists, and the church exists because Christ continues to create it by his Word. Truth, therefore, is not something the sermon contains but something that happens. The Word creates its own form of existence in the congregation—discipleship, obedience to Jesus Christ. Anything else— bourgeois respectability, nationalist belonging, moral heroism— is a betrayal of the church’s being.
Here Bonhoeffer brings the political stakes of preaching fully into view. The church’s life is not rooted in ethnic, cultural, racial, or national identity but in obedience to a LORD crucified by the world. A sermon that seeks proximity to a political ethos rather than fidelity to Jesus has already surrendered its authority.
Only a church that exists as discipleship can speak a word that is heard.
This does not mean the preacher’s life guarantees the sermon’s truth. God is not held hostage to human obedience. But a preacher who does not stand in obedience robs the sermon of credibility. The Word still speaks—but through a life that contradicts it.
At the center of Bonhoeffer’s homiletics is his refusal to allow preaching to become expressive, instrumental, or strategic. The sermon does not arise from experience, need, or urgency. It arises from Christ’s command and moves toward Christ’s church. Anything else replaces proclamation with communication.
Preachers are not mere communicators.
Or rather, effective communicators are rarely good preachers.
Speech, however eloquent, cannot bear the weight preaching must bear.
In this sense, Bonhoeffer’s homiletics is finally not about sermons at all, but about whether the church still believes that God speaks, and whether it is willing to live as though that gospel is true.
II. Scripture as the Only Concrete Situation
If Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the sermon exists for the sake of the church sounds austere, his understanding of scripture’s role in preaching can sound, at first, almost reckless. Against the trend in Wisdom preaching that captivates the church today, Bonhoeffer denies that preaching consists in the “application” of biblical texts to everyday life. This rejection is not pedagogical but theological. The idea of application smuggles in a false anthropology and a false doctrine of revelation. It assumes the scriptures are abstract until the preacher renders them concrete, distant until the sermon bridges the gap between ancient text and modern situation— this is precisely how homiletics was taught in my seminary.
Bonhoeffer argues for the reverse.
The text is already concrete.
The preacher’s task is not to make it relevant, but to get out of the way.
To grasp this claim, we must clarify what Bonhoeffer means by concrete. In homiletics, concreteness is most often defined by immediacy— social conditions, political crises, psychological needs, lived experience. A sermon is “concrete” when it names what hearers recognize as their real world. Bonhoeffer does not deny these realities, but he refuses to give them theological priority. They are not the decisive situation. The truly concrete situation, he insists, is always the same: sinners standing before the living God.
This conviction undergirds Bonhoeffer’s rejection of preaching that “addresses the situation.” He is not indifferent to context, but he insists the initiative belongs to the Word. The Word addresses the situation; the situation does not dictate the Word. To reverse this order allows fear or urgency to determine what may be said. In 1930s Germany, this reversal proved deadly. It produced sermons that were impeccably contextual and utterly faithless. Application assumes the scriptures are inert until activated by the preacher. Bonhoeffer finds this assumption theologically arrogant and spiritually disastrous.
As he cautions in his lecture from November 13, 1935:
“Because the concrete historical situation is ambiguous to the extent that God and the devil are always at work within it, [the contemporary moment and its issues] can never function as the source of the proclamation of the word.”
The scriptures do not need to be carried into the present.
They are already present.
Because Jesus is not dead; Christ is risen indeed.
What, then, becomes of concreteness? Bonhoeffer’s answer is deceptively simple: exposition. True exposition is not commentary adorned with illustration. It is the disciplined letting of the scriptures say what they say. The scriptures are concrete because they speak of God’s concrete acts— creation, election, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection. These acts do not float above history. They are history.
To proclaim them is not to evade reality.
It is to name reality truthfully.
This is why Bonhoeffer urges resistance to making scripture “interesting.” Interest often distracts from truth. It tempts the preacher to mediate meaning rather than serve the Word. Exposition, by contrast, requires restraint and trust— trust in the passage more than in the preacher’s ingenuity.
Underlying this restraint is Bonhoeffer’s confidence in the objectivity of God’s Word. Objectivity here does not mean neutrality but confrontation. The Word addresses preacher and congregation from outside themselves. It judges religious experience rather than arising from it. This objectivity is inseparable from christology. Scripture is concrete because it bears witness to Christ, and Christ is concrete because he has assumed flesh. The incarnation is not a metaphor for accessibility but the event in which God binds himself to human history.
God’s Word is no longer an abstract command. It is a living presence. To hear scripture preached is to encounter Christ himself. This is Bonhoeffer’s critique of the law/gospel distinction. Jesus is alive; therefore, he just might (probably will, in fact) tell you to do something for him.
Here Bonhoeffer’s homiletics takes on a sacramental character. The sermon is not merely about Christ; it speaks for Christ.
If nothing else this is the distinction I hope our project impresses upon your cohort. Preaching is not speaking about God; preaching is eschatological, first order speech. It is speaking for God.
It is an event of Christ’s promised presence. The Word does not simply inform; it works. It gathers, judges, forgives, commands, consoles. It bears the church.
This language of bearing is decisive in Bonhoeffer’s lectures. Preaching does not first instruct the congregation how to live; it places them on Christ’s shoulders. Only those who are borne can obey. Obedience is not the precondition of hearing the Word but its consequence. Thus Bonhoeffer avoids both moralism and despair. Law exposes sin to drive the sinner into Christ’s arms; gospel announces forgiveness as the ground of renewed obedience.
Because the Word bears the congregation, it also bears the preacher. The preacher does not stand above scripture applying it to others, but beneath it, judged and comforted by it. This shared exposure gives preaching its peculiar authority. The preacher speaks not as one who has mastered the Word, but as one still mastered by it.
For this reason Bonhoeffer insists on meditation and prayer— these are the only practical suggestions he gives in his lectures on preaching— as integral to sermon preparation. Meditation is not a technique for insight but submission to judgment. A sermon that has not first judged the preacher will inevitably become a judgment on the congregation. Bonhoeffer’s rejection of application thus becomes an affirmation of responsibility. The preacher is not responsible for making the Word effective; God has taken that responsibility upon himself. The preacher is responsible only for fidelity. Such trust requires discipline, courage, and the relinquishment of control.
Ultimately, Bonhoeffer’s account of scripture’s concreteness is inseparable from his doctrine of the church. The church is not a community formed by shared meaning but one called into being by a Word that addresses it here and now. When the Word is preached, the church happens. When it is silenced, the church dissolves into religion, politics, or memory. Bonhoeffer’s Lectures on Homiletics therefore rebuke every attempt to secure relevance by other means. The church is concrete because it stands under the Word that became flesh and still dwells among us.
To preach that Word is not an escape from reality.
It is the courage to name reality at its deepest level.
III. The Discipline of Disappearing
Bonhoeffer’s Christology forbids making homiletics exactly what it is in most seminary classrooms. For Bonhoeffer, if the sermon is the event in which Christ bears the congregation, then the question of form is no longer a matter of style or preference. Every decision about language, structure, tone, delivery— even the distinction between law and gospel— either witnesses to the objectivity of the Word or obscures it. Thus Bonhoeffer’s homiletics is relentlessly concerned with the danger of the preacher’s self intruding into the sermon— not because personality is sinful, but because the Word (who is a jealous God, after all) cannot be borne alongside a competing center. This concern explains Bonhoeffer’s suspicion of rhetoric. He rejects the subtle ways in which the preacher seeks to secure authority through eloquence, emotional appeal, or cultural cleverness. Rhetoric, in this sense, is not a neutral tool. It is a temptation. It invites the preacher to trust the power of speech rather than the power of the Word.
Don’t forget—
The Germany of his day was saturated with oratory.
In and out of the church.
No different than today’s social media, unceasing news cycle, and AI, the pulpit of Bonhoeffer’s day was under constant pressure to compete. Preachers were tempted to match the emotional force of political rallies or to retreat into harmless piety. In his lectures, Bonhoeffer rejects both options. Preaching must neither imitate propaganda nor insulate itself from reality through abstraction. Preaching’s power lies precisely in its refusal to coerce.
This refusal shapes Bonhoeffer’s understanding of homiletical form. The sermon must be simple, not because simplicity is virtuous in itself, but because the Word does not require adornment. Complexity often masks insecurity. Excessive structure, clever transitions, and thematic overlays can function as defenses against the unsettling freedom of the text. Bonhoeffer insists that the passage itself provides the sermon’s movement.
The preacher’s task is to follow, not to impose.
This conviction leads Bonhoeffer to commend verse-by-verse exposition as the most disciplined form of preaching. The homily does not flatter the preacher’s creativity. It binds him to the text, forcing her to dwell where she might prefer to move on. It resists the temptation to extract “ideas” from the scriptures and repackage them for consumption. Instead, it allows the congregation to hear the passage unfolding in real time. The effect is not dramatic, but it is formative.
The congregation learns how to listen.
Listening, for Bonhoeffer, is the hidden center of preaching. The preacher does not first speak; she listens. The preacher listens to the scriptures, to the tradition, and to the concrete Word that addresses him personally. Only then does she speak. Even then, the preacher’s speaking is a form of listening enacted aloud. This posture of listening governs the preacher’s language. Bonhoeffer repeatedly warns against language that is either overly sacralized or overly casual. Hallowed language creates distance, turning the sermon into a ritual performance. Casual language collapses the distance too much, reducing the Word to familiar speech. Both betray the objectivity of the Word. True preaching, Bonhoeffer suggests, inhabits a narrow path. The language must be human enough to be heard and strange enough to unsettle. The preacher speaks as a human being addressed by God not as a religious expert or a mystical intermediary. This is why Bonhoeffer insists that preaching must be intelligible without being explanatory.
The sermon does not exist to solve problems or clarify doctrines.
It exists to let the Word encounter the congregation.
This encounter inevitably exposes the preacher. Bonhoeffer is explicit that preaching involves vulnerability, but not the vulnerability prized by our authenticity culture. The preacher is not called to share his inner life, narrate his spiritual journey, or even voice his own fears and doubts about living up to the LORD’s commands. Such disclosures, Bonhoeffer fears, shift the focus from the Word to the self. The vulnerability of preaching lies elsewhere: in standing publicly under a Word that judges and comforts the preacher before it judges and comforts anyone else.
This vulnerability accounts for Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the preacher must not pursue personal goals in the sermon. Goals— be it moral improvement, emotional response, or political action— inevitably tempt the preacher to manipulate. Even good goals can corrupt preaching. The sermon becomes a means to an end, and the Word is subordinated to the preacher’s intention. Bonhoeffer’s alternative is radical: the preacher must relinquish intention altogether. The preacher preaches not to achieve something, but because he is commanded to speak. This relinquishment does not render preaching indifferent or detached. On the contrary, it intensifies its seriousness. Because the preacher cannot guarantee outcomes, she must trust the Word to do its own work. This trust is not naïve optimism. It is born of the cross. The Word that bears the church is the Word that was rejected, mocked, and silenced. Preaching that shares in this Word must be prepared to share in its vulnerability.
Bonhoeffer’s insistence in the lectures on discipline in sermon preparation follows directly from this understanding. Sermon reparation is not about polishing performance. It is about cultivating obedience. The preacher must submit to the scriptures long enough for it to disrupt his or her assumptions. The preacher must resist the temptation to preach what he already knows or what she assumes the congregation needs. The text decides. This decision may be inconvenient, unsettling, or even dangerous. Indeed this decision means the preacher risks seeming tone deaf or appearing out of touch. But it is precisely here that preaching becomes truthful. The preacher’s disappearance behind the Word is not self-negation in a psychological sense. Bonhoeffer does not advocate a denial of personality or emotion. He argues instead for a self-forgetfulness born of trust. When the preacher trusts the Word to bear the congregation, he no longer needs to assert himself. His voice remains, but it is a human voice through which another speaks.
This understanding reshapes the very act of speaking. Bonhoeffer emphasizes that preaching is oral, speech that happens between people in time. This temporality matters. The Word addresses the congregation here and now, not as an abstract proposition but as a living address. The preacher must therefore speak simply, directly, and honestly. Flourishes that draw attention to themselves disrupt this address. At the same time, Bonhoeffer rejects the idea that preaching should mimic everyday conversation. The sermon, he says, is not casual speech; it is summoned speech. It carries weight because it is commissioned. This weight does not come from the preacher’s authority but from the Word’s claim. The preacher must learn to speak under this weight without attempting to control it.
All of this culminates in Bonhoeffer’s Christological claim about preaching’s deepest reality. The sermon does not merely communicate Christ; it participates in Christ’s ongoing presence as Word. This participation does not abolish the difference between Christ and the preacher. It establishes it. Christ speaks through the preacher precisely because the preacher is not Christ.
The Word’s power is its willingness to inhabit frail human speech.
This is why Bonhoeffer can say, without exaggeration, that the sermon is an event in which Christ takes the congregation upon himself. The Word bears the weight of sin, fear, doubt, and resistance. It does not demand that the congregation make itself worthy. It demands that the congregation listen. Listening, in turn, becomes obedience— not as heroic action, but as consent to be borne.
In this light, preaching is neither a performance nor a strategy.
It is a form of suffering.
The preacher exposes himself to misunderstanding, rejection, and apparent ineffectiveness. He speaks without guarantees. He entrusts the Word to God’s freedom. This exposure is not accidental; it is intrinsic to preaching’s truth. The logic of bearing thus draws preaching inexorably toward the cross.
The Word that bears the church is the Word that was crucified. Preaching that seeks to avoid this scandal will inevitably seek substitutes— relevance, effectiveness, or influence. Bonhoeffer’s homiletics refuses such substitutes. It calls the preacher to stand where Christ stands: vulnerable, obedient, and free.
IV. The Discipline of the Unspectacular
Near the end of his series of lectures, Bonhoeffer’s homiletics sound less like instruction for preachers and more like preparation for martyrdom. This is not because Bonhoeffer romanticizes suffering but because he is convinced preaching participates in Christ. If Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim is the one who speaks in preaching— if the sermon is the event in which the Living Word bears the congregation— then preaching cannot be disentangled from the fate of that Word. And the fate of the Word, Bonhoeffer insists, is not glory; it is not applause, influence, or “impact.”
The fate of the Word is the cross.
Just so, Bonhoeffer concludes his series on homiletics with a lecture delivered on January 20, 1936 entitled “After the Sermon” wherein he turns from what happens in the sermon to what must happen after it. The shift, however, remains Christological. If preaching is the event in which Christ bears the congregation, then the preacher’s great temptation is not only to control the Word while speaking it is to clutch it afterward.
To measure it.
To explain it.
To mitigate its effects.
To revisit it in judgement or in self-justification.
Bonhoeffer’s counsel to the preachers at his “new kind of monastery” is intentionally ascetical. Once the Word has been spoken, he insists, the preacher must step aside and let the sermon be what it was, an act of obedience entrusted to God’s freedom.
This “after” is not an optional epilogue, Bonhoeffer says. It belongs to the sermon’s truth. For him, the preacher’s work does not culminate in a successful performance but in a relinquishment. The sermon is not an achievement to be secured. The sermon is a commission to be discharged. And the discharge includes a kind of holy refusal. The preacher refuses to chase outcomes. The preacher refuses to curate responses. The preacher refuses to turn proclamation into an instrument for producing the church the preacher wants.
The Word has its own way with hearers, often hidden, often delayed, sometimes painful. To attempt to seize control of that way— by anxiety, by manipulation—is to confess that one does not trust the Word to be the Word. So Bonhoeffer presses the preacher into an unusual posture: sober watchfulness without interference.
After the sermon the preacher does not become an engineer of effects. She becomes, again, a listener— one who waits under the Word she has spoken. This is where Bonhoeffer’s insistence on “bearing” becomes concrete. The preacher must bear the anticlimax: the possibility that the sermon seems to fall flat, that no one offers substantive feedback, that nothing appears to change, that the Word judges the congregation and the congregation resents it.
Bonhoeffer says “the best sign of a good preacher is that the congregation reads the Bible;” nevertheless, the afterlife of the sermon may— or very often will— look like failure. Bonhoeffer’s point is that the preacher must not rescue himself by translating proclamation into technique after the fact. He bears the apparent void because he trusts that the void is not empty but occupied by Christ’s promise. This also explains Bonhoeffer’s suspicion of the preacher’s “pastoral” impulse immediately after preaching— especially the impulse to soften what was hard, clarify what was sharp, reassure those who looked disturbed, or reassure himself that he “meant it nicely.”
Bonhoeffer is not forbidding the care for souls. He is warning against a counterfeit care that is really nothing more than damage control, a way of smoothing the Word so the preacher can remain liked, safe, and un-contradicted. After the sermon the preacher must resist the urge to become the mediator who stands between congregation and Christ, tidying up the consequences of Christ’s speech.
The Word does not need protection.
The preacher does.
In that sense, Bonhoeffer’s “after” is the moment when the preacher’s obedience is tested most purely. During the sermon, adrenaline and form can carry a preacher.
After the sermon there is only the naked question:
Will you trust God with what you have said for God?
Bonhoeffer’s answer is severe and freeing. The preacher must return to her place under the Word, where she cannot know— cannot control— what God will do. And yet this does not leave the preacher passive. The proper “after” is not inertness but intercession and silence. Bonhoeffer exhorts his students to prayer rather than damage control, repentance instead of performance review, humble availability instead of seeking after praise. Do not try to make sure your listeners “got it.” In his lecture entitled “After the Sermon” Bonhoeffer prescribes a difficult task for preachers; namely, the daily crucifixion of pastoral self-importance. The preacher speaks because he is commanded. After the sermon, the preacher must consent to be nothing more than what the call has made them— a servant who has delivered a message that does not belong to them, serving a Lord who does not require our supervision.
The world endures, Bonhoeffer lectures, because God has not withdrawn his Word— and that Word has a body. There is no risen Christ hovering above history, no Easter Jesus detached from flesh and time. The only Christ is the totus Christus: the risen Jesus together with his body, the church. He is not given to us otherwise. The Word bears the church only by inhabiting her; the church bears the Word only as she is borne by him. To preach, then, is not to mediate between heaven and earth, nor to secure results, nor even to complete a task. It is to stand within this mutual indwelling—within the endurance of the world sustained by Christ’s presence in his body— and to speak a promise that cannot be mastered and cannot be revoked.
The preacher does not supply Christ to the church.
Christ supplies himself, through his body, by his Word.
That is why after the sermon the preacher must return back to the communion of saints where Christ continues to speak. We return to witnesses like Bonhoeffer not as replacements for the scriptures, but as members of Christ’s body whose obedience reminds us that the scriptures are sufficient. Such saints teach us that preaching is not a discrete event but a long obedience, shaped by prayer, repentance, and renewed attentiveness to the Word that still bears the church.
If a preacher is a beggar who knows where to find bread, as Robert Capon says, then preachers must also tell one another where they themselves are fed. This is what I have endeavored to do here— to point toward a member of the cloud of witnesses who can sustain us for the long haul, who has fed me these past few years. I do not know whether our moment is a status confessionis, but I do know that the way forward will not be found by standing alone but by letting Christ carry us further through and with his body.
The pulpit can feel a lonely place. Listeners can project onto preachers messages we did not intend. The comment “Nice sermon” in the narthex can never compensate for the labor sermons entail, work few understand. Even when we attempt to live up to Fleming Rutledge’s exhortation, we will seldom be seen as courageous. Still fewer will appreciate that our failure to preach so boldly is more often than that born from our love for them.
Not many of my seminary classmates are now preachers. But as Bonhoeffer put it in a lecture in the summer of 1936, “Because the word by nature bears the new humanity, it is by nature always oriented toward the church-community. The word does not want to be alone.”
Thus, in his lectures on preaching Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds you: preachers, you are not alone.
+JM
