First let me articulate what I find dissatisfying about current sermon prep
We begin with a "hook", a concise main point summed up as a sentence, and then we have ~3 sub points that support/build on that "hook"
This gives sermons a sort of top-down symmetry
We do things this way because it's a clearly communicable method, something a beginner preacher can just fill-in-the-blanks and do. And it makes it easier to coordinate sermons across locations so two preachers can preach the same thing: same hook, same points
My church's sermons tend to be pretty impressive to new-comers: they're neat, they're clean, they bring things back to Jesus, they're fairly funny/engaging, they put a premium on "what are you going to go *do* with this"
the issue is that around year 2 or 3 people start feeling dissatisfied with the sermons; my church doesn't hemorrhage new people, it has a hard time keeping the old hands
the problem is that these sermons are made to be easily written and easily digested
My feeling around these sermons is that they have a brutal quality to them, all giant concrete blocks of pre-arranged order. They are basic, large, pre-fabricated
Alexander talks about beautiful things needing craft at *every* level; our sermons are concrete blocks not temples
There's a related problem: our sermons tend to, for all their practicality, not be an active word to the audience
the 'practicality' is really just simplicity
I can tell what we're going to say before we say it, which suggests to me that our sermons are dead not alive/awake
So what do I want?
I want sermons that make people wiser and better and are worthy of the Bible we're preaching out of, which played deep games with it's readers and didn't expect everyone to get everything the first time through
So I'm reading through Alexander's explanation of how to make buildings that are alive and trying to see if that solves my problem with our dead, mass-produced, blind-concrete-block sermons
I'm gonna start a thread going through his "15 Principles" and linking it to preaching
I think this means that our sermon shouldn't be shaped at the beginning of our writing process by a simple "hook", an empty image of what the sermon *should* look like that we fill in with verbal concrete
Our sermons still need coherence, though; the bits need to work together. One way to do this *is* to have some larger image that you're trying to build and point back to, some key theme that undergirds every part of the sermon
I'm gonna try to do the long-list-of-opinions thing but I don't know if I have the follower account to do the one like, one opinion thing
So let's just see what I can rattle off about wisdom
1. Wisdom assumes that the world is ordered. This sounds trivial, but it's not; there's a whole lot of power packed into the belief that the world is ordered and you can perceive that order.
2. Wisdom also assumes that the world's order is fractal--that analogies work, that what is above mirrors what is below, that order passes through levels of abstraction
How do you ponder the dialectic between ideologies? Aesthetics
What is level 6 subject to? Creation
Level 6 doubles back to level one, which was a simply perceiving existence, and reclaims perception with the strength of wisdom
Wisdom traditions are *not* about teaching you facts, or even ideologies; they are about teaching you to *see rightly*, which vision is the illegible territory every ideology attempts to map
This is why they sound so confusing; you expect maps and they stare at the territory
So I’ve recently been increasingly conflicted re: cops. I grew up in the sort of family (let’s call it ascendant working-class) that was *very* pro-cop: thin blue line, that kind of thing. Have some ex-cops in the family, who I quite like
Plus, families like mine tend to 1) relatively rarely have negative run ins with the police and 2) generally act so respectful to cops that they get pretty positive handling. Not because they fear cops but because they respect them. Also, my small town had pretty good police
So I grew up with a generally positive view of police. Never really had a negative run in. But then I crack open the DoJ’s report on police killings and brutality in places like Baltimore and Cleveland, and... whoa.