It’s easy to keep doing the same things without thinking about what you’re doing. That’s not a recipe for personal growth, though. This week, I’m taking a course called “Preaching the Narratives of Scripture.” There were a couple of books that I had to read in preparation as well as papers to write, summarizing their contents and my reflection on them. On Wednesday and Thursday, I’ll take in day-long lectures with the instructor, Kent Edwards, who will come to us from California by Zoom video call. On Friday, I’ll preach to my computer screen and then have the professor, and fellow pastor-students analyze and critique everything I’ve said and done. Pray for me! In the follow-up to the course, I’ll submit another three sermons for written feedback from the others and in turn, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the other participants. Having gone through the same process for the course I took in the winter, “Preaching Old Testament Poetry,” I know the value (and the stress!) of the feedback and reflection. You can’t grow in the echo chamber. Let me share some of the lessons I’ve learned so far.

1.       I often miss the forest for the trees.

One of the lessons that I’ve learned is to remember the big picture. I knew how important context was for rightly interpreting a particular verse and, with a short New Testament letter, it’s fairly easy to keep in mind the greater context of the chapter and even the entire letter. But I’d never really thought much about the context of the psalms. I had seen the headings Book 1, 2, 3, etc. before Psalms 1, 42, 73, 90 and 107 but I had pretty much ignored them. The psalms in each of those collections were addressed to a particular period in Israel’s history with common themes and emphases that can be helpful in interpreting what’s going on. Similarly, most scholars agree that Psalms 1 and 2 are deliberately arranged as an introduction or thesis statement for the Psalms. They’re the only psalms in Book 1 not attributed to David and they are linked by the word blessed in the beginning and end and many other connections in between. Together, they give an overarching message: blessing comes through meditating on the law and standing in right relationship to God’s anointed Son.

2.       I often miss the poetry of the poems.

While I’ve done a fair bit of reading about how to interpret the psalms, I realized that I often fail to appreciate the poetry. Hebrew poets didn’t rhyme or compose limericks, but they filled their writing with parallelism. Parallelism is a technique where they’d state a thought from two slightly different angles. The second line might be similar to, contrast with, or continue the thought of the first, but reading the lines together and thinking about how they’re connected gives a more three-dimensional picture of the thought. It’s like the difference between seeing with one eye and two. Looking at something from two slightly different angles adds depth. We went into many aspects of Hebrew poetry, some new and some sold, but it made me see how I can often read the psalms “flat” and so miss the artistry and emotion they are expressed in.

3.       I often miss the story in the stories.

As I’ve given more time to reflect on how to read and preach the narrative portions of Scripture, I realized that I often don’t read them as stories. I’ll try to take them apart to find principles I can apply and ways that they point to Christ, but in so doing I ignore that they’re written with a plot, tension, conflict and character development. There’s usually a plot twist that resolves the tension and it’s here that the main point of the narrative is made. By not treating the stories as stories, I can miss the point of those stories. I often also forget that each story was written by someone to a specific group of people to communicate a point about God and our relationship with Him. When I’m reading about Jacob for instance, I can treat the story as if God just wrote it to me, but it was first written by Moses to the Israelites as they were poised to enter the Promised Land. He recounted historical events to teach them theological lessons. Remembering that context helps protect me from making ridiculous interpretations. A passage can’t mean what it never meant, so if I come up with an interpretation that would have been nonsensical for Moses to communicate to the Israelites, for instance, then my interpretation is probably wrong.

While I reflect on the different forms in which Scripture was given to us, I’m also being challenged to think about ways that my preaching should reflect the different forms of Scripture. A sermon on a psalm probably shouldn’t sound the same as one on an apocalyptic passage like in Revelation. A sermon on a New Testament letter should probably have a different form than one on an Old Testament narrative.

Pray for me as I try to grow in these areas. And consider steps you might take to grow in your own reading of Scripture. As I said when I began, doing the same things without thinking about what you’re doing isn’t a recipe for personal growth. If you want some advice, send me an email and I’ll try to give you some suggestions.

In awe of Him,

Paul