Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Keeping and Talking the Word 6
Today our seminar welcomed Jeff and Karen Barker from the theater department of Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa. We began the morning with an informal conversation about reading the Word in public worship.
Jeff shared with us that the pastor of a church he once attended repeatedly waited until immediately before the service to ask him to read scripture. Jeff said that he defaulted to the “patronizing God voice,” as he called it. “There were saints in the room who have heard this before. I didn’t need to deliver it as if it were the morning news from God himself.” The people in the congregation could have read it for themselves, “but said, ‘Jeff, read it aloud so we can hear it, so we can mediate on it.’”
Jeff continued, “Acknowledge that, yes, God is present in the speaking of his Word, but God’s servant is also present here as well. And this word is having an impact on me as well as the saints gathered in the room. This is an important distinction; it’s a different sort of task than [the task of] an actor. An actor enters fully into the skin of another character… but when we speak scriptures there are other characters: there’s God’s voice, and there’s also me.” To show us how this might change the way we speak scripture in public, Jeff spoke James 1. Then he continued, “I’m vulnerable to the impact of those words at the same time that you’re hearing them. I’m loving James enough to re-choose, re-celebrate, reaffirm those words.”
Karen shared a story of a time when Jeff read scripture in church. The preacher had given Jeff no instructions, and so the way that Jeff read, preached, in a sense, a very different sermon than the sermon the pastor preached after Jeff finished reading. Tim summed up well the point of Karen’s story, “In some worship contexts, it’s a prize to have a lay person read the passage. If that’s the case where you are, work with that person, build a relationship, encourage them, coach them… so you can help them lay claim to the message that is to come.”
On preaching and scripture in public worship, Tim said, “I want my hearers to know that I take [the Bible] with deadly seriousness. It’s like if I’m going to sit with the brain surgeon who’s going to operate on my wife’s brain tumor. I don’t want him fumbling over his notes while he’s doing his work.”
When asked the difference between reading the Word and simply reciting it, Tim said, “I think there’s an immediacy, a kind of frightening-ness about [the Word], and there is an embodiment of it that is critical.” He continued provocatively, “This [Bible] is not the word of God. The word of God is the spokenness of God. This happens to be a book that has captured it, but the Word of God is the sounding out of God. You’re taking the printed-ness and releasing it.”