Vital Worship
Feature Stories ... for inspiration, learning, and group discussion
 The Old Testament is full of clues about Christ. Image of "The Risen Lord" by He Qi, courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library. |
|
|
Old Testament Sermons: The case for preaching the whole Bible
Paul said that all Scripture is God-breathed. Still, when did you last hear a sermon on the Old Testament? Ellen Davis says we can’t truly understand our relationship with God till we dive into the wondrous depths of the Hebrew Scriptures.
When Ellen Davis was growing up in the Episcopal Church, the standard lectionary readings were from the epistles, gospels, and psalms—hardly ever from elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures.
“In some churches, on principle, the Old Testament isn’t read. I rarely hear anyone preach on it. I learned the Old Testament stories as an adult, by teaching them,” says Davis, professor of Bible and practical theology at Duke Divinity School. Her books include Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament and Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament.
The Old Testament sets up the categories for how we see Jesus. It shows how God calls us to live in our religious, economic, and political realities.
“If the Old Testament was preached more often, the preaching of the New Testament would be deeper—because it presupposes, refers, defers, and alludes to the Old Testament. Ignoring the Old Testament is like reading the last 4 chapters of a 16-chapter novel and thinking you got the whole story,” Davis says.
 |
Overlooking the Old Testament
Preaching the whole Bible begins with truly treating it as God’s Word.
When church members fight about worship styles, leaders often say, “Worship is about God, not us.” In Wondrous Depth, Davis reminds herself and other preachers, “Remember the inspiration is in the text, not in you, so step aside and let it speak.”
She’s not on a church staff but often preaches, so she understands the pressure preachers feel “to ‘find an illustration,’ on which the success of the sermon is often supposed to depend.” But looking on the Old Testament as simply a (sparse) source of sermon illustrations misses its purpose.
Davis says seminaries have helped “perpetuate the neglect of Old Testament preaching from generation to generation.” Most Old Testament scholars focus on historical or historical/critical aspects instead of theological readings of the text. When Davis chose her specialty—how to preach the Old Testament and theologically understand its agrarian economy—her PhD advisor warned her she might be relegated to academic backwaters.
Nevertheless, Wondrous Depth woos preachers to see the Old Testament “as an indispensable source of knowledge about the things of God…to work deeply with the challenge found in a prophetic passage, or perhaps a narrative, expecting to find in the text itself some guidance for meeting that challenge…to discover in the instructions and prayers of the Old Testament a substantial measure of ‘the peace of God, which passeth all understanding’ (Philippians 4:7)…”
 Ellen Davis preached a sermon based on Exodus 16 at the Calvin Symposium on Worship. |
Doing the easy sermons
Davis knows that “seriously reckoning” with the Hebrew Bible isn’t easy. “It’s very sophisticated literature. It’s gangly, huge, extremely varied in style. A lot of it is hard to know what to do with, which is why I wrote Getting Involved with God.
“We’re more comfortable with New Testament literary style. It, too, has lots—Jesus’ focus on the poor, violence in Revelation—to give offense. We’ve found ways (not exegetically or theologically satisfactory ones) to read around those parts.
“In his Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the more he read the Old Testament, the more he came to feel Christians move too quickly to Jesus and the New Testament. He said that anyone who moves too quickly is no Christian—because he was concerned how Christians live in political settings. He objected to highly personalized and egocentric interpretations of Scripture,” Davis says.
Though she doesn’t think the New Testament holds up to “privatistic reading,” she says it’s easier to read that way if you don’t know the Old Testament well.
Delving into the Old Testament can be risky. When asked to preach on Exodus 16 for a recent Calvin Symposium on Worship, Davis says her heart sank. “I knew that preaching about what’s in the text—and its implications for our enmeshment in the global economy—might go over like a lead balloon.
“Then I realized it might be the first time some listeners would be confronted by what happens when God shows up in glory. Everyone has enough to eat. Everyone can worship God without distraction.”
 |
Missing Christ’s full promise
Truly knowing Jesus depends on understanding how he fulfils what Scott Hoezee calls “the unified Word of God. As the Book of Hebrews makes clear, the Old Testament contains shadows, prefigurements, predictions, and promises that came true in Christ.” Hoezee directs the Center for Excellence in Preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary.
He understands why preachers neglect the prophets. It takes effort to understand a prophet and to explain how the book fits within the Hebrew Bible and the big story of God at work in the world. Preachers don’t want to be lumped with those who use prophecy as a “weird codebook for predicting the future.”
Also, as his colleague Michael J. Williams explains in The Prophet and His Message: Reading Old Testament Prophecy Today and in lectures, calling worshipers to other-centered lives is uncomfortable. Most churches prefer to avoid discomforting people, Williams says. (Both the verb and noun meanings of “discomforting” apply.)
The result? Hoezee cautions, “People who never hear sermons on the prophets miss out on key themes and promises in Scripture, especially justice. The prophets forth tell truth about life right now. They reveal the heart of God and who God is.
“To understand the Jesus that Luke presents, you need a good sense of who Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah were. An overriding concern about rich and poor animated the Old Testament prophets, whom Jesus knew really well.”
Experience the Old Testament
At age 18 Ellen Davis left for a college junior year abroad in Jerusalem. “I loved Hebrew, everything about it,” says Davis.
It was the first of many trips to Israel, all of which deepened her appreciation for what she calls “a lost friend”—the Old Testament. In her teaching, preaching, and writing, Davis explains how to “experience the Old Testament as an immediate presence that exercises shaping force in our Christian lives.”
Slow down
The first step is something she’s learned from Orthodox Jewish friends. “The main thing is to slow way down while reading the Bible.
“If we are studying Talmud, Bible, or having a religious conversation, they just cite the text from memory, because they know it so well. That is getting less common in this generation of North American Christians. But with my Jewish friends, the verses just pour out. Orality is still so much a part of that religious culture,” she says.
Davis wrote Who Are You, My Daughter?: Reading Ruth through Text and Image to give readers the experience of carefully reading the Hebrew Bible.
She says that slowing down enough to savor the Old Testament often gives Christians “a much better understanding of Jesus and Jewish faith, whereas a long history of incomprehension has often led to persecution or contempt of Jews.”
Slowing down lets preachers—and worshipers—be astonished by the text. “No preacher can ever be astonishing (in a positive sense!) unless she has first been astonished. And the only regular and fully reliable source of astonishment for the Christian preacher is Scripture itself,” Davis writes in Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament.
 |
Be honest
The second step in letting the Old Testament shape you is yielding to its frank portrayal of human life.
“I’d like to see the recovery of bold honest preaching in the often very gritty narratives of the Old Testament,” says Scott Hoezee.
“The stories are often air brushed for Sunday school. We’ve left out certain ones altogether. That may be age appropriate. But a lot of people never get beyond it.
“The Old Testament is so real about human foibles—failings, flaws, struggles, doubts. It tells about utterly human people with feet of clay, like us. And yet, these are the people to whom God made promises and showed his grace…centuries before Christ came, full of grace and promise.”
Back when Hoezee was a pastor, he and a friend in a neighboring church challenged each other to preach through the Heidelberg Catechism using only Old Testament illustrations. “People loved it. There’s a lot of richness in those stories,” he says.
Ellen Davis says that honestly applying an Old Testament passage to contemporary life begins with seeing how the passage fits within the whole Bible. At a recent Calvin Symposium on Worship, she helped people work through Psalm 63 to think with the psalmist, follow the poem’s logic, and recognize its references to real places and body parts.
“How different is your reading of this psalm if you remember that, after the kingship, Israel and Judah usually lost in most conflicts? They were wishing their enemies would be harmed. But what’s it like to pray this psalm from a position of power?” she asked.
Davis says an Orthodox Jewish friend in Jerusalem recently told her, “There are a lot of psalms we can no longer pray in good conscience, not with what the Israeli army does.” Davis added, “It’s something I couldn’t say for him, but he could. Every community needs to take responsibility for how it uses psalms.”
 Emmanuel Mumtaz, a pastor from Pakistan, says he'd like to set the psalms to indigenous musical sounds and styles. |
Seek reconciliation
Davis often refers to the Old Testament as “indispensable” for all the ways it pushes us to look honestly at our individual and congregational relationships with God.
- It reveals how deeply God gets involved in our material lives.
- It shows us, over a long and complex history, all the ways we alienate ourselves from God, in our heart…and in our political, religious, and social institutions.
- It shows how “Israel’s relationship, and ours, may be compromised in the way we embed and express our relationship with God in and through our social practices and political institutions.”
- It forces us to admit how often we deceive ourselves about our closeness to God.
In Wondrous Depth, Davis says that preaching on the Old Testament, especially the prophets, can be emotionally harrowing. This biblical pressure takes different forms—guiding the perplexed, confronting our refusal to live as God asks, covenanting with us to oppose injustice.
“The Bible as a whole is pushing us toward something, though its internal tensions witness to the complexity of its subject matter and therefore the inevitable uncertainty of our understanding at many points. The Bible is pressing us toward reconciliation with God (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:19); at the upper limit, it even imagines true intimacy with God to be a possibility for us,” she writes.
 |
Using the Old Testament in Worship
At first it’s easy to see why many churches rarely offer sermons on the Old Testament.
“If you follow the lectionary and most of the congregation hears just one sermon a Sunday, you’ll tend to preach on the gospel or New Testament lesson,” says Scott Hoezee. Even in churches that still have morning and evening services, such as in the Reformed tradition, evening attendance is often quite low.
But Hoezee notes, “If your church has only one service, follows the lectionary, and is very New Testament-oriented, you still have the huge block of Ordinary Time from Pentecost to Advent. That’s a very fruitful time for preachers to do a 12-week series on Genesis or Exodus or Psalms or a prophet.”
He says worshipers need to hear Old Testament sermons “to connect the dots, to appreciate how God’s whole plan fits together. Preachers should show how the Hebrew Scriptures framework of biblical history connects with major Scriptural patterns. In the Reformed tradition, we might describe those patterns as creation, fall, redemption, and new creation.”
What about the idea that every sermon must “preach Christ”? Hoezee says that across a year or two of sermons, it ought to be clear to the congregation that “we look into the Old Testament to see Christ. This is true even if, on a given sermon on Exodus, there aren’t a whole lot of overt references to Christ or the gospel.”
Ellen Davis addresses the same issue in Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament: “Does it violate the literary, historical, and theological integrity of the Hebrew Scriptures to read and preach them as pointing to and illuminating the person, work, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ? My short answer is no…but that does not mean that every sermon must or should be explicitly Christological.”
 |
Returning to the psalms
Churches that want to use more psalms in worship will find a wealth of resources related to prayer, music, and readings.
A recent Calvin Symposium on Worship featured an all-day seminar on adding more psalms to any kind of Christian worship service. You can find resources for adding psalms in several forms—reading, responsorial, chant, metrical, contemporary—in this handout and in John D. Witvliet’s very practical The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship: A Brief Introduction and Guide to Resources.
Reggie Kidd, a worship pastor at a Presbyterian Church of America church plant, said that many people at his church would happily sing nothing but songs in the Passion genre.
“I’ve been surprised how well the mode of simple chant has been received. We looked at how psalm chants tie in with the Presbyterian prayer book and introduced it as a way to let the biblical text stay in control in music. I also asked our 27-year-old music director to help give the chants some sparkle,” he says. Kidd is also professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, and author of With One Voice: Discovering Christ's Song in Our Worship.
Building entire services around a psalm is a good way to handle long psalms, according to Stephen Breck Reid. “You can break the psalm into pieces, so that by the time you get to the end of the service, you’ve sung the whole psalm,” he says. Stephen Breck Reid is editor of Psalms and Practice: Worship, Virtue, and Authority, which shows how to use psalms in public prayer, liturgy, and preaching. He is also academic dean and professor of Old Testament Studies at Bethel Theological Seminary in Richmond, Indiana.
When is it appropriate to use psalms of rage and lament in worship? “Usually laments are just sprinkled in funerals. But during droughts in the 1800s, churches would gather to sing and pray psalms as corporate laments. It’s a good time now for churches to do this, because lamenting together brings you back to public engagement. Lament can put you in a missional mode,” Breck Reid says.
There’s a learning curve to using laments in worship. “It feels uncomfortable when you lament and are forced to praise…or vice versa. But ‘it’s not about you’ is a key learning for worship,” says Carol Bechtel, professor of Old Testament at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. Her widely known Bible studies use music, video, and current events to help people relate the Old Testament to contemporary life.
 Most kids enjoy the children's sermon. But how about occasionally letting them help lead worshipers in a psalm? |
Connecting real life in the Bible to our lives
Ellen Davis suggests that one way to see the psalms as germane to life, rather than as irrelevant snippets, is to look at how psalm superscriptions give a context. You can read Psalm 90 (a psalm of Moses) or Psalms 72 and 127 (by Solomon) and then look for narratives about them elsewhere in the Old Testament.
In Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament, she writes, “If the psalms are to be genuine prayers for us, then we must make that effort of recontextualization” and link them to our personal, congregational, and national life.
Reggie Kidd tells of hearing Gloria Gaither speak to ministers of music. She asked, “How many of you have written a song based on a psalm?” Everyone raised a hand. Next she asked, “How many of you have read through the life of David in the last year?” Hardly any hands went up. So Gaither chastised, ”How dare you rip off David’s punch lines if you don’t know what he went through to write it?”
Adding an interactive element can make psalms jump out in 3-D. Davis suggests reading or singing Psalm 55 as people gather around an altar or communion table. “If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it….But it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend, with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship…” (Psalm 55:12-14).
Responsorial psalms have long been an interactive way for worshipers to use psalms. But in The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship: A Brief Introduction and Guide to Resources, John D. Witvliet suggests a twist to the usual practice.
“For a children’s sermon on Psalm 8, instead of doing an object lesson about scientific wonders they can’t comprehend, try call and response. Let the kids lead the congregation,” he says. The leader says a few words (“Lord, our Lord.”) The kids face worshipers and repeat the phrase. The worshipers echo back. And so it goes in three parts through the whole psalm—“Lord, our Lord…how wonderful…is your name…” This method is almost guaranteed to help everyone experience the psalm’s exuberance.
 "Sleeping Elijah" is by He Qi, a former theology professor and well known painter from China. Image courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library. |
Art resources
Betsy Steele Halstead, who coordinates Calvin Institute of Christian Worship’s visual arts work, suggests the following books or artist websites to find art that will “help people dwell with the text.” Her book of woodcuts, Visuals for Worship (Faith Alive Christian Resources, 2006), includes Old Testament images such as the Cedar of Lebanon and Stump of Jesse.
- Brian Wildsmith is a British painter who has written and illustrated children’s books on Joseph and Exodus.
- Creation (Truth and the Christian Imagination) by Alister McGrath (Augsburg Fortress, 2005) is illustrated by reproductions from Van Gogh, Michelangelo, and others.
- He Qi is a former theology professor and well known painter from China.
- How God Fix Jonah by Lorenz Graham and illustrated by Ashley Bryan (Boyds Mills Press, 2000) features West African Bible story versions and full-page block prints.
- Sadao Watanabe was a Japanese printmaker. (There’s also a jazz musician with the same name.)
- The Jerusalem Windows by Marc Chagall with text and notes by Jean Leymarie (George Braziller, 1967) shows and describes stained glass windows the artist designed to portray the 12 tribes of Israel.
- The Psalms: An Artist’s Impression by Anneke Kaai and Eugene Peterson (InterVarsity Press, 1999) has vibrant abstract and symbolic paintings, as does Kaai’s From Beginning to End: Creation, Ten Commandments, Apostles’ Creed, The Apocalypse (Piquant, 2007).
- Timothy Botts specializes in calligraphy and has produced many prints and books.
- Who Are You, My Daughter?: Reading Ruth through Text and Image by Ellen Davis and illustrated by Margaret Adams Parker (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) uses woodcuts to help you slowly get into the story of Ruth.
Liven your Old Testament worship elements with more resources on visual arts, including liturgical art, and multimedia resources from around the world.
 |
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
Listen to brief audio interview excerpts of Scott Hoezee on:
- The decline of Old Testament preaching (3:53, 4.6 MB, MP3)
- Why to preach more on the prophets (4:59, 3.6 MB, MP3)
Read about how Ellen Davis helped set up an Old Testament languages program at a Sudanese seminary. Discuss—and review for your church blog or newsletter—several books by Ellen Davis.
- Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament deals with rage, lament, and other difficult Old Testament issues.
- Who Are You, My Daughter?: Reading Ruth through Text and Image works well in church education and retreats.
- Wondrous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament shows how to let Old Testament texts astonish you so you can preach them well. It includes classic sermons on the Old Testament, including one by John Donne that’s especially apropos among people who doubt or feel indifferent to God. This book is great for preachers, yet accessible to anyone.
Listen to an Ellen Davis sermon, "God's House," with texts from 2 Samuel and Hebrews, in the CEP archive (search by speaker); direct MP3 link.
On the Center for Excellence in Preaching (CPE) website, Scott Hoezee has gathered a wealth of help for preaching the Old Testament, including resources for preaching Genesis and Exodus (scroll down). The sermon starters for all 52 Lord’s Days of the Heidelberg Catechism include ideas based on Old Testament texts. You can research cultural trends, books that inform and inspire preachers, and essays on whether to cite references in sermons and how or when to use “theological talk.”
Of the CPE annotated list of OT commentaries, Hoezee says, “Anything by Walter Brueggemann is gold. Terence Fretheim and Daniel Block are great on Exodus. I also recommend Ellen Davis, Sidney Greidanus, and Robert Alter on the Pentateuch, biblical narrative, and biblical poetry.”
Search for sermons by chapter and verse. Sign up for sermon podcasts. Read or listen to sermons about the psalms. Get ideas from the Psalms for a Lenten Journey worship service series planned with help from Carl Bosma.
Other practical, easy-to-read books about adding Old Testament content to worship include
- Carol Bechtel’s Kerygma series
- The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship: A Brief Introduction and Guide to Resources by John D. Witvliet
- The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story by Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen
- The Prophet and His Message: Reading Old Testament Prophecy Today by Michael J. Williams
- With One Voice: Discovering Christ's Song in Our Worship by Reggie M. Kidd
Gather seminarian or preacher friends to dive into these worthwhile academic books:
- Preaching Christ from the Old Testament by Sidney Greidanus is a classic highly recommended by Scott Hoezee.
- Psalms and Practice: Worship, Virtue, and Authority edited by Stephen Breck Reid shows how to use psalms in public prayer, liturgy, and preaching.
- Punishment and Forgiveness in Israel's Migratory Campaign by Won Lee clarifies the overarching theology of Numbers.
Browse related stories about how to choose Bible commentaries, justice themes in worship music, moving from text to sermon, sermon helps, understanding the Bible’s full evangelical message, and voicing God’s psalms.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your staff, council, worship, or education committee meeting. These questions will get members talking about renewing your connection with the Old Testament.
- What, if anything, in this set of stories makes you feel uncomfortable?
- In an average year at your church, how much Old Testament content do worshipers receive through sermons, readings, songs, prayers, or other worship elements? What does your church’s ratio of Old Testament-to-New Testament content teach people about the relative value of these sections of God’s Word?
- What do you think about the idea that Christians who neglect the Old Testament risk missing out on the full gospel and deceive themselves about how close they are to God?
- Christians often vehemently disagree about how God calls us to live within contemporary social, economic, political, and religious settings. Can you think of any core principles that Christians can unite around? Use the whole Bible to back up what you say.
What is the best way you’ve found to add more Old Testament content to sermons and worship services? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- Did you develop a record keeping system to analyze the ratio of Old and New Testament content in your worship? If so, how long did you keep records and what changes did you make as a result?
- Did you create a sermon or education series to help people learn more about a certain prophet? The prophets often used strong visuals or lifestyle behaviors to get their point across. Which such examples worked best for as you as you preached or taught on the prophets?
- If you decided to use more psalms in worship, what worked best? Did you add spoken or sung lectionary psalms, come up with an effective way to marry psalms and multimedia, pray lament psalms together and tie that to an action outside church, plan entire services around a single psalm…?
CICW web story reprint policy:
You have permission to reprint this article (or other stories in this collection) in its entirety, in print or online. Before the title of the article, please reprint the following permission statement. If you are reprinting online, please link to the website listed.
This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/.