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.
The Old Testament is full of clues about Christ. Image of “The Risen Lord” by He Qi, courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library.

Experience the Old Testament

Learn More

Start A Discussion
Share Your Wisdom
Print This Story

E-mail This Story:


Related article from
Reformed Worship


Collection of Stories

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.

Wondrous Depth by Ellen Davis makes an excellent case for doing more Old Testament sermons.
Wondrous Depth by Ellen Davis makes an excellent case for doing more Old Testament sermons.

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.
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.”

Chris Stoffel Overvoorde’s “Jeremiah: Down, Deep Down” reminds us that Jesus wasn’t God’s first suffering servant. © 2007 Chris Stoffel Overvoorde | Eyekons
Chris Stoffel Overvoorde’s “Jeremiah: Down, Deep Down” reminds us that Jesus wasn’t God’s first suffering servant. © 2007 Chris Stoffel Overvoorde | Eyekons

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.”

The story continues ... Experience the Old Testament

Lent is a good time for psalms series. Jesus quoted Psalm 22 on the cross.
Lent is a good time for psalms series. Jesus quoted Psalm 22 on the cross.

Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig

LEARN MORE

Don’t miss the bonus story, “Using the Old Testament in Worship.”

Listen to brief audio interview excerpts of Scott Hoezee on:

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.

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

Gather seminarian or preacher friends to dive into these worthwhile academic books:

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.

START A DISCUSSION

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.

SHARE YOUR WISDOM

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:

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/.