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PREACHING SKILLSA Good MysteryWhy faithful preaching requires an element of mystery.Richard Hansen
As we come into a greater sense of what we don't know, our appreciation of how awesome God is increases, because we have to trust.
PreachingToday.com: Many cultural experts say postmodernists respond to preaching with an element of mystery. Several years ago, you wrote an article in Leadership Journal that supports this. What do you mean by mystery? And what don't you mean?
Richard Hansen: There is a lot of the landscape of human life that is simply beyond our understanding. Carl Sandburg says there is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there's a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud. That's what our human condition is. Paul describes it pretty well in . So what I mean by mystery is all those elements of human life and also Christian faith that don't fit together in neat ways. What I don't mean by mystery is just the absurd. Paradox has a certain sense of tension to it; even though it can't be rationally separated, much of the truth we have comes to us in that form. It comes to us in the form of two different truths that are held together in tension.
For example, God is three and yet one, the mystery of the Trinity. Or Jesus is fully human and yet fully God, the mystery of incarnation. Even salvation, that it's totally by God's grace, it's offered to us as a gift, and yet we have to personally respond in faith in order to receive it. The mystery of divine providence and human free will. Our whole lives are shot through with mystery, and postmodernism is rediscovering that. The Enlightenment world, what's called the modernist mindset, wanted to control life. Any of those pieces of life that weren't controlled by human intelligence were shoved to the margins or swept under the rug. Postmodernism is now open to all of those elements of mystery. In some ways, that is a great boon for Christians, because we're sitting on the mother lode of all mystery in God. We have a great opportunity to proclaim mystery in ways that people all around us are going to connect with, even better than they did decades ago.
Would you say, then, that mystery is a necessary component in communicating with that particular generation?
Certainly with that generation, but I think all generations. There is a felt need to get beyond how-to preaching; people have a need to go deeper. That's not to say people don't have felt needs for how to be a better parent, how to have a better marriage, or how to live an emotionally fulfilling life, but people also need to grapple with questions of existence that just won't go away. That goes across all generational lines.
For example, I recently finished a series of sermons called
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Thorns in the Flesh: Questions That Get Under Your Skin.
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I asked our people to send me questions about issues that have been bugging them, that they lay awake at night thinking about. I got lots of these questions, and by far the majority were not the pragmatic
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How do I have a better life
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type questions. They were questions like How do you reconcile creation and science? Or,If someone is sinning and unrepentant, would forgiving them be accepting evil? Even though postmodernism is more associated with the Gen-X generation, people have an appetite for mystery. It's in all of us.
What about those generations that find that kind of thing unsettling? They want resolution. How does that come across to them?
We have to be wise in how we approach them. Certainly you can damage people's faith if you leave them with lots of unanswered questions when they're used to resolution, used to having all their puzzle pieces fit together. Yet life is like having some puzzle pieces on the table that you don't quite know where to fit. Our preaching should leave some unanswered questions and a few loose ends dangling. Jesus was a master at this. If we're going to take Jesus as our preaching model, think of all the times he gave a sermon, and then his disciples would come later and ask,
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Now what were you saying? What's the deal about the soil?
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And he would explain it to them. In some ways, preachers today have been brainwashed into thinking we have to give people 100 percent answers, that they can't handle loose ends. Yet Jesus did that all the time. He did it in ways that helped people keep growing in their journey.
Give us some examples of how we might do this in our preaching?
There are several things I've discovered along the journey. We need to be more willing to leave people with some dangling questions and not unnecessarily give them all the answers. Sometimes that's being honest with ourselves as preachers and saying,
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I don't have all the answers.
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I've tried to be transparent about my own doubts and questions and confusions.
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