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 Romans 7. 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 " Thorns in the Flesh: Questions That Get Under Your Skin. " 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 " How do I have a better life " 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, " Now what were you saying? What's the deal about the soil? " 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, " I don't have all the answers. " I've tried to be transparent about my own doubts and questions and confusions.

Another thing I try to do that has been helpful is not to take everything quite so seriously. There is a real element of playfulness in mystery, and I see that in Jesus. He says paradoxical things to get people outside of their boxes. So I try to be playful at times.

One example is when I was preaching about the paradox of the Lord's Supper. Obviously the Lord's Supper is a very serious thing. Yet Scripture also talks about it as the foretaste of the messianic banquet. It's supposed to be a party. It's supposed to be a joyful event. How do those two things fit together? I came up with the idea of this imaginary story of God's caterers. I told of these guys who catered all of God's banquets down through history. They catered great celebrations in the temple, and they catered the Last Supper, and so forth. The story ends with them catering this heavenly messianic banquet where people are having fun, and John Calvin — who is one of my spiritual ancestors — is the life of the party. Imagine that. And then the caterers turn to each other and say, " When they were having all those times with that bread and cup back on earth, do you think they really understood what they were doing? " It wasn't a frontal attack, " You should be more joyful " ; it was an imaginary story with that underlying message, helping people to see that point. Oftentimes playfulness can introduce people in a non-threatening way into these elements of mystery.

Another thing I've discovered is traditional paradoxes can be put together in fresh ways to heighten this element of tension. In the examples I gave earlier — God is three and yet one, and Jesus is fully human and yet fully God, our salvation is predestined and yet there is free will — all of these have an inherent tension. Most of the truths we have as Christians are held in these tensions. To me, preaching paradox is not a matter of explaining paradox to people; it's a matter of helping them feel the tensions. If they live in that tension, not only do they come into more contact with truth, but they also have doors open into how awesome God is, that God is so much larger than can be contained in propositional truths. So I highlight these tensions.

For example, I call the tension of predestination and free will a harmonious tension. It's like a tuning fork. You need the two tines of the tuning fork vibrating in unison before you hear the note. There's no such thing as a one-tine tuning fork. When I preached about that tension, it was back in the days when my kids were watching Sesame Street. Remember the two-headed monster on Sesame Street that teaches kids phonics by one head saying one syllable and the other head saying the other syllable? I started at different sides of our platform, and I talked about some passages on predestination. Then I walked to the other side of the platform and talked about free will, and then walked back and talked some more about predestination, and walked back and talked about free will. Gradually I shortened the distance until at the end of the sermon I was in the middle saying, " This is a mystery, and we need to live in the tension of it. " Instead of having a sermon on each, I used this visible way to bring them together.

Preaching experts say the single most important thing about a message is clarity. And yet Jesus often was not clear, and you're saying that's a good thing. So is that a paradox?

In some ways it's a paradox. It is important that we understand what we're clear about. I certainly wouldn't dispute that it's important to have clarity in preaching, but there's also an element of our faith that someone called " conscious ignorance. " I've got a story to describe that.

When we first moved to the central valley in California, it was wintertime. It doesn't snow here, but they have this thick fog called Tooley Fog. We'd been here about a week, and a family in our church who lived outside our town asked us out to dinner. It was a foggy night. They said, " You sure you don't need directions? It's very foggy. " We'd come from Chicago, and we thought, What's a little fog?These California wimps. We started off toward their house, and this fog got thicker and thicker. Soon we were lost, and we actually drove all the way around the town without finding this house, most of the time not knowing where we were at all.

I've lived here 15 years now, and I've learned to enjoy the fog, because it has an element of mystery to it. When you're driving into the fog, you see where the range of your headlights shine, but you realize there is a lot of area outside the range of your headlights. In other words, there's something vast out there that you can't see. That's a key element of mystery. It's this relation of the known to the unknown. Something isn't mysterious if it's completely known.

Besides being clear about what we know, we also need to be clear about what we don't know. As we do that, we have an opportunity to help people grow in their faith, because faith, classically defined, is a combination of knowledge and trust. So faith contains an element of trusting that God is faithful in what we don't know. 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.

You've written that a steady diet of how-to sermons can leave a congregation spiritually anemic. How does paradox and mystery counter that?

Certainly there's nothing wrong with how-to sermons. The how-to format came about as a way of marketing the faith, primarily to the boomer generation who were looking for answers. But if all you do is provide people with " answers, " they never get beyond a utilitarian faith. Christian faith becomes a technique, and even God can become a means to my end. I worship God — not because God is awesome and holy and wonderful — but because if I learn these certain spiritual techniques, I can create a better life for myself.

Someone wrote me a letter after that article was published quite a few years ago. The person said she wrestled with some paradoxes in her own life. How could all things work together for good when she kept messing everything up with her free will? How could God work out his plan in the universe if I have a free will, and I go in directions God doesn't want me to and mess up this plan? This person went on to say she talked with several friends about these issues, and her friends responded with, " You think too much " or " Just don't ask questions. Take these things by faith. "

She came away from that struggle, she said, " with a greater sense of how awesome God is and a strange sort of comfort stemming from the fact that I could not get my arms around God. I was finally able to rest in the fact that there is a God, and I am not he. " She said, " What peace I gained from that knowledge. However, if I had not struggled, I would have never come to know that peace and comfort as well as a deeper knowledge of God. "

That's what I'm shooting for. People need to struggle and wrestle with the paradoxical landscape of faith. Our faith is not an interstate across Death Valley. It's a lot more like a mountain road winding its way up Pike's Peak. As we're on that road, if we can be honest about it and struggle with it, doors into the awesomeness of God open, and we get the sort of comfort that this woman described — there is a God, and I am not he.

Is there any sense in which you avoid practical application as you aim toward that understanding of God?

I don't think you avoid practical application. You just think of the practical application in different ways. The words practical application, speak of a sermon that leads you to a conclusion where you say, " Okay, now do this. " It's a top-down, deductive sermon. These are the three things you should do in your life based on what's been said. But there's another method of application, and that's an inductive way, where you start with the reality of human existence.

The difference is you leave the door more open for people to make their own application. You can do that by suggesting things: " It could be this, or it could be this. " Involve people imaginatively, as I mentioned earlier with that sermon about God's caterers. The practical application is still there; it's just not done deductively, where based on what I said, here are the three things you should work on this week. "

When people get engaged in the notion that paradox is a part of the landscape of our faith, it gives them a much greater comfort level in coping with the challenges of life. Again and again I've heard stories of people growing up in a conservative, evangelical home and church where they thought they had all the answers. Their faith was a complete, perfect topographical map for life, and all they had to do was follow that map. Then they go away to college and are thrown some things in a class that don't fit that map. They would have a friend who turns out to be a homosexual, or a friend who had an abortion. Suddenly nothing seems cut and dry anymore, and often they end up losing their faith because they didn't have an inoculation of mystery or doubt as they were growing up. They never were told there are parts of the faith you aren't going to be able to comprehend intellectually, and it doesn't all fit together as neatly as you might think.

An opportunity to wrestle with these things within the safety of the Christian community gives people a shot of mystery. So when they get out there in the world, they're not completely blown away by how life is. They leave the greenhouse and get out into temperatures that vary widely, and it's hard for them to thrive. We preachers do our people a disservice if we don't introduce them to the paradox and mystery of our faith, particularly when so much of our faith comes in paradox. If we can help our people grapple with that in safe ways, they are much less likely to be thrown for a loop when they confront mystery in life.

Richard P. Hansen is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Visalia, California.