Challenges to Preaching Paul

Challenges to Preaching Paul | Rev. Michael F. Hull | July 2008 Homiletic & Pastoral Review

St. Paul is a role model for the preacher because he exemplified faith, passion and utility in his letters.

Preaching Paul is no mean feat. The Pauline literature in the Lectionary includes the thirteen disparate letters bearing Paul’s name, as well as Hebrews.(1) To be sure, Paul’s letters are, at one and the same time, some of the most pastorally sensitive and theologically profound writings in the New Testament. There is no doubt that they present a richness of theological insight, which ought to be expounded from the pulpit for the benefit of the people of God.(2)

In order to speak about challenges to preaching Paul, my departure point is a definition of preaching by Brad R. Braxton, an African-American Baptist minister, who teaches homiletics at Vanderbilt Divinity School. In his book Preaching Paul, Braxton says: “Preaching is the faithful, passionate reporting of God’s useful news.”(3) Braxton’s definition is very helpful because it focuses on three challenges in preaching: the challenge to be faithful, the challenge to be passionate and the challenge to be useful. On one level, these challenges transcend Paul’s preaching and our own preaching of Paul, inasmuch as these three challenges are immediately present in all preaching, either from the Old or New Testament. Yet on another level, they are particularly poignant because they are conspicuous in Paul’s letters.(4)

Even a cursory perusal of Paul’s letters reveals his faithfulness to his calling on the Damascus road and his desire to finish the “race” that he first describes in 1 Cor. 9:24. The imagery is picked up again in 2 Timothy: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (4:7; cf. Heb. 12:1). So too, we cannot forget his passion in Romans, when, lamenting the lack of conversions to Christ among his fellow Jews, he says, “For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race” (9:3). Paul’s passion leaps off the page! And, as far as usefulness goes, no one speaks more to practicalities than Paul. Paul talks about anything and everything, whether it be women in church in 1 Corinthians 11 or fighting with Peter and company in Galatians 2. Once again, as Braxton has it, “Preaching is the faithful, passionate reporting of God’s useful news.”

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Comments

[joanne]

'Useful" in the sense that all God's news is good for use in our lives, yes? Not to differentiate from God's useless news, which would be a false distinction, since there is no such thing?
Don't mean to be picky--I feel the urge when saying our homespun Grace, thanking God "for the good food and all the good things You give us", to clarify the meaning. As if I can hear my children reciting to themselves those foods and things that they may exclude from the list of "gifts". The intended meaning, of course, is that everything we receive is a gift from the Hand of God...{"It is right, always and everywhere...")