The Playful Preacher - Christianity Today

“Rich, you’ve got to try harder!”

An earnest student, I had conscientiously visited everyone on the hospital floors assigned to me. I had written detailed verbatim reports. Now, my clinical pastoral education supervisor was frustrating me.

“What more should I do?” I replied.

“Just try harder” was his enigmatic reply. So I tried harder. But every week his exhortation was the same. One day, in anger and frustration, I blurted out, “I can’t try harder! I give up!”

“Good!” he replied, softening immediately.

The lesson I learned fourteen years ago still lingers: trying harder doesn’t work. It’s like a pair of Chinese handcuffs: the harder you pull, the tighter they get. Only by pushing both fingers together (the opposite of trying harder) will the handcuffs release.

The same is true in my preaching. When I work too hard to make an impact, when I assume too much responsibility for changing others, I can inhibit the very changes in my listeners I desperately seek. My well-intentioned efforts actually make matters worse.

In his book “Generation to Generation,” Edwin Fried man speaks to the paradox of trying harder: “If we assume that any chronic condition that we are persistently trying to change will, perversely, be supported not to change by our serious efforts to bring about change, then it is logical to consider the possibility that one way out of this paradox is to be paradoxical.”

The paradoxical way: to become less serious and more playful.

But that’s not easy for me, one whose spiritual ancestors are John Calvin and John Knox. They were passionate for the gospel, but playful? Still, having wrestled with the paradoxes of trying too hard, I decided to lighten up. Here’s what I’ve discovered.

COLORING INSIDE THE LINES

Playfulness is sometimes misunderstood.

One of my early attempts came while preaching about sexuality. To introduce the sermon, I asked both the men and women to read responsively some of the more graphic passages from the Song of Songs. Sure that I had made my point, I playfully asked when they were finished, “Did any of you know this X-rated material was in the Bible?”

I was met with stone-faced, hostile silence.

The following Monday, a line of unhappy campers were parked in the reception area for their turn to file into my office: “We don’t use that kind of language in church!” Even a woman of my own baby-boomer generation, whose support I had come to expect, said later, “If I’d had to say ‘breasts’ one more time, I would have died!”

One person’s playfulness is another’s irreverence. So it is wise to know your congregation’s limits.

Another try with my current church brought better results. A guest preacher had described being so excited when his football team scored a touchdown that he jumped off the couch in front of the divided, pumped his arm up and down, and shouted, “Yes, yes, yes. YES!” So I decided to use his antics the following Sunday after a soloist had just sung a deeply moving piece.

“There’s just one thing I want to say after James’s song,” I said in my best preacher’s voice. I paused. Then, pumping my arm, I said, “Yes, yes, yes. YES!” Everyone who had attended the previous Sunday roared with laughter.

My former congregation would have seen this as irreverent. But not this church. They considered it playful–and appropriate.

Playfulness is more than spontaneity. Witty, extroverted preachers are not necessarily playful. Nor is it a worship style. “Free” worship styles can also have cemented boundaries–just try something that isn’t spontaneous!

Neither is playfulness reverse psychology. It’s not stating the opposite of what I desire. (“Guess what? Our church does not need your money this year.”) Such obvious gimmicks are both ineffective and false.

Playfulness does not misrepresent or deny the truth; it creates a new dynamic–within me.

“The major effect of playfulness and paradox is on the perpetrator,” says Friedman. “It takes him or her out of the feedback position. It detriangles and changes the balance of the emotional interdependency. It is the change in the structure of the triangle that gets the other person functioning or thinking differently.”

In preaching, I am the “perpetrator.” Becoming more playful affects me more than my audience. I lighten up. Playfulness frees me from trying so hard to make an impact. Hence, the emotional triangle involving me, the congregation, and the message changes. People are free to listen without activating their defenses. The possibility of impact actually increases.

That’s the paradox.

AROUND THE MAGINOT LINE

I’ve found it helpful to identify who in the congregation I feel most responsible to convince. Ironically, these are often the very people I will never touch. Why? They have built a Maginot Line.

The Maginot Line was the impenetrable system of barriers and bunkers built by France to protect itself from Imperial Germany after World War I. In World War II, however, Hitler didn’t attack France through the Maginot Line. His Panzer divisions made a sweeping detour around it through Belgium. France fell swiftly.

When preachers try too hard to make an impact, klaxons sound and bunker walls go up. My people often know what I’m going to say even before I say it (they know the issues I’m most serious about). When facing a Maginot Line, frontal attacks are valiant but ineffective.

Rather than slug it out in a frontal attack, wisdom suggests a detour. What is the last thing they expect me to say on this issue? What would make them laugh? How can I good-naturedly (not spitefully) be playful? Why am I trying so hard with them anyway?

In a sermon on God’s destruction of Sodom, my self-diagnosis revealed that I especially wanted to reach the folks who cheer for judgment rather than, as Abraham did, pray for mercy. My detour began with a playful scene of righteous folks building grandstands on the hills above that evil city to enjoy the Lord’s impending judgment:

“With football-stadium fervor, they waved banners and chanted, ‘Go God–crush Sodom!’ But Abraham was not cheerleading. Sodom included his own nephew, Lot. For Abraham, Sodom could never be just ‘them,’ those evil people not like us. There is some of ‘us’ in Sodom, for Abraham and for all of us. Realizing this prompts us to pray for God’s mercy rather than cheer for God’s judgment.”

(One elderly farmer who obviously didn’t take the detour said to me afterward, “While you were preaching, all I could think about is wishing God would push the whole city of San Francisco into the ocean!”)

TO STING LIKE A BEE

Trying-harder preaching often goes hand in hand with an over-emphasis on content. As a young preacher, I was certain that if I marshaled enough exegetical evidence (from the original languages, of course), I could bludgeon my listeners into belief. My sermons were like boxing matches: I didn’t always score a knockout, but I expected to win on points.

Since then, I have joined the Mohammed Ali school of homiletics. I must learn to dance like a butterfly if I want to sting like a bee. The footwork of the sermon (how you say it) is just as, if not more, essential than the content (what you say).

Of course, you remember the cartoon of a boxer who dances all over the ring, obviously impressed with his footwork, only to be knocked out by a single punch. Footwork is a means to an end–impact. Playful sermons are not intended to impress the listener (or the preacher) with one’s creativity. They are used to communicate truth.

Once I wanted to preach about the Lord’s Supper as being a prelude to the Messianic banquet. I wanted to communicate the joy felt by the early church as they celebrated this event. However, only by coming at the sermon in a lighter fashion could I detour around my church’s years of solemn tradition. The Sacrament had an aura more of wake than banquet.

I hit on the idea of having eyewitnesses report on their joyful experience. Rather than using real people, I imagined what caterers present at the meals might have observed.

The sermon opened with two caterers pausing for breath while serving the heavenly banquet. Soon they begin to reminisce about their previous catering jobs for the Lord. They remember the joyful Old Testament feasts in the Temple, Jesus’ upper room meal with his disciples, the agape meals of the early church, and twentieth-century expressions that somehow (in the caterers’ minds) lost the intended joy. Finally, the caterers gesture at the people enjoying the heavenly banquet and ask each other, “When they were back on earth, do you ever wonder if they really understood what they were doing?”

This sermon, “Observations of God’s Caterers,” was my fancy footwork around the entrenched expectations of my listeners. Because it was screened through playful, imaginary characters, most who listened did not feel defensive or threatened.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

Some of us need permission to be playful. Like my personality, my preaching tends to be serious: to travel well-worn intellectual pathways, expressing the doctrines of the faith in centuries-old imagery. Fortunately, I also have some friends who release me to be playful with the great themes of my faith.

One such friend is Frederick Buechner. Another is C.S. Lewis. While studying, I keep an anthology of one or the other close at hand. I often dip into it for fifteen or twenty minutes as I begin thinking about my sermon. Their playful ideas, even on topics completely unrelated to my theme, push me to play with ideas as well. In their company, I see fresh approaches to the old, old story.

One such approach is playing the Devil’s Advocate. Serious preachers like me often have so many points to make, we skip over the questions that perplex our listeners. I have to keep coming back to the question: How might my message not ring true with life on the street?

While preparing for a sermon on Jesus’ challenge to enter the kingdom of God like a child, a woman in one of our seeker Bible studies came to mind. Deathly afraid of being manipulated, she would be repelled by Jesus’ challenge. To her, children are vulnerable.

That caused me to imagine other objections: Is reclaiming childhood innocence a sentimental illusion for an adult? If Jesus is talking about naive, simple-minded faith, what adult wants that?

Soon I not only had lots of questions to ask the text on behalf of my people, but the questions pushed me beyond the pat answers I might otherwise have offered.

PLAYING WITH WORDS

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word,” wrote Mark Twain, “is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

That’s a helpful reminder. Words are the raw materials of sermons. The right use of words can inject a sermon with needed doses of playfulness. Here are some questions I ask myself to add freshness to my words:

Can it be understood in different ways? While preparing an Easter message on the Emmaus road experience, I noticed that when the doubtful disciples were confronted with the risen Christ, they “disbelieved for joy” (Luke 24:41, RSV).

It dawned on me that “I can’t believe it” can be understood in two ways: either as an expression of doubt or as an ecstatic expression of joy (like when the 1980 U.S. hockey team won an Olympic gold medal against overwhelming odds: “I can’t believe it!”).

My sermon traced the journey each of us take with the disciples. It began with the “I can’t believe it” of doubt and despair while trudging down the Emmaus road and ended with the “I can’t believe it” of joy, hugging and dancing in the presence of the risen Christ.

Does it mean the same thing to all people? Fresh off the farm, I once heard several teenagers in inner-city Minneapolis exclaim that a sleek passing car was “bad.” I was their youth worker.

“What’s bad about it?” I asked naively. “It looks neat to me!”

That embarrassing moment started me thinking of events in life we wrongly interpret as bad in the literal sense but which a sovereign God sees as being ultimately good.

Does it have a little known or surprising meaning? Dr. Ian Pitt-Watson, professor of preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary, once preached a sermon in which he playfully countered the common assumption that Jesus’ beatitude “blessed are the meek” implies wimpish weakness.

He observes of the word meek: “In the French Bible the word is translated debonnaire–debonair!–with overtones of courtesy, gallantry, chivalry (remember Hollywood’s ‘golden oldies’ and Cary Grant in his heyday?). Debonair: gentle, sensitive, courteous, modest, unpretentious–yet strong and brave and fun and happy.”

Debonair Cary Grant released meekness from the negative images from which I had imprisoned it.

Will different age groups hear it differently? Recently I introduced a sermon by narrating a comic strip showing Barney, the preschooler’s purple dinosaur, being swallowed up by a fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park. I began, however, by asking the congregation, “When you hear the name Barney, who flashes into your mind?”

I offered some possibilities that occurred to me as a child of early divided (Barney Fife, Barney Rubble). Shaking hands at the door afterwards, the older generation bombarded me: “I thought of Barney Oldfield,” “I thought of Barney Google.”

Introducing the sermon by simply playing with one word arrested the attention of several generations.

Not every sermon can or should be playful. But when we find ourselves trying harder to little effect, we may be caught in the handcuffs of trying harder. Freedom comes as we can say with Bill Murray, an alumnus of Saturday Night Live, “Hey, I’m serious!”

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