It is difficult to get the news from poems,
yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.—William Carlos
Williams
April is poetry month and I’ve
been thinking about poetry and preaching. In college, I majored in English, which
meant I read a lot of poetry. My choice of majors also made me part of the
tribe of English majors that Garrison Keillor enjoys poking fun at almost as
much as Lutherans!
Like artists and musicians, when
you major in English, it’s important to have a day job. Mine was being a pastor.
The connection between preaching and English became clear to me in the midst of
preparing my first sermon. I suddenly realized that my most important task was
to communicate the gospel to people I barely knew in the clearest and most
convincing way. The only tools for accomplishing this formidable task were
words.
The relationship became even
clearer under the influence Joseph Sittler, a man I never met but who continues
to have great impact on how I see the world. Sittler taught for many years at
the University of Chicago Divinity School and then at the Lutheran School of
Theology in Chicago. He loved language and God’s creation in equal measures and
he saw the two as being intimately connected. When asked what one piece of
advice he would give to campus pastors (a group of which I was a part at the
time), he said, “Watch your language!”
Throughout his life, Sittler’s
focus was on the centrality of grace in our understanding of God and the world.
He frequently used poetry in his writing and preaching. When asked, “Why
poetry?” he answered, “It is the peculiar function of the poet sometimes to say
out loud and with resonant clarity what we all would wish to say had we the
dark music and the language.” He encouraged us to read poetry and to make use
of it in our own preaching and writing.
It was a lesson that stuck. As
I read more poetry, it didn’t take long to realize that many of the lyrics to
popular songs were also poetry; sometimes profound. It was poetry that people who
claimed not to like poetry and who might never darken the door of a church
could relate to and understand. I soon found myself re-listening to songs by
Van Morrison, U2, Joni Mitchell, and Paul Simon to name only a few, mining them
for memorable phrases and lines that could illuminate the gospel of God’s grace
at work in the world. It transformed the way I thought about my vocation. I
began to think of myself as a poet—not necessarily a very good one, but a poet
nevertheless. I came to see that good poetry, like the best preaching, was
about using language to reflect on life in all its complexity.
In his book about preaching in
contemporary culture, Finally Comes the
Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation, Walter Brueggemann reminds us that
the Hebrew prophets were poets. You can easily see it in the way our English
translations of the Hebrew Bible are formatted, e.g,
For as the rain and snow come down
from heaven,
and
do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it spring forth and sprout,
giving
seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out
from my mouth;
it
shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that
which I purpose,
and
succeed in the thing for which I sent it.—Isaiah 55:10-11 (NRSV)
That’s not just a claim Isaiah
is making on behalf of God; it’s also poetry—poetry that speaks against what
Brueggemann calls a “prose world” in which truth is greatly reduced to a closed
and manageable ideology that robs the gospel of its promise of a just, adventurous,
and hopeful future that is full of possibility.
Like the prophets, poets are
often not welcomed by those who presume to run the affairs of the world. Plato
wanted them banned from his ideal Republic and they are often the first to be
arrested during revolutionary times because of their inconvenient habit of
telling the truth (think of Vaclav Havel, Fela Kuti, Pete Seeger, and the
members of Pussy Riot to name only a few).
Regardless of their
unpopularity—or maybe because of it—poets inspire us and help us see a world of
surprises that dictators and demagogues try their hardest to eliminate. They
help us hear the Gospel in new and daring ways and inspire us to leave the
security of the “prose world” and set out on the journey of faith. During
Poetry Month, thank God for poets! jpr
