Preaching during the Pandemic: reflections by N T Wright

Preaching during the Pandemic

Reflections by N T Wright, Wycliffe Hall, Oxford

October 2020

Preaching, like prayer, sits uncomfortably between the love of God and the pain of the world. Slacken that tension and the sermon becomes either a rant or a placebo. The world is always in crisis somewhere, resonating with our own pain. Likewise, scripture is always full of comfort, though it’s costly: ‘Comfort, comfort my people’ in Isaiah 40 depends on the death of the Servant in Isaiah 53.

Every sermon should contain comfort, balanced with other elements, particularly warning. ‘Comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable’ applies here as usual. And along with comfort and warning, the sermon should offer two other elements: wisdom and vocation. In a world of half-truths and fake news, we need clear, crisp teaching, leading to a practical response.

The comfort, paradoxically perhaps, emerges not least in the biblical tradition of lament. So many Psalms lead us into – or find us already in – a place of sorrow and bewilderment. Often it’s only when we have said that out loud in God’s presence that the fresh comfort arrives. And even if it doesn’t – as in Psalms 88 and 89, for instance – there is still the knowledge that we can place even our despair before the God we continue to trust. The sermon needs to explain this.

From that, we move to warning and wisdom. There is misinformation about: conspiracy theories, suspicion of political leaders, false theological analyses (seeing the Pandemic as a ‘sign of the end’ or a specific punishment), and spurious ‘comfort’ (‘it doesn’t matter because we’re going to heaven anyway’). We need to be sensitive to our listeners’ probable reaction and ready to put things straight.

The wisdom we teach must be the whole-biblical wisdom of creation and new creation, covenant and new covenant. Spread out the larger map of God’s purposes, focused of course on Jesus. God’s new age of healing and hope, already launched in Jesus, overlaps uncomfortably with the ongoing old age of sin and death. Our vocation as Jesus-followers is to stand at that dangerous overlap, knowing (as in Romans 8) that, as we lament and pray at that painful place, God himself, by the Spirit, is lamenting and praying within us.  Other vocations, other obligations, fan out from there in different directions.

As always, the preacher needs also to be the pray-er. The sermon that will transform the hearers is the one that has already been transforming the speaker.

Preach magazine: Thank you Tom for these insightful words to encourage and guide us at this time. Preachers, if you haven’t read it yet, God and the Pandemic (SPCK, May 2020) should be on your list (review in Preach25 says, ‘The book finishes with a flourish, outlining fresh and healing policies across God’s wide and wounded world.’

And if you have read it, then Broken Signposts (SPCK, October 2020) could take the top slot. Tom Wright searches the Gospel of John for answers to 7 big issues that impact us all: justice, love, spirituality, beauty, freedom, truth and power. The conclusion looks promising ‘Mending the Broken Signposts.’ This is FOOD first for your soul, and then for your preaching and those who hear you.  

View a Preach interview with Tom Wright by Rochelle Owusu-Antwi about Paul A Biography HERE