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PREACHING SKILLSThis Easter, Surprise ThemThe resurrection means so much more than most people think.N. T. Wright
Editor's note: At the 2008 National Pastors Conference in San Diego, PreachingToday.com's Brian Lowery interviewed N. T. Wright about his book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church and how it relates to preaching. With the Easter journey in view, his words are timely, challenging, and above all, hopeful.
Preaching Today: In your book Surprised by Hope, you talk about a deeper understanding of hope "that provides a coherent and energizing basis for work in today's world." How has that deeper understanding influenced your preaching through the years?
N. T. Wright: While I was studying the Resurrection for an earlier book, Resurrection of the Son of God, I ended up rubbing my nose in the New Testament theology of new creation, and the fact that the new creation has begun with Easter. I discovered that when we do new creation—when we encourage one another in the church to be active in projects of new creation, of healing, of hope for communities—we are standing on the ground that Jesus has won in his resurrection.
New creation is not just "whistling in the dark." It's not a kind of social Pelagianism, where we try to improve things by pulling ourselves up from our own bootstraps. Because Jesus is raised from the dead, God's new world has begun. We are not only the beneficiaries of new creation; we are the agents of it. I just can't stop preaching about that, because that is where we're going with Easter.
That message of the kingdom is the thing that resurrection is really all about.
For me, therefore, there's no disjunction between preaching about the salvation which is ours in God's new age—the new heavens and new earth—and preaching about what that means for the present. The two go very closely together. If you have an eschatology that is nonmaterial, why bother with this present world? But if God intends to renew the world, then what we do in the present matters. That's 1 Corinthians 15:58! This understanding has made my preaching more challenging to me, and hopefully to my hearers, to actually get off our backsides and do something in the local community—things that are signs of new creation.
What themes emerged in your preaching after having been surprised by hope?
I've found myself addressing current issues—what you might call "God in public life"—and I've been doing so from a wide variety of points of view. If you start taking hope seriously, you begin to ask, "What does this mean for our public life?" You begin to wrestle with how this actually impacts education policy or what we do with those who seek asylum. These themes have crept into my preaching.
At this last year's Christmas Eve service, I talked about the problems the hill farmers in my diocese were facing because of foot-and-mouth disease. I noted how the government's attitude toward that issue was like the government's attitude toward those who seek asylum. It's the church's responsibility to stand up for those who have nobody to stand up for them. Somebody approached me on the way out the door and said, "You should stick to the Scriptures. There's nothing in Christmas about those who seek asylum!" I was so astonished, that the person had gone before I could say, "What about Matthew 2? What was Jesus doing in Egypt? Weren't they seeking asylum?"
I have found that my preaching is touching on some of the key issues of the times, presenting a Christian response and not just a political response for the sake of political response. I keep asking myself, how is one to think Christianly about these big things?
Many people still cling to understandings of hope, resurrection, and heaven as future-only concepts. How can today's preacher contend with these viewpoints in a way that the listener is pleasantly surprised, but not offended?
Some people are always going to be offended when you actually teach them what's in the Bible as opposed to what they assume is in the Bible. The preacher can try to say it a number of ways, and sometimes people just won't get it. They will continue to hear what they want to hear. But if you soft-peddle matters, they will think, Oh, he's taking us down the old familiar paths. There is a time for walking in and just saying what needs to be said. Sometimes you just need to find a good line. The line I often use—which makes people laugh—is: "Heaven is important, but it's not the end of the world." In other words, resurrection means the new earth continues after people have gone to heaven.
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