Preaching in the Dark Without Forgetting the Light

Over the past few years, I have grown increasingly bothered by a trend in preaching in the churches to which I’m connected. As United States culture has grown more polarized, many preachers have found ways to compromise with the fear-laden rhetoric inspiring some of their hearers. They do so by carefully avoiding certain topics such as biblical teachings about migrants or money or the character of leaders. They also do so by using words and phrases that mean one thing to the preacher and another to the audience.

Through a series of four articles, I want to examine the biblical language of light and darkness. As numerous sermons go, the church bears the light while everyone else stumbles in darkness. The sermon presents a binary world, “Us” vs. “Them.” And everyone who isn’t “Us” is “Them.” The metaphor thus feeds the culture’s conflicts in part because it functions in a denatured environment. Language that originally supported a tiny, beleaguered minority now emboldens a corrupted popular church culture with its teeming tens of millions. Our preaching too often trades in clichés and caricatures of Scripture, not the real thing.

The language of preaching, however biblical it may seem on the surface, needs to pass some ethical smell tests. Do we say what we do (or remain silent) to appease powerful people sitting in our audience? Do our words or our silences add to the pain of our listeners? Do we join them in their pain or stand above them as though we, rather than God, sat on the throne ? Even if we use only the words of the Bible, our preaching can still be unethical because we have not acknowledged our own sinfulness and vulnerability and because we have confused the voice of the human beings we wish to please with God’s voice. And for that we will be accountable at Jesus’s judgment seat.

So, how do we get this right? To take the language of light and darkness, we should remember that it is biblical. In the hands of the prophets and apostles, it is full of rich significance. We cannot avoid it altogether without impoverishing the church’s already thinned-out language. How, then, can we perform that language in ways that befit God’s mercy and splendor more faithfully? How can our preaching draw human beings closer to God rather than to the idols so often worshiped in the American church? That is the question.

To begin to answer this question, let’s turn to the Apostle Paul, who draws upon the rich imagery of light and darkness seen in the Psalms and prophets in constructing a new vision of the church as a pioneer people living out God’s graciousness in their own lives. [1] Paul offers neither the first nor the last word on the subject, but his witness is telling, especially given how often we hear (or mishear) his letters and consider (or distort) their message.

Stay tuned as this series continues next week. In the next two articles, we will try to make sense of Paul’s use of these terms through his letters, and in the fourth and final article, I will offer several key takeaways for preaching.

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[1] Of course, the imagery of darkness and light also figures prominently in John’s Gospel and Epistles. A discussion of that rich material would require a separate treatment, though I think the overall conclusion reached would be similar. What seems at first like a binary view of the world in John becomes, on closer examination, more complex.