Preaching with Holy Curiosity—and Three Curiosity Killers

Diane Ackerman was talking about life, but I think it applies to preaching when she wrote, “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived to the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”  The challenge of preaching is getting at a passage’s width, as well as its length. There are 31,102 verses in the Bible. Each verse has two measurements—length and width. Length is just getting the text right. Width is another dimension altogether—it requires attention to the heart and it allows the text to confront and transform. Effective preaching needs both, but width is too easily neglected.

Jesus was a master at this kind of preaching. On one hand, He would affirm a passage’s length: 

You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, "You shall not murder," and "whoever murders shall be liable to judgment." (Matt. 5:21, NRSVUE)

That's exactly the command in Exod. 20:13 & Deut. 5:17 (along with an expansion based on Num. 35:30 and other regulations in the Law). It captures the length perfectly.

Then Jesus would widen the scripture directing it into every aspect of human behavior.

But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment, and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison.  Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. (Matthew 5:22-26, NRSVUE)

Jesus’s way of speaking the Word opened the eyes of the blind, raised the dead, fed the multitudes and infuriated the establishment—and they couldn’t get enough of it:

Now when Jesus had finished saying these words, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as their scribes. (Matthew 7:28-29, NRSVUE)

The scribes were masters of length, but their teaching lacked width.

They would get it right... as far as it went. But they didn't get to the heart of the matter. And the people new it. It’s only the width that moves the listener to laugh, cry, sigh, look in the mirror and respond. You might nod and say, "that's correct" about a sermon that gets the length right. But only a sermon that gets the width of a passage right can change a heart.

Great Preaching Requires Holy Curiosity

For preachers, finding the width of a passage requires a different set of tools than finding length.

Holy curiosity is one of those tools.

If you spend much time with children you know they ask a lot of questions. People who study this say that a child asks hundreds of questions a day. But childhood curiosity peaks at about the age of ten, and by my age you’re down to just a handful. Maybe that’s another reason why Jesus said grownups should become more like children. Finding a passage’s width is like bathing in a spiritual fountain of youth.

It takes holy curiosity to expose a passage’s width. Without it, we’re all just like the scribes and Pharisees. In a generic sense, holy curiosity explores where and how a passage turns all the nuts and bolts of daily living.

In a more personal sense, holy curiosity wonders, “What about me?” This kind of holy curiosity takes time and energy and must contend with a pack of curiosity killers and they are what I’d like to consider next.

(What do you bring to the pulpit? See Dave Peterson on authentic preaching and how life outside the pulpit informs preaching.)

Curiosity Killer 1: Settling for "Good Enough"

The death of holy curiosity begins with complacency. Getting a message ready can be like Anne Lamott's description of writing a book: as putting an octopus to bed—except it’s not the sermon that’s the octopus, it’s the whole of the pastor’s life, amplified a hundred-fold by technology and the demands of institutional maintenance. Some octopus-leg-of-pastoral-responsibility is always sneaking out from under the sheets, interrupting and tempting the preacher to prematurely say about the message, “Good enough,” before the message really is good enough.

So, when is the message good enough? When is it time to call a design freeze? It’s when you’ve found the place in the message where you personally have been raised from the dead, been given eyes to see, ears to hear and strength to walk, where you’ve been moved to a place of deeper justice, kindness and humility. It’s when you’ve been convicted of something so compelling that you simply have to say it or you might as well abandon preaching altogether and go to law school. That’s when your good-enough message might actually be good enough to preach.

Curiosity Killer #2: Not Giving it Time

Paul wrote to Timothy, "Without any doubt, the mystery of our religion is great" (1 Tim. 3:16, NRSVUE). Scriptures don’t release their mysteries without an abundance of patience. That’s why preparing to preach is like marching around Jericho. Nothing much happens until the seventh time around.

The problem is, of course that preachers have other things to do, places to go, people to see. Sometimes the weekend comes before we’ve marched around the passage for the seventh time. But ready or not, the moment comes, the congregation is focused on the preacher and it’s show time. Then you give what you’ve got and hope to heaven you won’t have regrets over what you might have said if only you’d had more time.

It is possible to have more time, but only by starting earlier. When you wait too long to get started, impatience will cancel holy curiosity. Find ways to marinate in the passage for weeks, even months. Commit the passage to memory. Trust that your everyday ordinary life will give width to the passage, pressing it into the places that make people laugh, cry, sigh and say, Yes!

Someone asked poet, William Stafford, “Dr. Stafford, what is the secret of writing poetry?” After a thoughtful moment, he answered, “You wait.” What’s true for poets is also true for preachers. Every preacher needs to have a waiting room for passages. Holy curiosity depends on it.

Curiosity Killer #3: Fearing the Message and Fearing the Response

Reading the Bible scares the hell out of me—literally, I hope! Someone said the Bible is like a box of flashlights. You never know what it might expose. Curiosity-killing anxiety comes in two forms. The first has to do with the preacher’s own daily walk. On my desk, I keep a note printed on a folded three-by-five card that asks, What if it’s true?

Paul made a living off his old seminary convictions until a blinding flash of light and the voice of Jesus completely reformatted all his old mental models (Acts 9). After three long days, the scales fell off his eyes, and what had formerly been on the right was now on the left and what had been up was now down. Sermon prep should carry a little hint of terror. Because, what if it’s true?

Brian McLaren points out the challenge:

We all have a whole set of assumptions and limitations, prejudices and preferences, likes, dislikes and triggers, fears and conflicts of interest, blind spots and obsessions that keep us from seeing what we could and would see if we didn’t have them. 

Holy curiosity forces you to rethink. I can’t find anywhere in the Bible where it says it’s here to pat you on the head and say "Amen, Amen" to all your opinions. Rather, as Richard Rohr says in Falling Upward, "Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable." The first target of scriptural anxiety is the preacher’s own life, with all its blind spots, anxieties and unexplored prejudices.

The second form of this anxiety has to do with concern for how the congregation will respond. I think about that old saying that preaching is meant to comfort-the-afflicted and afflict-the-comfortable. My anxiety over the congregation’s response has always made me more of a comforter than an afflicter. Too bad. It shrinks the width of my preaching.

Jesus’s very first sermon got off to a good start. At the half-way point we are told,

All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. (Luke 4:22, NRSVUE)

But Jesus had another thing or two to say, and by the time He finished,

All in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. (Luke 4:28-29, NRSVUE)

If we follow the master, we may not get a warm reception every time. But we are still to follow.

Turbulence used to bother me when I fly. Not so much anymore. Videos from inside hurricane-hunter airplanes help me. In fact, I read that some turbulence is necessary for a plane to fly. That’s why there are little tabs on an airplane’s wing called vortex generators. As in, they send little, invisible tornados dancing on an airplane’s wings improve their effectiveness.

Preachers need to work on being vortex generators. We would do well to spin up a few tornados when we preach. Not EF5s that flatten everything, but a few EF0s that scatter lawn furniture and knock off dead tree limbs. Turbulence is necessary for transformation.

Sermons that are wide should have an uncomfortable place or two that leave the listener wondering, What if it’s true?

(What does challenging and informing look like in a secularized culture? Mark Glanville offers an approach.)

Don't Settle for Length—Go for Width

You've wrestled with enough passages to know that getting the length of a scripture passage is easy. Getting the width is more elusive—it requires holy curiosity—and that requires wrestling with complacency, impatience, and anxiety. Above all, it requires lavishing your attention on the passage. Simone Weil said that the purist form of generosity is attention.

Give each passage the attention it deserves and it will bless you with the revelation of its width.