Analyzing Narrative Preaching

My sermon today was a narrative version of the story of the Angel appearing to the Shepherds. One of the things I am attempting to understand is exactly how I do these kinds of sermons from a technical side of things. If I am going to teach others how to do this, I have to know some of the things that seem to come naturally to me (but may not to others). So, here is what I learned today in telling a narrative sermon:

1. My mentor tells his homiletics classes that repetition is extremely necessary in sermonic presentation. I agree. One of the major keys of narrative storytelling is the ability to have a repetitive line or concept that holds the story together. For instance, my opening line of the sermon today was, "It was a night like any other night." I not only repeated the line numerous times during the story but developed it further with two other variations. After moving from the job of the shepherds to the appearance of the Angel, I used the line, "But when the Angel appeared, it suddenly became a night unlike any other night the Shepherds had ever experienced." My final transition was to talk about the appearance of the host of angels and I used the line, "When the angel hosts appeared, that night became unlike any other night in the history of the world." The key here is to use both the mnemonic device for memory and the development of the idea as a way of building tension and plot. Eugene Lowry, in his landmark book, "The Homiletical Plot" talks about the stages of narrative as follows:
• Upsetting the equilibrium
• Analyzing the discrepancy
• Disclosing the clue to resolution
• Experiencing the gospel
• Anticipating the consequences
• He describes these as:
• Oops
• Ugh
• Aha
• Whee
• Yeah
• When I look at Lowry's process, my developmental repetitive phrasing helps move the plot along from the Oops phase to the Ugh phase. In other words, it was how I upset the equilibrium of the story (that at first it was a night like any other night) to analyzing the discrepancy (that is was a night unlike any other night). This moved to the issue that disclosed the clue to resolution (the birth of Christ). Whatever may be the case, you must find some device that allows you to build the story dramatically and create a tension between what seems obvious (it was a normal night for the shepherds) and what is hidden (the Angel's appearance broke the fabric of the space-time continuum between eternity and the now).
  
2. Another principle that I noted today was how narrative constantly gives opportunity to talk about quality issues of theology. Telling the story of the angels and the shepherds gave opportunity to talk about Temple sacrifice of lambs; the meaning of light and sound as the revelation of God to human beings; the reality of Jesus and the Angels as eternal beings that moved from an eternal place to a finite earth in order to accomplish a divine mission; the theological depth of the birth of Christ.
   
• The reason I bring this up is that it seems that many think that narrative does not allow preachers to preach either expository-like sermons with doctrinal or theological issues nor does narrative allow for theologically sophisticated messages. Nothing could (or should) be further from the truth. Preaching the word with 3 point sermons or telling the biblical story narratively allows you to share the deeper things of Christ if you are looking to do it. It must be intentional, but that's how it should be.
• Fred Craddock in his book, "As One Without Authority" criticizes expository sermons as doing harm to the text. We remove the text from its context in order to make some kind of alliterative, stylistic meaning out of it (The Pattern of the Shepherds; The Purpose of the Shepherds; The Perception of the Shepherds - or something like that). The real dynamic is that narrative, story based sermons allow you to stay in the story while making the points about doctrine and theology rather than leaving the story to wander through some made up idea about the meaning of the text that is really no more than your idea of how this concept should be viewed. Narrative allows you to stay with the scripture, even in the scripture, while you apply the power of God's thought (theology) to the words of the text (homiletics).
  

More To Come Later!!!