The (wo)manly art or preaching

Most preachers, homiletics professors, and writers about sermon preparation are male. Even the women in pulpits to day have studied primarily under men and had male role models. How has male experience shaped our proclamation of the Word?

Growing up male, I discovered that our society expected me to

• think analytically and dispassionately,
• know the answers—or at least pretend to know them,
• be strong,
• initiate, and
• be "one of the guys."

Women, on the other hand, have been expected to show "femininity" by

• thinking intuitively,
• admitting ignorance (or pretending it!),
• being "emotional,"
• nurturing others' growth, and
• being sensitive to and empathizing with others.

Taking a broader view

Thinking analytically. Men are expected to be analytical; my seminary emphasized analytic thought in exegesis. Scholarly analysis is valuable—but it is not always much help in preparing sermons. How many of us left the seminary with critical tools but little idea of how to move from text criticism to interpretation? To understand our experience, we must venture into the realm of feeling—and for many men, this is foreign territory.

Our most powerful proclamation of the Word is almost always an eyewitness account: telling what we ourselves have seen and done and experienced. My best sermon on evangelism, I am told, was my most personal one: the tale of how my home church showed courage in the face of political harassment—and I chose Christ over the surrounding culture.

One female pastor told Lynn Rhodes that she initially received complaints about her sermons being too emotional and too personal, but she said that she "continued to preach that way until the people in my congregation began to see that what I was doing was affirming their right to reflect seriously on their own faith experiences." Soon 20 of her parishioners mustered the courage to preach. ¹

Knowing the answers. School—and cross-examination in debate—taught me the power that knowing the answers conveys. Whether we are delivering a Communion meditation or teaching a Bible study class, we clerics often see our role as giving answers to the assembled. In Changing Male Roles in Today's World Richard P. Olson wrote that in our society the five hardest things for men to say are "I don't know," "I made a mistake; I was wrong," "I need help," "I am afraid," and "I am sorry." ²

For at least a year after graduation from seminary I dutifully played the part of Scripture expert every Sunday morning. I told what the Greek text "really meant." I pointed out the historical background "essential" to understanding each passage. I must have bored my congregation silly.

Then one week I wrestled with a passage that baffled me. After thorough exegesis I could not make heads or tails of it. The morning that I was to preach, my ultimate nightmare confronted me: 9:00 a.m. and a sermon in shambles. When I entered the pulpit, I—with great trepidation—admitted to my congregation, "I am not sure that I have figured out what this passage means." That got their attention! I shared what few bits of back ground seemed helpful, offered tentative stabs at what the story might be about, invited them to share their responses to the text, and sat down. I was greeted not by disappointment but by appreciation—I had given them permission to wrestle with the meaning of Scripture.

Barbara Brown Zikmund has noted that women use language that suggests openness to examination. According to linguistic studies, in conversation they ask questions more often than men do and qualify their statements with tag lines such as "Don't you think?" Homiletics professors coached many of us to avoid this sort of hedging so as not to "weaken" our message, but Zikmund contends that "when the preacher shares her journey and vulnerability she may speak more directly to the needs of aver age believers." ³

Couldn't our proclamation of the Word be strengthened by admitting our weakness? The editors of Leadership tell potential writers, "Our readers expect to share disappointments and struggles as well as triumphs. Each article must balance 'what went well' and 'what didn't go so well.' We've found this gives the writer credibility and allows our pastor/ readers to identify more readily with the situation."

Isn't it possible that our flocks appreciate this kind of openness too ?

Being strong. In our society men are expected to be strong—which too often means insensitive and rather self-centered. Women are the ones trained to empathize. But all preachers would benefit by learning to reason with empathy for others, to think with feeling. I once saw a preacher get himself into a great deal of trouble by saying "Genesis shows us that marriage between a man and a woman is the paradigm of Christian life." He was genuinely shocked by the uproar his sermon provoked. Perhaps greater empathy could have helped him realize that he should proceed with respect for the feelings of the widowed, unmarried, abandoned, and otherwise single—who made up 70 percent of his congregation.

Native Americans taught their children to "walk in another's moccasins" before criticizing. Maybe we preachers should apply that advice before we try to tell others anything.

Initiating or responding. We clergy, especially those of us who like to see our selves as strong leaders, often fall into a typically male trap. We tend to see our selves as the ones who initiate all reflection, dialogue, and action, rather than as those who share their response to God's Word and who respond to concerns raised by parishioners.

For years I wondered why my entreaties to Christian compassion produced more guilt than grace. Only recently has it dawned on me that I have been calling for compassion but not embodying it. I am on much firmer ground, I now realize, and more likely to be heard, when I preach not as an expert on justice but as a shepherd who feels distress for the pain of my flock. I don't need to be able to answer every legal issue surrounding obscenity to see that porn hurts the men who buy it. Nor do I need a special call to speak about peace, only compassion for the victims of war.

Laypeople tend to be suspicious of the prophetic word anyway. Perhaps they recognize how seldom God calls prophets and how often those who claim that role are mistaken.

Being one of the guys. And then there is the pressure to be "one of the guys." Face it, ours is not viewed as the most manly of professions, and this perception takes a toll on male egos. One senior pastor coped with this pressure by appointing himself "chaplain" of the high school football team and salting every fall sermon with gridiron references. (How his congregation must have rejoiced after the last game of the season!)

More subtly, most of us prepare our sermons by consulting the words of men and seldom present the writing, lives, or wisdom of women. Take a quick survey of your library. Who wrote most of the books you consult as you prepare for preaching—men or women?

Doesn't this neglect of the experience of women make our preaching more repetitious and more irrelevant to most of our parishioners? And does not the need to appear strong and "cool" make it harder for us to reveal our frailty and brokenness from the pulpit?

Getting it together

Does all this seem too one-sided? There are certainly good things to be said for masculinity. The self-confidence be fore a crowd that I learned in high school spared me the stage fright that afflicts so many talented women of the cloth. Knowledge, analytic thought, and strength of conviction (and delivery) surely aid the proclamation of the Word. Certainly God uses these qualities—even when found in insecure, bombastic clerics. But the church also needs those virtues our society assigns to women.

To be certain, change threatens many parishioners. But the major risk men face in learning to preach with these supposedly feminine qualities is not rejection by our hearers, but change. To open up, to share, to feel more deeply, to admit ignorance, to confess weakness—all these lead us further away from tough, hard masculine roles and identities.

We men have been taught to feel ashamed of anything that smacks of weakness. But, as Baptist preacher George Thomas has said, on Good Friday Jesus showed us that there are things worth being humiliated for. To free our selves from the burdens of misdirected shame, we can reclaim the message of Scripture that Christ atoned for our shame, that there is strength in weakness, that weakness does not make us unworthy in God's eyes. When we can claim with Paul that we "are not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation" (Rom. 1:16), we will truly preach Good News.