My first premise: the church is more than a religious organization to which interested participants have attached themselves.
On the contrary, the church is the Body of Christ. That is more than a mere metaphor. Just as we affirm that Jesus is the Christ and therefore embodies the Word of God, so in faith we claim that the Word of God continues to be embodied in the continuing Body of Christ, the church.
My second premise, following from the first, is this: the task of the preacher is not only to bring the Word of God to the people but to articulate what God is saying to and through the congregation.
Discerning God's Word in the congregation
The Word of God is already present.
Sometimes it needs to be exposed to the consciousness of the people, and sometimes it needs to be celebrated as the miracle of God's grace already expressed in the lives of God's people. This reality, of course, does not eliminate the need for the prophet who challenges the people to respond to what God is doing among them, but it does shape the prophetic aspect of the sermon. Just as the disciples did not always understand the Word as embodied in Jesus, so the members of the congregation may have trouble discerning the Word as it is embodied among them.
If these things were clear in our minds and hearts as ministers, prophetic sermons would concentrate less upon placing guilt at the door of the congregation and more upon a proclamation, spoken in awe, exposing the hidden things that God seeks to call to birth among His people. Such preaching would more closely resemble the proclamations of the Hebrew prophets, revealing a higher consciousness in the preacher of the pain and experience of the people; the sermon coming, at least partly, from the experience of the people.
Preachers must develop attentive ears as they walk among the people. I have often had the shape of a sermon significantly affected by what I hear in a counseling session, a phone call, or a visit prior to the sermon.
The focus of our listening is shaped by the character of God. Since we know that God pays particular attention to the needy, it will often be in the crucible of human need that God's Word becomes self-evident. Sometimes this will indeed be manifested in the agony of a member; or sometimes it will be apparent in the response of the church to the human need within the larger community. Because God is a God of justice, it will often be in the concern about injustice that God's Word will be expressed. The same will be evident in acts of forgiveness, healing, generosity, to name a few of these acts. The challenge for the pastor is to discern the word that God is expressing through this particular congregation in this particular moment in time.
The Bible and the people
The canon by which the preacher seeks to measure the behavior of the church to discern the Word of God incarnate, is the Scriptures. In the Bible we have the testimony to the Word of God as it is expressed first among a people (the Old Testament) and then in the transcendent person of Christ (New Testament). While it may be clearest in Christ, we must not forget that to the great majority of the world, it is the life of the humanity of the church that is seen first of all. We should not expect that the Word of God will be automatically self-evident to the world. It needs to be proclaimed in a way that enables both the members of the church and the community that witnesses the church, to recognize what is being expressed in their midst.
Pastors need to accept that they are listeners to the Word as well as proclaimers of the Word. They are to expect that it is God proclaiming the Word both through them as they lay the Scripture alongside the life of the congregation and as they seek to articulate what they have heard to the congregation. They also need to listen for the echo of the Word that is pro claimed as it ripples out over time among the people and rebounds back to the proclaimer. Preachers should never expect that a sermon is finished when it is initially spoken. It continues to work in the life of the congregation, sometimes in the most unexpected ways, and reshape itself to be reproclaimed long after the initial spoken word is delivered.
How context shapes hearing
The pastor must constantly pay attention to the way the congregation's context shapes the way the people hear the sermon. When the pastor does not stand outside the congregation seeking to bring the Word of God to bear on the people, but rather stands within the congregation seeking to listen for the Word of God, which is taking shape within the lives of the gathered people, it alters how the people listen. While the gospel may have an "over againstness" as it finds expression in our world, the pastor is allied with the congregation in seeking to discover the miracle of the incarnation as it finds expression in the lives of the people who have been gathered by the Holy Spirit for the purpose of hearing, receiving, and giving expression to God's Word.
The difference in the function of the pastor versus the average person is that pastors have been given the time and training to be theologians in residence among the people. In the midst of the divine and sociological realities connected to that role, the pastor is to be receptive to being addressed by God through both the Scripture and the congregation and the interplay between the two. It is from that experience that the words of the sermon will best be formed.
Conclusion
As any preacher knows, it is not the words spoken but the interaction between the words heard and the lives of those who hear them which creates the message received. All of this is so far beyond our control that we recognize that the Word that is proclaimed through the instrument of a sermon is truly a word from God. And the word that returns to the preacher can equally be a word from God that furthers the development of the expression of God's Word within the living Body of Christ.
