Preaching Professor Addresses Grief and Loss

Oct. 30 – In times of economic recession as well as when people are suffering from loss and grief, the pastor of a church has a significant role to play, a Duke University Divinity School professor told a group at Calvin Theological Seminary on Thursday.

Both from the pulpit and by developing and maintaining close connections to families in the congregation, pastors can help ease pain, provide comfort, and offer hope, Rev. Richard Lischer told those attending the 2009 Fall Preaching Conference.

"Pastoral imagination is a daunting task. We are called to insert ourselves into multiple frames of experience that aren't ours," said Lischer to those meeting in the seminary chapel for the daylong conference sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Preaching at CTS.

"As pastors, we have a mixed audience and we need to speak to all conditions of life. As a result, we do not need to limit our imagination to personal experience. . . . We need to use the honest language of hope, but we also must be able to speak a language of doubt."

Lischer is the author of several books and serves as the James T. and Alice Mead Cleland Professor of Preaching at Duke. During the morning session, he spoke on how to best think about preaching during difficult economic times. “Our congregations are thirsty for messages of hope that are aimed at those who are suffering,” Lischer said.

In the afternoon, his topic was "Suffering, Death and Grief."

A key component for the pastor is to find ways, especially through the use of Scripture, to broaden his or her imagination in order that preaching becomes much more than a performance and speaks to the very heart of what people are experiencing. In order to do this, the pastors must keep their minds and hearts open to experience and inspiration and be able to set themselves in place of other people.

At the same time, the pastor must stay humble.

In his book, The End of Words, he writes about this. "In the act of preaching something dies and something rises," he says. "What dies (or should die) is the preoccupation with the self that plagues so many performers." But there is a twist in this as well, he writes. "The death is ironic, since some sense of self is stimulated by God's call in the first place and is necessary for public speaking."

In encounters and conversations with God, the biblical prophets found their selves annihilated "only to reappear as powerful individual performers of the word on God’s behalf. They do not lack a sense of self."

Lischer also made it clear that a pastor's job does not stop at the pulpit, but should involve becoming acquainted with all the different types of experiences—the joys as well as the sorrows—of the congregation. An important part of this, says Lischer, is learning to become a good listener. "You are not asked to show off the range of your experience, but to talk of the empathy and pathos of God."

God is always with us, in every experience, and it is important to let that be known, by the words of a sermon or simple presence with someone who is sick in the hospital.

We live in a society that celebrates fighting and winning but tends to be uncomfortable around those who may not be winners. He pointed to the ways in which many people think about and deal with cancer. We fight the good battle. But what about when the disease wins? he asked.

"We need to both celebrate the human courage it takes to fight cancer, but also the courage it takes to accept death," Lischer said. "It takes a great courage to face a disease like that."

As a result, he said, "there is no one script to talk about cancer from the pulpit. We may not be experts in science, but we know about suffering and death. . . . We can name and lament our disease before God. . . . We can let people know that their church has a mind deeper than their despair."

Pastors are best to speak little about their own specific experiences and work to speak a bit more generally about those experiences, especially of suffering and loss, that everyone shares. "We need to speak about our common life" and the hope provided by Jesus who suffered and died on the cross for everyone, he said.

Pastors need to be realists who are also prophets able to speak of another reality. Pastors need to help their congregations face life, and all that it entails, head on. "We need to celebrate hope in relation to specific scourges that the church was not scared to name," he said.

—Chris Meehan, CRC Communications