Art vs. Death
Preaching like a theatre kid.
When I tell someone I’m in seminary as someone with a theatre degree, and they start trying to make that make sense in their heads, the first place they usually go is preaching.
“Well yeah, because there’s lots of public speaking!” They offer.1
If you think of theatre as fancy-public-speaking, I can see why this would be the case. Our definition of theatre needs to expand alongside our understanding of what it means to do church, because if we follow them each back to their wildest, most ancient roots, we find almost the same thing. We find a group of people gathered around truth in a story. It looks less like a Ted Talk and more like a myth and a meal.
In all honesty, I have found preaching rather discomfiting, even with a theatre background. I listened to friends who recognized a pastoral vocation in their first moment in a pulpit and I assumed surely it would be the same for me—shouldn’t my path resemble that of those I admire? But the first time I stood at that crossroads of ancient and eschaton, looking between God and the church and myself, I just felt overwhelmed. There was no love at first sight, so there must not be love at all. Preaching was not for me. If I were called, it would come in sacraments and prayer and pastoral care, because standing in the pulpit felt like trying to hold a fish in my bare hands.
With this attitude, I sat down for day one of my required preaching course. And when I introduced myself and people said, “oh—because there’s lots of public speaking!” I quietly tried to dissuade them from seeing any connection at all between theatre and preaching, instead pointing to liturgy or sacraments as the theatrical moments in church.
“I just worry I’m being manipulative or inauthentic if I use acting technique in a sermon,” I explained to the coach. “How is it any different from lowering the A/C and switching to a minor key during the bridge of a song and making people think their goosebumps are the Holy Spirit?”
Bit of rocky territory for me to enter there, because whether creative choices distract from or enhance a worship experience depends somewhat on individual situations. In most cases, I find the argument of whether or not an artistic choice is manipulative to instead be a question of what theological message the choice is conveying or disguising, rather than the art itself.
The true insecurity I laid before my teacher was: is who I am as a writer and preacher trustworthy for proclaiming Jesus? Is my inevitably artistic self in competition with the aims of preaching? Am I all frills?
Is who I am as a writer and preacher trustworthy for proclaiming Jesus? Is my inevitably artistic self in competition with the aims of preaching?
Up until this point, the few times I prepared and presented a sermon, I followed the steps that I imagined the people I admired did. I read and prayed over the text. I perused commentaries and wrote paragraphs. I used bullet points and clear signposting. I stood very still while speaking.
None of that was wrong. But in my terror of being perceived as inauthentic, I succumbed to that very risk and drew false limitations around the fullness of who I was designed to be. It was as though I tried to write a book while pretending I had never learned English grammar. It takes more work and is also self-deluding. In the end, you bring who you are to the pulpit.
Both in costume or vestments, some aspects of your identity inevitably surface in a performance. You can edit yourself to an extent to lean into certain aspects of a story, but you cannot change the essence of your instrument: your body and mind. If this weren’t the case, any actor could be cast as any character. Keira Knightley could play Ironman—can you imagine? The arts thrive on diversity, and so does the body of Christ. Other preachers might come to the pulpit with a three-point sermon that crisply and authentically communicates the gospel, but I would be arriving with fairytales and acting warm-ups in hopes of doing the same thing.
Malcolm Guite answers the question I threw at my sermon coach.
Far from becoming a substitute for the salvific action of the Word made flesh, the poetic imagination helps us make sense of that action and is indeed underpinned by it.2
In resisting my artistic impulses, I hindered one of the more prominent ways God communicates with us—a truth-bearing imagination. In order to tell the story of God well, all preachers must employ their imaginations as connective tissue between the disparate worlds of text, tradition, context, and eternity. Lisa Thompson puts it this way:
Preaching is an imaginative work. This work engages a very aesthetic process of pursuing one’s best hunches and seeking rhythmic alignment among the ancient worlds of sacred texts, the contemporary world, and the preacher’s own intuition. Often the process is one of creating alignment where it does not readily exist. This is the imagination at work in preaching— finding similarities alongside dissimilarities for the sake of precision in message.3
Also, despite my protests that preaching isn’t the most theatrical activity happening on a Sunday morning, it still presents several dramatic features. Like a script, the sermon is incomplete on the written page; a body must perform it and an audience must receive it to bring it to fulfillment. And for all my discomfort at being exposed in proclamation, there is also a sense in which the preacher adopts another role, becoming the voice crying out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord!”4
My preaching class continued to surprise me with similarities to familiar artistic experiences. We met half the time in a lab setting to preach sermons to one another and provide feedback—almost identical to a good old fashioned acting lab. Sensory ways of engaging with the text and with our preaching were not only allowed, but encouraged. So when our professor declared one day that every Sunday is “a preach-off with death”, I had loosened up somewhat and was poised to hear it with my own whimsical ears.
A preach-off with death. The stakes were not mass approval or the assuaging of my brittle ego, they were contending for the congregation to grasp a vision of life that transcends any circumstantial role. This would require the best of my arsenal. What is more powerful against casual and certain death than the extravagance of God’s beauty? If I let my sermons run free into fields of creativity, I would only convey the truth more fiercely. My poetic imagination would be not a deterrent but an essential gift. The holy ground of an open laptop and Bible, the square of walkable carpet in front of the mic—these were the scenes of my cosmic performance.
With death at stake and beauty in hand, I started preparing sermons like nothing I had seen or heard of. I did not like sitting quietly and reading scripture in my head, so instead of reading the printed words of Isaiah 60, I listened to Handel’s Messiah on repeat and memorized the prophecy that way. Rather than taking prose-y bulleted notes on Mark 4:35-5:20, I vivisected the text with haiku and let that form the backbone of my message.5 I did not design three alliterative points for structure, I instead pulled in the successive lines of a liturgy I knew my congregation had unwittingly internalized to be the transitions between ideas, letting poetic prayer direct our thoughts.
When I spoke, I used my full knowledge of silence to kindle and rouse my listeners. With winks, sharp hands, loose shoulders, and crisp diction I breathed on the embers of holy words and set them crackling. I did not pretend that I had not practiced being comfortable in my body and keeping people’s attention with it. I beat my sermons. This is the process actors undertake of marking the shifts in intention and the pauses in their scenes or monologues. The creative Spirit danced ahead of me, opening my eyes to see the preaching moment ablaze with drama and possibility.
Once we are freed from the expectations of looking exactly like other “good preachers”, the challenge shifts from, how do I turn myself into a ‘normal’ preacher, and becomes, how do I share my unique way of beholding God in a manner that allows accountants and artists, fifth graders and fifty-year-olds to see it too?
Another professor of mine has described the role of the priest or pastor as “courting the church for God.” What a lovely thought, that the priest arrives with a bouquet of Eden’s flowers and says, “Come, let us grasp the hem of redemption.” They move slowly, honestly, and with a tenderness and wisdom not their own to coax others towards a beatific vision.
How do I share my unique way of beholding God in a manner that allows accountants and artists, fifth graders and fifty-year-olds to see it too?
On the other side of that tenderness, there is a bit of grit required to communicate the gospel. There is the preach-off with death, and the artist preachers come best equipped to survive. A creative preacher is sustained in their work by the sacred imagination, and drinks from it often for the energy to face death routinely. They are attuned to a storyteller God who works and speaks in lovely but enigmatic ways. Pragmatically, in an age abuzz with instant entertainment, consumerism, and short attention spans; the imaginative preacher offers enduring imagery and inventive paths towards deep, still, living water. A preacher with a supple imagination weaves a sermon that enhances and is enhanced by the other elements of the liturgy. They craft a unifying narrative of music, prayer, scripture, and proclamation.
Thus armed, the whole symphony of the church moment comes together to rage against the dying of the light. Not in a naive way, but as if to say: we have plumbed the depths of horror, and still the light of the Morning Star breaks upon us. We have seen that glory, glory as of a father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.6
Cover image: The Mower by Georges Seurat, 1881
This is very kind, because the other thing they might say is, “My stars, it’s like you’re trying to be poor!” In those instances, it’s best to reply, “Thank you, I am.”
Malcolm Guite, Faith, Hope, & Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination.
Lisa L. Thompson, Ingenuity: Preaching As an Outsider.
Is 40:3.
Mk 4:35-5:20. You thought I was exaggerating? Here is the amateur haiku:
Summer tempests rage From death to life baptizing All water is mine.
Jn 1:14.
Loved reading about this journey. The intersection of theatre and theology, preaching and performance, is so fascinating and I love how you have found a way to bring them together in a way that is authentic for you! Beautiful.
This is amazing. I am an amateur pianist and I hope this means that I count as an artist in some senses 😅 and that means I relate with this post in some ways. I had never realized liturgy is the drama of salvation always being presented before us. If you go on with this kind of thinking, I wonder what your thoughts on the sacraments are. I'm sure you'll write about that soon.
Anyways, I have a question. It's one I have been wrestling with and it's related with something you've said. You mentioned in passing whether creative choices in worship enhance or distract. (Ps I would love more on this. Not that I am telling you what you should write😅) The question is, what do you think about what Paul says in 1 Cor 2:4-5 which Paul says that his speech was not in plausible words of wisdom so that faith in God doesn't rest in his own wisdom but in the power of God? What do you think about this verse as it relates to what you are saying?