With Words Like Crystal

My first sermon series at the FreeWay was a four part-er on the parables of Jesus. One of the things I discovered back when I was putting this material together is that parables are really tough to preach.

When they asked Jesus, "Why do you speak in parables, anyway? Why can't you just tell it like it is?" He told them: it's because people see, but they don't see; they hear, but they don't hear. Whatever else he meant when he said this, I think he meant this: If you want to know the things of God, you'll have to listen with more than just your ears-- you have to listen with the ears of your heart.

And a parable's a pretty good way to tell who's willing to listen with the heart and who's not.

So the tough part about preaching parables is to open up the text in a way that allows people to "get it," without letting us off the hook of needing to "listen with our hearts." To let the text do what the text is doing. It's something akin to the difficulty in explaining a joke: nothing wrings the humour out of a joke faster than needing to explain why it's funny.

So too, to a certain extent, with Jesus' parables. As speech-acts, they're like crystal: they refract the light beautifully, but our best efforts to polish them so they shine can easily shatter them.

Here's one of the sermons I preached as part of that series. I hope my words didn't shatter His Word.

Luke 16:1-9

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