I read dissertations as part of my job, and so I regularly encounter language about God that is filled with theological abstractions and lofty speech. It’s painful.
But the problem isn’t just with dissertations. I’m noticing similar tendencies these days in sermons, blogs, podcasts, and church teaching. Our language has become too untethered from lived experience, too focused on insiders who already know the lingo, too absorbed with deconstruction that we never get around to offering generative ways forward.
This is wildly different than how Jesus communicates. His go-to teaching style is the parable, especially in Luke’s Gospel. There we find about 3-4 dozen parables, from the Prodigal Son to the Good Samaritan. The lessons vary widely, but the language is relentlessly relatable and down to earth. The parables give us theology from the ground up, which is to say, lived experience isn’t offered at the end as a superficial point of application. Lived experience is the starting point for the theological reflection that follows. Theology doesn’t help us think differently about mustard seeds. Mustard seeds help us think differently about theology.
The point of a parable is to provide a mirror that reflects back to us truths about ourselves and our communities. This mirroring effect draws us into the story, but it also can produce a “shock of recognition” when we discover, unexpectedly, that we are not the hero of the parable. This happens to David when he hears Nathan’s parable about a rich man who takes advantage of a poor man, and it happens all the time with the disciples as they encounter Jesus’ parables.
It’s also important to remember where Jesus is when he delivers his parables. In Luke’s Gospel almost all of the parables are clustered between 9:51 and 19:44, which is where we find Jesus on the road from the Galilee to Jerusalem. The natural habitat of a parable isn’t a synagogue or Temple or scribal school. It’s out in the wild, where people are already living, working, playing, and grieving. Jesus’ language meets people where they already are and draws on the stuff of their everyday lives – coins, sheep, seeds, weeds, vineyards, managers, debtors, clothing, builders, meals – to communicate truths about faith.
My point is not that we should use parables as much as Jesus did. Even still, it’s worth wondering: What if we let go of abstractions, lofty speech, and our propensity for deconstruction? What if our teaching got more down to earth, and what if lived experience was not a last-second point of application in a sermon but the starting point for all of our theological reflections? What if we left the safety of our pulpits and social media echo chambers and took our witness out into the wild? What if we learned to speak about God from scratch and with eyes towards those who don’t already know the lingo? Maybe then we could break through noise and help more people discover their story in Jesus’ story.
In your ministry contexts…
- What excites you about the call to leave behind theological abstractions and lofty speech in your own language about God? What scares you about it? What would make it hard to do?
- Pick one of the parables found in Luke 9:51-19:44. Read it multiple times, slowly. Who do you identify with in the story? Why? What questions, issues, or struggles in your life does the parable mirror back to you?
- What spaces, communities, or forms of media would you want to engage if you were to do more talking about God “out in the wild”?
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