Sermon Exegeis

good morning and welcome to another session of preaching and preachers I'm dr. Martha Simmons and I am glad that you have joined me today let me begin by saying that next section I will be talking about critical preaching in light of the election we will be talking about critical time preaching since this is such a critical election but today we want to begin talking about sermon exegesis that work in preaching that scares so many preachers but we want to try to make it easier but before I go into that let me invite you to like this session if you find it encourage preachers especially to share it with your clergy that may not have attended seminary and even those who have and especially with your peers who are homebound please like and share the video I'd appreciate that sermon exegesis I have said in my book doing the deed that in essence if you fail to do proper sermon exegesis you have really failed before you started let me also thank one of my mentees dr. Brandt Braxton for sharing with me his thoughts on this session he's one of the best extra juice I know some in exegesis where do you begin great sermon exegesis begins I believe in prayer you really do need to talk to God about what you want the people to know and hear and what God wants to say to you and to give to you for the people so the first thing you need to do of course in sermon exegesis is to invite the Holy Spirit into your exegesis for your interpretive process I know that may sound evangelical to some but trust me with this difficult work you need the help of the Holy Spirit to do it so that's the first thing we want to do second you want to take the passage whatever it is regardless of how long or how short and read it aloud read your text aloud and you want to do this and make it a regular part of your exegesis so that you realize reor lives these written texts remember these texts were first read they were oral texts so you want to read them and remind yourself of that what you also want to do is to start to hear the text and what the text is saying to you you can do that if you oral eyes the text read it loud that's a big step and then as you are reading it aloud you want to have pen and pad next to you or maybe you want to type it as you are reading it aloud start to listen for any images that you see in the passage was there something that was said an illustration of color that gained your attention if it gains your attention it will gain the attention of the here is two so start to write down any images this is just in the initial stage so don't worry about going back and gaining all of the images in the text just those that stood out to you as you were reading the text aloud write those down and keep them simple just write them down and certainly any colors sounds sites that you see in the text write those down remember I said in a previous session that one of the reasons that sermons died is because they are colorless and they lack detail to gain the hearers attention so if you see a sky for God's sake let us know if it's a a blue sky a gray sky or a sky the words of a song that's raining men let us know what that sky looks like write that down and then you might also want to initially ask yourself in the past how will other people react to this passage and start downs to either think about or jot down your initial thoughts if it gripped you you can ask why and then in that text ask what might potentially grip others remember I said in previous sessions that preaching has sped up people are doing what I term fire out the gate preaching and if you want to know more about exactly what I mean by that people want you to get their attention in the first three to five minutes of hearing you preach they don't want you to go for 25 minutes and then try to shout them in the end they want you to get their attention quickly and one of the ways to begin doing that is to ask yourself while you're studying what gripped me and what might grip the attention of the hearers and I talk about that more in my book doing the deed the mechanics of 21st century preaching just gonna hold it up doing the deed the mechanics of 21st century preaching what you can of course get on Amazon where I talk in detail about the interpretive process also at this point as you are reading the text aloud and thinking about interpreting it for your community you will begin to get material for your sermon introduction you'll get images and maybe even a conclusion as you start to look at the text now for that long slog work your literary analysis which you need to spend several hours on or at least to first carefully investigate the English ionization translation for your text and of course if you speak Greek or Hebrew then you can investigate it and that way you really want to look at the text carefully diagram it if you will just as we did in grade school and look for unusual words words of that you're not familiar with or that you know hearers will not be familiar with and jot those down as repeated phrases I often tell students if a phrase is repeated it's to get your attention so pay attention to repeat it phrases and flag those for further investigation and then you want to further investigate words that you just don't know you want to look them up look at what was their original meaning look at what may be their current meaning and then of course you're looking for you've already started to think about what big themes are in this passage remember I've said previously that so much of preaching is bad it dies it fails because it's so thin we don't preach the big themes preach the big themes and look for them in your passage the big themes hope faith love charity sin hospitality those are a few of the big themes remember praise is not a big thing that's a great thing to do but worship is a big thing look for the big things in your text right away as you begin your literary analysis and you're deciding what do you really want to talk about in this passage third in terms of literary and now says you need to establish the larger literary context for the past passage in other words you need to read what came before your passage and what came after your passage know about the book that you are reading find out why the book from which you are preaching why was this book written what is this father trying to say and to whom and you really do need to know why the book was written so that you don't misunderstand a passage or take it out of its context remember you want to execute the passage not ice achieve the passage then you will probably here is where if you will begin to ask more questions of the text how many people are in this text what are they doing what words don't I understand what is strange for me in this particular passage and you might find these you'll come up with 50 10 15 or even 20 questions write down the questions and answer them ask the questions ask the questions keep probing the text after you have done all of that then you can start to pull out your commentaries to answer your questions and I know that people out there saying but what commentaries what commentaries well there are great commentaries that are out there in hardback as well as those you can download and buy in programs such as log awesome so remember we are already using a good Study Bible and of course the seminary Bible is the New Revised Standard Version I to look at passages in 3 or 4 different versions of the Bible I'll use the NIV I'll use the message Bible I'll use the Jewish Study Bible but always I begin within RSV and then go to good commentaries the old standard is the interpreters Bible commentary I have the new version that probably came out 30 or 35 years ago and then there's the new interpreters Bible commentary set I think the new version is 12 volumes so you want to use that Carole Newsome did a great commentary it's the women's Bible commentary for those of you who are preaching to large numbers of women for those of you preaching Women's Day messages consider making sure that you look in a women's commentary that's helpful then there is the commentary by Michael Cogan and sent me a Chapman which is called a brief introduction to the Old Testament and you want the third edition of that there is the belief theological commentary which features multiple authors of various ethnicities that's a great commentary and of course then there is the warn Wizards be the b-series you know what it is and that's my David C cook I think there are about 50 volumes in that series now and that's the BB II series so you have quite a number of commentaries from which you can choose to make sure that you understand the passage and the reason for which it was written the audience and those kinds of things we will go through textual analysis in not my next session we're gonna talk about critical preaching next time but we're going to return to sermon exegesis after that and talk about theological and contextual analysis in sermon exegesis I hope this has been helpful I know it it was a you a little bit heavier than usual but this is the important difficult work that you have to do in preaching to preach well remember invite the Holy Spirit into your process read your passage aloud make a list of important images that you see in the passages and especially colors that you see in the passage and then start to ask what is arresting your attention and why and what will get the attention of the people in your congregation and why and make sure you're looking for the big themes in the passage what grips you and why what will grip the people because remember you are trying to persuade using the big theme then start to look at the translations in a variety of sources and diagram the passage just as you would diagram a sentence look for those repeated words they are important then move to the larger literary context of context of your passage and finally after you have asked questions of the text there are no stupid questions this is you talking to God and God talking to you ask all of your questions after you've done all of that then pull out those great commentaries and make sure that they're good commentaries not commentaries that skew to one point of view or another go with the good commentaries commentaries that speak to your community's commentaries for women commentaries that just look for what in the passage they look to exegete it not isogenic god bless you this has been dr. Martha Simmons with another session of preaching and preachers if you were helped by this session please like this video and share it with friends especially young preachers and your peers who are homebound have a great day

Channel: Dr. Martha Simmons

Views: 2,998

Keywords: Exegesis

Id: inYbec3pD60

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2017