At last September’s Festival of Preaching in Cambridge, a ‘preaching clinic’ addressed some of the issues prompted by preaching on controversial topics. These are verbatim notes of some of the responses given.

The clinic’s panel was made up of the distinguished Episcopalian preacher and author Barbara Brown Taylor; Amy-Jill Levine, Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, and the University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita and the Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University; Doug Gay, Church of Scotland minister and Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Glasgow; and Mark Oakley, author and Dean of Southwark. The questions were put by Paula Gooder, Chancellor of Saint Paul’s Cathedral and a popular speaker and author.

Question: Where do you draw your main inspiration from when you’re writing a sermon and do you have a message that you always want to get into your sermon that you will preach every time, do you focus primarily on the text ,and do you have other things in mind, where do you begin when you’re thinking about how to write sermon?

Mark Oakley I’m interested in the acrobatics of language, so I think language can do a lot more than we often allow it. So, I’m interested in what I suppose and what you might call creative curation of the gospel. That’s how I tend to approach it, so of course, surprise, surprise, I turn to poets. I’m always looking for the bridging between poets who are not particularly religious but who by their art are helping us hear our thoughts.

And the other thing I would say is that when I sit down to write a sermon, I’m very clear now that I do not write a sermon in order to be understood, I write a sermon in order to understand. I’m discovering what I believe is important, and if it’s resonating with me, I’m just sort of hoping it’s going to resonate with somebody else.

Amy-Jill Levine I look at sermons and look at lecturing as much like playing jazz. You know what the basic tune is but what actually gets played depends upon who else is with you, what the audience is doing, how you feel at that particular moment. So, I want the rigorous historical critical stuff to be done so then I’m confident that I’ve done my homework and then I want the freedom to be able to say what needs to be said at that particular moment.

Barbara Brown Taylor I kept thinking of something a beloved teacher taught me. So, people don’t need you to tell them what you think they need to know, they need you to say what they want to say but don’t know how. I trust that what I want somebody to say for me is like others there. I explain less, I’ve heard biblical text go by a lot, I did a lot more than earlier in my life and I find myself less eager to explain things now and more eager for things to land in people’s experience because then they’ll take it further themselves.

Question: How do you preach politics well? How you preach politically, it being your area; have you got some thoughts around that?

Doug Gay Well, I knew I had been given notice of this question, so I walked up to the door of the church and just before I came in a young man walked up to me and said, ‘My name is Paul and I’m just out of prison,’ and was asking me for some money, he was homeless and is looking for a place to stay tonight. So here we are on the streets of Cambridge, and I thought, well this is interesting, I’m going to talk about preaching politics and God has a sense of humour here. So, let’s pray for Paul tonight whatever he was going to spend that money on.

Whenever people gather, who’s there, who’s speaking, and where you are, are already political realities. Nobody begins preaching in a non-political situation, our context is always political.

I preached at church in Glasgow in 2014 during the independence referendum and I would say that 70% of the congregation were going vote ‘no’, and it was very publicly known that I was going to vote ‘yes’. And there was a lot of nervousness among some of the people in the congregation about whether I was going to abuse the pulpit. But in terms of preaching politics and I think, I hope, that I managed to get through that without avoiding the subject because it was a huge thing that was happening in Scottish national life and so it had to be preached about and attended to, but without people feeling I had abused it. So, I think you need to maintain trust; people need to feel you’re not crudely trying to push them in one direction or another. And then I don’t think we should preach about who people should vote for, which political party you should vote for, and but there’s a few other things I want to say.

First, is that if you are in any sense expository and you preach across the whole of Scripture, you will end up preaching about politics, you won’t be able to avoid it. Also, I think we cannot preach well about politics without preaching on the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. You need to preach the whole of Scripture and if you’re faithful to Scripture you will find the political things are cropping up in your preaching.

The pulpit needs not to be abused because in some sense it is also a megaphone for many things including politics, and sometimes if you have a megaphone and people have trusted you to have it and they gather to listen to you, you need to use it. And so this summer, during the riots in English cities and Belfast, I preached the Sunday after the riots and I preached straightforwardly against fascism and said that under no conditions could anyone in the church ever belong to any of these groups and it was our duty to stand against all forms of racism and fascism. So, there are times when although I don’t think we should tell people to vote Lib Dem or SNP or Labour or whatever, I think you can tell people that there are things, I think as Justin Welby said, there are things that will not withstand the judgement of God and we have to be bold enough to declare that sometimes.

Two more very quick things: one of my favourite texts in the Gospels is the story of the window’s mite and Jesus sits down opposite the Temple and watches, and one of the things we can do as preaches is we can encourage people to pay attention. The beginning of the Book of Jeremiah, after his call vision there’s a question to Jeremiah, and God says to Jeremiah, ‘Jeremiah, what do you see?’ If you put that together with Matthew 25, Jesus saying ’When did you see a guy homeless in this very rich city of Cambridge?’ There’s a ministry in preaching of directing people’s attention as part of what we do.

And also raising questions. Sometimes we can raise intensely political questions, we don’t necessarily have to answer them, but raising certain questions can itself be a very political act.

Question: There was a question that came in that fitted quite interestingly after the initial question, which was how do you preach on really controversial issues like the Israel-Gaza war? What do you with preaching when you have some really, really difficult issues going on in the world? I’m not going to ask the panel to comment on the Israel-Gaza war because that’s a very complex thing to do, but actually to ask you more the bigger preaching question, what do you do when something really big globally has blown up which is immensely controversial, what do you do in preaching in those kinds of areas?

Mark Oakley Try to resist the great temptation in this social media world of preferring dishonest simplicity to honest complexity. So, keep honest about complexity would be number one for me.

Number two is: Martin Luther King never once in his life said I have a nightmare, he said ‘I have a dream’, and if you’re going to be prophetic in your preaching, prophetic does not mean just being angry. Prophetic means having anger but also pointing people to the horizon of hope, it is about dispelling peoples’ illusions but not leaving them disillusioned. The Christian preacher is characterised by always, but always having that element in the picture.

Barbara Brown Taylor I think I have become known for doing that parabolically as best I can. To speak in a way that people can name themselves, a la the Prophet and King David. But I was fortunate to end parish ministry in a congregation of 200 or less, and I think what I would do tomorrow is cancel the sermon and convene in the parish hall. And have done my homework, probably along with some representatives from the parish, to have a full attendance discussion because one voice just strikes me as never enough for the truly hot and important things.