Preaching from font to table
The Rev. Dr. Dave Davis leads an instructive webinar for the Synod of the Covenant
LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Dr. Dave Davis gave preachers in and around the Synod of the Covenant plenty to think about last week through a webinar that helped participants weave the sacraments more fully into their sermons.
Davis, pastor of Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey, offered his “Preaching from Font to Table” talk as part of the synod’s monthly preaching webinars. His talk is available here.
Davis has been teaching this material as an elective at Princeton Theological Seminary for a couple of years. “This is a conversation about preaching on the occasion of the celebration of one of the sacraments,” Davis said, “and also how a deeper understanding of the sacraments can provide imagery and a theology for our sermons, a more robust relationship of Word and sacrament.”
When he asks seminary students to come up with a quality sermon they’re heard or are aware of on either of the sacraments, they sometimes have difficulty, Davis said, adding, “I’d like to invite you to join me today in reflecting on your own preaching life in respect to the sacraments.”
Dr. Nora Tubbs Tisdale, who taught Davis and many other preachers, argues in “Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art” that pastors ought to be exegeting congregational life as well as biblical texts. “She suggests early on in that book that one can observe sacramental furniture as a reflection of the church’s relationship to the sacraments, especially when the sacraments are not being celebrated” on a given Sunday as part of worship, Davis said.
Davis grew up in a church where worship leaders pushed the communion table “against a far wall in the chancel” on Sundays when the Lord’s Supper was not being celebrated. But other faith communities take a more visible approach. Davis visited Woods Memorial Presbyterian Church outside Annapolis, Maryland, where he was shown a prominent baptismal font bolted to the floor, rendering it unmovable for any event. “What better image for a bride and groom on the day they make their promises to one another to be standing here at the font,” Davis said, “remembering their baptism.”
Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, features a large window with a view of a wadi that fills with water when it rains. The water then “goes right into their baptismal font. It’s a very powerful image,” Davis said. Church leaders told Davis the font has a leak that can’t be fixed, “and so baptismal water was always leaking into the nave of the sanctuary, which I think is a cool image to work with,” he said.
He noted that author and priest Barbara Brown Taylor calls preachers “detectives of divinity,” and Notre Dame theologian Mary Catherine Hilkert in her book “Naming Grace” identifies the preacher’s task as helping “the listener see what Christians know: that the whole world and life itself is charged with the very grandeur of God,” Davis said. “What we are called to do with our sermons is help people see the world as God intends, bearing the very grandeur of God.”
Preaching is a corporate act, and Dietrich Boenhoeffer put the preacher’s task like this in his “Worldly Preaching”: “I preach because the church is there, and I preach that the church might be there. Church preaches to church.”
Davis sometimes uses the phrase “bringing the world to bear on unsuspecting biblical texts” when preachers employ the lectionary to aid their preaching. With that approach, “it’s amazing how contextual your preaching can become and how relevant the living Word becomes,” Davis said. The sacraments can also be brought to bear on unsuspecting biblical texts as “a way to unleash understandings of scripture in new ways and make it relevant on the occasion of baptism and eucharist,” he said.
“I don’t want you to think I’m perfect at this,” Davis said. “I went back and looked at some of my sermons in preparation for today, and I was doing exactly what I am now calling out.”
Davis mentioned BEM, the Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry document the World Council of Churches first published in 1982 and reprinted many times after that. BEM gives “the clearest outline of the theological fenceposts of each of the sacraments,” Davis said, employing a term favored by his professor, Dr. James Kay. “That’s how I understand these various ways of approaching the Lord’s Supper.”
Not surprisingly, the fenceposts for baptism — including washing, forgiveness, cleansing and conversion — aren’t all that different from those that mark the Lord’s Supper, Davis said.
When one person on the call said that “for many of us, our baptismal fonts are pretty darn dry,” Davis said he often thinks of congregations that have few baptisms.
At Nassau Presbyterian Church, “we put water in the font every Sunday, whether there is a baptism or not,” Davis said. “Occasionally when there is a baptism, I will throw water up in the air and encourage those in worship to remember their baptism. Children get a kick out of that.”
Another workshop participant said a “bashful” woman in her 70s plans to be baptized on Palm Sunday. “Getting into the meaning of baptism will be very useful” during worship, this preacher said.
“Let her know what a gift she’s giving” the congregation, Davis suggested, “to celebrate a baptism on Palm Sunday.”
Davis teaches new member and confirmation classes at Nassau Presbyterian Church something he calls the “sacramental equation”: Command of Jesus + Promise + Sign = Sacrament.
He included a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s acclaimed novel “Gilead,” in which a dying pastor, the Rev. John Ames, writes to his seven-year-old son about a communion memory:
“In any case, you may remember this: when almost everyone had left and the elements were still on the table, your mother brought you up to the aisle to me and said, ‘you ought to give him some of that.’”
“You were too young, of course, but she was completely right: Body of Christ broken for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you. Your solemn and beautiful child face lifted up to receive these mysteries at my hands. They are the most wonderful mystery, body and blood.”
Davis commended Charles Rice’s “The Embodied Word: Preaching as Art and Liturgy” to webinar participants. “It’s one of the few books out there about preaching and the sacraments,” Davis said. “He’s Episcopalian, so he goes a little further than we would theologically. But it’s really well done. He talks about how preaching begins at baptism and ends at Eucharist. It’s an interesting thing to think about.”
The Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick, executive of the Synod of the Covenant, recalled that Davis was present to hear the first sermon Hardwick ever preached. “It’s such a treat to have someone who thinks so rigorously, who’s been trained so rigorously about preaching” — and who’s also a weekly practitioner — lead the workshop, Hardwick said.
The next preaching workshop to be offered by the Synod of the Covenant will be held from 10 a.m. through 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, May 6. Dr. Lisa Marie Bowens of Princeton Theological Seminary will speak on “Preaching the Book of Romans.” Learn more here.
You may freely reuse and distribute this article in its entirety for non-commercial purposes in any medium. Please include author attribution, photography credits, and a link to the original article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeratives 4.0 International License.
