Karoline Lewis

The OvershadOwed Preacher is a revision of Jerusha Matsen Neal’s dissertation; as such, it is thoroughly researched, with extensive footnotes and a robust bibliography. Neal’s thesis gives contemporary homiletical discourse much to consider, and readers will certainly find in its pages the resources needed if they wish to pursue further the various emphases and areas that the book seeks to integrate.

THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK aptly and pointedly describes its primary focus. The word of God is the foundational principle of Christian worship. All of what the church should be about is to serve the word in worship, preaching, and sacrament. The book’s thesis argues for the mutuality of relationship between worship and preaching,“because both are founded in the word of God” (p. 7). As worship serves the preached word, preaching serves the liturgical word. Melinda Quivik uses the Emmaus story (Luke 24:13–35) as both a foundational and biblical basis for the church’s liturgical pattern. Gathering, word, meal/response, and sending as incarnated in the road to Emmaus eliminate any kind of separation we might try to make between preaching and worship.“Preaching and the breaking of bread are intimately connected” (p. 2). Quivik also grounds the pattern of the worshiping community in the historical context of the Reformation’s insistence on the relationship between faith, the word, and the meal. On the basis of this theological, biblical, and historical framework, Quivik turns to a case study in order to illuminate the kinds of issues that surface when attention is given to the reciprocity of preaching and worship. Ash Wednesday serves as the liturgical example by which to view the relationship between sermon preparation and worship structure. The remainder of the book tends to each of the movements in worship separately, using the specificity of the Ash Wednesday example to identify particular questions and challenges in each stage of the church’s liturgical pattern. This volume in the Elements of Preaching series (O. Wesley Allen Jr., editor) will find an audience in pastors looking for a theological refresher, or perhaps a theological rationale, for the relationship between preaching and worship. The most fitting audience, however, is the seminary preaching class, where a principal goal is to help students realize that the sermon is not an isolated event. The lens of service and mutuality between sermon and worship provides a critical perspective for beginning preachers who tend to imagine a call to the preached word alone. A more pointed analysis of the difficulties in maintaining this reciprocity would lend a certain candidness about the challenges of mutuality when trying to respect the specificity and particularity of each biblical lesson. While Quivik’s argument for the hertzpunkt (heart point) that unifies the lectionary texts, and thus justifies a sermon on all three lections, is a useful hermeneutical tool, a more developed critique of the lectionary might contribute to an appreciation of the worship service that is as unique as the voice of each biblical text.

... Karoline Lewis examines the "Shepherd Discourse" in John 10:1-21 with a particular focus on the internal integrity of the larger unit of John 9:39 ... I want to thank Dr. Steven J. Kraftchick, Dr. Carl Holladay, and Dr. Hendrikus Boers, whose guidance and instruction were invaluable. ...