Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit: An Interview with Rodney Kennedy
by William Trollinger
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, is the focus of this interview. And there are more books to come!
1. One of the things I most love about this book is its passion – it permeates very chapter. I am particularly struck by this quote from your introduction: “I am interested in the work of preparation – the long hours that take place every week in the life of the preacher. We have so much to learn from novelists, poets, philosophers, and rhetoricians. Let the dance begin!” (16). Could you say a little bit about where your passion comes from, and could you say something about why some preachers may not be doing “the hard work” you describe here?
First, thanks for mentioning the passion of my book which is an extension of my passion for preaching. I have always felt uneasy about the church calling half of the church year, “Ordinary Time.” I understand the meaning, but “ordinary” doesn’t quite fit the power of the faith. My fear is that preachers can treat every Sunday as “ordinary.” I believe passion must come to the pulpit every Sunday. So I remind myself, that every Sunday, even during Lent, is a “mini-Easter.” And there is nothing ordinary about resurrection.
In my introduction to homiletics class, my first lecture is always about reading – the reading life of the preacher. I encourage my students to have a file for new words they “discover.” And to find ways to use those words in sermons. A preacher is a reader. I give my students a reading list of 200 books from multiple disciplines. As impossible as it is, I want my students to be Renaissance persons. For example, I’m currently reading David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
Since preachers have to face the nonsense of biblical creationism, I always give them books to read by scientists. Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, Francis S. Collins, The Language of God, and Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. In the memorable words of physicist Freeman Dyson, ours is a “universe that knew we were coming.”
My passion for the preparation phase of the sermon comes from the more than 20 years I spent playing baseball. My father, frequently my coach, taught me that what happened on game day came down to how well I practiced. I believe the sermon comes down to how well the preacher has practiced the gathering of the very best materials. This has always been my passion.
Every book, article, or essay I read always has one question for the material: “Will it preach?” I have spent a lifetime gathering materials for sermons. I’m sure you would laugh at the sight of me scribbling a quote from a movie on the side of a bag of popcorn at Cinema 11.
While I know there is a tremendous amount of great preaching every Sunday in America, I sense preachers are being squeezed into a giant cauldron of busyness – most of it good work, but it takes away precious hours needed for sermon preparation.
One of my favorite Flannery O’Connor pearls of wisdom is when she is talking about writing: “I go to the typewriter every day for three hours so that if anything comes, I am prepared to receive it.”
2. In your chapter, “What the Poets Teach Us About Preaching,” you make the claim that “to speak of, about, or for God, poetry is required. No other language suffices” (82). Why do you say this?
I don’t quote a lot of poetry in my sermons, but I am always imitating the way the poets use language. For me, poetry is life and life is poetry. Writing and life for the preacher becomes the search for an imaginative space to find ways of expressing truth even though everything appears to have been said before. The poets lead the preachers into the rich world of metaphor. Here we discover metaphors are not mere stylistic flourishes, but rather a strategy used to speak old truth in new ways and create new realities.
The poets allow us a linguistic freedom as we attempt to develop our own unique voices over against our precursors. Harold Bloom argues that meaning occurs as part of an agon or struggle with previous meaning.
Metaphors produce a new kind of knowledge, a new vision as a defense against literal meaning. Literal meaning feels like a prison, a life-sentence handed down by stern-faced masters insisting on binding all creativity and imagination.
Nothing helps preachers to be poets like the 150 poems in the book of Psalms. Andre Chouraqui says, “We are born with this book in the depths of our being. A little book: a hundred and fifty poems: a hundred and fifty steps set between life and death.” And the psalms are an unending reservoir of metaphors.
And I am grateful for the poetry of the King James Version and the Book of Common Prayer. Both are products of the 17th century and both are still filled with joy and deep pathos.
Walter Brueggemann’s Finally Comes the Poet still rings with truth. Flat prose is not the language of preaching. Flat prose is what gives preachers the sobriquet – “Boring.” Poetry is our language. Approach it as a throne of grace and mercy even if you never publish a book of poems.
In the book, I use Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook almost as a preaching textbook. She’s a worthy guide for preachers.
I find a deep connection to preaching in Jane Kenyon’s poem “Otherwise.” She reflects on her daily life after she was diagnosed with leukemia.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
And I must say, “Letters from a Father,” by Mona Van Duyn, is a powerful sermon. A father, convinced of his approaching death, receives the gift of a birdfeeder from his daughter. He grumbles: “I don’t see why you want to spend good money on grain for birds and you say you have a hundred sparrows, I’d buy poison and get rid of their diseases and turds.”
In the conclusion, the father has come to life and joy again:
I am going to keep
feeding all spring, maybe summer, you can see
they expect it. Will need thistle seed for Goldfinch and Pine
Siskin next winter. Some folks are going to come see us
from Church, some bird watchers, pretty soon.
They have birds in town but nothing to equal this.
So the world woos its children back for an evening kiss.
3. Please expand upon this quote from your chapter, “What the Philosophers Teach Us About Preaching”: “I refuse the binary choice between a populist, evangelical ministry and a progressive ministry. I believe both evangelicals and progressives have much to learn from the secular disciplines, as the early preachers in the church so amply demonstrated” (99).
In our postmodern, post-truth age where opinions dress for the ball as if they were the truth, the preacher has never so needed the company of the philosophers. Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Wittgenstein – the list is endless. From the philosophers we learn how to think.
Dualism is the enemy of the preacher. We keep thinking binary choices are our only choices. For example, I have found a way to take Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel and combine it with the awful criticisms of evangelicals to create a third way: an evangelical social gospel. “Either/or” bores me.
Preaching was born in the house of philosophy and rhetoric. From St. Paul to St. Chrysostom to St. Augustine, the early church filled her pulpits with men trained in philosophy and rhetoric. Any move the churches make against this intellectual grounding is detrimental to the cause.
My preaching students were reluctant to read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, for example. Most of this revulsion came from the book being almost a thousand pages long. But beyond my students being too busy to read philosophy, they didn’t enjoy the struggle to grasp the complexities of what it means to be faithful witnesses in a secular age.
I’m not suggesting sermons be filled with philosophical diatribes, but I am saying preachers increase their intellectual firepower by spending time with philosophers. Paul spending time with the Greek philosophers in Acts 17 always fills me with a sense of adventure. Here’s how Paul’s sermon to the philosophers ended: “When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’ At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers.”
4. In your conclusion, so wonderfully entitled “For God’s Sake Feel the Sermon,” you assert that “the perfect word” for a preacher’s attitude is “parrhesia.” Could you explain what this means, and could you talk about (as you do in the conclusion) the danger that comes from this in the year 2025?
Michel Foucault has a small volume on parrhesia – the word translated as “boldness – that is so powerful. Foucault says parrhesia involves risk, truth, danger, and a willingness to speak truth to power. Parrhesia may be the most needed virtue for preachers. Some preachers belong to the status quo and they preach the gospel of “the king’s temple.” Others are Amos and they preach the truth that clashes with the status quo.
None of this is easy. And no preacher should put on the mantle of the prophet every Sunday in every sermon. She or he will become to be more of a scold than a faithful preacher. But in our time, in our dangerous political environment, I believe the preacher simply must bring to bear the truth of Scripture. I believe the Word has plenty to say to our current political malaise. The anger, the mistrust, the outrage, the lack of civility, and etc. cries out for homiletical application.
5. Related to this, you ask in the introduction, “Why are progressive preachers often such wimps”? Why do you say this, and how do you answer your own question?
George Lakoff, in The Political Mind, asks, “Why are Democrats such wimps?” The question hit me hard and I applied it to preaching. Lakoff says progressives are stuck in the Age of the Enlightenment and don’t understand the importance of emotion in today’s culture. We are not so good when it comes to pathos. We still think if we can just tell people the facts, they will see the truth. This is no longer the case. This, of course, also relates to parrhesia. Speaking truth to power is never an easy task. As Otis Moss, Jr. reminds us, “We don’t like prophets.”
I think the reaction of the Nazarene synagogue crowd to the preaching of Jesus scarred preaching. I think the pain of that moment went deep into the sinews and bones of every preaching. The crowd, after all, was “outraged” and tried to kill him.
6. Besides your passion for preaching, you also have a deep passion for writing, Could you tell us a little about your latest writing project?
Most of my writing over the last several years has focused on the threat I believe we face as a nation and as a democracy. The irony for me is MAGA evangelicals are driving this movement and my mind seizes at the idea. I have a book of essays on President Donald Trump that will be published later in 2025. I have compiled 30 of my essays about Trump that were originally written for Baptist News Global, added an introduction, and a concluding analysis. I believe democracy is in danger. I cannot sit on the sideline and not respond. We live in dangerous times. I am glad I am alive for such a time as this, because “dissent” lives in my Anabaptist DNA.
As usual I am working on a new book about preaching. I am especially interested in how evangelical and progressive preaching seems to miss the mark with what I deem an excessive attention to anthropologically centered sermons instead of theocentric sermons. The title, Preaching in Doxology, is intended as my most definitional understanding of the preacher’s task. Doxology is not just chanting the psalms; it is whole different language.
I have one basic regret for Dancing with Metaphors. The book was already too long and I had to cut two chapters, “What the historians teach us about preaching” and “What the scientists teach us about preaching.” Since evangelicals are engaged in a cultural war against American history and science, I saved those chapters and I am now writing a tribute to historians and scientists.
In the meantime I pray a congregation somewhere will take a chance on this allegedly radical preacher and allow me the privilege of preaching for them one Sunday. The art of preaching, after all, only comes alive in a pulpit.
