Preaching Tips

What is happening in your culture? Try to use metaphors that help people relate scripture to what is going on in their lives and their world. If the metaphor is unrelatable, they will not receive the full impact of that scripture.

Ask questions of your metaphors. It is not enough to recognize them within the story. Many times, we read over them, because traditional ways of understanding the story have been deeply ingrained in our minds. Asking questions of the metaphors opens up the text to greater and deeper meaning. You…

Jesus uses metaphors as a way of reeling people in only to surprise them with a different meaning or outcome than they expected. If you see Jesus using a metaphor, look for the twist!

Summer seems the perfect time to call up a favorite book of metaphors –Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The book uses metaphors of shells to describe life, relationships, and the issues the author is dealing with at the time. This in a sense is what we want to…

One of my favorite Jewish metaphors for prayer is the burning incense or burning candle, which sweet smoke rises to heaven and disperses into the air to perfume all in its path. Some metaphors can be powerful without being spoken or without being only visual. Scents, sounds, touch …. What…

When we read scripture, we need to read visually in order not to miss some of the intricacies of the metaphorical landscape. What would a moving picture of the story look like? What do you see during that “video” stream that you missed in two dimensionality? Remember, the orality of…

It’s one thing to speak in common language, good English, or the language of the “marketplace.” It’s another to speak in the code-language or the personal language of someone or a group of people. Chris Pratt recently did this in his talk, when he said things like, “Don’t be a…

Metaphors are prisms that point to truths or reveal depths of meaning. They are not ethical standards or principles in themselves. This is important when looking at scripture. Metaphors such as leprosy use a terrible skin condition that eats away flesh to describe the way sins (particularly of guilt and…

When you mine for metaphors, make sure to dig into them deeply, so that what you say is not just a matter of tradition or worse, cliché. You must not imagine that those before you have found out everything to be found, although it’s helpful to know what they did…

Metaphors are all around us. In our current culture, we think in metaphors, we dream in metaphors, we imagine in metaphors. Psychologists now know that if we want to change, we need to change our current metaphors and put others in their place. Do you feel in your life that…