Preaching and Writing Fantasy

While reading one of my son’s posts on writing fantasy I happened upon something that has helped me better to understand preaching and the hearing of the preached word. In his writing on fantasy as “escapist” he says, “Escape is not a flight of reality; it is merely the move from one reality (prison, death, Evil, or darkness- take your pick) to another (life, salvation, Good, or light). Desertion is the rejection of reality and your value for life. While it seems fantasy may be the escape from reality with its common use of dragons, elves, knights, castles, and other such ancient notions, the creators of such beasts or beings do not let them exceed the limits of Reason or reality. While you may create some beast that has hooves and can fly, the beast itself does not try to escape from what it was created to inhabit.” Here he is reflecting on what J.R.R. Tolkien writes when he says, “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” The beauty and “glory” of fantasy is the weight it has on the mind and the soul to move us from one reality to another or to liberate us through an escape into another realm of reality. But preaching God’s Word and hearing God’s Word is not considered fantasy. However, it shares something in common.

Preaching is escapist and hearing preaching with the ears of faith is escapist. A preacher is given the task of rightly dividing or handling the Word of God. The Word of God contains many different genres of literature. But it is not a book of literature; it is the breathed out Word of God. Therefore, the preacher enters into a prayerful studious process to understand what God is saying in a particular text through the study of its language, context and culture. As he unpacks what it says he then must understand what it means. He must discern by the Spirit what it meant to the original audience and what it means to the contemporary audience who is to hear it in the present. He must then apply this meaning to the present context of hearers and their lives within the Kingdom of God. But as of yet he has only been a student of the Word, he must now preach the Word.

He must preach to the people of God as one faithfully handling God’s Words through the power of the Spirit. He must tell them what it says and what it teaches applying that to their minds and hearts. And it is here that the preacher reaches glory and takes the hearers with him. He leads the hearers by God’s Word like prisoners with their minds and affections from one reality to another, not as deserters rejecting reality and a true value for life, but as escapists into a life they are created and re-created to inhabit. This is where the preacher escapes one reality and his hearers go with him into another reality that is glorious and weighty. It is not the role of the preacher to give three simple points that rhyme so that you can practically remember them for a moral life. The role of the preacher is to carry the Words of God as other worldly to a people in the world and by them lift them out of this world into a great escape in the new heavens and earth.

The listeners must expect this from God each Lord’s Day as they prayerfully gather around the servant of God called out by him to lead them in their escape. They must see him as the slave of God joyfully bound to the God of righteousness sent to them as a vessel spewing forth the Words of life. They must not see him as a communicator but a herald of words that they can light on by the power of the Holy Spirit and ride from one reality to another they were meant for with weight and glory. They must look past the man; his tie, bad hair, and quirky mannerisms, that they may hear Christ, their prophet, speak his escapist words to their mind and heart.

Preaching and hearing the preached word is escapist. And until the preacher longs for this liberty for himself and his hearers and until the hearers long for this movement from one reality to another through Word and by Spirit, the preacher and the hearers will only go to church like robots following a calendar of days.