Preaching Through Personal Pain
What can you say when the tragedy is yours?
Daniel T. Hans
January 1, 1989
"Two days ago my daughter Laura died."
So opened the most difficult sermon I have ever had to preach. In that message, titled "God on the Witness Stand," I put myself in the place of Job, who, when assaulted by horrible personal tragedy, declared, "But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God."
That morning I preached a dialogue between myself as the prosecutor and God as the defendant. For nine months I had helplessly watched my 3-year-old lose her physical and mental abilities to a malignant brain tumor, and I had a strong case against God.
Friends questioned the wisdom of my decision to preach so soon after my daughter's death. Could I withstand it? Could the congregation handle the emotional impact?
But if I did not use my personal life as the basis for preaching during this time of crisis, would I have either an audience or a message for someone else's time of pain?
Exegeting Our Experience
Those who caution against becoming too personal in preaching raise necessary questions. Does a preacher have the right to carry his or her own confusion and pain into the pulpit? Doesn't such transparency focus more upon the preacher than the Lord? Does not personal exposure in preaching turn the pulpit into a soap opera and denigrate the ministry of proclamation into self-aggrandizement?
Certainly discretion must be employed in what the preacher says about personal matters from the pulpit. However, in response to these cautions, a counter question must be asked: Shouldn't a human preacher be human in preaching?
That sermon preached two days after my daughter's death was one of many messages composed at my daughter's bedside in the hospital and her deathbed in our home. Those sermons constituted a collection ...
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