Preaching God's Story in Psalms: The Importance of Seeing the Tapestry in the Threads

Abstract

This paper seeks to answer: “What homiletical strategies can help pastors preach the Psalms in a way that reinforces the hermeneutic that all of Scripture is a unified story of God’s love for people?” The paper is split into three major sections following an introduction that demonstrates how Scripture—from Genesis to Revelation—is a unified story of salvation for mankind. The first section covers a brief look at the Psalms and examines several reasons that preaching them is sometimes neglected, why we should preach them, and how to preach Christ from them, as we do from all of Scripture. The second section of the paper covers how we see “the Tapestry” of God’s story in “the threads” of Scripture when approaching the Psalms by thinking of it in terms of Story. This section also examines why “Story” speaks to people on an intrinsic level and why being aware of that matters when writing a sermon. The final section examines three different homiletical strategies and shows how they help with thinking of Psalms in terms of Story: Eugene Lowry’s “The Lowry Loop,” Paul Scott Wilson’s “Four Pages of the Sermon,” and Walter Brueggemann’s “Orientation/Disorientation/New Orientation Rubric.”