Related Links
"On Preaching" by Scott Hoezee
Reflections on Preaching from the Center for Excellence in Preaching.
Meatball Exegesis (Posted on August 21, 2008)
In his recent and delightful book The Fully Alive Preacher, Mike Graves relays an image that has been used by Stephen Farris as a way to sum up the life of busy preachers. Farris harks back to the television series M*A*S*H and especially to the episode when Hawkeye, B.J., and Col. Potter welcome aboard a new surgeon to their medical unit: Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester, III. Winchester is an outstanding surgeon and had a distinguished career going at Boston’s most prestigious hospital before getting called up into military service in the Korean War. Upon arriving at M*A*S*H 4077, Winchester makes clear that he knows his surgical skills are better than his new-found peers and that the genius of his method can be summed up this way: "I do one thing at a time, I do it very well, and then I move on."
The problem is that in a mobile Army hospital only a couple of miles from the war’s frontline, the bodies come by the doctors on a virtual conveyor belt. Speed is of the essence. The fancy stuff could wait until the wounded soldiers could get transferred to a real hospital in Seoul or Tokyo. At the M*A*S*H unit, it was all about patching them up and shipping them out. In the operating room on Winchester’s first day, the other doctors had successfully saved the lives of three or four soldiers each while Winchester was still meticulously operating on his first patient. So the other doctors have to take their superior peer in hand to show him the tricks of what they call "meatball surgery." This kind of surgery is down and dirty with lots of shortcuts and medical tricks that speed operations along. As Col. Potter has to tell the haughty major from Boston, it may not be pretty or fancy but meatball surgery saves lives.
Stephen Farris and Mike Graves use this to remind us preachers that parish life in ministry is similar. Many preachers prepare one or two new sermons every week on top of which are often some lesson plans and other tasks that require some measure of reading and research. Busy preachers don’t have the luxury of hiding out in some seminary library for hours on end, poring over every commentary and biblical-theological resource they can find. Instead they need to learn to do "meatball exegesis." The work must be done with due diligence and no small measure of care but certain shortcuts can also come in handy. It may not be pretty and it may not pass muster as a great scholarly endeavor worthy of researching some Ph.D. dissertation but at the end of the day, meatball exegesis, like its surgical counterpart, saves lives, starting with the preacher’s own life (!) but extending also to those in the congregation who need to hear the Word of God each week.
This past summer I led two week-long seminars back-to-back. In the one I reminded my colleagues in the seminar of this "meatball exegesis" idea and shared with them some ideas on how to do it well. For instance, here on the Center for Excellence in Preaching website you can find lists of recommended commentaries on most every book of the Bible, many of them written with busy pastors in mind. The Interpretation series is particularly well-suited for pastors, partly because preachers and teachers of preachers are the authors of some of the better volumes in the series (Walter Brueggemann on Genesis, Tom Long on Hebrews, Fred Craddock on Luke, William Willimon on Acts to name just a few). But the point is that in addition to some of the better scholarly commentaries that preachers should have on their shelves, those who are forced to engage in meatball exegesis need at least one cracking good commentary for preaching on each book of the Bible. Preachers need to identify which commentaries fit that bill and then remember to reach for them weekly to help them get into a text quickly. Similarly, maintaining a computer database of illustrations on an ongoing basis and filed by keywords like "compassion" and "Advent" and "death" generates over time an invaluable resource that busy preachers can build for themselves and then access quickly. (Tip: The good folks who run the Firefox web browser have recently made available a free computer database where you can store all the fruit of your web browsings. It’s called "Zotero" and is more than worth checking out.)
Busy preachers need access to quick and ready-to-use tools. But the other seminar I led reminded me that inside every pastor who can do good "meatball exegesis" there needs to be also the ability to engage in deeper biblical work. The surgeons at M*A*S*H could not have learned to do meatball surgery if they had not first mastered the techniques of regular surgery (and so they needed to be able to return to regular and more meticulous surgery, too, if and when the situation demanded it). So also pastors need to have a love for deeper biblical scholarship—and an ability to do it—even if the hustle and bustle of the average week does not always allow for it. In the second seminar I co-led, eighteen pastors got to spend a week with one of the best Bible teachers around: Frederick Dale Bruner. For five straight days Dr. Bruner led these pastors into deep studies of the biblical Word.
And the pastors, to a person, opened up like flowers at the chance to finally, finally return to the chance for the kind of deep study their average weeks do not typically afford. Many of them commented afterwards that they wished they had the luxury Dr. Bruner enjoys as every week he can spend 8 hours a day in the library, delving deep into texts. As one pastor put it, "Compared to the exegetical feast Dr. Bruner gets to have each week, I feel like a light snacker!"
The parish may force us to "snack" on exegesis but what we should never forget is that there is great joy to be found in deep exegesis, and that pastors need to find at least a few seasons in life and in the course of most every year when they can engage in it again. Maybe a summer seminar or a mini-sabbatical can help refresh us. Maybe forcing ourselves to dig deeper for a special sermon or class we’re teaching can help (or signing up to be an auditor or visitor in a biblical theology class if we happen to be within driving distance of a college or seminary).
Yes, preachers need to be good at meatball exegesis, and the Lord blesses our studies even when we are forced to be down and dirty about them. But behind our ability to do the meatball stuff should be still a love—and even a hankering—to engage in deeper studies as well as the ability to do that kind of work with relish and joy. Because tucked right behind that desire and ability is something even more important: a love for the riches of God’s Word and all that the study of that Word can bring. And every preacher should be a lover of that Word.