Let’s Preach Paul!

A year and a half ago I attended a conference at the College of Preachers, affiliated with the Washington National Cathedral. The topic was “Preaching Paul.” The leader was Brad Braxton, a newly tenured homiletics and New Testament professor at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee. Is it any surprise that I was the only woman signed up for the conference? Not to me. At the conference it became clear to me, however, that women are not the only ones rolling our eyes at Paul. One man, an Episcopal priest, had to search back through at least 10 years of sermons to find one on a Pauline text. A male Lutheran pastor had to go back to seminary days to find one. I am guessing that could have been 15 plus years for him.

Disdain for Paul can get pretty thick in the “liberal air” and I have heard more times than I can count some version of the statement “I prefer Jesus to Paul” as if to say “I prefer true gospel to false gospel.” Some liberals are strangely much more familiar with the Pauline passages that appear anti-woman, anti-gay or anti-sex- in- general than with the rest of Paul’s writing.

So why dust off Paul and make him more central to our preaching (if we happen to be disinclined to do so)? Why not stick with the gospels and pull out James now and then and leave well enough alone?

I feel like a convert as I prepare to name the reasons I see for preaching Paul. Maybe others have not been living under this veil, but I can say that for a long time I was more irritated than thankful that Paul’s mail was in our canon. And for this experience of conversion I credit first Deb Krause at Eden Seminary, then Brad Braxton whose book “Preaching Paul” I picked up on a whim when it was first published just two years ago. I credit Brad again from the leadership of the conference I attended and especially an exercise he had us do before we arrived at the conference. He asked us to do “homiletical summaries” of 4 of Paul’s letters. Reading a full letter at a sitting was as much a part of my conversion as anything.

So, why preach Paul?