Sermon Prep Weekly

Preaching Old Testament Narrative: Nathan, David & Finding Tension

Sermon Prep Weekly — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 11:06:31 -0600

Too often we open an Old Testament story and go straight to the lesson: be brave like David, don't be greedy like the rich man. This episode is about preaching narrative passages by finding the story's tension and following it, using Nathan's confrontation of David in 2 Samuel 12 as the model.

In this episode:

Why the tension in 2 Samuel 12 is already there before Nathan speaks, and how "Thou art the man" (2 Samuel 12:7, KJV) lands only after David has felt the injustice himself.
Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 1981; revised 2011), the standard literary study of Hebrew narrative and winner of the National Jewish Book Award.
Alter's chapter "Characterization and the art of reticence": the gaps in a story are deliberate, so don't fill them with a moral too early.
Type-scenes and repeated phrases as a map of where a story's weight falls, plus a reminder that Alter wrote literary scholarship, not a preaching manual.
Eugene Lowry's The Homiletical Plot and its five stages, from upsetting the equilibrium to anticipating the consequences, as laid out by C.J.H. Venter in In die Skriflig (2007), including Venter's critical evaluation.
Matthew Henry (1662-1714) on the passage: "By this parable Nathan drew from David a sentence against himself."
Barna Group's October 6, 2026 study of 442 U.S. Protestant pastors: 24% use AI to write or edit sermons, 94% say churches should have AI guidelines, and 79% say their own church has none.
Asbury Theological Seminary's first "Proclaim!" preaching summit and its workshop "Don't Let AI Write Your Sermon: Practical AI for Faithful Preachers."

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Full transcript

Pastor Tom Reinholt: "Thou art the man." Four words. Second Samuel twelve, verse seven, in the old King James. And if you get to those four words too fast on Sunday, they don't land at all. They just... sit there. Like a verdict read in an empty courtroom.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Here's the problem I want to sit with today. We open an Old Testament story, and almost by reflex we start mining it for a lesson. Be brave like David. Don't be greedy like the rich man. Be honest like... somebody. And the story itself, the actual STORY, gets flattened into a moral on a refrigerator magnet. So today's about narrative passages. How to find the tension and follow it, and not turn the characters into a lesson plan.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Okay so... let's start with the text, because that's where we always ought to start. The text before the outline. The outline before the illustrations.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Second Samuel twelve sits right after one of the darkest chapters in David's whole story. Chapter eleven is Bathsheba, and it's Uriah, and it's a king using his power to take what wasn't his and then cover it up. And the chapter closes with God displeased. So when chapter twelve opens, the reader knows something David is pretending not to know. That's the tension. It's already in the room before Nathan says a word.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: And what does Nathan do? He doesn't walk in and accuse. He tells a story. A rich man with flocks and herds, a poor man with one little ewe lamb, and the rich man takes it. That's it. Simple. And David gets angry, really angry, and he pronounces judgment on the man... and then Nathan turns it around. "Thou art the man."
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Notice what happened there. The tension did the work BEFORE the application showed up. David felt the injustice first. Then he found out it was about him. If Nathan had led with the application, David would've had every defense ready. Most of us would.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Now, a little background, because there's some real help here on how these stories are built.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Robert Alter wrote a book called The Art of Biblical Narrative. It first came out in 1981 from Basic Books, and a revised edition came out in 2011. It's become the standard literary study of how Hebrew narrative works, and it won the National Jewish Book Award. If you've never read it, it's worth a Tuesday or two.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: One of his chapters has a wonderful title... "Characterization and the art of reticence." Reticence. Holding back. Alter's argument is that the Bible's sparse way of telling a story is on purpose. When Kirkus reviewed the book, they summed up his point this way: earlier scholars had mistaken the biblical writers' "selective reticence" for "primitive bareness."
Pastor Tom Reinholt: I love that. Because how many of us have treated the gaps in a story as a problem to fix? The text doesn't tell us what David was feeling, so we fill it in. The text doesn't say why, so we supply a reason. And usually the reason we supply is... a moral. Too early. So here's the takeaway for prep. The gaps are part of the design. Don't rush to fill them.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Alter also looks at how these stories use convention. He talks about "type-scenes," which are scene patterns that recur, and he pays attention to repeated phrases that build from one telling to the next. And those repetitions are a kind of map. They show you where the story's weight falls. So when you're reading on Tuesday, watch for what gets said twice. Or three times. That's the writer leaning on something.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Now, I want to be fair to Alter. He wrote literary scholarship. He did NOT write a preaching manual. Taking his work into the pulpit is our step, not his claim. I just think it's a step worth taking.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: The other name I'd put on your desk is Eugene Lowry. His book is The Homiletical Plot, and it gives you a sermon shape that actually runs on tension. Five stages. First, upsetting the equilibrium. Second, analyzing the discrepancy. Third, disclosing the clue to a possible resolution. Fourth, experiencing the gospel. And fifth, anticipating the consequences.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: The idea, as C.J.H. Venter lays it out in an article in the journal In die Skriflig back in 2007, is that you're ordering the listener's EXPERIENCE. Not a list of ideas. An experience. And to his credit, Ven...

Preaching Psalms of Lament: Psalm 88, Brueggemann and Athanasius

Sermon Prep Weekly — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 11:49:14 -0600

Psalm 88 ends with no turn to praise, so what do you do with it on Sunday morning? This week we look at preaching the Psalms without flattening them: let a lament stay a lament, and build a sermon that follows the shape of the poem.

In this episode:

Walter Brueggemann's three groups from The Message of the Psalms (1984): psalms of orientation (Psalms 1, 37, 104), disorientation (Psalm 13) and new orientation
Why Brueggemann ties disorientation to the crucifixion and new orientation to the resurrection, and why new orientation is not a return to the old, naive faith
Rolf Jacobson (Luther Seminary, Working Preacher): roughly a third of the psalms are laments, or "prayers for help," and "the ask" is at the heart of the form (Ps. 13:3)
Why "genuine biblical faith is comfortable challenging God," and the risk of preaching thanksgiving psalms as "everything's back to normal"
Psalm 88:18 (NRSVue): what to do with a psalm whose last word is darkness
A sermon structure that follows the psalm's own moves (complaint, the ask, trust, the vow to praise) and does not force a resolution where the text gives none
Athanasius of Alexandria's Letter to Marcellinus: the Psalms as a mirror of "the emotions of his soul"
Election Day: Lifeway Research finds 93% of U.S. Protestant pastors don't plan to endorse candidates during worship, plus where the IRS settlement case stands at the 5th Circuit

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Full transcript

Pastor Tom Reinholt: Psalm 88 ends in the dark. Literally. Its last line, in the NRSV Updated Edition, is "You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness." ...And that's it. No turn. No "yet I will praise." The poem just... stops. So here's your Tuesday question. What do you do with that on Sunday morning?
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Because I know what I used to do. I'd sand it down. I'd find a hopeful verse somewhere else in the Bible, staple it to the end, and send everybody home feeling better. And the psalm never got to say what it came to say.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: That's this week. Preaching the Psalms without flattening them. Letting a lament stay a lament long enough that the people in front of you hear their own voice in it.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Okay so. Text before the outline. And with the Psalms, "context" works a little differently than it does with a letter or a story. You're not following a plot. You're reading a poem, and the poem has a shape. The shape IS the context.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Walter Brueggemann gave a lot of us a map for this. In The Message of the Psalms, from 1984, he sorts the Psalter into three groups. First, psalms of orientation. They celebrate an ordered world. Think Psalm 1, Psalm 37, Psalm 104. Everything's where it belongs.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Then psalms of disorientation. Those are the laments, prayed from inside anguish. Psalm 13 is one. And then psalms of new orientation... thanksgiving and praise for a surprising new gift from God.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Here's the part I want you to sit with. Brueggemann ties the move down, into disorientation, to the crucifixion. And the move back up, into new orientation, to the resurrection. So new orientation is NOT a return to the old, naive place. You don't get to climb back into Psalm 1 like nothing happened. Easter isn't a reset button. Right?
Pastor Tom Reinholt: So when you pick up a psalm, your first prep question isn't "what's my point?" It's "where's this poem standing?" Up on the level ground. Down in the pit. Or climbing out with mud still on its knees.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Let's stay with the lament form a while, because that's where most of the flattening happens. Rolf Jacobson, at Luther Seminary, writing for Working Preacher, says roughly a third of the psalms are laments. He calls them "prayers for help." A third! That's no footnote. That's a third of the book.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: And Jacobson says, I'm quoting him here, "The heart of this type is 'the ask' - the request for help." His example comes from Psalm 13, verse 3: "answer me... give light to my eyes." That's the ask. Not a vague sigh. A request. Do something, God.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Around the ask you get anger. Confusion. That cry... "How long, O Lord?" Jacobson's point is that those aren't flaws in the prayer. They're part of the form. Then trust usually shows up, and a promise to praise. Usually. Hang on to that word.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: He's got another line I keep coming back to. These psalms "admit that life is not as well-ordered as a simple Sunday School faith may pretend." And then: "genuine biblical faith is comfortable challenging God." Comfortable. Not grudgingly putting up with it. Comfortable.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: He warns the other direction too. When you get to the thanksgiving psalms, it's tempting to preach them as "see, everything's back to normal." But he writes, "faith that speaks the truth can never pretend that all will always be well." That's Brueggemann's point from another angle. New orientation is new. It's not the old furniture put back in the old room.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Which brings us back to Psalm 88. Most laments turn toward trust. This one doesn't. Its last word is darkness. A preacher's instinct, a good one, a pastoral one, is to rescue it. But that's the psalm we were given. It's in the Bible just as it is.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: Alright. Illustrations. And remember the order... text, then outline, then illustrations. We've earned them now. Here are three.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: The first is old. Athanasius of Alexandria, fourth century, in his Letter to Marcellinus. In one translation, he says the Psalms "become like a mirror to the person singing them, so that he might perceive himself and the emotions of his soul." Another translation has "motions of his soul." Translations differ a bit, so just say "in one translation" and you're on solid ground.
Pastor Tom Reinholt: In the same letter, he says the Psalter "contains even the emotions of each soul." Each soul. So here's how I'd use it. A mirror doesn't flatter you. It doesn't fix your hair before you look. It shows what's there.