In the previous post I noted what Tim Saleska thought he saw "God doing to people in the bible". The reason he spent most of his lecture on this was because he thought that the preacher should find in God's actions the model for what he does when talking to people about God.
Tim Saleska wants us to read the bible asking: "what is God actually doing here to his people?" "What does he do to you as a reader?" And once we have answered that question, he wants us to seek to achieve the same in the people we speak to about God. So having set out what he sees God doing in the Bible he concludes that the preacher's task is:
to make people Israel. It is your job to kill the old and resurrect them to the new. We bring people into the kingdom and make the story of Israel their story; the experience of Israel their experience. So rather than thinking about the sermon in terms of Law and Gospel as content - in other words it is my responsibility to give a bunch of cognitive propositions that I can label 'law' and then move from that to a bunch of cognitive propositions and label those 'Gospel' - think of the sermon in more functional terms. What you want to actually accomplish, what you want to do, in your speaking.
... you actually want to bring them through this death and life experience. Remember as Lutherans we think of the whole Christian life as a continual death and resurrection. ... we mean that baptism was this once-for-all death and resurrection that actually plays itself out day-in-day-out in the life of a Christian. Repentance is nothing but death to the old and ... faith is the resurrection to the new. In the Christian life, one of repentance and faith, that's the experience that comes to us which is a foretaste of what is going to happen at the end of time when God comes and raises us from the death for all to see.
