David L. Barnhart, Jr., M.Div.
Graduate Student
Great Clichés
Great Clichés
The problem with most of these expressions is that they have lost a good deal of their meaning not just because of overuse from the pulpit and in pop theology, but because they were fairly empty to begin with. For example:
The future lies in front of us. Where else would it lie? To our left? If it lie behind us, wouldn't that automatically make it the past? This is not necessarily a bad expression - if you are using an explicit metaphor of travel to express time, then you might want to present the future as a destination. But it might be more fun to twist the metaphor a bit. If the future actually did lie in front of us, why can't we see it? Maybe the future actually lies behind us, and we are sort of backing into the future. We can see the past just fine, but the future we can only guess at through our peripheral vision.
Hope for the future. This one is redundant, as well. Hope for the past might be a slightly more interesting variation. After all, we can always hope that somehow the future will redeem the past.
We need to meet people where they are. Where else do you meet people? Do you often meet people where they aren't? If in fact you see someone who is meeting people where they aren't, you generally assume that person is suffering hallucinations. In this case, it would be far better to say what you mean - that instead of assuming people will come to hear the gospel, we should be carrying it to them.
And it would be a mistake to say that this is what Jesus and John the Baptist did. They generally made a point to stay away from the cities and went from backwater to backwater. John, in fact, preached in the wilderness - a great example of meeting people where they aren't, perhaps.
Covered/washed/redeemed by Jesus' blood. Think about this very carefully. Imagine being covered in blood. Do you know how sticky and smelly that would be? In a day and age where people fear the slightest risk of touching blood, the metaphorical implications should be obvious. I mean, this is something out of a slasher movie, and here we are singing this stuff in church. "There is a fountain filled with blood..." Don't just say it, but take some time to draw the image in your head. Ewwwww.
Of course, the problem here is mostly of historical perspective. Even when they were composing most of the hymns about Jesus' blood, they had already lost the metaphor. Blood does not have the same symbolic power today (or even in the 1800's) that it did in the first century. Then it was life energy. Now it has the possibility of carrying HIV or some other deadly disease.
But in that change there is the possibility to open a new kind of metaphor. How scandalous is it to drink Jesus' blood, and eat Jesus' body, in a culture which is germ-phobic? Where death happens in hospital rooms or closed execution chambers, and not out on a hill in public view? Where we practically wear latex gloves just to shake hands?
The other problem is that this phrase usually crops up in an exposition of substitutionary atonement - which is a problematic metaphor in itself, and goes beyond the scope of this page.
Unconditional love. This has got to be one of my favorites. On the surface it seems to be a simple redundancy: if it isn't unconditional, it's probably not love. Perhaps it is affection, or infatuation.
But at a deeper level, it reflects a slightly warped philosophy. When you ask people what they mean by "unconditional love," they frequently use the illustration of a parent's love for a child, and they will say something like, "no matter what my son or daughter does, I will still love them." But that is an example of extremely conditional love. The condition is that that person is your son or daughter - if he or she were not your son or daughter, you would not give a flying fig about them. An unconditional love would be one that did not care if the person were your son or daughter - an interesting alternative, I think, when talking about the love of God.
This cliché comes to us from the technical term "unconditional positive regard," a psychological concept which indicates what children desire from their parents - hence the stock illustration of parental love. Speaking of which...
God is like a parent. Now, I have no problem with referring to God as Father or Mother. I think these are good, solid metaphors. But frequently when people use this expression they want to talk about how God disciplines us or guides us.
One theological problem is that you have this little thing called The Fall. This doctrine says that we were such rowdy children that God left the house without a babysitter and the kids are now in charge. Picture "Lord of the Flies," but with guns and bureaucracy. If you think this is too negative a picture, I suggest looking at Jesus' parable of the vineyard, in which God sends a servant to check on things at the farm and the tenants murder him.
Now, to say "God is in charge" in the face of this situation - that is a true claim of faith. It might also work to describe what an intimate and personal relationship with God might look like. How, exactly, does God guide us or discipline us? God certainly doesn't put us in time out. I could come up with a long list of people who are way past due for a divine spanking.
Another problem with this metaphor is that it often subtly reinforces the domination of kids by adults. More on that issue below.
Yet another theological problem is that this metaphor is so overused that we almost always forget that God is also like a child. Once a year, at Christmas, we get a glimmer of this metaphor, but it is usually so tangled in metaphorical acrobatics that somehow God still winds up being Daddy. The metaphor of God as a child is full of unexplored imagery. How often do children influence their parents? How is developing a relationship with a child like developing a relationship with God?
Youth (or children) are the future of the church. Which leaves us with the question, what are they now? Nobody, according to this cliché. Yet youth and children do as much if not more hands-on ministry than the adults do - how many church adults take a week or more out of their lives every year to go live in some rural area and work on people's houses and read the Bible? How many sing in the choir? A much greater percentage of kids do these things than adults.
Furthermore, what does that say about the current adults? At some point are they too old to be the future of the church? According to Christian theology, you don't get kicked out of the church when you die, so even your Great-Aunt Edna is still in the church even when she is pushing up daisies - that's why there's an All-Saints Day.
No, what we really mean by this expression is that we consider the church to be composed of a series of committees and official church leaders who make policy and go to conferences and such - which is a very sad idea. Perhaps we could take a lesson from those children we are supposedly so concerned about: I am the church, you are the church, we are the church together.
We have to do (x) for the good of our children. This cliché is a rhetorical strategy which attempts to motivate people by implying a threat to their progeny. Political groups do this all the time: "The Republicans are trying to starve our children," or "the Democrats are trying to indoctrinate our children." We should not be so manipulative from the pulpit. It describes children as objects of adult control - effectively leaving children out of the sermon.
If in fact there is a real danger or concern with the "good of children," we need to make sure that we portray it accurately - can you describe in a concrete way what that good is? Is it a tangible good? "Education" may be a concern, but can you describe to us what the good education looks like?
Now that I have blasted these expressions, I should point out that they are all fine phrases. There is nothing really wrong with them. They are a kind of verbal shorthand that allows you to indicate a larger idea without having to reconstruct the idea every time you refer to it.
But they may undermine a theological claim in a sermon in two ways. First, if in your move you want people to have a clear understanding of your theological claim and the corresponding image you use to illustrate it, you cannot rely on verbal shorthand. You want to make it as explicit as possible. Second, if you want to model a Christian hermeneutic, a way of interpreting the world which often deviates from conventional wisdom, using clichés which embody that conventional wisdom is counterproductive.
This is not to say that you cannot use clichés in a sermon, either. If it helps create an image with which you intend on making a theological claim, by all means, use whatever metaphor is handy. Just don't rely on them to carry the image, and be sure to use them critically.
I will post more to this page as I hear them. If you want to suggest a cliché, please send it to me at david.L.barnhart@vanderbilt.edu