Postmodemity emphazises the microcosmic, the local, ordinary life. Therefore Reclaiming the sacredness of everyday life stresses the relation between preaching and daily life. In my local congregation I can see that people have problems with time. They are stressed. When people are stressed and hunted by heavy demands, it is important to give back to everyday life its dignity and sacredness. To reclaim the sacredness of everyday life implies, for me, both to try to name the grace and the challenge which the Gospel gives to us and confronts us in ordinary life. The question is how preaching can reflect and affect everyday life. This thesis pays attention to the meaning of metaphor and narrativity in relation to preaching and daily life. According to many linguists, philosophers and theologians, metaphor is important in creating a new understanding of reality. Metaphor can change our conceptual system and create new reality. So, it is important to reflect over the use of metaphors of God and other metaphors in preaching. Story is sometimes called ’’extended metaphor”. Story has the power to affect and change. With the help of story we interpret and form reality.
Many homiletics think that the preacher has a prophetic task. It is equally important to name grace as it is to name sin that confronts human beings and creation. The preacher constructs a new world beyond settled reality. Metaphors, stories, fiction help the preacher to achieve this task. The deep places in our lives are not reached by instruction and rules, but by stories, images, metaphors and words which create a different world. The local context is important for the sermon. The theological landscape of the local congregation is in this thesis investigated with the help of Paul W. Jones and the theory of 5 theological worlds. Every human being is a unique creature and has a theological world of his or her own, but the individual worlds overlap, forming communities. This thesis reflects two sermons, preached in the church of St. Olof, Uppsala, Sweden, the 23rd of September and the 7lh of October 2001. The first sermon is a story from the beginning to the end. The text of the Bible is Luke 10:38-42, the story of Martha and Mary. The second sermon has a narrative structure and is based upon the parable of the rich fool, Luke 12:13-21. The purpose of the first sermon is to let the congregation experience grace in everyday life, that the timeworn usual everyday is a gift. The second sermon wants to challenge the congregation to reflect over the relation between stress and the consumer-society and at the same time give a ‘counter-image’. One of the conclusions of Reclaiming the sacredness of everyday life is that it is important for the preacher to be aware of the closure of the sermon. How should the preacher know when he or she shall stop? How should the preacher, at the end, narrow the sermon without doing a complete closure? A well thought sermon purpose statement can be of great assistance for this end, but it is no guarantee for the sermon to reach its goal. Anyway it will help making the sermon a better sermon. The narrative form seems to work. Members of the Parish Project Group have remembered the sermon and have thought of it in relation to their everyday lives even after we had finished the conversation about the sermon in the Parish Project Group.
