Understanding the Word: An Interview with Eugene Peterson...Continued from page 1

That exploded in my imagination. This is what pastors d they stand in the middle of these great traditions, great proclamations and charismatic centers of what we are doing, and they say, “This is the way we do it.” So that is what started the book; it took me five or six years to write that book. I was a new church developer, I was practicing, I was using those texts to shape the way I was doing things. I think the tension between the big story, the kerygmatic proclamation and talking to individuals about this, talking about the Sinai, the revelation, Moses, finding Ruth in my congregation and Boaz, and Naomi, and then saying, “How do we live that out now?” So that is what happened and everything kind of came from there.

Preaching: As you progressed as both a writer and a preacher, did you find that your writing altered your preaching?

Peterson: I am not sure it did. Writing is very different from preaching. Oral ways of using words is very different from a literary way of using words. If I preached something first then wrote it, it was really hard, and the same way the other way. They don’t mix. I usually wrote my sermons; not always, most of the time. I had a hard time getting the written word into oral.

I never read my sermons, never memorized my sermons. I hate doing that; I miss the spontaneity of pastor/congregation. So I am not sure they helped each other, or maybe they helped each other just by the tension, the contrast. I think I found it harder to write into a book something that I already preached, because of the emotion, the energy; the adrenaline of the pulpit wasn’t there when I was writing it, so it was like starting over again. A number of things I have written started off as preaching, but nobody could take that and preach it; there is not enough juice in it.

Preaching: The Message has been a wonderful resource for pastors in preaching. As I read sermons, it is not at all unusual to see that as preachers are trying to explain a passage they pull the text from The Message because it does a wonderful job of adding flavor and understanding. How did working on that change the way you thought about some passages, the way you preached?

Peterson: It was the other way around. I could have never done that if I hadn’t been a pastor for thirty years. It was the way I preached – not so much the way I wrote – that shaped the way The Message came out.

I never thought of myself as a translator. I was always trying to translate – I was having this war between American culture and the Hebrew New Testament’s culture and wondering: how can I say this? If Isaiah had been in my pulpit how would he say this? That is what was going on in my head all the time. I was free to change metaphors; if a metaphor didn’t fit I figured out a way to do it. I was always working directly from the Greek and the Hebrew. I was trying to stay true to the rhythms, the syntax, the way those words worked in that culture.