Cracking the Shell of Humpty Dumpty Homiletics: A Brief Word

'Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall...'

[Humpty Dumpty]: “There’s glory for you!”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knockdown argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knockdown argument,’” Alice objected.

 “When I use a word ,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” 

In this extract from Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s work, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Humpty Dumpty subjectively defends what Alice knows to be the absurd misuse of a particular word. Whatever this portion’s purpose in the schizophrenic story world of the Looking-Glass, it does introduce us - with some degree of profundity - to a philosophy commonly held (either philosophically or practically or both) by people today. In explaining his choice of vocabulary, Humpty Dumpty seems to parody the same logic of an essentially postmodern worldview, where meaning is ultimately meaningless and definitions are definitive only according to personal feeling and not principled fact.

No doubt one could find for such satire many contemporary applications across a vast spectrum of disciplines and fields, but I could not help but think of those tasked with preaching God’s Word, the Bible.  Abandoning the unprofitable and incompetent style of pulpit Humpty Dumpties, good preaching will clearly and boldly say not what we want the text to say, or what we feel the passage means, or the interpretation that we think might probably be most consistent with our viewpoint, system or collection of charts (as valuable as these things may be) but rather what the text actually says, unpolluted, and what it actually means, undiluted. Certainly a passage can be approached from different angles and may bear within it several applications, but those angles are not infinite and those applications not indefinite. The Bible is not a collection of abstract proverbial sayings that can mean anything to anybody. The God-breathed Word is really profitable for real people, dealing with real problems, living in real places and in need of real power – which demands real preaching! Real preaching is not being a 'master of the text', it is being mastered by the text.

Though the talking egg-man on the wall answered wrongly, he asked correctly: “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” So, who will be master in the pulpit: The Spirit or the servant? The text or the teacher? The passage or the preacher?