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Casting Our Mammon on the Baptismal Waters:
Preaching Economic Justice During Lent
André Resner Jr. New Brunswick Theological Seminary, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Lent ‘s Gospel Resources The seasons of the church year, illumined as they are by the narrative portrayal of Jesus’ life and ministry in the Gospels, provide continual light for Christians to evaluate their lives and commitments. Lent situates us at a crucial juncture in that story: the unrelenting and unchangeable path to the cross. Once Ash Wednesday hits, we are at Luke 9:51 and there is no going back: “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” As Christians we are drop-shipped on this Lenten road to the cross directly from baptism. Water is an element of creation that I love and fear. There is nothing like the feeling of diving into and through a crisp ocean wave. Warm water gently embraces and soothes the achy body even as it cleanses. Pouring pure, cool water down aparched throat gives a kind of relief that is singular in life. At the same time, one of the most stressful nightmares I’ve ever had was of being in an underwater tunnel unable to find my way to the surface. My despair at the prospect of drowning woke me. Baptism holds both the thrill of life and the terror of death in creative tension. When I was eight years old, I stood in the baptistery of a little church in Oceanside, California. The minister, Eugene Winters, whispered to me, “Hold your nose or water will go up it when I tip you back.” After he said those words, everything went into slow motion as I fell into the cold water. I remember opening my eyes on the way out, thinking, “I don’t want to miss anything of what this newly resurrected life looks like.” I remember thinking how pure, clean, and untainted by sin I was at that moment. Secretly I thought my first sin would undo the whole thing. I understand completely how the Essenes came up with their daily baptismal ritual. It made perfect sense to me until I realized over the years that just as I would never really be done with that baptismal experience back in May, 1966, that baptism would never be done with me either. Lent insistently reminds us that baptism, by the mystery of God’s stubborn grace, is never done with us. Historically, Lent is the season of preparation for baptism by initiates and renewal of baptismal graces and commitments by Christians. Whether we were baptized as infants, children, young adults, or at full adulthood, Lent leads us back to the river and invites us to wade back into the cleansing and renewing tide. Lent takes us to the water and says, “This is where you began. This is where Godbirthed you anew. This is where the death of Jesus and your own death collided. This is where you died to ways contrary to God’s designs for you. This is where you touched the hem of Jesus’ resurrection garment—and received power to rise up out of your watery grave and keep rising into a life as you never knew it before. By God’s miraculous and mysterious working, these waters washed you, purified you, and set you apart—sanctified you, made you holy— for God’s purposes in this world. These waters immersed you into the fathomless love of God. They plunged you into God’s will and ways for as long as you have life, which is forever. This was your real birth, and when the water broke and you came forth as
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a new creation in Christ, you were no longer your own. You came forth God’s person and God’s possession, with all the privileges and responsibilities thereto appertaining .” And when you came out of that maternity ward you discovered something remarkable. You were not alone. You were now part of a family as large, as old, and as diverse as the human family. And all bear a striking family resemblance because of the image of God that all share in common. Baptism is our true birth, and, in a very real sense the umbilical cord that connects us back to baptism’s birthing waters never gets cut. Lent gives us all the chance to reconnect to our beginning and reminds us that by this new birth we have been organically joined to our Divine Parent and the human family. Preaching in Lent taps the Gospel resources available in baptism. Indeed, a good theology of baptism can help resolve a lot of church problems. Lent provides the time and space—forty days plus Sundays—for preachers to delve into the rich thematic depths of holiness, repentance, conversion, and the nature of discipleship as cruciform existence.1 Concrete practices of spirituality punctuate the season’s visual and verbal cues: the imposition of ashes, fasting, prayer, renewed meditation on scripture and other devotional resources, penitential acts, evangelism, and almsgiving. This last discipline, almsgiving, puts us in touch with our special concern for this article, the economics of Lenten discipleship.
Acoustical Armor: Hearer Resistance to Just Preaching Preaching on economic justice requires several things: a biblical and theological perspective on economics and justice, a political and sociological perspective on our current global economy, the gift and ability to prepare and deliver sermons, and, perhaps most important of all, sheer guts. This is because preaching on economics, politics, and justice can get you seriously injured if not killed. The prophets never got parades, at least not from the home crowd. The prophets always seemed to be cheering on the wrong sideline. In his story, “The Prophet,” Garrison Keillor reveals how one July 4th God gave him the chance to be a prophet. Though only a child, Keillor knew instinctively that prophecy was not a career path for him. He didn’t want any part of a community role that would require him to become the scourge of the very people with whom he lived. So instead of becoming a prophet, one who told people the hard truth and got persecuted for it, Keillor decided to do the exact opposite. That’s why, he explains, he became a professional liar, one who weaves miles and miles of deception about a non-existent town in Minnesota. And, ironically, he notes, ifhe had chosen to take God up on the offer to become a prophet, Keillor would have been barred from most churches and pulpits throughout the country. As it is, since he became a professional liar, he is welcome to speak in as many pulpits as he would like, as often as he likes. This tells preachers something about what they’re up against in the American pulpit. True prophets, like the master artists, are only canonized after they’re long dead and gone. My hunch is that Hananiah (the prophet whose popular sermon series on peace was rudely interrupted by the invasion and plunder of Jerusalem, cf. Jeremiah 28) would always get more ministry job offers than Jeremiah. In general, people love feel-good sermons and get uncomfortable with sermons that “meddle” into personal matters like money, politics, and—surprise, surprise—religion, especially when religion is defined the way James described it: “Religion that is pure and undefiled
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before God is this: to carefor orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world*’ (James 1:27). We may say in the P. R. brochures that we Presbyterians are “reformed and always reforming,” but a hard truth is that the radical social and economic reform to which prophets call people is resisted, and sometimes quite vigorously. The church has contrived a lot of excuses for its resistance, many of which are quite clever and even persuasive. The church has developed a talent for coming up with what look like legitimate reasons for avoiding justice issues, or at least for letting them slip to the bottom of the priority list. These excuses can be categorized as theological, spiritual, ideological, and sociological. Theologically, the church—especially the conservative church in all denominations —has conveniently avoided this-world justice concerns by an almost inordinate focus on “salvation and justification” matters, especially as those are defined in “spiritual” or relational terms with God. Justice is typically reduced to the appeasement of an angry God from whom we are estranged, with whom we need atonement, and who provides such in the sacrifice of Christ. The church’s mission is reduced to evangelizing the lost for their security of an afterlife in heaven. Since nothing is more important than this, undue attention to anything in this world is an unnecessary distraction from the church’s priority to seek and save the lost. This version of justiceavoidance becomes most sinister when the ostensibly evangelistically focused church insists that only its version of and procedures for securing salvation are legitimate. William Muehl lampooned a justification-stuck ecclesiological mission in his classic sermon, “The Cult of the Publican.”2 He pointed out the ultimate failure of the revivalists through a story. His uncle, who owned a bar, loved to tell about his six conversion experiences due to the fire and brimstone preaching of Billy Sunday. But then, not recognizing his theological conundrum, the uncle would say, “But then every Monday there was this damn bar.” Exclusive attention to justification—even when well-intentioned—without taking the next and necessary step to sanctification—and thus, concrete acts for social righteousness in this world—must be named for what it is: heresy. Spiritually, the church—especially the evangelical church—has conveniently reduced the believer’s life with God to individualistic piety. This devolves into an ostrich-type, head-in-the-sand, spirituality that is individualistic and often hedonistically self-serving. Popular church music reinforces this form of spirituality, such as “I Go to the Garden Alone,” a hymn that extols the privatized, personal savior who “walks with me and…talks with me and tells me I am his own.” Undue attention to the privatized, personalized, individualized, retreat-to-the-hills-alone kind of Christian faith eclipses the sense of community interconnectedness and interdependence that is inherent to being God’s person and people. Even our English translations have been abused when plural second person pronouns—”you”—have been largely read and interpreted as singular. This is especially the case in the Pauline letters where Paul’s strong community emphasis is reduced to the individualistic paradigm. Such privatization of spirituality must be named for what it is: heresy. Ideologically, the church—especially the mainline church—has confused its ecclesial sense of self in the United States context with capitalism, democracy, and Americanism. It has preferred this cultural distortion of its ecclesiology to disciplined reflection that evaluates its surrounding cultural ideologies in light of the core
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theological categories of the cross, the spirit, and biblical perspectives on justice and love. The church thus violates its charter by allowing provincial ideologies to eclipse its theology and faith. A recent example of this kind of distortion occurred when, after 9/11, the American flag became a more important symbol for people than the cross, even in church sanctuaries. It almost goes without saying that the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America is a more important creed for many, if not most, American Christians than the Apostles’ or the Nicene creeds, and that the national anthem evokes more passionate response than the hymn “God of Grace and God of Glory.” Another example is when greed becomes God. As wealth discrepancies widen, American Christians are having a harder and harder time evaluating the ideology and ethics of capitalistic greed from the vantage point of Christian commitments . This is especially true for those who have benefited a great deal from the capitalistic ideology. Yet, what else can explain the levels of giving in the mainline church nationwide?3 The mainline church is currently passionately divided over the issue of homosexuality, but I am convinced that greed and the cost it exacts in the church, as well as the human and global community, is a much greater moral problem than sexual preference or practice. Yet many of the same Bible verses that some are straining to defend their position against homosexuality contain very clear condemnations of greed.4 Our near complete silence on the problem of greed as a contributing factor to ecclesial, national, and global economic injustice must be named for what it is: sin. Sociologically, the American church has made a not-so-subtle shift in the questions it asks itself as it defines its mission in society. This shift has been influenced by the American market economy and the gluttonous desire to grow numerically at virtually any cost. The church’s mission often begins with a marketing, rather than a theological, question. This change in focus causes the church to change its question for mission from, “Who are we as God’s people and how are we to be faithful to that identity in the world?” to “What do people who are not church-connected want and how do we provide that to attract them to join us?” At present, the only numerically growing churches are those that focus on “market needs.” Growing churches ask the Marketing 101 question: “What do people want?” The current dominant ecclesial model in America is church as service-provider. So, if people want upbeat, highlycharged , “contemporary-style,” music-infused worship experiences with celebritytype ministers who resemble game-show hosts and who always keep everything moving and positive, then let’s do that. If people want a one-stop-shopping-church where they can get their dose of spirituality, social life around the Starbuck’s coffee cart, Christian cardio-Karaté class, childcare through college, sports leagues, and even movie and concert nights, then let’s create the “Mall Church” so people can be “in the world” but hardly even notice.5 The marketing oriented American church is moving toward an R-21 insulated Christian ghetto sequestered away from any and every questionable influence that we or our children could face. This brand of ecclesiology has perfected the “urban flight” and baptized it into Christ. It is the church as Elijah, hiding in the cave of Horeb, away from the big, bad threat of Jezebel. Called to prophetic witness and given divine strength against the world’s powers, Elijah has become frightened and has retreated to a safe place, a place of former revelation. The Word of the Lord comes to Elijah, but not the way that it came to Moses. Elijah has to learn that God is not in the big show, but in the silence. Elijah’s revelation comes
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in the form of a question: ” What are you doing here, Elijah!” (1 Kings 19:13). The ghettoized church needs to be asked the same hard question: “What are you doing cutting yourself off from the world?” Such separation from the world must be named for what it is: sin—specifically, the sin of abandoning one ‘s place and call in the world. Add to these daunting barriers of resistance the tenacious American belief in rugged individualism, a tenaciously guarded private life, and the notion that each individual has the personal right and privilege to the acquisition of money and property. Once acquired, each person is assumed to have personal and unaccountable sovereignty over its use and distribution. Here we have a kind of strong ideological gospel that is probably preached more consistently in our homes than any other gospel. Stepping into the pulpit to speak a word for justice when there is so much resistance can be a daunting prospect. So how do we do it, if we dare try? Let me suggest several possible paths through the resistance.
Negotiating Just Preaching Paths Through Resistance The Ironic Path: Keillor’s story, “The Prophet,” sneaks in his version of the prophetic truth sideways, as he always does. Ostensibly he purports to deny God’s call to him. He confesses his life of lies, and so disarms his hearer. All the while, he covertly and overtly names the truth as he sees it. Using humor, he names one truth that he knows: it is the fourth of July and it is snowing. Even though everyone else is in denial—”It’s not snow; it’s just fluff from the dogwood trees!”—because they cannot tolerate the possibility of snow in July, young Garrison knows the truth. Building off this mundane truth, he slips in his political critique by wondering out loud what a prophet might say to America today. In the process he condemns America’s bullying of the world through power and prideful gloating over our military prowess. He says that he isn’t a prophet, not because he’s unsure of what to say. He knows what needs to be said, he just chooses not to say it. But in spite of his denials, he says it anyway. And by the time he does, his hearers, whether they agree with him or not, are all ears. The Indirect Path: Fred Craddock appealed to narrative indirection in preaching in order to get a word through to those “who had heard it all before.” Resurrecting Craddock’s wise counsel on inductive preaching would be another useful strategy for preaching on justice, especially for those who are allergic to imperatives. Storytelling that weaves plot and characters toward a Gospel end of confrontation with self and God allows the preacher to become a narrative prophet in the same sense that Nathan did for David. This story has become the prime exemplar for narrative indirection from scripture, but it is rarely appreciated that it is a story about economic injustice. Swept up in the story of injustice done by one powerful man over his poor neighbor, David was led to an unexpected prophetic indictment of his own unjust behavior toward Uriah and Bathsheba and all of Israel. The resources for storytelling in preaching are numerous, and I encourage us all to reopen those files for use on justice.6 The Path of Identification: Another Craddock preaching strategy, that of “identification ,” may prove even more helpful to those negotiating the homiletical map on justice matters.7 When I began imagining what the book Just Preaching: Prophetic Voices for Economic Justice should look like, I knew that the easiest preaching to do on justice was the stereotypical, big and blustery, forehead-mopping oratory that looks
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a napalm raid on an unsuspecting village.81 also knew that most preachers feel that to preach effectively on justice requires one to look and sound like Martin Luther King, Jr. or William Sloan Coffin. This assumption usually douses the hopeful flames of any preacher’s attempt to enter the justice fray. In laying out JustPreaching, my goal was not to perpetuate the stereotype but to display a variety of approaches, through a number of different preachers of varying personality and denominational persuasion. Justice preaching is not a one-size-fits-all King or Coffin template that all preachers must force themselves into. Through eight essays and twenty-four sermons, the reader sees that there are a variety of ways and means to faithfully broach the subject. The Path of uSoft-Sell “Justice: Some of the entries in JustPreaching are what one might expect: hard-hitting orations, chock full of facts, statistics, and white-hot passion. The contributions by James Forbes, Coffin, Marion Wright Edelman, and Walter Burghardt fit this mode. But others are, for lack of a better term, “soft-sell” justice sermons. The sermons by Mary Catherine Hilkert, Pamela Couture, and Jim Burklo each give a glimpse of a kind of preaching on justice that sneaks up so slyly on the hearers that they may even think they’re in a feel-good sermon moment. Each sermon is held together by one, simple defining image that shows what justice looks like for one person in a moment in time. As a kind of pastoral justice, such sermons don’t ram justice down the hearers’ throats. And they don’t try to name or solve all the world’s ills in twenty minutes. Frankly, when those are the only kinds of justice sermons people hear, they will build up a tolerance against them and resistance to justice will harden. As soon as one starts to sneak out of the sermon bag, out comes the acoustical armor. To preach well and often on justice requires more than one approach, more than one style. The Path of Scribal Traditioning: In one of Just Preaching’s essays, “Ancient Utterance and Contemporary Hearing,” Walter Brueggemann helps preachers reimagine the preaching task from the vantage point, not of the prophet, but of the scribe. Brueggemann rightly notes that most preachers are probably better suited seeing themselves as descendants of the scribes (cf. Mt. 13:51-52), those trained religious leaders whose job it is to faithfully steward old texts—scripture—into the present-day community’s life. Some of those texts include the prophets, as well as the many other texts in the biblical witness that call the community to just relations. Brueggemann’s helpful re-envisioning of the preacher’s role as scribe places the preacher alongside the hearers ala Craddock’s role of “identification,” in view of some hard texts. In this paraclete-positioning with the hearer, the preacher can give voice to the horror and objection of the hearer faced with the prophetic claims of the text: “I’m not sure I like what this text seems to be insinuating about us…And I’m not sure it’s anyone’s business but my own what I choose to line my walls with at home and what kind of couch I choose to be a potato on…” Being a faithful scribe of the prophetic texts becomes an exercise in confessional preaching among a people with whom we share the prophetic indictment. This repositioning allows us to walk with our people toward the text and kneel with our people under the text’s sometimes indicting claims, rather than cause the people to feel that they are being ganged up on by God, the text, and the preacher. At the same time, Brueggemann can be seen to be extending Karl Barth’s helpful description of the preacher’s fundamental role as bearer of scripture’s words: “We bear witness to that [the biblical] witness.”9 Brueggemann, Barth, and Craddock all
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remind us that although we may not fancy ourselves as stereotypical social justice-type preachers, if the texts our tradition hands down to us are justice-rich and, on analysis pertinent to our situation, then we have a responsibility to pass them on faithfully. Faithful traditioning of these calls to justice requires further that we render such claims in as homiletically authentic and consistent a way as possible. This means doing what Tom Long insists is the key to being biblical in our preaching: saying and doing in our sermons and community contexts what the biblical writers were saying and doing in theirs.10 And, as Long helpfully instructs, that doesn’t necessarily mean saying what they said in the way they said it. Preaching on a proverb does not require the preacher to preach in a proverb-type style. Preaching on a Psalm does not require poetic sermonic verse. In the same way, preaching from the prophets does not require putting on Elijah’s mantle and ranting and raving. It doesn’t require preaching naked (like Ezekiel), or angrily (take your pick since they all sound at least a little torqued, but Jonah would do), or violently during the children’s sermon (like bald Elisha with the she-bears). The form the sermon takes can fit the preacher’s personality and style as well as the congregational situation and community context. Like Keillor, a sermon on hard prophetic truth can take the ironic form of a confessed lie and denial of call. Like Craddock, a sermon on justice may take the form of the preacher standing in resistant solidarity with the hearer, yet ultimately open to the text’s claims.
The Preacher as Importunate Widow and Kierkegaardian Clown Why do people change? Among all the possible answers, I have become convinced that crisis is the number one driver behind radical change in people’s attitudes and actions. If I am correct, then a key problem in promoting social and economic justice in our preaching is that preaching can announce the crisis or our world, of our God, of the cross, of our call and stewardship as agents of God’s justice; but how does the crisis that preaching announces take existential hold in our hearers? Only life-rocking experiences compel an at-any-cost alteration of one’s existence so that one engages in true accompaniment, and sustained efforts to advocate for systemic change. There would have been no “Amber Alert” without the tragic loss of Amber. MADD started because a child was killed by a drunk driver. The homiletical question behind effective justice preaching is this: Where is our existential crisis that compels us to act, not out of guilt or fear or obligation, but because we are convicted that there is no other reason for us to be alive except to see love and justice sweep over the earth and pervade every human, social, political and economic relationship? The means and methods discussed above, the paths of irony, indirection, identification , and scribal traditioning, all point to possible strategies of incremental change. These will enhance our preaching on justice, making it more consistent and even more effective. But a hard truth remains: if crisis is the key to substantive and systemic change, are we ultimately doomed in our prophetic calls to economic justice without somehow making justice’s need transformationally apparent and existentially palpable ? To preach with passion on justice in the North American pulpit may be as absurd as a clown trying to be serious. Soren Kierkegaard tells a parable about an audience gathered at a theatre for an evening play. Backstage a fire erupts and one of the actors, dressed as a clown, runs onto the stage and begins to frantically address the crowd: “Firel Firel ” Assuming this is part of the play, the people laugh and comment on how
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impressive the clown’s acting skills are. No matter how much the clown protests, states the “God’s honest truth,” or punctuates the cry with tone or gesture, the people applaud and enjoy the performance as an act of entertainment. If the clown then stood at the exit, I’m sure that everyone would shake his hand on the way out and say something like, “I liked that sermon a lot.” Why do we preachers not give up or give in? How do we repent of our failings and our timidity, and take up again God’s passionate concern for justice in our world, especially for the sake of increasing presence in our world of contemporary widows, orphans, and strangers in the land, those vulnerable who are exploited and have no power or resources? A new image for the preacher has captured me and is fueling a renewed fire in me for speaking out for justice in a church and in a world that not only does not seem to want to hear about it, but that has decided it will persecute those who persist in talking about it. The image is from Luke 18, the story about the persistent widow and the unjust judge. Preachers who do not give up the cry for justice are the importunate widow incarnate in today’s pulpits who persist in lifting our voices up to a church and in a world that, more often than not on matters of justice, seems neither to fear God nor respect any human being. And in spite of the overwhelming odds, the widow didn’t back down and didn’t give up. Though the unjust, non-heeding judge had no reason to do anything that she asked, she persisted. And finally, he relented. Why does the widow not give up? I believe it’s because of this: she knew there was One greater than even this seemingly omnipotent judge. She knew that right was greater than might. She knew it didn’t matter if this judge had no faith and no sense of social responsibility, since she would by her continuing to raise her voice cause the powers to act for justice anyway. This widow demonstrates what Charles Campbell has recently argued is the ethic of preaching: Preaching is itself an act of justice against the powers and principalities of this world that stand opposed to God’s ways and will.11 It isn’t mere cheap talk. Preaching the Gospel is doing the Gospel. Preaching justice is doing justice. And it effects justice in the lives of people who, by the miracle of God’s gift of grace, do hear and are transformed. Preaching justice raises awareness, motivates concrete acts of accompaniment with the disadvantaged, and spurs advocacy for systemic change of unjust systems. The just preacher as importunate widow is the opposite of “Murphy” when it comes to praying the Lord’s Prayer. Murphy, following his discouraging law that “what can happen will happen,” is turned inside out by the just preacher as persistent widow. She says, “What will happen, can happen.” This is to bring an eschatological dimension to one’s prayers, pleas, and sermons of protest. Jesus taught us to pray saying, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” She asks, “What is God’s will? What will happen in heaven?” And she asserts, “By God, this is what’s got to happen here!” The church exists to continue the eschatological reversal of Murphy’s law for those who have known nothing other than the worst thing happening to them. If in God’s heaven the lonely will be enveloped in loving and supportive community, then what will happen can happen: The church can and will become the loving and supportive community for the lonely now. If in God’s heaven the hungry will be filled, then what will happen can happen: The church can and will become the community of the welcoming table to feed the hungry. If in God’s heaven the naked are clothed,
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the sick are healed, the widows, orphans, and strangers are cared for and given family, then what will happen can happen: the church can and will become that hundred-fold family that Jesus promised. We are neither naively optimistic, nor are we given over to despair and cynicism. We are rather a tenaciously eschatological people: what will happen can happen and by God, for God, and because of God’s own tenaciousness, it must happen in and through our words and actions. In fact, our baptism guarantees it. Baptism is the crisis that we all need to transform our lives from complacency to obsessively driven justice. The crisis exists, as does injustice, and a people of God who have been anointed at baptism to be the ambassadors of God’s will, way, love, and justice in the world. May we be faithful to do the justice, in word and deed, that God has called us to do.12
Notes
‘Cf. André Resner Jr., Preacher and Cross: Person and Message in Theology and Rhetoric (Grand Rapids, Mich. : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), esp. chaps. 3-4 for the nature of discipleship as cruciform existence. 2William Muehl, ‘The Cult of the Publican,” in A Chorus of Witnesses: Model Sermons for Today’s
Preacher, eds., Thomas G. Long and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994), 148. 3PCUSA Research Services reports that total contributions for Presbyterian (U.S.A.) Churches in 2002
were $ 1,972,131,517, an increase of $ 18,738,576 (0.% percent) over 2001. The average contribution per member was $883.46. The synod with the highest per member giving for 2002 was Alaska Northwest; their 61,130 members contributed a total of $75,179,801 averaging about $1,229.83 per member. 4Cf. Ephesians 5:3-5 and Colossians 3:5, where greed is defined as idolatry, scripture’s chief sin; 1
Corinthians 5:11,6:9-11. 5Cf. Philip D. Kenneson, James L. Street, and Stanley Hauerwas, Selling Out the Church: The Dangers
of Church Marketing (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997). 6Resources for using storytelling in preaching include Fred B. Craddock’s As One Without Authority
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, paperback reprint, 2001); Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1985); Overhearing the Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986; and Michael Graves and Richard Ward, eds., Craddock Stories (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001). 7Fred B. Craddock, Preaching (Abingdon, 1985), 162-65.
8André Resner Jr., Just Preaching: Prophetic Voices for Economic Justice (St. Louis: Chalice Press,
2003). 9 Karl Barth, Homiletics (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991).
10Cf. esp. Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press,
1989) zndPreaching andthe Literary Forms ofthe Bible (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990). 1 ‘Charles Campbell, The Word before the Powers (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2002).
12I recommend two excellent resources on the topic of theology and economic justice: Christian Faith
and Economic Justice, approved by the 196th General Assembly (1984) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Hope for a Global Future: Toward Just and Sustainable Human Development, approved by the 208th General Assembly (1996). Write the Office of the General Assembly, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, KY, 40202, call 800-524-2612, or email pds@ctr.pcusa.org. Hope for a Global Future is only $2.50 from PDS.
