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  • The Faith of the Poor: A Invitation to Hope

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    The Faith of the Poor: An Invitation

    to

    Hope

    by Jorge Lara-Braud Director, Council on Theology and Culture, Presbyterian Church in the U.S., Atlanta, Georgia

    “For this reason the human righteousness required by God and established in obedience—the righteousness which according to Amos 5:24 should pour down as a mighty stream—has necessarily the character of a vindication of right in favour of the threatened innocent, the oppressed poor, widows, orphans and aliens. For this reason, in the relations and events in the life of His people, God always takes His stand unconditionally and passionately on this side and on this side alone; against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly; against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied and deprived of it. What does all this mean? It is not really to be explained by talking in abstracto of the political tendency and especially the forensic character of the Old Testament and the biblical message generally. It does in fact have this character and we cannot hear it and believe it without feeling a sense of responsibility in the direction indicated.” Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/I, p. 386. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957

    INTRODUCTION

    I was recently asked to deliver an address which was not quite within my competence. My assignment was to summarize for a large Christian gathering the salient trends in the world economic system. In spite of many hours of research and a carefully gentle presentation, the outcome was far from felicitous . I did end on a note of hope, but most of the audience was not prepared to go along with my analysis. In essence, I held that with the leadership of the industrialized nations, the earth in the 1960’s was organized as a global factory by the economic lords, and in the 1970’s as a global arsenal by the military lords. And since the human agenda was not primary to either group, the human prospect had never been in greater jeopardy. The hope I held was that of my own and other denominations: the promotion of the New International Economic Order which the United Nations since 1975 has favored as a sort of global Marshall plan. Allowing for my incompetence in technical economics and my failure as a speaker to empathize with an audience already frightened by ominous economic setbacks, I was still struck by the contrast between the fear of the future among us, the Christian non-poor of the United States, and the hope for a

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    different future among the struggling Christian poor in Latin America. The contrast is fairly easy to explain. For those who have much to protect, losing ground induces fear and self-protection. Conversely, for others who never had much to protect, there is little to lose, but much to hope for in a change of circumstances. In Latin America, the vast majority belong to the second group. But what may be of utmost importance is that both as individuals and as a class, millions today are to be found among the struggling poor who are the primary actors in a Christian movement no less far-reaching than the 16th century Protestant Reformation.

    MEDELLIN: THE CLAIM OF THE CHRISTIAN POOR ON THE CHURCH

    This movement is rightly identified with Latin American liberation theology . But, to be precise, one should say that first came the movement and then the theology. The sequence is basic to the integrity of the new church which God’s Spirit has been raising in Latin America since the late 1960’s. That it was born as a massive movement in that part of the world is no coincidence. Nine out of ten Latin Americans are baptized Roman Catholics, and either of those are poor. More important still than such statistics is that an authentic ecclesial miracle took place in 1968. In Medellin, Columbia, the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (CELAM II) committed themselves to give their top pastoral priority to the poor. In a real sense the bishops were converted by the tenacity of the hope of the poor. Although these poor Christians had much reason to give up on the church, they claimed their birth-right within in. In fact, they claimed to be the church, not just to belong to it. At Medellin the Catholic Church was supposed to engage in a Latin American follow-up to the Second Vatican Council (19621965 ). Instead, to its own surprise, it began to rediscover its identity as the companion of Jesus among the poor. This experience of conversion has come to be known as “the preferential option for the poor.” The 1979 Puebla Conference of CELAM III ratified the same stance, and in so doing, it confirmed that following Jesus is inseparable from communion with the poor.

    GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS IN THE NEW ACCOUNT OF FAITH

    Liberation theology is the account of faith resulting from this new (and ancient) way of being the Church. This is to say the understanding of the Bible , the Creed and the magisterium (the living tradition of the Church) comes from the “underside of history,” where the Good News of Christ is preached to the poor and where their emancipation breaks in as the preeminent sign of the arrival of God’s Kingdom. It takes no clairvoyance to realize that such an account of faith is an immediate threat to all the tyrannies that rob men and women of the abundant life preached and ushered in by the Lord of the Church and the world. Indicted are economic and political systems which keep the poor “in their place.”

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    Unmasked is the violence perpetrated in the name of order, stability, national security or anti-communism. Rejected is the fiction that the church or theology takes no sides (such neutrality become transparent in its support for things as they are). Denounced are the rich—persons and nations—who came by their wealth by exploiting the labor and goods of the poor. Condemned is the militarism whose only purpose is to protect privilege at the expense of the unarmed. Good news for the poor inevitably carries with it this sort of reverse bad news for those who oppose the hope of the poor. The most dramatic evidence comes from the ranks of the Latin American Catholic Church itself. In spite of Medellin and Puebla, and in spite of the vibrant new life of the believing, struggling poor, most rich Catholics and not a few of their chaplains among bishops and priests, denounce the new church as subversive, political, worldly—in sum, an aberration to be fought against.

    SHARING THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST IN THE WORLD

    The new church became “illegal” the moment it took the side of the poor in imitation of its Lord, and like him, it began the way of persecution and martyrdom. Of course, a church which knows itself to be worthy of sharing the sufferings of Christ in the world becomes invincible. That is, unfortunately, something the legalized killers in the service of national security cannot possibly understand. Their concept of order is the preservation of the status quo, often in the name of Western “Christian” civilization. It is appalling to realize that in Latin America today the martyrs of the new church are being killed by fellow-Christians trained and financed by other Christians. That explains the (unheeded) appeal made to Salvadoran soldiers by Archbishop Romero in his last homily (March 23, 1980):

    Brothers, each of you is one of us. We are the same people. The peasants you kill are your brothers and sisters. When you hear the words of a man telling you to kill, remember instead the words of God, “Thou shall not kill·” God’s law must prevail. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. . . . In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people who have suffered so much and whose laments cry out to heaven, I beseech you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God, stop the repression!

    A previous, related appeal was also made by Archbishop Romero to President Carter (February 17, 1980). Addressing him as a fellow-Christian, the Archbishop begged that no U.S. military assistance be given to the Salvadoran government because “it will almost surely intensify the injustice and repression of the common people who are organized to struggle for respect of their most basic human rights.”

    “THE AMERICANS ARE KILLING US”

    Because both appeals failed, Archbishop Romero became one more of the

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    thousands of martyrs of the church of the poor. And the carnage goes on, unabated , and the primary target continues to be the believing, struggling poor and their defenders. Amidst the horror one often hears “the Americans are killing us.” Between 1950 and 1975 the United States trained 71,651 Latin American military officers, including eight of the region’s dictators, and in addition supplied $2.5 billion worth of armaments. More recent figures could easily parallel or enlarge the amounts of personnel and armaments recorded for those years. The cost of national security against the Christian poor and other subversives seems to escalate in direct proportion to the increase of their hope. The new church, so biblical in its teaching and preaching, so centered on Jesus as its companion and liberator and so expressive in its base-level communities of the priesthood of all believers, has evoked a growing Protestant partnership . It is still a minority partnership, but one full of ecumenical promise. That may open up more conduits of understanding among Christians in a still predominantly Protestant United States.

    SHARED FAITH: SHARED HOPE The faith of the poor in Latin America is indeed an invitation to hope among us fairly comfortable U.S. Christians. Surely their perseverance and faithfulness are a loving rebuke to our cruel innocence when it comes to the misuse of American power against them. Surely we have something to learn from them whose hope against hope keeps the future open for more concrete realizations of the Kingdom of God against the horror of nuclear extinction posed by the super-powers. Surely the believing, struggling poor remind us that both poverty and luxury have no place in God’s shalom. Perhaps the greatest invitation to hope lies in the willingness of the new church literally to lose its life so that it may regain it in the power of Christ’s resurrection. Life used to be cheap and death senseless for the Christian poor and their defenders. That is no longer so. The rediscovered God of Jesus of Nazareth is supremely the God of life. Life is therefore sacred, to be treasured and nurtured in its infinite dignity. But if for the sake of my friends and their future, I must risk it, like Jesus did for me and all humanity, then I have learned indeed to live beyond fear: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay life down for one’s friends.” That generosity toward life and death is indeed an invitation to hope.

  • Pentecost: In Search of Spirituality

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    PENTECOST: IN SEARCH OF

    SPIRITUALITY

    by Joseph S. Harvard, III

    First Presbyterian Church, Durham, North Carolina

    If we listen attentively, we shall hear,

    amid the uproar of empires and nations, a

    faint flutter, the gentle stirring of life and hope

    -Albert Camus

    What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

    nor the heart of man conceived,

    What God has prepared for those

    who love him,

    God has revealed to us through the Spirit.

    For the Spirit searches everthing,

    even the depths of God.

    -I Corinthians 2:9-10

    In his novel, The Final Beast, Frederick Buechner tells about the Reverend Theodore Nicolet who passes his church’s bulletin board which reads: “Pentecost: The Birthday of the Church, 11:00 A.M. Sunday.” Later in the novel, Mr. Nicolet envisions what will happen after the service: “They would file past, shaking his hand. ‘It was so lovely, so spiritual . . . A fine message . . . You really put it to us that time, Nick . . .’”* How would you feel if someone greeted you at the door following worship with the remark: “You had a spiritual sermon today, preacher”? Most of us in mainline churches would be ambivalent about such a comment. What does it mean to preach a “spiritual” sermon? It is a reasonable question to ask in a discussion of preaching during Pentecost. Even though we observe Pentecost as an important event in the Christian year, we are ambivalent about spirituality. Our ambivalence about spirituality is not confined to our image of wild worship services among Pentecostals, charismatics, or other “sects,” which make most mainline preachers shutter. There is also a historical hesitancy to embrace spirituality which grows out of an embarassment over “the distinctive doctrine of the Presbyterian Church in the United States.” Dr. E.T. Thompson ‘s discussion of “the spirituality of the church” is a valuable reminder of how our ancestors hid behind “spirituality” to avoid addressing the issue of slavery from the pulpit. The result was a defense of slavery. James Henley Thornwell argued that as a spiritual body the church should not interfere with civil relations, but concentrate on “spiritual influences.”2 Such arguments have modern equivalents which suggest that the primary role of the church is to

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    establish “homogeneous” congregations or to address “spiritual” issues while the world struggles to avoid nuclear holocaust, racial conflict, and starvation. The attempt to divide “spiritual” issues from mundane matters such as economics and human relations reflects a dualism which denies the essence of the incarnation. Any search for spirituality places us in the company of Jesus of Nazareth who began his ministry with this text: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has annointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” (Luke 4:18-19). The Spirit which annointed Jesus to address the Good News to the oppressed and the poor does not allow us to privatize our spiritual experience. The Spirit of the Lord leads us in mission. In spite of an uneasiness about the roads down which searches for spirituality have led, there is a renewed interest in the spiritual life. Henri Nouwen, a Roman Catholic priest, who until recently taught at Yale, has been the leader in the quest for a new spirituality. The new quest is a recognition that our resources are inadequate for the tasks of preaching and living in a world flirting with self-destruction. Nouwen suggests, “There is a great hunger for a new spirituality that is a new experience of God in our own lives.”8 According to Nouwen, this hunger grows out of the separation between professionalism and spirituality which is the main reason for the many frustrations, pains and disappointments in the life of numerous Christian ministers. He argues that the development of professional skills as valuable as they may be are no substitute for the development of a spiritual life with personal faith and insight into life at the core.4 Another leader in the search for Spirituality is the novelist and preacher, Frederick Buechner. In The Final Beast, the young minister, Theodore Nicolet asks a parishioner, Clem Vail: “Why do you want to join a church? You believe in God or something?” “Do You?” Clem Vail responded surprised at his own question since he had no real reason for asking it. “Sometimes I believe in the hot breath down my neck.” “I suppose if somebody was breathing down my neck,” Clem said, “I’d believe in that, too.” “Somebody probably is.” “I’ve never gone in too much for the Holy Ghost.” “Well, I’m sure the feeling’s mutual.”5 The “spirit” means breath or wind so we are dependent upon it and surrounded by it. And yet, like Clem, we’ve never gone in too much for the Holy Ghost. Paul Tillich points out the dilemma:

    . . . The use of the term “Holy Ghost” produces an impression of great remoteness from our way of speaking and thinking. But spiritual experience is a reality for everyone, as actual as the experience of being loved or the breathing of air. Therefore, we should not shy away from the word Spirit. . . . for this is what Divine Spirit means: God present to our spirit.6

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    Women and men from all walks of life seek a dimension to life which enables them to survive and to make some sense out of their lives. This desperate search has led to some bizarre experiments in an attempt to experience the Divine Spirit. What our search suggests is that the Spirit is not to be found on the periphery but in the middle of our chaotic lives, where we are increasingly aware of the permanent threat of total destruction and cry desperately for a new spirituality which enables us to come to terms with our search for meaning . It is at the center of life we experience somebody breathing down our neck. Spiritual preaching hears the desperate cry and the breath on our neck. Prayer, study, and meditation are traditional ways of nourishing the spirit. What Nouwen does is to go beyond the “how to” exercises to describe the reality which is vital for the spiritual life. It is “to experience the transcendent Spirit of God.” Transcendence enables us “to break the boundaries of our imprisoned world which frees us for the discovery of God’s life-giving Spirit in the midst of this maddening world.” The freedom to perceive what God is doing in the world is the essence of true spirituality. It is like putting on a hearing -aid which enables one to hear a deeper dimension to life. Nouwen believes the function of ministry and the practice of spirituality come together when we are able to hear the sounds which break through the chains of death and destruction and create new life which can be affirmed.7 An example of what Henri Nouwen wants to encourage is found in the movie “My Dinner with Andre.” The movie is a simple story of a dinner between two old friends. All the action takes place during a two hour conversation in a restaurant. Wally is reluctantly keeping a dinner date with Andre because he has heard that Andre has engaged in strange behavior, talking to trees and animals and weeping at inappropriate times. As the dinner begins it appears that the reports are accurate that Andre has lost touch with reality. However, as the dinner conversation progresses it becomes apparent that Andre is in search of a lost language to overcome the boredom and despair that plagues many people who are playing prescribed roles which cut them off from the meaning of their lives. Andre and Wally are playwrights and actors by profession. Andre complains that their profession has succumbed to conventional wisdom by describing vividly the raw experiences which characterize contemporary life. These portrayals confirm the feelings of being powerless to do anything about the tragic quality of life. In contrast, Andre describes an experience with a group of unemployed actors in Poland. At the conclusion of a workshop, the group performs a baptism of Andre in which they give him a new name. The effect of the joyful ritual is to lift Andre’s spirit and give him a new perception of reality. As the movie closes, Wally is riding home through the streets of New York where he has grown up. Passing a familiar clothing store, Wally suddenly remembers the day his father took him there to buy his first suit. An ice cream parlor which Wally routinely passed is suddenly alive with memories of ice cream sodas shared with classmates and friends. The dinner has empowered Wally with a new perception of reality which revives his spirit. It is not an easy transformation for Wally as he has been content with conventional wisdom

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    which defines reality as one dimensional. Andre invites him to perceive reality from another dimension. The story of Pentecost offers a similar transformation. The Spirit enabled people who spoke in different languages to understand each other. The search for spirituality involves the discovery of a lost language which uses the imagination to remember, to hear, to see, to feel, to perceive a new reality which preserves our humanity. The television advertisement suggests that the ability to reproduce information , even an ancient manuscript, by a copying machine is a miracle. There are many useful functions that machines can do for us but they cannot tell us who we are. The lost language of transcendence introduces us to a new reality about ourselves. This is the sound of the Spirit—”Somebody breathing down our neck.” Henry Nouwen and Frederick Buechner want us to hear this language because it is essential for preaching and living with an authentic spirituality. Nouwen says “the spiritual life is a life in which we struggle to move from absurd living to obedient living.” He points out that absurd contains the word surdus which means “deaf’ so that absurd living is remaining deaf to the Spirit. According to Nouwen the world in which we live conspires against our hearing in order to make us deaf. Deafness leads to a life filled with events without fulfillment—”busy yet bored, involved yet lonely.” These symptoms of the absurd life mean that we are painfully cut off from the vital source of our existence—God’s life-giving spirit. In contrast the spiritual life is characterized by obedience which includes the word audire which means “listening.” “Living a spiritually mature life is living a life in which we listen to the voice of God’s Spirit within and among us . . . To be obedient means to be constantly attentive to this active presence of God.”8 How do we hear the voice of God in our lives? Nouwen suggests the three disciplines of the Spiritual Life: The Church, The Book and the Heart. Spiritual preaching draws from all three sources as we listen for and help others to hear what Peter Berger calls signals of transcendence: “phenomenan that are to be found within the domain of our natural reality but that appear to point beyond that reality.”· At times the sounds are clear for all to hear. Our time seems to be one in which we must strain to get a signal of transcendence. Listen as Arthur Yereance who is 92 years old describes such a signal: “Sometime ago I was looking toward the west as the sun slowly disappeared behind the treetops. It was a strange feeling that possessed me as I watched the sun disappear. My mind was free of thoughts. I was marvelling at the beauty of it all when suddenly this thought came to mind—losing sight of the sun with its warmth was like losing a dear friend. As this thought lingered, bringing with it the sorrow that accompanies such happenings, the sky turned a beautiful pink. The glow spread across the whole horizon and it seemed to me God was telling those who listen that going home is beautiful, that the warmth of God’s love is ever present and its glow is like the glow of the beautiful sunset.”10 Another illustration comes again from The Final Beast as Buechner de-

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    scribes Theodore Nicolet stretching out on the grass near his father’s barn: Two apple branches struck against each other with the limber clack of wood on wood. That was all—a tick-tock rattle of branches—but then a fierce lurch of excitement at what was only daybreak, only the smell of summer coming, only starting back again for home, but oh Jesus, he thought, with a great lump in his throat and a crazy grin, it was an agony of gladness and beauty falling wild and soft like rain. Just clack-clack, but praise him, he thought Praise him. Maybe all his journeying, he thought, had been only to bring him here to hear two branches hit each other twice like that, to see nothing cross the threshold but to see the threshold, to hear the dry clack-clack of the world’s tongue at the ap­ proach of spendor. 11

    For those who have ears to hear in the desperate cry of the poor, or a faint flutter of hope or the clack-clack of two apple branches, there is the voice of God’s Spirit breathing down our neck and breathing new life into sermons and lives. Such listening is at the heart of a search for spirituality.

    And when the fight is fierce, the warfare long, Steals on the ear the distant triumph song, And hearts are brave again and arms are strong. Alleluila! Alleluila! 12

    1 Frederick Buechner, The Final Beast (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 175.

    2 Ernest Trice Thompson, The Spirituality of the Church (Richmond: John Knox Press.

    1961), p. 25. 3 Henri J.M. Nouwen, Creative Ministry (New York: Image Books, 1971), p. xxiii.

    4 Ibid., p. xxiii.

    5 Buechner, op. cit. p. 27.

    β Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), p. 85.

    7 Nouwen, op. cit. p. 117.

    8 Henri J.M. Nouwen, “Spiritual Director”, Reflection, Volume 78, No. 2, January, 1981. p. 7-

    8. 9 Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels (Garden City, Doubleday, 1970) p. 65.

    10 From a Letter to the editor in The Charlotte Observer, February 25, 1982.

    11 Buechner, op cit., pp. 177-178.

    i a The Hymbook, “For All the Saints Who from Their Labors Rest,” p. 358.

  • Bit Parts in the Christmas Pageant

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    Bit Parts in the Christmas Pageant

    by Thomas G. Long

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.

    The story is, I suppose, as old as Times Square and as corny as “Mary Poppine”: a Broadway producer has spent a long and tiring day reading through a stack of plays by hopeful, but hopelessly pedestrian, playwrights. Nearing the end of the day, and his tolerance, he reaches out for the last play in the stack and accidentally picks up a copy of the Manhattan telephone directory . He thumbs through a few pages, then scribbles a note to himself on the cover, “No plot. . . but what a cast!” When it comes to the Christmas story, the ancient narrative of the birth of Jesus, the plot, of course, moves us, inspires us; but, in some ways, it is the cast of characters that knocks us off our feet. The plot is shaped by God’s mighty and redemptive act into a parabola of grace. Heaven touches earth. The proud are scattered; the low exalted. The hungry are filled; the rich are sent away empty. A divine coup d’etat. Into the fabric of this majestic plot, however, are woven the unlikliest of threads. What a cast! The children’s Christmas pageants in country church basements on Sunday evenings perhaps capture it best with their slack-jawed shepherds in terry-cloth bathrobes, fawn-eyed Marys more child than woman, and gauzy angels with Reynolds-wrap wings bouncing wildly to the beat of “Gloria in Excelsis.” In what is arguably the best of the scholarly commentaries on the Christmas narratives, The Birth of the Messiah, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co. 1977) Raymond Brown notes how the fanciful imagination of later Christian piety has worked overtime on the characters of the nativity stories, most notably the Matthean “wise men.” First they were elevated to royalty, becoming kings instead of mere magi. Then they became three in number and were given names, such as Balthasar, Melchoir, and Gaspar. By about A.D. 700 they were given colors: Melchoir was “white-haired,” Gaspar was “ruddy complexioned ,” and Balthasar was “black-skinned and heavily-bearded” (Brown, pp. 197-200). That these characteristics of the wise men are extrabiblical may come as a surprise to the art department at Hallmark Cards, but not to Brown, who knows the text. Having rehearsed how it is that we have tinted the Matthean magi with non-biblical crayons, however, Brown makes a startling remark:

    We may smile at the anachronisms in such descriptions, but this imaginative reflection on the magi is not too far from Matthew’s own intent. In the persons of the magi Matthew was anticipating the Gentile Christians of his own community . . . . Subsequent Christian midrash continued this process of coloring-in the outline of the magi with hues familiar from the lives of Christians of later centuries . . . . Naive? Yes, but a valid hermeneutic instinct nevertheless. (Brown, pp. 199-200) [emphasis added]

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    What do we have here? If I read him correctly, we have none other than the respected Dr. Brown suggesting that by dressing our children in cardboard crowns and lamé sashes, filling their small palms with bottles of allspice and English Leather, and gently urging them on cue toward the Christ child; by allowing these ancient magi to invade our folk-art imaginations so deeply that they emerge as our children, wearing our clothes, and presenting our gifts to the infant king; we have somehow firmly grasped the secret wish of the gospel writer himself! If that notion is anywhere even close to the truth about the power and purpose of the birth narratives, then it will serve us well to pay a visit to the wings at the Christmas drama, to discover who some of the “bit players” in this divine tragi-comedy are and what has happened to them in what Dr. Brown would call “subsequent Christian midrash.”

    Extras: The Genealogy

    While Luke has the dramatic flair to wait until Jesus is 30 years old before trotting out the family tree, Matthew is clearly from the “you-can’t-tell-theplayers -without-a-scorecard” school. He opens his gospel with Jesus’ genealogy , a list spanning forty-two generations and including nearly fifty names, containing such notables as Abraham and David along with clearly peripheral types like Eliakim and Matthan. While Brown acknowledges the tendency of modern reachers to pass over such lists with a yawn or a joke (“When Adam and Eve ate from the tree they ‘began the begat.’ “), he points to the importance of genealogies to the biblical writers themselves (Brown, p. 64). He suggests a number of key features of Matthew’s list (e.g., the three “sets” of fourteen generations each), the most interesting of which is the presence of the names of five women (Tamar, Rahab , Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary). He discusses this aspect in a section cleverly , if riskily, entitled, “Why Bring on the Ladies?” (Brown, pp. 71 f.). This odd presence of five females in an otherwise male-dominated inventory is treated in a fashion similar to, but even more engaging than, Brown by Fritz Kunkel in his Matthew commentary, Creation Continues (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1973). Kunkel was a Jungian psychotherapist, not a biblical scholar, by trade, and his unrelievedly psychological approach renders his commentary something of a loose cannon on the deck of Matthean studies. Creation ContinuesÁs, though, a rare example of a genuinely readable commentary, and every now and then Kunkel actually catches some valuable insight about Matthew which has fallen through the slats of historical criticism. It is Kunkel, for example, who spots how infuriating and disgusting Matthew ‘s genealogy would have been to the first readers of the gospel. The list unfolds pleasantly enough, Abraham . . . Isaac . . . Jacob . . . Judah . . . Perez . . . Zerah . . ., then, wham, Tamar, whose very name conjure up stories of incest. The list goes back to its sonorous cadence: Hezron . . . Ram . . . Amminadab . . . and so on until, wham, Rahab, a harlot. Then Ruth appears, a foreigner, and Bathsheba, involved in adultery and murder. Wham, wham.

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    Through fourteen generations the lineage soars to its climax in David the King. Four times, however, the solemn rhythm of the temple gong is interrupted . In opposition to the ancient custom four women are mentioned —famous women it is true, but each one representing a taint in the ancestry of Christ. (Kunkel, p. 34)

    The reader begins to suspect that something is up. Each time the predictable routine of the list is interrupted by a woman’s name the whiff of scandal is in the air. Matthew knows what is coming; his readers begin to anticipate it, perhaps to dread it: “Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” When all is said and done, Matthew’s genealogy is something of an offense. As Kunkel puts it, “Jesus is neither Joseph’s son nor David’s nor Abraham’s; a new ‘scandalon’!” (Kunkel, p. 35). Brown is more prosaic, “These women were held up as examples of how God uses the unexpected to triumph over human obstacles and intervenes on behalf of His planned Messiah” (Brown, pp. 73-4).

    Supporting Cast: Mary and Joseph

    In Cynthia Pearl Maus’ book Christ and the Fine Arts (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938) there is a print which captures it all. It is Francois Lafon’s “The Son of a Carpenter,” and it depicts a scene from “the world’s most famous carpentry shop.” The boy Jesus stands at a workbench, his hands confidently grasping what appears to be a T-square. Somehow you know that the miters will be precisely correct. From the edge of the painting Mary, seated, looks serenely on, her face full of the sort of dark romantic beauty one associates with silent movie starlets. At Jesus’ side is Joseph, looking far more comfortable to be holding that saw in his left hand than he does to be wearing that halo, which appears to have been borrowed for the picture. Joseph is clearly trying, as most fathers do, to be a wise and helpful father under difficult circumstances , somehow knowing already that the boy will not remain in the family business. Lafon’s painting is classic Christian piety in art, and yet something warm, appealing, and authentic about the holy family shines through nevertheless. These are simple people, gentle people. We want to draw near to these people, and we are mysteriously assured that they will receive us, though we sense that we are unworthy to be received by them. Their reverent and calm acceptance of the miraculous in the midst of the everydayness of their fives touches a hunger in us to discover the treasure in our own much-furrowed lives. Rembrandt’s much-abler hands have depicted a similar truth in his 1646 painting “The Holy Family.” Mary and Joseph are at home, not in Bethlehem but in an ordinary Dutch dwelling. A small, cheery fire blazes on the hearth. Joseph sits to one side, on the boundary between light and shadow. Mary has her shoes off (for goodness sake!) and warms her bare feet by the fire as she plays with the baby Jesus. A purring cat is curled on the wooden floor beside its dish. Almost every detail of the painting virtually shouts of domestic routine . Almost every detail. Curiously painted onto the edge of the canvas is a

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    pleated drapery, a stage curtain, creating the expectancy that any moment an unseen hand may pull the veil across the painting, barring the scene from our view. Commenting on this work, art critic Horst Gereon has commented, “Drapes as a rule are meant to protect from everyday use what is reserved for Sundays. Draperies separate the sacred from the mundane.” (Rembrandt’s Paintings. Amsterdam: Reynal and Co., 1968, p. 92). Rembrandt has portrayed , then, his profound understanding of the irony of the gospel. The holy curtain has been momentarily pulled back to give us a sudden, breathtaking glimpse of the sacred, and what we see is an ordinary couple, with a housecat and a new baby. As William Willimon, commenting on another painting with a comparable theme, has phrased it:

    Old masters . . . did “know it best.” They understood Emmanuel, God with us. They understood our blindness not only to the tragic but also to the triumphant in our m i d s t . . . . We trudge by epiphanies with barely a shrug of the shoulders. “God comes to us only on the stage, in some fantasy drama of the extraordinary,” we say. Not here, not in Bethlehem or wherever else we make our home. In life, the Presence goes unnoticed as we thumb through the evening paper. And so we wait, sitting in the darkness of the everyday until something extraordinary breaks in. Someday God may break into the everyday, we say. But for the time being , it is best to work, eat, make love, pay taxes, fill out government forms, and mind our business. But sometimes on busy, ordinary days like this one, on my way to the breakfast table and the cornflakes, I . . . am reminded: it’s the ordinariness , the everydayness that are our best defenses, our most effective relativization of God’s advent among us. For Bethlehem, and for us, something steals silently across the canvas of our dull lives, unnoticed, unheralded, unexpected. The One whom we await becomes present. And we, anticipating the trumpet blast of angelic messengers or the rending of heavens, sometimes miss God’s advent before our very eyes. (“Advent into the Everyday,” The Christian Century , Nov. 28, 1979, pp. 1178-9).

    Walk-ons: the Shepherds, the Wise Men, and Simeon

    When the shepherds appear in art and literature they are often depicted as emotional counterpoints to the brainy wise men. The wise men plot the trajectories; the shepherds simply feel their way along toward the incarnation. Poet Albert Howard Carter’s “The Second Shepherd” is a good example of this drift. First published in 1969, the poem still has some sharp edges despite its clear sixty-ish tone:

    Like I’m on this crazy-cold hillside all the live-long, die-long night while these like buddies of mine drop out, whip off to this gone starlight.

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    Millions—who’s seen one?—the multitude bit, of angels, and this cat’s “for unto you” tuned them in, a neon-snowflake groove: purple sparklers, saffron flaming blue.

    Nobody was sore, but, man, afraid; “You watch, that’s your bag,” what they said; “Mack” (turns out that’s for real my name), “This is where it’s at. Watch is your head.”

    Watched, man, saw nothing for eternal hours, Till they blew back, faces lit like flowers. (“The Second Shepherd,” in For Magi, Shepherds, and Us. Richmond : John Knox Press, 1976. p. 25)

    If Carter slipped Maynard G. Crebbs into a psychedelic shepherd’s cloak, twenty-five years earlier W.H. Auden fancied the shepherds as anonymous shift-workers adjusting the steam valves in the bowels of some metroplex and struggling, one rung at a time, up the middle-class ladder:

    The First Shepherd: The winter night requires our constant attention, watching that water and good-will, Warmth and well-being, may still be there in the morning.

    The Second Shepherd: For behind the spontaneous joy of life There is always a mechanism to keep going,

    The Third Shepherd: And someone like us is always there. (“For the The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden, New York: Random House, 1945. p. 436)

    Bus drivers, doughnut bakers, word processors, bolt tighteners, hamburger cooks, orderlies, and shepherds: “Someone like us is always there,” and always conveniently dismissed, except, Auden knew, by the gospel:

    The Third Shepherd: What is real About us all is that each of us is waiting.

    The First Shepherd: That is why we are able to bear Ready-made clothes, second-hand art and opinions And being washed and ordered about;

    The Second Shepherd: That is why you should not take our conversation Too seriously, nor read too much Into our songs;

    The Third Shepherd:

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    Their purpose is mainly to keep us From watching the clock all the time.

    The First Shepherd: For though we cannot say why, we know that something Will happen:

    The Second Shepherd: What we cannot say,

    The Third Shepherd: Except that it will not be a reporter’s item Of unusual human interest;

    The First Shepherd: That always means something unpleasant. The Second Shepherd: But one day or The next we shall hear the Good News. (Auden, pp. 437-8) For Auden, then, the shepherds gather up that part of all of us bored senseless by the mechanical routine of our well-ordered lives, glancing apprehensively at our wrist-watches, hoping for something good to happen. If Auden’s shepherds want something to happen, his wise men want something to mean. One wise man follows the star “to discover how to be truthful now,” the second “to discover how to be living now,” and the third “to discover how to be loving now.” These three quests combine into a single, searching journey:

    The weather has been awful, The countryside is dreary, Marsh, jungle, rock; and echoes mock, Calling our hope unlawful; But a silly song can help along Yours ever and sincerely: At least we know for certain that we are three old sinners, That this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners, And miss our wives, our books, our dogs, But have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are. To discover how to be human now Is the reason we follow this star. (Auden, pp. 430-1)

    Matthew tells us that the wise men, having sought and found, played hide and seek with Herod and “departed to their own country by another way.” It is almost irresistible, of course, to wonder about them “back home,” back with their dinners, wives, books, and dogs. T.S. Eliot, in his “Journey of the Magi,” sketches for us a picture of an older, reflective Magus (a Wiser Man?), remembering the journey, still gazing in wonder at the deep mystery found at the end of it:

    All this was a long time ago, I remember,

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    And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death. (The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1952. p. 69)

    And don’t forget Simeon. The composer has given him one song, the choreographer one dance step. He is old, of course, very old, kept alive on the respirator of hope and the Spirit. “I am tired with my own life,” Eliot has him say, “and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me. Let thy servant depart, Having seen thy salvation” (“A Song for Simeon,” in The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950. p. 70). You know the story of course, but can you see it? Simeon has worked on his one number, endlessly practiced his soft-shoe, waits now for his cue. Can you see it? The Spirit prompts him into the temple. He sees Mary, Joseph, and the baby there. His moment has come, and his aged arms reach out for the child. Do you see it? The artist Giotto has seen it, seen it well. His “Presentation in the Temple ” is, according to John W. Dixon, Jr., “One of the few genuinely witty paintings in great art” (Art and the Theological Imagination. New York: The Seabury Press, 1978. p. 96). Simeon holds the babe, his lips moving now beneath his hoary beard, carefully reciting his oft-rehearsed lines, “Nunc dimittis . . . . Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace . . ,.” Giotto knows his Simeon. He also knows his babies, for the infant Jesus, far from resting contentedly through this aria, is responding as all babies do when held by eccentric strangers . Jesus wants nothing of it. His dark eyes are narrowed and fixed in frozen alarm on Simeon. He reaches desperately for his mother, every muscle arched away from the strange old man. Giotto has grasped the human feeling of this scene . . . and the irony of it. For as Jesus reaches away from Simeon toward Mary we observe that the infant is suspended momentarily above the temple altar. “This very human baby is,” observes Dixon, “from the beginning, the eternal sacrifice for the redemption of mankind” (Dixon, p. 96).

    Curtain Call

    It should now be clear what a risk God takes in giving us the Christmas stories, for look at the ways in which we have cast them: barefoot Marys, middle -class shepherds, and existentially philosophical magi. There is our nextdoor -neighbor reciting the Nunc Dimittis, the kid down the street in Nikes

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    carrying a cigar box of frankincense. There is our daughter, adjusting her halo and singing, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” And there we are, staffs in hand, stumbling over each other to catch a glimpse of the new-born King. What a risk; what a glorious risk! As John Vannorsdall puts it:

    And that’s what we, the people of the Church, are intended to be. The manger in which the Word is laid each day, the body of Christ on our own city streets, the orchestra which plays on a mid-Summer’s eve. We are the voice of angels singing glory to God at an interchange on 1-84. We tell stories about the wheat and the tares, the future of the poor, the halt, the lame, and the blind. We know about cock’s crow, speech that betrays, and sleep which cannot wait. But we are Sunday’s people always, who receive into our hands the Word of God present to us now. The One who calls us to receive the future coming, to lift up our hearts and receive now the bread of life for today’s living. (“The Incarnation as Danger and Promise ,” a sermon preached on the Lutheran Series of the Protestant Hour, December 31, 1978)

  • God’s Compassion and the Passion of Christian Life

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    GOD’S COMPASSION AND THE

    PASSION OF CHRISTIAN LIFE

    by Winn Legerton

    Charlottesville, Virginia

    “And he (Jesus) began to teach them (the disciples) that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly.” Mark 8:31-32a.

    “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” I Cor. 1:17.

    “When I came to you, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” I Cor. 2:1-2.

    As an aide for sermon preparation and preaching during Holy Week, this study considers the meaning of God’s compassion in the passion of Jesus Christ, Jesus’ suffering and journey to death on the cross, and its dynamic meaning for God’s compassion and passion in the lives of Christian believers today. That the cross of Christ may not be emptied of its power, we are re­ minded by Paul that the eloquent wisdom and lofty words of human institu­ tions are overturned and superceded by the Crucified Christ. By this gospel, God “chose what the world considers nonsense to shame the wise,” and “chose what the world despises . . . in order to destroy what the world thinks is im­ portant.” (I Cor. 1:27-28; Today’s English Version: Good News Bible)

    I

    The Journey to the Cross

    In the remembering and reenactment of the events of the Passion Week, we tell and re-tell the story of Jesus’ journey to the cross. This journey is a drama of the passion, ρασχα, the suffering, of Christ. From Jesus’ Entry into Jerusalem on Passion Sunday, and specifically from the Supper on Thursday and the night in Gethsemane, to the crucifixion outside the city gates on Fri­ day, and Jesus’ death, the events portray a drama of suffering in which “Jesus is the acting subject of a ‘pa0eii/’ understood actively.” 1

    This drama, in its individual stages and in its totality, is a story that we must hear and retell in the active voice. We describe Christ’s journey to Jeru­ salem as his passion, as when Luke writes, “After this time Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem.” (Luke 9:51) The journey to Jerusalem and the journey to the

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    cross reveal God’s passion in Christ, God willfully deciding and acting in human history. For Jesus, this obedience is a passionate obedience: a singleminded setting-of-the-heart, in compassion with and for all who suffer. The journey through affliction and to death on the cross is fully symbolized as well as realized in understanding the meaning of the cross in the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day. The cross is not only the instrument of most severe torture and death for the enemies of the state, it is also a weapon of fear, the most humiliating practice for moral and physical persecution in the Empire. The Cross of Christ is a stumbling block, Paul says, for people trying to understand God’s activity on a cross.

    For the orthodox Jew of this time, the cross represents the most serious form of public ridicule ostracism, racism, and torture at the hands of a foreign power. Any notion of God’s activity in the world which is bound to the cross is certainly viewed with much suspicion and question. On the surface, the cross reveals no visible sign of God’s power and respect, no security, and no blessed leader of the nation—only the upsetting event of a social outcast who is weak and defeated, bloody and dead. . . . “For the average Greek of this time, the cross is a weapon of torture and persecution which has nothing to do with the experience of God. The cross points out the weakness and foolishness of criminals, not the truth or power of divine reality. Such a notion of the activity of God in a cross is absurd . . . the cross reveals no physical beauty, no wisdom of philosophy , and no boastful expression of might—only the bothersome event of a weak fool who suffers the consequences of upsetting the social fabric of everyday life in an occupied land.2

    That God would choose the cross as the instrument and reality through which the world’s redemption might be known: how absurd! How grand and preposterous —to find God’s glory in a crucifixion.

    In the totality of Jesus’ pain and rejection, unto death, Christian faith seeks to understand the love and compassion of God. The awareness and exploration of the activity of Jesus’ passion, the journey of spiritual and physical pain and social degradation, contradicts any notion of passivity that might be ascribed to Jesus’ suffering. This one whom we know as the Christ actively enters into human life, in its joy and in its pain. In the gospel, the good news of Christ crucified, God’s all encompassing love is revealed: compassion, “suffering together with” (humanity), in the life and death of Jesus. Walter Brueggeman writes that Jesus’ compassion becomes the ground for criticism of the system, forces, and ideologies that produce hurt in the world. In the journey to the cross, “Jesus enters into the hurt and finally comes to embody it.”

    “In his compassion he embodies the anguish of those rejected by the dominant culture, and as embodied anguish he has the authority to show the deathly end of the dominant culture. Quite clearly, the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage

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    charity and good intentions, but has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief. So the structures of competence and competition stand helpless before the one who groaned the groans of the hurting ones. . . . If the groans become audible, if they can be heard in the streets and markets and courts, then the consciousness of domination is already jeopard­ ized. . . . Suffering made audible and visible produces hope, articulated grief is the gate of newness, and the history of Jesus is the history of entering into the pain and giving it voice.” 8

    Thus, Jesus’ passion embodies God’s compassion. And, in this entering into the pain, Jesus embodies that passion and agony of human emotions: an­ ger, grief, pain and desolation. Following his entry into Jerusalem, the decisive entry of the path to the cross, Jesus enters the temple to drive out the traders and moneychangers who have made it “a den of robbers.” (Mark 11:15-19; Matthew 21:12-13) Love is expressed and communicated in disciplined anger, compassion in criticism. Righteous anger grows out of love and grief. In Luke’s account, when Jesus enters Jerusalem to the singing and praises of the com­ pany of disciples:

    “Some Pharisees who were in the crowd said to him, ‘Master, repri­ mand your disciples.’ He answered, Ί tell you, if my disciples keep silence the stones will shout aloud.’ “When he came in sight of the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If only you had known, on this great day the way that leads to peace! But no; it is hidden from your sight. For a time will come upon you, when your enemies will set up siege-works against you;. . . because you did not rec­ ognize God’s moment when it came.’ ” (Luke 19:39-44, The New English Bible)

    The grief and righteous anger communicated in the form of lament, as we feel in the Psalms of lament, becomes the language of suffering. Jesus ex­ presses God’s judgment and compassion in the Lament over Jerusalem:

    “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would Hot! Behold, your house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Luke 13:34-35; parallel, Matthew 23:37-39)

    Characterized not only by the anger and grief of moral and spiritual suf­ fering, the passipn of the cross leads Jesus to extreme physical pain and social degradation. In her book, Suffering, Dorothée Soëlle writes that such extreme suffering, anticipated and experienced in Gethsemane, is always characterized by the sufferer’s experience of being forsaken by God. Extreme suffering constitutes affliction, which Simone Weil analyses “in terms of its three essential dimensions: physical, psychological, and social. ‘Affliction’ involves all three.”4 The cross and the passion of Jesus represent the deepest affliction that our souls can imagine, that our bodies could experience. Soëlle asks, “How can hope be expressed in the face of senseless suffer-

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    ing?” Encountering the cross, she says, Christian faith can make sense only by seeing that “this one whom God forsook himself becomes God.”5 God’s pain, God’s anger, and God’s grief are the subject and the object of the cross. Soëlle tells a story from Auschwitz, related by Elie Wiesel in his book Night:

    “The SS hung two Jewish men and a boy before the assembled inhabitants of the camp. The men died quickly but the death struggle of the boy lasted half an hour. ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ a man behind me asked. As the boy, after a long time, was still in agony on the rope, I heard the man cry again, ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer, ‘Here he is—he is hanging here on this gallows. . . .e

    God, as victim, is on the side of the persecuted and rejected. On the cross, on the gallows, God enters into human affliction. In the paradox of faith, we believe that in this activity, God renounces the powers and instruments of human death.

    II Letting Go of Fear

    In the anguish of Gethsemane, Jesus asks his disciples to sit with him as he prays. Jesus feels greatly distressed and troubled:

    “He took with him Peter, James and John, and began to be horror-stricken and desperately depressed. ‘My heart is breaking with a death-like grief,’ he told them. ‘Stay here and watch.’ Then he walked forward a little way and flung himself on the ground, praying that, if it were possible, the hour might pass him by.” (Mark 14:33-35; J.B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English)

    In the activity of suffering, entering into the pain, Jesus prays that God’s will be fulfilled. The compassion of God in Christ calls upon disciples to lose their lives and to let go of all fear for self, finding security in nothing other than God’s love.

    “. . . deny oneself and take up one’s cross daily and follow me.” Luke 9:23 “For it has been given to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict which you saw and now hear to be mine.” Phillippian» 1:29-30

    The sense of dynamic activity that Christ’s call represents is vibrant in the images of “letting go of fear” and “taking up” the daily cross:

    Letting go of fear, Entering into pain, Taking up the cross Means Encountering our fears,

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    Experiencing our angers, Claiming the fullness of Christ’s passion God’s compassion Among Us.

    Compassionate faith in our time confronts the cultures of apathy, of suppression and repression, of fear and hate abroad in the world. In speaking about apathy, Soëlle points out that the Greek word apatheia literally means “nonsuffering, freedom from suffering, a creature’s inability to suffer”:

    “Apathy is a form of the inability to suffer. It is understood as a social condition in which people are so dominated by the goal of avoiding suffering that it becomes a goal to avoid human relationships and contacts altogether . In so far as the experiences of suffering, the pathai (Greek for things that happen to a person, misfortunes) of life are repressed, there is a corresponding disappearance of passion for life and the strength and intensity of its joys.”7

    Compassionate faith confronts the human fears and angers that we experience in the passion of human life. To ally ourselves with God’s compassion in Christ, we “let go” in order to “take up”—we acknowledge and perceive the pain in our own lives and take upon us the suffering of others. Passionate faith is an extreme compelling emotion, and an intense emotional drive (Webster’s definition of “passion”). This faith involves letting go so that we may lose our lives—for the security and will of God’s justice and mercy. Consider the passion in this contemporary faith statement: “I believe that Jesus died so that no human being should ever have to die that way again.” “We shouldn’t have to . . .,” but we do and we will die in similar and different ways if we lose our lives to take up the cross daily. The difference is that we enter human pain in behalf of God’s love and justice and we seek to transform that pain into solidarity and strength, into criticism and compassion. By letting go—of personal security, of national security, of financial security? The cost is so great.

    “To make the cross a present reality in our civilization means to put into practice the experience one has received of being liberated from fear for oneself; no longer to adapt oneself to this society, its idols and taboos, its imaginary enemies and fetishes; and in the name of him who was once the victim of religion, society, and the state, to enter into solidarity with the victims of religion, society, and the state at the present day, in the same way that he who was crucified became their brother and their liberator.”8

    Repression and suppression function within us, in our individual psyches and in our culture, so that we can cope with and bear the pain of human reality . We repress our fears, we suppress our anger, because we imagine that we will not be able to bear the power of these human emotions. “Idols and taboos”, “imaginary enemies and fetishes” keep us safe and secure—in ourselves.

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    Only with God’s compassion are we able to find strength and confidence not to adapt to society and to stand in solidarity with those who are victims. To see God’s glory in the Cross, when we are wont to move quickly on to the power of the Resurrection, we confront the powers and instruments of death in our world. Consider how Jesus’ call to “take up your cross daily” might be rendered in contemporary versions:

    “Take up your firing squad and follow me.” “Take up your electric chair and follow me.” “Take up your tiger cage and follow me.” “Take up your atom bomb and follow me.”9

    In this taking up—and letting go, we perceive and identify those structures, systems and ideologies that are death-dealing. If God has already disarmed these powers and instruments of death, how long will it take us to let go of the security that we vest in them?

    Ill

    Passion and Compassion in Community In order to nourish God’s compassion and the passion of believers in Christ, we seek out a community of faith. In this place, truly wherever, two or more are gathered in Jesus’ name, we have the possibility of vulnerability with God and with one another. In Christian community, we are invited to face and perceive together the events and experiences that are both death-dealing and life-giving. Only when Christian community and family can provide this space, a space in which we become aware of our fear and grief and in which we are able to speak about and analyze the instruments of death, only then will we realize and embody the compassion of God. For North American Christians, community must allow us to let go of guilt that is anger turned inward and to take up the criticism of the cross. In recent years we have begun to develop this language about suffering, speaking as the church about the structures of thought and ways of living that make us benefactors, even executioners, of injustice. To conquer the sense of powerlessness that we feel and to move out of our isolation from one another, we must involve ourselves in sharing the vulnerabilities that society would have us hide. The pulpit is the place from which we can proclaim this gospel; the challenge to the church institutionally is to create ways that this solidarity can be experienced. No single minister can provide enough pastoring to provide this space and place for members of the congregation , much less for the community in which the church finds its mission. In communities of compassion, small groups of Christian believers, members of our congregations are called to encounter with one another:

    —the stories and suffering of persons and families who live with and struggle with alcoholism, drug abuse, and other diseases which are physical and spiritual, individual and social. —the isolation and anguish of “unemployment” or nonemployment,

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    wherein self-identity, meaning in life, and even one’s sense of Christian vocation become threatened and eroded; —the pain and estrangement of women and men, of couples and families, as we struggle with issues of power, of sexuality, of limited resources, in our own households; —the pain and silent suffering of persons in our communities and families , people who are “despised and rejected” by society—be they senior citizens, people of color, disabled and handicapped persons, persons whose life-partnerships are same-sex oriented. —the fears, behind our numbness, that we feel about nuclear weapons and a national economy based on military arms; —the powerlessness that we feel to effect change in the distribution of world resources: food, materials, energy; —the ways in which God’s compassion can enable us to bear pain and work for the transformation of the instruments of death in our world.

    All of us are freed by God’s compassion in Christ. Numbness, the submission of passivity, in repressing or suppressing the world’s pain, only keeps us from being sensitized to God’s pain. In the settings for Christian family and community, the church as a whole and our congregations in particular are called to be people of compassion. Not in any individualistic notions of silently bearing the misfortunes of life, we are asked to discern ways in which we can daily take up the cross together. In a community of compassion, we Christian believers experience the gifts of joy and hope in our solidarity with God and one another. The structures for mission organized by the congregation of the Church of the Savior, in Washington, D.C., provide exciting examples of mission groups which are communities of compassion. The writings of Elizabeth O’Connor and Gordon Cosby, as well as those of Sojourners, Koinonia, and others,10 describe new structures for compassionate Christian communities in our time. Characteristics of the congregations and communities who are, if you will, passionately involved in Christian proclamation and witness, include:

    —the formation of community and mission not around a building or a given denominational allegiance, but out of the identity of the people; —the congregation organized in various small groups, specifically for mission; —Christian education taking place in the context of mission; —a clear requirement of commitment and concretely defined behaviors that result from this commitment; —the opportunity to renew specific commitments in mission and to chart new directions, on a systematic, at least yearly basis; and —a commitment to spiritual development that is rooted equally and mutually in the inward journey and the outward journey of faith.

    The creation of compassionate community, through which we can respond to God’s pain and joy in our humanity, is imperative for our survival as the body of Christ. Matthew Fox, Dominican priest and theologian, seeks to retrieve the spiri-

    li

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    tuality of compassion from its lonely exile, in his book A Spirituality Named COMPASSION and the Healing of the Global Village, Humpty Dumpty and Us. In celebrating the joy of God’s “love-justice”, Fox suggests that the global village is a new mandala, in the sense of a symbol and picture of the sacred and healing circle. He writes that:

    . . . compassion is not altruistic but is a matter of the fullest selfinterest . For we are all alike in our pain and we will suffer equally if the mandala self-destructs. As Paul warned: ‘AH of you are Christ’s body, and each one is part of it. . . . If one part of the body suffers, all the other parts suffer with it” (I Cor. 12.26f.). We love others» as we love ourselves, and if we wish our own survival, then we wish others’ survival and work to make it happen. This is not altruism—it is love, self-love and otherlove . It is compassion, compassion toward others and compassion toward self and compassion toward the precarious world egg, lately named the global village.” 11

    Thus, it is in compassion, our suffering, living and loving with God’s world, that we seek to embody this witness to the Christ. We are sustained by God’s power and being among us—transforming the journey to the cross, enabling the activity of our own passion, and leading us into new life in community.

    1 Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Gerhard Friedrich, Volume V, p.

    916,7τν>σχω (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1967). 2 Mac Legerton, “The Spirit of the Cross,” unpublished Masters Thesis, Union Theological

    Seminary, New York, 1981, pp. 10-11. * Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), pp. 86, 88. 4 Dorothée Soëlle, Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), pp. 85, and 13, quoting Simone

    Weil in Waiting For God. * Ibid., p. 147. β Ibid., p. 145, quoting Elie Wiesel, Night.

    I Ibid., p. 36.

    8 Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 40.

    * Mac Legerton, op. cit., p. 25. 10 See Elizabeth O’Connor, The New Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), and

    Sojourners Magazine, published by Sojourners, Washington, D.C. II Matthew Fox, A Spirituality Named Compassion and the Healing of the Global Village,

    Humpty Dumpty and Us (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1979), pp. 251-252.

  • The Play Is the Thing: New Forms for the Sermon

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    “THE PLAY IS THE THING: NEW

    FORMS FOR THE SERMON”

    by F. Wellford Hobbie

    Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia

    “The play is the thing . . . . ” These are, of course, words spoken by Hamlet as he describes his strategy “to catch the conscience of the king.” Recognizing the need for some way to communicate to the king the fact that his foul deed of murder is perceived, Hamlet decides the best strategy is the use of the form of a play. Form is important, whether in catching the conscience of the king, or in catching the attention of a congregation. So let us focus upon the form of the sermon. We shall attempt to describe its rather impoverished past, its emergence from obscurity, and finally introduce new approaches being taken today. The intention of this too-brief survey is simply to whet the appetite of the preacher for further study and experimentation.

    I

    An assumption of a decade ago was that good sermons were simply the result of solid biblical studies and theological reflection. Content was everything . If form was remembered at all, it was just a faint echo from an almost forgotten class in homiletics about structure and outlines. Generations of ministers left seminaries convinced that if they were competent in biblical exegesis , the result would be congregations sitting on the edge of the pews waiting to hear the latest insights from historico-grammatico exegesis. However, the result , as far too many of us know too well, has been either the glazed eyeballs of congregations in hypnotized stupor, or listeners passing the time counting the pipes in the organ or the lights in the chandelier. There is evidence now, however, of a slow dawning realization that much more is involved in an effective sermon than a handful of study notes. The challenge is to gain the attention of the congregation by placing the message in a form which will capture the interest of the wide variety of listeners before us. Some of these listeners are at the periphery of faith, for whom the biblical language is largely unintelligible; others have heard the message until they seem no longer able to hear. Our challenge is how to get the truth, the gospel, heard among the varieties of listeners before us. One wonders why there has been in the past so little attention paid to how the message is to be expressed. Fred Craddock is certainly accurate in describing the situation:

    Perhaps no word among us has suffered more abuse than “how,” not the honorable abuse of attack, but the humiliating abuse of inattention, dis-

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    regard, slight. “How” has been made to stand out in the hall while “what” was being entertained by the highest minds among us.1

    This disregard of form is in stark contrast to other persons and other disciplines who have recognized the importance of form in which content or ideas are expressed. One recalls, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre turning to the theater and becoming a playwright, recognizing that this medium was the one most likely to make his message heard. Clearly the day is overdue for a rediscovery of the importance of form, to invite it “to come out of the hallway” and to take a more honored place in the creation of the sermon.

    II

    Fortunately, during the last decade, form has been winning notoriety and respectability. This is due to a variety of reasons. First, there is the work of biblical scholars in the area of form and literary criticism demonstrating the inseparableness of Gospel and form. These studies pose the question whether form can be viewed only as a vehicle for content, to be discarded when the idea or concept or teaching has been extracted, or whether form and function are inseparable. They raise the question whether the preacher may be discarding on his or her study desk a basic element in interpretation. For example, to extract from a parable the “idea” or “teaching” and to ignore the characteristic form of the parable in sudden surprise, the shock of the commonplace turned upside down, may diminish radically the power of the material. Secondly, and closely related to the first, are studies in the language event; how language functions and, most particularly, how language functions in the New Testament. Amos Wilder, in his work Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel, recognizes that “the preacher . . . is like a man speaking into a dead microphone,” and suggests that ministers, in order to overcome this failure in communication, would do well to ask the basic question : “What modes of discourse are most congenial to the Gospel?” Again, the focus of concern is upon form. Wilder is helpful in identifying the major modes of discourse as dialogue, narrative, the parable, and poetry, but more importantly , he identifies certain characteristics of these forms. These characteristics are: proximity to oral conversation in that the language is immediate, spontaneous and not discursive in style; the speech is related to the everyday concrete life of the community of faith; and the speech places the listener into the scene, to evoke from him or her some response. The third reason that form has been gaining attention is quite pragmatic. It ¿5 that the form of sermons has become predicatable, stereotyped, leading to boredom for the listener, and forcing ministers to search for new forms of discourse. This frozen form, so predictable in most pulpits, is the point sermon . This form has its roots deep in Greek rhetoric. A theme or idea is extracted from Scripture, and marshalled in a logical sequence designed to persuade a logical listener. This form is easily recognized, for it is the form of most of our preaching. Now one must be careful lest this form be caricatured and dismissed as

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    “an introduction, three points, and a poem.” This form, attempting to present biblical insights in a logical arrangement of ideas in order to persuade a rational listener, when done with expertise, has a clarity and preciseness about it which makes effective preaching. However, difficulties do arise when this one form is the only form utilized by the minister. It may blunt communication simply because of its predictability. The listener , after some years of sitting under such preaching, knows the way the sermon will unfold. First point followed by second point is always the way, and one can imagine the congregation silently counting the points until the final illustration provides “the clincher.” A more serious weakness for this form consistently followed is its tendency to force a distortion of biblical material. As Wilder has pointed out, the biblical message comes in a rich variety of forms. These forms may be leveled out, restrained by being forced into a preordained straitjacket of the point system. As we have noted previously, form and content are at times inseparable, and there are times, most notably in parables, when a rigid point system with its logical progressions may violate the content of the passage. Finally, this form of sermon does have the weakness of being discursive in style, lacking what Wilder has identified as being the genius of New Testament form: evocative, immediate, spontaneous. Indeed, the sequential, logical point system, identifying a theme and developing it logically, almost requires a discursive style, analytical, objective, primarily designed to give instruction or information , rather than endeavoring to involve the listener into the material and evoking a response.

    Ill

    Form has begun to win deserved attention among those of us responsible for preaching the Word. Space will not permit an identification of all of these new forms, but at least several emerging on the horizon should be noted. I have selected three: the inductive form, the narrative form, and a form dependent upon the biblical passage itself. First, what is described as the inductive form.2 There are basically two directions in which thought moves: deductively and inductively. Deductive movement is from a particular truth to an affirmation or application, while the inductive form moves from the general to the particular. The deductive approach is typical of most preaching. From a biblical passage , an idea or concept is extracted. For example, in Ephesians 2 the concept “the unifying power of Christ in destroying hostility” may be selected. Then from this affirmation points and subpoints are made and applied to the particular situation of the hearers. The preacher thus brings to the congregation the results of his or her work; the exegetical tidbit from the study of the text neatly developed and packaged. This deductive, traditional form of the sermon is highly authoritative, with the listener generally passive, willing to accept the truth gleaned from the minister’s study. This approach really assumes as a presupposition the general acceptance on the part of the congregation of the authority of the minister, or the authority of Scripture. The listener is ex-

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    pected to accept what is being said simply because it is being said in church by the minister. But while the acceptance of authority may have been a reality in some past era, no longer does the figure in the pulpit evoke from the listener a meek acquiescence to the authority of preacher or Word. Rather many listeners , now devoid of any commitment to authority, sit back and wait to hear in preaching a Word which speaks their name, describing their human dilemma and evoking from them a response. It is in the light of this reality that the inductive method commends itself. Here, rather than starting off with a truth or idea or concept such as the “unifying power of Christ,” the sermon begins with experiences of divisiveness in the everyday, or the experience in the Ephesian church, and then leads the listener into the passage for a search for some resolution. This inductive method does, in a sense, turn on its head the usual moves in the form of the sermon. Application to the contemporary comes first, raising in the listener the same search for meaning experienced by the originad hearer, and leading the listener into the passage. This approach attempts to enlist the listener as participant , so that pulpit and pew together seek for the Word. The result is a sermon that does not present a prepackaged, predigested set of authoritative propositions, but rather invites the congregation to join in the quest with the preacher and to seek for new insights. There are two basic strengths of this inductive approach. One is that it takes the listener quite seriously. The sermon begins with the listeners, their experience in the everyday. There is a concreteness, a realism about the sermon which arrests the attention of the listener. Secondly, the sermon, rather than presenting truths discovered by the preacher, enlists and expects the listener to discover the truths of the passage. The sermon, in a sense, encourages the listener to follow the same procedures, to ask the same questions the minister asks in his quest for truth. This approach places a confidence in the congregation , and assumes that the preaching of the Word is determined not just by the skill of the preacher, but by the committed hearing of the congregation. There are, of course, difficulties with this form. There is the quite obvious one that some listeners want concrete, predigested truths and answers, and are restive with an open-ended search for meaning. But there is the more serious difficulty, and that is the point raised by Karl Barth in general about preaching : that methodologically, a particular reading of the human scene will influence and govern the interpretation of the biblical passage. There is, therefore, a possible danger that the inductive sermon, starting “where the listener is,” may skewer and distort the meaning of the passage. Now it must be pointed out that the use of the inductive form does not presuppose that a wrong interpretive move will be made. It is quite possible that one may start with a biblical passage, be true to its intentionality, sense its application to the contemporary, but in the strategy of forming the sermon, nevertheless start with the human dilemma, the concrete application, and move inductively toward the meaning of the passage. A second form of discourse is the narrative or story form.3 This is a form one would expect if one searches for clues for form in the biblical material, for a great deal of biblical material is, simply by observation, material in the form

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    of narrative. The biblical writers bore witness to what they believed by telling and interpreting a story of what God has said and done in their history. This story runs from Egypt to Sinai, to kingdom to captivity, to new kingdom to Golgotha, to empty tomb to new Israel. And interwoven in and around this one central narrative, there are stories and vignettes and parables presenting faith in commonplace language. But the narrative form attracts attention not just from its biblical warranty , but also because the narrative form is one of the most effective forms for communication. Close to the spoken word, a story still has power to hold attention , to convey ideas because of its immediacy. Most preachers know that a way to bring a congregation back from the outer limits of stupefying boredom is by the magic words, “once upon a time,” or some other key word signaling the beginning of the narrative form. This story form reaches a significant and dramatic level in the New Testament. For here, as Eric Auerbach has pointed out in Mimesis, the birth of a spiritual movement is conveyed through vignettes based upon everyday occurrences in the contemporary lives of the common people; a blind beggar, a tax collector, a fisherman, an ill woman, disloyal disciples.4 The force of these scenes is that of any other good story: as we listen , we become engrossed, and suddenly find ourselves “in the story”; the questions and responses ours. We become Peter saying in the courtyard in fear, “Woman, I do not know him.” Or, we are the rich man saying in rationalization , “But from my youth up I have kept the commandments.” We are there and respond in the silence of our hearts. But recognizing the significance and power of this form, how is this translated into a sermon? Clearly what is indicated is not the pulpit filled with ministers simply telling a story in the place of a sermon, or piling illustration upon illustration. What is suggested is rather seeking and retaining the narrative movement within a passage, or placing the passage, if it is, for example, part of a Pauline letter without narrative, against the narrative backdrop which elicited the particular passage. For example, the narrative of the divisiveness of the Corinthian church which is the backdrop of the material on the gifts of ministry, on the Lord’s table, on the more excellent way of love, may be lifted up and brought into play as the narrative line for preaching on any of these. Once identifying the narrative, the preacher then identifies a similar vignette in the common, everyday occurrence of congregation and community which allows the biblical story and the contemporary to be seen in juxtaposition. Edmund Steimle, who has been one of the leading proponents of the recapture of the story, puts it this way, “The primary purpose of the preacher is to interweave the biblical story with my story (your story) so that we can see a bit more clearly (even if we do not want to see) who we are, what is expected of us, and what the future may hold for us.” This mode of discourse does not mean just a piling up of story upon story with no time for reflection or observation. This new approach begins with the biblical story or our story. This forms the structure with reflections and observations along the way. If it is done well, the listener becomes involved at the outset with the story, for she sees it also as her story, and she has a part to play, not as spectator, but as participant.

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    If one new form of discourse is emerging as the most popular, it is this narrative or story form. As professor of homiletics, I am intrigued by the enthusiam of the students to use this form, since used correctly it may cut through some of the boredom surrounding a great deal of preaching. But at the same time I am uneasy about its misuse. The difficulty lies not in the use of the narrative form per se, but in the attempt to weave my story into the biblical story. Given the perversity of the human animal, it should be evident which story is going to be dominant. Far too many sermons now utilizing this form are beginning to have a bit too much first person singular in them. The answer does not have to be a rejection of this form, but simply an increased level of sensitivity of its dangers. The pulpit by its very nature provides fertile ground in which egotism flourishes and so restraint is perhaps the key word here. A third form of discourse is one being suggested by David Buttrick.5 Difficult to title, it is basically a return to a form or structure or method based upon the intention, the form, the logic, the movement of the passage itself. The beginning point for Buttrick is the question, “What is the passage trying to do?” The passage stands at the heart of all the minister does in preaching. Not at the center only until the passage yields an idea for the sermon, but at the center in determining the “focus of concern” for the sermon, in determining the logic of movement, in identifying the best form for proclamation. A significant key emphasis of this approach is that preaching should be “a speaking of Scripture and not about Scripture.” The sermon is not to speak of the passage as object to be discussed, from which certain points are to be extracted . Rather, the preacher is to allow the passage in its intention and logic to speak to the human situation of the congregation in its own individuality. This approach to preaching also emphasizes a narrative style with development of a story line. It is interesting that Buttrick’s preconditions for preaching from biblical passages, to wit, that the passage must have a central intention, a logic of movement, rules out certain biblical material as being preachable. If a particular passage does not have movement, narrative line, developmental logic, it does not commend itself as homiletical material. Buttrick does not flinch from simply affirming that some material may not belong in what he calls the “homiletic canon.” In this view, material such as Psalms or Proverbs have a function in the community of faith, but their function is not in the preaching of the Word. One is intrigued by Buttrick’s move in exploring this approach to preaching . It is, of all those on the horizon, the one that takes most seriously the biblical passage standing at the heart of the homiletical task. However, it may not commend itself as being the only way to approach a biblical passage, especially if it forecloses such a rich lode of biblical preaching as Psalms and other Wisdom material. As one way to preach, it presents a distinct and necessary rediscovered emphasis, but not as the only way.

    IV The conclusions of this too-rapid and too-brief survey of new forms of discourse are two-fold. First, that there is a need to break the stereotype of ser-

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    mon structure now dominant in preaching and to investigate new ways of structuring sermons. Secondly, there is no one way of formulating content. A characteristic of effective preaching may simply be its varieties. Just as the biblical author or compiler was free to express the faith in a rich variety of forms, so the preacher must also sense freedom and creativity in the formation of the sermon.

    1 Fred Craddock, Overhearing the Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon, 1978), p. 10.

    2 This form is described more fully by Fred Craddock in his book As One Without Authority

    (Enid: The Phillips University Press, 1974). 3 The number of those writing on this form is legion. Certainly its chief exponent has been

    Edmund Steimle. The book recently edited by him, Preaching the Story (Philadelphia: The Fortress Press, 1980) may be the best introduction to this form. 4 Emil Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton:

    The University Press, 1953). The chapters in this book dealing with the genius of the biblical narrative provide exciting insights in biblical interpretation. 6 David G. Buttrick, “Interpretation and Preaching,” Interpretation XXXV No. 1, January

    1981. This article introduces his understanding of preaching with a succinct survey of forms “biblical preaching” has taken in the last decade.

  • Whither International Mission and Whence Its Support

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    Protagonist Corner

    Whither International Mission and Whence Its Support?

    Malcolm Brownlee

    Jakarta School of Theology, Jakarta, Indonesia

    Most members of mainline denominations in the United States hold a concept of international mission which is about thirty years out of date. Most congregations think mission means sending out American missionaries to do evangelistic work overseas. Some church members believe that this is exactly what the church should be doing. Others see it as a patronizing diversion from more important tasks. But few are aware of the tremendous changes which are taking place in the work of the world church. As a result, international mission today lacks a broadly-based, educated support. Those who might be assumed to be most in favor of current trends have often written off the world mission enterprise as outmoded. Tragically, many persons who could be helping needed changes to take place have abandoned ship and are leaving international mission to more cautious persons who are sometimes hesitant to change. In fact my itineration in the Presbyterian Church in the United States indicates that it is often easier to lead normally conservative Christians to agree with and welcome current trends than to educate normally liberal Christians who have already made up their minds about international mission. Current changes in mission programs involve the style and methods of mission more than its goal. The basic goal remains the same: to witness to the Lordship of God in Christ over all persons and societies and to his saving work on behalf of all persons. The understanding of how that witness is to be carried out, however, contains new emphases and directions. First, there is a growing emphasis on partnership. The missionary outreach of most United States denominations in other nations is increasingly carried out with and through national churches and their agencies in those nations . In earlier years when churches in many countries were young and weak, missionaries played a dominant role. Today, however, the main work of the church in almost all countries of the world is done by Christians who are citizens of those countries, not by missionaries from other countries. Missionaries work not as bosses but as partners who provide expertise and a different cultural perspective. Second, there is an awareness that justice and service cannot be separated from evangelism and the proclamation of the gospel. We cannot witness with sincerity to the love and righteousness of God unless we are concerned about the suffering of the poor and the violation of human rights. Our international mission program will lack integrity if we are not seeking to change those aspects of the world economic order and American foreign policy which hurt the people to whom we are sending missionaries and mission funds. Third, there is a greater humility in our style of evangelism and a greater

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    respect for traditions and beliefs which are different from our own. There is an awareness that our understanding of the work of God in Jesus Christ has been colored by our culture and economic position. Thus parts of our theology may not speak to the needs of those from different backgrounds. Also, many Christians who affirm the uniqueness and authority of Christ are aware that they can learn much from followers of other religions. They seek to balance a respect for other faiths, an openness to new insights, and an absence of coercion with their affirmation of their own convictions and their desire to share those convictions and their accompanying joys with others. Fourth, there is a greater humility in our theology of mission. The church is seen not as the bearer of salvation but as a sign of and witness to God’s saving action, which occurs outside the church as well as within it. There is also an awareness that our nation with its materialism, hedonism, secularism, and violence needs to be the object of Christian mission. It is not accurate to think of our country as “Christian” and most third-world countries as “heathen.” All four of these emphases represent trends, not accomplishments. There are still many differences of opinion and many problems related to each trend. The church desperately needs the thought and prayer of a membership which understands these problems and can wrestle with them. Our success or failure in becoming churches who understand current trends and issues in international mission will determine the type of missionary we send and the type of mission program we have. One third-world church leader remarked, “We said, ‘Missionary, go home.’ But the wrong missionaries listened to us.” Between 1969 and 1975 there was a decline of 31% in the number of missionaries serving under denominations constituting the Department of Overseas Mission of the National Council of Churches. During the same period the number of missionaries related to the more conservative Evangelical Foreign Mission Association and the Independent Mission Association increased about 12%. More important, what type of persons will be attracted to serve as missionaries, and what type of persons will shape international mission policy? Will they be sensitive to the problems involved in representing a rich, western church in countries that are usually poor and non-western? Will they agree in general with current trends in the church’s policy? The issue here is more basic than politeness or even humility. The effectiveness and authenticity of our witness to Christ is at stake. A more adequate understanding of international mission is also needed to avoid isolationism. Some Americans still use international mission as a way to evade issues in their home towns. They find it easier to be concerned about the poor in Africa than about the poor across the tracks. But other American Christians have become so bogged down in a parochial concern for problems close at hand that they fail to see those problems in global perspective. A concern about the world church can widen our horizons. American missionaries and Christians from other countries can serve as reporters and interpreters who help us understand and address such matters as human rights violations, the use of infant milk formulas, and the renewed zeal of Islam. They can also help us look at American wealth, moral standards, and family life from a

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    different perspective. Because they deal constantly with the dangers of a syncretistic mixing of Christianity and other faiths, they can help Americans see the danger of combining Christianity with patriotism, faith in technology, and the worship of success. It is time for us all, liberals and conservatives, to take a new look at international mission.

  • The Madness of Ministry

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    Protagonist Corner

    The Madness of Ministry

    by Gary W. Charles

    Bethany Presbyterian Church, Wilmington, N.C.

    Several years ago, I turned the television to a PBS production of a new play called, ZALMEN or THE MADNESS OF GOD, by Elie Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1974). I became more involved as the story unfolded with each new scene. Soon afterwards, I purchased a copy of this play. Over the past few years it has haunted me, as Zalmen haunts the Rabbi throughout the course of the play. For contained within this play are insights into what prevents us and, at times, enables us to minister in divine madness to the com­ munity of faith. In the preface to this play the editor offers these words, “On Yom Kippur eve in 1965, Elie Wiesel found himself in Russia, in a synagogue crowded with people. The air was stifling. The cantor was chanting . . . . Suddenly a mad thought crossed my mind; Something is about to happen; any moment now the Rabbi will wake up, shake himself, pound the pulpit and cry out, shout his pain, his rage, his truth. I felt the tension building up inside me; the wait be­ came unbearable. But nothing happened. It was too late. The Rabbi no longer had the strength to imagine himself free” (Wiesel, p.ii). In ZALMEN, the Rabbi does finally cry out his truth. Yet, it is not something that he does not powerfully resist. It is in the conflict between the Rabbi and Zalmen that Wiesel examines the struggle of both hearing and obeying the madness of the voice of God. The oppressive situation in which the Rabbi found himself is alien to pas­ tors in the United States. His sentiment is anything but alien. The pressures of Christian ministry today are complex and enormous. Leaving the seminary often as an idealist and visionary, the pastor discovers after a few months in the local parish the necessity, if not the art, of compromise. There can only be so many sermons on the arms race before we find ourselves preaching to emp­ tier pews. There can only be so many demands for increased social awareness made upon a church board before their commitment becomes a matter of di­ minishing returns. I am offering no argument against the legitimacy, and even value, of compromise in ministry. Yet, the frequent practice of compromise tends to cloud our vision and impair our judgment. It becomes so much a way of ministry that we do not set enough limits. In the name of compromise we sacrifice deeply held convictions. In the name of compromise, we deafen our ears to the maddening voice of God (Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, San Francisco: Harper and Rowe, 1929. ρ 177). Challenged by Zalmen to reveal the angst of his community when a group of Western Jews attend the service of Yom Kippur the Rabbi asks, “What would you like to hear? The things I have to say, how can I say them? And who am I to say them? All I can do is pray—I am the shepherd who follows his flock”

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    (Wiesel, p.21). As the Rabbi speaks with such brutal honesty a mournful “Amen” echoes inside many of us involved in Christian ministry. We justify the cloudiness of our vision and the shallowness of our ministry in the most creative of ways. We keep the customers satisfied, to borrow an image from Paul Simon, or we maintain shalom to speak more theologically. Such inauthentic approaches to ministry can easily become our purpose and goal. To take too many risks would certainly alienate some, thus unfairly depriving them of the nurture and fellowship of the church. At times, some of us proclaim an unpopular idea from the pulpit largely to assuage our consciences and boost our flagging self-esteem. Other times, we hold back our vision. We temper the Word of God, because “they” are not ready to hear it. We resist wrestling with the awesome theological, ethical, political and pastoral issues of the day because our people easily tire of listening to these concerns. So, our rationalizations go. “I am the shepherd who follows the flock,” says the Rabbi. Over the years we compromise our integrity. Much more, we compromie the integrity of the biblical vision of life, and even the integrity of our call to “madness.” Faced with a rare opportunity to speak boldly of the oppression of the children of God, Zalmen, the Rabbi’s “beadle,” urges the Rabbi to “let yourself go mad!” (Wiesel, p.78). Like any responsible leader of a believing community the Rabbi wants to weigh the probable impact and estimate the potential damage that could result from such a demonstration. He asks Zalmen, “What happens then?” (Wiesel, p.78). Zalmen cries out, “Let the future take care of the future. Make this one evening count.” It does not take great imagination to hear in Zalmen’s cry the cry of Jesus, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness , and all these things shall be yours as well. Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself’ (Matt.6:33-34). Zalmen is as relentless as the voice of God. Again, he cries out to the Rabbi, “One has to be mad today to believe in God and in man—one has to be mad to believe. One has to be mad to remain human. Be mad, Rabbi, be mad! . . . Become mad tonight and fear will shatter at your feet, harmless and wretched” (Wiesel, p.80). In a rare moment of candor the Rabbi loses his calm and responds to his persistent beadle, “Not so easy, Zalmen, not so easy. Fear and I, we have shared the same roof for a long, long time” (Wiesel, p.80). This is often also our reality. We too are bedfellows with fear. Words go unsaid, deeds go undone, visions slowly blur in the name of pastoral care. What occurs when our pastoral care springs largely from a sense of fear? Does it not become a shabby commodity that really satisfies no one? Zalmen challenges our ministry today as he challenged the Rabbi’s, “Tear your fear out by the root! Let it not become your night and your universe, your silence and your lie—or, what is worse, your truth, your God!” (Wiesel, p.80). Prompted by the tirades of Zalmen and by a vision of God, long since laid to rest, the Rabbi acts in “madness.” During the service of Yom Kippur, at which the Western Jews are present the Rabbi boldly describes the plight of his people. “Dammit, what came over you all of a sudden?,” asks the inspector of the KGB. Almost in a state of euphoria the Rabbi answers, “A moment of unconsciousness, of falling upwards” (Wiesel, p. 88). Implicit in our tendency

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    to compromise deeply held principles, and our reverence of fear, is the suspicision that to respond to the madness of God’s vision would be a destructive experience for both the minister and the church. Certainly, that is a possibility that should not be casually dismissed. Yet, to act upon the madness of God’s vision also holds within it tremendous potential for the minister and the community of faith “of falling upwards.” The Rabbi’s outburst frightens and angers most of his community. The chairman of the community council tries to correct the Rabbi’s disasterous blunder by assuring the Russian inspector, “We have only one mission: to survive . To survive at any cost!” (Wiesel, p.105). The chairman’s words are reflective of the goals, and resulting ministry, of many Christian communities. Whenever this happens, faithfulness becomes confused with survival. To survive encourages us not to say anything too challenging, nor do anything too provocative, lest the delicate balance of the church be endangered. The irony of the church is that to survive is slowly to die. Our ears deafen and our lives rebel against hearing and obeying our God. When survival becomes our goal; even our god, Jesus’ words sound with devastating judgment, “He who would save his life will lose it” (Mark 8:35). There is an element of madness within us whenever we lead our communities of faith to challenge the primacy of survival . When we lose our lives in this way, we open up the possibility of “falling upwards.” A dim spotlight focuses upon Zalmen as the play closes. Turning to the audience with a crazed look in his eyes, Zalmen says, “And you believed me! You really believed me! That story I just told you . . . it never really happened . . . it couldn’t ever have happened. Never! Not here! Not now!” (Wiesel, p.172). As we participate in the drama of ministry, the Word of God calls us to listen, to speak, and to act in ways that others, and even our inner voices of caution, consider madness. The grace of divine madness is that it does not result simply from our deliberate decision-making. It comes to us more as a gift. The theological, ethical, political, and pastoral issues before the church are overwhelming, and will only increase in the days ahead. Undoubtedly, God will provide us, as he did the Rabbi, with moments for madness. We will hear that disturbing voice crying to us, “Be mad! Be mad!” Will we fall upwards? Or will we sit, like Wiesel, disillusioned by our own silence?

  • Protagonist Corner

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    Protagonist Corner

    by Arthur Ross, III

    First Presbyterian Church, Morehead City, North Carolina

    The great festivals of the Christian year are times for preachers to enlarge our own perception of the Truth which we are called to proclaim. One of the aids to assist us in meeting this challenge is the work of modern fiction writers. Flannery O’Conner is one such author. In her short story, “Revelation,” she introduces us to Mrs. Turpin.

    Mrs. Turpin could not see the woman’s feet. She was not white-trash, just common. Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people , not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the whitetrash ; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the homeand -land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered white-face cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.1

    Mrs. Turpin’s effort to classify people and thereby separate the good from the bad is representative of the effort each of us makes to decipher the complexities of life and therby make sense out of creation. Because our efforts are no more successful than Mrs. Turpin’s, we too become frustrated and dream of cramming the whole mess called “life” into a box car and sending it off. This failure to understand human relationships and our disappointment over the apparent confusion of the created order bring us directly to the significance of Easter. For Easter, like Christmas, is a time in the life of the Christian community when we celebrate the revelation which gives meaning to life. Yet the relevation is often hidden by the celebration. The spirit of joy, coupled with the pagentry of music, beautiful flowers, and large crowds obscures the meaning of Easter; we tend to become so caught up in the celebration that we forget the revelation which gave birth to the festival. Christianity is not based on the feelings of majesty created by a sunrise service or of excitement induced by a religious extravaganza complete with massive displays of Easter lilies and glorious music. Neither is our faith built

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    upon timeless truths such as the Ten Commandments or the historical records of the Resurrection. Christianity is built upon revelation. That is, as Christians we believe we cannot discover on our own the truth about the universe; it has to be revealed to us. It has to come from beyond us and be made intelligible to us. However, the more intelligent we are as individuals and the more advanced we become as a society, the greater is our tendency to become like Mrs. Turpin . But like Mrs. Turpin, no matter how great our wisdom or how vast our experience—no matter how good our blood—we cannot make sense out of the complexities of life and we end up with all the events of history “moiling and roiling” around in our head. Revelation, then, means we look beyond ourselves to a power greater than we, for the meaning of life. For Christians, the two great festivals of faith are celebrations of the Revelation which comes from God in Jesus Christ. Christmas , with its message of the incarnation, not only tells of a God who is with his people, but also reveals a God who can and will limit himself that we might know him more completely. And Easter, with its focus on the resurrection, not only tells of God’s power to defeat death, but also reveals God’s ability to transform the crucified Jesus and the defeated disciples, giving them new life and new purpose. We cannot force God to come into our world or into our lives; God chooses to come to us. We cannot take human beings who appear to be useless and give them new meaning and purpose, but God can. God chooses to come to us and God can transform us. These two truths are revealed to us in Jesus and they become the essence of our faith. Neither truth can be discovered on our own, Easter, then, is a time to celebrate the Revelation of the solution to the confusing complexities of life. Out of this revelation comes a new way of seeing ourselves and of seeing all creation. O’Conner makes the truth of Easter known as she closes her story by telling of Mrs. Turpin’s “revelation”:

    A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the

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    invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.2

    When Easter becomes our vision of the transforming power of God, we, like Mrs. Turpin, discover the ability of God to take our world, filled with “battalions of freaks and lunatics,” and turn us into citizens of his kingdom. And it is this same revelation which shows us a God who can take those of us who are filled with pride over having been given “a little bit of everything and the Godgiven wit to use it . . .” and burn away our virtues, transforming us into his servants. When this revelation becomes our bright vision, we too can shout hallelujah.

    1 Flannery O’Conner, “Revelation,” Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York, 1965),

    p. 217. 2 Ibid., p. 238.

  • Protagonist Corner

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    PROTAGONIST

    CORNER

    by Joan S. Gray

    Oglethorpe Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    Emily Warren is an acquaintance of a member of your congregation. She is engaged to be married within a month. Her fiancee, who lives in Seattle, is flying into town four days before the wedding, and they will be leaving immediately after their wedding trip to take up residence in Seattle. She has requested that you perform the wedding service to be held in the home of a friend. Neither she nor her fiancee are members of any church, and as far as you can tell from her answers to your questions, neither are professing Christians . She has already been turned down by three other ministers who refused to officiate at the service unless she and her financée will participate in four to six premarital counseling sessions over a period of a month. What do you do? The above vignette illustrates a perennial problem facing not just parish ministers, but almost anyone who is ordained. Clergy who may seldom officiate at funerals, baptize or even preach will still receive calls from total strangers asking them to perform the marriage service because they are ordained, and as such, are licensed agents of the state. In simpler times it was common for couples simply to show up at the parsonage or church office asking to be married within days or even hours. Even for couples who were members of the church, extended counseling before marriage was rare. However, with the divorce rate spiralling upward, many pastors began to feel that integrity in their contacts with engaged couples demanded a more serious approach. Perhaps in response to the advent of a pastoral care emphasis in seminary training, the route chosen by many in response to this need has been to require that engaged couples schedule a number of counseling appointments with them prior to the ceremony. Covering a wide range of topics from money management to religion to sex, these sessions have helped many couples build a firmer foundation for their marriage. They have also helped ministers feel better about their responsibility for the future of the marital relationship. The requirement that counseling must preceed the wedding causes little problem for many couples. In fact, they often welcome the opportunity to talk about their relationship in depth. But what about the Emily Warrens? Those who are simply not comfortable with this kind of experience or those who for reasons of time or distance cannot schedule a number of sessions with the minister seem to fall between the cracks. While we sincerely attempt to uphold the high standards of Christian marriage in requiring premarital counseling of all couples, they may be hearing us say, “Do it my way, or else. . . .” Unchurched couples who seek out a minister to perform their wedding, only to be turned down repeatedly, must surely develop a rather jaundiced view of the church and its clergy. False impressions developed out ot this experience range from “They only care about members of the church,” to “We have to pass some sort of ‘test’ before he will

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    marry us,” to “The preacher cares more about her rules than about us.” Uncorrected , such negative feelings may fester into outright hostility against the church in years to come. My experience in dealing with people like Emily Warren has led me to reconsider whether extensive premarital counseling is necessary or even helpful for all engaged couples. Perhaps it is time for us to explore other forms pastoral work can take prior to the wedding and to come up with some creative ways to meet the needs of those who are now being turned away. Toward that end I offer three comments. First, research in the area of evangelism has indicated that there are certain key events in life that tend to make one more open to the gospel. These events include the birth of a child, a death in the family, and marriage. Even for a compatible couple with an excellent relationship, marriage is in reality a “leap of faith.” In dealing with unchurched couples seeking to be married, I have found them surprisingly open to discussing things spiritual in the context of the wedding service. I believe that here the minister has a wonderful opportunity to touch lives in such a way that may later result in Christian committment and church membership. A good relationship established while planning and celebrating a wedding is an excellent basis for future evangelistic contacts. However, we must earn the right to approach them with the gospel by being open to their perceived need and accepting them where they are at present. Second, why not look on the wedding service itself as a teaching opportunity rather than as the culmination of a period of prior instruction? If a sacrament is “an outward sign of an inward grace,” then certainly the wedding of people who love each other has a sacramental character. The human reality reflects the divine; the divine reality illuminates the human. Words like grace, forgiveness, faith and committment take on flesh. The wedding celebrates the miricle and mystery of human love in the context of the mystery and miracle of God’s love. In it we bear witness to a God who is personal and relational, who created us for joy, and who is involved in every area of human life, not just the “spiritual.” In order to foster this exercise in “incarnational theology,” my practice is to give the couple a copy of the service I plan to use several weeks before the wedding day. I ask them to go over it separately, then together, noting things they like or dislike along with any sugestione for changes. When we meet several days before the wedding, they have already made an investment in the service, and the foundation for a meaningful discussion about the spiritual dimension of marriage has been laid. Heard sensitively, their comments on various parts of the service can initiate conversation about numerous areas of the marital relationship. This kind of learning experience can be fostered in spite of limitations of time and distance by mailing the copies to the couple in advance . The result is a service that is not only meaningful to the couple, but also a witness to others present who may seldom darken the church’s door. Third, even the best premarital counseling is no guarantee that a marriage will not face rough times. With all the excitement surrounding the wedding it is probable that little the minister says will be remembered specifically. Given these realities, perhaps the most helpful thing any minister can do is to assure

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    the couple that they are not in this marriage all alone. If the problems become overwhelming there are a variety of people who can help them. If they are going to be settling locally, let them know that you are available if they need to talk with you in the future. Tell them about community counseling resources, especially those that do not charge or have a sliding scale of payments geared to what clients can afford. Stress that there is nothing wrong with seeking professional help to heal their relationship if it becomes damaged or to nurture its growth in the years ahead. I have found that a personal faith in God and the support of a community that shares that faith are two things that have helped me weather hard times in my own marriage. I share this insight with couples at times and urge them to consider finding a place where they can explore that kind of faith and find that support when they are settled in their new home. Perhaps more than any other part of the premarital contact, these suggestions about where to find help will be of lasting value, as well as a source of hope in difficult days ahead. These comments are in no way meant to denigrate the usefulness of premarital counseling for most couples, but rather to speak for a balanced approach to pastoral work before the wedding. For some people the time prior to their wedding may be the one occasion in their entire lives that they actively seek out the ministry of the church. It is tragic to let them go away untouched for lack of creative, flexible strategies that will meet their needs while upholding the integrity of the minister.

  • Resurrection and Apocalypse: Biblical Perspectives on the Future

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    RESURRECTION AND APOCALYPSE:

    BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE FUTURE

    John B. Rogers

    First Presbyterian Church, Shreveport, Louisiana

    And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in thee. (Psalm 39:7) No man’s “hope for years to come” is better than interim unless his “expectation” of his future (including his death) has already been committed to God’s love and tendance. (Albert C. Outler, Who Trusts in God; Musings on the Meaning of Providence)(l)

    The issue, then, is Christian hope. We ask after the continuing purpose and providence and presence of God behind and before, above and beneath, within and beyond human existence and the created order. Immanuel Kant wrote in his Critique of Pure Reason that the whole interest of reason, both speculative and practical, is centered in three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? All three are important questions. However, in a time such as ours, marked as it is by uncertainty, anxiety, and loss of confidence, the first two pale before the third. What, indeed, may we hope? How often do our prayers echo that of the Psalmist: And now, Lord, for what do I wait? For what do I work? To what end is my knowledge? Toward what do I live? These are questions deep within the human self to which resurrection and apocalypse are addressed. Both resurrection and apocalypse have God as their subject, and therein is the secret and source of the hope they offer. Resurrection and apocalypse point to the sovereign grace and gracious sovereignty of this God who raises the dead and creates a new heaven and a new earth. They stand as distinctive last words at the end of the Biblical drama of divine grace which begins with the call of Abraham (historically), with the Exodus (dramatically) and with creation (actually). In this sense, the resurrection of Jesus and apocalypse (specifically, the Apocalypse of John) might well be called the climax and finale, respectively, of the Biblical revelation of God as Savior and Lord. In them are gathered up the great themes of creation, reconciliation and redemption, of grace and providence which run through the Biblical drama. In them we are bidden to hear and trust the great good news that God who, in Jesus Christ, graciously elects to be “God with us” and “for us” is, at the same time, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the One from whom we come arid to whom we go. And conversely, the Creator of heaven and earth is One whose very name (i.e. nature) is a sure promise:

    I Am . . . I Will Be . . . I will be with you. I will be there with you/for you. Immanuel—God with us.

    *

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    Resurrection and apocalypse stand at the end of the Biblical story as the gracious promise and the sovereign guarantee that the One who creates and controls the future for which we are bidden to wait and work and hope, is the God who meets us in scripture, and supremely in the person of Jesus Christ, as the Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer of the universe. It is my purpose, in the remainder of this article, to point in the direction of the Biblical bases for this claim, and to suggest some theological conclusions for the living of our days.

    I RESURRECTION AND THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD

    But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead . . . (I Corinthians 15:20a) . . . and I am counting on the resurrection of the dead . . . (Nicene Creed, alternate translation) The solid core of all damnation is the false persuasion that we are done for, that the powers of sin and death have no match, that despair is an honest reading of existence. What we need to know is that all of the power weilded by “the powers of sin and death” is actually supplied by us in our sin, pride, and fear, as we feed the lie that evil has the upper hand. (Albert C.Outler)(2)

    At its deepest level, the resurrection of Jesus Christ means that God is faithful. We have referred to resurrection as the climax of the Biblical revelation of God as Savior and Lord. In one sense the resurrection of Jesus is announced, reported and proclaimed in the gospels and epistles as an absolutely unprecedented event, the acting subject of which is, and can only be, God. At the same time, however, as the supreme expression of the faithfulness of God, resurrection is completely consistent with God as we have been given to know Him in scripture up to this point. In Exodus 3, in the context of Moses1 call and as a prologue to the event of Exodus, there occurs the revelation of the name of God.(3) Two themes are consciously brought together here which identify God, on the one hand, as the God who saves . . . as One who sees the affliction of His people, hears their cry, knows their suffering, and comes to deliver them (cf. Exodus 3:7-8). The very name, Yahweh, (I Am . . . I Will Be . . . I will be there for you/with you) seems to have the character of a promise of God’s effective presence with and for His people. On the other hand, God identifies Himself with the God of the Fathers—the God of the promised blessing to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the God who, by them and their descendents, will bless “all the families of the earth” (cf. Genesis 12:1-3; 26:3-5; 28:13-15). The content of this mysterious revelation is God’s promise that He will be known as the One who accompanies, sustains, secures, guarantees, saves, and provides for His people. But He will be known thus in His own way and in His own time and on His own terms. Throughout the Old Testament, in the subsequent history of Israel, the promises of salvation (deliverance) and blessing (provision) are made good time and again, and they give shape to Israel’s understanding of God. As the God who does Exodus and who acts faithfully and mightily to deliver His people from the threat

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    and oppression of their enemies, He is called “Savior.” As the God of the covenant who binds them to Himself, He is the God of “steadfast lovet” As the God who condemns sin and who disciplines His people in their disobedience, He is called “righteous judge.” As the God who is never satisfied with vengeance, but always seeks restoration and reconciliation beyond punishment, He is called:

    . . . merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. (Psalm 103:8)(4)

    God’s faithful presence as Savior/Deliverer takes many forms, and, as the people respond in worship, there is a tendency to underscore compassion as a dominant trait of His character. God shows compassion through his mighty, saving acts for those who suffer (e.g. Exodus 3:7-8; Psalm 78; Isaiah 40:48; 54). He shows compassion also for the sinner in His acts of discipline, mercy, forgiveness, and atonement (e.g. Hosea 11:1-9). At the same time, God is understood to be as truly present, as effectively present, in the routine, continuous, unspectacular affairs of life. God keeps His promise even in those times and circumstances which fall in the intervals between Exodus and the victory of Gideon and the success of David and the reforms of Josiah and the rise of Cyrus and other such “saving” events. Here God is present and at work to give security, sustenance and provision in the birth and development of children, the growth and maturing of individuals, the development and expansion of families—God present with and for His people, as it were, as the God who blesses. In all this, God is understood as One who makes good on His promise to be with His people, to deliver them and to provide for them. It is no accident, therefore that when the New Testament announces the incarnation of God in the Christ-event, it brackets the life, death and resurrection of Christ with the familiar language of the God whose very nature is the sure promise of His presence:

    Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, And His name shall be called Emmanuel (which means God with us). (Matthew 1:23) And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matthew 28:1820 )

    In the One whose name will be Emmanuel, the promise rooted in God’s name (Yahweh), which dominates the revelation in Exodus 3, finds its final fulfillment. When the risen Christ promises: “I will be with you always . . . , ” we are meant to know that God’s faithfulness to His promise is maintained in and beyond death itself, in and beyond each and every death including your death and my death and the deaths of our dearest loved ones. The Bible leaves little doubt as to Who is in control of the future, and consequently, as to the Source of our hope. The Psalmist in Psalm 39 was more on target than he knew when he answered his own question:

    And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in thee. (Psalm 39:7)

    Now, in our effort to hear the deep and profound truth of the resurrection, it is important to remind ourselves that nowhere does the Bible deny that death is real and that it is a threat to the human self. And yet nowhere has the Bible any

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    misgivings about God’s freedom and omnicompetence. Everywhere His creativity, His divine initiative, His providential care and direction and resourcefulness stand secure against evil in all its forms: sin, unbelief, suffering, disobedience, death. Nowhere does the Bible suppose that God’s own fate is locked into or frustrated by the fortunes of His creation, and it is unthinkable that anything creaturely can finally defeat His purposes. His final goal—the rule of righteousness and the reign of love—is never hedged or sold short. Indeed, the very concept of resurrection has its roots not in the concern for individual survival, but in the theodicy question and concern about the ultimate triumph and vindication of God’s purpose. The promise of God to be present with and for His people is not thwarted by death, even in the Old Testament. Over and again we hear of God’s eternal presence, freedom, purpose in face of death and Sheol (Isaiah 40, 46; Psalm 90, 139; Job 38). Compare, for example, Psalm 139 and its soaring confidence in the presence of God (not only in history and nature but in the Psalmist’s personal life) to the picture of Sheol in Job 10:21-22:

    . . . the land of gloom and deep darkness, the land of gloom and chaos where light is as darkness. (Job 10:21-22) . . . if I mal^e my bed in Sheol, thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead npe, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, “Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to thee, the night is bright as the day; for the darkness is as light with thee. (Psalm 139:8b-12)

    While we have here no idea of a personal survival in heaven, nor any other idea of immortality, and while much about death remains unknown, still God is acknowledged to be present at death as the gracious, ultimate reality who undergirds and even controls our coming and our going. In the New Testament, under the impact of Easter faith, the idea of resurrection develops in such a way that it becomes a source of hope for the individual, God’s victory over death in the resurrection of Jesus now coming to have personal implications. As with the Old Testament’s emphasis upon the reality of God over against the reality of death, so in the New Testament the meaning of resurrection, at its deepest ìeveìj centers upon God and His power and victory over death. It does not mean primarily that “there is hope for me.” It does mean that secondarily, and truly. But that is as it should be; for it is because God is faithful that we have eternal hope, not because of any immortality we possess in and of ourselves. The key question and concern in the New Testament treatment of death is not individual immortality, but whether the universal fact of death mocks the moral integrity of God’s sovereign grace and righteous purpose. That is to say, the key question is theodicy. In this connection, Leander Keck comments:

    The New Testament views of death are not at all concerned with the preservation beyond death of the identity and achievements of the middle and upper class individuals, as are many books today. Rather, because the New Testament is open to a broader range of reality it implies that the starting point for a theology of death and of resurrection is moral outrage against the world in which there appears to be no justice on which the weak can count, a world in which sucklings are bombed and

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    rabbis gassed. The central issue is not whether man has an essence that survives death, but whether the God in whom he believes, however fleetingly, has enough moral integrity to “make good” with the life He himself called into existence. In the last analysis, the central theological issue in the death of man is the character of God. In its own diverse ways the New Testament has always been saying this. It can still hold our feet to the right fire.(5)

    This does not mean that the question of personal survival is unimportant. It simply reminds us where, according to the Bible, our hope really and ultimately lies- -in the faithfulness and sovereignty of God. The Incarnation is significant not only for history and the community, but for the individual as a present and future participant in the Kingdom of God. To say this is emphatically not to justify idle speculation or undue concern over what form “eternal life” will take, or any other self-centered manifestation of the eschatological itch into which pietism and sentimentalism so easily lead us. Like the whole of the Biblical drama, the resurrection has God as its subject, and not humanity. We need to remember that our lives and the lives of those we love are “hidden with Christ in God,” that He will shape them for His purposes and fit them into His plan for His Kingdom, and that they are and will be safe in His keeping for time and for eternity.

    II APOCALYPSE AND THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

    The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever. (Revelation 11:15b, with gratitude also to George F. Handel for knowing that this is more appropriately sung than spoken.) Hope is not the projection of our wishes onto the calendar of the forthcoming future. It is, rather, the confidence that God is holding that future open so that its potential for meaningful participation will remain, so that life will still be fit for living and dying, secure in God’s provident presence in life and death and destiny. ( Albert C. Outler)(6)

    If resurrection means that God is faithful, apocalypse means that God is sovereign and that His is a gracious sovereignty of which the Christ-event is the interpretative key. If His resurrection is the climax of the drama of God with us and for us, the Apocalypse of John, with its vision of a new heaven and a new earth, conforming in every way to God’s purpose and dominated in every way by God’s presence, is the finale. The scene is, appropriately, cosmic—the whole created order. The good news is not only that individuals are reconciled but that nature and history are to be redeemed as well. In the dramatic movement of the Bible, the whole history of salvation unfolds on the stage of creation. Indeed, the conscious placing of Genesis 1-11 at the beginning of the Bible serves to set the stage, as it were, for the drama of “God with us” and “for us” to take place. Conversely, it is in and through this drama that creation receives its ultimate meaning, its ultimate purpose, its ultimate destiny. God’s intention to be “with us” and “for us,” expressed in His promise to save and to bless, and make good in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ,

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    is the very goal of creation—the reason why “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” All this is brought to dramatic expression in the apocalyptic vision of the new heaven and the new earth in which everything is determined by and conforms to what God has done in Jesus Christ. Understood in this way, apocalypse is delivered from misunderstanding and especially from human arrogance which, through some literal, self-serving interpretation or another, strips it of grace, empties it of hope, fills it with fear, and turns it into a tool for exploitation of frantic people in the hands of a religious charletan. To do this is both to read the Bible and to live in the world amid the suffering and tragedy of life as if Christ had not come. Apocalypse is not a word of gloom! It is a promise!

    He shall reign! Behold the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them and they shall be His people and God Himself will be with them . . . (Revelation 21:3) (Note the repeated emphasis on the promised, effective presence of God.)

    We are not given a blueprint for this fulfillment. Indeed, Jesus warned the disciples about wanting to know “the times and seasons the Father has fixed by His own authority.” Like the people of God from the beginning, we are given a promise . . . a promise uttered . . . and then the promise made flesh . . . in Person . . . and sealed with death and resurrection. Let us understand: The consummation of history is hidden. But like our own lives it is “hidden with Christ in God.” For the time being, the reality of evil and sin, death and chaos do threaten faith and life and hope. The poet, Yeats, knew it:

    Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. (W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”)

    It is our Christian responsibility to live against evil, to oppose all the woes that afflict humanity and to stand against their human causes. We dare not leave misery unalleviated. We dare not leave social reform to the angry and the selfish, even the angry and the selfish within the Christian community, which is all of us some of the time and some of us most of the time. We dare not stand aloof from what Keats called “the giant agony of the world.” To do so is a kind of practical atheism in face of the good news of a God of compassion who “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” who was “in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” This has always been the “answer” to the problem of evil given by the saints and heroes of the faith: evil is overcome through the intelligent, confident, courageous concern of people who live by the promise that lies at the heart of apocalypse. This is the promise that not even the principalities and powers, much less human rebellion and disobedience, are a match for the God who will descend into hell, move heaven and earth (or create new ones), and even raise the dead in order to keep His promise to be with us and for us. Like the hope of resurrection, the hope of apocalypse is realistic about the

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    problem of evil. Like resurrection, apocalypse knows there is a cross in the heart of God . . . that God is with us in the agony of sin and death, evil and chaos. Like the promise of resurrection, the promise of apocalypse is that whether or not God’s grace is irresistible, it is invincible. And that is good enough news by which to live and by which to die.

    Ill CHRISTIAN LIFE UNDER THE FAITHFULNESS AND SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

    Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, And His name shall be Emmanuel (which means, God with us). (Matthew 1:23) And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. . . . and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matthew 28:18, 20b) Of all creatures (the Christian) is the one who while he simply experiences the providence and lordship of God also consents to it, having a kind of “understanding”—if we may put it this way—with the overruling God and Creator. (Karl Barth)(7) We would, therefore, do better (or so it seems to me) to learn to live in the atmosphere of God’s grace with the courage provided by His love— the courage to face death daily and to react to disaster without hitting either the panic or the destruct buttons, to labor and love with the confidence that counts on grace as the fulcrum for the levers we have to push and pull in getting the world’s work done. (Albert C. Outler)(8)

    To live under and by the promise of resurrection and apocalypse means to live in the world not as one who claims to have all the answers, but as one who acknowledges the mystery of God’s sovereign grace and gracious sovereignty. To do so does not answer all questions or solve all riddles. One still asks: Why? Whence? Whither? Wherefore? One still has to struggle for faith and, with Jacob, wrestle with the heavenly presence amid the ambiguities of life. The Christian has no master-key to all mysteries and all knowledge. Indeed, the Christian is especially wary of anyone who claims to have a master-key, whether in the name of religion (even the Christian religion) or some other authority which a human being can construct and possess. One thinks of the claims about life after death put forth in popular books by people like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (On Death and Dying), or Raymond Moody (Life After Life), or those claims about the future in the name of “Biblical prophesy” espoused by Hal Lindsey (The Latet Great Planet Earth) and others. Some may be more helpful than others, but are they not all, at bottom, attempts to secure the future and find the key to the future within ourselves and on our own terms? Karl Barth put it succinctly: (The Christian) will not be like an ant which has foreseen everything in advance, but like a child in a forest, or on Christmas Eve; one who is always rightly astonished by events, by the encounters and experiences which overtake him, and the cares and duties laid upon him. He is the one who is constantly forced to begin afresh, wrestling with the possibilities which open out to him and the impossibilities which oppose him. If we may put it in this way, life in the world, with all its joys and

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    sorrows and contemplation and activity, will always be for him a really interesting matter, or, to use a bolder expression, it will be an adventure, for which he for his part has ultimately and basically no qualifications of his own. And all this is not because he does not know what it is all about, but just because he does know. Ail this is because he has an “understanding” with the source from which everything derives, from which directly or indirectly everything happens to him; the “understanding” of the creature with its Creator, which is, for him, that of the child with its father.(9)

    In short, to live under the promise of resurrection and apocalypse is to live with a quiet confidence that the whole of life is etched in grace, cradled in mystery, carried in love by One of no mean strength. It is to know, as Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote:

    . . . we are wound With mercy round and round As if with air.

    It is to trust what Karl Barth called the “basic and controlling grace” of God which begins as a readiness of God the Creator to be God with us and for us; which appears and continues as God, the Savior and Provider, gives and keeps His promise to be with us and for us; which reaches its ultimate expression in the life, death and resurrection of Him whose name is Emmanuel (God with us/I will be with you always); and which is given final expression in the apocalyptic vision of a new heaven and new earth in which the dwelling of God will be with humanity . . . God having graciously directed everything that occurs in this world for good through Jesus Christ our Lord. Given this understanding of resurrection and apocalypse, there may well be a sin against the Holy Spirit which cannot be forgiven; namely, for the Christian man or woman, or the Christian community, to live as if Jesus Christ had not come. This sin might take the form of being at ease and complacent amid the suffering of the world which is loved to death by a God who then raises the dead. Or it may consist in showing off our zeal for righteousness, or flaunting our cynicism, or nursing our despair when we should long since have been satisfied and confident that:

    The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever.

    (1) The Sprunt Lectures, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1967. Published in 1968 by Oxford University Press. The quotation is found on page 126. (2) Ibid., p. 108. (3) For a more complete treatment of what follows in these paragraphs, see Claus Westermann, What Does the Old Testament Say About God? The 1977 Sprunt Lectures at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. John Knox Press, 1979. Also, see Westermann’s monograph, Blessing in the Bible and the Life of the Church, in the Fortress Press Series “Overtures to Biblical Theology.”

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    M See W. Eugene March, “The Dynamics of Biblical Authority,” a study of the creedal and cultic formula describing God as “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. . . .” This article appears in the Austin Seminary Bulletin, May 1980, Vol. XCV, No. 8. (5) Leander Keck, “New Testament Views of Death,” in Perspectives on Death, Liston Mills, ed. (Abingdon Press, Nashville), pp. 97ff. (6) Outler, op.cit., pp. 109f. (7) Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. Ill, 3, pp. 242f. (8) Outler, op.cit., pp. 131f. (9) Barth, op.cit., pp. 243f.