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  • Advent: departure and homecoming

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    Advent: Departure and Homecoming

    Walter Brueggemann

    Decatur, Georgia

    Advent, more than any other season in the church year, is most powerfully contradicted by the socioeconomic practices of our society. That is why Advent preaching is so difficult and why we are temped to cheat and slide over into Christmas as soon as we can. It is exceedingly difficult to live in the tension and maintain the tension between Advent and “early Christmas” in a consumer culture. In fact, Advent still belongs to the Old Testament and is preoccupied with the hopes of Israel that have not yet come to fruition. There is a-waiting that is required, and a summons to wait with discipline. But our Advent preaching must be done in a culture of instant gratification that wants to wait for nothing, a self-indulgent culture that resists any inconvenient discipline. The consumer orgy that has come to dominate Christmas shopping is the most vulgar form of “realized eschatology”; it imagines we have it all now. Consequently there is nothing yet to receive and nothing for which to hope. But Advent is the insistence that “coming soon” is the great “plus” of the newness that is “at hand” but not yet visible. In the Church season, there is a wait until Christmas, for the time when “the wondrous gift is given.” In Advent that wondrous gift is “at hand”…but not yet in hand. Thus I suggest that Advent preaching is about hope in a culture that attempts to fend off its despair by frantic self-indulgent busyness that is determined to work itself into a frazzle; that frazzle serves a) to keep from hoping and b) to keep from the hopelessness that saturates our common polity.

    I The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible is a Book of Hope that has received various fulfillments in Jewish and Christian tradition. In a notorious way, Rudolf Bultmann has argued, from an acute Christological stance, that by itself the Old Testament does not reach fulfillment, i. e., that it awaits Jesus. It is true that the Old Testament awaits fulfillment, though one need not (and must not) cast that reality in Bultmann’s supersessionist terms. We may do better to pay attention to the ending of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible as it is given in two quite different shapes. On the one hand, the Jews have a particular ordering for the Hebrew canon, and it ends with 1 and 2 Chronicles, culminating with the decree of the Persian ruler, Cyrus:

    In the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, in fulfillment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord stirred up the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia so that he sent a herald throughout all his kingdom and also declared in a written edict: “Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him! Let him go up.” (2 Chron 36:22-23)

    It is noteworthy, in passing, that even the decree of the foreign ruler is linked to

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    prophetic hope in an allusion to Jeremiah 50:9, a connection that subsumes even imperial policies under the rule of YHWH.1 In that rendering, the culmination of Jewish Scripture is the permit of Cyrus who has been “stirred up” by YHWH. That decree allowed displaced Jews to go home and resume life in the territory of Judah, amid Jerusalem. That is a powerful hope that eventuated—through Ezra and Nehemiah—in the restoration movement of Judaism. Of this culminating promise, we may notice four matters: 1. The promise is exclusively for Jews. The restoration of Judaism is the final hope of the text. Indeed, Jon Levenson in his important book has recently connected “resurrection faith” and “God’s ultimate victory” to the “restoration of Israel.”2 2. The hope is a political/historical one made with reference to the political-imperial decision on the part of the Persian Empire. 3. The hope is concretely material and concerns land. This sort of promise continues to play in the contemporary state of Israel and in the hope for the reestablishment of Jerusalem. But we should not miss the theological angle: land claims are linked to the larger purpose and will of YHWH with particular reference to Jews. 4. Perhaps most important, the Hebrew canon culminates with a literature of hope in the Persian period. Indeed Old Testament scholarship is now largely preoccupied with the Persian period of Israel’s memory.3 There are, to be sure, some pieces of literature in the Old Testament that are later than the Persian period in the Hellenistic era. But they are not defining for the hope of Judaism. In the Book of Daniel that is judged critically to be set in the Hellenistic period, moreover, the memory in the text is situated in the time of Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century. Historical location fixes Jewish hope in the Hebrew Bible to that time and place. On the other hand, Christians have their own ordering for the books of the Old Testament, which enunciate a very different hope in its conclusion. I have noted the Cyrus decree in 2 Chronicles 36:22-23 because I have wanted to contrast that final articulation of hope with the final hope voiced in the Christian Old Testament in Malachi 4:5-6. It is of enormous significance that the Hebrew Bible ends in imperial decree, for Jews are always living amid empire; it is equally significant that the Christian Old Testament ends with a prophetic oracle, an act of imagination and expectation that is propelled not by political analysis, but by divine promise that surges beyond Realpolitik. I do not for an instant suggest that the latter articulation is a superior one, only that it is very different. The Christian Old Testament ends with a divine promise that Elijah will return with the capacity to reconcile parents and children (Mai 4:5-6). This concluding oracle thus attests that God is not finished, that God intends reconciliation in time to come, and that God will authorize human agency (Elijah) to accomplish that reconciliation. We may read the Elijah promise backward and forward. When we read the Elijah promise back to 1 Kings 17-21, we arrive at this narrative character who had the courage and authority to challenge kings, override death, evoke rain, and make all things new. He is an uncredentialed agent who subverts royal authority and puts his authority to work against the rapacious policies of establishment economics. It is astonishing that the Old Testament ends with a divine assurance that this unsettling, subversive agent will reappear in time to come in order to overcome the alienations of family and society. (The Jews as well, at Passover, anticipate the coming again of Elijah).

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    When we read this promise forward into the New Testament, we arrive at John the Baptist who is the key character in the drama of Advent and the last character in the Old Testament. The gospel writers do not spend much energy linking John to Elijah, but the connection is quite explicit in Luke 1:8-17 where the angel announces the birth of John: “With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” (Luke 1:17) In this part of the angelic enunciation, there is a direct allusion to the promise of Malachi, but that promise is now expanded in explicit ways. John, soon to be born, will turn the hearts of parents to the children; will turn the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, and will make ready a people prepared for YHWH. The exposition of the Malachi offered by Luke has both modified and extended the expectation in order to draw closer to John. In addition to this explicit linkage, two advent texts in this year’s common lectionary reference John. In Matthew 3:1-12, the Gospel reading for the Second Sunday in Advent, John is described as an uncredentialed outsider who enters into dispute with Jewish leadership (Pharisees and Sadducees). He speaks harsh words of judgment , urges repentance, and dismisses their claims of pedigree. Then he announces the one “coming after me” which will gather the wheat and burn the chaff. That is, he anticipates one who will sort out who is qualified to be the “new people,” the ones prepared, gathered around the new leader. The second reading is Matthew 11:2-11, the gospel reading for the Third Sunday in Advent, which ends (in verses excluded from the lectionary) that “he is Elijah who is to come”(v. 14). In this narrative account John claims his role as prophet whose work is to proclaim the coming one. John’s assertion is in the wake of Jesus’ message to him about Jesus as a transformative agent who makes all things new: Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” (Matt 11:4-6) The interface of John and Jesus, so well articulated here, consists in (a) John’s demanding preparation and (b) Jesus’ performance of newness. Clearly the account in Matthew intends that the two, John and Jesus, prophetic voice and transformative agent, cannot be separated from each other any more than they can be confused with each other. In this rendering, John is the teacher who guides preparation so that “a people prepared” may receive the newness. But the newness of Jesus, reported back to John, is not the news of consumer goods or security or self-indulgence or any of the matters that constitute our usual “Christmas season.” Rather the newness that is promised and enacted is the rehabilitation of human well being among the disabled and the disinherited…the blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf, the dead, and the poor. It is as though John, counting on the declaration of Jesus, is seeking to change the subject away from conventional desires to the gifts of the new regime that concern the most elemental human possibilities of health, healing, and wholeness, all of which require wrenching transformation out of old settled conventions. I suggest that Advent preaching might indeed focus on change the subject, away from much of our usual agenda. If we begin with John and read backward (even as Matthew 11:2-11 begins

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    with Jesus and reads back to John), we read back to Malachi and the promise of reconciliation; if we read back from Malachi to Elijah, we understand why Elijah is identified as “troubler” in Israel (1 Kgs 18:17) and “my enemy” (1 Kgs 21:20). The force of Elijah’s ministry was a huge “trouble” to settled power in Israel. And now John—via Malachi—anticipates the coming time when Jesus comes to heal and transform. We are able to recall that Jesus’ adversaries resisted his healing power. As soon as he healed, they sought to destroy him, because present power arrangements thrive on social relationships of disability that foster fear, anxiety, exploitation, and violence (Mark 3:6). A change of subject toward the gifts of health, healing, and wholeness exposes conventional modes of management as fraudulent and pathological. What Elijah, Malachi, John, and Jesus discovered is that most of their hearers have an enormous stake in the way things are and resent the cost and refuse the disciplines of a changed agenda. What a way to imagine Advent preaching as a changed subject that calls attention to social possibilities that we would rather not notice. Preparation consists in receiving new agenda, and that cannot happen through conventional busyness that our society practices in order to keep from facing the new agenda.

    II. If we take John the Baptist as the key character in Advent and as the last character in the Old Testament, then we may notice one other remarkable matter about John in the narrative. It is this: in all four Gospels, when John announces the coming Messiah, he quotes verses from Isaiah 40:

    This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” (Matt 3:3)4 * * * As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” (Mark 1:2-3) * * * As it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” (Luke 3:4-6) * * *

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    He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said. (John 1:23)

    The quotes from Isaiah 40 serve different purposes in each of these four citations. But given such differences in nuance, it is nonetheless the case that the commonality of quotation is a defining feature of John’s message, and so a defining note of Advent. We may linger a while to ponder why it is that John appealed to these verses, and why it is that the gospel writers all embrace that common memory. What does it mean to have exposition of Jesus drawn into the orbit of Isaiah 40? As is well known among us, Isaiah 40 begins the second part of the Book of Isaiah that stands in deep tension with Isaiah 1-29. (The material is well known in Handel’s Messiah and is commonly referred to as “Second Isaiah.”) Isaiah 40 would seem to be an utterance that is situated at the beginning of the Persian Empire under Cyrus (about 540 B.C.E.) and stands historically remote from Isaiah 39 that concluded the first part of the Book of Isaiah. Isaiah 39 concerns Hezekiah and reflects time about 690 B.C.E. This means that the time between Isaiah 39 and Isaiah 40 (690…540 B.CE.) is about 150 years. It is as though the faithful have waited 150 years for this poetic utterance. In that 150 years a great deal has happened to the city of Jerusalem on which Isaiah reflects, the destruction of the city and the displacement of its leading inhabitants. In Isaiah 39:5-7, the prophet announced that the leading members of the Jerusalem establishment, including members of the royal family, will be carried away into exile. Then, after 150 years of silence and waiting, the Isaiah tradition speaks again to announce a homecoming to those who have been displaced as exiles. The poetry of Isaiah 40:1 -11 purports to be a decision made in the heavenly realm of the gods about the deployment of new political reality on earth. The text: asserts God’s pardon for punished Jerusalem (vv. 1-2); imagines a highway that will permit displaced Jews to return home in splendor (vv. 3-4); asserts that God’s promissory word is reliable (vv. 8-9); commissions a messenger to announce “gospel news” to those who have been displaced (v. 9); offers a summary of the good news, “Here is your God” (v. 9); presents God as the protector on the journey home, God as powerful warrior, God as gentle shepherd (vv. 10-11). The sum of the poetry is the announcement that YHWH, God of Israel, is now back in action after a long season of dismay. That new divine action is the emancipation of Jews for homecoming so that they may depart the Babylonian empire and return home to well-being in Jerusalem. We know from elsewhere that this act of emancipation was accomplished by Cyrus the Persian who defeated Babylon and who is termed “Messiah” in the Isaiah poetry (Isa 45:1 ; see 44:28 as well). It is to be noted that this is the same Cyrus who issued the decree in 2 Chronicles 36:22-23. In the gospel narrative it is of course obvious that John, in early Christian reading, is assigned the role of the messenger in Isaiah 40 who will prepare the procession home. While John quotes only these verses in chapter 40, it is clear that his task pertains

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    to the whole of the text of Isaiah concerning departure from Babylon and homecoming to Jerusalem. In this usage John (and the early church) transposed the poetry in order to apply to a first century crisis of faith. The message is still one of emancipation and homecoming for Jews who had been alienated and marginalized both by Hellenistic culture and Roman governance. The message is still that departure and homecoming are to be accomplished by human agency, now Jesus of Nazareth. This is the good news made possible because of YHWH’s empowerment and authorization of emancipatory human agency. John announces nothing less than the end of the power of the old regime and the emergence of a new rule embodied in Jesus. The New Testament is capable of readily transposing texts into new contexts, drawing the text close to new crisis. John anticipates that Jesus will enact all of the hopes that Jews held in the first century, in order to recover the freedom and dignity of their Jewishness that had been diminished in a sociopolitical environment that was hostile to Jewishness. The recovery, moreover, is seen as an act of human rehabilitation , with reference to Matthew 11, concerning the many who await restoration and have no hope. Thus an advent text, placed at the beginning of the gospel narrative, may have been heard by first century listeners as news about recovered political status, economic possibility, and healthy theological identity. The transposition from Babylon to Rome is an act of imagination that the early church readily makes in its reutilization of Old Testament texts.

    III. It remains now to consider how the advent theme of changed subject, the character of John the Baptist as the last character in the Old Testament, and the quote from Isaiah 40 about departure and homecoming may be heard in contemporary preaching. The decisive themes are still emancipatory departure and glad homecoming-, it will require, however, a large act of imagination by the preacher to make a connection, for clearly the news is not now heard in the church as departure from Babylon and return to Jerusalem or departure from Roman severity and homecoming to Jewish wellbeing . Here is how an act of contemporary interpretive imagination might work. What if, for exile and displacement, we take the alienation and displacement of the contemporary world that turns out to be a) a mad pursuit of money, success, and security that counts on exaggerated individualism and hostility toward the neighbor, and b) a bewilderment by new technological capacity that leaves the world a strange place or an invitation to hustle harder for more technological leverage. There are a variety of ways in which that alienating environment may be characterized, among them the way of Enlightenment rationality with its passion for control, the intoxicating consumerism that can never be sated, the National Security State that depends on fear and anxiety that commits its citizenry to an endless state of war and therefore an endless fate of amorphous anxiety. However a preacher may characterize it in a local setting (and the preacher has a lot of imaginative alternative ways of lining it out), it is clear that many people who lack labels for it know down deep that our current shared life is in a culture that is, by its very nature, alienating and that causes us to be dissatisfied strangers and restless threats to each other. The truth ofthat cultural setting is that all of us—liberals and conservatives—are situated in anxiety and endless pursuit of well-being that is always kept out of reach. The situation is not different from

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    that of our ancestors with the endless brick quotas of Egypt or the endless requirements of “Songs of Zion” in Babylon or the endless threats of Rome. Imagine that the preacher of the gospel has the chance to change the subject, to announce that the fate of Enlightenment reason, frantic consumerism, and the National Security State are not the truth of our lives. The news is that there is a possible departure from the “empire of force” because the empire offeree is not our true home and it could be otherwise.5 The preacher, in the context of the liturgy, constructs the highway of homecoming that permits us to depart that world that has exerted too much coercive power and that has left us all orphans. The rat-race is not where we belong. And we have known since Malachi that reconciling help is on the way. Advent is to start that journey toward our true home given us in the gospel. Here is the concrete discipline of disengagement and departure offered by John Witte, simply a refusal to play the game and to accept that characterization of our life:

    Both modern technology and modern privacy make escape to the frontier considerably easier than in the days of covered wagons and mule trains. Just turn off Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Turn away the missionary at your door. Close your eyes to the city crucifix that offends. Cover your ears to the public prayer that you can’t abide. Forgo the military chaplain’s pastoral counseling. Skip the legislative chaplain’s prayers. Walk by the town hall’s menorah and star. Don’t read the Decalogue on the classroom wall. Don’t join the religious student group. Don’t vote for the collared candidate. Don’t browse the Evangelicals’ newspapers. Avoid the services of the Catholic counselors. Shun the readings of the Scientologists. Turn down the trinkets of the colporteurs. Turn back the ministries of the hate-mongers. All these escapes to the virtual frontier, the law does and will protect—with force if necessary. Such voluntary self-protections from religion will ultimately provide far greater religious freedom for all than pressing yet another tired constitutional case.6

    But the preacher has more to say than simply the naming of the lethal system in which we are all variously enmeshed. John’s message, after the hints of Malachi, is not only a critique. It is also an anticipation. John’s work, even as starchy as his critique is, is to announce the one who is to come. That is the function of his quote from Isaiah 40. The highway leads somewhere! In the book of Isaiah, the imagined highway leads to Jerusalem. In the transposition of John, of course, it leads to Jesus. It leads to the baby who will confound Herod in Jerusalem. (Remember that on the First Sunday of Christmas we get Matthew 2:13-23 again, the slaughter of the innocents.) It leads to the crucified and risen Lord who will astonish the authorities in Rome and bewilder the governor. And between the baby and the crucified one, the road leads to the teacher rabbi who will astonish by his brave teaching, who will overwhelm by his inexplicable miracles, who will summon by his authority to a new life. The path of Advent will lead to Jesus. John belongs to the Old Testament; Jesus of course belongs to the New Testament, the new covenant, and the new regime. This is the one through whom “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” (Matt 11:5) Advent is to invite people to imagine homecoming. What would it be like to cross

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    over into the new regime, to come under the aegis of a new set of commandments and a new set of permissions. All that is required is to desist loyalty to the old order and take up the new disciplines that entail healing and transforming and caring. The discipline of Advent is to be ready to entrust life to the coming one. Such a preached summons will of course evoke explanatory resistance. Every preacher knows about that resistance. And you and I, dear reader, also know the resistance ourselves…we have lives to live, we have budgets to raise, we have mortgages to pay, we have obligations to fulfill. Of course! The summons of Advent departure and Christmas homecoming is not likely to happen by heroic action, though here and there it might. It is more likely to entail steady intentionality that takes a step and a step and a step. I heard a TV preacher on the Exodus; his testimony was that the waters did not part all at once in the Red Sea. When Moses put his foot into the water, it opened a few feet in front of him. Another step and a few more feet of openness, but no opening without a foot in the water. The highway from the empire toward home is like that. It is not an “open road.” It appears only enough to take the next step toward home; the road home keeps opening and appearing as we walk the walk. All that is required in Advent is the recognition that the Old Kingdom of fear, anxiety, and coercion is not our true home. The good news of Advent is that there is another home and there is a path there, the path of intentional Torah obedience that has the neighbor in purview. On Christmas Eve the church makes its defining move from John to Jesus, from old regime to new home. But that moment of break from there to here is not in a vacuum. To get to that wondrous hidden hour of newness, we must be on our way. The goal of Advent is to come home to Jerusalem, to Jesus, to the neighborhood, to peaceableness where the rule of the God of covenant is under way. At the threshold of home, where the subject has been changed and the road has been walked, the people of the gospel may all echo the well known mantra of the Shaker tradition: ‘Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free, ‘Tis a gift to come down where we ought to be. That will preach! ‘Tis a gift to be simple after all the complexities of the old enslavements that never satisfy. ‘Tis a gift to be free after all the old coercions that leave us programmed into restless, breathless performance. And it is a gift: “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!” In Advent the question is raised: Where ought we to be? Where is our true home? Well, our true home is with Jesus. Our true home is with Jesus’ people. Well, our true home is with the lame who now walk, with the lepers who are now healed, with the deaf who now hear, with the dead who now have been raised, with the poor who now have heard good news. That whole company has departed the empire of force and disability in order to spend its time in glad amazement. Think about it! Nobody in Egypt or Babylon or Rome is ever amazed—fatigued, but not amazed. John, with his starchy word, is not the goal of the highway home. But he is the access point. The verse in Isaiah 40:1, just before the verses quoted by John, affirms that Jerusalem has suffered enough. It is an evangelical word spoken “tenderly” to all the displaced: Enough already ! Advent could be among us a sense of self-awareness of the ways in which that old regime has sapped us of our humanness, of our true selves…and now we may be welcomed home! But we have to be on our way!

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    Notes

    1 The verb “stir up” is a preferred usage to characterize the undefined way in which God impinges upon the public human process (see Isa 41:2, 25; 45:13; Jer 51:11; Hag 1:14). It is instructive that in the Anglican tradition, two of the four collects for Advent use the verb in an imperative. 2 Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 3 See Jon L. Berquist, Judaism in Persia’s Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). 4 This text is the Gospel reading for the Second Sunday in Advent. 5 I take the phrase “empire of force” from Simone Weil; on her usage, see the brilliant exposition of James Boyd White, Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 6 John Witte, Jr., God’s Joust, God’s Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 262.

  • Rightly cambered in advent: stewardship out of season

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    Rightly Cambered in Advent

    – Stewardship out of Season

    Robert E. Dunham

    University Presbyterian Church, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

    One summer Sunday earlier this year, a parishioner waited in line following worship to express his displeasure that the lectionary had assigned Luke’s Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-21) during the dog days of August, when half the congregation was on vacation. “That would have made a terrific stewardship text in October,” he said. “It was a terrific stewardship text today” I responded, smiling, and added what has become for me a recurring refrain over the years, “Stewardship is never out of season.” I meant what I said at the church door that Sunday; I have long found it unfortunate that talk about stewardship gets relegated to a few Sundays in the fall when we are stressing the budgetary needs of the church. In my mind, there is no more important measure of our discipleship than the way we steward the gifts God has given us; thus, there is no season that is out-of-season for faithful conversations about stewardship. I would also argue that there may be no season more in need of such conversation than the season of Advent. In one sense, Advent is the perfect stewardship season, given the Advent stress on watchfulness and time, on the unexpected time and circumstance of Christ’s return, on the culmination of human history, and more personally, on the end of our own human history. In that latter sense, the Parable of the Rich Fool is an exquisitely suitable Advent text, for it bears at its heart a profound message about time. Novelist Clyde Edgerton’s character, Grove McCord, got at that message when he said, “You are history longer than you are fact,” a truth the Rich Fool failed even to consider.1 Of course, that message may not be the first lesson we notice in the parable. The more obvious point is its warning about the dangers inherent in the relentless pursuit and accumulation of wealth and possessions. That word, too, is a worthy message for Advent, the season when Mary sings for us, “God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich God has sent empty away.” “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed,” Jesus says, “for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions.” I need not elaborate on the counter-cultural quality of such counsel in the American holiday season. Michael Lindvall offers a helpful observation about the hidden danger in all the various things we acquire either as gifts or purchases that seems especially pertinent in these days. Whenever we bring home something new, he says, when we open the box, we are customarily greeted not only by the thing itself, but by pages of written materials: owner’s manuals, assembly diagrams, directions for use, warranty cards, surveys and the like. All these pages, Lindvall says, can be classified in one of two categories, either as instructions or warnings: “instructions on assembly, use, and maintenance, and warnings not to let kids put pieces in their mouths, not to use this product in the bathtub…[or] without safety goggles.” Still, he says:

    Maybe they should put one more instruction page in every box. It could say,

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    “You are a fortunate consumer to have the ability to own this fine product. Remember to share what you have.” And maybe they should put yet another warning label on every new product. In bold red letters in a white decal affixed to the side, it could read, “Warning: This thing, like all things, could be dangerous to your spiritual health.”2

    The problem is, we are all the time confusing the eternal and the temporal, the need and the want, the necessity and the excess. To know the eternal necessities and to live into them is, I believe, part of what it means to be “rich toward God,” as Jesus says. To live lives consumed by transitory things may be satisfactory for a season, but in the end, it leaves us spiritually impoverished, adrift from our moorings, apart from the purposes and relationships that give life meaning. Sometimes, when I find the pace of pastoral work becoming too frenetic, I observe a kind of balancing ritual. I walk down to our church’s memorial garden, where the ashes of scores of church members are buried. I sit there for a while and study the names etched in the garden’s granite panels – so many people I have known and loved during my years as pastor here. I speak their names aloud, one by one…so many remarkable people. I think of the extroverts and the introverts, the up-front leaders and the quiet servants. There are those who died too young and those who outlived all their friends and siblings; those who died suddenly, tragically, and those whose deaths were long and labored. Of the latter, I remember watching more than a few come to terms with the fact that all their striving and all their acquisitiveness, even all their best efforts, ultimately had to be relinquished and entrusted to someone else. Ultimately, and sooner for some than for others, their whole lives had to be handed back to God. Every time I visit the garden, I reckon that many of these saints, in the end, came to understand that the only things that would finally matter after they were gone were the good they made possible along the way and their investment of time and energy in those they loved and those they served. I remember, too, that those who seemed to have found the greatest contentment in the face of life’s final mystery were those who had seen their lives as full of gifts, those who had lived their lives fully as stewards of the gifts that had been entrusted to them. They were those who had a profound understanding of what time it was. Our stewardship of time, our awareness of the inbreaking of the eternal into the temporal and of what constitutes a faithful response, is so important. The cultural anthropologist Edward Hall once wrote: “Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spoken language. It can shout the truth when words lie.” He continues,

    If we could comprehend what time is saying about us, what would we discover?…. [M]any of us are concerned about whether we could give a worthy answer to this question….The problem has been around for millennia , for time has never been given to mortals in unlimited supply, and we cannot prevent its passing. Yet the problem of time has taken on especially startling features amid the rapid change engulfing the world today. Our ancestors, most of them farmers, worked to the rhythms of the sun and the seasons. Our children do work that is shaped by the round-the-clock

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    rhythms of the World Wide Web. The shift from one pattern of life in time to another has been under way for centuries, but in recent decades it has spiraled in speed and scope. Our pace is accelerating. Our hours are unhinged from nature. Whether we as human beings will or can or should adapt to the emerging rhythms of time is an open question.3

    How then will we cultivate the notion of time as a gift? How can Advent help us to think about a proper stewardship of time? In part, I believe it can do so by reminding us of the length of our days. “So teach us to number our days,” the Psalmist prayed, “that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who spent a career dealing with end-of-life issues, understood that prayer. She said, “It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth – and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up – that we begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.”4 I think back to the comment my friend made to me this August past, when he argued for moving the Parable of the Rich Fool to the autumn stewardship season. The more I think about it, however, the more I come to think that perhaps a more appropriate placement is in Advent, especially the American Advent, when we are all the time forgetting what time it is. Consider Advent in our towns and communities, when the great eschatological texts, the annual appearances of John the Baptist, the visits of the angels to Mary and Joseph, and Mary’s Magnificat all have to compete for attention with the red bows on Lexus SUVs or whatever extravagant, must-have gifts may await the acquisitive gift-getters this year. Consider the difficulty of getting people to settle for singing Advent hymns in a land where Christmas Muzak has been piped into the malls since Halloween. In such a context, the Parable of the Rich Fool can urge us toward a proper regard for time— for the gift of time, of the way we use it, and the way that gift can be taken back. To be sure, this story of the Rich Fool is an engaging story that Jesus tells, clearly one of the most compelling of the parables. The parable is rooted in a simple request someone brings to Jesus – a request for help with a family dispute about an inheritance. But that request becomes a platform on which Jesus lays out a warning about the dangers of greed and a reminder that no one’s life is based on an abundance of possessions. “Let me tell you a story,” Jesus says, and the story he tells is of a rich landowner whose land produces an abundant harvest, and of the calculations this landowner performs leading to his conclusion that even his ample grain elevator isn’t big enough for all those crops. So he resolves to tear down his existing storage facilities and build bigger ones, so that he will be set for life. The problem, Jesus says, is that the man has left God out of the equation. God speaks directly to this rich man and calls him a fool, because God knows that the man’s life is coming to an end that very night. “All these things you have prepared,” God inquires, “whose will they then be?” And then Jesus replies that such is the case with any person who builds a personal treasure but is not rich toward God. It is a haunting story, and an unsettling conclusion. Two things, in particular, are striking in this story. The first is the way God addresses the landowner. God doesn’t call him, “Reprobate.” He doesn’t say, “You sinner!” God calls the farmer a fool. “You fool!” God says. You fooll Now, what is it, exactly, that makes this man a fool? To many, his actions might seem prudent, forward-thinking, even progressive. Why would he be considered a

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    fool? That question has long intrigued me, and it came into focus for me once again a while back in a most unexpected place – during a family trip to northwest England. It was there that I believe I came across a hint of an answer. We were in the car one afternoon, traveling from the village where we were staying north of Manchester to the Yorkshire town of Haworth, a town made famous by the Brontë sisters who lived and wrote there with their pastor father in the mid-nineteenth century. The trip involved crossing the moors, a vast expanse of rolling grasslands and sedges that, even in summer, seemed to warn of imposing wintry weather. The road across the moors that day was not very good. About one-and-a-half lanes of semi-paved thoroughfare were bordered on one side by the hillside above and on the other by even more hillside below. We were making our way across the moors when we approached a sweeping left turn and saw the road sign. The sign had an arrow noting the turn we were approaching, and underneath the arrow were the words, “Adverse Camber.” We were, I suppose, a hundred meters beyond the curve before I asked, “What did that sign say?” My cousin was quick to respond. “It’s my favorite British road sign,” he said, and then he explained. Camber is tilt or slope, or an arching. “Adverse camber” as a warning sign describes a road that arches and slopes or tilts the wrong way. In our particular case, the sign spoke of a left hand turn in which the road, instead of banking to the left, actually sloped away to the right. I love British road signs. And I laughed at the wonderful British understatement of danger in that sign. Adverse camber, indeed! I wondered how many people had driven off the road and down the hillside pondering what the sign meant. However, as the day and the trip wore on, I began to think of that road sign as an amazingly apt description of the reason Jesus describes the rich landowner as a fool. It is because his life slopes the wrong way. Instead of cambering toward God in gratitude and toward neighbors in graciousness, it had tilted precariously toward his own greedy assumptions . Instead of banking toward its source, his life had become unbalanced, and his cavalier assumptions about time and the centrifugal forces of avarice and selfindulgence were ready to run him off the road. A fool indeed! “So it is,” Jesus said, “with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” That statement, of course, raises the other significant interpretive question, the other striking feature about this story: what does it mean to be “rich toward God?” Later in this same chapter of Luke, Jesus will point to the linkage between the location of one’s treasure and the location of one’s heart, and in another story, recorded in each of the three Synoptic Gospels, Jesus will speak of laying up treasure in heaven. Is that what he means by being rich toward God? Such linkages are certainly part of such a definition, but I think of “rich toward God” as an attitude toward life, framed by gratitude to its Source. I think of it as a life cambered toward its true Center. Athey Keith is a Kentucky farmer in Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow. He is the kind of farmer who eschewed the modernization and machine-driven agriculture of the corporate farm in favor of a kind of farming that took note of the needs of the land and tried to live in harmony with it. He owns a lot of property near Port William, but Berry describes Athey Keith this way: “Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a ‘landowner. ‘ He was the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; [and] he knew that of the two lives, his was meant to

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    be the smaller and the shorter.”5 In my life, I have known a whole generation of people like that…not necessarily farmers, though farmers seem to understand the contingencies of life better than most others. But I have known many people who came of age in the 1930s, say, whose lifelong values were built around concepts not of bigger and faster and more productive, but of balance and proportion and scale. “He was the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his.” Now, if the truth be told, I am the product of a different generation. I grew up believing the old motto of General Electric: “Progress is our most important product.” I am also a creature of comfort, abeneficiary of convenience, a child of technology and innovation. I am disciplined about my resources to some degree, but I still tend to confuse wants and needs from time to time. Like others of my generation, I am also a person who prefers control, or at least the illusion of control, to contingency. Wendell Berry didn’t use the word specifically, but behind the metaphors he employed to depict Athey Keith was a profound sense of the stewardship of the earth, of the stewardship of life and time and relationships. A deep-rooted stewardship simply affords one a different way of understanding this world. By stewardship one sees life not in terms of control, but in terms of service and sacrifice for something much larger than our own selves. A steward sees the world not in terms of endless bounty, but in terms of thoughtful limits and appropriate boundaries. Stewards know that the earth is ours, not in the sense that it belongs to us so much as because, by the expenditure of our energy and work, we belong to it.6 Stewards understand that life is sometimes fleeting, and that our faithful response to that fact is not so much to acquire all we can acquire, building bigger and bigger barns, or even to see the earth and its riches as our rightful inheritance, but to know at our depths that we borrow the earth and its riches from our children and from generations yet unborn. Stewardship teaches us to number our days, so that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Athey Keith may not have been a rich man in worldly terms. He may not have been a particularly intellectual man either, but he was no fool. Indeed, in the language of Luke’s Gospel, one might well have called him “rich toward God.” He understood the nature of God’s abundance; he understood his dependency on that abundance, understood that it was an abundance not of his own making; understood the way he belonged to that abundance far more than it ever belonged to him. The problem with the Rich Fool was that he couldn’t see that at all. He just didn’t get it, not one bit. As he rounded what would be the last turn of his life, he had no thought of God – no thought of gratitude – and all that he valued would soon slip away, because his life was so adversely cambered. And yet, he thought he was at the top of his game. He never even noticed the danger until it was too late. Of course, that’s what made him a fool. In this season of timelessness commingled with human time, in this season of extravagant abundance made manifest to us in a simple cradle, we pray to be rightly cambered, to be good stewards, to have eyes to see gifts and hearts to know what time it is. This is not a time for foolishness, all other signs of the times to the contrary.

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    Notes

    1. Clyde Edgerton, In Memory of Junior (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1992), 47. 2. Michael L. Lindvall, The Christian Life: A Geography of God (Louisville: Geneva Press, 2001), 115. Italics mine. 3. Dorothy C. Bass, Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), xi-xii. 4. Stan Toler, Stewardship of Time (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1998). 5. Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: A Novel (New York: Counterpoint Books, 2000), 182. 6. I borrow this line from another book by Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack (Washington: Counterpoint Books, 1974 (rev. 1999)), 125.

  • Evangelistic preaching in the twenty-first century

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    Evangelistic Preaching in the Twenty-First Century

    Leighton Ford

    Charlotte, North Carolina

    “Who are the most effective evangelistic preachers you know?” When I have asked that question—and qualify it to mean pastors, not traveling evangelists—most pastors, laypeople, and even preaching professors are stumped. They may come up with Bill Hybels or another megachurch pastor. It’s as if I had asked: “How many college students do you know who read newspapers?” So I want to take you on a little memory journey back half a century, to an unlikely encounter between two very effective but very different evangelistic preachers. On an August evening in 1963 a hundred thousand people gathered in the openair coliseum in Los Angeles for a Billy Graham Crusade. That night Helmut Thielicke, the distinguished German theologian and preacher, sat on the platform. On his way to speak at a conference, he had come to the crusade rather reluctantly, since German church leaders had been suspicious of mass rallies ever since Hitler had used them to manipulate and seduce their nation. Later, Thielicke wrote to Billy Graham to admit how his stereotypes had been challenged.

    I am ashamed that we Christians—including myself—are always susceptible to the preconceived opinions … The evening beneath (or better, behind ! ) your pulpit was a profound “penance” experience (poenitentia) for me…When I have been asked now and again about your preaching…I have certainly not been too modest to make one or two more or less profound theological observations. My evening with you made clear to me (and the Holy Spirit will have helped in doing so !) that the question should be asked in the reverse form: What is lacking in me and in my colleagues in the pulpit …that makes Billy Graham so necessary? …we learn to see ourselves as various dabs of paint upon the incredibly colorful palette of God.1

    So forty plus years ago the German theologian (a poetic preacher) and the American evangelist (a more matter-of-fact preacher) were learning from each other (for Graham asked Thielicke how to improve his own preaching). Now, a half-century later, I hope we can learn from each other how we can more effectively preach the gospel in our time. I have learned so much from pastor/evangelists I have greatly admired. Tom Allan of St. George’s Tron sought community at this church in the heart of Glasgow. Sir Alan Walker, superintendent of Wesley Central Mission in Sydney, was knighted for his powerful advocacy of justice for the Australian aboriginal peoples. In Montreal I heard Canon Bryan Green of Birmingham Cathedral preach the gospel simply and answer the searching questions of his large audience profoundly. All were committed pastors. Each was a passionate evangelistic preacher. Several convictions become clear as I reflect on preaching as evangelism today. The first: every sermon should have the gospel at its core and an evangelistic edge. This is not to say that every sermon should aim primarily at pre-Christians; clearly,

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    most sermons will be for those already in the fold. But every sermon needs an evangelistic heart and note. Could George Buttrick have known one Advent Sunday at Madison Avenue Presbyterian in New York that a struggling young novelist would be present, or that one question (“Are you going home for Christmas?”) would be the spiritual pivot point for Frederick Buechner? Could Jack Jensen have expected poets Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall to be among the handful at his tiny congregation in rural New Hampshire, or have known that a line he quoted from Rilke would alter Jane’s life forever? So we preach the gospel never knowing what seeking persons have been drawn by the Holy Spirit. But we also preach knowing that those who are already Christfollowers need to be constantly re-evangelized, reminded that our faith journeys continue as they began by grace. And that the way we preach in the pulpit may be a model for disciples to know how to talk about their faith in the marketplace. And that our own souls need it. “Woe is me,” said Paul, “if I do not preach the gospel.” I could not count the number of times my own wayward soul has been called back to the Christ who is alive and well—even through my own preaching ! But if we are going to preach with an evangelistic expectation the challenges come: How do we make the offer of the gospel clear and fresh? The promise of the gospel visible? The spirit of the gospel winsome and strong? The claim of the gospel urgent and compelling?

    What are they hearing? The Gospel Made Clear and Fresh

    It became unforgettably clear to me on this memorable evening, that you, my dear Dr. Graham, are passing out Biblical bread and not intellectual delicacies and refined propaganda. I wish to thank you for that. (Thielicke to Graham)

    We do not proclaim ourselves (but) the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. (Saint Paul)

    The late Henri Nouwen said that practically no one comes to church expecting to hear something they did not already know. “The last thing they expect to come from a pulpit is any news.”2 So here is our challenge: how do we preach the gospel as fresh bread to those for whom it seems stale? How do we proclaim Christ as light to those for whom the gospel is veiled by their own secular or religious philosophies, or hidden by our own ideological and political smokescreens? How do we proclaim it to that increasing number of people who have never really heard the story? Too often evangelism has suffered from an “imaginational cramp” (Simone Tugwell), nailing Jesus inside our own small categories, gutting truth by tiresome repetitions. But the gospel itself is grand and rich and flowing. It weaves more threads into a lovely pattern than a Celtic cord, reflects more facets than a diamond turned about in the light. The “godspell” has almost endless variations: the “gospel of the kingdom” (Matt 24:14); the “gospel of God’s grace” (Acts 20:24); the “gospel of God” (Rom 1:1); the “gospel of Christ” (Rom 1:16); “the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Cor 4:4). Yet it has a singular focus: “We proclaim Christ.” There is no evangelism that does not make clear that God has come near to us in Christ. Karl Barth was once asked at Princeton Seminary if he did not agree that God had revealed himself in many

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    religions besides Christianity. “No,” he answered (in true Barthian fashion), “God has not revealed himself in any religion, including Christianity. He has spoken in his son, Jesus Christ.” Always the heart of the gospel is the same: Christ has died! Christ has risen! Christ will come again! But how do we express these non-negotiables in fresh ways? In our postmodern world both believers and pre-Christians may see the gospel as neither good nor news. Perhaps this is because we have simplified it and “codified” it too carelessly. “Accept Jesus and you’ll go to heaven. Don’t and you won’t.” True, but not meant to become a truism. I think Rick Richardson has got it right: “The biggest missing piece in our understanding of the gospel has to do with our angle of vision.” Biblical evangelism has a kingdom angle, an eschatological vision: God has broken and is breaking into our world in the person of Jesus to set all things right; and we can enter into God’s rule by turning from our way to God’s way and putting our trust in Jesus, and becoming part of his special (covenant) people.3

    Christ as Image and Icon The word “image” has come into my mind as a template to express this transforming gospel, especially Paul’s picture of the Spirit “transforming us into the same image” (2 Cor 3:18), and his great poem on Christ as “the image of the invisible God” (Col l:15ff). For the early believers this was “subversive poetry” in a world where images of Caesar were seen everywhere. Caesar was revered as a son of God, preeminent above all. But, counters Paul, Christ is our image: Christ is the one who made it all, holds it all together, will bring all creation together again, and claims to rule us all. Talk about near treason. Is there an empire whose images surround us?

    The average American person is confronted every day by somewhere between five and twelve thousand corporate messages, all geared to shaping a consumer imagination. Whether you are running a political campaign for the highest office in the land or selling a particular brand of cigarette, it’s all about image!

    The primal responsibility of Christian proclamation is to empower the community to reimagine the world as if Christ, and not the powers, were sovereign.4

    I am intrigued by N.T. Wright’s comments about presenting the gospel in apostmodern world, where neo-Gnosticism (and we could add new Caesars) reign:

    In Colossians (Christ) is the image of the invisible God. In other words, don’t assume that you’ve got God taped, and fit Jesus into that. Do it the other way. We all come with some ideas of God. Allow those ideas to be shaped around Jesus. That is the real challenge of New Testament Christology.5

    And it is the challenge for evangelism. On Christ the King Sunday, the anthem in our

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    church began Christ the Image, Christ the Dawning and ended with Christ the glory, Christ alone. It didn’t sound subversive in the singing; but as I heard the anthem, then re-read the gospel according to Colossians, I realized again how personal, how corporate, and how cosmic is its reach. It is so personal in our beginnings as we receive Christ: “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins… As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him” (Col 1:13,14,2:6). It is so corporate in our belonging, as we are joined to his church: “He is the head of the body, the church, the firstborn from the dead” (Col 1:18). And it is so cosmic in its transforming power: “Through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1:19). To quote Tom Wright again,

    The gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transform the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn, can be part of the transforming work. That draws together what we traditionally called evangelism, bringing people to the point where they come to know God in Christ for themselves, with working for God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.6

    On a corner in Victoria, Canada, last summer I met and spoke with a delightful street artist. She said she was sure there is something “on the other side” but not quite sure what. But she was sure she was not a Christian. She spoke of her churchgoing parents on the Canadian prairies. “The most creative thing they do is to watch television.” She thought their god was too small. “But, Leyana” I said. “Do you realize how really great God is? There is nothing puny about him. He made it all—you and your paintings, your animals and colors.” I quoted for her Hopkins’ poem about the Spirit brooding over the bent world, like a great bird with warm breast and bright wings. She wanted to write it down. “But my parents would think that’s too ‘new age’,” she said. Then I was able to tell her just a bit about the age-old greatness of the gospel, the immensity of the poetry of Christ that Paul wrote to the Colossians. Could we perhaps put the gospel into poetry for the Leyanas we meet? As Charles Williams said, God is a poet, the world past and present is his poetry, and the words of our lives the lines of his poem. And long before Williams, Paul saw us as God’s poiema, God’s creative work, part of the great master poem God is writing (Eph 2:10).

    You, Poem A poem, you, composed to let my glory through. A word run wry, a wayward child, defiled. A stain, removed, remade, through harrowing pain. A body, entered by my Word, (dark images draining out his blood). A work revised, by syntax of my grace. A mirror, to reflect that scarred and lovely face. A long delight for me once more to read. Or must it be, again, again, to bleed?7

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    There, Leyana, is creation, and fall, grace and salvation—and, in the final reading, great joy or great loss. The gospel is not any one formula—or any number of them. The gospel is a “power”—one greater than the “powers” that hold us in thrall—God’s kingdom breaking into the disrepute and disrepair of our lives and our world in a way utterly transforming, the Christ of history alive in our lives today.

    “More broken than we can imagine, more loved than we could hope” Tim Keller is senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, meeting at Hunter College in New York City, an urban, upper middle class, and well-educated congregation with Sunday attendance of four thousand five hundred. Diverse in makeup— forty percent Caucasian, thirty-five percent Asian, and twenty-five percent AfricanAmerican and other—its age span is from college students to those in their sixties. Many have had churched backgrounds, but the church also draws many intellectual skeptics. Keller blends an exegetical style of biblical preaching and an ability to articulate the Christian worldview in a pluralistic culture. For him the gospel “is the good news that through Christ the power of God’s kingdom has entered history to renew the whole world. When we believe and rely on Jesus’ work and record (rather than ours) for our relationship to God, that kingdom power comes upon us and begins to work through us.” He seeks to incorporate both evangelism and discipleship in every sermon. Rather than preaching biblical principles to be obeyed— “speaking to the will,” or evoking sentimental convictions—”speaking to the emotions,” Keller seeks to “preach to the heart” by exposing and breaking down the distorted motivational heart structures of his listeners. It speaks both to the secular humanist who says “I accept myself as my own god and obey my own laws,” and the religious person who says, “I obey, therefore I am accepted.” Both are motivated by self-absorption and the desire to be in control. For Keller, the story of the two sons illustrates both: the rebellion of the younger son (“I want to be my own god”) and the pride of the older son (“I have earned my way into the family by being good”) with both missing the good news that “human beings are more broken and sinful than they could ever imagine, and more loved and cherished than they could ever dare hope.” Keller’s style is casual, like a conversation with an audience. He disarms skeptics because he asks and addresses their difficult questions before they can verbalize them. He holds a question and answer session after each service to talk more about the sermon. Yet he expects people to be changed, not because of his style, but because the gospel is the power of God to change people (irreligious or religious) from the inside out. “Christ gives us a radically new identity, freeing us from both self-righteousness and self-condemnation. He liberates us to accept people we once excluded, and to break the bondage of things (even good things) that once drove us. In particular, the gospel makes us welcoming and respectful toward those who do not share our beliefs.” That latter note may seem surprising. But surely it lends a “welcoming respect” to the invitation, subtle but present in every sermon, inviting believers and nonbelievers alike to embrace the gospel wherever they may be in their journey to God.8

    Iconoclasts, Iconographers, and Icon-Bearers If Christ is the image, then as evangelistic preachers we will be both iconoclasts who confront (shattering false images, as Moses ground to pieces Aaron’s golden calf)

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    and iconographers who communicate (holding up Christ as that true image of God and humanity), with images that both “sting and sing” (Donald Carson). But then we ourselves have a calling as icon-bearers, letters from Christ, mirrors reflecting his glory, common clay pots holding precious treasure, servants who through the Spirit of the Lord are being transformed into his own image.

    What are they seeing? The Gospel Made Visible Lillian is an Atlanta lawyer, part of the “boomer” generation, formerly senior warden at her Episcopal church. We talked about her friends who are not (yet) committed to Christ. “If you invited them to church,” I asked her, “what would you want them to see and sense?” She responded, “Two of our preachers have been storytellers. Another was more of a poet. They preached well. But most of all I would want my friends to hear a preacher who believes at the cellular level what they are preaching. And they would want to hear and feel a full welcome.” The credibility of the message is so closely tied to the authenticity of the preacher who preaches, and the congregation who hears. In the first recorded evangelistic sermon of the early church “Peter stood up with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd” (Acts 2:14). Peter did his part. He stood up and raised his voice. But there were eleven others standing with him. Peter gave voice to the community. And people paid attention not just because of Peter’s powerful words, but because of the community’s authentic faith: “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own…With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of Jesus, and much grace was with them all”(Acts 4:32-35). There was a certain quality of life among the early believers that demanded an explanation, made observers ask, “What’s with these people?” So Peter’s pentecostal sermon was an explanation. “These people are not drunk. They are filled and flowing over with God’s Spirit.” Evangelism, in this sense, means “provoking the question”— and preaching is answering that question. A good contemporary example is Sanctuary Covenant in Minneapolis. It has become a community committed not simply to proclaim the gospel with their mouths, but to live the gospel in service to the community around. Pastor Efrem Smith believes that the gospel must be present in everything we do, and proclaimed not just as the promise of eternal life, but as the liberating power of God’s Spirit to transform our lives now. I imagine him, like Peter, standing to preach, raising his voice, and his “Eleven are standing with him”

    “The Good News Is not Distant” Smith is senior pastor of Sanctuary Covenant, a three-year old church plant which seeks to be an urban, multi-ethnic, relevant, holistic, and Christ-centered community serving North Minneapolis. Over half of the worshiping community of eight hundred is aged nineteen to thirty-three, and the church’s multiethnic makeup reflects the community. To those who listen to Pastor Smith, one word comes to mind: passion. No one could leave sanctuary without sensing his passion for the hope of the gospel. Smith says, “If there is hope for this world, it should be found in the church.” On a Sunday morning in November, Smith declares that the gospel speaks to our lives now as well as our eternal lives. As he puts it, “How many kids have to die, while

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    we go home and we are still talking about churchy stuff? How many homicides have to happen before we stop playing church and be the kingdom of God in the streets? Kids are dying, and we are in church.” As he calls for people to be prayed for at the end of the sermon, many come forward and allow members of the church to pray for them, for healing, for a reconciled relationship with God, for a passion and a purpose in their lives. Later, at a small café in the neighborhood, he speaks again about the power of the gospel to change lives. “The good news is not distant,” he says. “We live in the good news daily .Through an intimate relationship with God we have the opportunity to play a role in the drama known as the good news.” I remember his Sunday sermon: “The church must not merely be about Christian education, but about Christian formation. We must be on a continuing journey of being transformed by the Holy Spirit into Christ-likeness.” He believes that one must have a “wholistic” understanding of the gospel for that to become a reality. One cannot simply see the gospel as the promise of eternal life, although it is that. One must also understand the gospel as the liberating power of God’s Spirit to transform our lives here and now. If someone has stated their belief in Jesus as God’s Son sent to reconcile the world to God but cannot afford to feed themselves or their family, how is that good news? For Smith, the gospel is both a future reality and a present reality, and it must be preached that way. Smith’s passion is the same on a Tuesday afternoon as it was on Sunday morning, and that is why so many people are coming to hear God’s Word spoken by him. Listening to Smith makes me believe that the gospel really can change lives and change this world. I am moved to want to serve the people of the city of Minneapolis and declare the passionate gospel. And I get the feeling that the other eight hundred people here at this church do, too.9

    What are they sensing? The Gospel Made Credible and Authentic “My name is Bill, and I’m an alcoholic.” My friend Bill has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous since his early teens. From my own early teens I was one of the youngest leaders of Youth for Christ. Bill and I have spoken together at outreach sessions, telling our stories from different backgrounds, but with the same experience of God’s grace. Bill often reminds me, “There’s no seniority in AA.” At an AA meeting it doesn’t matter whether someone has been sober (or struggling) for thirty years or thirty days. They all know they need God (as they understand him) and each other. Realness counts.10 So it’s striking that when I asked people of different ages what would make an evangelistic preacher effective, one single word stood out again and again: authenticity . They use that word, I believe, not in the popular sense of expressing one’s “authentic inner self,” but in the classical sense of sincerity, reality, being what we present, a genuine product of God, a true “letter from Christ.” “Billy Graham and our Presbyterian pastor were both so real. You felt they really believed what they were saying.” That’s from a couple who have both been elders in their church, and leaders in a Graham crusade. “People are attracted to transparency, authenticity, integrity, humanness. They want to know that Jesus makes a difference now.” Those words come from a mentoring group of young evangelists from across North America and Europe I met with recently.

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    Graham Johnston, a young American who was part of my evangelistic team, now pastors at Subiaco Church of Christ in Perth, Australia. Preaching in the very unchurched Aussie culture has taught him a lot. For one thing, he uses story regularly in his preaching and has learned much about storytelling from filmwriters. But by far the most important quality in reaching the unchurched, he has found, is the trust factor. He believes the attitude of the church members is, “We invite our friends because we trust the way Graham Johnston talks about the faith.” He sees authority in a postmodern culture coming not out of position, role, or title but from the ethos of the preacher— as a good, believable person. “I don’t see my role as providing answers to people,” he explains. “That is much more of a modernity model. I see my evangelism as much more of a process, creating a sense of openness, hoping seekers will see a person who will journey with them. I want to unpack propositional truth in a way that they will see where it comes from. Ask them to suspend belief or disbelief for a while. And then, even if they don’t buy what we believe, they will say: this person respected me. Showed me how they got there. I’m willing to come again.” This dialogue approach, rather than a command form, is what Johnston commends. Johnston gives the telling example of a young woman, a recovering heroin addict who walked into church one Sunday. At the end of the service she came to him and said, “You need to know I’m an atheist. I don’t believe any of this rubbish.” Johnston responded, “It took a lot of courage for you to come here, Becky.” Becky kept coming. Four months later she passed by him on the way out of church, her arms crossed, and said, “You said some good things.” Fifteen months later Becky gave her own story as part of one of Johnston’s sermons and told the congregation, “I came here as an atheist. Now I’m baptized. And I really love Jesus.” If authentic evangelism is, as D.T. Niles has said, “one beggar telling other beggars where to find bread,” we need to preach first to ourselves. Writer William Stegner told an interviewer who asked how he made his stories believable, “The first job is to convince yourself, the second is to convince the reader. If you do the first, the second more or less follows.” When we preach out of an awareness of our own humanness and hungers, despairs and hopes, then people by God’s grace may sense in us a holy humanness—and humor.

    “God Does Allow IJ-Turns ” Neely Towe has been senior pastor at Stanwich Congregational Church in Connecticut since 1989. Sunday attendance has nearly doubled in addition to birthing a nearby church offering a contemporary style to reach a younger population. You can tell a lot about a church (and its leadership) from its bathrooms. Stanwich Congregational Church has great bathrooms. They’re brand new—and they have style. The ladies’ room is beautifully decorated, and the inside of every stall door is adorned by a Scripture verse: “You know when I sit and when I rise…” (Psalm 139:2). The message is clear: Stanwich Church, for all its elegance and tradition on Connecticut’s “Goldcoast,” is a place where people are free to laugh and be themselves! Neely Towe’s flock has become accustomed to hearing Scripture communicated through the often-comical events of everyday life. A humorous commentary on frustrations with the highway system leads into “God does allow U-Turns.” Says a long-time member: “Neely’s not bashful about sharing situations where she’s been wrong. She shows where God has brought her back to the fold and empowers people

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    to do the same.” Towe’s presence and mannerisms all speak volumes. She (and the God she represents) is approachable, loving, and trustworthy. She will interrupt a sermon to make sure an elderly congregant can hear her, and wait patiently before starting worship until everyone has a seat. God’s unmerited love and the hope through a relationship with Jesus Christ is particularly important for her success-oriented congregation of Wall Street traders, business tycoons, and the like, many of whom had no time for church before discovering Stanwich. “Everything is earned in this town. There is tremendous posturing and fear of failure, and loneliness,” Towe says. “The thought of a God who would love you for who you are and would be willing to die for you is extraordinary here.” Having grown up in a church environment where talking about one’s faith was considered inappropriate, Towe relates well to her flock, many New Englanders with some church background, but who had never experienced a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. “Have you discovered the joy and the freedom of professing your faith personally with someone else? I was never raised to talk about it …that is tacky! Well, fortunately someone knew better and said to me, ‘Neely, are you gonna live for Christ or for your friends? Make your decision.’ If you haven’t done that, be sure you say, ‘Yes, I do love you Lord, as best I can.’”11

    How are they responding? The Gospel Made Compelling and Accessible After watching people come forward at Graham’s invitation, Thielicke wrote:

    It all happened without pressure and emotionalism. It was far more the shepherd’s voice, calling out in love and sorrow for the wandering ones. I saw their assembled, moved and honestly decided faces. Above all there were two young men—a white and a negro—who stood at the front and about whom one felt that they were standing at that moment on Mount Horeb and looking from afar into a land they had longed for. It became lightning clear that men want to make a decision. I shall have to draw from all this certain consequences in my own preaching, even though the outward form will of course look somewhat different.

    Why should we preach in our congregations as evangelists? Certainly not just to add numbers—though the Lord may do that, too. And not even just to do our duty. The only adequate reason comes in another of Paul’s breathtaking images: “We are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God”(2 Corinthians 5:20). Imagine! “God is making his appeal through us.” Preaching, true gospel preaching, is not our talking about God. It is God speaking through us. Could anything be more awesome, more humbling, and, yes, more exhilarating? We are part of a “double search,” a kind of homing instinct of the soul that God has placed within us, that makes us turn Godward in response to the God who turns toward us and says, “Come home to me.” And how does God say that? In many ways beyond our imagination. Jesus can speak for himself. But he uses us and the “foolishness” of our preaching. Increasingly I think of evangelism as “initial spiritual direction.” It is helping people to see God not as policeman or examiner but, as Simon Tugwell daringly says,

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    “the great seducer, wooing us so that his joy may be in us.” We help people to see the “clues” that God is already reaching out to them, through the beauty, the joys, and pains of their lives. We help them to acknowledge the resistances and attachments that keep them away. And then we help them, as Steve Hayner says, “take steps toward Jesus.” And our preaching can offer them opportunities to take those steps.12 My wife Jeanie walked in as I was writing this, and I asked her thoughts. “Why is it” she said, “that people want to be married publicly? Isn’t it because they love each other and want to make that known?” Of course, just as many people have gone to a Graham crusade expecting to go forward as they would at their own wedding. The form will differ, as Thielicke wrote to Graham, but the appeal must be there. And always we remember it is “God who is making his appeal through us.” The Holy Spirit is the evangelist. And we are the common clay pots in which he shares his treasure.

    “Jesus is so good, and I have no choice but to surrender to him ” Darrell Johnson is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, Canada. An ordained Presbyterian (PCUSA) minister, he has served congregations in Manila; Glendale, California; and Vancouver. For Johnson, all preaching is evangelistic or it simply is not preaching. Why?Because all preaching is about the Evangel, about Jesus and his gospel. Johnson works from the presupposition that whether it is a person’s first introduction to Jesus or the person has been attending church for a lifetime, everyone needs to be evangelized and re-evangelized. At the heart of evangelistic preaching is Jesus Christ. In Scripture, we don’t have just one text that speaks toward evangelism, but the whole story speaks to the life of the Evangel, Jesus Christ. So a sermon about Jesus is by its very nature an evangelistic sermon. The lectionary title or category can refer to different themes of the Christian life, but it has to be grounded in Jesus. A sermon on holiness has to be about Jesus the Holy One. A sermon about stewardship has to be about Jesus our security. A sermon is not transformational unless there’s an encounter with Jesus in the midst of it. From Johnson’s perspective in North America, there is too much “good advice” taught from the pulpit and not enough good news. Good advice, as biblically sound as it may be, has to be grounded in good news, or people won’t be able to live it. Johnson attempts to incorporate three factors in his sermon preparation. The first is to think along theological terms. Whether the people sitting in the pews realize it or not, they were made by Christ, for Christ. So the message of Jesus Christ is not going to be strange to their souls.This leads to a pragmatic question: what kind of words will help people access this conversation that their soul is carrying on with the Holy Spirit? Often Johnson tries to picture five or six people that he knows and attempts to develop words, phrases, and images—”hermeneutical triggers”—that will help these people engage and access. The third factor, being culturally alert, helps to develop how the story of the Evangel will be conveyed at that particular place in that particular time. It conveys the sense that preachers know where their listeners live. “Evangelistic preaching” generates an image of response preaching. Johnson hopes for a fresh sense of wonder at who Christ is and a fresh act of surrender, so that at the end of every sermon, a person’s heart is saying (although she or he may not be able to articulate it), “Jesus is so good and I have no choice but to surrender to Him,” whether for the first or hundredth time.13

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    Offering Space for Open Response At the churches he served, Darrell Johnson sought to cultivate a culture of open responsiveness. He wanted open response not to be some unusual idea, one reserved for special occasions, but a regular “space for response,” allowing the first-timer as well as the hundredth-timer to engage with the claims of Christ. Crisis times especially nurtured this expectation. When Princess Diana was killed and the Hollywood community was shocked, many came to church at Glendale Presbyterian. “Your heart may be breaking,” he said. “We have a whole team to pray with you.” And he invited people at the end of the service to come for prayer. He also offered “safe places” for response. During prayers he might say, “You may have been attracted to faith but don’t know what to do with it. Try this. Tell that to Jesus. Say, ‘This may sound silly but I’d really like to know if you are real.’” Sometimes at the conclusion of a sermon he would invite people to “Put your hands on your knees, palm down, and then if you are wanting to know Jesus raise them slightly.” After Communion by intinction he might say, “You want to respond to God but don’t know what to do. You may be here concerned for a loved one who needs the healing touch of Jesus, or perhaps you do. After you partake, Jim or Joe will be here to pray with you.” “Even the staunchest Presbyterian elder,” notes Johnson, “won’t object to the invitation to have someone pray for someone they love!” In the bulletin would be an invitation: “If you are here and need prayer, or a loved one does, or if you need prayer for stress or healing, or you want to know Jesus, come at the end and we will talk.” Again, open response becomes no big idea, nothing unusual. I asked Johnson how he came up with these ideas. “I prayed,” he said, “Lord, what can we to do offer safe places for people to respond?” Not a bad idea: to pray about it! And to use our baptized imaginations. Reflecting on Johnson’s suggestions, I wonder what would it be like if we actually allowed two minutes of silence after the preaching is done? Some folk might be very uncomfortable, for silence too can be subversive in a culture bombarded by images and sounds. Who knows what God might say to people in the silence! Or who says invitations must be extended only at the end? One pastor occasionally in the middle of a sermon will pause, explain the meaning of repentance and faith, and invite folk to respond in quiet prayer right then. If we are alert to the nudgings of the Spirit we may invite in more ways and at more times than we have imagined! The forms will differ, as Thielicke wrote to Graham, but the appeal should be there, God making his appeal through us. And so, in whatever way we may be led, we can say something like this: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Give as much of yourself as you know, to as much of Christ as you know. It will cost you nothing, and it will cost you everything. But there will be wonder after wonder, and every wonder true. Will these new disciples continue?14 It’s the staying power of Christ that counts. A final observation from Thielicke to Graham is worth noting, and counting on:

    The consideration that many do not remain true to their hour of decision can contain no truly serious objection: the salt of this hour will be something they will taste in every loaf of bread and cake which they are to bake in their later life. Once in their life they have perceived what it is like to enter the realm of discipleship. And if only this memory accompanies them, then that is already a great deal.

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    Notes

    1. Excerpts from a letter to Billy Graham from Helmut Thielicke, August 23, 1963. 2. Henri Nouwen, Preaching and Ministry. 3. Rick Richardson, Reimagining Evangelism: Inviting Friends on a Spiritual Journey (Downers Grove, 111.: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 121. 4. Brian J. Walsh and Sylvia C. Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (Downers Grove, 111.: InterVarsity Press, 2004). They believe “The primal responsibility of Christian proclamation is to empower the community to reimagine the world as if Christ, and not the powers, were sovereign.” (8485 ). 5. N.T. Wright, “Mere Mission,” in Christianity Today 51, no. 1 (January 2007): 39-41. “If you simply address the God-shaped blank that people think they’ve got, the God that you end up with is the God shaped by the blank.” 6. Ibid. 7. This “poem” formulation is my adaptation of one way the Sri Lankan evangelist, D. T. Niles, presented the gospel: “God made you: you are responsible finally only to him. God loves you: he sent his Son to tell you so. Christ died for you: no one truly comes to himself until he can look at the cross and say: Ί did that.’ You are going to God: that will be great joy for some, but it will be terrible for others.” 8. Contributed by David Drake. For more on Tim Keller’s preaching go to https://www.gordonconwell.edu/ ockenga/store/ series “”Preaching to the Heart.” For sermons,go to http://sermons.redeemer.com/store/ index.cfm?fuseaction=category. display &category_ID=l 1. 9. Contributed by Michael Binder. For more about Efrem Smith’s preaching go to http://www.sanctuary covenant.org/sermons/index.htm. 10. Bill and I spoke as a team at an AA meeting, as part of an “affinity group” evangelism outreach with churches in Ottawa, Canada. This cooperative outreach brought teams of communicators to the city to speak at two dozen or more breakfasts, lunches, dinners, coffees, each aimed at a particular segment of the community: engineers, physicians, military, bereaved parents, cancer patients and many others. This “affinity group” approach can be particularly effective, at low cost, and building on already established relationships so that people can invite their friends to a non-threatening setting to encounter a presentation that relates to their life situation. Dr. Lon Allison, director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, Illinois has a team that can give guidance in “affinity group” evangelism. 11. Contributed by Barbara Cannistraro. For more about Neely Towe’s preaching. Go to http:// www.stanwichchurch.org/new/sermons_current.html, “Neither Do I Condemn You” (John 8:1-11), and “Prepare the Way of the Lord” (Luke 3:18). 12. For more on evangelism as spiritual direction see Ben Campbell Johnson, Speaking of God: Evangelism as Initial Spiritual Guidance (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991). 13. Contributed by Chris Kim. For more about Darrell Johnson’s preaching, go to www.djohnsononline.com http://www.djohnsononline.com or http://www.tenth.ca. See also “What Have We Gotten Ourselves Into?” (sermon preached January 8,2006 at Tenth Avenue Alliance Church; available at www.tenth.ca). 14. I thank my young preacher friends, Michael Binder, Barbara Cannistraro, David Drake, and Chris Kim for their part in preparing these thoughts and writing the preacher profiles.

  • Preaching as evangelism

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    Preaching as Evangelism

    Catherine Gunsalus González

    Decatur, Georgia

    What does the phrase “preaching as evangelism” mean? This is an ambiguous phrase: “preaching as evangelism.” The term “evangelism” can mean any proclamation of the gospel. However, let us assume that here the term is used in its more common understanding of proclaiming the gospel to those who do not believe. The term “preaching” could also mean any proclamation of the gospel. But let us here assume that by preaching we use the more common understanding of the proclamation of the gospel in the gathered community of believers. Obviously, there is preaching outside of the church, in contexts where faith is neither expected nor taken for granted. If the wider use of both terms is implied in the phrase “preaching as evangelism,” then there is no issue at all: all preaching could be evangelism. But when we speak of preaching in the context of Sunday worship, preaching in the church, in what sense should this preaching be considered evangelism, that is to say, preaching to those who do not believe? There are at least four ways in which this might be understood. First, though the congregation gathers because they believe they are Christians, the pastor does not believe this about them, and therefore treats them as nonbelievers in need of evangelization. This is obviously a very negative way of stating the matter. It is rather like John the Baptist telling Jews they needed to be baptized as though they were converts. Such a direct approach would hardly work week after week, however, nor might we expect a congregation to return time and time again only to be told they have made no progress but have to start over. At the same time, there is the reality that where Christianity is very much a part of the culture, people go to church as much out of habit as out of conviction. It is simply the thing good people do. Sören Kierkegaard once wrote that the most difficult task was to deal with people who were under the illusion that they were Christians. He wrote:

    A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. . . . It means that one does not begin directly with the matter one wants to communicate, but begins by accepting the other man’s illusion as good money. So one does not begin thus: I am a Christian; you are not a Christian.1

    Evangelistic preaching to such a congregation would therefore need to be quite indirect. It would have to at least give the congregation the impression that the preacher does believe they are Christians. This leads us to our second possible meaning of the phrase. Though both the preacher and the congregation acknowledge that they are the church, that they rightly bear the name of Christian, they have, in the words to the church in Ephesus, “fallen away from their first love” (Revelation 2:4) and need to be

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    recalled to their vocation as Christians. This is really revival. Every congregation needs this—though not every Sunday—and such times are actually built into the church year. Granted, many congregations and preachers do not take this seriously, and the opportunity for revival is passed by as unnecessary. Services for the renewal of baptismal vows are such occasions. The entirety of Lent leads itself to this. The third possibility is that the preacher is truly preaching to the unconverted— guests brought by members, children of believers brought to church by their parents. This means, however, that the majority of the congregation is hearing words addressed to someone else. In fact, this can happen often when the preacher thinks he or she is preaching to the members of the congregation who need revival, but those members assume the sermon is directed at others. The fourth possibility is that the preacher is demonstrating what evangelism looks like in the hope that members will take seriously their own task of evangelism outside of the service of worship. This is probably the least likely meaning of the phrase, and it is probably also one of the most important needs in most congregations. For Eastern Orthodox Christians, the words “preaching as evangelism” would have a totally different meaning, since worship is assumed to be a form of proclamation to the principalities and powers, unseen observers of the worship of the church. Preaching, and indeed the entire worship service, has the power to cause the powers of evil to retreat and the powers of good to become stronger in our world, even if the human agents of such powers are not present. This is probably what Paul means when he writes to the Corinthians that whenever they celebrate the Lord’s Supper “they proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). The proclamation is not simply to the congregational members in attendance, but also to the “principalities and powers” that are also witnesses.

    What should the phrase mean in our context? Of the first three, more typical understandings, each has serious drawbacks. There is an added problem that lies at the heart of the issue, however. Precisely because of the revival format within which the modern Evangelical movement had its rise, the term evangelism often has a strongly individualistic note to it. That is to say, preaching has the intent of leading individuals to make a decision, a commitment to the gospel message. They are called, individually and personally, to become believers. This is important in a revival service, aimed at bringing people who have not been believers or those who have fallen away from their faith to become Christians for the first time or to renew their faith in Christ. When the original revivals took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they had roots in a culture in which it could be assumed that everyone at least knew what the message of the church was. It was clearly a revival, not a proclamation of the gospel to those who did not know it. However, when this evangelistic form is taken into the church itself as a dominant form of preaching, it means that the sermon is directed at individuals, and not at their life together as the church. And yet, the Bible itself as written in large part not for individuals but for the communities of those who are the People of God. It is written to God’s People and comes out of the experience of those communities, showing where they have been faithful and where they have not. It is this ancient word to God’s People that the preacher is called upon to proclaim in our own day. To make it a call only to separate individuals rather than to the congregation as a whole is to do some

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    harm to the character of the text itself. The gospel is not only a word of salvation to individuals: it is also the creation of a new people. In a way, to proclaim only the cost of salvation—the cross—and omit the emergence of the new creation is to omit the power of the resurrection and leave the message on Good Friday. That is to say, though the price of our salvation is the cross of Christ, the victory proclaimed by Easter is that the new creation, the firstfruits of the Kingdom of God, has entered into our world. This is experienced in the church: the body of Christ, gathered by the power of the Holy Spirit. To concentrate only on personal salvation without an equal stress on the community of faith is to truncate the gospel itself. This problem is abetted by the changes in the English language itself. We no longer make any distinction between the second person singular and the second person plural. For both we say “you.” At least in the time of the King James translation, the difference was clear: “thee” and “ye.” But now, when we hear “you” we often assume it means me individually, whereas many times—if not most—the Scripture intends it to be a plural “you,” meaning the whole community gathered to hear the Word. In addition, because of the printing press and the ability to have personal Bibles, we often read Scripture alone, privately, and even more likely assume it is addressed to us as a solitary individual. Of course we should read Scripture by ourselves, but we still need to understand that it is really addressed to us as part of a community, part of the People of God. When it was written, and for centuries thereafter, Christians only heard Scripture in the midst of the gathered community, and more likely understood it as applying to them as a group. If we read Scripture in this sense—as addressed to the community of faith—then it is challenging all of us, all the baptized, to become the community we are called to be. It is therefore not a matter of deciding if each individual member is truly a Christian but whether the whole gathering is what it should be. There is always room for growth, always a clearer way to be a witness to the world around us of the kind of life God intends for human communities to live. If preaching as evangelism means calling the congregation to remember what it is—the body of Christ—then that is an appropriate task for every sermon. It is reminding the congregation of the meaning of the sign they bear because of their baptism. If there are those present who are not believers, at least they will understand what the church is and what Christians are about when they gather. It might be exciting enough that they would like to become part of such a people. Part of what the church is called to do is to proclaim the gospel to the world outside the church, both in deed and in word. Therefore, such preaching could also help the faithful in their own evangelistic task. If the preacher uses the lectionary, then the readings will look different if they are studied with the congregation rather than individuals in mind.

    Some Lectionary Passages for the Season after Pentecost We will look at the pericopes suggested for two of the Sundays in the period of Ordinary Time following Pentecost in Cycle C, propers 11 and 14, for Sundays between July 17 and 23 and August 7 and 13. In the passages for proper 11, one of the suggestions for the Old Testament lesson is Amos 8:1 -12. It is a prophecy about the coming destruction of Israel because of its

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    unethical ways, and in spite of its “proper” worship. In other words, the people gather and go through the motions of worship but they never really hear what God’s word says to them. The prophecy includes a future famine for God’s word, precisely when the people begin to hunger for it because they have reached a time of utter despair. The message is clear for a congregation: if the people do not cherish the Word of God while it is in their midst, then it will be gone when they finally are ready to hear it. Just attending worship is not enough. The Gospel lesson is Luke 10:38-42, the story of Jesus’ visit in the home of Mary and Martha. The same point is made: Mary realizes that the Word of God is in the living room and she therefore stays there to hear it. Martha is in the kitchen, going about her usual tasks. Jesus clearly commends Mary as having chosen the better part. The Epistle lesson is Colossians 1:15-28, a description of Christ as the firstborn of all creation, and Paul’s own work in preaching the gospel. Here Paul addresses the church directly, writing, “And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him—provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith.” These words could easily be understood as referring to individual Christians, and yet in the text they are clearly referring to the church. Their holiness is corporate: it has to do with how they behave toward each other, and not only with their personal holiness. The reconciliation Christ has provided has linked them to each other, and not only to Jesus. The Amos passage is also clearly addressed to the community of faith, and it is even more poignant because it includes comments about their gathering for worship. Their behavior toward each other has been unethical. They are not the holy community , the witness to the world of God’s intentions for humanity, that they were created to be. It is their common life that is the cause of their condemnation. The Mary and Martha passage could also be viewed individually, and justifiably so, since the words of Jesus address two individuals. But when it is read alongside the Amos passage, the word to the whole congregation becomes more obvious. This passage has had an interesting history. For centuries it was read in the service of veiling for a nun—when she took her final vows. In that context it affirmed her choice of the monastic life over against the choice of those women, who, like Martha, took care of the home. Obviously, Protestants did not care for such an interpretation. For them, the cloistered life was not higher than the life of marriage and family. So the passage was interpreted to mean that both the life of Bible study and the life of service in the community were equally valuable. Many congregations had women’s groups that were divided between “Mary circles” and “Martha circles.” The first spent their time in Bible study and the second in rolling bandages or collecting clothing for the poor. The stress was on the equal validity of both groups. The problem is that Jesus does say that Mary chose the better part! The Amos passage read alongside this Gospel lesson makes it easier to see that Martha was reproved, not because she was doing something wrong, but because when the Word of God is present, the faithful are called to listen to it. If Jesus is teaching in the living room, then the kitchen is not the place to be, even though when he is not teaching, Mary too should be about serving the physical needs of Jesus and others. The Gospel lesson for the fourteenth proper is also in Luke, chapter 12, verses 3240 . Since it begins with the words, “Do not be afraid, little flock…,” it can hardly be

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    understood as addressed to only one person. The little flock is to continue together, faithfully carrying out the Master’s commands, until he returns. It is paired with the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 1:1 and 1:10-20, where the prophet, speaking for God, is condemning the people who gather for worship but then live faithlessly. They fail to live together as God’s people, so that the poor suffer injustice and the widow and the orphan have no one to defend them. The Epistle lesson is from Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16, and recalls those who lived faithfully. Their faith was seen in their living by hope, living out of the future that God had promised them. This is what the people in Isaiah’s time failed to do and it is what the Gospel lesson calls Christians to do. They are to live now by the ethics and mores of the Kingdom that is promised, whose down payment or earnest money was seen in the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Living by such faith is not easy. Luke records words of Jesus to his “little flock” to sell what they have and give to the poor. Such generosity is only possible when one trusts the community. Luke’s second book—Acts—tells of the early Christian community in Jerusalem that did live in this manner. It was not a matter of giving up everything all at once and becoming destitute. Rather it was a radical sharing, so that those who had resources gave to those in need. They did not call anything their own, but whatever they had was used for the whole community where it was needed. Our congregations are not like that. We may assume that since those early Christians expected the full dawning of the Kingdom in the very near future, they could risk such behavior. But the pattern persisted even when such an expectation was gone. Our communities are different. Our economic system is different. But we also live in a society that assumes economic success and failure are personal matters and have nothing to do with church life. If some people lose their jobs, other members of the congregation have no obligation to help them. If a member gets into financial difficulty, chances are they will hide it from other church members. A congregation may help the needy outside its own membership but assume that members are on their own. Somehow, neediness is not proper for church members! There is something wrong with this picture. The church is called to be a community—a loving, generous community. Its love is to overflow its own life and go into the world around the church. However, if this love and generosity are shown only to those outside, if there is little sense that the congregation’s own life is its greatest witness to the world around it, then much of the Bible will be incomprehensible, because it is written to communities of faith and deals with their life together. Granted, in our culture it is difficult to overcome the entrenched individualism. But an understanding that preaching seeks to show the congregation the significance of its life together as an evangelistic form to the wider society is surely a beginning.

    Note

    1. Kierkegaard, The Point of View Etc. : including The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Two Notes About the ‘Individual* and On My Work as an Author, trans. Walter Lowrie (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 25,40-41.

  • God and the chaos monster

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    God and the Chaos Monster*

    Lamentations 3:22-24, 31-33; Mark 1:9-11; John 20:26-29

    Jimmie D. Johnson

    First Presbyterian Church of Waco, Texas

    I don’t know if you can dedicate a sermon to a human being rather than to God, but I seriously doubt that insecurity is a big issue for God. For preachers, yes. Insecurity as a problem for God, no. This baccalaureate sermon is dedicated to a beautiful—even when bald—little six-year-old named Pepper. Pepper never had a college commencement; she never made it out of first grade. She died at the age of six in 1984 of a horrible cancer that stalks little bitties. Her death on that Sunday afternoon in April was my first conscious encounter with the chaos monster. By conscious encounter, I mean I have stayed with this clash of faith and fear since 1984 and have not let the monster drive me into a premature closure through magic, superstitious religious belief, or the palliative of agnosticism. I had become Pepper’s pastor in December 1982. A telephone call came from a friend who was also a Presbyterian minister and, incidentally, an Austin College grad. He said, “Jim, a family from my church in McKinney has moved to Waco, and I would like for you to go visit them.” “Sure” I said. “Glad to do so.” “I’m not really doing you a favor,” he told me. “What do you mean?” “They have two little girls …” I interrupted him, “Great! I have two little girls. I was made to be a dad of daughters.” There was silence, and then he continued: “Not like theirs, Jim. Their first— though she is beautiful and brilliant—was born with a severe birth defect and is dwarflike . But it is the other one, the one named Pepper, to whom you need to go. She will probably die soon from cancer.” I telephoned and then went to visit the family, sure that I would be competent and capable for them. This is why, even today, I say, standing before you, about to turn fifty-nine, married thirty-nine years, ordained for thirty years, a father of two and grandfather of three, on my best day, I am still nine-tenths fake. Why do I say this? Because I am full of fear. The difference today is that I know it. Then, I pretended not to know. Turns out, the McKinney Presbyterian pastor had done me a tremendous favor: He introduced me to Pepper, and I have loved her ever since. Her little life and big death have been a primary lens through which I have tried to see God with belief, yet be faithful also to my experience of the absurdity of the chaos monster. I used to go to the ICU and rock Pepper so her mom and dad could get a break. She loved butterflies and drew me pictures of the little beauties. Then I would sing to her. Little Pepper Haynes’s gonna fly someday>, fly someday… God’s little butterfly… The

    * This sermon was preached at the Baccalaureate service at Austin College on May 13, 2006.

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    singing was silly, terrible, but she fiercely liked it and always giggled. I never thought I would let her down. I certainly never thought I would run out on her, but I did. On that April afternoon in 1984, they called me to come to their home. Pepper had been brought home from Hillcrest Hospital to die. I went, and, upon entering her room, I encountered the God who both delivers the needy and abandons the crucified. My faith has never been the same since. Even as I stand before you and preach, my faith dwells between the polarities of this divine contradiction. Pepper was visibly shaking as I entered her room. Jay and Debbie, her parents, could see my immediate alarm. They tried to comfort me by telling me that the shaking was from heavy morphine usage. They were holding her as they all huddled together on the bed. Pepper looked like the images F d seen of Jewish children who had survived concentration camps. Her mom and dad were comforting her with hugs and ice chips. I was able to stay in the room for ten minutes at most; then I abandoned her. I made up the excuse that I would go into the other room and hold her sister who was half the size of her six-year-old baby sister. I did go and gather her sister into my lap and sit with her, though it was an excuse. All I knew was, I had to get out ofthat room and away from that shaking. I was abandoning Pepper because it seemed to me that God was abandoning her, and, therefore, everything I had believed was being savaged. Her shaking death was shaking my faith to death. She died within an hour or so. Only then could I go back into her room. Hemingway wrote: “Life breaks everyone. Some grow strong at the broken places.” The only reason that I can come up with that could explain why some grow stronger and some don’t is the visit of an angel in their life. An angel. Don’t romanticize , and there’s no need to be anti-intellectual, either. I am not witnessing to a fundamentalist form of faith. An angel is a messenger. And an angel can be a six-yearold who lets you rock her and sing funny made-up songs as she grins, yet goes about her work of dying. Every one of you will have your angel, your messenger. For those who have ears to hear, hear your angel, and for those who have eyes to see, see your angel. You are being given a message. Some of you have already heard, but you are frightened to tell anyone; the others will be hearing your message. Sooner or later, life breaks everyone. Simply breaks you. It might be by your own doing, the result of your own betrayals suddenly rising up to betray you. It might be that you are perfectly innocent. God makes life precarious, and the innocents do often suffer in this dangerous world. And this is why I believe that God, too, will have to give an account of God’s self to God’s creation. Perhaps the final cleansing of creation will be the bathing of God’s own tears until God has passed through God’s own peculiar judgment before us. I wanted us to hear the beautiful verse in John’s Gospel about those who believe without seeing. John’s Gospel is usually a little too triumphalistic, a little too full of certain glory for me when it comes to Jesus as God’s human face. But I think I have misunderstood John’s witness and his take on God’s glory. I now perceive John’s witness as far more subversive than triumphal when it comes to power. The verse about believing without seeing is not in any Gospel but John’s. “You believe because you have seen me, but blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.” Why? Why are those who don’t see the miraculous considered

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    blessed? I suppose it is because, for them, their faith comes without seeing, without validation. We believe only with the awareness that our belief is always in dispute, never imperialistic in its triumphs. Some of us find that we can believe only because Jesus himself underwent the experience of encountering the deafness of the universe, the chaos with trembling; Jesus himself encountered the question of abandonment. I believe Jesus’ baptism is about all of this, though a first read rarely makes the connection. It is why I wanted the baptism text read; I believe there is a connection. There is a connection between him and us that refuses to become discouraged. A connection between the start of his brief parade on that day of his baptism and your parade, which begins this weekend. A connection between his baptism and the chaos monster’s absurdity, too. Sooner or later, heaven no longer opens up. Sooner or later, heaven falls silent. Our parade lurches to a grinding halt. It did for Jesus, as well. Now, you can play those religious shell games that will give you all kinds of reasons to pretend you still have your miracle, that you are still seeing signs of heaven and hearing heaven’s voice. And you can always find a preacher and a congregation that will vouch for your miracle. Any fool can fill a church. But at what cost? The grand, undisputable sign that there is a God and that life is worthwhile and makes sense and always turns out all right—all this will disappear and fall silent. In every life—in your life—there comes a point where all is lost. Nothing is there but a trembling absurdity and faith devouring itself, divided between the God who delivers the needy and the God who abandons the crucified. This violent contradiction will stare you right in the face. Its silence is deafening, and, I guarantee you, you will be the one to blink first. For me, there only is one miracle: we are loved by God. When Jesus was baptized, wasn’t it an expression of this one, true miracle? I have never viewed the baptism of Jesus as exclusive of Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics, and atheists. On the contrary, I see his baptism as a portrayal of his brotherhood of us all. When I used to say evening prayers with my daughters, I tried to convey to them this notion that God’s arms reach around the whole world to include all. I said the same prayer every evening: “Dear God, thank you for the high honor and privilege of being Shannon and Shalyn’ s dad. Thank you for their baptism, which is a sign that they belong to you, and not only them but all children, whether baptized or not. In Jesus’ name, Amen.” I wanted them to sense the connection between their baptism and their neighbor. Who knows all the reasons for the baptism of Jesus? For me on this evening with you, it is enough to believe he was baptized to show his willingness to be drenched in the swirling contradictions of full, human life. On that day, Jesus sees and hears, according to Mark, the sounds of the heavens torn open, the Spirit appearing something like a dove, a voice declaring the pleasure of God. Jesus hears and sees validation, surely something like you are experiencing this weekend, everyone surrounding you with hoorays and pride, producing pleasurable hope. And appropriately so, for you and all who love you. But don’t forget that this same Jesus would be the one who later in life cried out in agony to God, “Why have I been abandoned?” That protest on the cross was not his baptism speaking but his protest to his baptism and to God. And for him, too, the silence was deafening. Of course, in that beautiful prayer about the experience of holy abandonment, in

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    which Jesus legitimizes both the presence of God and the absence of God, he takes our own lives even more into his. For when we cry out such a prayer of painful abandonment , calling for God to get God’s good in gear, we are praying his prayer, which, of course, was the prayer of his own Jewish people in their lament literature in the Older Testament. There are times in life when we see, hear, and feel the miracle of God’s presence, pleasure, and joy ; as, assuredly, there comes the day when all is lost, and the authentic, genuine, religious experience of God is one of abandonment. Because Jesus was baptized into the experience of no exemptions, no free passes, from the chaos monster, I can say this evening in worship with you: “I believe though I have not seen.” I can profess Jesus as my Lord and Savior because, first, I profess him as a brother, my brother who endured and endures the chaos absurdity with me. Had you been present and had a video camera at the baptism of Jesus, I believe that later, on the replay, you would have simply seen a human being joining other human beings like us. No sounds or sights of heavenly voices, no thundering affirmations. Just a human being participating in a public religious ceremony that anyone might say was plebeian and meaningless. But the next time we are in the contradiction of chaos, all miracles gone, the silence deafening, the nauseating absurdity spinning us, let us remember, there is someone at our side who has joined with us and will never run out on us. He joined with us, not to grant God’s love, but to take our suffering and dying and righteous protest into God’s love and keeping. The chaos monster of life still gives me the shakes. We cannot and ought not deceive ourselves. Innocents suffering, the strutting of death and oppression, are all absurdities in God’s world. Suffering will remain an absurd, irrational fact, and, worse, the final word, unless we join with God in becoming weak in power in order to become strong in love and give ourselves to the calling message. And what is that calling message? It will be something like the one spoken by the mysterious fox to the little boy in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic story, The Littlß Prince. When at long last the secret message is told, it is this: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Your angel will say something like that. “Blessed are those who believe without seeing.”

  • Ye gates lift up your heads on high

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    Ye Gates Lift Up Your Heads on High

    O. Ben Sparks

    Second Presbyterian Church, Richmond, Virginia

    The worship is an indelible memory; it has remained a driving force for my preparation of liturgy and leadership of worship since 1965. I first saw the scene enacted in the Abbey Church on Iona (a small but religiously significant island off the West coast of Scotland). In Sunday worship when the time came for the celebration of The Lord’s Supper, a procession emerged from the abbey crossing, led by the founder of the Iona Community, the Very Reverend George F. MacLeod.1 He bore in his hands the chalice and paten. Behind him came a tray almost overflowing with freshly baked bread, and behind the bread were other communion servers carrying large crystal goblets filled with dark wine. The procession moved with dignity though the choir stalls toward the green marble altar under the abbey’s east window shining with sunlight, as five hundred people sang, “Ye Gates lift up your heads on high, ye doors that last for aye, Be lifted up that so the King, of glory enter may.”2 For the first time I was palpably aware of the presence of the Risen Christ in worship. The intentional symbol/reality was unmistakable: the One who hung the stars in space and spun the planets into orbit; the One who is seated at the right hand of God, praying for us, was here among us, present (though words cannot truly capture it, thank God) in bread, wine, and the gathered community of God’s people. As we sang the Scottish paraphrase of Psalm 24, the elements were placed on the altar, the servers gathered behind, and the words of institution rang through the room: “This is my body, broken for you; this cup is the new covenant in my blood, poured out for a multitude, for the forgiveness of sins.” Who would ever doubt again the Word made flesh, dwelling among us? The Eucharistie Prayer which rose to heaven included a spoken Sanctus and a responsive Agnus Dei. Never had I seen The Lord’s Supper celebrated in such manner, nor as frequently as each Lord’s Day. There was a youth communion service every Friday night: after the opening liturgy and the sermon, the same procession emerged from the abbey crossing. Only now we sang: “He’s got the whole world in his hands, the whole world – and you and me sister, you and me brother…” Then I knew God in the Christ of all people, not just my kind, and the Christ for all nations—not only mine. I knew Christ as I had not before that time—Christ for the world, not as Someone we possess to take to others, but as One who is (as the Colossian letter declares) the image of the invisible God for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created… and in him all things hold together (1:15-17). Christ was not just for the world, but in the world already, even where the church had not yet shown its face. As Macleod reminded us regularly, “There is a cross in the nature of things.” When I went to Scotland to join the Iona Community after graduating from Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (now Union-PSCE), I was initiated thoroughly into an incarnational theology, far removed from the spirituality of the church that had dominated my childhood and youth. Try as they certainly did, that theological separation of the physical from the spiritual (of soul salvation from bodily existence here and now) was not fully eradicated from our understanding by excellent seminary

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    professors, even in the heyday of the Civil Rights movement. And worship as a transforming experience was as negligible at Union as it was everywhere in the former PCUS; it was dutiful but rarely joyful. Sometimes in seminary there were responses in student led prayers, but the memorable event that signaled even slight risk was the occasional playing of “Never on Sunday” disguised as a Bach fugue for a chapel postlude. In my student years, communion was not celebrated in chapel. After all, we were not a church, but an educational institution. Chapel worship was ‘Puritan plain’ – with extemporaneous prayers and solid biblical preaching and the singing of hymns. Liturgy was something Catholics used in worship; it was Episcopal at best, and certainly not encouraged for serious Presbyterians. My own upbringing in an urban church was similar—hymns, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer were all in which the congregation was invited to participate. The Lord’s Supper was ‘administered’ (that word speaks volumes) four times a year. While I was brought up to be respectful of holy places and the sanctuary of the church, the churches of my childhood had none of the gravitas of a twelfth century abbey built by Benedictine monks, now presided over by a towering, world-renowned Scottish preacher who, with the eloquent, persistent, merciful, generous preaching of the gospel, denounced nuclear weapons, and promoted healing, prayer, social and political action, and the renewal of worship. On Iona, in addition to Sunday and Friday communion services, there was morning and evening worship six days a week. We followed set liturgies, with time left within each service for extemporaneous prayer. I can sing from memory some of the hymns we repeated on alternate days of the weeks, a couple of which are included in our most recent Presbyterian hymnal. After about three weeks of repetitive prayers – ‘the same old, same old’ – 1 began to feel restive, and thought the worship boring. Then one day during my summer on the island, something came over me (was it the Holy Spirit’s work?) and the repetition ceased seeming trite or hackneyed. The prayers began to ring true, immediate; they became my prayers. What I realized was that to each worship service I was bringing my own daily experience: my life, my sorrow, joy, longing, and fears—and that with each different circumstance, the prayer took on new meaning. They were helping me speak to God. Members of the community were listed in a small book called the Miles Christi (the way of Christ). We prayed for each other (in geographical clusters) each day. Five to twelve members were listed on a page, and at the bottom of each list of members several countries were named, until by the end of the month and the end of the book, every nation on earth was lifted before the throne of grace. Also listed in these pages were communities similar to the Iona Community: Taize and several lay academies on the continent, indeed any Christian community of like purpose, people who were seeking new ways to touch the hearts of all, for the sake of the gospel.3 By using the Miles Christi I was being initiated into an understanding of the world church, of the ecumenical church, of the church as God’s holy people out of every nation. On Iona I made a startling discovery. In Americus, Georgia, a couple of hundred miles from my home, was something called the Koinoinia Community, an interracial fellowship for which we prayed once a month on a remote Scottish island. The founder of Koinoinia was Clarence Jordan, a Baptist who had studied at Union Seminary in Virginia.

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    The worship of the Iona Community drew on Wesleyan, Anglican, and Roman Catholic sources. In the early days of the Community’s founding, the Church of Scotland, ministers and laity, were critical of MacLeod’s trying to “Catholicize” the Kirk with his funny papist ideas, his responsive prayers, and his encouragement of the congregation’s response to prayers in public worship with a loud “Amen.” George would reply to his critics, humorously, polemically, and consistently: liturgy is the work of the people—not only of the preacher and the choir. Every Wednesday night there was a healing service. Requests came from all over the world seeking prayers, from churches wherever George MacLeod had traveled and preached after the end of World War II throughout the 1960s and 70s. Names came from cities in Africa and Asia; prayers were sought for persons in Australia and South Africa, prayers for people with every kind of illness and disease. At the healing service, the last act of worship before the hymn and benediction was prayer with the laying on of hands. Kneeling cushions in front of the communion table filled with those who came forward. After the custom of the Apostles, the worship leader would lay his hands on each person’s head and ask God to heal her of all that harmed her in body, mind, and spirit. At first this was unnerving. The only time I had seen anything inhabiting the same universe was at an Oral Roberts revival I attended on a dare one summer during my first fieldwork experience. The atmosphere was manipulative, and at first, people at the Roberts’ revival, held in a tent on the river bank in Roanoke, Virginia, were asked to raise their hands, and then as the music played and the cajoling increased, they were asked to stand up, then to step out of their chairs into the aisle, then to step forward to the front, and finally they were asked to kneel. On Iona the service was not emotionally manipulative; it was reserved, modest, and suffused with quiet reverence. Sometimes there were tears. Before people were invited forward, at every healing service, George MacLeod provided the same explanation: “that we do this at the invitation of our Lord. Our actions are neither opposed to—nor meant to be a substitute for—the practice of medicine. The church rejoices in all healing, wherever it takes place, in Communist Russia, in Communist China, in a hospital in Edinburgh, in a village hut in Africa. All healing comes from God and is the work of God’s mercy in all creation. But Jesus told his disciples to pray and to lay their hands upon the sick, and in the mystery of faith, and in the tradition of the holy, universal church, trusting his love and power to heal; we do this in obedience to him.” Then MacLeod would read the verses from the “long ending” of the Gospel of Mark that include the words about the handling of poisonous serpents, a text before which most of us are inclined to hide our faces. After the Scripture, the suppliants would come forward and kneel. In 1965,1 knew nothing of Paul Ricoeur, or of his understanding of a naive reading of the text. Nor had I been asked to take canonical criticism with any seriousness at all. I was an Enlightenment graduate of a seminary renowned for some of the best biblical historical/critical scholarship in the world, a seminary famous for its struggle against fundamentalism. What I had learned to deplore in exegesis courses was a simple spirituality that took a text at face value, because such simplicity had been used to justify segregation from which the South (and the nation) was even then painfully emerging. Here was a simple reading of a hard text—not ignored, but read (within the mystery of faith) alongside the known facts of medical science and healing.

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    It would take thirty-three years before that text came alive for me in another way – in Africa, in discussing demon possession with African pastors. They answered my questions with kindness but were astonished at my naivete. I had told them that exorcism was not something we understood in mainline churches back home. They said they were sorry for my inexperience. There was acceptance of modern medicine and of the use of psychiatrists in Ghana for people who are mentally ill. “But we also have exorcists at work in the church; there is a difference between mental illness and demon possession. Do you think evil gains no foothold in America?” Finally, in the matter of healing and worship, each week we were given to understand that there is no sharp distinction drawn between social healing and personal healing. They are cut from the same cloth. Wherever there is personal illness, there are often social ills: low wages, oppression of workers, improper sewage systems, chemical spills, poisoned water supplies, and faulty food production. It was unthinkable that Christian people should be snatching individuals (or the souls of individuals) out of a diseased community while leaving others to languish in the conditions that brought on the illness. Thursday night in the abbey there was a commitment service designed especially for the induction of new members into the community but also expanded to welcome those who wanted to re-dedicate themselves to the work and worship of God, and to faithful discipleship. It, too, involved kneeling on cushions on the stone floor of the abbey. As people knelt, praying, the leader of worship moved in among those kneeling, laying his hands upon them, and quoting verses of Scripture (“Do you love me? Then feed my sheep” or “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you” or “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these.. .you have done it to me”). Here all at once was something personal, addressed directly to you—for you, about you—to nourish and engage you. At the same time one never lost the corporate dimension, that we were members of a world-wide fellowship of persons who had committed ourselves to the ‘four pillars’ of Iona’ s mission to the church and the world: ministries of healing and social/political justice, the renewal of worship and of prayer – individually and in community. We held each other accountable. We prepared for the commitment service by rehearsing St. Patrick’s Breastplate, a hymn of great majesty that rejoices in the glories of creation and redemption while the singers bind themselves to “the strong name of the Trinity.” Just before the final stanza is an interlude that includes these words: “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me … Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.” That interlude is now standard in many prayer books; the hymn can be found in the 1982 Episcopal hymnal. It comes out of the Celtic tradition in which the Iona Community was born, and lives, and still has much of its being, a tradition that sanctifies both the redemption of the common life and the thunderous glories of creation displayed on the rocky coasts of an island nation. In that hymn, at the core of the commitment service, was the power of the incarnation suffusing all nature, made personal in the fellowship of saints. We were not to be withdrawn from a world too tempting and full of suffering to confront; we were rejoicing, underneath the brokenness of this world, in God’s true reality, which would not fail us. The brokenness is being made whole by the blood of the Lamb who invites his disciples to follow on the way to the cross—and beyond the cross to the New Jerusalem.

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    When I was invited to write this article for the Journal, I was asked to reflect upon how my experience in worship on Iona in 1965 and my membership in the Iona Community had shaped my ministry in the PC (USA). I have concentrated on the worship, and I hope that the recounting of experiences has awakened in you the contrast between what I was reared in—faithful though my people, my teachers, and pastors were—and what set my soul singing long ago on Iona. I returned to Virginia and to worship that was in most respects what I had left behind. I found much of it spiritually suffocating. Worship at a synod meeting in 1968 where communion was served in the First Presbyterian Church in Staunton, Virginia, was a sad example. There was no Eucharistie prayer and certainly no Sanctus or Agnus Dei. The words of institution were mumbled, and then came a prayer that lasted less than thirty seconds—or so it seemed—and mentioned neither the sacrifice of Christ nor the needs of the world. The service managed to be somber and boring, but not only because it lacked the majesty and simplicity of Iona worship. It reflected nothing of the world around us, for which Christ died and in which his holy presence might also be discovered—binding, loosing, lifting up, consoling. And yet from that same synod meeting, carloads of people departed to Washington to join the Poor Peoples’ March. I cite that example because it characterizes so much of the worship that nourished me, especially with regard to the celebration of the Eucharist. On Iona and in the parishes where Iona members were pastors, the form of worship reflected, even then, an emphasis on mission, and upon the world’s suffering and lostness, for which Christ died. Iona was never meant to be a place of escape from the world’s needs, but a place of refreshment for mission, evangelism, and social justice. If people know the Iona Community today, apart from the thousands who have visited the island, they know it through the words and music of John Bell, a member of the community, now a fellow of the Royal College of Music and one of the most prolific and influential hymn writers in the English speaking world since the Wesleys. In addition, Bell has (through Iona worship and in workshops internationally) ‘channeled’ music from South America, South Africa, and nations all over the developing world, into the mainstream worship in the West. Bell has traveled more than any other community member since George MacLeod, and has taken the Iona gospel of the wholeness of salvation to many lands and places. He was selected as convener of the Church of Scotland committee that produced a revision of the Book of Common Order in 1994. In the preface Bell writes:

    Whatever else God call us to, we are called to worship, to do so together, and to do so in the promised company of Jesus Christ. It is in worship that our lives are expressed before God and informed and converted by God’s Word. It is in worship that through song, prayer, and preaching, our theology is formed, our discipleship encouraged, and our spirits nourished. In worship we reach out to touch the hem of Christ’s garment and find that, instead of touching the hem, we are being offered the grace of God by word of mouth and gift of hand.4

    Those words capture what I found—and fell headlong into—on Iona in 1965. If I had now to say what really led me there—the suggestion of a professor, the invitation

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    of the Iona Community, and a sense of adventure—yes, all of that. But I would also confess—and witness to—that somehow deep inside I knew that what I had learned from the church in which I had been raised, and which was an incredible blessing and foundation for life and Ministry of the Word, was also, to some extent, stunted and impoverished. My heart was reaching out for something to live into, and what found me was worship of almost indescribably beauty. Bell also writes words with which to close this essay, words that speak with power to every pastor and congregation where there is conflict over or even conversation about worship—ancient, modern, traditional, lively—or where there is longing for worship that is grounded—faithful to the church’s past and yet open to the Spirit’s leading.

    In worship we engage as the Body of Christ in an encounter with almighty God. This engagement should never be a rambling incoherence of wellmeaning phrases and gestures. It should exhibit that deliberate and historical patterning of sentiment and expression which befits the meeting of the sons and daughters of earth with the King of Kings. Further, in public worship.. .it is important that the whole congregation sense a purpose and direction in their representation before God. They should never be placed in the position of being spectators at a performance which is entirely dependent upon the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual whims of its leaders. This in no way precludes the inspiration and direction of the Holy Spirit. The enemy of the Spirit is not form, but anarchy. 5

    In such a time as ours when so much is changing around us, we who lead worship regularly are privileged to bring each Lord’s Day before the people of God our “deliberate and historical patterns” which are as old as the words of institution and the Eucharistie prayer of Hippolytus, and as new as the most recent African “Amen.” When George MacLeod walked briskly around Iona, or met with guests and new members, talking about his experiment on Iona and about the renewal of worship, he often quoted John A. Mackay, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, who said in the early 1950s : “By the beginning of the next century, the church will manifest itself in two forms: a mature Pentecostalism and a truly Reformed Catholicism.” Some of what John Mackay foretold, which has largely come to pass, had its origin in the worship of the Iona Community. Every Lord’s Day, may we who lead worship and preach be lifted up so that the King of Glory may come in. 6

    Notes

    1. When I first knew George MacLeod, he was a former moderator of the Church of Scotland and a Chaplain to the Queen, thus the ‘very’ before the Rev’d. 2. Scottish Psalter and Church Hymnary, revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929). 3. From a phrase “new ways to touch the hearts of all” from Morning Prayer in the Abbey. 4. Book of Common Order of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, 1994), ix. 5. Ibid., χ. 6.1 was greatly assisted in writing this article by Lift Your Hearts on High, Eucharistie Prayer in the Reformed Tradition by Ronald P. Byars (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005).

  • Forty days in the womb: worshipping in Lent

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    Forty Days in the Womb: Worshiping in Lent

    Kimberly Bracken Long

    Office of Theology and Worship, Louisville, Kentucky

    It is the beginning of Lent. As Nora Gallagher walks into the sanctuary for the evening service on Ash Wednesday, she anticipates the litany of repentance and the imposition of ashes. She is already wrapped in a cloud of guilt and remembering what it was like to give up smoking. A friend quips, “Anne’s giving up drinking, Tern’s giving up chocolate, and I’m just giving up.”1 I imagine they laughed—I would have laughed. But behind the humor there is a bit of truth. Lent is, in fact, giving up. Not just chocolate or wine, but the giving up of the will, the giving over of oneself to God. For some of us, it is a matter of daily remembering and relinquishing, a constant, steady practice of saying “yes” to God. For others of us, giving oneself over to God is something like collapsing in a heap and crying “uncle!” before the hound of heaven after a protracted chase. Whether “giving up” is a daily practice or a dramatic conversion (or return) to God, it is part of the continual and ever-deepening baptismal journey. Baptism, as the funeral liturgy goes, is complete only in death. Congregations who travel together through the liturgical year recognize that this baptismal journey is not so much a straight line through time, but rather more like a spiral. Each time we encounter a new season of the church year, it is both familiar and new. We’ve been this way before, but we are not the same – and so the journey continues and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, faith is enriched and renewed. To enter into Lent is to enter into an annual cycle of giving up, letting go, so that God might work wonders with us. That makes Lent a liminal time—a time when we are opened to being re-formed. Augustine, bishop of Hippo (354-430 C.E.), saw Lent this way. New believers (and the congregations that nurtured them) spent Lent in preparation for baptism. It was, he said, like “time in the womb.” That made it, says William Harmless,

    a “liminal” or “threshold” phase during which they found themselves marked off-physically, socially, ritually—as people in transition…. In this transition, Augustine played midwife, mixing firmness and gentleness: on the one hand, calling them not to flee the labor pangs, and on the other, encouraging them to look forward and love the new self coming to birth.2

    Augustine, the Catechumenate, and Lent By the fourth century, many churches interpreted baptism as a dying and rising with Christ (cf. Romans 6) and so viewed Easter as the most theologically rich day of the liturgical year on which to baptize new believers.3 The forty days of Lent, then, became a time when many churches readied converts for baptism.4 In Augustine’s day, people preparing for baptism (catechumens) would come to Hippo from the surrounding villages and stay for the forty days of Lent, the Easter vigil, and Easter week. They went through a process that involved penitential disciplines, selfexamination and exorcisms (performed by breathing on the baptismal candidates to force out the demonic spirits within them), and teaching. Lent was the time to reshape

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    one’s life and prepare for the sacrament of baptism and the first receiving of the Lord’s Supper. As Paul instructed, “they were to strip off the old and put on the new.”5 Augustine regarded the baptismal preparation during Lent as something of a “boot camp” for catechumens. Like Chrysostom and Ambrose, he compared the process (the catechumenate) to military or athletic training that prepared one “for a wrestling match with Satan or for a battle against the forces of darkness.” It was preparation that involved the whole person, body, mind, and soul. And not only the catechumens took part in the rigors of the Lenten discipline. All of the faithful (as they were able) took on the same practices as the catechumens: fasting each day until three in the afternoon, abstaining from meat and wine, refraining from sex, and distributing alms.6 Yet Augustine did not only use these masculine images to describe the time of preparation for Easter; he also spoke of the Lenten period as time in the womb. In one sermon, Augustine explained that while a woman in labor is not particularly happy, once she gives birth joy abounds. During Lent, he says, “people ‘fast and pray since this is the day of labor’; moreover, the Spirit ‘stirs up in our hearts the indescribable pains of holy desire,’ a sort of spiritual equivalent of a woman’s labor pains.”7 Baptism was a new birth, and those who were baptized were, in a sense, themselves born. Nevertheless, as Harmless puts it, “while certain labor pains ended, others continued. True rebirth would happen only with the coming of the kingdom in which ‘we shall be poured out from this pregnancy of faith into eternity’s light.’”8 The eschatological thrust is impossible to miss. While baptism was birth to new life in this earthly realm, suffering and sorrow remained mixed with joy and confidence. Only in passing from this life to the next did the Christian experience true and complete birth to new life. For Augustine, then,

    these twin threads within human life found expression in the seasons of Lent and Easter: Lent symbolized the darker one, the painful coming to birth that took a lifetime; Easter symbolized the happier one, that periodic foretaste of an eschatological birth into God. Thus, in these two liturgical seasons, Christians drank in by turns, the ‘not yet’ and ‘already’ of New Testament eschatology.9

    Lent continues to be a time for conversion and repentance—for turning again to God and for renewing our baptismal covenant even as we wait and work for the reign of God. It is indeed a gestational period—a journey from the old life to the new. It’s true whether we walk steadily toward Easter as long-time Christians seeking to deepen our baptismal covenant, or stumble back toward the font after being away from home for a long, long time. It’s true whether we’re new believers seeking baptism or parents bringing children to the waters, or sponsors accompanying them as companions along the way. Churches are reclaiming Easter as the heart of the liturgical year and the time when new believers, or the children of believers, are baptized, young people are confirmed, and the whole congregation celebrates the resurrection of Jesus with a renewal of baptism.10 That means that Lent is not only a time for personal selfexamination and spiritual discipline, but a time for the whole community to prepare for sharing in the dying and rising of Christ. It’s a time to move from death to life, from old to new, from repentance to resurrection. “On Ash Wednesday, I enter the desert,” writes Nora Gallagher.

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    I become the woman at the well who demands, “Give me some of that water.” I am the blind man begging for sight, the sisters of the dying brother, the halt and the lame calling out from the alleys and hedgerows, “Jesus, remember me,” as the sweet song goes, “when you come into your kingdom.” Finally, on the eve of Easter, a priest lights the tall, white paschal candle in a darkened church. A deacon sings, “The light of Christ.” It is a journey, as a biblical scholar put it, from ashes to fire.11

    We may enter Lent with our individual longings and needs, but we do not make the trip alone.

    Ash Wednesday The journey begins with ashes. Placing ashes on the body is an ancient biblical practice associated with turning back to God. As Jon Walton reminded us in a sermon that appeared in these pages, Nineveh put on sackcloth and ashes in response to Job’s call to repentance. Jeremiah called for Israel’s repentance by putting on sackcloth and rolling in ashes himself. Jesus reproached sinful cities because they wouldn’t put on ashes and return to God.12 When ashes are imposed on our foreheads, we receive a stark reminder of our own need to repent—again—and to once more turn away from the forces of evil and turn to God.13 Repentance is not just about owning up to our various sins; it is an acknowledgment of our very nature—frail, flawed, fickle, and always less faithful than we intend to be. In short, ashes remind us of our human nature—our mortality—and the shortness of our earthly life. When God first tells Adam that he is destined to die, God says, “Dust you are and to dust you will return.” And so we say those same words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”14 During one memorable Ash Wednesday service at the church where I worship, we went forward for the imposition of ashes. Instead of being marked by a pastor, however, we marked one another with an ashy cross. After I had taken part, I watched from my perch in the choir loft as people imposed the sign of the cross on one another, flesh upon flesh, and spoke those words, sometimes to strangers, sometimes to friends, often to spouse, or child. As I watched a mother lean down to trace a smoky cross on her child’s forehead, tears rolled down my cheeks. How could a mother begin to speak words of death to her own child? Quickly tears of pain became tears of joy as I realized that in that gesture a mother does not curse her child but pronounces blessing: You will turn from God only to be drawn in again, she says with that mark. You will die, but in order to live. In life and in death, you belong to God. And so begins the journey from death to life. To start here, with a bold expression of our creatureliness, is to break open the veneer and create a space for God to lead us through to a renewed life of intentional truth-telling and more profound trust.

    The Sundays of Lent One of the simplest and most revealing ways to grasp the Lenten season’s movement from death to life is to read in succession the Prayers of the Day commended for each Sunday (cf. Book of Common Worship 242-246). Since the prayers reflect the lectionary readings for the day, they offer a compendium of the scriptural themes at work. The prayers for the first Sunday of Lent, for instance, make use of the image

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    of the wilderness. Just as Jesus was tempted in the desert, we come face to face with our need for God:

    Almighty God, your Son fasted forty days in the wilderness, and was tempted as we are but did not sin. Give us grace to direct our lives in obedience to your Spirit, that as you know our weakness, so we may know your power to save; through Jesus Christ our Redeemer, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.15

    The prayer signals not only Christ’s victory over temptation in the desert, “but also…his victory over the powers hostile to God, as well as an anticipation of his glorification (‘angels came and ministered to him’). It is an overture to the paschal mystery of Easter.”16 In other words, the texts, prayers, songs, and preaching on the first Sunday in Lent not only instruct us about the temptations we will face and present the model of Jesus as perfect denier of all temptation; rather, they invite us more deeply into the mystery of who Jesus is and, therefore, the life in Christ to which we are called. Another prayer commended for the first Sunday in Lent points us to this possibility while reminding us that baptism is at the heart of the Easter story:

    God of the covenant, as the forty days of deluge swept away the world’s corruption and watered new beginnings of righteousness and life, so in the saving flood of Baptism we are washed clean and born again. Throughout these forty days, unseal within us the wellspring of your grace, cleanse our hearts of all that is not holy, and cause your gift of new life to flourish once again 17

    The texts and prayers for the second Sunday in Lent invite us further into the sacred journey that is the season’s work. In Year C (2006-2007) of the lectionary, the readings remind us of God’s covenant that began with Abraham and also that before the triumph of the resurrection Jesus must suffer and die. A prayer for the day signals both the promise of future salvation and strength for the earthly journey as well:

    God of our forebears, as your chosen servant Abraham was given faith to obey your call and go out into the unknown, so may your church be granted such faith that we may follow you with courage

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    The first two Sundays of Lent, then, point to the goal of this earthly journey, the mystery and joy of Easter, and invite us to “travel this way as followers of Christ.”19 The third, fourth, and fifth Sundays follow the path to Easter as themes of renewal and transformation (Lent 3), the promise of the welcome table (Lent 4), and the surety of the resurrection (Lent 5), even in the face of impending death. Through the season of Lent, then, one sees clearly the movement from old to new, from death to life, from repentance to resurrection, and—since the season of Easter eventually ends with the feast of Pentecost, from ashes to fire.

    Holy Week More and more, congregations are observing Passion Sunday rather than Palm Sunday on the Lord’s Day before Easter. This is a wise move, as contemporary Christians are less apt to worship during the week. Throughout the whole Lenten journey it has been made clear that the road to the cross is not an easy one, and that death precedes life; it is essential, therefore, that Christians not move directly from palms to lilies during this central week of the Christian year. A Passion Sunday service enables the telling of the whole passion story and ensures that we do not move too blithely from one celebratory event to the next. Passion/Palm Sunday is “a day of contrasts”20 in which we move from “the joyous demonstration of loyalty to Jesus” to the betrayal and pain of the crucifixion. The service then, should make those contrasts plain; indeed, these are the very contrasts that we have been holding in tension throughout the entire Lenten journey. A number of resources provide suggestions for telling the whole passion story in the context of a Passion/Palm worship service.21 Holy Week culminates in the Three Days—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday—which can be understood as one continuous service of worship. Gail Ramshaw points out that during Holy Week we are invited to both tell the story and enact the meaning of these days.22 Indeed, this is the most dramatic period in the whole Christian year. On Maundy Thursday we hear the story of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples and his commandment to love; we may even enact his own demonstration of love by washing one another’s feet. We share the meal, too, remembering that this is not simply a funeral for Jesus but a strengthening for the passion of Christ—and for all of life. Here we sit at a table prepared in the midst of the enemies of righteousness and grace. We remember Christ’s sacrifice for us even as we anticipate his coming again. In other words, we tell the story and we also enact it, through touch, sight, symbol. Good Friday is not only a day for remembering Christ’s suffering, but a day of recognizing the paradox inherent in the Christian story. Ramshaw points us to the signs: in the death of Jesus, majesty is placed next to weakness; the tree of death (the cross) is really the tree of life; the shepherd becomes the lamb. The death of Jesus is also the triumph of God.23 Sylvia Dunstan’ s stunning hymn text brings the paradoxical nature of Good Friday to life:

    You, Lord, are both lamb and shepherd. You, Lord, are both prince and slave. You, peacemaker and sword-bringer of the way you took and gave.

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    Worthy is our earthly Jesus! Worthy is our cosmic Christ! Worthy your defeat and victory. Worthy still your peace and strife.

    You the everlasting instant; you, who are our death and life.24

    On Easter Sunday we will proclaim the good news unequivocally; but on Good Friday, we face the mystery and the paradox head on.

    Holy Saturday and the Easter Vigil Some churches have reclaimed the ancient practice of the Easter Vigil as a culminating event of the liturgical year. In this single service the whole of the Lenten journey is recalled—indeed, the whole of the Christian life. (See the Book of Common Worship, 297ff for an outline of the service.) The service begins in darkness with the lighting of a fire and a greeting that echoes the Jewish seder meal in which a child asks, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The minister or other worship leader answers the implied question:

    On this most holy night when our Savior Jesus Christ passed from death to life, we gather with the church throughout the world in vigil and prayer. This is the Passover of Jesus Christ: through water and the bread and wine, we recall Christ’s death and resurrection, we share Christ’s triumph over sin and death, and with invincible hope we await Christ’s coming again The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.25

    The light from the fire is then carried into the sanctuary by the candles of each worshiper, and the service continues with readings and songs that trace the story of salvation, culminating in the baptism of new Christians or the children of believers and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The long gestation is over; the journey is complete. We are delivered from the Lenten womb to new life. In his book, The Secret Knowledge of Water, Craig Childs chronicles his journeys deep into the deserts of the American southwest in search of water holes—everything from large desert lakes to tiny hollows that collect enough water to satisfy the thirst of a single sparrow. His treks are dangerous and are as spiritual as they are scientific. As he begins his narrative he makes a surprising assertion: “If you want to study water, you do not go to the Amazon or to Seattle. You come here, to the driest land.”26 In other words, to fully understand the nature of water, you must go through the desert first. And so it is with Easter and the fullness of baptism. If we want to apprehend the deep mystery of Christ, and our participation in his death and resurrection, we must

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    journey through the desert of Lent. In order to grasp the new life we have been promised—and indeed, the new life that is given to us again and again—we must return to the womb. That is the gift of the liturgical year—that we are led, together, through the pattern of story and prayer, each year, returning not to the same place we have been before, but to a different and deeper place, because we are different, because we are continually led through this life and to the next by a God who constantly graces us with vision and strength and hope.

    Notes

    1. Things Seen and Unseen, A Year Lived in Faith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 80. 2. Augustine and the Catechumenate (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 294. 3. MaxwellE. Johnson, The Rites of Christianinitiation, Their Evolution and Interpretation (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 168. 4. As Johnson points out, there is diversity in liturgical practice throughout the early church. To say then, that Easter was the only appropriate time for baptism and that Lent was always devoted to baptismal preparation, is to generalize and oversimplify the intricacies of the historical record. For the purposes of this article, it is enough to note that these practices did exist in some parts of the fourth century church. 5. Harmless, 250. 6. Harmless, 251-253. 7. Harmless, 257. 8. Harmless, 257. 9. Harmless, 257. 10. For more insights into the ancient catechumenate and its adaptation for twenty-first century churches, see Martha Moore-Keish, “The Recovery of the Catechumenate and North American Presbyterianism,” Call to Worship 38:1 (2004), 63-70; David B. Batchelder, “Recovering a Forgotten Way of Being Church,” Liturgy 21:2 (2006), 43-49; Stanley R. Hall, “Reforming Christian Initiation: The Catechumenate and the Church,” Reformed Liturgy & Music XXIX: 4 (1995), 247-253. 11. Gallagher, 82. 12. Jon M. Walton, “Imposition,” Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXIX, No. 2 (Lent 2006), 37-39. 13. Book of Common Worship (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 407-408. 14. Book of Common Worship, 227. 15. Book of Common Worship, 242-243. 16. Adolf Adam, The Liturgical Year, Its History and Its Meaning after the Reform of the Liturgy, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1981), 100. 17. Book of Common Worship, 243. 18. Book of Common Worship, 245. 19. Adam, 101. 20. Hoyt Hickman et al., The New Handbook of the Christian Year (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), 131. 21. See, for instance, The New Handbook of the Christian Year. 22. Gail Ramshaw, The Three-Day Feast. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter (Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress, 2004), 10-16. 23. Ramshaw, 47. 24. Sylvia Dunstan, “Christus Paradox,” in Voices United, The Hymn and Worship Book of The Church of Canada (Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada: The United Publishing House, 1996), 210. 25. Book of Common Worship, 2979-298. 26. Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water (Boston, New York, London: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), xvi.

  • Laughter at Easter

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    Laughter at Easter

    Matthew 28:1-10

    Martin B. Copenhaver

    Wellesley Congregational Church, Wellesley, Massachusetts

    Of all the traditions surrounding Easter, among all of the different ways various branches of the Christian Church celebrate this holy day, perhaps none is so strange— and yet, in its own way, so strangely fitting—as one ancient tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In that part of the Christian Church, the day after Easter is set aside as a day of laughter and hilarity. On the day after Easter, in these venerable and tradition-bound Orthodox churches, the people will gather in the sanctuary for worship, and to hear the priest tell jokes—not particularly religious jokes, necessarily, but jokes that tease laughter out of the worshipers. I’ve never been to such a service, but it’s fun to imagine. I try to imagine the extravagantly bearded priest, all vested in full Orthodox regalia, and the extra twinkling light in his eyes as he looks out over his congregation on such an occasion. I imagine the laughter of the congregation cutting through the aroma of incense that lingers in the air after the Easter services. I imagine the laughter ricocheting off the ancient stone walls of the church. I imagine the laughter carried by clusters of worshipers into the streets, like food that has been sanctified in worship and then given to share with the world. What a strange tradition! And yet, in its own way, so strangely fitting. I have a friend who, a few years back, shared this tradition with his New England Congregational church on Easter Sunday. He used the children’s sermon time just to tell jokes, one right after another, silly jokes mostly, elephant jokes and knock-knock jokes and the like, whatever got them laughing. In this dignified New England Congregational church, the people gathered for worship on Easter Sunday, of all times, and here is the preacher telling jokes. I, of course, would never do that. Not in a thousand years. Well, okay, maybe just this once.

    Knock-knock. Who’s there? Why. Why who? One question at a time, please!

    (I made that one up. You can tell, right?) Anyway, this friend of mine went on like that, telling jokes, one right after another. You’ll be relieved to hear that I’m not going to do that. But there is this one: Why are Congregationalists such bad singers? Because they’re always reading ahead in the hymnal to see if they agree with it. Anyway…Lead me not into temptation—I can find the way myself. Have you noticed that the early bird gets the worm, but it’s the second mouse who gets the cheese? What do Attila the Hun and John the Baptist have in common? The same middle name.

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    For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism. Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, after receiving the commandments from God, says to the people: “I’ve got good news and bad news. First, the good news: I got Him down to ten. The bad news: adultery’s still in.” “Dad, I’m going to a party. Would you do my homework for me?” “I’m sorry, son, but it just wouldn’t be right.” “Well, maybe not. Give it a try anyway.” Or, our Alanna’s favorite when she was a little younger: What do you call cheese that doesn’t belong to you? Nacho cheese. Am I right that it seems like a strange way to celebrate Easter? No doubt about that. But let me tell you why it is also strangely fitting. Consider for a moment what prompts us to laugh. Philosophers, psychologists, and literary theorists have all taken a stab at defining what makes something funny. Some have produced elaborate theories. Aristotle wrote at length about humor. Sig­ mund Freud wrote a whole book on the subject called, Jokes and the Unconscious, which is a stiflingly humorless book, but it does contain what Freud called his favorite joke: A husband says to his wife: “Dear, if one of us should die, I think I will live in Paris.” That’s about as good as the book gets. Anyway, among all of these great thinkers, and others who have addressed the subject of humor, there is no particular consensus on what makes something funny, no comprehensive theory that encom­ passes the variety of things that make us laugh. But there is at least one recurring theme: much humor is based on surprise, on the reversal of expectations. When I was a boy my favorite joke was about the man who showed up with his dog at the office of a theatrical agent, hoping that the agent would take them on as clients. He says to the agent, “You’ve got to see this. This dog of mine talks. I’ll prove it to you. Γ11 ask him a question: Fido, what do you call the thing on top of the house?” The dog responds, “Roof!” The agent says, “That’s terrible! You’re wasting my time!” The guy says, “Hold on a second. I’ll show you. Fido, what is the texture of sandpaper?” The dog responds, “Rough!” The agent says, “You’re killing me here…” “Hold on, hold on. One more chance. You’11 be really impressed, I promise you. Fido, who was the greatest baseball player of all time?” And the dog seems to say, “Ruth!” So the agent says, “That’s it. I’ve heard enough!” And he throws them out the door. The dog and his owner go tumbling onto the sidewalk. Then the dog looks up at his owner and says, “DiMaggio?” Surprise, you see, is a reversal of expectations, a sudden upending of the usual order of things. That’s one of the essential elements of humor. And it’s a biblical theme as well. God establishes a covenant with Sarah and Abram, and tells them that they are to parent a new people who will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. Which is all well and good, but they are having a hard time getting pregnant. Sarah is now in her nineties when a visitor comes to their home. As she stands at the kitchen door she overhears the visitor tell Abram that they are going to give birth to a son. And Sarah laughs. And who can blame her? She laughs at this surprising turn of events, not a brittle little laugh, but a full-bellied laugh. She laughs, as one person put at it, at the thought of her baby being born in the geriatric ward with Medicare picking up the tab. And when that baby was born, they named the child Isaac, which means, “He laughs.” Our God, a God of surprises, is always taking our expectations and upending them. And nowhere is that more true than in the life of Jesus. For God to appear in human form is surprising enough. But consider what kind of human life God chose. God did

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    not come as a mighty king or as a learned priest, but as an untutored peasant from a backwater town, speaking in a country dialect. When Jesus recruited followers, he didn’t seek out the best and the brightest. Instead, he brought together a rag-tag group, each one chosen as one might choose a grab-bag gift. They were the original “gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” and yet Jesus told them that they are to spread his gospel until it covers the earth like water covers the ocean. He said that in his realm children will be sitting at the head table, along with the poor and those who are so notorious that they never get invited anywhere else, while the wealthy and the members of the religious establishment will be checking their coats. Jesus was forever reversing expectations, upending the usual order of things. The people in charge, the folks who didn’t want things upended because they were sitting on top, determined to stop Jesus. When they couldn’ t find any other way to stop him, they killed him. It’s called the final answer. Only Jesus was not through reversing expectations, upending the usual order of things. Easter is the ultimate surprise, the punch line of God’s story, turning creation on its head with the most surprising reversal of all. I can just see the headline in the Wellesley Townsman: “Village Church Pastor Calls Resurrection a Joke.” But hear me out. According to M. Conrad Hyers, who has written a number of books on the intersection of religion and humor, “Comedy is closer to the deep springs of [the Christian] religion than tragedy. The tragic perspective ends in unredeemed and unredeeming conflict, in bitter defiance, without resolution and without hope, while comedy is a préfiguration of anticipated joy.” If our story ended with Good Friday, it would be a tragedy, indeed, punctuated only with tears. But there is laughter this day, because our story has a surprising ending, indeed a joyful ending, in the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. So we laugh this day, not only in response to God’s surprise on Easter, but we also laugh in gleeful recognition of God’s triumph. I have worshiped here each day over the last several days and this has been a solemn place. There has been no laughter. There was no place for it. It would have seemed a sacrilege. There was no laughter at the Maundy Thursday service, as we took our place at Jesus’ Last Supper and remembered the ways he was betrayed by his closest friends. There was no laughter when we gathered to worship on Good Friday, and remembered Jesus’ agony and death on the cross. There was no laughter at the Easter Vigil held last night, as we marked the day when the rule of death was unchallenged. There was no laughter at any of those services. It would not have been appropriate. It would have seemed a sacrilege. It’s not beseeming to laugh at tragedy. But today is different. One of the reasons that joking and jesting are considered appropriate in Eastern Orthodox sanctuaries on such a day is because of the big joke God pulled on Satan in the Resurrection. Satan didn’t win after all. Death did a victory dance, but it was premature because the game wasn’t over. Also on Thursday, this sanctuary was full of people gathered to offer words of thanksgiving for the life of Jack Colbert and to hear God’s promises about living and dying, about eternal love and everlasting life. Although we gathered on the day known as Maundy Thursday, we gathered as Easter people. There was actually quite a bit of laughter at that service—not the kind of black humor that masks a fear of death, but a more joyous humor. It was a laugher befitting someone who himself had a wonderful sense of humor and a laughter appropriate for people who worship in the light of the

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    Resurrection. At that service, I used an image that I often use to describe God’s triumph over death. I said, “Our God is the kind of God who insists on having the last word.” But I could have said, in fact it would have been strangely fitting to say, “Our God is the kind of God who insists on having the last laugh.” So there is surprise in laughter, and there is triumph in laughter. But there is one other characteristic of laughter that makes it particularly appropriate on such a day. Laughter can be an expression of joy. The late Joseph Campbell put it so well. He said, “[Humor] is a leap into the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.” Doesn’t that describe what this day is about? “A leap into…the inexhaustible joy of life invincible?” And so one of the lesser-known Easter hymns in our Pilgrim Hymnal puts it:

    The whole bright world rejoices now, Hilariter, Hilariter (Latin for “hilarity, merriment”) The birds do sing on every bough, Alleluia, Alleluia.

    Then shout beneath the racing skies Hilariter, Hilariter To him who rose that we might rise Alleluia, Alleluia.

    I love the way that hymn uses as a refrain both “Hilariter” and “Alleluia,” interweaving merriment and praise. How wonderfully appropriate for a day such as this: our laughter and our praise offered to the surprising God who this day has triumphed over evil and death. So as you gather around a table for Easter dinner, may I suggest that it is appropriate to offer prayers of thanks and praise, but also to offer a joke or two? And let your laughter, in some strange, and strangely fitting, way, remind you of the triumph of the God we worship here, through the Resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ. And remember: the one who laughs last…didn’t catch on.

  • The Easter texts: getting hold (or not) of Easter

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    The Easter Texts: Getting Hold (or not) of Easter

    Kimberly L. Clayton

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    Somewhere in the second half of Lent, the phone calls between pastors begin. We are, at first, casual in our conversations with colleagues and friends. But soon we move the conversation to the subject of our increasing preoccupation: the Easter sermon. While parishoners out there suspect Easter Sunday is our favorite day of the church year, bolstered as we are by the crowds and the lilies and the trumpets, we know it is our most fearsome Sunday. What we say to one another in the safety of “professional circles” is something like ¿his : “I know that Γ m going to preach about resurrection.. .but have you found any good illustrations!” We are looking for that story or image that will help us speak clearly and convincingly of the resurrection to disciples today from biblical texts that feel as elusive as the actual event must have felt to those first witnesses. Christmas is much easier. For one thing, the season is shorter. For another, Christmas is a lot more, well, tangible. It is about a birth, the birth of the Messiah, yes, but a birth nonetheless. Most of us have held a baby—our own or someone else’s. And the story is so “touchable” beyond that in all of its details, real or imagined. Here are a manger and hay, woolly sheep, a sturdy cow and perhaps a donkey. There is a baby wrapped comfortingly, securely in swaddling cloths; shepherds with staffs; bejeweled kings or exotically dressed magi carrying their fragrant gifts. We manipulate the Christmas story with our own hands as we arrange brightly-colored Nativity sets. We put up lights and decorate trees and wrap gifts of our own. There is so much to get hold of at Christmas. Not so with Easter. Easter is hard to get hold of. There are those elusive angels that in each gospel either give instructions or ask questions that no one can understand or answer. This story has its own cloths—but the fabric no longer swaddles a human being securely even in death. At Easter, the cloths are cast aside or folded up, a detail no longer needed. Fragrant spices also make their entrance in the Easter story, but the bottles remain corked, quickly forgotten, set aside literally (and textually). There is the gaping emptiness ofthat tomb. And this season will go on for seven Sundays of texts from John and Acts that tell even more stories of strange encounters and outrageous happenings. Some years ago now, I got one of those “Christian Supplies” catalogues. It advertised the “Calvary Hill Play Set” complete, the ad said, with “a stone that really rolls away and three removable crosses.” I ordered it. It is made of gray plastic. The stone really does roll (slide) and the crosses are easily removable. Figures, human or angelic, were not included, but you could order the “Jesus, Son of God, Action Figure” separately. I have that, too, if anyone ever needs it, but these items will not help you feel that you have come any closer to getting hold of Easter. Still, we keep trying to get hold of Easter, to understand and claim resurrection faith for ourselves and to foster it in the church and in the world. One of the texts for Easter Sunday this year makes plain why it matters so much to us. First Corinthians 15:19-26 contains one of the most poignant lines in Scripture: “If for this life only we

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    have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” Who has not felt this way at one time or another in one’s own life, or on many days when examining the state of things in the world? Death assaults us daily in high definition by way of another bombing on the streets of Baghdad or another murder in our own suburb. A serious illness in us or someone we love sharpens the recognition that one day death will make a very personal high definition appearance. So in this life, which is the only life we know, we lean from verse 19 toward verses 25 and 26 with deep Easter yearning: “For [Christ] must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” On Easter Sunday and every other day of the year we stand between these two truths: In Christ’s resurrection, death has been defeated. /The last enemy (still) to be destroyed is death. The texts in this Easter season put us in the company of those who first stood in this place of deep yearning and hope.

    Easter Sunday, John 20:1-18 In this reading, the Gospel According to John offers, as will be the case on following Sundays, a story within a story, leaving preachers the choice of addressing one or both scenes in the Easter sermon. The story of Mary Magdalene is told on either side of an account of Peter and “the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved” going to the empty tomb. Much has been written about the two disciples racing (against?) each other to reach Jesus’ tomb. It is often noted that the other disciple lets Peter enter the tomb first, perhaps an acknowledgment with a significant portion of the early church of the primacy of Peter among all the disciples. However, the “disciple whom Jesus loved” may have been the important disciple among the community for whom this gospel was written, so he retains ‘first place’ in this part of the narrative by those who interpret him to be the first to come to full Easter faith. Jean Vanier, in an interesting book that he says is not so much a commentary on John’s Gospel as it is “meditative prose,” offers a different perspective on this footrace. Of John 20:4-9, Vanier offers a psychological interpretation: “Peter, heavy with sadness and guilt, is confused and runs slowly. The other disciple, ‘the beloved,’ seems less troubled. He had followed Jesus to the cross and so is more sprightly. But he is respectful and lets Peter go into the tomb first.” 1 Mary Magdalene is the first follower of Jesus who tries to get hold of Easter as she grabs hold of Jesus with either her hands or her cry, “Rabbouni!” But just as quickly, Mary is the first to understand that she cannot hold onto the Resurrected One in the new day that is dawning. He is ascending and she is being sent, and soon other disciples will be sent on the way, too, into places and among people they could not have imagined any more than they could have imagined his resurrection. It is worth noting that before Mary is “sent,” Mary stays. Hers is the one sustained witness in this passage because she is the one who stays. In the dark, Mary stays. In sadness and confusion and fear, she stays. Angels speak to her, she stays. A stranger approaches, perhaps the gardener, still she stays. When this stranger speaks her name, and his voice is the voice of her beloved friend who was dead and is now… what? What in the world has happened? Mary stays. Perhaps there is lesson enough in that small detail. She stayed long enough, waited long enough, to glimpse resurrection. People who have gone through the long, dark experience of grief say this is what it takes. Call it by whatever name you like: stamina, courage, stubbornness, dogged determination, anger, faith…but staying there—through the dark, the confusion, the questions—this

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    is the way we come to glimpse, eventually, resurrection life. All of the gospels tell us that, this side of heaven, there are glimpses of resurrection, but it will always be beyond our grasp. The Risen Christ is on the move in new ways in the world and he calls on Mary to get moving, too. So, after she stayed there that Easter morning, Mary went. And it was her joy, and her responsibility, to announce that a startling new morning of the world had begun.

    2nd Sunday of Easter: John 20:19-31 This story of a small group of disciples huddled together, low in spirit, is perfect for the Sunday after Easter. The trumpets are silent, half the choir has gone on vacation, a few wilting lilies remain in the chancel, and the folding chairs have been returned to the closet until next Christmas. The “faithful remnant members” are here this week, huddling together for warmth instead of being squeezed in by crowds, joined (in many cases) by the associate pastor who will be the preacher this week. We join the disciples who are hiding in a house behind locked doors, afraid. There are, again, at least two stories within this one reading: Jesus’ appearance to the disciples without Thomas, and Jesus’ second visit that focuses on Thomas who this time is present and accounted for. The conversation between Jesus and Thomas is always worthy of a sermon, but this time around we’ll focus on verses 19-23. If death was no barrier to the Risen Christ, then the locked doors of a house could never hold him back. Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace to you.” This is not just a wish or a hope from the Lord. It is a declaration that peace is already among them.2 He is their peace. Jesus showed them his wounds and the disciples rejoiced in recognition of him. As with Mary, Jesus then sends the disciples. They will have to get out of the house! Jesus breathed on them, giving life to the new creation.3 Jesus tells them their mission has to do with forgiveness. Think of those disciples hunkered down in fear in that house, perhaps turning accusing eyes on one another following Jesus’ arrest and death. Or perhaps each disciple in that room blamed himself for all that had gone wrong. The atmosphere may have been so dark that it is no wonder Thomas—who had missed the first visit of the Risen Lord—refused to believe a word they said! They needed forgiveness. They needed to forgive themselves and each other, for a start. This mission of forgiveness, of sharing God’s mercy generously, may be just the word in our own faith community, torn apart by suspicion and anger and accusation over doctrines and interpretations and practices. Offering forgiveness and mercy is certainly a needed mission in the world. Think of how stunned we all were in the wake of the Amish Schoolhouse shootings in October of 2006 when people ofthat close-knit community immediately responded with forgiveness toward the man who killed the young girls and toward his family. Newspapers, television shows, and websites reported the words and deeds of forgiveness with incredulity and awe. Sometimes it is a moment of such ultimacy that gives us the eyes and ears of faith we need to receive and offer the peace and forgiveness Christ brings to us. In 2004, Laura Mendenhall, President of Columbia Theological Seminary, wrote of one of her last visits with Shirley Guthrie, beloved and long-time professor of theology at the seminary. She wrote: “We were talking about his approaching death, and I told him he seemed to be at peace. His eyes twinkled, and with amazement in his voice he said, ‘Yes, and the peace is bigger than I imagined.’ He went on to say that he had quit worrying about all the things he had to do…ought

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    to do. “It turns out,” Guthrie said, “these things are not as important to God as I thought. It’s all about forgiveness.”4 Unlocking the doors, to Easter sends us out with just what the world (and we ourselves) need.

    3rd Sunday of Easter: John 21:1-19 I have a special place in my heart for people who fish. Every summer of my childhood, I and my siblings would go to Florida and visit our grandparents. They lived on one end of a dirt road and at the other end was a marshy lagoon filled with egrets, bass and bream, and a twelve-foot alligator who liked to sun himself on the bank beside the three little boats the neighbors shared. We spent hours fishing with our grandfather. At least I called it fishing…never mind that he had to put the worm on the hook for me and take the fish off the hook if I happened to catch one ! Fishing always felt like a great adventure in an exotic world beyond the bounds of my suburban upbringing. In this passage from John, so soon after the resurrection of Jesus, the disciples are not in some exotic world. Instead, Simon Peter says to a few of the other disciples, “I am going fishing.” They said back, “We will go with you.” After the confusion, fear, and uncertainty of the past few days, it was no doubt a relief to think of leaving the “Easter world” going back to their usual routine of life. The disciples apparently decide to return, at least for this day, to the ordinary world they knew before Jesus interrupted more than their fishing with the invitation to “Come, follow me.” There is so much to choose from in this passage for a sermon. The miraculous haul offish, the communion-like tone of the breakfast of bread and fish, and the hint of ongoing “rivalry” between Peter and “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” are only the beginning. The second half focuses on the conversation between Jesus and Peter, with its three-fold questioning, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Perhaps Jesus is giving Peter the opportunity to respond with a faithful “yes” at daybreak, once for every denial of Jesus made in the night ofthat garden. Though some might dismiss the connection, it seems that those two stories are connected by a literary device. Beside the Sea of Tiberius, Jesus cooks breakfast on a charcoal fire (21.9). It was by another charcoal fire that Peter denied he knew Jesus at all (18.18).5 In this exchange, Jesus calls Peter to become a shepherd of a new and vulnerable flock…the little community of the early followers of Jesus. Peter will find himself having to give more than ever before now that it is the crucified and risen Lord who says, “Follow me.” While most of us do not live as costly a discipleship as did Peter, it is important to remember that faithful discipleship often does cost us something: time, energy, money, comfort, safety or security perhaps. To put it too simply, we can’t forever let someone else put the worm on the hook and someone else take the fish off the hook and still call it fishing!

    Four More Sundays to Go The remaining texts from the Gospel of John go back to the time before Jesus’ death and resurrection. These passages have an overarching theme of Jesus’ identifying his followers, giving them a new commandment to love one another, sending the Advocate, the Holy Spirit to be with them, and praying for their unity. These words are all very relevant to the church today as we struggle more with the things that divide us than we seek the love and the Spirit that unites us. The passages from Acts in the Easter season are astounding stories of what

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    happens in the lives of people now that Christ is risen and the Holy Spirit is at work in (and beyond) the church. If, after two Sundays of Easter, the preacher has said all she or he can say about the post-resurrection appearances, then Acts offers more than enough to deal with for the next month or so: There is the conversion of Saul/Paul. The raising of Dorcas. Peter having to explain himself back in Jerusalem for the controversial act of “letting Gentiles in.” Peter’ s question, “Who am I to hinder God?” still rings in our ears. The conversion in Macedonia of Lydia and other women. Acts 16:16-34 introduces us to a slave girl and her owners and to a jailer keeping watch over Paul and Silas and other prisoners. But in this Easter upside-down world, who is enslaved or imprisoned and who is truly free has been completely redefined. There is more than we can ever get hold of in these Easter texts and in the meaning of Easter for our own lives, for the church, for the world. We grasp what we can of this death and resurrection and pass it on from one to another to another, like bread and wine shared. We let go, too, and watch as the Risen Christ continues to surprise us in unexpected places and ways filled with yearning and hope.

    Notes

    1. Jean Vanier, Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John (New York: Paulist Press, 2004), 335. 2. Francis J. Moloney, S.D.B., The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina Series (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1998), 534, note 21. 3. Ibid., 535, note 22. 4. Laura Mendenhall in Vantage, Autumn, 2004. 5. Moloney, 550.

  • Martin Luther King sermon, 2007

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    Martin Luther King Sermon, 2007

    Micah 6:6-8; Amos 5; Luke 10:25-37

    Rush Otey Selwyn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Charlotte, North Carolina

    What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? —Langston Hughes, 1951

    It is appropriate and timely on this particular weekend for us to consider again the dream, birthed and rooted and grounded in Scripture, of people living together in peace, without animosity or discrimination or fear, a dream in which swords shall be transformed into plowshares and spears into garden tools. First, we may be thankful and hopeful for the dream itself, that it still haunts us in many ways but always beckons us to be better human beings than we have been, better citizens of the world than we have been, better Christians than we have been. It is a blessing for me to be pastor of a congregation which keeps the dream alive, which welcomes all people regardless of ethnicity or age or nationality or gender orientation or economic class. On the front of our bulletin is an invitation which you have brought to life in so many wonderful ways—”to whosoever will come, this church opens wide her doors and offers her welcome in the name of Jesus Christ her Lord.” No church has to be. The church is the creation of God, part of God’s gift to the world for the healing and the repair and the future of the world. Sometimes we may say, “the children and youth are the future of the church;” but the church is always dependent upon the fidelity of each current adult generation and the responsiveness of leaders and members to the transcendent call of God to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God and with one another. There have been many times in American history when the dream was in danger of being forgotten or even extinguished. The Civil War of the mid 1800′ s was perhaps the crucial period, and it was at great cost that the dream prevailed. But even after the civil war, how violently people held to their prejudices and misshapen ideologies of power! I hope some of the congregation, and some of the younger people in particular, will take the opportunity this week to watch “Eyes on the Prize,” a documentary of the civil rights movements of the 1950′ s and 1960′ s—violent times and frightening times, but maybe in the long run, redemptive times, too. Many of us have read Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name, the author’s

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    account of growing up as a Methodist pastor’s son in Oxford, North Carolina in the 1950′ s and 60′ s. The pivotal event in the narrative was the murder of an innocent black youth by a white man who was friendly to the Ku Klux Klan and who subsequently was acquitted by an all white jury. I want to share with you two occasions regarding Tim Tyson and his book which just received the Graumeyer Prize in religion. In 2005 I was part of a small group of ministers who had breakfast with Tim Tyson here in Charlotte. What came through to me even more than in the book, was his memory of how terrifying it had been for him as a youth to be confronted with the irrational hostility of the white people of his hometown. Forty years later that memory was still vivid for him, and I am sure it is even more vivid for black persons who were victims of that hostility more often than not. The other thing was that Tim Tyson’s father, Vernon, an otherwise unheralded Methodist pastor, displayed remarkable courage and gentleness and strength throughout his ministry. In fact, in the fall of 2005 when Blood Done Sign My Name was the book discussed by all students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it was interesting that after the lecture, there was a much longer line of students to talk with Vernon Tyson, Tim’s father, than with Tim himself. There is something utterly powerful and full of awe and grace, even at a great cost, when Christian faith is authentic and clear and stands for justice and for love. In Charlotte, whatever strides have been made since the days of apartheid have been led by fairly ordinary and humble Christians and Jews and humanists and others who simply would not let go of the dream—Judge James McMillan, Julia Maulden, Harvey Gantt, Jack and Dolly Tate, Randy and Arline Taylor, Charles and Beryl Kraemer, Doug and Claudia Oldenburg, Carlyle and Elizabeth Marney, Joe and Joan Martin, Mike and Caroline Myers, George Thompson, Gene Owens, Tom and Jean Stockton, T. J. Reddy, Thomas Moore, Adeline and Jay Ostwalt, Mel and Eulada Watt, L. A. Ellis, Ernie Patterson, Charles Ratliff, Ruby Huston, Loy Witherspoon, Bonnie Cone, Michael Begley and others. We may not know their names, but we benefit daily and immensely from their sacrifices. Even here at Selwyn Avenue Presbyterian Church, I expect that our vitality of mission and service and social witness, alongside others in more than twenty community ministries, goes back to ministers such as Bob Ramey and Neil McMillan and Susan DeWyngaert, and Caroline Craig, and Elders and Deacons too numerous to name, who continue to surround us in the great cloud of witnesses, most of whom were unassuming yet full of love, and at heart, full of dreams. It is a miracle that the dream lives, and apart from the power of the Lord, it would not live. The dream is as old as Moses and the Exodus, as challenging as Amos and Micah and Isaiah, as difficult to behold as the crucifixion of Jesus, and as astonishing as the empty tomb. This past autumn I have been part of a project sponsored by the interfaith group Mecklenburg Ministries called “The Souls of White Folks.” (For more information contact the Rev. Maria Hanlin at www.meckmin.org) The project gathers small groups of religious leaders (Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Unitarian) to consider the dream and also to reflect upon the corporate social issues of white privilege which still beset us here and across the nation. I was reminded of the all but forgotten work by Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). If any of us were asked about our hearts and our hopes, few would be avowedly racist in our responses. On the surface all people of good faith desire to live as people who accept

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    others based upon their character and not upon their skin color. However, social evil is an affirmation of the old theological notion of original sin—we are born into structures which are unjust and unfair, and but by grace we cannot escape them. Niebuhr observed decades ago that we participate in structures and systems which do things that no individual would devise or support. There is a strong and resilient web of cultural bias that continues to blind, bind and beset us. For example, Thomas Hanchett, the Charlotte historian with the Levine Museum, has written a very interesting book about segregation in Charlotte (Sorting Out the New South City). Hanchett discovered that one reason the neighborhoods in Charlotte are racially segregated is because of practices begun in the 1940’s and 1950’s, supported by federal agencies and banks, which allowed for generous real estate loans to Caucasians in predominantly Caucasian areas, and no or highly restrictive loans in primarily black neighborhoods. If you were born black in Charlotte, such practices assured that your chances would not be high that you could ever live in Myers Park or South Charlotte, simply because there were huge legal and cultural and unspoken barriers to your ever becoming a property owner anywhere in the city. Some doors just did not open to black persons, and these same doors opened readily for white persons. In fact, as our church officers were recently working to lift a deed restriction regarding our use of the property we have just acquired on the corner of Selwyn Avenue and Hassell Place, I learned that one of the original deed restrictions was that the property could never be sold to persons who were not Caucasian. (That was from the 1940’s, next door to the sanctuary!) Another illustration of the immoral society occurred during the urban renewal efforts in the same period following World War II. Maybe you read something about this in the Charlotte Observer! Have you ever wondered why the trajectory of Independence Boulevard/Highway 74 South is like it is—an arc, veering slightly upward from the city and then angling eastward and then south? Hanchett observed that it was to avoid high density traffic in the affluent Caucasian Dilworth and Myers Park neighborhoods. The straightest and shortest distance between uptown Charlotte and Monroe would have been down Providence Road or Park Road or Selwyn Avenue, but instead, Independence Boulevard was expanded —the road bisected the predominantly black neighborhood known as Brooklyn, and a major piece of Charlotte’ s black history was decimated. This was in the 1940’s, when black citizens had neither vote nor voice. The “Souls of White Folks” project included a couple of assignments which I want to share with you. One was for us to try to remember the first time in our lives when we realized we were white. This proved to be more difficult and more painful than we expected. Many people were in tears as they remembered incidents from their childhood where their innocence was assaulted by a racist ideology into which they/ we were born. The stories went something like this: My family was privileged to have as a helper to my mother an African American woman, Elizabeth. She would come to our home several days a week, assisting with housecleaning and cooking and child care and whatever else needed to be done. We children loved her dearly, for she was a guide and a constant companion and shepherd to us. When my brother was born, Elizabeth had been present more than usual in order to aid in my mother’s recovery from a difficult pregnancy. I remember one evening, after Elizabeth had taken me to play in the nearby park. We were getting ready to have

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    dinner. I exclaimed to my parents, “Elizabeth and I had a great time swinging and riding the merry go round and sliding down the sliding board—I want to sit by her at dinner so we can tell you all about it!” After a silence, one of my parents said, “Elizabeth can’t sit beside you. She will eat in the kitchen as always.” “But why not?” “When you get older, you will understand that this is the way things are, this is the way things have to be.” Well, I am now a lot older, and I still don’t understand. Another painful personal memory was recalled: When I was eleven years old, I was a member of the school safety patrol. There was a summer camp for safety patrol members held down in South Georgia during the stifling and gnat-infested heat of July. When we boarded the un-air conditioned school bus to go to the camp, we were handed a box lunch for the journey. The lunch for some reason included a pressed-meat sandwich. We didn’t like pressed meat under any circumstances, but on this day, after a few hours in the paper sacks on the floor of the bus, the mayonnaise had begun to turn green. We were smart enough to eat only the potato chips and cookies! But, human beings being what we are, one of the boys thought of another use for the pressed, rancid meat sandwiches. All along the highway through Middle and South Georgia, there were black persons walking. They quite likely were simply on their way to fetch water from the well behind the white people’s houses, since their own sharecropper dwellings had no water sources. Several of the bus riders collected the sandwiches. And the sandwiches became missiles, hurled at the black sharecroppers along the side of the road, along with the commonplace racial epithets. I remember that two Georgia State Troopers were on the bus, advisors for the summer camp. They said nothing, did nothing, to stop this. (And neither did I, who had just completed confirmation class and knew better.) And so, some years later, it was no surprise to me that much of what passed for law enforcement, from the FBI to local authorities in the Southland (and most ministers and Christians I knew), often “saw nothing” when civil rights workers were beaten or murdered. I began to know in my heart then that whenever race is the subject, for me there must be repentance both from what I have done and what I have left undone. And later on, when I was sixteen and playing in an integrated rhythm and blues band, I received some of what I deserved when the KKK threatened and chased us simply for getting together and playing music! When was the first time you realized you are white? Chances are it was a time when the immoral society confronted your deepest morality. The other assignment was to meet with a person who is African American and discuss his or her experiences and encounters with white privilege. This was difficult in that many participants, even in 2006, did not have an African American friend or acquaintance with whom this kind invitation could be extended, with whom this kind of deep and possibly excruciating conversation could occur freely and openly. Whether or not we Caucasians can or want to admit it, unspoken prejudices still abound and hurt our neighbors each day. Our “souls of white folks” group heard this clearly from our individual conversations and also in a group meeting with a number of African American clergy who let us know that the smell of rancid meat sandwiches is not yet gone. What happens to a dream deferred? We are thankful that by the power and mercy of the Lord, the dream is not dead. There may be wondrous and awe-filled and dread-filled experiences ahead of us as we continue on our way to the Promised Land.

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    One arena which deserves our concentrated attention in these days is the need for large amounts of affordable housing in our city. According to Fred Kelly in the Charlotte Observer,

    Mecklenburg County Commissioners on Tuesday heard details of a study that suggests leaders (should) subsidize affordable housing for the homeless instead of putting them in shelters. Last month, a coalition of social service agencies endorsed the plan designed to end chronic homelessness in 10 years. A 2005 report showed Charlotte needs more than 11,000 affordable housing units for families earning less than $16,000 a year. The report said it would take nearly $800 million to build enough units over the next 10 years just to cut the shortage in half. (Fred Kelly, “Family Inspires Help for Homeless,” Charlotte Observer 1/10/07).

    Now that’s a lot of money, but it is attainable. Just think—thirty years ago there was no Habitat for Humanity in Charlotte or anywhere else to speak of. But in Charlotte, if we stacked the Habitat homes on top of one another, the Habitat Homes would form a tower which would dwarf any skyscraper on the city scape! The dream lived then, and it is still alive— though too often and always sadly deferred. What a difference it would make if the bankers, realtors, attorneys, political and religious and civic leaders, neighborhoods, ordinary citizens of Charlotte would put our heads and hearts together in addressing this urgent matter! What happens to a dream deferred? I am so thankful to God that you are part of the answer instead of part of the problems, that we move on together longing to be recipients and bearers of the Good News, remembering as we travel the story of the Good Samaritan. Jesus said, “Who proved to be neighbor to the wounded man?” And the lawyer, a bright person for sure, answered, “The one who showed mercy. The one who had compassion. The one who stopped and stooped to care.” What happens to a dream deferred? I have a dream—yes, I have a dream this morning with Jesus. And so do you!