Just another WordPress site

Author: Sara Palmer

  • The evangelist as storyteller

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 26

    The Evangelist as Storyteller

    Leighton Ford

    Charlotte, North Carolina

    He taught them many things by parables [stories!. Mark 4:2

    Binx Boiling is the improbable name of the main character in Walker Percy’s 1960′ s novel The Moviegoer. Binx is a young stockbroker in post-World War II New Orleans who loves fast cars, girls, beer, beaches, and movies. But Binx has another side to him, a sense of longing that is not easily seen. One week before his thirtieth birthday he is on a search. On a bus he sees a fine-looking girl and begins to fantasize about meeting her. If this were a movie, he thinks, he would just have to wait and it would happen. Just then the idea of a search comes to him. He becomes so absorbed that he forgets about the girl. What is the search? It is, he says, “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.” To be aware of the search is to be on to something; not to be onto something is despair. “The movies are onto the search,” he says, “but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair.” “What do you seek— God?” he imagines being asked, and says,

    I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the matter for themselves …Who want to be dead last among one hundred and eighty million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics —which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker….I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them?1

    The Moviegoer was Percy’s first novel, winning the National Book Award for fiction in 1962, and beating out J.D. Salinger’s Franny andZooey and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Percy was one of the first of the new crop of Southern novelists in the midcentury . A dropout from a Presbyterian church in Birmingham, Alabama, he went to medical school and trained as a psychiatrist, but never practiced medicine because he contracted tuberculosis and had to spend many months in a sanitarium. During that time and after, Percy began to be painfully aware of his own spiritual search. An epiphany of some sort happened to him on a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, setting his life on a new course. He decided all at once to get married, to become a writer, to live in New Orleans, and as he told his amazed traveling companion, the writer Shelby Foote, to give up his scientific agnosticism, take Christianity seriously and become a Catholic! Several years later he was published and a new star rising in the literary sky. The Moviegoer was applauded by critics for its sly poking at accepted mid-America values and for its wacky humor.

    * This is an edited version of one of three lectures on the theme, tkFrcsh Images of the Evangelist,” given by Ford, Columbia ’55, at the seminary’s April 2005 Colloquium.

    Page 27

    Yet Percy was a writer with a mission. Binx Boiling represented some of both Percy himself and America in the fifties: unapologetically materialist, out for a good time, yet with a deep sense of longing for something more. This sense of longing ran like an underground river through Percy’s characters, like Tom More, the lapsed Catholic psychiatrist in Love in the Ruins, who sits in a sand trap on a golf course, musing about being ten years old and in love and full of longing: “The first thing a man remembers is longing and the last thing he is conscious of before death is exactly the same longing. I have never seen a man die who did not die in longing.”2 By this time some critics were put off that this talented, ironic, stingingly funny writer was now turning out enchanted religious fairy tales ! His biographer Jay Toison complained that even his religion was missing something. “We need to hear from the Christian ironist before the novel ends; but we don’t.” Toison points out that “during the last decade of his life, he would become a forceful defender of orthodoxy.”3 So we have in Walker Percy the novelist becoming evangelist. Percy’s church recognized that this storyteller was becoming one of the church’s most effective missionaries to late twentieth-century American culture. And in fact, he was invited to be a key speaker on Culture and Evangelization to the Pontifical Council in Rome not long before his death. Speaking between a British Lord and a Nigerian feminist, he cited all the usual cultural suspects for the spiritual decline of his nation. But he did not conclude that secularism would win. Rather he boldly predicted that evangelization would have a better chance of succeeding in a “thoroughly secularized United States in the year 2000” than in a society “nominally and perhaps superficially Christian”! His reasoning? That the promises of secularism would have exhausted themselves by the new century, and the anonymous consumer would have “exhausted the roster of ‘needs-satisfaction’ …whether…the manifold goods of a sophisticated consumer society, or the services of four hundred or so different schools of psychotherapy.” And how should the church then serve society? “By remaining faithful to its original commission,” said this novelist/evangelist in 1988 to the Pontifical audience. Surely his words are prophetic to us years later. I highlight the influence of Walker Percy not to suggest that preachers should become novelists (though I wish that those who do could be as deft as Percy!) but to ask: if a novelist can have a spiritual vocation, then should not we evangelists take to heart the power of story?

    The Gospel as Story Storytelling is both a gift that we may covet and a craft that all preachers should learn. My wife has always reminded me that people will remember the stories I tell long after they have forgotten the statistics I quote. True, there are outstanding preachers who hardly ever tell stories. On the other hand, perhaps you have heard sermons that simply strung together anecdotes (and often secondhand ones at that) with little biblical meat. My point is not only that as evangelists we need to tell stories; I am advocating that we see the gospel as story, and that we understand evangelism as living and telling the Story of the One who has entered and changed our story and will do so with theirs who also encounter his story. Barbara Mutch writes, “Through the telling and receiving of stories – family stories and family of faith stories we become ‘storied’ ones.” Let me propose a few reasons story is crucial to evangelism, always, and especially today

    Page 28

    when in many ways this is a world that has lost its story. Story Follows. It follows Jesus ! “Follow me,” he said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” Matthew tells us (and so do Mark and Luke) that when Jesus preached the kingdom he told the crowds “many things in parables [stories],” and then declares that actually “he did not say anything to them without using a story” He explained to his inner core that he had a double reason for using stories: to light up the truth for those who were ready to receive it, and to hide it from the spiritual dilettantes and curiosityseekers who were not. If Jesus told nothing without a story, then if we are going to follow him and become “fishers of people” we had better be storytellers! Story Feeds. It feeds a basic human hunger. The novelist Reynolds Price asserts that next to food and drink, our most basic human need is story. We might quibble that touch is even more basic. Yet his assertion is born out, for storytelling is a growing form of entertainment. It’s estimated that in San Francisco on any given weekend forty storytelling sessions take place in bars and clubs, not only by professionals but by “normal” people who have a story to tell. Who would have thought that people would go to bars to hear and tell their life stories? Why not, we might wonder, to church? But the nurturing power of story is nothing new. The British scholar Marjorie Reeves has written,

    The Bible has been the main source of spiritual story throughout the Christian centuries … it was story rather than doctrine that nourished the spirituality of many generations because it fed the imagination. Story came first; doctrine afterwards.4

    Reeves points out that while scholastic minds in medieval times did the important work of relating theology and philosophy, “story influenced a much wider range of the devout. From the lectio divina of monastic community to the visual representation of sculpture and painting in churches, sacred story was ‘read’ by the many.” Story Bridges. We have moved (as Neil Postman said a generation ago) from the Age of Exposition to the Age of Entertainment. Once many ordinary people read books, gave rock star-like welcomes to writers like Charles Dickens, and went to presidential debates that lasted up to seven hours (during the Lincoln-Douglas campaign)! Today even the so-called evening news is in entertainment format. How does the church respond? By our becoming entertainers? God forbid! But story can be the entry point into jaded minds and imaginations. Story Draws. This postmodern world rejects all efforts to claim absolutes (except of course the absolute claim that there are no absolutes!). Dare to quote Jesus’ claim to be the Way, the ideological door slams, and you are dissed as a bigot. How then to communicate the truth we know and treasure in Jesus? I believe the authentic sharing of our own stories can get under the protective radar screen, like the blind man who said, “I don’t know the answer to all your questions, but I do know that I was blind, and that man made me see.” People usually can’t or don’t argue about firsthand experience. And if we will listen to their stories, and if they can hear ours and know that we are almost as “normal” as they are, that can be the first step to their listening to the story of Jesus. Story Heals. There is therapy in story, as Daniel Taylor has written in The Healing Power of Stories.5 Taylor believes that story is already at the center of our lives, and

    Page 29

    if we do not notice that, it is because story is as all-pervasive as the air we breathe. “There is no story without a telling,” writes Taylor, who believes that “Everyone without exception, should be allowed to tell his or her own story—even God let Adam try to explain.” At Bellevue Hospital in New York, medical students are learning the importance of using story in their practice. “Just tell me a story,” Dr. Danielle Ofri admonishes them. Doctors often speak and write as if “there are no people there,” she tells her students on their rounds. “Think of the way we make presentations. We say, ‘The spleen was palpated.’ Who palpated whose spleen?” At the core of every patient’s history, she emphasizes, i s a mystery story, a narrative full of surprises. So to humani ze their work she tells her students, “Just tell me a story. Don’t read from your notes.” Story Teaches. I have a friend who is the son of two immigrants, a Jewish father and Ukrainian mother. When he was growing up in Cleveland, he was sent both to synagogue and an Orthodox school. One taught in Hebrew, the other in Ukrainian. So he could understand virtually nothing of what was said. Dick is a highly ethical person, so I asked him how he developed his sense of morals and ethics with no religious basis. “Through the radio,” he said, to my astonishment. As a boy he listened to the daily serial programs on radio—and in hearing stories about Jack Armstrong, the AllAmerican boy, or the Long Ranger and Tonto fighting fight the bad guys, he learned courage, honesty, the difference between right and wrong, and a lifetime virtue of doing right. The director of the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, told me the center’s research shows that corporate values are most effectively taught not through slogans or policies put on a wall but through what he called “value parables,” stories of people in the company whose principled actions, undertaken perhaps at risk to their careers, made a difference. Story Redeems. “Tell me the old, old story” runs the old gospel song, for the old story is ever new ! Much of the early life-changing preaching—the kerygma—of the apostles was just a telling of the story of Jesus and the kingdom. Indeed the “gospel” itself is story. When you say the word over and over until it begins to sound like nonsense, you will start to hear the very heart of the word:…gospel…gooospell …goooospell…gooood-spell…God-spell! “Godspell” is the old English form of gospel. It speaks to us of a “good spell,” something very good from God. “Spell” is equal to a good talk, discourse, or “spiel,” a good story. And “spell” also means a charm, an influence, a fascination. So the “good spiel” is the good story, the story of God. And the “good spell” is the good charm— the spell of God. So the “gospel” is a “story to tell” by those “LUI” – living under the influence of Jesus.

    Evangelism as a “Collision of Stories” My point is not just about telling stories but about seeing the gospel as story, and evangelism as a collision of stories. The Bible contains a vast and sweeping narrative, God’s Story with a capital “S.” Narrative evangelism is living this Story and sharing this Story with others—and inviting them to be part of it. Think how the story of Jesus collided with the lives of his early followers as the gospel narrative spread through the encounters of Acts. His story collides with Peter, and Peter’ s with Cornelius; it collides with Stephen, and Stephen’s with Saul; it collides with Philip, and Philip’s with the

    Page 30

    Ethiopian treasurer; and so on through the centuries, until Jesus’ story collides with someone else whose story collides with yours, and yours with—on it goes. Each of us has a story – a story with a small “s” – the story of our own journeys. At the point where our story collides with the Story of God – the story with a large “S” – we choose either to be written out of the Story or to become part of it. So evangelism means living and telling the Story of the One who has changed our story.

    Storytelling and Evangelism There are three stories which are vital in storytelling evangelism, and which we need to weave together as we tell the gospel story. First, of course, are the Bible stories themselves. When I wrote The Power of Story a critic took me to task for not taking time to establish the power of story more thoroughly from the Bible. Since a single criticism usually obsesses me more than several dozen compliments, I thought, “Shoot, I blew it.” Then it dawned on me: proving that the Bible teaches story is like trying to prove the air I breathe. The Bible is story, isn’t it? It is the story of God and God’s creation and redemption and his people. Check the table of contents. At least half the pages of the Old Testament are pure narrative, and narrative is the backbone of many of the Psalms. Over half of the New Testament is story. And for the rest—how could we understand the prophets of Israel or the letters of Paul without knowing the story line against which they wrote? The philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff says our lives are “story-shaped,” as by the stories we heard as children that shaped our imagination. The issue he is says is not whether we will be shaped by stories, but which stories shape our lives.6 Knowing this, is it any wonder that God has chosen to be the Great Storyteller? We Christians are indeed a People of the Book. But our book is not magic. It is the authentic and living witness to the Great God-Story, the God-Spell. The stories of our Book are more than a series of tales. They reveal the great overarching story: the story of God the Father and his steadfast love; the story of God the Son and his strong and redeeming grace; and the story of God the Spirit and his living breath. There are two grand themes, writes Barbara Mutch, which shine forth in the Bible stories: stories of separation – ofbrokenness, exile, longing, plight – and stories of transformation – of healing, returning, discovery, light! Behind all our stories is One at work rewriting our stories into his script. The early Christians knew the power of story. For the most part, the first preaching was not debate or argument, but the telling and retelling of the mighty acts of God in Christ. If biblical evangelism means anything, it is that God the Evangelist is God the Storyteller, writing our lives into His Great Story. Our part as evangelists is to be shaped by the Story, tell the Story, and invite others to live in the Story. Our personal stories are also an integral part of our ministry of evangelism. In becoming a storyteller I need to pay attention to how His Story has touched and changed my own story. Have we recast our own theology in terms of narrative? How long has it been since we reread the Bible asking, “How is this story our story?” and let ourselves be grasped again by the wonderful story of salvation history—the story of Father, Son, and Spirit, and of God’s people? If it’s time to do that, then listen to Jesus’ story again in fresh words, as in Peterson’s The Message. Or through a cross-cultural exposure, as Catholic priest William Donovan did working with the Masai in East Africa, powerfully recounted in

    Page 31

    his Christianity Rediscovered. Or read Kenneth Bailey’s accounts of what he learned when he told the parables to middle Eastern villagers in The Cross and the Prodigal. Or read prayerfully and reflectively Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal. If I am paying attention to my own life in the light of Scripture, I will see how the Bible stories connect with my own history and the stories of those with whom I am sharing the “God-spell.” How often have you and I felt like Abraham, called to leave the familiar and go into the unknown? How often have we found ourselves, like Jacob, wrestling in the middle of the night with our own fears and limps, aware of the mystery that is attached to our names and God’s? How often have I, like Jonah, been rebuked for my narrow-mind and small-heart until God lets me be swallowed up in my own seas, and taught to care for my own Nineveh ! And how often have you and I, like Peter, wept our way to the cross in search of a fresh start? Authenticity is very close to topping the list of qualities for effective evangelism. Few have put this more eloquently than the writer/preacher Frederick Buechner. In Telling Secrets, he opens up some of the secrets of his own life, and then makes this searching charge:

    Sad to say, the people who seem to lose touch with themselves and God most conspicuously are of all things ministers…. Ministers give preeminence to of all books the Bible whose absolutely central and unifying thesis is that God makes himself known in historical experience. In other words, a major part of their ministry is to remind us that there is nothing more important than to pay attention to what is happening to us, yet again and again they show little sign of doing so themselves. There is precious little in most of their preaching to suggest that they have rejoiced and suffered with the rest of mankind…what it is like to love Christ, say, or to feel spiritually bankrupt….Ministers run the awful risk…of ceasing to be witnesses to the Presence in their own li ves….Their sermons often sound as bland as they sound bloodless….7

    When have you had the opportunity to tell your own story without hurry, without interruption, without much editing? That opportunity does not come often, unless it’s in some kind of therapy. Most of us are so full of our own thoughts and concerns that we find it difficult really to attend to another, or we are so concerned about how we will appear to be that we find it difficult to tell our story. I was asked not long ago to write an appreciation for a friend who was retiring as a seminary dean. I asked him to come by for coffee and tell me not only about his academic career but about his life. For two hours we listened together to the story of his pilgrimage and of those who helped him on the way. At times he was in tears. I say we listened “together” because he was listening to his own voice relating his own full story for the first time. And we were listening together to God’s voice. At the end he thanked me and said, “No one has ever asked me to tell my story this way before, and taken the time to listen.” If I gave him a gift I also received one, as I heard his sacred story in all its joys and scars. So I urge you: if you have neither received this gift, nor offered it, then find a soul companion and listen to your own soul adventures!

    /

    Page 32

    A Caution, a Question, and a Biblical Model Here a caution is in order: you and I can become so wrapped up in the details of our own stories that God’s story is eclipsed. Our witness then become an exercise in self-indulgent narcissism. Marjorie Reeves suggests a helpful distinction: Whereas “my experience” spells out the ego-centered feelings of an individual, “my story” assumes the involvement of the person in relationships over time. What distinction is there between telling stories between friends, or at a bar, and telling stories in the context of our faith sharing? Psalm 99 offers a good biblical model. After referring to the stories of Moses and Aaron and Samuel, how they called on the Lord, and how the Lord spoke to them, and forgave his people (while holding them accountable for their sins) the Psalmist concludes:

    Exalt the LORD our God and worship at his holy mountain for the Lord our God is holy. (Psalm 99:9)

    Based on this psalm, we preachers ought to ask, when we use a story of ourselves or others: Do these stories exalt God or ourselves? Do they lead to worship God or to self-flattery? Do they create a hunger for holiness or just bring a good feeling? There is also the story of God’s people, the stories of our faith families. The late Henri Nouwen wrote a beautiful small book about praying with icons. Describing the fifteenth- century icon of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, which depicts the apostles and evangelists, hands folded, the community of faith waiting for the promised Spirit, he remarks how this stands in contrast to the hyper-individualism of the Western church:

    That God reveals the fullness of divine love first of all in community, and that the proclamation of the good news finds its main source there has radical consequences for our lives. Because now the question is no longer: How can I best develop my spiritual life and share it with others? but Where do we find the community of faith to which the Spirit of God descends and from which God’s message of hope and love can be brought as a light into the world?8

    Evangelism, especially in the West, usually calls up images of a gifted individual, a charismatic preacher or a relational lay witness who passes the message on to others. And it has always been true that the Risen Lord—the Evangelist—gives to the church some who are especially gifted in faith sharing. For them we give thanks and pray God will increase their number even as we relearn that the church of Christ is itself the missional body: that the community of God’s people is also a crucial part of God’s story ! The Friends Missionary Prayer Band in south India often evangelizes by going to people of other faiths, asking to use their home for a service of worship. As they pray and praise, rehearse the story of God and worship, the very real presence of the Spirit of God in this small worshipping band has a powerful way of attracting others to the God-spell. Here is liturgical evangelism and communal evangelism indeed! How can we faithfully use story in the context of worship? Or perhaps we could ask: how can we not use story if we know and live and preach our Bibles? How can

    Page 33

    we recognize that every time the Word of God is read and the sacraments are observed, we have a gospel opportunity for the Story to be seen and heard, and a perfect time for the invitation to become part of the Story? A group of us were puzzled when an Episcopal bishop asked us to cite the most often told story in the Bible. We mentioned the obvious ones: the story of the prodigal, of the good Samaritan, the feeding of the five thousand. He kept shaking his head and then we were chagrined when he quietly said, “And Jesus took bread and broke it.” Of course! We had missed the most obvious. For what is the liturgical life of the church except the retelling and the reliving and the re-inviting to all of us to enter more fully into God’s story! If we pay attention to the church year we will not have to search for stories: they are already there in Advent and Lent and Holy Week and Pentecost.

    We All Have a Story to Tell—and a Gracious Way to Tell It My wife has two brothers. One is Billy Graham, the preacher. The other was her younger brother, Melvin, the farmer, who died with a heart attack two years ago. He was a down- to-earth, straightforward layman and Presbyterian elder who liked to say, “I’m just a nobody, telling everybody, about Somebody who can change anybody”! I could not put it more memorably. And there is not a follower of Jesus, ordained or not, who cannot tell The Story in his or her own way. How then are we to be storytellers? We Tell the Story Honestly. Of course we need to speak honestly out of our own struggles. I am moved by the words of Episcopal dean Alan Jones: “I name him Jesus because I know of no other name that so adequately fits the wide range of human experience… When I am honest, I experience myself as a mass of contradictions…I am an artist, an authoritarian, a bigot. I am rich. I am poor. I am gifted. I am useless. I am cruel. I am loving. In Christ, nothing has to be left out or sanitized. All my many ‘me’s’ meet in him.” Jones’ words reveal something like the transparency we see in Nouwen’ s writings, the light Nouwen allowed to shine through his own human sensibilities. Have we all not discovered the power there is when God’s treasure is revealed in our own frailties? When our son Sandy died during heart surgery at the age of twenty-one, and when I was able to speak with tears and questions and the deep disappointment of a bereaved father, I found people listening with their hearts, because they were hearing not just a preacher, but a father with his own doubts, hurts, and unresolved questions. We Tell the Story Humbly. Among the greatest stumbling-blocks for evangelism in our culture is the perception that evangelists are arrogant people who think we have all the answers and are trying to force them on others. I have told my evangelical friends I think we might take a moratorium for a while on laying too much claim to absolute truth, not only for tactical reasons but for reasons of humility. God is absolute. True. God is also the Great Mystery. Jesus is the Way. True again. But there are many ways to Jesus. The Scripture is God-breathed Word. This too I believe. But I know I receive and filter God’s truth through the lenses of my own culture and prejudices, and my own wounded and one-sided self. Yes, there is Absolute Truth. And that Absolute Truth is a Person who has me—but I do not have it! My wife and I were at the annual Renaissance where a diverse group of people, leaders in all fields come to talk about everything under the sun. I was on a panel moderated by Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of Why Bad Things Happen to Good

    Page 34

    People. Harold knew that we had lost a son, as he and his wife had also. He threw me a question I had not encountered before. “Leighton,” he asked, “do you know why it is that some people go through hard things and lose their faith, and others go through the same and keep theirs? Do you have an explanation?” I thought quickly of a halfdozen partial responses, none of which, however, really spoke to the mystery his question posed. So I finally sighed and said, “No, Harold, I do not.” He shook his head and said, “Neither do I.” Later a woman wrote me a note of thanks to say, “Thanks for your honest answer. I have hardly ever heard an evangelical leader admit there was something they didn’t know! You helped me.”

    We Tell the Story Courteously and Responsively As Peter counseled the early Christ-followers on how to share their faith in the face of hostility: Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope you have. But do this with gentleness and respect (I Peter 3:15 NIV). Does this mean we never take the initiative in evangelism? Of course not. It does mean that we usually listen before we speak and that we ask permission. Effective evangelists learn to listen attentively. Keith Miller has said that when we listen deeply and carefully and lovingly to another, it is as if we put a gentle finger into the rim of the soul of the other, as into a precious cup, and feel along the rim until we come to a broken place, which may be the entry point for the words of grace. Jesus was the Great Listener. Read carefully his encounter with the Samaritan woman by the well. Count the quoted words. She says twice as many words as Jesus does! If we are going to be evangelists like Jesus, we had better learn to listen. God gave us two ears and one mouth, but many of us—especially preachers—act as if we had just the opposite: two mouths and one ear. What a compliment when someone says, “That pastor listened to me as if she was really interested!” And we learn to listen to the culture. A gifted young evangelist told me he tried to listen with “three ears.” He said, “I listen to new Christians because they put their faith in fresh words, not jargon they have absorbed. I listen to liberal theologians—I may not agree with their answers but they are asking important questions. And I listen to secular novelists to hear how they portray real human beings.” Another friend says evangelism means “loving the hell out of people—literally.” If so, then part ofthat love is caring enough to listen both to the hell and the heavenly longing that is in them. In Speaking of God, Ben Johnson has helped us think of evangelism as “initial spiritual direction.”91 like that. When we evangelize, we are not first on the scene. God has already been at work in the lives of those with whom we are able to share the good news. It helps me to know that this “spiritual direction” is not first of all telling them what they have to do, but pointing out the clues as to how God has been busy seeking them. But to do that we must listen well first!

    We Tell the Story with Proper Confidence Telling the story with proper confidence means, of course, confidence in Christ. In Paul’s magnificent words,

    We do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his life shine in our hearts to give us the light of the

    Page 35

    knowledge of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. (2 Corinthians 4:5-7 NIV)

    In our evangelism we know that God has gone before us preparing the way. God works with us even as we preach Christ. And God is the one who will make the light of Christ shine in others as he has done in us. Being written into His Story—with the Capital S—is what gives meaning and life and hope to your story and my story—the stories with the small s’s. If your story and mine are incomplete without God, then others, like Binx Boiling and Walker Percy, may find the longing in their own stories fulfilled in God, too. Whether you are primarily a preaching evangelist, or a personal evangelist, ordained or lay—you have the Greatest Story Ever Told to tell again and again—and it is worth learning to do it well—with attentiveness, imagination, authenticity, and faithful patience.

    A Story About a Bird Have you read novelist Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies—her “coming out” as a Christian?10 If not, then buy it and laugh and pay attention. Her language may shock you awake ! Also get her Bird by Bird, everything she knows about writing, so she says, in one slim volume. The title comes from her father, also a writer, who told Lamott’ s brother when he was struggling with a term paper, “Son, just write it bird by bird.”11 You could tell about a bird. I could. The hummingbird that flew into our open garage on a Saturday last fall. I found it frantically beating its wings, flying over and over up to and all over under the roof trying to find an escape. When it got tired it would rest a moment on the metal frame of our garage door opener. Then up it would go again, flying, flapping, beating, searching. Finally I opened every window and door in the garage. I got a long broom and an extended light-bulb changing pole, and used them to stir the little bird, to try to scare it enough to make it move toward one of the open windows or doors below where it could fly out. But to fly out the bird would have had to fly down. And its only instinct was to fly up and up and up where there was no way out. By nighttime it was perched drooping on one of the door struts. Sunday morning when we left for church the bird sat exhausted on a windowsill. I gently picked it up and carried it out to and put it in the grass. It lay there quietly. And by the time we came home from church it was dead. “Oh,” I mused, “I wish that foolish little bird had known to fly down. Down was the only way out. I wish it could have learned. I wish I could have shown it.” But before I went to bed that night I saw myself in the little bird’s plight, so often frantically flapping to fly higher, to rid myself of fears or drives that could destroy me. And how stubbornly I too have refused those who would tell me that the way down is often the only way out. Then I remembered Jesus’ story about the social climbers who clambered all over each other trying to get first to the best seats at a dinner party, and how Jesus said that it was better to take a lower seat first and be invited up. And all the stories he told about the way up being the way down, how the kingdom turns everything on its head. And I remembered how he lived that story, actually, died that story, as the one who did not consider being equal with God something to grab on to, humbling himself to the death of a cross, with the end of the story being that God exalted him with a name above every

    Page 36

    name, so that every knee might bow to him. It sounds so hard. So uncomfortable. So right. The little hummingbird didn’t know that story. But I do. And why is it that I forget so easily and need to hear it over and over again? So, please: listen to my story. Tell me your story. And remind me of His story— over and over and over again. Then we can leave the endings of our stories in God’s hands, perhaps in the spirit of the Native American storyteller Thomas King, who ends his narratives like this:

    Take (this) story for instance. It’s yours. Do with it what you will… Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.

    Notes

    1. The Moviegoer (New York: Avon Books, 1980), 18-19. 2. Love in the Ruins (Picador USA, 1999). 3. Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (Chapel Hill: Chapel Hill Books, 1994). 4. From her article, “The Power of Story: The Incarnation of Truth in Culture,” in Paul Fiddes, ed., Faith in the Centre: Christianity and Culture (Smyth and Helwys Publishing, Inc., 2001). 5. The Healing Power of Stories: Creating Yourself through the Stones in Your Life (New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1996). 6. “Living within a Text,” in Keith E. Yandell, ed., Faith and Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 212. 7. Telling Secrets (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 36-38. 8. Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons (Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 1991), 60. 9. Speaking of God: Evangelism as Initial Spiritual Guidance (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991). 10. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2000). 11. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 1995).

  • Death in the midst of life, life in the midst of death: preaching and worship in the Easter season

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 8

    Death in the Midst of Life, Life in the Midst of Death:

    Preaching and Worship in the Easter Season

    Martha Moore-Keish

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    Thine is the glory, risen, conquering Son;

    endless is the victory thou o’er death hath won!

    So we sing joyfully at Easter in churches around the country, belting out Handel’s boisterous chorus from Judas Maccabeus. Organ stops are pulled out, brass choirs are hired, and the lilies quiver with the resounding praise. Triumphant gladness is the order of the day. Surely this is appropriate, for at Easter we celebrate the heart of the gospel: Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Yet as we come to consider worship during Easter, there are two cautions to bear in mind: first, Easter is not just a single day, but a season of fifty days leading to Pentecost. Many early churches approached the Easter season as a time of particular reflection for those who had been baptized at the Easter Vigil. Preachers like Ambrose of Milan and Cyril of Jerusalem offered sermons during the week following Easter Sunday focusing on the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, in order to help new Christians understand the mystery of the life into which they had been incorporated. Recent revival of interest in the catechumenate has turned attention to this practice, so that the weeks of Easter open up for believers (old and new alike) the riches of the sacramental life.1 So too for us this season can be an invitation not just to a single celebratory occasion, but to sustained attention to the shape of the new life we have received in our baptism into Christ. Second, the joyful proclamation of new life at Easter is only good news to those who know the threat of death. We have to tell the truth about death in our world in order to receive the truth about Easter life. For this reason, though it may seem peculiar, Easter can summon us to new reflection on death as it comes to us in the midst of life, as well as the promise of life that comes in the midst of death.

    Death in the Midst of Life In Stephen Sondheim’s musical, A Little Night Music, two of the main characters sing an ironic ballad, “Every Day a Little Death.” Their lament focuses on the little deaths that erode romantic love: the deception, the pretense, the sweetness on the surface that disguises the bitter emptiness beneath. The song concludes:

    Every day a little dies In the looks and in the lies. Every move and every breath (And you hardly feel a thing) Brings a perfect little death.

    Even for those who do not dwell in Sondheim’s darkly cynical world, we know there is truth in these words. Every day does bring its own “little death,” in many

    Page 9

    different forms. We all know people who carry on in marriages or relationships that have died at their core. The partners go through all the motions: pouring the coffee, picking up the children from school, making the bed, coordinating the calendar. Yet something at the heart of that relationship stopped breathing long ago. We have all lived through the death of particular hopes: hopes for a certain job, a certain honor, a certain magic, or a certain security. We move through our days distracted by all the mundane demands of living, and suddenly one day, we look at the paint peeling on the ceiling and realize, “this is not the life I had hoped for.” Somewhere along the way, the bright visions for the future have died, and a tiny piece of our selves have died with them. More seriously, the newspapers each day proclaim brutal new deaths in wars overseas, new deaths on streets at home. As I write this, twelve miners have just died in an accident in a coal mine in West Virginia; a suicide bomber has killed 32 at an Iraq funeral; the death toll for U.S. soldiers in Iraq has passed 2000; and the death toll for Iraqis during the same period, though not calculated as carefully, is over ten times that. We encounter “little deaths” every day, and we confront real death each time we read, hear, or watch the news. Ultimately, death comes to each of us not only as a bitter disappointment or a harrowing headline, but as the termination of our lives. Death hangs on the horizon for all of us—not always as a present threat, but as the dark line that marks the limit of our vision, there whenever we turn our heads. Whether we go quietly into that good night, or rage against the dying of the light, death comes for all of us, and we cannot finally defeat it. Death lurks, too, in the gospel texts for this Easter season. On the second Sunday of Easter we encounter Thomas, whose faith in the resurrection comes only after touching the wounds of the crucifixion (John 20:25ff). Thomas has to touch the marks of the nails and the wound in Jesus’ side in order to confirm Jesus’ life. It is precisely the marks of death that make him realize that Jesus is alive. On the fourth Sunday of Easter, we encounter the charming image of Jesus as the good shepherd (John 10:11-18). This day, which some churches celebrate as “Good Shepherd Sunday,” is frequently filled with images of woolly lambs frolicking happily in verdant pastures. Yet the threat of death pervades this text: wolves threaten the sheep, and the shepherd Jesus gives up his own life for the safety of his flock. Death is not absent from this text; in fact, the life of the sheep depend upon the death of the shepherd. On the following two Sundays, the gospel texts present Jesus as the true vine (John 15:1-8 and 9-17). As the life-giving vine, Jesus enables those who abide in him to bear fruit. But the threat of death haunts this story as well, for the branches that do not bear fruit are cut off and burned in the fire. At supper, in the meadow, in the vineyard: in the midst of all of these life-giving settings, the gospel also shows us death. So, too, in the midst of our daily lives: in our homes, at our jobs, in the newspapers, as we go about our business, life presents us with the specter of death.

    Life in the Midst of Death Yet death is not the only reality we encounter in the gospel texts, or in our lives. Easter is, after all, about resurrection, about the triumph of life over death. On the first Sunday of Easter, in John 20, Mary comes weeping to the tomb, to the place of death,

    Page 10

    only to discover that there is no longer a dead body there. Instead, the one who had been dead speaks to her in the garden, calls her by name, and sends her to announce to the other disciples that she has seen the Lord—alive ! Life emerges right in the place that was suffused with the scent of death. Back in the meadow with the sheep on the fourth Sunday of Easter, Jesus does indeed announce that he will lay down his life for the sheep, but he does so in order that they may live. And more: he lays down his life in order to “take it up again” (John 10:17-18). Death here is real, but it is the source of life for the sheep, and it does not mark the end even for the shepherd himself. Here, too, the final word is not death, but life. On the fifth and sixth Sundays of Easter, Jesus declares himself to be the vine not in order to threaten death, but precisely in order to offer life to all who abide in him. “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples” (John 15:7-8). Abundant life is the promise here: the flourishing of those who are engrafted into Jesus Christ. How does life appear for us in the midst of death? Where do we see hope embodied? Putting my older daughter to bed one night recently, I apologized for having a short temper earlier in the day. “I’m sorry I have been in such a bad mood today,” I said. “I shouldn’t have gotten so angry at you.” Something inside me felt dry, withered, worthy only of being cut off and thrown into the fire. But my daughter looked at me, puzzled. “I didn’t think you were angry.” A hug, and a kiss good night. “I love you, Mama.” At once, unexpectedly, the old life was gone, and a new life had begun. New life emerges each time we practice forgiveness, and each time we receive forgiveness from someone else. When a relationship has been poisoned with bitterness and seems to be dead, it is yet possible for someone to turn around, to say “Γ m sorry” or “I forgive you.” And there, in the midst of what seemed like death, new life is born. Forgiveness allows us to acknowledge the wrongs of the past but not be determined by them, and thus it is a real instance of the possibility of new life. Poet Billy Collins finds new life in the testimony of the earth itself. In “Picnic, Lightning,” he recounts the various ways death comes suddenly: meteor, plane crash, lightning strike. Then he continues:

    And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body’s rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore.

    is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow,

    Page 11

    and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak.

    Collins is well acquainted with the reality of death. Yet the poem does not end here. He goes on,

    Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white,

    and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.2

    This may not be the witness of the gospel, but on the other hand, as Christians we can celebrate the testimony of the beetles and the small plants singing, for they, too, point us to new life. Small wonders like these remind us of the great wonder that life does emerge in the midst of death. Our ultimate hope, in the Easter season, comes to us from the gospel story itself— that the darkness does not overcome the light, that death is real but not final, that the end of the story is life. When sleepy children kiss us good night in spite of our scolding, when lingering resentment gives way to forgiveness, when beetles scurry into the soil, all of this reminds us that life springs anew even in the face of death.

    Death and Life in the Easter Season Several recent writers have pointed out the importance of holding together death and life, Good Friday and Easter, in reflecting on the Christian life. Jim Farwell, professor of liturgies at General Theological Seminary, makes this case in his compelling book This is the Night: Suffering, Salvation, and the Liturgies of Holy Week. To begin with, Farwell describes the modern myth of progress in which “little by little, through the interaction of technology and capital, humanity is growing toward a more perfect future.” In this popular story of our culture, suffering and death “is reduced to an unfortunate but inevitable moment in the process of growth toward a greater good.” The liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, however, contrast sharply with such a myth of progress. Suffering and death are not simply a moment to get beyond in order to celebrate; the paschal mystery is precisely that life emerges out of death, in the midst of suffering. “Far from being a three-day drama that

    Page 12

    mimics the modernist sense that suffering is no more than an unhappy but temporary step on the way to triumph, each and every liturgy of the Paschal Triduum is a ritual interweaving of suffering borne and hope celebrated.”3 Death in the midst of life, but finally life in the midst of death: this is the central mystery celebrated in the liturgies of Holy Week. Alan Lewis, late professor of theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, echoes a similar theme in Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday. In this powerful theological reflection written as he was himself dying of cancer, Lewis focuses attention on the day between Good Friday and Easter, between crucifixion and resurrection, to ask what we might learn of Christian faith from that vantage point. Standing in the empty, formless silence between the horror of Golgotha and the wonder of the empty tomb, Lewis reminds us that “the complex, multiple meaning of the story will only emerge as we hold in tension what the cross says on its own, what the resurrection says on its own, and what each of them says when interpreted in light of the other.”4 Easter Saturday, Holy Saturday, he suggests, is a “boundary” where we appropriately stand to look both backward and forward in faith. He concludes his opening chapter with these questions:

    Where better than at the Easter Saturday grave to see with clarity the vivid contrast between the humiliation of the crucified Christ and his glorious exaltation? Where better to find the wisdom which can unite cross and resurrection inextricably, and discover truth in such foolishness as presence -absence, powerful weakness, and life-giving death? Where better to hold in equilibrium the first-time hearing of the gospel story and its constant retelling by the people of faith?5

    Farwell and Lewis focus in their work on the theology of Holy Week: the three days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Vigil called the Triduum (Farwell), and Holy Saturday (Lewis). But their words are equally important for us to hear as we move beyond Easter morning, as we travel through the Great Fifty Days of Easter. Once we pass Easter morning, Good Friday seems far, far away. In the Easter season, we might be tempted to say nothing of death anymore, for after all, “the old life is gone, and a new life has begun.” We might be tempted to engage in seven weeks of unmitigated celebration, an orgy of lilies and Alleluias with nary a kyrie in sight. But this celebration of “pure presence” would be a mistake, both for anthropological reasons and for theological reasons. In the midst of our alleluias, we cannot forget that there are still those among us who grieve, who face death either physically or emotionally. Easter needs to acknowledge such suffering in order that those who grapple with death may receive the good news of life. Theologically, we cannot forget that our resurrection hope is real but not yet fully realized. Easter, the most joyous season of the Christian year, must not just focus on the presence of the living Christ here and now, but must lean into the future, anticipating the time when we will all sit at the table of the Lamb. In witnessing to the new life that has come to us in Christ Jesus, we must not succumb to our culture’s denial of death, but must acknowledge with honesty the death that yet haunts us—even as we know that it does not have the last word.

    Page 13

    In a recent essay, theologian Jürgen Moltmann laments the modern denial of death and suffering. “Modern society has no time for mourning, and no space,” he declares. “Death and mourning have been radically privatized and banished from public life.”6 Our modern Western culture tends to make death invisible, relegated to private rooms and the edges of cities. It is embarrassing, unseemly. But we, as Christians, must not fall into this trap of denying death. In this Easter season, it is a particularly tempting path, but it is one that we particularly need to avoid. The wonder of the gospel message is that life comes right in the midst of death.

    Death and Life in Easter Worship How do we express liturgically this interweaving of death and life that is the heartbeat of the Easter season? I suggest four moments of worship in which this can be most clearly embodied: prayers of confession, preaching, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. First, prayers of confession. The confession of sin and declaration of forgiveness, so important during worship the rest of the year, are often omitted during this season. There is some justification for this; during Eastertide we anticipate the perpetual rejoicing of the saints around the throne of the Lamb in Revelation, where mourning and crying and death will be no more. But even in Easter, we know that this future is not yet fully realized. Might not this season of joy be an appropriate time to acknowledge the continuing presence of death in our world? Resurrection hope is ours, but hope is not a denial of death; it is a declaration that death is not the final word. And so perhaps we should lift up prayers of confession even in this most joyous of seasons; in light of the resurrection it might be particularly important to acknowledge the ways that we continue to live as if we had no hope, the ways that we continue to fear death, as well as the ways our world continues to groan for redemption. Second, preaching. As I have already suggested, Easter preaching cannot effectively proclaim new life without naming honestly the real power of death in our lives and in our world. A preacher in this season might fruitfully take time to name the little deaths that invade our lives, in order that the promise of new life is made real to people who need it so deeply. Another approach to preaching that takes seriously the intertwining of death and life in Easter is to learn from the ancient practice of “mystagogical preaching,” preaching that begins with the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist as primary encounters with death and life: death of the old self, the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, and the gift of new life that comes to us in the resurrection. Third, baptism. In the first centuries of the church, Easter Sunday was commonly regarded as the most appropriate occasion for celebrating baptism. If churches celebrate baptisms on Easter Sunday, or on other Sundays during the Easter season, this provides a prime opportunity to confront the mysteries of death and life. In Romans 6:3-4 Paul declares, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” Reflecting on this passage, Cyril of Jerusalem preaches to the newly baptized, “We know well that not merely does [baptism] cleanse sins and bestow on us the gift of the Holy Spirit—it is also the sign of Christ’s suffering.”7 Even as baptism marks the triumph of life over death, it also marks the beginning of a life characterized by death—that is, a life of death to the

    Page 14

    things that enslave us. Early Christian converts spent this Easter season celebrating new life, but also learning that living that new life involves dying to “the old life.” It may seem peculiar and out of place to proclaim this gospel of death and life at the baptism of infants, but it is in fact a prime opportunity to underscore that at baptism all of us are welcomed into a new way of being—a life that dies daily to the old ways of death. Finally, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist. During Easter we repeatedly encounter stories of the risen Christ at table: in the upper room of John 20, on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. We also encounter more subtle images associated with the table: Jesus as the true vine, Jesus as the good shepherd who feeds the sheep. All of these images guide us to the celebration of the Supper. Easter is a particularly appropriate season to come to the table—and not just on the First Sunday of Easter, but each Sunday afterward, since it is the season of resurrection. The Supper brings us face to face with both life and death. Here at the table we meet our risen Lord face to face, but the risen Lord still bears the wounds in his hands and side. The bread broken recalls both the body broken on the cross and the bread that is blessed and broken by the risen Lord in the unknown village of Emmaus. Resurrection does not deny the reality of death, but declares that the death we know too well is not more real than the life that is ours in Christ Jesus. In prayers and preaching, in baptism and Eucharist, worship during the fifty days of Easter proclaims the astounding news that Christ has risen from the dead. “Thine is the glory, risen, conquering Son; endless is the victory thou o’er death hath won!” This is the good news. In the midst of death, in the face of all that threatens to undo us, we proclaim Christ’s resounding victory. We can tell the truth about death now; we can honestly tell of the ways the world continues to struggle and suffer—because we know that Christ has joined us in these struggles and has pronounced the death sentence on death itself. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

    Notes

    1. For more on the revival of the catechumenate and the practice of mystagogical catechesis (preaching to the newly baptized on baptism and Eucharist), see Edward Yarnold, S.J., The Awe-inspiring Rites of Initiation 2d ed. (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1994); William Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995); and Craig A. Satterlee, Ambrose of Milan ‘s Method of Mystagogical Preaching (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2002). 2. Billy Collins, “Picnic, Lightning,” in Sailing Alone Around the Room (New York: Random House, 2001), 98-99. 3. James Farwell, This Is the Night: Suffering, Salvation, and the Liturgies of Holy Week (New York: Τ & Τ Clark, 2005), 8-9. 4. Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 33. 5. Ibid., 41-42. 6. Jürgen Moltmann, “Mourning and Consoling,” in In the End—The Beginning: The Life of Hope (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 121. 7. Cyril of Jerusalem, “Sermon 2: The Baptismal Rite,” in Yarnold, 79.

  • Preaching Easter

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 42

    Preaching Easter

    Barbara Brown Taylor*

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    Easter is coming. On Resurrection Sunday, the high peak of the church year, many of us will invite the largest congregations we have seen all year to join us in proclaiming the central truth of Christian faith. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. As usual, this will not be the only reason that people come. Some of them will come to hear the music, others will come to bring their children, and a higher ratio than usual will come to please their mothers, but when the preacher stands to deli ver the sermon they will all enter into the same silence for a few moments at least, giving the anointed one in their midst one more chance to tell them why what they are doing there really matters. I do not know anyone who relishes preaching on Easter Sunday. Along with Christmas Eve, it is one of the most difficult days on the homiletical calendar, not only because our listeners’ expectations are so high but also because their plates are already so full. When we stand to speak, we look out at people with much on their minds. Even those who mean to listen to us cannot stop their minds from ricocheting between the roast in the oven and the war in Iraq; the painted eggs on the kitchen counter and the threat of bird flu; the maiden aunt in the nursing home, whom they will visit later that afternoon, and what they will do if her dwindling resources run out before she dies. What is the good news this Easter morning? When I teach preaching workshops that require participants to preach, I tell them not to worry about presenting a whole, perfect sermon. Just give us your introduction, I say, or tell us a story that you think you want to use. Take a risk. Try something new. Think of this as a lab where a failed experiment won’t cost you your job. When preachers take me up on this offer, the results are often gratifying, both for them and for their listeners. Typically, these preachers begin very much as they are used to beginning. They read a biblical text. They pray a prayer. They say something apologetic about whatever they are about to present and then they launch into it, going strong until they all of a sudden look up and say, “That’s it. That’s as far as I got.” As anti-climactic as this is, it has a liberating effect on many of us who listen. The pressure to produce a whole, perfect sermon is relieved, and in its absence some of us become so weightless that we erupt in giggles. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to do that one Sunday? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to make a couple of good points, tell a story or two and then say, “That’s it. That’s as far as I got”? Because I have never allowed myself to do this in person, I have decided to do it in print. With the kind permission of the editors, I am inviting you to walk with me toward an Easter sermon with no pressure, either external or internal, to arrive at my destination. All I want to do is to think out loud about the difficulties of preaching this particular Sunday, and to share with you some of the resources I am using as I prepare my own Easter sermon.

    * Barbara Brown Taylor’s new book, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, will be published by HarperSanFrancisco in May.

    Page 43

    Besides the difficulties I have already mentioned, there is the difficulty of gaining a fresh hearing for a story that our listeners have heard so many times before. I am not sure this is a requirement, since the preacher’s job is to come up with a true word, not a new word, but this year in particular I am aware of the ways in which I have participated in the domestication of the gospel. When I look back at my file of old Easter sermons, I note how often I have preached the Easter story as a call to courage for those who fear death, or the deaths of those they love. I have preached it as a primer on walking by faith and not by sight, since all four gospel writers record the testimonies of those who saw things we have not seen. I have even preached the empty tomb as an occasion for idolatry, since there sometimes seem to be more Christians who would rather sit inside of it arguing about what “really happened” than pack up and follow the living Lord who is no longer there. What all of these sermons have in common is that they are aimed chiefly at individuals seeking some reassurance that they are right, or will be all right, in the days following their own Good Fridays, whatever shape those crucifixions may take. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach—the gospel is personal, after all—I have lately been struck by the almost complete absence of the political in my preaching. Where is the gospel that once threatened the values of the most powerful empire in the world? Where is the gospel that turned Jesus, Peter, and Paul into “persons of interest” for the Roman government, which eventually executed them all? In preparation for this year’s Easter sermon, I have gone hunting for that gospel. Since I am a lectionary preacher, I am understudying Mark this year. Before I decide what I want to say, I want to hear what he has to say, so that he and I are not working at cross-purposes. The gospel reading for the principal service on Easter Sunday is Mark 16:1-8, the most ancient end to the Jesus story, which breaks off abruptly with a sentence that is hardly a whole sentence. According to Mark, the story ends after Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome encounter the young man dressed in white in Jesus’ empty tomb. Shocked senseless not only by his presence but also by his instruction (“But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you”), they flee the tomb in terror and amazement. Translated directly from the Greek, the last sentence of Mark’s gospel reads like this: “…and no one anything they told, they were afraid for…” There is a whole new Da Vinci Code waiting to be written about how such an ending came to be. Did Mark slump over his manuscript at that point, dead from a sudden heart attack? Did a Roman soldier walk up behind him and say, “You’re done, son”? Maybe those who inherited Mark’s manuscript were so appalled by what he had written that they ripped it right there, right in the middle ofthat sentence, and pretended that was all there was to it—or maybe Mark was simply a brilliant storyteller, the James Joyce of his century, willing to take linguistic risks that no one else dreamed of taking. Whatever the explanation, there it is: “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In one of my favorite old commentaries, The Gospel in Solentiname, a Nicaraguan campesino named Laureano wants to know why the three women get so much credit for going to the grave. “They weren’t running any risk by going there, the soldiers weren’t attacking the women or doing a damned thing to them,” he says at the Easter

    Page 44

    Vigil, where the priest has invited everyone present to comment on the gospel. “Going to see Jesus and weeping for him there, why were they running any risk?” But a Colombian poet named William has an answer for Laureano. “It takes a certain courage, man;” he says, “it’s like going now to lay flowers on the grave of a guerilla fighter.”1 In the 1970′ s, Nicaraguan peasants had no trouble hearing the political implications of the gospel. The Sandinista Revolution was underway, seeking to overthrow the Samoza dictatorship. While this revolution was far from peaceful, it offered students of the Bible a vivid parallel to the world in which Jesus lived. A little later in the Easter Vigil, Laureano pipes up again. “What’s important is for us to live resurrection here, right now,” he says, “and for us not to believe, as many have believed, that this world doesn’t count, that what counts is to go to heaven afterwards and all that nonsense.” A woman named Olivia agrees with him. “And there’s people that say you have to put up with things and live in poverty and sickness,” she says, “and live with your kids naked, because that’s the way Jesus lived, and be resigned so we’ 11 get to heaven. We’ ve been told that Christ’s death is so we’ 11 live resigned to misery. And I don’t know why, because Christ died like a brave man, because that’s why they killed him, for being so brave, always denouncing injustice.” I imagine that the gospel Samoza heard in his private chapel later that same Easter morning was offered from a different hermeneutical angle, but I do not believe that we have to pretend to live in a different place or time in order to wonder what kind of revolution Jesus might inspire in our own empire today. Many of us have Walter Brueggemann to thank for teaching us how to read the Hebrew Bible as a response to empire. Now Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan are helping us to read the New Testament in a similar way. Their jointly authored text, The Last Week, looks at the final events of Jesus’ life as challenges to the domination system of the empire. One need not agree with their conclusions in order to be awakened by their questions. As Crossan has been saying in lectures across the country, the way of the empire and God’s way are not the same way, regardless of similarities in their vocabulary. While both proclaim peace to those who are far off and those who are near, their strategies could not be more different. Where the way of the empire is peace through victory, God’s way is peace through justice. This insight alone will keep me from using the language of “victory” on Easter Sunday, especially since that language is presently linked so strongly at both the conscious and subconscious levels to U. S. military action in Iraq. Ched Myers has also been helpful to me as I seek to read Mark anew. In his book Binding the Strong Man, Myers notes that it is not one, two, or four women who come to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning, but three. Replacing the three men who formed Jesus’ inner circle, these three women become the “lifeline” of the discipleship narrative, he says, who do two things that their brothers in faith found impossible to do: they become servants, and they continue to follow Jesus even after he has been arrested and executed. “The world order is being overturned,” Myers writes, “from the highest political power to the deepest cultural patterns, and it begins with the new community.”2 While the young man in white, whom Myers calls “the martyr-figure,” tells the women to go reinstate their brothers—that is, to go tell the disciples and Peter that

    Page 45

    Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee—they do not do this. In a reversal of Mark’s trademark healing stories, in which healed people are commanded to keep silence but speak anyway, these three women are commanded to speak but keep silence instead. Because they do, the burden of the narrative shifts from the women in this gospel to the hearers of it, who will either choose to be members of the new community by returning to Galilee to follow Jesus all over again or who will flee the scene in order to go back to the world the way it was. The ambiguity of Mark 16:8 cannot be resolved “aesthetically,” Myers says, but only by practice. Will we flee or follow? Whether or not anyone in this story ever “sees Jesus” will depend on whether they renew their commitment to walk his way. Myers finds the dynamism in Mark’s original ending so compelling that he dismisses longer endings as “imperial rewritings” in which male dominance and triumphal aspirations are restored, miracle-working is resumed as a guarantor of belief, and Jesus is removed from earth to heaven. Far from honoring the struggle of real disciples to act faithfully, the longer endings allow readers to remain passive while Jesus does all the heavy lifting. In this way, Myers says, the rewrites try to “rescue” Mark from his own “deepest narrative and ideological commitments.”3 On the controversial subject of where Mark’s narrative really ends, make sure to get a copy of Marked by Steve Ross, a graphic novel of Mark’s Gospel recently published by Seabury Press. I will not spoil the ending for you, but the very first page of this book shows a refugee camp just beyond the outskirts of a big city. Two helicopters patrol overhead. A big sign is posted just inside the coils of razor wire that circle the camp. “Annual Thank Your Liberators Day,” the sign reads in big block letters, “Have your ID ready for inspection.” A hushed dialogue is taking place between two people hidden inside one of the tents. “But Dad,” one of them says, “they say we have to band together if we want to fight the occupa….” “Shhh,” the other voice warns, “I’ve told you before. What happens to the others is none of our business. Period.” Another book I am reading as I prepare to preach on Easter is When Jesus Came to Harvard by Harvey Cox. For fifteen years, Cox taught a course called “Jesus and the Moral Life” to undergraduates at Harvard. Some of his students were Christian, and many were not, but the content of the course proved so compelling that their numbers grew and grew, until Cox finally had to move the class to a theater usually reserved for rock concerts. Divided into sections called “Stories He Told” and “Stories They Told About Him,” the book covers some of the same territory as the class, showing how Cox used Jesus’ parables to bridge the gap between the ancient and modern worlds. In his chapter on “The Easter Story,” Cox tells why he initially ended his class with the story of Jesus’ crucifixion. The students were from a variety of religious backgrounds, he explained. Unlike the crucifixion, the resurrection was a “borderline event” that sat on the line between the historical and the mystical. Cox thought it best to stop short of that, devoting the last few sessions of the class to discussing some of the different interpretations of the moral significance of Jesus’ life that have arisen in the centuries after his death. His students pressed him, however, and not just the Christians. They wanted to know why Cox was leaving the climax of the story out, the part that made Jesus different from Moses, Muhammad, or the Buddha. Listening to them talk, he dis-

    Page 46

    covered that the closest parallels some of them had for Jesus’ resurrection were the stories of Dracula or the Terminator. So Cox decided to add the resurrection to the syllabus, but not before he had done his own research. Chief among his surprises was the discovery that

    stories of raising the dead in the Old Testament did not have to do with immortality. They are about God’s justice. They are expressions of a human hope that is both of a moral, not a metaphysical impulse. They did not spring up from a yearning for life after death, but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply had to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful.4

    In the course of this rich chapter, Cox compares the stories of Moses and Jesus much as the evangelist Matthew does. Along the way he points out the political dimensions of a story that is too easily declawed by those who do not want to replace the furniture. To restore a dead person to life is to strike a blow at mortality, Cox points out, but to restore a crucified man to life is to strike a blow at the system that executed him. His most startling insight is that the deep hope nourished by Christ’s resurrection —that God’s shalom will triumph in the end—is not the private property of Christians but a hope that may be shared by people of other faiths and no faith. If the Easter story “cannot be parsed to include the hopes of all peoples,” he says, “then we are left with a tribal god who will be rightly dismissed by those who hold no church or synagogue membership card.”5 That’s it. That’s as far as I got. There is still a great deal to be done—deciding what one thing I want to say, making sure that it is true to what Mark wanted to say, finding the central image that will show what I want to tell, figuring out how I will engage my listeners’ hearts and wills as well as their minds—but, God willing, I still have time for all of that. You, meanwhile, have your own journey to make. No one can go to Galilee for you. If you want to meet Jesus, you will have to go see for yourself.

    Notes

    1. Ernesto Cardenal, trans. Donald D. Walsh, The Gospel in Solentiname, vol. 4 (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis Books, 1997), 247. 2. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark ‘s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, N. Y. : Orbis Books, 1991), 397. 3. Ibid., 401. 4. When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 274. 5. Ibid., 283.

  • The fullness of ordinary time

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 3

    The Fullness of Ordinary Time

    Ted A. Smith The Divinity School, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

    Christians sometimes think of Ordinary Time as a kind of liturgical leftover. We celebrate the great cycle of the Passion, from Ash Wednesday through Lent and Easter and on to Pentecost. And we celebrate the great cycle of the Incarnation, from Advent through Christmas to Epiphany. Ordinary Time – a little sliver between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday, and then a great chunk between Pentecost and the first Sunday of Advent – comes into sight as what is left over. It is defined precisely by its lack of particular significance. Some of the most influential scholars of liturgy reflect and extend this view of Ordinary Time. Dom Gregory Dix writes that the time outside the special seasons around the birth and death of Jesus “stands vacant.” A more recent handbook describes the periods of Ordinary Time as “gaps” in the church year.l Such views see Ordinary Time as defined by absence. The absence of any particular significance leaves a void that is waiting to be filled. Local congregations find dozens of ways to fill the emptiness of Ordinary Time. Congregations excited by the liturgical renewal movement might celebrate Trinity Sunday and Reign of Christ Sunday, the little feast days that serve as transitions in and out of the longest stretch of Ordinary Time. They might give particular attention to All Saints’ Day, a refreshing splash of holy-day white in a sea of ordinary green. Even more content can come from family and civic holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and the Fourth of July. And Ordinary Time seems the natural time for all the holy days that sustain the institution and mission of the church: Stewardship Sunday, Rally Day, Youth Sunday, Ordination Sunday, Blanket Sunday, Earth Day, Children’s Sabbath, and more. Celebrations from multiple calendars gain constituencies in the congregation and places on the calendar, and they become hard to dislodge. Congregational politics usually make it easier to add a special day than to subtract one. After all, Ordinary Time stands empty and waiting, like a vacant lot waiting to be improved. Why not fill it with something special? In this essay I hope to offer some answers to that question. I argue that the view of Ordinary Time as leftover time arises from a forgetting of history. And I argue that the view of Ordinary Time as vacant time tells only half of a deeper theological truth. I conclude with some practices for keeping Ordinary Time, for receiving the fullness we cannot create.

    The First Unit of Christian Time Before there was Christmas, there was Sunday. The earliest Christians gathered on the first day of the week, the day hallowed by the resurrection of Jesus, the day they called “the Lord’s Day.” Paul gives the Corinthians instructions for an offering to be collected on “the first day of every week” (I Cor. 16:2). The author of Revelation writes of being caught up in the Spirit “on the Lord’s Day” (Rev. 1:10). Christians gathering on the Lord’s Day did not just remember the resurrection of Jesus as a past fact, as we might mark the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. They rather celebrated the new creation made present in Jesus Christ. Dying at the hands of sin, he broke the

    Page 4

    power of sin. Rising from the depths of death, he lives as the firstborn of the new creation. Early Christian worship treated this good news not as a past event to be commemorated, but as an eschatological moment in which past, present, and future believers are swept up into a chorus of praise without ceasing. Particular practices for the Lord’s Day varied from place to place, but for almost every Christian community it was the primary day of worship, the seed of the whole church year.2 Early Christian calendars also marked the feasts of Easter and Pentecost. Those who gathered to share in the body of Christ celebrated the raising of that body and the sending of the Holy Spirit to fill their sojourn as the body for this world. But Easter and Pentecost did not displace Sunday as the first feast of Christian sacred time. On the contrary, early Christian communities detached Easter from strict links to Jewish celebrations of the Passover and set it always on a Sunday. They also tied Pentecost to Sunday, fixing its date at fifty days after Easter. This tying of time suggests that early Christian communities did not see Pentecost as different in kind from every other Lord’s Day. Not even Easter represented a radical break from ordinary Sunday worship. After all, every Sunday was already a little Easter. The annual celebration of resurrection simply intensified the weekly celebrations of resurrection.3 The Christian calendar grew through centuries of both persecution and establishment . Christian communities in the second and third centuries added fasts and special celebrations to remember the “birthdays” of their martyrs, the days when those martyrs were killed in this world and born to the new creation in Christ Jesus. The fourth century brought imperial establishment of the church, and with it increasingly regular doctrines and calendars. Experienced Christians joined catechumens in fasting to prepare for Easter, and a season of Lent took hold. Feasts of the Incarnation became established, centering on Christmas in the West and Epiphany in the East. Later centuries would see the addition of more saints’ days and more days celebrating events in the life of Jesus: Ascension, Circumcision, Annunciation, Transfiguration, and more. Feasts emphasizing doctrines like the Trinity and the Body of Christ (Corpus Christi) began to win widespread acceptance in the tenth century. Men of the Church Sunday came later still: the feasts of the programmatic church expanded steadily throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 The gradual accretion of holy days slowly obscured the central role of an “ordinary” Sunday in the liturgical calendar. It led worship leaders to neglect the need to develop forms for Sundays in Ordinary Time, and left in those rites a little of what Dix calls the “character of a stop-gap, something upon which the liturgy falls back when the historical cycle has nothing more interesting to offer.”5 But this loss of emphasis should not distort the historical record. The Sundays of Ordinary Time were not invented to fill the space left between the really holy days on the church calendar. Nor were they dead and dull days which those feasts began to redeem. The Sundays of Ordinary Time were rather the first rhythm of the Christian calendar, the days that oriented all others. And now they are not so much the leftovers of sacred time as the coals that feasts and seasons fan into flames.

    A Theology for the Eighth Day The name of “Ordinary Time” invites us to see it as common, everyday, and mundane: ordinary. Christian traditions offer powerful resources for developing a theology of the everyday, and it is tempting to develop a theology of Ordinary Time

    Page 5

    from them.6 But while the “ordinary” part of Ordinary Time has taken on connotations of the mundane, its first reference is not to commonness but to the numbers that name its days. Ordinary Time is the time marked by ordinal numbers, as in the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Sundays of Ordinary Time. In contrast, the great cycles of the Christian year have a stronger sense of narrative time. They drive toward the stable or the empty tomb. A worshiper knows “when she is” by the readings, the colors, the hymns, the prayers, and the special elements of worship. While the Sundays within the great cycles might be assigned ordinal numbers-like the Second Sunday of Advent, or the Fourth Sunday of Lent-these numbers function like page numbers in a good novel. They are secondary aids, almost unnecessary to an attentive reader. The real time is kept in the body of the text, in the story. The Sundays of Ordinary Time are different. They resist assimilation to a narrative. They are not arranged as a narrative journey to some great end of the story. They are rather, each one, an interruption of narrative, a tearing of time. Because each one is a little Easter, each one declares the end of historical time. This string of ends cannot be fit together easily into a sequential story. And so a worshiper in Ordinary Time knows “when she is” by counting the days with ordinal numbers. A theology of Ordinary Time begins not with the mundane, but with this syncopated, interrupted, eschatological time.7 A theology of Ordinary Time begins with the time of the eighth day. Early Christian communities saw an “ordinary” Sunday as anything but mundane. They referred to it not only as the first day of the week – the beginning of a new creation – but also as the eighth – the culmination of all time. The Epistle of Barnabas, a text from around 130 C.E., begins to suggest what the eighth day meant to early Christians. As Jewish and Gentile Christians struggled to define themselves in relationship to rabbinic Judaism, they needed to clarify the relationship of the Lord’s Day to the Sabbath. In taking up that polemic task, the Epistle of Barnabas helps develop the significance of the eighth day. Making reference to Amos’ great denunciations of feasts offensive to God, the letter continues:

    Ye perceive how He speaks: Your present Sabbaths are not acceptable to Me, but that is which I have made, [namely this,] when, giving rest to all things, I shall make a beginning of the eighth day, that is, a beginning of another world. Wherefore, also, we keep the eighth day with joy fulness, the day also on which Jesus rose again from the dead. And when He had manifested Himself, He ascended into the heavens.8

    The Epistle of Barnabas contrasts the old, unacceptable Sabbaths to the eighth day as the “beginning of another world.” The Sabbath is the seventh day of a seven-day week. It is a day of rest, a day to delight in creation. But it can still be fit comfortably within a cyclical sort of time. After the seventh day comes again the first, as the wheel of time rolls on.9 The Epistle of Barnabas argues that Christian worship is ordered by a different kind of time. The resurrection of Jesus is the culmination of all that has come before, but it cannot be a moment on a cycle, a time after which things simply “reset” and start the cycle as they did before. It is the “beginning of another world.” It is like the eighth day of a seven-day week, a day both in and out of the flow of time, a day when the wheel of the week flies off its track to turn in the sky. If it returns – and who knows if it will? – it will not be the same.10

    Page 6

    The good news of the eighth day announces our deliverance from a world in which every moment is fit into a narrative in which it is a means to some other end. Contemporary American society tends to view time instrumentally, defining the value of a moment by its usefulness for achieving some good to be enjoyed at another time. In this view, no fraction of time has value in itself. By itself it is empty-but also malleable. If it is not valuable as it is, it can at least be used for the production of something that is valuable. This is the time of both manufacturing and service economies: an hour may not be worth anything in itself, but it can acquire value if it is used for the production of some commodity or the performance of some service. On this view of time, ordinary Sunday worship stands waiting to be redeemed by incorporation into a process of production. That production need not be “economic” in the narrow sense. We might use the time to produce awareness of and action on a set of social issues, as on the Children’s Sabbath. Or we might use the time to produce the money that will sustain the congregation’s institutional life, as on a string of Stewardship Sundays. More subtly, we might let the time lie fallow, even grow a little bit boring, in order to produce stronger responses to upcoming holy days.11 All of these views assign an instrumental value to Ordinary Time, and so conform on a deep level to an already pervasive economic mindset. A celebration of Sunday as the eighth day breaks open this dominant view of time. Easter is the end, the telos, of all time, not a means for making people better able to go about their daily routines. Just so, the eighth day of each week shares in the resurrection that is the fulfillment of time. The eighth day cannot be used as a means to some other end – there is no ninth day in which the real end could come. The eighth day cannot even be fit into a cycle, like a seventh-day Sabbath that has value because it provides rest that enables work. The eighth day shatters the dominant culture’s instrumental view of time. It breaks open, as present reality and eschatological hope, the order in which time and land and all creation have value only in their usefulness. In the eighth day creation receives deliverance from the tyranny of utility and blessing with the new life that is itself the source and substance of all goodness. Such deliverance and such blessing are not goods that remembering the eighth day can help humans produce. They are rather the gifts of God, received and enjoyed for their own sake in the eighth day.

    Practices for Receiving the Gift of Ordinary Time There is a perpetual temptation to overstate the significance of liturgical reform, as if the Good News of Easter depended on our right celebration of the day, or as if the Incarnation depended on the adequacy of our Advent preparations. Liturgical practices do not make the gospel they celebrate, but they can help us to delight in and proclaim that gospel. More strongly, they can be means by which we share in the gospel, even sacraments in which the gospel is realized. They are, to borrow a phrase from Dorothy C. Bass, “Christian practices for opening the gift of time.”12 Congregations eager to open the church year might begin by recognizing the creep of many calendars into Ordinary Time. They might prune those calendars in ways that let the eighth day breathe. The church has engaged in such pruning for centuries. Various reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries trimmed the calendar in different ways, but all of them took some action to restore the centrality of ordinary Sunday worship. The Second Helvetic Confession, published in 1566, followed

    Page 7

    Martin Luther’ s lead in cutting feast days that remembered human beings and retaining those that focused on events in the life of Christ (like the Ascension, Circumcision, and Passion).l3 The Westminster Directory for Worship, published almost a century later, took the task of pruning even further. “There is no Day commanded in Scripture to be kept holy under the Gospell,” the Westminster divines insisted, “but the Lord’s Day, which is the Christian Sabbath.” All other days had no warrant in Scripture, and so should not be celebrated. The Westminster reforms effectively moved the Christian calendar from an annual one to a weekly one, with Sunday as its chief feast.14 Such trimming is not only the work of Protestants. Monastic communities have long maintained a weekly rhythm in counterpoint to the annual rhythm of the church year. In most communities the psalms set for the services of the “little hours” change according to the day of the week rather than the season of the year. Sunday’s arrival can bring a bigger shift in these services than the coming of a season like Advent. The liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council also stressed the centrality of Sunday worship. “The Lord’s Day is the original feast day,” according to the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, “and it should be presented to the faithful and taught to them so that it may become in fact a day of rejoicing and of freedom from work. Other celebrations, unless they be truly of the greatest importance, shall not have precedence over Sunday, which is the foundation and kernel of the entire liturgical year.”15 Both Catholic and Protestant reformers have seen the need to plan the church calendar in ways that receive the gift of ordinary Sunday worship. Congregations join this tradition when they examine their calendars and consider whether and how to change them in ways that celebrate Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time usually starts to disappear into functional time when congregations consider requests for “special” dates one-by-one. “Feast days” can accumulate beyond any individual’s intention. A congregation might begin to reform its calendar by setting up a way of considering proposals for special observances that remembered and protected the gift of ordinary S unday worship. A congregation might also set aside time to consider the year as a whole and decide which feast days really need to be kept in ordinary Sunday worship. (Others might be kept on other days or in other settings.) It is not that the sacred days of civic, familial, institutional, and even liturgical calendars are necessarily bad. They often play good and important roles in the life of a congregation. But they are not primary in the way that Sunday is, and something significant is lost when the whirl of special days displaces the deep, weekly rhythm of Ordinary Time. A congregation committed to receiving the gift of Ordinary Time might also hold certain elements in Sunday worship constant, regardless of season or holy day. As monastic calendars retain strong elements of a weekly cycle, so congregational calendars might keep some aspects of worship common to every Sunday. Celebrating the Eucharist each Sunday not only reminds a congregation of the eighth day but makes the gift of that day present in especially powerful ways. But even if a congregation chooses not to receive the Lord’s Supper each Sunday, it still might hold to other practices that mark the weekly cycle. Psalm 150, for instance, has long been associated with Sunday worship. Singing or saying it weekly lets worshipers share more consciously in the cosmic praise of the eighth day. When practices are common to every Sunday, it is clear that they are present not because it is Advent, or because it is Scouting Sunday, but simply because it is the Lord’s Day. The common practices make visible the ways in which the ordinary Sunday liturgy is the seed from which all

    Page 8

    other worship grows. They help to make clear that a Sunday in Ordinary Time is not simply a warm-up for some other day, because the next Sunday-even Easter-will still involve some of the same practices. Practices common to each Sunday help congregations receive the eschatological gift of each eighth day. As congregations might carry elements throughout Ordinary Time and into Easter, they might also bring traces of Easter worship into Ordinary Time. A complete Easter worship service would be out of time, but a congregation might sing an Easter hymn or say an Easter prayer. Singing “The Day of Resurrection” on an Ordinary Time Sunday is not simply a time-bending gimmick, like a “Christmas in July” sale. Each Sunday, by the grace of God, really is the Day of Resurrection. The stone has been rolled away, and we are set free to sing Easter praise. When little glimpses of Easter appear throughout the year, they make clearer the ways in which the Easter season gathers and intensifies the stuff of ordinary worship. Both Easter and Ordinary Time can become richer for congregations that remember their mutual connection. Congregations might also live into the eschatological promise of Sunday through practices like the Black Church tradition of giving thanks for the chance to gather “one more time.” Such thanks might come in an opening prayer or a song:

    One more time, one more time He allowed us to come together one more time! One more time, one more time He allowed us to come together one more time!16

    Thanksgiving for Sunday worship remembers the great and always surprising gift of the eighth day. It remembers and celebrates the goodness of gathering for worship, of sharing in the wedding feast of the Lamb. It also remembers the perils of the week, and even of the eighth day itself. When every Sunday brings the end of time – and the new creation – the next Sunday is recognizes that time does not rol ; by no means assured. Giving thanks for each Sunday on like a smooth wheel of fortune on a frictionless surface. It is rather punctuated, interrupted, and redeemed by the presence of God in Jesus Christ and in the church that shares in Christ’s ministry. The coming of another Sunday is a little miracle, an occasion for wonder, thanks, and celebration. All of these practices remember that Ordinary Time is not a dull void that waits to be filled, improved, or put to use. It is a kind of emptiness. It is the emptiness of open, ordinary days on the calendar. It is the emptiness that refuses human attempts to corral time too closely, to pretend that we can shape time always to our own ends. It is the emptiness of a church that knows how to wait, how to refuse filler until the real meal comes. In the emptiness of Ordinary Time the church opens itself to receive a gift. Into the open Sundays of Ordinary Time God pours the fullness of a time we could not make and cannot control. It is the fullness of the eighth day.

    Notes

    1. Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945), 359. Hoyt L. Hickman, Don E. Saliers, Laurence Hull Stookey, James F. White, Handbook of the Christian Year (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1986), 21. 2. In these paragraphs I try to sketch a rough outline of a generally agreed-upon history of the church year.

    Page 9

    I rely especially on Dix; Hickman, et. al.; Maxwell E. Johnson, ed., Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2000); and Laurence Hull Stookey, Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press). 3. See Dix, 341. 4. Ibid., 348-49. 5. Ibid., 360. 6. Preachers interested in thinking through a theology of everyday life might begin with resources like these: St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries, trans. Leonard J. Doyle (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1948); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendali (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work” (New York: Paulist Press, 1988); Nancy Mairs, Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). 7. On the first reference of “ordinary” in Ordinary Time, see, for instance, Stookey, Calendar, 133. 8. Epistle of Barnabas 15:9. This translation comes from Ante-Nicene Fathers, Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., as revised by A. Cleveland Coxe (New York: The Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1885; reprint, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), 146. 9. In contrasting the eighth day with a seventh-day Sabbath, I do not mean to suggest that the Sabbath is always encased within a cyclical notion of time. Too many contemporary exhortations to keep Sabbath do stress its functionality, its ability to renew a worshiper for the rest of the week. But the best Jewish and Christian commentators on the Sabbath consistently refuse functional arguments for the Sabbath and stress instead its eschatological dimensions. [See, for instance, Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 14 and pass.] The best Christian theologies of time will keep notions of both the Sabbath and the eighth day in play. 10. My sense of the significance of the eighth day has been formed especially by Mark Searle, “Sunday: The Heart of the Liturgical Year,” in Maxwell Johnson, ed., Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2000). 59-76. 11. Laurence Hull Stookey, one of the best contemporary commentators on the church year, slips into an instrumental view of Ordinary Time when he stresses the value of “contrast by alternation” in the liturgical calendar. While it may be true that humans thrive on cycles of feasts and fasts, the meaning of Ordinary Time is not simply to prepare worshipers for the “really” holy days. Stookey remembers this elsewhere, stressing that the “liturgical calendar as a whole exists in large part to remind us that Christ has sanctified all of time, bringing us and the whole of our experience into the orbit of resurrection.” As sanctified time, the moments of Ordinary Time receive meaning in themselves, and not merely as preparative contrast for other days. Cf. Stookey, 133-134. 12. Dorothy C. Bass, Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000). 13. The Second Helvetic Confession, in the Book of Confessions: Part I of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 5.226. 14. The Westminster Directory: Being a Directory for the Publique Worship of God in the Three Kingdoms (1645; reprinted Bramcotte, Notts.: Grove Books, 1980), 32. 15. “Sacrosanctum Concilium” (The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), in Vatican Council II: The Basic Sixteen Documents, Austin Flannery, ed. (Northport, N.Y.: Costello Publishing Co., 1996), § 106, p. 150. 16. Traditional. I learned the song in this version from JoAnn Price, Director of the Sanctuary Mass Gospel Choir at Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia.

  • Preaching the Advent texts

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 3

    Preaching the Advent Texts1

    David Bartlett

    Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia

    I.

    The Middle of Time: Luke In Advent time gets all mixed up. There is the confusion between “secular” time and ecclesiastical time. Are we waiting for an incarnation or counting the shopping days till Christmas? There is the odd temporal mix of two “comings” of our Lord, the humble coming at Bethlehem and the triumphal arrival yet to come. But there is also the complicated way the lectionary sets our Gospel lections. Obviously when Luke wanted to tell Jesus’ story he wrote Luke 1, and then Luke 3:16 , and then Luke 3:7-18, and then Luke 21:25-36. But in the lectionary we get Luke 21 first, then the two Luke 3 passages in reverse order, and then the Luke 1. While it may be comforting theologically to know that the last is first and the first last, exegetically it poses a problem. The trick for the preacher is to be able to move thematically through Advent without losing Luke’s chronology altogether. Some attention to the larger context of the Gospel will enrich the preaching of each particular Advent Gospel text. For many years now there has been a general consensus among professional New Testament scholars that Luke, of all the Gospel writers, is most like a traditional historian, which is to say that he is most concerned with the nature of “time.” The most influential study of the nature of time and history in Luke’s Gospel is Hans Conzelmann’ s The Theology of St. Luke.1 The original title of the book, in German, was Die Mitte Der Zeit, which means “The Middle of Time.” Conzelmann’s argument was that for Luke the story of Jesus is the story of the “middle of time.” The beginning of time is the era of the prophets; the time in which Luke writes is the era of the church; and there, right in the middle at the turning point of history is the story of Jesus, his life and death and resurrection. As we look at the way time fonctions in these Advent texts we rely heavily on Conzelmann’s insights—with the important reminder that for Luke, as for the other synoptic writers—the faithful also wait for the time beyond time, the consummation of history in the eschaton.

    Luke 21:25-36 Advent preaching begins with the end of the human story. In Luke 21:25-36, Jesus warns the apostles about that end. Part of the challenge of preaching at Advent is precisely to talk with our congregations about end times. It’s a challenge in part because both church and secular culture are focused now on Jesus’ first coming and it still always comes as a shock to some in the congregation that Advent celebrates two comings and not just one. But it is a challenge also because most of us have very little idea what to do with the apocalyptic themes in the New Testament. “Mainline” Christians simply note that apocalyptic is puzzling. Other Christians think they have got the solution to the puzzle, and they write best selling books telling us when the end time prophecies will be fulfilled—almost always soon. The problem is that the Gospel writers also thought that the time was coming very

    Page 4

    soon, and in every generation from the first until now both honest and sleazy prophets have arisen to say: “Here it comes.” Yet we cannot simply ignore apocalyptic literature. Even those of us who are most skeptical of timetables can learn from this text two major claims of apocalyptic. First, the end oftime is in God’s hands. Second, the history leading up to the end of times is in God’s hands. The verses that precede our text talk about tangible historical signs of God’s presence, not just spectacular post-historical signs. God is in the business of dealing with Jerusalem and with armies, and with pregnant women and with captivity and with release. To ignore the apocalyptic signs in Scripture is to diminish much of Scripture’s meaning and its—still puzzling—power. Our text also gives us three further clues on the understanding of apocalyptic. First, by pointing to the fig tree, Jesus tells us that one appropriate way to understand eschatology is to do so parabolically, metaphorically. Don’t just look at the newspaper ; look at images like fig trees, mustard seeds. Like all good images, they help us understand how God works without pinning God down to a literal timetable. Second, as in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus here “demythologizes” his own claim. By the time Luke writes his gospel it is already clear that many of the original generation of believers has passed away before the end of all things. So Jesus interprets his own prophecy: to say that this generation will not pass away means primarily that the testimony of this generation will not pass away. The words they heard from Jesus and their testimony to those words endure till the end of time. Third, Jesus reminds us of the ethical “cash value” of apocalyptic prophecy. What counts is not so much how accurately we predict the future but how faithfully and watchfully we live in the present. For the Christian, every season is Advent, every day anticipation, every moment crisis, every time the right time to be alert.

    Luke 3:1-6 If we want to follow Hans Conzelmann’s understanding oftime in Luke’s Gospel, we now go from the beginning of the end (Luke 21), to the end of the beginning (Luke 3). For Conzelmann, John the Baptist is the consummation of the age that points to Jesus—the last and greatest of the prophets. One thing is certain: all four of our Gospels agree there is no way to get to Jesus without going through John the Baptist, and the lectionary in all three cycles reminds us there is no way to preach Advent without preaching John the Baptist. There is no way to understand John the Baptist or his cousin Jesus without knowing that their lives and ministries and losses and triumphs took part, not in Bible land, but in “real” time— the tough, complicated secular world where Tiberius was the emperor and Pontius Pilate was governor and the corrupt Herodians were puppet kings of the imperial power. And there is no way to understand John the Baptist without understanding the history in which he stands—sacred time—the history of God’s dealing with Israel. The popular distinction between the Old Testament God and the New Testament God simply falls apart when we read the gospels carefully. One can only understand John the Baptist in the light of Isaiah’s prophecy. John is the prophesied prophet. He both fulfills and proclaims. What he fulfills and proclaims is the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. We cannot begin to follow Jesus unless we undertake the repentance—the change of mind and life—that comes with John the Baptist.

    Page 5

    The end of the beginning drives us forward to the beginning of the end, and in the middle oftime, Jesus.

    Luke 3:7-18 Perhaps the most striking verse in this passage is the evangelist’s conclusion: “With many other exhortations he proclaimed the good news to the people” (v. 18). The “good news” we have heard seems to consist of frightening judgment in the first and third paragraphs and difficult demands in the second paragraph. In comments and sermons through the years, William Muehl has suggested that good news needs to include the good news that what we do makes a difference.3 If anything goes, nothing matters. If nothing matters, we do not matter. The fact that God in Christ comes in judgment as well as in mercy reminds us that what we do makes a difference to God, and that God is in charge of history and of our lives in the midst of history. What is more, the difficult demands in Luke 3:10-14 are unusually “good” for the gospels because they actually seem attainable. We are not told to give up everything, but if we have two coats to give one to the needy and to share our food. Tax collectors aren’t told to get out of the tax collecting business, but to do their jobs fairly. And soldiers aren’t called to pacifism, but to refrain from abusing their power in dealing with civilians. How one squares these tough but relatively modest demands with the immodest demands of the Sermon on the Plain soon to follow (in Luke’s Gospel if not in the lectionary) is a matter for some reflection and perhaps some preaching. Given Luke’s overall project, it is almost certainly not the case that John presents a first step in faithfulness and Jesus a second step for the super-faithful. As Advent moves toward Christmas, and as John’s time edges into Jesus’ time, we will soon be officially allowed to sing the carol “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Some of us have probably been humming it for weeks. The last stanza includes these words: “What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb. If I were a wise man, I would do my part. Yet what can I give him? Give my heart.”4 The story of John the Baptist expands this theme. What we bring to the newborn Jesus is a repentant heart: we turn from the strategies of selfishness to welcome the child in love and our neighbor in justice and compassion.

    Luke 1:39-55 On the last Sunday of Advent, especially when that day is also Christmas Eve, it is time to announce the meaning of what we have been waiting for. What we have been waiting for is time fulfilled and time turned upside down. We have been waiting for time to be fulfilled. The promise to Elizabeth that she will bear a child, though she is old, has been fulfilled. The promise to Mary that she will bear a child, though she has not had intercourse with a man, has been fulfilled. The promise to Zechariah that his son will point to Jesus is fulfilled in that wonderful moment when the baby John greets the baby Jesus by leaping in the womb. Time fulfilled is also time turned upside down. Mary sings about what God will do using the past tense, turning prophecy from wish into promise. Now, in the middle of time, God moves time toward its consummation. “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” “Yes,” we say, or “yes,” we hope. And also, “Please, not yet.” Most of us in our churches on the last Sunday of Advent will be

    Page 6

    relatively powerful, relatively rich, and altogether full. We know that the Magnificat is not only a promise for us, it is a promise against us. We proclaim what we hope for and fear: that the coming of the Messiah is the beginning of the Messianic age. We listen for what the rest of the Gospel of Luke will tell us. We are called to serve a cause larger than ourselves, a justice that may necessarily be more just to others than to us. We enter into the adventure of a new time, begun but not yet fulfilled, which will be God’s time, and then the world’s time, and then—because we, too are children of time and of the world—our time, too.

    Π. Before the Middle of Time: The Prophets Most of us will center our preaching on Luke during the four Sundays of Advent and on Christmas day as well. The Old Testament lessons help because if Luke portrays the center of time, the Hebrew Bible shows us the time that prefigures that center.

    Jeremiah 33:14-16 One of the peculiarities of time seen from a Christian perspective is that we read prophecy in the light of its fulfillment. We sometimes read time backwards instead of forwards. When the prophet spoke of the “coming days,” he was almost certainly not looking ahead centuries to the birth of Jesus but ahead a few years to a new, righteous dynasty on the throne of David. Christians, looking back, claim that the rich meaning ofthat promise can be seen only in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Indeed, for Luke, who writes after the fall of Jerusalem, even the prophecy of Jeremiah 33:16 is fulfilled, not in the city, but in the man. It is not Jerusalem who becomes “The Lord is Our Righteousness,” but Jesus himself. Taken with Luke 21:25-36, this passage recalls us to the double focus of our Advent expectation. We wait for the fullness of time, as in Luke, but we also wait for the coming of the true Davidic king, as in Jeremiah. We read the times of prophecy in the light of the times of fulfillment.

    Malachi 3.Ί-4 5

    In like manner also we read Malachi’s promise of a messenger of judgment looking back from the future, in the light of the judgment we see in John the Baptist. (Mark makes this connection explicit in Mark 1:2.) We do not know for sure what messenger Malachi has in mind, though the name “Malachi” is translated “my messenger,” and it may be that the prophet is himself the messenger of whom the oracle speaks. The rigorous cleansing and refining that Malachi predicts reflects his hope for a newly refined levitical priesthood to lead in the worship in the temple. In any case, the passage helps us see the way in which John the Baptist in our New Testament passage is the link between the time of prophecy and fulfillment. In one sense, he is the messenger Malachi has predicted. In another sense, John as messenger himself points ahead to Jesus who will claim the God’s temple in Luke’s Gospel and who is like a refiner’s fire. Jesus comes to cleanse not only the priesthood but the whole community of believers, indeed the whole world. John is the fulfillment of prophecy, and the final prophet, both. “Time past and time present…”

    Page 7

    Zephaniah 3:14-20 The Advent texts play off against each other in surprising ways. On this third Sunday of Advent, we have New Testament judgment and Old Testament grace. Could one preach a sermon that moved from the judgment in John to the promise in Zephaniah? The final great assurance of Zephaniah is certainly a psalm of Advent hope: “At that time I will bring you home.” William Brown makes the exegetical and homiletical point: “Home is a destination as well as a direction. God is our home, and homesick is what we are.” 6

    Micah 5:2-5a It is perhaps a little odd to use this text in Year C of the lectionary. We would expect it in Year A. Luke may or may not have this text in mind when he writes his birth narratives, but Matthew certainly does. (See Matthew 2:6.) At any rate, whether or not Luke saw connections between Jesus’ birth and Micah’s prophecy, we can see how Micah’s time points to Jesus’ time. Again here God’s time and human time come together in striking ways. Micah speaks in his present time of what God will do in some future time, and yet that future time is entirely rooted in the past. Micah predicts a ruler “whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.” The reference to the past and to Bethlehem, David’ s town, surely suggests that the King Micah foresees will inherit the power and the promise of David. Whether or not Luke remembers Micah’s oracle, he stands in his own present time. He looks back to see David and the prophets looking ahead. He looks back a few years to the whole story of Mary’s Magnificat and Jesus’ birth and ministry. Through the words of Jesus, he looks ahead to an even fuller consummation ofthat Kingdom which led from David through Micah to John the Baptist to Mary to Jesus to the end of time. Furthermore, the images of the passage point us toward Jesus’ own story. Jesus, the Messiah, fulfills the promise when “she who is in labor has brought forth” (5:3). Jesus (more in John’s Gospel than in Luke’s) “shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord” (5:4).

    ΙΠ. After the Middle of Time: The Apostles Paul and the author of Hebrews help us further to see how Jesus, whose story Luke tells, is Lord in the ongoing life of the post-resurrection communities.

    1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 Writing after Jesus’ first coming in Galilee, Paul anticipates Jesus’ second coming in glory. As with Luke 21, the question is not just what (and whom) we wait for, but how we live in the meantime. In Luke, Jesus tells the apostles, and through the apostles the church, to “Be alert at all times”(Luke 21:36). Paul specifies the responsibilities of waiting somewhat differently: “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you”(l Thess 3:12). Perhaps one good test of faithful eschatological expectation is whether it increases or dimin­ ishes love. Do we wait in hope of the world’s redemption or in hope of our enemy’s defeat? The whole passage is steeped in joy—joy not just because of what God does in Jesus Christ, but joy because of what God does in the church: that community that is called to sustain each other and all the saints.

    Page 8

    Philippians 1:3-11 Again Paul returns to the theme we saw in Thessalonians. How do we live in the light of our expectation? John the Baptist calls us to repentance and to faithful behavior. The first verses of Philippians spell out again what faithful behavior looks like: “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight, to help you determine what is best”(Phil 1:9-10). During a period of crisis in the church and the society, a distinguished ethics professor finished his lecture only to hear a student’s plaint: “Sir, you are so cerebral and the issues are so visceral.” Yet Paul here reminds us that real love requires real thought. Sometimes in the light of Christ’s advent and in awaiting God’s triumph we are most faithful by being most careful. Sometimes church is not just the place for proclamation but for difficult and even controversial conversation.

    Philippians 4:4-7 We live in the meantime, between Christ’s first advent and the consummation that will come in Christ at the end. The question is, how do we live eschatologically even while we still go to work, pay the bills, raise the children, and attend church meetings? John the Baptist gives some answers in today’s Gospel lesson. Paul’s list sounds simpler, but in fact it is theologically just as rich. To say that God is in charge of history, to say that Christ will come again, is to say that Christ is always near. If Christ is always near, what do we do? We rejoice. For God in Christ is near enough to touch every life. We pray, not dutifully, but gladly, because God in Christ is near enough to hear every prayer. And we trust in the word that is not simply a hope but a promise. In the meantime, in between times, “The peace of God which surpasses all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

    Hebrews 10:5-10 The problem with preaching Hebrews alongside another text (especially so rich a text as the Magnificat) is that the language and thought world of the Epistle is unique in the New Testament, and it takes at least half a sermon to place the text in context. Nonetheless, for any brave preacher who wants to take on Hebrews 10 for Advent, this, too, is a passage on the distinction between time present and time past—a distinction made on the basis of a reading of Psalm 40. Time past is the time of priests and sacrifices. Time present is Christ’s time: his body, his sacrifice, replaces all the sacrifices of ages past. His time becomes our time. And, as all of Hebrews will argue, the present time when Christ redeems us through the sacrifice of his body opens us to that future time when we all receive “a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Heb 12:28). In different ways, all our Advent passages remind us of the oddity of Christian time. Christ is the center oftime: the prophets lead to him: the apostles lead from him. Prophets and apostles—all the saints—await him.

    Notes

    1. Thanks to Professor Robert Wilson and those who participated with us in the summer seminar on these texts at Yale Divinity School in June 2006.

    Page 9

    2. Trans. Geoffrey Buswell (New York: Harper & Row, 1961). 3. See especially William Muehl, Why Preach? Why Listen? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). 4. Christina Rosetti. 5. For helpful background on Malachi, Zephaniah, and Micah, see William P. Brown, Obadiah through Malachi, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1996). 6. Brown, 117.

  • Looking on the other side: preaching in a multicultural society

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 21

    Looking on the Other Side:

    Preaching in a Multicultural Society

    Nibs Stroupe

    Oakhurst Presbyterian Church, Decatur, Georgia

    My wife, Caroline Leach, and I have been pastors at Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia, for twenty-three years. We were the first clergy couple to serve a church in the former P.C.U.S., and we came of age in the 1960’s. We had seen and done a lot, but nothing prepared us for the challenge to our faith and for the deepening of our faith that we have encountered in the multicultural collage that is Oakhurst. This challenge and this deepening occurred on many levels. I learned that I had a cultural context when I came to the Bible. I learned that I brought a particular way of understanding the world, a particular sensory apparatus that I used in reading and interpreting the Bible and to reading and interpreting life. I learned that this is not a bad thing: it just is. It is a necessary part of being raised and defined by a particular cultural context. I learned also that there are other contexts for approaching the biblical text, and they have validity just as mine has validity. As I write this, I am aware of the frequent criticism of a multicultural approach, that it relativizes biblical truths, that an appreciation of pluralism requires that we “dumb it down,” that we lose our base of truth that has guided us so well, whatever our cultural context may be. The first response to this criticism is biblical and theological. The account of Pentecost in Acts 2 reminds us that the church did not begin or grow in homogeneity. It began, and it grew, in a multicultural context. The women and men who were driven out into the streets by the Holy Spirit were from similar backgrounds, but they spoke in many different languages and to many different contexts. It was so confusing that the crowds asked: “What does this mean?” Some answered that it meant nothing, that it was accidental, that indeed these first followers of Jesus were filled with spirits other than the Holy Spirit. Peter stepped forward to give a different meaning, that it was the work of God’s Spirit, a powerful force from the God of the Exodus, a God who had made Herself available to humanity in a new way in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The Pentecost story in Acts 2 proclaims that God has acted decisively in Jesus Christ to break down the dividing walls of hostility, as the author of Ephesians so eloquently put it. In all our stories and in all our sermons, we should keep this multicultural origin of the church before us. The second response to this lingering suspicion of a multicultural approach comes from our experience at Oakhurst. We experienced this in many ways, but it came home to me most powerfully in a Bible study. We do this on a weekly basis, and we are blessed to have people from different cultural contexts participate. I remember especially a time when we studied Luke’s Gospel, and we encountered Jesus engaging a centurion in Capernaum (7:1-10). The story focuses on the authority of Jesus and the faith that the centurion has in that authority. The centurion has a slave whom he values highly but who is dying. He sends word to Jesus, asking Jesus to come and heal his slave. As Jesus approaches the centurion’s house, the centurion sends word to Jesus not to come to his house, for he is not worthy to have Jesus enter his house. He

    Page 22

    requests that Jesus command his slave to be healed from a distance, believing that Jesus’ authority is so powerful that it will be done. Jesus is amazed at the centurion’s faith and contrasts it with the faith of the people of Israel. And the slave is healed. As we began our discussion on this passage, I had intended to take it toward such issues as faith healing, the power of faith, and whether folk believed that this happened in quite this way or whether it had been embellished by the tradition. I also thought the contrast between the centurion’s faith and the faith of Israel might be a good direction. The African American folk in our study, however, raised another issue: why didn’ t Jesus order the centurion to free his slave? Did this passage mean that Jesus gave implicit if not explicit blessings to slavery? Was the mission of Jesus to change society, or was it a mission only to individuals? Was his mission to heal individuals such as this slave without healing the society that created the sickness called slavery? I learned that many of us who are white had accepted slavery as part of the social landscape of this passage, part of the background to the real meaning and power of this story. Those who were black had a different orientation; this story spoke to them about slavery. We had a lively discussion as we noted the differences between Roman slavery and American slavery, and as we noted the ambivalence of the biblical witness on the issue of slavery. In Deuteronomy 23:15 we find that runaway slaves are not to be returned to their masters, while in Philemon, Paul returns a runaway slave but urges Philemon to grant him freedom. Paul also emphasizes obedience to masters by slaves (Colossians 3 and Ephesians 6), but in Galatians 5 urges all Christians not to allow themselves to become slaves. Preaching in a multicultural context has reminded me of the rich diversity that God has created and continues to sustain. In an age of great technological and material power, it has helped me to rediscover the bedrock Reformed idea that God is greater and deeper and wider than I can ever imagine. I have said that and believed that with integrity in the past, but I have learned that I also believed that God surely operated as a white, middle class, Western male. That cozy accommodation of my cultural beliefs with the nature of God has been exposed to me in ways that have been painful and delightful and liberating at the same time. I give thanks for my family and for my culture and for their nurturing of me. It is important to know my story and my history, for these have given me life and meaning and hope. If I don’t appreciate my story, then I cannot appreciate the stories of others, and I will not be able to receive the gift of the story of God’s coming to us in Jesus Christ. This is part of my narrative. I grew up in the Deep South in the 1950’sand 1960’s, in a little town in Arkansas in the Mississippi River delta. My Presbyterian church was very important to me because my father had abandoned my family when I was a baby, and I was raised by a very dedicated and loving mother and great aunt. Despite their loving devotion, I listened to a powerful voice inside me that told me that I was not worth much because my father had left me and had never come back to see me. My developing definition of myself became “boy abandoned by his father.” The people of my church “stepped into the breech,” to use that wonderful phrase from Isaiah 58. They helped me to begin to hear that I was a boy loved by God. They were loving and caring people who taught me who God was and who I was: a child of God. Instead of being “boy abandoned by his father,” I began to hear that I was “boy claimed by his Father in Jesus Christ.” It was a great gift to me from First Presbyterian Church. At the same time, though, they taught me about another god, a god who would rival

    Page 23

    the God I knew in Jesus Christ. They taught me the god of racism, the idea that white people are superior and should be in control. They taught me that black people especially were not human beings like I was, and I believed them. I accepted the lie of racism as a valid understanding of life and of my life. I became captive to racism. They taught me racism not because they were mean and evil people but because they were anxious and fearful people, because they too were captive to racism. I am captive to many other powers, and I learned them all from really decent people. God has worked on me in many of these areas, and the multicultural context is one of the central places where I have learned about my captivity and about the possibility of freedom and liberation. In this context we have rediscovered our faith and ourselves there, and we have rediscovered God there. We have discovered that our cultural contexts are central but also can be confining, that God intends for us to retain our context while broadening it to include the gifts of other cultures. Our calling is not to give up our culture or to seek to strip others of their culture, but rather our calling is to seek to be weavers of all our stories, making a new tapestry called the church, a community of faith whose base must necessarily be multicultural if we are to receive the depth of the riches of God’s gifts to us. In this journey we have found at least four guidelines for preaching in a multicultural society. First is the value of our stories and our cultures, each of us and all of us. It is vital to our faith development that we have an awareness of our own stories and cultural values, with both the enriching dimensions and the difficult aspects. It is also vital to realize that there are other stories and other cultures in God’s creation. Those others stand as both gifts and challenges to our own stories, and our goal should not be the competition that we have emphasized for so long in Western culture, but rather developing a sense of complementing one another. The truth of the multicultural context in which the church began, and in which we increasingly find ourselves again, is that this is an opportunity to rediscover the richness and depth of the God that we thought we knew and that we thought that we had confined. The richness and diversity of our stories and our contexts will help us find the gift of the truth that God has broken down the dividing wall of hostility. What we find on the other side ofthat wall are not the monsters that we had been taught to fear but rather the si sters and brothers for whom our hearts are longing. The second guideline is the re-emergence and even the necessity of community. Our American context, still so strongly rooted in the white and the Enlightenment belief that the individual is ultimate, values the autonomous individual above all else. Talk radio and television are filled with this idea that the goal of life and of society is to develop independent individuals who are self-sufficient and in control. We have the technological power to lead us to believe that this is possible, but recent events like September 11 and hurricane Katrina have reminded us of the inadequacy and the danger of this approach. Even more difficult is the fact that our individual hearts cannot bear the weight of this expectation. Our hearts long for God and for others, and unless we feed this hunger with authentic food, we will move toward feeding it with the clans and cheap community that so pervades our society at present.1 In our multicultural context at Oakhurst, we have been intrigued to learn that this individualism is not biblical, but rather cultural, based on the slaveholders’ captivity of the Bible and theology on which we were raised. The biblical emphasis is not on God’s

    Page 24

    Spirit working to redeem individuals who will go to heaven when they are saved (and when they die) but rather on the development of the community of God’s people whose life and whose worship will glorify God and will testify to God’s grace and God’s justice.2 Preaching in a multicultural society requires that we encounter the truth that many other cultures still value the power of the community as well as the individual, and in some cases, over the individual. Rather than seeing them as primitive relics to be exploited and developed in free market globalization, we would do well to listen to their wisdom in seeking to hold on to the importance and the necessity of community. Preachers in our mainline denominations will need to consider the extent to which our imaginations and our sermons are captured by our cultural value of individualism and how much we need to be enlivened by the idea of the value of community. A third guideline concerning preaching in a multicultural society is one that many of us have already experienced: there will be plenty of conflicts in crossing cultural boundaries. Part of this is a natural process because our cultures and our stories are important and life-giving to us. When we encounter other stories and other approaches that present different orientations, our usual approach is to build our walls of defense even stronger. Part of the source of the conflicts also is that we do not have much practice in these conversations. Because the demonic powers of race and class have captured our hearts and imaginations, our first response to such encounters is to make ourselves ready to fight or to flee, rather than seeing them as opportunities for growth. Our usual experience of the “other” is to be dominated by fear rather than by possibility . Thus, we lack practice at crossing cultural boundaries with openness and hope rather than our usual fear and resentment. Even when we seek to cross the boundaries with hope, we will make mistakes, for that is the nature of the process. The answer is not withdrawal into fear but rather a recognition of our limitations and our need for practice. That is, after all, the meaning of practice. The biblical witness is that the miracle of Pentecost leads into conflicts that abound in the multicultural context of the church in Acts. Peter and John are arrested after they are vessels for the healing power of Jesus Christ for the man at the Beautiful Gate in Acts 3, and by the end of Acts 4, they are praying for boldness to continue to cross these kinds of boundaries. They recognize both the external forces and their own internal forces that have a gravitational pull on their hearts, a pull that would make them draw back in fear. In Acts 5, there is the terrifying story of conflict about the power of money, as Ananias and Sapphira fall down dead when their worship of money and subsequent deceptions to the community are exposed. In Acts 6, the office of deacon is established as a result of complaints by the Greek-speaking widows about the favoritism shown toward the Hebrew-speaking widows in the distribution of food. These biblical stories remind us that when we actually begin to step through the hole that God has made in the dividing wall of hostility, we will almost immediately find conflict. Such conflicts often make us timid, fill us with fear, and cause us to feel pain and to inflict pain. The remainder of the the New Testament witness is, in many ways, the story of this fledgling community of faith seeking to follow the Spirit of God into the brave new world of multicultural ministry. Whether it is Paul trying to find his way in Jewish-Gentile relations in Romans, or trying to help the cross-cultural currents of the church at Corinth flow into one river, or whether it is the author of Ephesians reminding the diverse churches of the region of Ephesus that they belong

    Page 25

    to Christ and to one another, or the author of James reminding his community how much their life together is influenced by class, the New Testament witness is that the dividing walls of hostility are broken down in Jesus Christ, and our calling as the people of God is to walk through that breech in the wall and find both conflict and possibility. It is this idea of possibility that is the fourth and final guideline for preaching in a multicultural society .The promise of possibility is what the biblical witness proclaims in so many metaphors and images: a new heaven and new earth, being born again, seeing more clearly after many years of seeing only dimly, gaining new life, life abundant, a life greater than we ever had imagined. Preaching in a multicultural society must acknowledge the fears and the conflicts, but it must also be an invitation to experience this new life. It must point us to the Promised Land, a place where we learn to be dominated by loving rather than being dominated by fear. In our journey together at Oakhurst, we have come to know Jesus Christ in a way that we were not previously aware was possible. As one of our elders put it, “Oh, I need to be at Oakhurst every week. It is the power that renews me and enables me to go out into the world each day of the week.”3 That power is not Oakhurst but what it represents for those of us who are part of it: the diverse, gathered people of God, molded into a community of faith by the power of God’s Spirit through our crucified and risen Lord. It is a power that comforts us and confronts us and uplifts us and challenges us and gives us hope and courage and vision. It is a power that gathers us up and then sends us down into ourselves and out into the world to experience and to proclaim God’s calling of each of us and all of us as children, calling us to imagine the whole new world that God has called into being in Jesus Christ. It is the power that calls us to hear that our primary definition is not rooted in any category of the world but in the gracious mercy and love of God. Our primary definition is daughter and son of God, and out of that definition comes the high and difficult calling to which the author of Ephesians exhorts us to live: that we are sisters and brothers after all. That is the scary and the wonderful part of preaching and living in a multicultural society.

    Notes

    1. For more discussion of this, see Gibson Stroupe, “Preaching on Covenant in an Age of Individualism,” Journal for Preachers (Pentecost 1992): 23-26. 2. For more information on this, see Nibs Stroupe and Caroline Leach, O Lord, Hold Our Hands: How a Church Thrives in a Multicultural World (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003), 134140 . 3. Stroupe and Leach, 148.

  • Easter preaching to young adults

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 36

    Easter Preaching to Young Adults

    Thomas Daniel

    North Avenue Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I might share in its blessings. (I Cor 9:17-23)

    With God there is a spiritual intimacy…(but) I would rarely be asking these questions inside the church. I see lovely nice people hanging out in a church…but, basically, religion left me cold.1 (Bono, lead singer of U2)

    We are in need of “winning” young people to the gospel. As our society continues to drift away from Christendom, young people are looking at the church with increasing cynicism and skepticism. Many have come to see the church as the enforcer of the status quo, full of rule makers who teach what not to do, and ultimately an irrelevant voice in the conversations happening within culture. They talk openly and abstractly about life giving spirituality, but they easily ignore the church and religion. Accordingly, the number of young adults attending mainline congregations is at an alarmingly low level, and we as the church must be ready to listen to the example of the Apostle Paul. We need to win our young adults back. Actually, we need to prepare ourselves to be instruments in the hand of God, who will ultimately win them back, but this is a resolve and prayer that I see far too infrequently in the mainline church. God as truth is unchanging, but the context in which we proclaim that truth is constantly shifting. The church must find creative and deliberate ways to keep the truth in front of people. Paul understood this idea, and it allowed him to become one of the greatest evangelists our faith has ever known. The question of relevancy has faced the body of Christ with each new generation, and over time we have transformed ourselves so that the gospel comes into contact with people of every age and life situation. In contemporary America, the quest to relate to young adults is certainly not lost, but it is imperative that we act immediately or risk losing the vast majority of a generation. While this article is intended to aid pastors who seek to relate to the young people in their midst during this glorious Easter season, these principles are relevant throughout the year. Today there is a general consensus that an enormous shift is happening in the ways that younger generations think, feel, act, and process information; at the same time, church and society are struggling to grasp some kind of understanding of the term “postmodernism,” especially as it relates to the lives of these younger generations. For

    Page 37

    the sake of winning young adults through preaching and pasturing, one of the most helpful summaries of postmodernism can be found in the book Missional Church, edited by Darrell Guder. In a wonderful analysis of postmodernism and its implications for the church we see that young people are on a “quest for meaning and connection.”2 In other words, if we are to speak in ways that are relevant, the church must be prepared to first address whether there is a reason that we inhabit this planetÖis there a transcendent point to our lives that is beyond our own personal desires and ambition? Second, in a culture that is increasingly individualistic, what does it mean to feel connected to God and one another in authentic and meaningful community? The resurrection certainly speaks to both of these needs, and as preachers it is our job to present the truth in the specific contexts in which our young adults find themselves.

    Meaning According to Missional Church, young adults need to explore whether their lives have any kind of transcendent meaning and purpose. Meaning can only be discovered when we respond with our lives to some kind of reality. Meaning never exists on its own, but is a response to something greater. In this way it is like laughter. Laughter does not exist on its own, but is a response to seeing or hearing something funny. In the same way, we find meaning when we experience an entity or cause that changes us and we become so enamored that we declare this reality gives meaning to our lives. For Christians, this reality is the resurrected Jesus; what better time to boldly proclaim this author of true meaning than on Easter? For the sake of preaching, the need for meaning requires us to remain focused on the person of Jesus Christ in our Easter messages. While this may seem obvious, it is amazing how quickly our sermons can move beyond the person of Jesus to the implications of the resurrection. We move into “church speak” and talk about the ministries of our congregation or the witness of our congregants. We talk about the social and political connotations for our world, and while we certainly we need to extrapolate the implications of the resurrection, it all begins with one man who walked out of a stone cold tomb 2,000 years ago. Don’t forget to make him the focus of your sermon! He is the creator of purpose, he is the master, he is the way, the truth, and the life; and for young people to find meaning in their existence pastors must be willing to allow them to recognize the splendor of the sacrifice and victory won for us all. If we fail to preach the person of Jesus, then we can not offer meaning to young adults because they are missing the greater reality that is worth responding to with a commitment of faith. The church, its ministries, its witness, its working for justice, are not what give meaning, but rather are the results of people who have found meaning. Easter is the perfect time to talk about the One who gives meaning to all creation. Always remember that young people are looking for meaning and we have to win them back. This may mean our Easter sermons delve into the realm of evangelism, and for a post-Christendom age, such an Easter proclamation is entirely appropriate. The cross is a revolution of the cosmos, a perfect victory of light overcoming darkness. It is a message of transformation. God transforms death into life, doubters into believers. God transforms mourning into tears of joy, loss into gain. God transforms defeat into an eternal victory. The message of a triumphant Messiah who brings transformation into the world is a message that will win people for the gospel. We only find meaning in a God who is worthy of worship. Our God is such a being. God can

    Page 38

    transform the world, and following God will transform any person’s life as well as our world. Living in the light of his resurrection means that God can change the darkness of our lives into light. God can take the broken places and bring wholeness. God can take our cold hearts and turn them into a fiery passion that propels us into the world. God deserves and demands awe and wonder on Easter and throughout the year. In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb in mourning, but is transformed by an encounter with the risen Christ into one who returns to the disciples with that first majestic Easter proclamation jumping from her lips, “I have seen the Lord!” It is Christ’s presence that changes her, so consider spending enough time on him that your congregation can arrive at the tomb and be so taken with his majesty that they have no choice but to echo Mary Magdalene’s passionate cry. Discovering such meaning is not just an experience for individuals, but for all creation. While Jesus must be the focus, a sermon must certainly be balanced with the implications of the resurrection for this world. Young adults live in a society where the need for transformation and meaning is all around them. They have witnessed planes flying into the Twin Towers, AIDS epidemics, racism, and injustice in age of mass media that allows them unlimited access to stories of tragedy and pain. Many will not be able to hear about a God who does not bring about both individual as well as corporate transformation of the entire world. Easter is certainly the time to talk about how this God has conquered brokenness, but only after spending time on the person of God in Christ. In a postmodern culture, young people are discouraged from believing in or proclaiming a viewpoint of truth and meaning. While the church must never claim to have complete understanding of the truth, Easter must be a time when we move beyond the realm of relativism and boldly proclaim salvation in Jesus Christ. He is alive, active in the world, transforming creation, and calling us to submit our lives to him as disciples. This act of following the resurrected Christ, of “presenting ourselves as living sacrifices,” offers meaning to a generation that is searching desperately for it. We will not engage young people by offering yet another message of relativism and weakness. Jesus is alive! He has conquered sin and death, and his victory is experienced by all who believe in him as Lord and Savior. There is no greater meaning in this world than that found in the gospel.

    Connection Based on the definition of postmodernism in Missional Church, meaning is only one of two needs that young adults are searching for. The other is related and is defined by Craig Van Gelder, author of chapter two, as “connection.” He describes how our culture has become increasingly individualistic over the generations. “The structures that previously shaped such community have eroded. With this erosion, persons find themselves very alone. In this context, individualism is not so much a choice people make as a condition forced upon them.”3 There is a loss of connectedness both with God and one another. An Easter proclamation that hopes to be relevant to young adults must engage this loss against the backdrop of the resurrection. If nothing else, Easter illustrates the power of God over the forces of sin and death. The Bible clearly states that we live in a broken creation, that nothing in creation could restore our relationship with the Creator, and for this reason Jesus Christ came into the world to bridge the gap that had been created by sin. On the cross, Christ, who was

    Page 39

    blameless and sinless, took the sin of the world upon himself so that those who believe in him would not have to face the final judgment based on their own merit. While the church proclaims Easter to be about more than atonement, Romans 8 and other passages of Scripture make it clear that atonement is certainly a central theme of Easter. This theological point can speak volumes to young adults as Easter represents a connection to God that exists beyond the merits of their own action. What an incredible message it is for a lonely generation to hear that God loves and values each person enough to give up his only begotten son in order to be in an intimate relationship for all of eternity ! For many who have grown up in the church, these words might seem basic (although to recognize them as such would be a mistake) but to a postChristendom generation this news is both welcome and revolutionary. Even though we might feel alone, Christ, through his resurrection, has paved the way so that through faith, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Easter offers us a permanent and everlasting connection with our Creator, news that all of us, but young adults particularly, need to hear again and again. Because of Easter, we are intimately and permanently connected with God and therefore can never be alone. In addition to connecting us with our Creator, Easter also allows for deeper relationships with other people through the journey of faith. For many young adults, church is often stereotyped as a weekly gathering of like-minded people who have relatively shallow relationships. It has become a place to dress up, smile, and by no means reveal the struggles and temptations one may be wrestling with. In other words, church appears to be a charade, and who wants to wake up early on a Sunday for that? Our individualistic culture means that we struggle to know how to move into deep relationships where persons expose themselves to the point of vulnerability. Therefore , many young adults are caught in the trap of desiring deep relationships and yet being too scared to really pursue them. However, by believing in the resurrection and its promises for our lives, we admit to God and one another that we are sinful and yet saved by God’s grace. There is a liberation for young adults to admit their true struggles, temptations, hopes, and dreams because God’s grace has freed them from the yoke of having to measure up to everyone else. This kind of connectedness is another facet of the resurrection that young adults need to hear about! As Christians, we are also called as a community to go into the world and witness to those with whom we come into contact. We do this through both word and deed. It is important that we tell others about Jesus and the transformation we have experienced, but it is also important that we take this resurrection into the streets and work to embody the Kingdom to come. This means striving for the day when “justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” In other words, we must work together not just to proclaim the resurrection, but to embody it. There are countless examples of contemporary Christians who proclaim and embody lives as people of the resurrection. For example, immediately following their Easter service, one pastor led his congregation to a neighborhood park that was a known hangout for drug dealers and prostitutes. Together they spent the afternoon cleaning the park as a service to their community. Not only did they want to reclaim the park for the neighborhood, but as resurrection people they wanted to take the light of Christ into the darkness and believe in God’s transforming power to work miracles in their

    Page 40

    midst. At another church a group of young Christians spent an Easter afternoon making dinners for AIDS patients. After taking the meals to the sick, they offered to pick them up in a van to attend a vespers service back at the church. Many infirm people who had retreated to their own private worlds of sickness and scorn were able to experience the power of the resurrection because young Christians wanted to do more with the good news than simply leave church and retreat to private lunches in restaurants. In these, and so many other cases, young Christians did not want simply to talk about Easter, they wanted to act on it as well. These might seem to be ministries that many congregations engage in year round, but when they are explicitly tied to the resurrection, they become something wholly different. In addition to connecting with God and neighbor, there is a special connection that can happen between the pastor and young adults during the actual delivery of an Easter sermon. In a recent conversation, a prominent senior pastor of a thriving mainline congregation and the spiritual home of many young adults, mentioned that he believed the postmodern generation connects with authenticity in a sermon as much as anything else. It is not enough simply to read Scripture and talk about it, but the question many young people are asking is, “Do you really mean this? Does it make a difference in your life?” A stereotype young people often have of preaching is summed up by CS. Lewis, who wrote that many preachers are “mild-mannered people, exhorting mildmannered people, to be more mild-mannered.” The resurrection is hardly mildmannered . It is radical. How can we honestly present it as anything else? This is one of the reasons that many pastors who effectively communicate with young adults work incredibly hard to be free of a manuscript. While they might take one into the pulpit, they do not ‘read’ it. They know communicating with a congregation involves much more than words: it includes body language, gestures, and making eye contact with those who have gathered to hear God’s Word proclaimed. Let them see your passion and what Easter really means to you. Another way to connect is to use occasional and relevant personal examples. Such stories not only help humanize the pastor (thus making him or her more relational) but can also exhibit the difference the resurrection has made in the pastor’s life. While pastors must always fight making themselves the centerpiece of any sermon, opening up in the pulpit can have a profound impact on winning young people. True connection gives the pastor a chance to engage and challenge young adults. We need to win them over and that will not usually happen by a solid theological reflection on the resurrection that fails to challenge the lives of contemporary listeners. Young adults who are in church on Easter are doing something that is incredibly countercultural for people of their generation. If we don’t challenge them with the Word then they will probably figure that gathering in coffee shops and discussing the deeper meaning of their favorite movies, books, and music is much more relevant to everyday life. Being authentic ought to include challenging aspects of life and culture that young adults assume or take for granted. Paul knew God was the author of truth. However, he also understood himself to be an instrument in winning people to Christ based on the context of his listeners. In order to reach the context of young adults in America during Easter, pastors must relate their messages to the longings postmodernists experience concerning the loss of meaning and connection. We need to understand our context as well as Paul did “for

    Page 41

    the sake of the gospel so that [we] might share in its blessings.”

    Notes

    [.Rolling Stone Magazine, November 3, 2005, Issue 986. Interview by Jann S. Wenner. 2. Craig Van Gelder in Darrell L. Guder, et al, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 18-45. 3.1bid.

  • One Christian’s voice against the death penalty

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 40

    One Christian’s Voice Against the Death Penalty*

    Isaiah 53:7-9; Matthew 5:17-20, 38-39

    Gary W. Charles

    Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    I stand before you this morning as one Christian whose study and prayer has led him to oppose the death penalty. I wish I could stand here, open the Bible, and point to chapter and verse to show why the death penalty is wrong, why every Christian should oppose it, and why anyone who sits on the fence or the other side of the issue is in Scriptural violation. But, I cannot do that. In fact, I can cite any number of texts that authorize a public execution as the specific intention of God. For instance, in chapter 20 oí Leviticus, the law code declares: “Every one who curses his father or his mother shall be put to death” and “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.” Indeed, read out of context and without interpretation, much of Leviticus raises far more serious challenges for our modern, Western sensibilities than whether we oppose the execution of a known mass murderer. Mouthing off at parents and cheating on a spouse – both capital crimes in Leviticus — rip at the fabric of human relationships, but even the most zealous prosecutor today would be laughed out of court for seeking the death penalty in such cases. So no matter how much we may long to open the Bible, point to chapter and verse, and be done with it, to take Scripture seriously – to read it prayerfully and with an appreciation for its context – means the work of interpretation is far more complicated than that. For those new to the ancient Hebrew law found in books of Scripture like Leviticus, actually these harsh-sounding laws mandated a kinder, gentler judicial system than was found in most of the surrounding cultures of the ancient Near East. The Hebrew law code was meant to keep retaliation in check. This idea of “measure for measure,” or “punishment should fit the crime,” came to be known in Roman jurisprudence as lex talonis. Leviticus expresses this idea in biblical law: ” ‘life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’”1 In one way, lex talonis guarded against excessive punishment – it tamed the thirst for untamed retaliation when emotions were running high, because this form of justice forbade the killing of many as retribution for the killing of one. In another way, lex

    * This sermon was preached on March 23, 2005, at the end of a six-month period in which there were three state executions in Georgia. Central Presbyterian Church is located immediately across from the state capítol, and on the night of an execution members of this congregation join with other Christians across the street to bear witness to a God who weeps whenever we sanction state sponsored killing. The church is also located adjacent to the Fulton County Courthouse where three days prior to the sermon, Brian Nichols had escaped his captors and killed a judge, a court clerk, and wounded several others, before later that day killing another. There was no doubt about his guilt, and the pain and anger in the city and in the sanctuary that Sunday morning was palpable. Following the sermon, the congregation was invited to join me for a time of conversation about my sermon, the recent horrific events in the city, and their views and questions about the death penalty.

    Page 41

    talonis evened the economic playing field. In older law codes, class differences brought about starkly different and unequal distributions of justice. If you were of an upper class and you wronged someone of a lower class, for instance, you could pay your way out of punishment by compensating your victim. The result was that for murder, for example, there could be a wild disparity of punishment between the rich and the poor, with the harshest punishment often inflicted on the lowest class. So, though admittedly harsh and even arcane to our modern ears, Leviticus advanced a more civil and just way for the community to live together. At this point, I could do the common and all too unfortunate Christian twist and excoriate the first testament as archaic and irrelevant to the Christian life, but to do so, I would have to let go of the story that informed the life, thinking, and discipleship of Jesus, and as a follower of Jesus, the story that informs mine. Instead, I invite you to see how Jesus wrestled with this part of his and our religious heritage. No doubt, Jesus grew up hearing the mantra, “An eye for an eye” and could have completed the couplet with his eyes closed. That’s why it is almost shocking what Jesus says in his Sermon on the Mount (a sermon that can only make mine seem mundane). Jesus declares: “Don’t react violently against the one who is evil. You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. ‘ But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”2 At first glance this sounds like ludicrous counsel to those living in a violent world. It sounds as if Jesus is not just standing on a mountain, but is living with his head in the clouds, as if he’s saying, “Just lie down and let the world run over you.” But take a closer look at his words. “If someone strikes you on the right cheek,” assuming they are right-handed, they are most likely not using their right hand. Think about it. Most likely, they’re backhanding your right cheek with their left hand. In other words, they’re humiliating you. Walter Wink argues, “The backhand was not a blow to injure, but to insult, humiliate, degrade. It was not administered to an equal, but to an inferior. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; Romans, Jews. The whole point of the blow was to force someone who was out of line back into place. Notice Jesus’ audience: “If anyone strikes you.9′ These are people used to being thus degraded. He is saying to them, “Refuse to accept this kind of treatment anymore. If they backhand you, turn the other cheek’”3 Tom Long offers this critical insight about this complex text: “What if the man, struck on one cheek, should stand there firmly and thrust forward the other cheek, as if to say fcYou may like violence but you are not in total control. I choose another way’ ? The turning of the other cheek discloses that cruel people may do violence, but they do not have the power to take away the dignity and humanity of other people”4 Why would anyone with even an ounce of good sense listen to Jesus in such a circumstance and not retaliate? In his refusal to meet violence with retaliatory violence, Martin Luther King Jr. argued: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.”5 Jesus preaches a sermon about violence in Matthew, and in John’s Gospel, the writer preaches a sermon about the violence done to Jesus by Pilate and Pilate’s Rome. More than once, the Roman governor announces that Jesus is innocent of the crime of which he has been accused. And though Mel Gibson tries to paint the Jews as the

    Page 42

    principal villains of the piece, in John, it is Pilate who sentences an innocent man to execution. Jesus is one of many, before and since, wrongfully executed by the state – in this case, Rome. If the state is charged with safeguarding human life, there can be no more atrocious an act than for the state knowingly to take the life of one who is innocent. For Christians, this reality of our own biblical story alone should give us great pause before we entrust any judicial system with the authority to carry out state-sanctioned executions. This reality alone should demand that at the very least every state should provide the most stringent judicial safeguards to insure that an innocent citizen is never executed. For most states, including Georgia, this warrants a moratorium on the death penalty until and unless such safeguards can be demonstrated. As a Christian and a citizen, though, I pray that we will move beyond a moratorium and end the use of the death penalty altogether. Let me be clear. I am not a romantic about human nature. I have sat with families of victims of a capital crime as they wailed in agonizing grief and have prayed with those whose lives have been rent asunder by a capital crime, like so many lives were rent asunder here in Atlanta in the past few days. What most capital perpetrators do is nothing short of hideous. The mad shooting spree in the courtroom here on Friday makes that point painfully clear. In the case of murder, capital criminals steal away the future of other children of God, often in the most obscene and violent ways. And that’s not all the damage they do. They devastate whole systems of human relationships and bring about immeasurable agony to families and loved ones, while exacting tremendous costs from the judicial system. If I were to base my position on the death penalty solely on what capital perpetrators do, I’m sure I would jump into the majority stream of those who support this practice. As a Christian, though, I follow a wrongfully executed Savior who refused to meet hatred with hatred and violence with violence. Elsewhere in his sermon, Jesus declares: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. ‘ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’” (Matthew 5:43-45). In Jesus, I see one who looked beyond the stigma: “prostitute,” “tax cheat,” “diseased person,” and saw in each one, no matter how malformed and despicable, an unmistakable sign of the presence of God. Jesus doesn’t require that we hold tender thoughts toward those who have done inexcusable things, only that we realize that when brutality is met with brutality, scores are not settled, but it only brutalizes society and those who have already been brutalized. Some argue that the death penalty is a deadly, effective deterrent and though unfortunate, is necessary, in our violent society. Even if that were true, which the vast body of death penalty research refutes, the life and teachings of Jesus demand that we factor in more than deterrence before ending any human life, no matter how loathsome. My views on the death penalty almost always lead someone to ask: “What would you do if some dreadful crime happened to your wife or your child?” I can’t say what I would do, thank God, but I can only imagine if that were to happen, it would bring out the darkest thoughts within me. I pray, though, that if hatred and violence began to ooze out of me and I began to search for retribution, that other Christians would confront me with Christ’s compassion, challenge me to live out Christ’s forgiveness, and love me with the redemptive power of Christ until I no longer found a home in the land of hatred and retaliation.

    Page 43

    As my children were growing up, I taught them that it is wrong for a person to take another person’s life. It is also wrong for the state to take a person’s life in the cause of justice. The death penalty doesn’t bring justice; it doesn’ t restore or redeem life. It compounds the injustice that has already been done as the state executes what it forbids. At his own execution, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” At how many executions since that time has Jesus had to utter that same plaintive prayer? Few people in American today have spent more time on death row and speak with more eloquence about the devastating impact of the death penalty on society than Sister Helen Prejean of the book and movie, Dead Man Walking. Reflecting on her understanding of God, Sister Helen writes: “I cannot believe in a God who metes out hurt for hurt, pain for pain, torture for torture. Nor do I believe that God invests human representatives with such power to torture and kill. The paths of history are stained with the blood of those who have fallen victim to ‘God’s Avengers.’ Kings, popes, military generals, and heads of state have killed, claiming God’s authority and God’s blessing. I do not believe in such a God.”6 To that I can only say, “Amen, sister” and pray that we will soon end the statesponsored killing of God’s children in Georgia and that the United States will soon join the vast majority of nations that refuse to confuse justice with the death penalty.

    Notes

    1. Samuel E. Balenane, Leviticus, Interpretation Series (Louisville, Ky.: John Knox Press, 2002), 190. 2. Matthew 5:38-39. 3. Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for A New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 99-100. 4. Thomas G. Long, Matthew, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 63. 5. Wink, 124. 6. Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 21.

  • Pastors who won’t be preachers: a polemic against homiletical accommodation to the culture of contentment

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 37

    Pastors Who Won’t Be Preachers:

    A Polemic Against Homiletical Accommodation

    to the Culture of Contentment

    William H. Willimon The North Alabama Conference, United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Alabama

    Official preaching has falsely represented religion, Christianity, as nothing but consolation, happiness etc. And consequently doubt has the advantage of being able to say in a superior way: I do not wish to be made happy by an illusion. If Christianity were truthfully presented as suffering, ever greater as one advances further in it: doubt would have been disarmed, and in any case there would have been no opportunity for being superior – where it was a matter of avoiding – pain. The Journals ofS0ren Kierkegaard1

    Recently I was part of a group that interviewed more than a dozen seminarians upon the eve of their graduations. We asked each person, “What is your particular gift, the special passion that you bring to the pastoral ministry?” They spoke about their enjoyment of counseling, their eagerness to work with people, how kind and sensitive they are in ministering to people in need. Not one single seminarian mentioned preaching. Just for today I’m thinking that the saddest moment in the recent history of my church was that day, sometime in April 1951, when those who had always been known as Methodist “preachers” began being referred to as “pastors.” On that day we exchanged the external, divine, extraecclesial, theological, and biblical authorization of our ministry for more tame organizational, parochial, anthropological standards. We preachers swapped effectiveness for truthfulness, made peace with the gospel, bedded down with our people, and began our harried attempt to meet their felt needs. Pastoral Care trumped homiletics as a dominate seminary discipline, we put our ear to the ground, engaged in empathetic listening, sensitive caring, and well, the rest is history. The therapeutic culture has got us. Joel Osteen and T. K. Jakes are us all over. In a multicultural environment it is my judgment that the predominant culture of our middle to upper middle class congregations is the culture of the therapeutic. Trouble is, we cannot be faithful pastors if our ministry is not to some great degree countercultural to this oppressive, imperialistic culture of contentment. So I have for you a simple thesis that goes against just about everything you think about pastoral leadership today: To be a preacher is to be called to love God more than our congregations. Faithful preachers exist in an ambiguous, potentially contentious relationship to our congregations. The congregation is the Body of Christ, that gathering whom God has convened to hear the royal proclamation, but the congregation is full of the same incomprehension, cowardice, disbelief, and rebellion that is found in any human gathering when it is assaulted by the Word. We preachers meet no resistance to the

    Page 38

    Word that was not first encountered in our own hearts, and in the hearts of our most regular listeners. As Karl Barth might put it, the church is just full of “religion” and therefore full of idolatry and credulity, resistance and artful dodging of the Word. Though the church may say it wants to hear the Word of God—to be addressed by its Lord and Savior—the church lies. Perhaps resistance to the Word is even more pronounced in the church because the church knows firsthand that God’s word is always a summons, an address, a vocation, and an obligation; and that God has great work in mind for the church, and therefore the church is justified in feeling some fear and consternation in the face ofthat vocation and therefore is full of resistance to that Word. Church thus tends to be not only training in discipleship but also in various techniques of avoiding the transforming Word of God. A major means of Wordavoidance today is the culture that says that we pastors have no greater purpose than our people. Although Barth speaks of preaching as an ecclesiastical activity – “Preaching must be done in the sphere of the church, i.e., in concrete connection with the existence and mission of the church”2- Barth constantly contended that preaching is prior to and superior even to the church. Preaching is the peculiar speech of the church, but it is not authorized or dependent upon the church and therefore may often be experienced as against the church, in order to be for the church.3 The words of the sermon are not a congregationally derived Word; that Word comes from God to the church. Preaching is what God says to the church, not what the church musters in its own behalf. Therefore, preachers must be willing to risk conflict, resistance, and rejection by the church in order to be faithful to the church’s peculiar vocation: joyful subservience to the Word. Preachers are to serve the Word, not to be acquiescent to the congregation. In a day when pastoral care for and caring about the needs of the congregation has virtually overwhelmed much of Christian ministry, Barth reminds us that the best and most loving service we clergy can render to our people is utter subservience to the Word. There is therefore a great need among us pastors to free ourselves from mostly sociological descriptions of the church and reclaim the theological significance and basis of our primary vocation to be preachers. Church development guru, Tom Bandy, has been most helpful to us in North Alabama as we think our way into the future. While Bandy is somewhat of a sociologist , expert in thinking about systems theory applied to the church, he also believes that most of our pastoral problems stem from a failure to have a theological construal of our ministry. In a recent book, Mission Mover, Bandy says to us clergy, “Once upon a time when preparing for ministry meant meetings, political activism, counseling, now it’s preparing to interject Jesus into the conversation and a willingness to relinquish control.”4Nowhere do we do that more effectively and explicitly than when we let go and preach. We clergy are called by the church to talk about God, to interject Jesus into the conversation and, in Bandy’s words, to be willing to “relinquish control.” Alas, most of us who have been to seminary are better trained to analyze and to construe the human condition through mainly sociological, political, or economic categories than essentially theological ones. We adopt the language of anthropology and relinquish our peculiar theological speech. We are to be “God people,” those who “interject Jesus into the conversation” in a world that would rather think in exclusively anthropological categories. To be a

    Page 39

    preacher is to be trained to talk about what God wants to talk about and to talk in the way that God talks (i.e. Scripture). Recently somebody wrote to me complaining about some political statement that was made by the National Council of Churches, criticizing their stand and saying that it was “unpatriotic” and “not supportive of our troops” and the “war effort” and therefore we ought not to send any more good Methodist money to the NCC. I replied that, while I had no great interest in pumping up the waning influence of the National Council of Churches, I was a preacher, a person who was supposed to talk about Jesus and the Bible rather than to be concerned with less significant matters like “patriotism” or “the war effort.” I therefore was uninterested in his complaint against the National Council of Churches. Bandy goes on to say that, “Yesterday’s challenge was to find leaders who could help people discern Christ in the midst of godlessness, today’s challenge is to find leaders who can help people discern Christ in the midst of rampant godliness.” I like that. Yesterday we were worried about secularism, atheism, and what was required of us to get a hearing from Christianity’s cultured despisers, godlessness. Today our concern is “rampant godliness,” vague and free-floating, undemanding and vacuous “spirituality.” Our task is to help people look at their lives not in terms of some amorphous sense of the “spiritual,” but specifically in the light of Jesus Christ, the Lord of Lords, Prince of Peace. We have got to give some content and challenge to the “rampant godliness” that infects our culture, to point to the specific, discipleship demands of Jesus Christ, rather than allow folk to slip into an inconsequential morass of the merely, vaguely, helpfully spiritual. Veteran church observer Bill Easum, like Bandy, has been helpful in rethinking the peculiar nature of pastoral leadership. Bandy makes an interesting distinction between the pastor as “enabler,” as “care giver,” and the pastor as transformative leader. Easum is critical of the way we pastors have so wholeheartedly adopted a model of ministry where we become the pastoral giver of care rather than the homiletical-spiritual leader. Here is Easum on the problem of pastors as mere enablers:

    Enablers are people who above all else love caring for people so passionately that transformation or discipleship is seldom a concern. They often exude the Great Commandment, often to the extent that they have no time left for the Great Commission. Because they care so deeply about how others feel, they usually: — Allow everyone else to set their agenda instead of letting the call set it, — Avoid controversy rather than address it, — Wait to take action until they are forced, instead of being proactive. Often, this desire to care goes to the point that the enabler depends on his or her church to need him or her. In the most severe cases, the enabler needs the church to need him or her in order to gain self-worth. Enablers usually have such a high level of mercy in their personality or gift mix that they render themselves ineffective. AH of us have some mercy in us. They key is, does our tendency toward mercy dominate our lives? Mother Teresa had great mercy, but also great leadership skills and used her mercy to fuel her mission. Mercy is good if it fuels the mission; it is

    Page 40

    disastrous if it stifles or sidetracks it. With most enablers, mercy derails the mission. The statement…that best defines enablers is: “I enjoy visiting people in parishioners’ homes, hospitals, and nursing homes and giving people spiritual comfort.”5

    This is one reason the designation of pastors (and even bishops!) as “servant leaders” is not quite right. Too often the term “servant leader” is code for servility to the congregation. We can’t be faithful servants of our congregations, as Christian congregations, without being (in Luther’s favorite designation for pastors) ministeri verbi divini “servants of the Word.” One reason the preaching office is primary is that it is a primary means of forming us preachers into the sort of people who take God more seriously than ourselves or our congregations. To be a preacher is to be trained and formed by the weekly disciplines of bending our interests to the countercultural concerns of the Word. I’m concerned that too many recent books on preaching are mostly about our listeners, analyzing the limits and the interests of our congregations and their ability to hear, when they ought to be most interested in what the Trinity is able to speak. I think it was this sort of pastorally unctuous, congregation-corrupting preaching that caused Father Wesley to rail against the people pleasers of his day:

    Why, this is the very thing I assert: That the gospel Preachers, so called, corrupt their hearers; they vitiate their taste, so that they cannot relish sound doctrine; and spoil their appetite, so that they cannot turn it into nourishment ; they, as it were, feed them with sweetmeats, till the genuine wine of the kingdom seems quite insipid to them. They give them cordial upon cordial, which make them all life and spirit for the present; but, meantime, their appetite is destroyed, so that they can neither retain nor digest the pure milk of the word.6

    Kierkegaard couldn’t have said it better or more bitingly. It is all well and good to urge us pastors, as many now urge us, to be more culturally sensitive, to speak our words in ways that are aware of the cultural embeddedness of our congregations. But we preachers must always keep before us the understanding that there is no way for us to preach the gospel faithfully that is not an attack upon the dominant, prevailing culture or an attempt to form a new “culture” called church. Thus, in our ministry, preaching has theological precedence over all other pastoral activity. In preaching we are most explicitly attached to the Word; we demonstrate the external authorization for our ministry; we model for the congregation what a life commandeered by the Word looks like; we rise above sentimental servility to our people and their narcissism and call them to their higher vocation. We become more bold than we would be if left to our own devices. In my bureaucratic office in Birmingham, we are establishing a “Hall of the Saints,” or something to that effect. It’s to be a collection of photographs and descriptions of Alabama Methodists who did the right thing in the 1960’s. There are stories of preachers who, after a Sunday sermon, had to pack up their families, under cover of darkness, and flee for their lives. One preacher had the distinction of having

    Page 41

    a cross burned, not once, but twice, in front of his parsonage before he hung it up and got out of preaching for good. Dan Whitsett’ s picture is going to be placed upon that wall. Dan was both admired and despised for his sermons. First Methodist, Sylacauga, Alabama, both grew in numbers and lost members because of Dan’s courageous pulpit leadership. One of my pastors gave me a sermon he found in the library at Sylacauga First, a sermon that Dan preached on Independence Day Weekend 1953, titled, “Fidelity to the Faith of Our Founding Fathers.” Dan began with history, recalling the faith of our nation’s founders in a land that would truly be a place of justice for all. He then spoke up for racial justice, specifically in regard to the schools of Alabama. He launched into an attack upon the evils of then-current McCarthyism in America that made Edward R. Murrow sound like a wimp. He reminded the congregation that while some of the state’s demagogic politicians were busy fighting change in Alabama, we are Chris­ tians who take our marching orders not from tradition, not the “Southern way of life,” not from the Supreme Court, but from Jesus. He said that we were blessed to be living in a time when the distinction between a follower of Jesus and an ordinary American was easy to see. Dan said that we ought to thank God that the Christian way is so clear and simple in the present conflict. I’m sure that Dan got some negative response to this sermon. Eventually, Dan left Alabama, forced out, it is said, by his preaching. He continued his ministry in Massachusetts. (He returned to Montgomery for retirement.) Reading Dan Whitsett’s sermon reminds me of the awesome responsibility that we preachers of the gospel bear. I haven’t preached as powerful or courageous a sermon as Dan’s. But I ought to take him as my example, my homiletical mentor, a witness from the past who speaks us into the future, a man who loved being a faithful preacher more than being a caring pastor. Today, when some layperson whines, “Why don’t we have more great preachers,” I tend to respond, “Because you ran off the good ones.” In my first year as bishop, Γ ve gotten maybe two dozen letters complaining about pastors who are under my appointment. Some complain that their pastors are spending too much time with the young and neglecting their duty to visit and care for the old. Other letters charge that the pastor is tardy in her hospital visitation or not sufficiently accommodating to the aches and pains of the congregation. Not one single letter complains about the pastor’s preaching. I’d give anything to get a letter, like the letters that some bishop before me surely got concerning Dan, some letter that says, “Our preacher had better stop preaching the gospel, or we’re going to kill him—before he kills us.”

    Notes

    1. The Journals ofS0ren Kierkegaard, trans. Alexander Dru (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 437. 2. Barth, Homiletics, 56. 3. This is what concerns me, not only about some Evangelical Christians’ embrace of Catholicism, which substitutes a tame ecclesiastical magisterium for less manageable biblical authority, but also about some expressions of “Christian communitarianism,” as espoused by Hauerwas, Willimon, et al. Any community in Christ, even a community of “resident aliens” is no match for the Word, the verbum externum (Luther) that is the persistent authorization for and the primary judge of the community.

    Page 42

    4. Thomas G. Bandy, Mission Mover: Beyond Education for Church Leadership (Nashville: Abingdon, 2004), 27. 5. Bill Easum, with Linnea Nilsen Capshaw, Put on Your Own Oxygen Mask First: Rediscovering Ministry (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004), 79-81. ó.John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed., ed. Thomas Jackson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1979) vol. 11,491.

  • The E prayer

    This text was converted from the original print edition for full-text searchability. Formatting may differ from the original. Consult the PDF for citation and presentation details.

    Page 47

    The E Prayer

    Luke 24:13-35

    Gary W. Charles

    Central Presbyterian Church, Atlanta, Georgia

    There is something elusive about Easter. Even staid Southern Presbyterians now observe Lent and take a slow prayerful walk through Holy Week. Churches of every tradition pull out all the stops for Easter day; it’s after Easter that stumps us. After Easter the throng fades much like the crowds faded soon after a rush of religious renewal following 9/11. We’re left with our new Easter clothes and nowhere to go. There is something terribly elusive about Easter. If you don’t trust me on this, read the Bible. Flip to the ending of any of the four Gospels. You’ 11 read about the final week of Jesus’ life – his last supper, his agony in the garden of Gethsemane, his trial before the Sanhédrin and then Pilate, his torture, the horrific march to Golgotha, the mocking and derision at the foot of the cross until his final breath, and his burial in a borrowed tomb by Joseph of Arimathea. Flip to the ending of any of the four Gospels and you’ll read quite a bit about the last week of Jesus’ life. Then read the Easter stories by these same four writers. The details are sparse and the stories are few. And, it’s not because Easter is unimportant to any one of them; it is because Easter is just that elusive. Luke’s Emmaus story is a case in point. Emmaus was a hole in the wall some seven miles outside Jerusalem, but in this Easter story, Luke is more interested in what Emmaus is than in how you chart it on MapQuest. Fred Buechner says Emmaus is

    the place that we go to in order to escape – a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway”… Emmaus may be buying a new suit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that [people] have had – ideas about love and freedom and justice – have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish [people] for selfish ends.1

    For Luke, Emmaus is not just the destination of two despairing disciples; it is what they are doing. They’re getting out of town, doing whatever they can to get Jesus out of their hearts. They’re on the way to wherever they can go to forget that what is lovely and sacred dies—to Emmaus, the place for forgetting—just when they are joined by someone who makes them remember. In this Easter story, Luke tells us, the readers, that the unannounced alien on the road is the risen Jesus, but the two despairing disciples don’t get the same memo. For them, the newest arrival is just another stranger who’s got to be the only person on earth who hasn’t heard about the execution outside Jerusalem. The two despairing disciples pour out their hearts to this utter stranger. They tell

    Page 48

    him about their disillusionment, about how much they had hoped Jesus was the one to bring in the promised reign of God. The unrecognized alien listens to their woes and then speaks and is surprisingly curt in his response. He would certainly fail Pastoral Care 101 based on this verbatim. He doesn’t comfort them, saying, “I know you must be really hurting now. I can feel your pain.” He says nothing nearly so trite. In fact, he’s downright rude. He calls them: “Idiots! Fools!” Then he asks them: “Have you never read your Bible?” Then he gives them a lecture on Bible basics. By the time, he’s explained the story of Abraham, Moses, David, the Exile, and the people’s return to Jerusalem, this trio has reached the disciples’ home. At the house, Jesus bids them farewell, but they say: “No. Stay with us for evening is coming.” Actually, by this point, they may well be ready for this biblical know-itall to move along, but instead, they offer this stranger their hospitality. Given how Jesus has treated them, it’s amazing that they do. Perhaps, even in Emmaus, something of his legacy lives. Upon their invitation, the stranger stays. Do you remember that story in Genesis when Abraham and Sarah in their great old age are visited by two strangers? Little do they know that these aliens are actually a delegation from God. Abraham and Sarah offer them their hospitality, and these angels stay long enough to tell this old couple that the pregnancy test will soon be positive. Years later, in The Letter to the Hebrews, this story from Genesis is remembered with the provocative phrase, “entertaining angels unawares.” Once inside the disciples’ house, this story begins to sound like something you and I often hear inside this sanctuary. The sage stranger takes bread and blesses it and breaks it and gives it to the two disciples. At that moment, the fog lifts and they know he is no alien; he’s the risen Jesus. Then two things happen almost simultaneously. The risen Jesus vanishes from their sight, but he doesn’ t vanish from their hearts. They experience a serious case of religious heartburn as they revisit all he said to them while walking along the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. That’s not all they do. Within the hour, the disciples leave Emmaus. If Buechner is right, perhaps that is why they do. If Emmaus is the place to go when hope has decayed and died, then they can’t stay there now that hope has been renewed. It’s not just that they want to leave; they must leave. You can’t stay in Emmaus once you’ ve seen the risen Lord. I love this story. I love the way Luke tells it. I love its powerful reserve. I love the way it challenges the typical pious Christian comment: “I’m on a sacred journey to find Jesus.” Emmaus is all about a God who is in a life-and-death search to find us, and often finds us on the run. I am not an Episcopalian, either by birth or by choice, but I admire many Anglican and Episcopalian prayers. When I’m on my own retreat to Emmaus, I often turn to the Book of Common Prayer for words of insight and inspiration. In Luke’s Emmaus story, two disciples invite Jesus to “Stay with us, for it is almost evening and the day is nearly over.” The Book of Common Prayer captures this ancient act of hospitality in a moving word of prayer: “Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love.” There’s a lovely old hymn that we don’t sing much today, because it’s an evening

    Page 49

    hymn. In it, the Emmaus “prayer” is changed from the plural to the singular: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide . . . help of the helpless, O abide with me.” I would commend that prayer for anyone to say or sing several times a day, but it is not the Emmaus “prayer.” “Stay with us” is the petition of the two hospitable disciples. It is finally not just their prayer, but the prayer of the church, a most plural prayer. This prayer is hardly a command invitation, as if you and I had that kind of command over God. It’s a prayer born in hospitality and issued in gratitude, not from a desire to keep God captive here, but to celebrate God’s grace out there. Luke tells us that the risen Jesus is on the move in here and out there. To utter the E prayer, to pray for Jesus to abide with us, is to pray that you and I be changed, that our eyes be opened to God’s risen presence in the most unlikely places, among the most unexpected aliens. If God answers our E prayer, we’ll no longer be able to drive by blighted neighborhoods in our city as if they weren’t our problem and stare at a panhandling stranger as if she were an anonymous intrusive nuisance, for within these places and with these strangers walks the Emmaus alien, the risen Christ. If we are to pray for Jesus to stay with us, the church cannot be a fallout shelter to which we run from a world gone mad, a safe place to hide and sing our joyful campfire songs while God’s children cry out in misery out there. The tomb could not hold Jesus; neither can any church building. He is risen! He is not only herel Once we know that, we cannot stay in any Emmaus of our own making. To offer the E prayer is to quite likely hear Jesus shouting for shalom over the wall being built between Israel and Palestine and see him riding buses and sitting in restaurants where homicide bombers make their way in Jerusalem; see him walking the halls of Congress and Parliament like a madman who knows that peace is possible for those who desire it more than they desire the economic boom of war. To offer the E prayer means that we might well see the risen Jesus holding a calculator and announcing that the largest federal deficit in U.S. history is a deficit of compassion for the working poor, the disabled, the sick, and the aliens who pick our crops and clean our houses and staff our stores. Offer the E prayer and we’ 11 most likely find the risen Jesus walking the streets of Atlanta with our sisters and brothers struggling to find a place to stay now that “shelter season” is over. “Stay with us” may sound innocuous enough, a nice, sweet, innocuous church prayer. “Sweet hour of prayer.” “Sweet hour of prayer.” But the E prayer extends long beyond Sunday morning worship and long after intrudes into every part of our lives. Just ask the two disciples walking the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. They probably asked themselves: “What bother can this stranger possibly be?” “Sure, stay with us tonight.” “How much can it cost us to give this guy some bread and wine?” How much did it cost them? It cost them their lives. They would never again walk that Emmaus road assuming that they were alone; never walk that familiar path resolved that life is one long extended disappointing replay. They would never again listen to Scripture read or break bread and drink wine without remembering how the risen Christ came alive in their midst. They would never again return to the same Emmaus. What about you? Are you ready to offer the E prayer? Are you and I ready to welcome the risen Jesus not just into our Sunday sanctuary, but into our daily businesses and bedrooms and classrooms, into our battles and prisons and asylums, into our greatest joys and most convoluted struggles? I wish I could say, “Yes, Lord, I am ready,” but I am too well acquainted with Emmaus to say that, too well acquainted

    Page 50

    with seeking refuge and looking for a safe place to put all my disappointment and despair and fear. I don’t know if I’m ready. What two despairing disciples discovered in the comfort of their home was that it’s not so much about what we are ready or not ready for, what we see or refuse to see, but that the risen Jesus is ready for us, ready to open our eyes to see his life-giving presence even in our haunts of hiding, even in Emmaus. Luke tells this story to call the church to prayer, the E prayer, which is not only the Emmaus prayer; it’s the Easter prayer. It’s the prayer for churches and Christians who recognize that, whether we are ready or not, the risen Jesus leads us headfirst into change, into untiring engagement against those powers that market Emmaus as the most desired destination on earth, into a life’s work with redeemed vision for a world being transformed by the death-defying, life-giving love of God. The E prayer is the most powerful prayer that will ever come from the lips of any person or congregation: It is a prayer that will cost you and me our lives. So, I ask you again, “Are you ready to pray?” Please, pray with me: “Lord Jesus, stay with us; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love.”

    Note

    1. The Magnificent Defeat (San Francisco: Harper & Row. 1966), 85-86.