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  • Outside the walls

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    Outside the Walls*

    Acts 2:1-24

    Shannon Johnson Kershner

    Woodhaven Presbyterian Church, Irving, Texas

    I am glad we are outside today for worship. Now, don’t get me wrong—I have been a nervous wreck about this whole thing. What if it rains? What if people can’t hear what’s going on and are too easily distracted? What if my own daughter gets up and starts running around in the middle of my sermon? What if? You know me and my fear of chaos. But standing here, in front of this amazing Pentecost mural, surrounded by all your faces, I am glad we are out here—outside the walls— surrounded by God’s creation, teetering on the edge of worshipful chaos, with no barriers between us and the world. No barriers. It makes us feel a little vulnerable, doesn’t it, worshiping out here. I mean, what if the neighbors hear us? Will we disturb them with our singing or with my preaching? And what if someone we don’t know walks over here off the street and just plops down to worship with us. My goodness. We don’t have our usual sanctuary walls to help keep us together, to help us center, to serve as the markers between the holy and the profane. Being out here with no barriers between us and our community makes us feel a bit vulnerable, doesn’t it? The disciples had left the place of Jesus’ ascension and returned back to their own gathering space there in Jerusalem. All along the way they had run into teeming crowds. People were coming to celebrate the Jewish festival day of Pentecost, or the Feast of the Weeks. This festival day is the Jewish holiday celebrating the harvest season in Israel. It is held exactly seven weeks after Passover. The holiday not only celebrates the first fruits of the harvest, but also commemorates Yahweh’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses and the people of Israel. And so, people were coming into Jerusalem from all kinds of places to get ready for the celebration. They came from Parthia, Rome, Judea—all over the land. Different shades of skin, different languages, different ages—a cacophany of noise and smells and colors filled the streets. It was merry chaos! The disciples had to elbow their way through the crowds, being careful not to step on the small children running wild, in order to make their way back to their locked-up gathering space. But finally, they made it and were let into the room. They all gathered together, safely tucked away, and engaged in prayer and conversation about what they should do next. How should they reach out into the world? What would be the shape of their ministry for the next five years? The disciples, including women like Mary, were all tucked away, apart from the chaos of the streets, cloistered together so they might safely and systematically discern where God was calling them. They were not disturbing their neighbors. No one from the outside could interrupt their time of prayer and worship. The barriers were all in place, nice and neat, keeping the chaos out and the control in. No need to be vulnerable on that day.

    * This sermon was preached in the context of an outdoor worship service on Pentecost Sunday.

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    And then, intrusioni God’s rowdy and tumultous Spirit broke down the doors. Now God could have simply slipped in, being respectful of their process and their prayers, not wanting to cause too much of a scene. But that is not what God was in the mood for that day. God’s Spirit blew in, swept in, and tore through the group, creating not just a scene, but pure chaos and confusion! The Spirit completely unsettled their planning. And, much to their surprise, and later, to their delight, all of those in the room began speaking in different languages. They simply could not help themselves. God’s Spirit caused them to burst forth into unfamiliar languages to proclaim all the amazing things God had done in Jesus Christ. They were making such a racket that people on the outside began to wonder what was going on. The outsiders started to push through the doors and lean into the windows, captured by what they heard and curious to know what was behind it. And those outsiders were astounded and amazed. For the Elamites looked around the corner expecting to see other Elamites. The Parthians expected to find Parthians. The Libyans thought they would see another group of Libyans. But instead, when the outsiders burst into the gathering, they found a bunch of Galilean Jewish Christians— people who looked like they were more comfortable on a fishing boat than in the marketplace.l But even in their shock, the outsiders were transfixed, first by curiosity, then skepticism. They must be drunk, a few decided. Too much wine is the only thing that could explain this kind of openness to us. I wonder what the disciples felt as they watched all those barriers tumble down around them. As those outsiders filled the room trying to get a taste of the gospel, did the disciples feel vulnerable? Did they wonder how they would be church in the midst of such Spirit-caused chaos? Did they get nervous as they contemplated that if other people came into their group, they might be changed with and by them? Perhaps Bartholomew turned to Simon and said, “Now what do we do? This sure seems awfully risky.” And then, smack dab in the middle of the chaos, Peter, that wonderful mess of a disciple, stood up and began to preach. “We are not drunk,” he proclaimed, “Don’t you remember the words of the prophet Joel? God promised that in God’s own time, all people, young and old, men and women, slave and free, would receive the Spirit, dream dreams, see visions of God at work, and be drawn together in God’s gracious embrace of salvation. That time has come. In Jesus Christ, the barriers are broken down. In Jesus Christ, the chaos of community erupts. In Jesus Christ, there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, for all are one.” And with his words, worshipful chaos erupted in that room. Parthians began embracing Judeans. Elamites shared their lunch with Libyans. And three thousand strangers were baptized into family. Perhaps in the middle of it all, Mary turned to James and said, “Now what do we do? This sure seems awfully wonderful!” That small group of locked-up disciples became a Pentecost church without walls. That is why I think it is both wonderful and terrifying that we are out here, outside of the literal walls, in worship on this Pentecost Sunday. Because maybe this experience of literal openness will help deepen our discipleship and our conviction to keep moving out into the world, to take the grace that we inhale with one another and exhale it in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Perhaps our literal openness on this day will once again remind us of the reality that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to God’s own self.

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    And then, maybe with that reminder, we might be willing to take risks of discipleship—risks like being willing to counter so much of the negative rhetoric that is sweeping through our town these days around the issues of race and immigration and language. Or risks like saying unequivocably what our church’s constitution claims, “that people of good faith may differ,”2 when it comes to social issues and Scriptural interpretation, actively resisting the culture’s pressure to demonize theological diversity . For our text shows us that a Pentecost church is one that is constantly reaching beyond the things that divide us. A Pentecost church is one that is willing to take risks and engage people who may look or sound different or act differently from the usual person sitting next to us in the pew. A Pentecost church is one that does not expect that unity in Christ must equal uniformity, or diversity must bring division. On the contrary, a Pentecost church manages to hold enough trust in God’s wild Spirit to believe that God is at work in the unfamiliar, in the chaos, outside the boundaries we impose, bringing new life and new hope to a world that sorely needs it. A Pentecost church believes God knows how to be God and rejoices that we get to be God’s partner in spreading the word of grace and embrace and reconciliation that we know in Jesus Christ into all the world. And so as we gather here outside the walls this day, may our prayer indeed be “come, Holy Spirit, come.” And may we be open to God’s tumultuous intrusion into our lives.

    Notes

    1. Barbara Brown Taylor, ‘The Gospel of the Holy Spirit,” Home By Another Way (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999), 144. 2. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

  • Protagonist corner

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    Protagonist Corner

    Murphy Davis

    The Open Door Community, Atlanta, Georgia

    I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore, choose life, that you and your descendants may li ve…(Deuteronomy 30:19)

    To get right to the point, one of the more difficult aspects of pastoral and preaching work in face of catastrophic, serious and/or chronic illness is talking frankly about money. Healthcare in the United States has become largely a commercial transaction. Those who get quality healthcare are those who can afford it. There are, of course, important exceptions to this, but we live and work in a context in which the fine print in your health insurance policy and the amount of money in your bank account largely define your access to the care of a physician, medications, medical procedures, and hospitalization. Another option is for poor and middle class folks to go deeply into debt or to go over a financial cliff, as it were, because of medical bills. There are also those who, frightened by the soaring costs of care, forego medical attention until an illness has become very serious and even more expensive to treat, or it is simply too late. And there are the elderly and chronically ill among us who make regular choices between paying for expensive life-sustaining medications and paying the rent. But access to money—the class divide—is only part of it. A recent study showed that between 1991 and 2000, the deaths of nearly 900,000 people could have been prevented if African-Americans had received the same care as whites. AfricanAmericans and Hispanics are more likely to be uninsured, underinsured, and underserved. The intricate intersection of race and class in America remains key to defining access to life-saving and life-sustaining resources. Disturbing language patterns have developed in healthcare, a system now referred to as an “industry”! In the HMO for-profit era, patients have become “consumers.” Hospitals, clinics, physicians, and other medical caregivers are referred to as “providers.” Insured patients are faced with “co-pays” for doctor visits and prescription medicines. In a system where the care provided is defined in such commercial terms, the uninsured and the poor become nonexistent. If patients who can pay are “consumers” instead of patients, those who are not able to pay do not exist in the system at all. The dehumanizing aspects of such language are another (serious) matter altogether and certainly worthy of deep reflection and consideration. But suffice it to say, it seems we have come to a point in the U. S. in which people of every race and class are coming to understand that our healthcare system is in critical condition. For the poor, the system has been broken for many years. For all the rest, it started with the poor and is moving through the whole system. And surely a large part of our common dis-ease is our mostly silent realization that to have the means and resources for healing and cure but to withhold care because some sick people do not have money or insurance is simply evil. Sin. The number of medically uninsured has grown steadily in recent years as the profits of the insurance industry have grown and corporations continue to cut costs on the backs of their workers. Many other factors play into the fact that growing numbers

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    of families and individuals are plunged into distress and often meeting financial ruin. There are religious communities here and there dealing forthrightly with all of this, but my guess would be that many families and individuals are suffering in silent desperation in the midst of congregations where this truth is never publicly acknowledged . My family and I have lived, for the past twenty-four years, in a “ProtestantCatholic Worker” community in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. When we set off on this journey, all of us who were founders discerned that we should give up insurance, salaries, and personal savings in order to live into solidarity with the homeless and hungry sisters and brothers with whom we are in community. We did not want to separate ourselves by having access to insurance and savings that our desperately poor friends would never have. This abstract move became harshly concrete eleven years ago when I was diagnosed with a virulent strain of Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Since that time, I have gone through two major surgeries and three stringent rounds of chemotherapy. As one of my hematologists said last year, “You know, you’re not supposed to be alive?” I am, indeed, alive and grateful beyond words for the wonderful care I have received. I am alive primarily because of the fervent and steady prayers of my community, the larger church, friends, and family; but I am alive also because I live in a major city that still has a public (read, poor people’s) hospital. Institutions like Grady Hospital in many cities around the country have closed their doors because of economic trends in recent years that have cut away at everything helpful to the poor and those outside the economic mainstream. Grady saved my life several times. Because I lived long enough, I finally qualified for Medicaid as a permanently disabled person. But like any homeless or poor person, I would not have ever lived long enough to meet the stringent federal definition of “disabled” without a public hospital that absorbed the costs of my care. Now Medicaid is one of the most threatened of federal programs, and Grady Hospital is cutting services and holding on by a thread. The solidarity with the poor for which we fervently prayed in our early years grew and brought deep joy over the years. But solidarity took on a whole new meaning when I was thrown onto the mercy of the dwindling system of public healthcare. I had access to the same system of care available to a homeless person or the uninsured working poor. An important reality all the while is that my husband and I are highly educated and better able than most to understand my care needs, monitor care, and advocate for what I have needed. This has separated me to some extent from other patients at Grady, and it has made us even more zealous in trying to provide this kind of accompaniment for the poor and homeless with whom we live. Solidarity has become a reality for us in ways we never dreamed. I am deeply grateful for this gift, but it makes me long for the day that the church will stand up to resist the ongoing efforts to cut access to care for growing numbers of sick and hurting people. And such public resistance would indeed create new pastoral space for all those in congregations rich and poor, black, brown and white, who are being ruined and/or completely left behind by the for-profit medical system. One reason Jesus was hunted, despised, and executed is that he healed freely and spontaneously, without tipping his hat to the prevailing medical establishment or asking, “payment for services rendered.” In other words, his healings were noncommercial , and this simply wouldn’t do. What would Jesus have to say—and what

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    would Jesus do in response to our healthcare system based on the bottom line and corporate profits? Would he go into the hospitals and overturn the tables in the bill collection office? Would he drive the administrators out of their offices—and the corporate executives away from their money-changing desks? Then as now, healing miracles threatened the system. The miracle of a church standing up to unmask and confront a sick and sinful system—a system creating death and havoc in the lives of all of our people—will also threaten the current system: threaten it with resurrection hope.

  • Leaves from the notebook of an untamed preacher

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    Leaves from the Notebook of an Untamed Preacher1

    James S. Lowry

    Great Falls, South Carolina

    In the practice of ministry, the way forward has always seemed fairly clear even when it was not a pretty picture. On the other hand, for me, the call to ministry has been seen in nothing but hindsight. I have always been envious of my colleagues who are cocksure they have discerned the call of God as clearly as Samuel in the night or Paul on the road to do damage in Damascus. For me, call has been more vision than voice; and, what vision of call there was, has been as through a fogged-over rearview mirror. Nevertheless, after four decades of squinting at those clouded images, I have discovered with some certainty and a fair amount of humility that I am, in fact, called by God to be a parish preacher. Moreover, along the way, I am equally sure I have been called by God to preach first in this, and then in that, and, so far, always in yet another congregation. Looking back, I can see there have been too many times when I have wound up at the right place at the right time for it to be any other. For saying yes to all those calls, God owes me no favors. I was ordained at The Church of the Good Shepherd (Presbyterian) in Anniston, Alabama, on a hot Sunday night in the summer of 1966, a bit shy of two years before Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot down on the balcony of the Lorainne Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Though I didn’t know it then, at the time of my ordination, Henry Loeb was mayor of Memphis and Paul Tudor Jones was pastor of the Idlewild Presbyterian Church in Memphis. By all accounts, Henry Loeb was scared of Paul Tudor Jones and the gospel truth being preached at the Idlewild Church. It was the same truth Paul Tudor Jones regularly repeated on visits to the mayor’s office. It’s pointless to speculate what might have been had the mayor heeded the prophet’s cry. He didn’t. But the mayor knew the prophet well. More to the point, the mayor trembled in the presence of the prophet. Twenty-six years later, in the spring of 1992, when I was installed as pastor of the Idlewild Church, Willie Herrenton was the mayor of Memphis. The first African American to hold the post, he was highly effective and widely popular. He still is. When Herrenton and I were thrown together at some social or public event, he could never quite remember me. When I would remind him that I was pastor of the Idlewild Church, Herrenton would invariable say something like, “Oh, yes, that’s the church with the community recreation program,”2 or “Oh, yes, that’s the church that provides transitional housing.” Where once the important call to ministry in Memphis was to be a prophet, a short quarter century later, the important call to ministry in Memphis was to be a servant. The story of that shift in emphases at the Idlewild Church, in some ways, is a parable of the many similar shifts that have taken place in my own ministry. In those early days, when I was starting out in Anniston and Paul Tudor Jones was in Memphis, like Jones, I took all the right stands on race and other issues of a public nature, and I took them publicly. I don’t claim any particular bravery in that. Though my entire ministry has been either in the southeast or in the mid-south, my job and safety were never threatened, unlike the experience of many of my contemporaries who took

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    similar stands. Without a doubt, I sometimes made my congregations nervous, but I never felt anything less than their support and admiration. Moreover, as often as not, it was I who supported them when in their daily lives and professions they took far braver stands than I. What faithful people they are—so very many of them! Exactly when the shift from prophetic ministry to servant ministry took place is impossible to determine. Maybe parish ministry is never at one of those poles or the other but always on some continuum between them; and the truth is, they are seldom if ever contradictory. In any event, soon enough white people were neither needed nor welcome in the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War did finally end. At about that time it seemed clear enough that the way forward was less to stand and say with Amos, “Thus says the Lord,” and more to stoop and heed the word of Jesus when he said, “I was hungry and you fed me; I was naked and you clothed me,” and all the rest. There were refugees to be resettled, there were released prisoners to be reintroduced to the community, there were hungry people who needed soup kitchens and food banks, there were homeless people who needed night shelters, there were people living in shacks who needed affordable housing, there were sick people who needed affordable health care, there were schools in poor neighborhoods that needed tutors, and, above all, there were ministries needed to help people break the cycle of poverty. The congregations I served did all ofthat and more. Occasionally I had to nudge them. More often I needed only to encourage them. Sometimes all I had to do was stay out of their way. What faithful people they are—so very many of them! Along with that shift from prophetic to servant ministry, there have been other significant and closely related changes. While some registered no more than three or four on this preacher’s Richter scale, others registered eight or ten. Some were encouraging. Some were frightening. All were seismic. For example, on the positive side of earthshaking change, grateful for being schooled and grounded in neo-orthodoxy, I am now greatly instructed by narrative theology. Similarly, grateful for being schooled and grounded in critical methods of Bible study, I now approach our ancient texts seeing them first in their narrative form. Moving up the Richter scale of positive change, I now know there is extremely important gospel truth that I just could not see until I shifted from working with all male ordained leadership to working with both female and male ordained leadership. As to frightening seismic shifts in ministry, I have experienced the bitterness of one senseless major split in my denomination, and I fear we are on the cusp of another. I have also felt the impact in our General Assembly’s shift from a mission oriented body with some legislative and judicial responsibilities to a largely legislative and judicial body hanging on by fingernails to a few tired and under-supported missions. And, of course, by virtue of serving Christ in the southeastern and mid-south regions of the United States, I, along with my colleagues of a similar age, were present and presiding when the grandest seismic shift of them all settled in on us. Ironically, it came more with a whimper than a bang. As far as I can tell, it was precisely in the region where I have spent the last forty years living and preaching that the last vestiges of Christendom died. Now, everywhere in the world, even in the southeastern U. S., when the people of God are being faithful to gospel truth, we are strangers in a strange land living out that truth among those for whom it is utterly foreign. Looking ahead, I am absolutely convinced there is nothing is so clear as the future. The future is this: Empires, economies, and cultures are hell-bent on self-destruction

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    or mutual destruction, while the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing exponentially. In that context, the church is yet the body of Jesus Christ; and, in that context, we in the church can no longer choose to be either prophet or servant. The clear way forward for the church is to stop talking about sex and to be both prophet and servant. As to discerning a call to ministry in the face of such a challenge, for me it is still as looking through a clouded rearview mirror, hoping to unravel some clue as to what God would have me do in retirement and what advice I might have for young preachers struggling with their calls to ministry. About that I can say this much and not much more: At this end of forty years of squinting at clouded images in hindsight, I am discovering again, with some certainty, that the help of God in ages past is yet our hope for years to come. With equal certainty, I am discovering that, if we will carefully and diligently care for the pastoral needs of God’s people, and, if we will go weekly to our ancient texts and return to God’s people with a message from God passionately and imaginatively delivered, God’s faithful people will follow us wherever God is calling them and us. Moreover, if we care for them and preach truth to them, they will support us in the strong prophetic stands we must now take in a world gone mad and in the servant roles we must now assume for an ever more desperate people. The thought of doing that while in exile is both exciting and daunting. At least that’s the way it looks in my rearview mirror.

    Notes

    1. With apologies to Reinhold Niebuhr for the play on the title of his famous book. 2. Idlewild’s large recreation ministry was started during Jones’s tenure as a way for black and white people to play together because they wanted to rather than because they had to. With Robert Fakkama, Roger Manass, and now Brian Manass as succeeding directors, it has grown under the leadership of several pastors.

  • No news is good news

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    Protagonist Corner

    No News Is Not Good News

    J. Neil Alexander

    Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia

    When the parent of a teenager hasn’t heard from the police department on a Friday night, no news may well be good news. But when it comes to preaching, no news is not good news at all. No news is simply bad preaching. I suspect that part of the problem here is that our present-day electronic culture provides “news” around the clock. Perhaps you remember the fine movie Newsies about the young paper boys of an earlier era whose vital public service was to deliver the news morning and evening day after day. Remember how people would gather on the street corners waiting anxiously for the newsies to come bringing the latest edition? Remember how news from Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley was a daily, special, anticipated event? The weekly and daily “news cycles” have now been reduced to “minute by minute” coverage. The twenty-four hour instant availability of whatever we want to know may have flattened the world, but it has also anesthetized us to the point that we can hardly tell when we have actually heard something that qualifies as news. I often wonder if our recent fascination with “entertainment-style worship” and “powerpoint preaching” isn’t some sort of attempt to force the news we have out into the open. Fearful that our message is not getting through, we adopt and adapt and repackage the goods to the point it looks more and more like everything else we see and hear and encounter. All of a sudden what we do in the church begins to blend in with its surroundings, and its distinctiveness and clarity is lost once again. One morning we all wake up and discover that the churches that never managed to get on board with these new movements – those that basically just get together and sing and pray, preach and celebrate sacraments – are without any warning on the cutting edge of a revolution that is impossible to hold back. Much to our amazement, we discover that what really sells is not the packaging but the content. We too easily allowed ourselves to believe that the medium is the message. Now we have a never-ending medium and all-too-little message. Perhaps we can now begin to discover afresh that it was really about the news all along: the good news of Jesus. In my nearly two decades of teaching homiletics, I found that keeping my students focused on “the news” was both the hardest part of the job and also the most rewarding. Discovering passion about the news is the most valuable lesson to be learned for their future ministries in the church. The best rhetorical strategy, careful exegesis, thoughtful theology, pastoral sensitivity, oral style, and effective delivery in the world will not make them decent preachers: they have to know the news, believe the news, and be compelled to share the news. And they have to know and internalize that their vocation is to be a very special breed of newsies. Several years ago I mused with some of my colleagues in the academy that a homiletics class might well be a carefully crafted disguise for a course in the spirituality of public ministry. My older brother was a newspaperman of the old school. By the time he retired he had been the editor or publisher of several major American dailies. He was a breed unto

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    himself. For years we had a very special kind of connection, and it was not just because we were brothers. We discovered that we were both in the news business. In our long conversations over the years, the principal thing he taught me was the importance of distinguishing between an event and the news of an event. He believed strongly that even the greatest and most profound events rarely made much of a difference in people’s lives or in the life of the world. But he believed just as strongly that how those events are reported, how the story is told, how it becomes news, has the power to change the course of human history. One of his favorite examples of this principle (and he had lots of them!) was the assassination of President Kennedy. A man by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president as his motorcade made its way through Dallas. The president was injured, blood was splattered on Mrs. Kennedy, a bullet wounded Governor Connelly, and a few Secret Service men got winded. The president died a short time later. That was pretty much the event. In global perspective it was a rather insignificant few moments. DATELINE: Dallas, Texas. November 22,1963. The President of the United States of America is dead. That’s the news! It reverberated around the globe. Nations were shaken and kingdoms tottered. The event itself was relatively minor. The event itself was over and done with in a matter of minutes on a November afternoon decades ago. But the news of it continues to this day to change the world. It is a reference point in American and in world history. Only a small handful of people felt the direct impact of the event, but everyone who was alive at the time knows exactly where they were, who they were with, and what they were doing when they heard the news that President Kennedy was dead. And those who were not yet born when President Kennedy was killed live their lives in a world still reeling from the news of it. Perhaps a personal example will be useful. Some time ago, an old and dear friend was tragically killed in an automobile accident. At the time of his death, I was frolicking on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with my family, completely oblivious to the tragedy. When my friend died, I felt no pain, no sadness, and no grief. The rites of Christian burial came and went without my knowledge or participation. My friend’s death had no impact upon me whatsoever. Months later, and quite by accident, I heard the news of his death. I was shocked. I was angry. I was distraught. By that time, his family and other close friends were well into the healing of their pain and grief. For me, however, it was as raw and tender as could be. My experience was very much in the immediacy of the moment when I heard the news. My friend’s death caused me no pain, but the news of it nearly killed me. The implications of this for preaching the gospel are clear: lives are changed not when words are spoken but when news is heard. Let’s think about this for a moment in reference to the most critical event – the core event without which nothing else makes much of a difference – at the heart of the gospel, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Consider this statement: The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead never changed anyone’s life! Before you call the heresy hunters, think through this with me. You remember the resurrection narratives. Who was there? No one, basically. There was that angel-guy sitting on the rolled-away stone, but remember, angels are messengers; he heard it from someone else. Mary and the other women make their way

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    to the tomb. They lug their jars of embalming ointments, fresh cloth to wrap the body of Jesus, perhaps some incense to cover the odor of the decaying flesh. They make their way in the light darkness of early morning, overcome by sadness and despair, and filled with fear at the thought of everything their future might hold. (Jesus by this time has already been risen for an hour or so and is on his way to Galilee to surprise the other disciples.) Nothing about the resurrection of the Savior has changed anything in the lives of the women on their way to the tomb. Why? (“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”) Because they have not heard. (“He is not here. He is risen !) News ! Immediately their lives are changed because they have heard the news that Jesus is risen from the dead! All the while, the other disciples are locked behind closed doors, and as far as they are concerned, life is about as desperate as it gets. (Jesus is risen, remember, but the disciples don’t know it.) So the women go in haste to the place where the disciples are in mourning with the news that Jesus is risen from the dead. And that news has spread from behind those fast-closed doors to the ends of the earth, changing the lives of those who hear the news that the one who was dead is alive forevermore. Got any news?

  • Imposition

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    Imposition

    II Corinthians 5:20-6:10; Psalms 51:1-17

    Jon M. Walton The First Presbyterian Church in the City of New York, New York

    I think this is the first time we have imposed ashes at First Church, or if not, it is at least the first time I have done so here. I do this realizing that imposing ashes, as it is called in the liturgy of the church, is a new thing in our midst. It is considered by many as a “Catholic” or an “Episcopal” rite and not very Presbyterian in nature. In reality, the order for this service comes directly from the Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church, the approved source for liturgical use in our church for the past decade. And today many Presbyterian churches across the city and the nation will impose ashes in services just like this one. More importantly, the observance of Ash Wednesday and the imposition of ashes have a much longer history than the developments of the past decade in Reformed worship. Using ashes as a sign of repentance is an ancient practice, often mentioned in the Bible. Nineveh responded to the prophet Jonah’s call for repentance by putting on sackcloth and sitting in ashes (Jonah 3:5-9). And we thought a small sign of ashes on the forehead was ostentatious. Sitting in ashes! Explain that to your boss! Job at the end of his trials repents before God with dust and ashes (Job 42:6). Jeremiah calls for Israel’s repentance by putting on sackcloth and rolling in ashes (Jeremiah 6:26). And Jesus reproaches the cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida, Tyre and Sidon and Capernaum for their lack of repentance, their unwillingness to put on ashes (as he said) and turn to God (Matthew 11:2Iff). The early Christians adopted the use of ashes from Jewish practice as an external mark of penitence. Far from being simply a practice of the more liturgically formal churches, the imposition of ashes takes us much farther back, to our biblical roots, to our sourcebook and standard of faith and practice, the Bible. Traditionally, the ashes used for imposition on Ash Wednesday are taken from the palms of the previous year’s Palm Sunday, burned, and mixed with oil to make the dust that is used in this service. Ashes symbolize several elements of our lives. They remind us of the price of our sin. In Genesis, God tells Adam for the first time that he will die: “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” It must have been a stunning announcement for Adam, like that time when as children it suddenly dawns on us that we too are going to die. When the ashes are imposed, the tradition is to repeat that phrase, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Believe it or not, the ashes also represent cleansing. In the ancient world, ash was used in the absence of soap. And we apply the ash to the forehead as a substitute for water and as a reminder of our baptism. Ashes remind us of the shortness of human life. At the funeral service, the words said at the graveside are “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” a solemn reminder that even our bodies are impermanent. Finally, ashes are a symbol of our need to repent, confess our sins, and return to God, perhaps the earliest and most biblical reason for using ashes at all. In that sense, the ashes remind us that nothing in this life is permanent. Or as my friend Cliff Swartz,

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    a professor at Stony Brook University, used to say, “On the day I die, all my projects will be incomplete.” For the longest time we Presbyterians got away from imposing ashes. In the Reformation, Zwingli and some of the other reformers were particularly opposed to the idea of using any rituals that did not appeal to reason and intellect. Preaching was considered to be Christian education, and signs of the cross, even religious paintings, were considered anathema. Zwingli had the paintings on the walls of his church in Zurich whitewashed for fear of any representation of God that might appeal to superstition. It was a bleak time for the mystery and the inexplicable of our faith. We overcame many such excesses of the Reformation, but imposing ashes took longer, until the latter part of the twentieth century, for many Presbyterians to recover. I wonder if one of the reasons for that may not have been simply because of our forebears’ fear of superstition. But also because the ashes remind us of our mortality, a mortality and vulnerability that we try to keep at bay, and out of our minds. There is an episode of the Golden Girls in which Dorothy has something wrong with her. She goes to a series of doctors who try to diagnose her problem, but it eludes them, and several even suggest that it is psychosomatic. Dorothy visits her neighbor and friend, Dr. Harry Weston, and asks him to look at her chart, the record of all the medical tests she has taken. Harry reads it carefully. Finally Dorothy asks him, “Am I going to die, Harry?” And Dr. Weston answers, “Without a doubt. Sooner or later, you’re going to die. But I doubt you will die of whatever this is.” Over the years, when I have visited in the hospital with parishioners, and when I myself have been a patient, I have always realized that the elephant in the room about which we are all reluctant to speak is the persistent question, “Am I going to die?” And like the response Harry gives Dorothy, the answer is “Without a doubt, sooner or later you and I are going to die.” It is a reminder none of us likes to hear. In fact it’s an imposition to hear it. The reminder of our mortality imposes itself into our life, like an unwelcome visitor. We keep death at bay by distracting ourselves, by going shopping, watching television, seeing the latest movie and play and concert, and logging onto the internet for interminable hours chatting with others we don’t know yet acting as if we do. We work from seven in the morning until ten at night, and sometimes overnight, and slip a briefcase under the pew on Sunday morning because we are headed to the office after the service. We build up our bank account as an insurance policy against Old Scratch, as if somehow if we have enough of that security we will have security of the soul as well. But Scratch knows how to get to us anyway and take everything we treasure, just when we thought we were safe. Of course we don’t like to think about the dust that we are, the sin that stands between us and God, the earthliness and humanity of our frame, our transitory dust that blows away one day. We try to convince ourselves that we are invulnerable, invincible, immortal—that this moment is forever. This past week I came smack-dab into the face of this mortality issue. I had occasion to return a call to my former church in Delaware and to try and reach one of the former pastors with whom I had worked there. There is a new receptionist at the phone in that church, a person added to the staff since I left. I have dreaded somewhat calling that church, in the past, because I was so well known and the receptionist always knew my voice and would hold me up by asking how things were going here

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    and how was I doing, and did I like New York, and all that. And I just wanted to have her pass me on to the person I called. But there’s a new person there now, and the new person does not know me. “May I speak to Anne,” I asked. “I’ll pass you through,” the new receptionist said. “May I ask who’s calling?” she inquired. “Jon Walton,” I said with some hesitancy, sure she would recognize my name and say, “Oh I’ve heard so much about you” and “How do you like New York?” and “How are things going there?” and all that. But instead she repeated back my name, “Jon Walton,” completely disinterested. “Just a moment.” I got Anne’ s voicemail, but I also got a dose of reality. In a moment of time, in that lack of recognition, I realized that life moves on. Others come and take our place, and we will not always be remembered. Somebody else moves into the apartment we leave. Somebody else takes our job after us. Somebody else comes next, and we are reminded that we are dust and to dust we shall return. “I have been thinking a lot about death, these days,” a man with HIV told me recently. And, of course, we all do, whether it is conscious or not, think about death— when we hear the reports on the morning news that a suicide bomber has taken a few more lives in Fallujah or Mosul, or that a soldier has been killed overnight in a mortar attack, all this as we, unaffected, spread the jam on our morning toast. A teenager on a wrestling team in Long Island is killed the night of his team’s championship match, and here in the city a truck kills two boys, ten and eleven, on their way home from school. Even the young must die. And we try to pretend we don’t care. But we do, even when we don’t allow ourselves to care. We notice. We notice death when we hear about the friend who is battling cancer, or see the neighbor in the elevator with a wrap around her head, the loss of hair a side effect of chemotherapy. We notice the shadow of death with the pain in the shoulder, and the look in the mirror in the morning and all those gathering wrinkles. We notice it, even though we won’t admit it. We notice it. Ash Wednesday reminds us of two things, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. How is it the psalmist puts it? “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; …for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” We fly away. And the ashes remind us that we are fallen and we can’t get up on our own. We need God’s help. We need God’s forgiveness for our sin. And we need God’s love, like a mother who gathers her children to her to nurture and protect them. That is finally the hope that is scratched in the ash on our foreheads, that God’s love has reached all the way to earth, to the dust from which we have been made, and made of the dust the peace of heart and spirit that we seek. Made with tender mercy and loving care, just like that dust God took in hand to shape the first creatures, man and woman. There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. We may be dust, but dust that we are, we are loved—loved, made whole, and made new by the resurrection of Jesus, who has shown us in his death and resurrection that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing can separate us from God’s love. That is the secret scratched in the ash and imposed on our foreheads. Nothing can separate us from God’s love.

  • From windows overlooking the street

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    From Windows Overlooking the Street

    Walter Brueggemann

    Decatur, Georgia

    I have been pondering words from Woodrow Wilson, son of Davidson College, that he wrote while still an academic. He wrote them in 1891 in The Atlantic Monthly, words reprinted in the current issue of that journal. Wilson considers what it is that causes some books to become “immortal,” long-lasting in influence and stature. And then Wilson wonders about the kinds of authors who can produce such books. As an author who is well short of any book that is “immortal,” I find his words nonetheless instructive to me:

    It is best for the author to be born away from literary centres, or to be excluded from their ruling set if he be born in them. It is best that he start out with his thinking, not knowing how much has been thought and said about everything. A certain amount of ignorance will insure his sincerity, will increase his boldness and shelter his genuineness, which is his hope of power. Not ignorance of life, but life may be learned in any neighborhood ;—not ignorance of the greater laws which govern human affairs, but they may be learned without a library of historians and commentators, by imaginative sense, by seeing better than by reading;—not ignorance of the infinitudes of human circumstance, but knowledge of these may come to a man without the intervention of universities;—not ignorance of one’s self and of one’s neighbor, but innocence of the sophistications of learning, its research without love, its knowledge without inspiration, its method without grace; freedom from its shame at trying to know many things as well as from its pride of trying to know but one thing.1

    These words are important to me because they resonate well with the “ignorance” entrusted to me by my disadvantaged educational history. And then Wilson writes words that for me have a much broader significance:

    The ability to see for one’s self is attainable, not by mixing with crowds and ascertaining how they look at things, but by a certain aloofness and selfcontainment . The solitariness of some genius is not accidental; it is characteristic and essential. To the constructive imagination there are some immortal feats which are possible only in seclusion. The man must heed first and most of all the suggestions of his own spirit; and the world can be seen from windows overlooking the street better than from the street itself.2

    The mark of writing that has a chance of durable import, he suggests, is the consequence of a closely guarded and relished privacy for those who are not too busy networking too widely or intensely, but who make room for brooding and independent thought of a courageous kind. Of course the readership of the Journal is not committed primarily to the writing

    Easter 2006

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    of books, immortal or otherwise. But it strikes me that Wilson’s wise words may, beyond the production of books, be worth considering in two other zones. First, it occurs to me that these words may be good counsel to pastors. There is no doubt that pastors need to be in touch with folks, to network and be attentive with all due grace to social interaction and expectation. But the church—and even more the society around the church—does not need winsome or skilled social directors. Given the power of an anti-life ideology in our society and given the temptation of the church to dumb down, the church urgently needs pastors who are thoughtful, informed, wellgrounded , and alert to the connections that lie well beneath the surface. Most especially in the Reformed tradition but more generally in all old-line churches, there is an urgent need to think the faith. And that cannot be done by e-mail messages or the last news summary or the latest press conference or fad. There is of course great merit in being “on the street itself.” But there are limits to what can come from such engagement that stays on the surface. Beyond that, pastors will have a fresh word and a good word from time spent with the classics of the theological tradition and with enough free time to ponder connections and interfaces that one may receive from “the windows overlooking the street.” Wilson’s words suggest to me a recovery of the critical intellectual task of the church, for somebody among us now needs to think in a society where thinking has all but disappeared. Second, as à theological educator, I wonder about seminarians, college students, and other young people who strike this old guy as excessively “connected.” (And from that I wonder about “youth ministry” that tends to border on entertainment. We seem to forget in much ofthat process that we are nurturing the next wave of disciples who can stand before the authorities with the truth given us.) There is no doubt that e-mail can savage one’s time and yield the illusion that one is at work or even being educated. There is no doubt, moreover, that excessive cell phone contact extends adolescence and slows the hard process of becoming free, “autonomous” moral and intellectual agents. Of course the old model of isolated learners is not one to which any of us would return. But there is a place in nurture and education for independence, risk, responsibility , and accountability. One may wonder where the leadership will come from in time to come, with enough sustained, grounded self to step out front without checking first to see that everyone else is also headed there. I assume Wilson would not have written these words back then unless he sensed a problem with excessive connectedness. How much more now! The outcome of such connectedness may be humaneness and a gentle attentiveness; but such acute interdependence also leads to an ersatz therapeutic propensity that does not specialize in moral courage or daring thought. There is no doubt that Jesus regularly withdrew from the crowds, “the street,” to pray. It must also have been the case that he withdrew to ponder the tradition in which he stood and its promises, and to reread his context from the angle ofthat tradition. Prayer and thought go together but should not be confused with each other. They both require moral courage that will not be nourished by too much “group think.” The process of individuation matters among those who might, on some occasion, be able to say with freedom, “Thus saith the Lord.”

    Notes 1. Woodrow Wilson, “How Books Become Immortal,” The Atlantic Monthly (January/February 2006): 58-60. 2. Ibid, 60.

    Journal for Preachers

  • What did you feed them?

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    Protagonist Corner

    What Did You Feed Them?

    H. Gray Southern St. James United Methodist Church, Greenville, North Carolina

    Like most pastors, I run into a lot of people at the hospital. Late last spring I had two juxtaposed conversations, one going on the elevator, one going off. Going on, I ran into a clerical colleague. It was Sunday afternoon, so our exchange automatically drifted to our morning worship services. “I gave them my very best and they’ll never remember it,” was his review of the morning. I understand that depression, and I hear a lot of it in other preachers. Preachers work hard, and they want to see the effectiveness of their work. We hear parishioners talking about the movies they saw, broadcasts that moved them, the new and the best. Even worship is discussed as a designer craft: Is this a “traditional” or a “contemporary” worshiping congregation? Are we “emerging” or “retro”? After my friend got off at his chosen floor, I spent the rest of my ride wondering what my congregation remembered from that morning’s brilliant sermon. I worship with gracious and encouraging people, many of whom say nice things at the door, but is that even what I want? I do, but I want more. I want to preach in ways that move and amaze, to change lives and to redirect energies. I want to preach in a way that confounds the university crowd I enjoy; I want to preach intellectually acceptable sermons. Getting off the elevator, I ran into a man I barely know. He works at the hospital as a patient transporter. He can walk fifteen miles a shift, pushing gurneys and wheelchairs all over the medical center. We met last year when he transported a church member and I walked along beside her. He is a devout Christian who has remembered me ever since. He greeted me with “What did you feed them this morning?” That greeting is his standard hello for the early part of the week. What did I feed them? His greeting has taught me one of a preacher’s most valuable lessons, how to understand the weekly, sometimes daily, task of preaching. My transporter friend is not asking me if I “moved” people or shocked them into new sensibilities. He is asking me how I offered them the gospel to sustain them. I have eaten many meals throughout my life. A few of them—my first date with my wife, my first meal in a new home, Christmas with my grandmother—I remember. However, most of my previous meals I don’t recollect. But plainly they happened. I am here, sustained and made stronger by each one. In an older edition of The Book of Common Prayer, the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent applies well to preaching:

    Blessed Lord, who has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest [emphasis added] them, that by patience and comfort of the holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.

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    To conceive of preaching as offering life-giving, life-sustaining food redirects the preacher’s desire to amaze into a holier desire to have it shape and sustain a life in Christ. “You are what you eat” is the constant refrain of all the people who urge us to better nutrition and better living. People starve when not well fed, no matter how much they consume. In our culture of plenty, malnourished people abound, and the poor among us literally starve while others of us worry about diets to slim. The parallels for a preacher in our culture are plain. Preachers are called to serve what will satisfy, nourish, and give ground for strong growth. We offer the Word, and the Word is the basis on which people grow into Christ. Meals that aren’t “remembered” contribute nonetheless to our life. The metaphor of feeding the flock comes not only from Jesus but from our charge at ordination when clergy, almost without regard to tradition or the wording used, vow “to preach the Word of God in the congregation” as a “means of grace.” Some meals are difficult to swallow because they confront us. When I sit down to eat and have a modest meal with items not of my choosing, I am confronted with my own desires to eat all the wrong things, as well as the consequences. On a few occasions, I have even complained to the cook that the meal wasn’t to my liking. The bracing news that it’s what I need—or must have—can be hard to take. So, too, sermons sometimes serve up what we do not want to swallow. When congregations complain about the offering, the preacher could well answer simply that this is what we need. My hospital friend’s query, “What did you feed them?” bespeaks a need for me as a preacher to recognize how hungry my people are. Throughout my life, I have been blessed with cooks around me who cared enough for me to consider my likes and dislikes, along with what I truly needed. The metaphor of feeding the flock extends even here. Jesus wept over us and preached to us out of love for our needs. As preachers, we are to do the same. If my job is to serve up the Word, to feed the flock, I am responsible to do it in ways that ensure my people can understand and digest that Word. Different meals suit different occasions; different meals suit different people. My friend’s question reminds me as the gospel chef to consider to whom I preach. Faced with a variety of tastes in my family, my mother used to vary her offerings. Why should I do any differently as a preacher preparing the Word for a hungry flock? We identify some foods as comfort foods. Many people devote a substantial amount of time and money reading cookbooks and watching The Food Network. The church rightly devotes energy to the incredible contradiction that in the midst of that physical abundance millions are hungry. The metaphor extends into the pulpit. I understand my colleague’s pain that no one remembers what he said that Sunday morning. But I know he’s wrong: he’s a good preacher who delivers the Word that sustains with love and grace. He needs to meet my other friend, the hospital transporter, who, I suspect would ask him the same question: “What did you feed them?” When my preacher friend reframes his self-analysis into “What did I feed them this morning?” he will grow in his understanding of his work as a pastor who preaches the Word to a hungry flock. He will become more effective at the serving. He will see himself as a host for the Host. And he will be thankful to be invited himself to the Table where he and others feast on the Word, feast on the Lamb, and look for the heavenly banquet to come.

    Advent 2006

  • The gold star

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    Poem

    The Gold Star

    Mary Kennan Herbert

    Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York

    Exemplars here endure these long Sunday nights.

    We remember soup or trains or peppermint or tin,

    baseball and summer and a distant radio again.

    When I was seven I felt sorry for Mrs. Young

    next door because she did not have a son any more.

    She did have a Gold Star flag in her front window.

    All the people of the world walked past her window.

    I was sure they all wanted to see her Gold Star.

    Mrs. Young looked out and saw me skip by.

    How long did those Gold Stars last? Where does

    a star go when it fades? He was her only boy,

    my mother said. Be nice to her, stay off her flowers

    growing by the fence. Yet I climbed that fence

    anyway, and picked the flowers, wanting beauty

    and power of my own. Mrs. Young came outside

    and said sternly, “Get down!” and life was reined in.

    It is a Monday morning joke: Sundays are depressing.

    The world knows why you are late putting your life

    in order. How can you, when you must chew open

    your own belly to liberate bad, beloved dreams?

    The gold cloth star in the window was so pretty,

    like the flowers, like the afternoon sun reflected

    on the window, where Mrs. Young waited and

    watched us, then stared at her newspaper, not poems.

    Advent 2006

  • Interpreting the truth: changing the paradigm of biblical studies

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    One New Book for the Preacher

    Charles E. Bennison, Jr. Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    INTERPRETING THE TRUTH: CHANGING THE PARADIGM OF BIBLICAL STUDIES by L. William Countryman. Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2003.

    L. William Countryman’s 1988 study, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today, was arguably the seminal work behind the 2003 decision by the Episcopal Church to consecrate a partnered gay man as a bishop – thereby establishing a sexual ethic unparalleled symbolically by that of any other faith community to date. Drawing on insights of the anthropologist Mary Douglas regarding purity and danger, Countryman, Professor of New Testament at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California, reevaluated biblical texts dealing with purity in light of their ancient Jewish context in order to clarify the foundations of theological-ethical discourse in the New Testament and to arrive at surprisingly fresh understandings of the truth of the reality of our human (and therefore sexual) lives. In his new book, Interpreting the Truth: Changing the Paradigm of Biblical Studies, Countryman describes his interpretive practice employed earlier. Substitute “preacher” whenever he mentions the “interpreter” or “reader” of biblical texts, and here we have an insightful and provocative challenge to our understanding of the homiletic enterprise. With apologies to Countryman, I make this substitution throughout this article. For preachers tempted weekly to scour the biblical text for information or content, or to latch on to a single word, a single passage, or a single theme in isolation from the larger complexity that gave the text meaning in its age of origin, Countryman reminds us that texts are rhetorical and must be read rhetorically – or “between the lines.” Indeed, in this book he models how to do exactly that through his exegeses of the Letters of Jude, James, and Romans. Rhetoric, like homiletic, is speech used to sway others, to move them toward a “point,” to effect metanoia or “change of mind.” Because in New Testament letters the authors delay making their “point,” thereby allowing time to build their argument, leaving it to the end, Countryman recommends reading them “back-to-front.” Like preachers, their authors stand in “the interpretive triangle” between the text and the social environment of the human community, using imagery, rhythm, sound, assonance , appeals to emotions, variations in pacing, use of unusual vocabulary, chains of argument, to encourage and make possible certain responses and definite actions. Indeed, from his reading of New Testament letters, Countryman lists rhetorically persuasive devices instructive for every preacher. He also charges preachers to demonstrate “a certain teacherly care and concern” by approaching the text for its pastoral effectiveness, its results, its sophrosune or “practical wisdom.” Practical wisdom comes through an “interpretive practice” that “expects both questions and answers to emerge, develop, and change in the living process of

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    interpretation through a conversation involving many partners and significant human complexity on all sides.” The practice takes seriously both the “spiritual dimensions” and the “social nature of interpretation,” is based on experience, and is experimental. Because it is experimental and experiential, Countryman confesses that he came to what is he proposing “by osmosis,” that it is “deliberately somewhat vague,” and that he pursues it through “intuition,” a process of trial and error, and of “hypothesizing and confirming or relinquishing our hypotheses.” In a process of oscillation between theoria and praxis reminiscent ofthat described by Don Browning in Λ Fundamental Practical Theology, Countryman contends that “sometimes practice changes and makes theory rethink itself; sometimes the reverse happens.” Whatever critical methodologies he employs, he does so, not as prescriptions leading to conclusive answers, but as heuristic devices to be used artistically and creatively in order to ask new questions and see things the preacher might not otherwise have sought or may even regard as bizarre. For Countryman, the preacher is not simply a functionary analyzing or taking apart the text, but “a creator continually creating the culture of the present and future in the act of interpreting the past.” The text is like a musical score that is constantly being brought to life anew by its performance. Every performance, moreover, is de novo. No two are ever the same. In contrast to much current practice, preachers should engage in less analysis and more synthesis. Practical wisdom is grounded in an understanding of the truth different from or contrary to what we often assume. “Remember,” Countryman warns, “that the text itself is not the point of the conversation. The ideas in the text are not the point. Ideas about the text are certainly not the point. All these are means, not the end. The goal of the conversation is illumination of life, of reality, of all the ‘out there’ of our existence, which we understand in large part through our culture’s construction of it, but which always remains also, to a significant degree, undomesticated by our cultural constructs and ready to break them.” Because the texts themselves are projects of a particular culture, they cannot be reduced to abstract, timeless, “high-theory” doctrines. By the same token, however, because the culture of which they are products is not our culture, they can help us see “reality” beneath the social constructions of our own prevailing culture. Thus they are useful to us precisely because they are foreign and not contemporary with us. Coming from other than our own time and place, their use to the preacher is to make relative “the certainties of the present, break their stronghold on human possibility, and offer a few alternative directions, and so set our collective imaginations free to continue into the future.” As an illustration, Countryman points out that through scriptural interpre­ tation, gay and lesbian persons have come to see that the social constructs of sexuality we have inherited have been in error because they have not adequately described those persons’ reality. To come to terms with a hitherto unseen “reality” beneath the prevailing social constructs is to discover “truth.” “Truth” is less the opposite of “heresy” or “error,” than of a “lie.” Consequently, it is not apossession, but a surprising discovery. “Truth,” he writes, “is the chink in the steel helmet of our preconceptions, through which we catch an unexpected ray of light. It is the disconcerting (and perhaps happy) moment when you find that part of what you were told can be peeled back to reveal something

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    quite different underneath.” “Truth” is not “something I was told on authority,” but “something I have stumbled across.” Countryman argues that while written texts communicate what James C. Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance would call the “public transcript” of a culture, because they are written down, they are subject to analysis that can lead to the revelation of their incoherence and eventually the galvanizing of a “hidden transcript” that subverts the prevailing, public one. To take written texts seriously, the preacher cannot have a “tin ear” for their complexities. Lamentable, therefore, is the current fragmentation between academics and non-academics with the result that “seminarians learn about biblical scholarship; but, in many cases, once they are in positions of parish leadership, it has little effect on their preaching.” Countryman wants to overcome a division wherein the academy feels the community of faith can “be fed off its scraps,” and the community of faith fails to see the text as dangerous, subversive, and threatening to the status quo. To discover the “truth” of the “reality” that is often veiled by the social constructs of any given culture, preachers must listen attentively and critically to, rather than merely make use of, the text. Only in that way can they hear, and consequently be surprised and challenged by, the ancient, alien, human voice that the text offers. They must attend to “larger wholes,” and read in such a way that the text will defeat their own expectations. They need a willingness to be surprised, and to address the vital question of what human life means in this world, in relationship to God, one another, and the rest of the creation. Preachers thereby give fresh voice to the human voices embedded in the text. As they do so, they put the faith community in touch with its own humanity, thereby liberating it from the temptation now so rampant across our divided world to identify itself with God, to see itself as superior to other communities, to claim that it has perfect access to the mind of God. “Scripture fulfills its reason for existing,” Countryman writes, “only when it serves to facilitate the community’s fallible, searching approach to the God we shall never fully understand.” The search for the truth of our reality thus results in its continuing, evolving revelation. Countryman finds a precedent for this search in the Letter to the Romans where Paul demonstrates a capacity to read scripture with new eyes, “seeing things previously passed over as unexpectedly central and questioning the centrality of issues such as purity that he previously thought to be of great importance. In Paul’s experience, Scripture is not in conflict with change. Indeed, it can, however surprisingly , turn out to ground it.” To be listeners, preachers must be both a part of the faith community and something like what classical Greek called a zenos, a “guest-friend” who can bring to the interpretive task a perspective those more closely identified with the community probably do not have. Required is a combination of engagement and detachment, a willingness to be transparent to glimpses of truth, facilitating the encounter between the text and the community. Unless preachers have one foot outside the community as well as one foot in it, the community will become stuck in a claustrophobic, cultural cul-de-sac. To help the community remain human, the interpreter must above all be in touch with his or her own humanity. The task is that of “plumbing human values in the presence of the Holy.”

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    Countryman claims that the fragmentation caused by globalization, multiculturalism , the entry of new voices in the interpretation of the scriptures, and academic specialization has only multiplied the number cultural cul-de-sacs. Even the postmodern drive to undermine the hegemony of meta-narrati ves like patriarchalism often eventuates in the enthronement of those meta-narratives in their own right. Countryman is at his most provocative and instructive in his assertion that the scriptures constitute nothing more or less than a “unique human artifact.” That, indeed, is what makes them practically useful and truth-revealing. Whatever claims are made for divine influence upon them, they result from human effort, are put in the human medium of language, are inevitably limited by their humanity, and connect us with other human voices. It is the scriptures’ humanity that interests us, because through it we can, in conversation with other voices, discover anew our own humanness. Therefore, rather than being an object of study, the scriptures are a medium through which we humans can encounter God and learn in greater measure than heretofore the truth of our reality and that of the world around us. Like people of other faiths with their canonical texts, our preachers take up ours in order to find out, not just about the texts, but also the world and the meaning of human life within it. Countryman is an Episcopalian, heir to a pragmatic, empirical, experiential, Anglican “common law” approach that steers away from developing systematic theologies or grand theories or comprehensive meta-narratives. (He expresses dissatisfaction with Rudolf Bultmann’ s and Raymond Brown’s schematic treatments of the Fourth Gospel.) He prefers dealing spiritually with concrete questions, issues, and problems in terms of precedence found in what he calls “the larger context of our ancient, scriptural, catholic faith.” Anglicanism, of course, was born on an island that for much of its history the English Channel kept out of reach from the more hegemonic theological influences that dominated the European continent. People consequently had to rely largely on their own experience of reality for their understanding of the truth, tested over time. Doing so, they realized that, as Countryman puts it, “no two people or communities or moments of history begin from the same point or have the same vocation.” Of course, the Bible itself, Countryman notes, is not univocal. It is a conversion of many voices. Through the hearing of them the truth may be discovered. When? Countryman borrows from the text for his answer: “When that one, the Spirit of truth comes, it will lead you in all truth” (John 16:13).

  • Mirror to America: the autobiography of John Hope Franklin

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    One New Book for the Preacher

    Joseph S. Harvard

    First Presbyterian Church, Durham, North Carolina

    MIRROR TO AMERICA: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN by John Hope Franklin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 401 pages.

    Let me begin with an admission of my personal gratitude for the appearance of Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. I am honored to call Professor Franklin a dear Mend and neighbor. We met in the early 1980’s soon after we both moved to Durham. He had come from the University of Chicago to teach American history at Duke University, and I had accepted the call to the First Presbyterian Church. Our meeting took place as we joined with others in working to oppose what President Dwight Eisenhower had earlier called the “military industrial complex” and the bellicose foreign policy that has been dominant recently in the United States. Fortunately, our friendship has been much more rewarding than were our efforts to change foreign policy. Several years ago, Franklin and I were discussing his latest book about his farther, Buck Franklin. I mentioned that I hoped he would write his autobiography soon. He said that it was his intention to do so after he finished a couple of other books he had in mind. I must have expressed some concern as his ninetieth birthday approached, but he assured me that he had a plan. We are all the richer because of the appearance of this autobiography. The cover describes the contents of the book: “The twentiethcentury fight for civil rights told in the first-person singular by a preeminent American historian.” Franklin is an outstanding historian whose classic work, From Slavery to Freedom , has sold over 3.5 million copies, gone through eight editions, has been translated into six languages, and remains the best account available of the African American experience in America. His autobiography makes it clear that his life has been a struggle to make his voice heard in a culture whose racial barriers have been constant impediments to people of color. With courage, commitment, discipline, and hope (he was well named!) Franklin has persevered. You can not read this book or listen to Franklin tell about the many times he has experienced bigotry, exclusion, and threats of violence simply because of his race without feeling the pain. It is so important for those of us who have benefited from “white privilege” to hear these stories. It is remarkable that these experiences have not embittered Franklin but rather have made him all the more determined to make a difference in removing racial barriers. In many ways, the task is more difficult now because many of the legal barriers have been removed and those that remain are more subtle and more devious. Franklin’s contributions are too numerous to acknowledge, as he has been an outstanding professor, author, and teacher. In addition, he finds time for family, friends, and students. As his ninety-second birthday approaches, you can still find him receiving manuscripts to evaluate, holding interviews, traveling to give lectures and attend book signings, tending his orchids, entertaining friends, and fishing. He

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    describes his disciplined life:

    During my life it has been necessary to work not only as hard as my energies would permit, but to do it as regularly and as consistently as humanly possible. This involved the strictest discipline in the maximum use of my time and energy. I worked two jobs in college and graduate school that made inordinate demands on my time, but there was no alternative to the regimen that circumstances demanded. And those circumstances included a refusal to check my catholic interests that have always prompted me to participate in activities beyond scholarship. (9)

    The title of the book is so appropriate: Mirror to America. Good “preacher” that he is, Franklin always has a text: “Now we see through a mirror dimly” (I Corinthians 13:12). The title of the book’s epilogue is “Through a Looking Glass.” This autobiography is a mirror into which we are invited to view ourselves and our nation. The picture we see is not pretty. The damage done and which continues to be done by racism is costly in human suffering and the lost human potential from gifted children of God who were born black. Franklin makes a particularly poignant plea for us to work together to reclaim the lives of many young African American males whose difficult struggles are symptoms of the continued destructive aspects of inequality and injustice. A cartoon in The New Yorker several years ago pictured a middle-aged man showing physical signs of his years. He is standing in front of a mirror and he says, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, lie to me !” We are like that man, for we have a hard time facing the truth about our racial history in this country. But Franklin believes, and I agree, that unless we have looked honestly into this mirror, it will be difficult for us to move forward toward a more just society. This is not an invitation to us to submerge ourselves in guilt. Rather, it is a call to action, to face honestly the truth about “the color line” and the sad history of our treatment of our African American brothers and sisters and then to do something about it. It is a reminder of the words of Jesus that knowing the truth shall set us free. This book is an invitation to learn how to listen to and to speak the truth in love. There is an incident described near the end of the book that captures our dilemma. Franklin was in Washington staying at the Cosmos Club. He describes what happened after a dinner with friends: “It was during our stroll through the club that a white woman called me out, presented me with her coat check, and ordered me to bring her coat. I patiently told her that if she would present her coat check to a uniformed attendant, ‘and all of the club attendants were in uniform,’ perhaps she could get her coat” (340). The next day, Franklin was standing in the East Room of the White House receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given by this country to a civilian. The old world and the new world exist side by side, and we stand in both. There is much love expressed by the author that reflects his gratitude and joy in life. Consider his description of how life is enriched by others:

    My life and my career have been fulfilled not merely by my own efforts but also by the thoughtful generosity of family, friends, and professional colleagues. I can only hope that they realize, as do I, how interdependent we

    Journal for Preachers

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    all are and how much more rewarding and fulfilling life is whenever we reach a level of understanding where we can fully appreciate the extent of our interrelationships with our reliance on those who came before us, kept us company during our lives, and will come after us. (8)

    The great photographs in the book capture Franklin’s strong affirmation and appreciation of life. The time he spends in his greenhouse with orchids is a source of great pleasure; in one photo, his beloved wife, Aurelia, holds one of his beautiful orchids. His gratitude and devotion to her is moving. Couples about to be married should read his chapter, “In Sickness and in Health”; it is a marvelous testimony to the way a commitment to another enriches life. Another photo captures Franklin’s love of flyfishing ; in it, he proudly holds a thirty-two pound salmon. Through these photos, his joy in life shines through. Are you looking for a gift for the person who has everything? I’ll bet that person does not possess a mirror like this autobiography. I admit that I did not have one until this book arrived. There is still some “dimness” in the mirror, but thanks to John Hope Franklin, my eyes have been opened so that I may see a vision of God’s truth that has the power to set us all free.