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  • Bury the Graveyard

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    Bury the Graveyard

    Matt Fitzgerald

    Saint Pauls UCC, Chieago, Illinois

    ”Tell yourself something you have no faith in has already begun to occur. ^’1 Kathleen Graber

    After Covid’s death threat forced every broadcast-resistant congregation in America to become a cut-rate Crystal Cathedral; after an ICU visit to a dead 28 year old on a respirator; after repeatedly delivering the indignity of live-streamed funer­ als; after teenaged screen-school and its attendant suffering; after suffering the virus and its idiot politics; after feeling the specter of death take shape and intensify so acutely it seemed death had become a living, breathing beast; after humming hymns because death would not let us sing; after singing hymns through a spit-wet mask…, I cannot tolerate the euphemism

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    Covid dead made the wrong choices, ate the wrong food, bought the wrong meals. They didn’t take care of themselves. ” But the deaths kept coming. Schools closed. The deaths kept coming. Church stopped. The deaths kept coming. Covid blew through consumerist theodicy, wrecking our ability to explain the grave away. At the height of the pandemic, people passed faster and faster, even as the word itself began to fail. If this is true, it is subconscious. On the surface we mean

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    The more isolated a person is, the less adept they are at navigating social cur­ rents. Interactions become awkward, and awkward interactions drive a person into deeper loneliness. How do you talk to a stranger when you haven’t had a conversa­ tion in weeks? How do you talk to an angel when you haven’t spoken to your best friend in days? One option the lectionary offers preachers this year is the Easter story from John’s Gospel. Standing at the mouth of Jesus’ grave, Mary Magdalene stammers and fumbles. Mary weeps. The gardener speaks: “Why are you weeping?” All she wants is his dead body. Is that too much? She tries to let her anger overwhelm her pain, but the gardener interrupts: “Mary.” She knows the voice. “Teacher!” Her pain was a sunbright beacon, her isolation a prayer of invocation: Come Lord Jesus! When we cry out. He acts. He is prone to arrive when we’re in tears. Tears might be the best lens to view him through. For this reason, you should spend time at the mouth of the tomb this Easter. But not too much time. Right before the first Easter after 9/11, the church I served printed 2,500 post­ cards, inviting the entire neighborhood to worship. I wrote the copy: “The ancient truth in a progressive church. Beautiful music and a short, joyful sennon.” When I sat down to compose my message, I could not stop thinking about bodies falling and bombs dropping, the dead in New York and the dead in Afghanistan. I knew Christ’s resurrection could upend their graves, but I spent more than half of that sermon contemplating death. Afterward in the handshake line, an elderly man I’d never seen sighed, “Young man, that was not joyful.” Then he looked me in the eyes saying “and I don’t think it was short either. 99

    This Easter, we need to face the pandemic without being subsumed by it. Every single person who donned a mask in 2019 felt death breathe down their neck. Preach­ ers don’t need to belabor death. At the same time, our collective awareness of the grave could strike isolation with a killing blow. None of us are alone. We are all grieving. Meanwhile, there is a larger death stalking all of existence. The polar ice caps are melting faster than the minutes of our lives. So we kill lions to clear forests to grow palm oil to replace fossil fuels. 90% of the world’s lion population has expired since 1993. No wonder we are grieving. Or maybe I’ve got the facts wrong. Maybe I don’t know a thing about lions. That’s entirely possible. It isn’t just our planet. Truth itself might be dying. Our task on Easter is to name a truth greater than the death of lions, earth, and honesty. Our task this Easter is to address the badgering suspicion that everything is ending. Our task this Easter is to craft sermons that kill the disorienting pain of pandemic grief as effectively as a dentist kills a toothache. To borrow a phrase, we believe grief follows loss like thunder follows lightning, if thunderclaps rolled for years. Grief is a drawn out experience of longing. Grief is the price you pay for love. I’ve said that at many funerals. The implication is that the more you love, the more harrowing your pain. We accept this because such pain

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    may be our only enduring connection to the dead. There is a temptation to cherish it. Everyone knows you must express it. If you repress it, it will fester and double, then club you. This means a grieving nation, a grieving world, must bewail itself back to health. Here is how Jon Connelly describes the conventional wisdom: “Painful emo­ tions need to be expressed in order to be eliminated. Such emotions need to be felt in order to be expressed. So, people are encouraged to feel bad in order to eventually feel somewhat better.”^ He then asks a surprisingly rude question: What if that is wrong? Connelly believes our reverence for grief inflicts injuries on the bereaved. “Anything that causes a loving couple whose child has died to go through a divorce cannot be sacred.”^ Connolly makes a distinction between the conscious mind and the deeper primitive mind by highlighting the difference between “I” and “self’: am not al^vays in control of my self ” In that sentence, the I is the alert, knowing mind. The “self’ is the unconscious that keeps my blood pumping and my lungs breathing and my basic drives fired. In grief, the two suffer a disconnect. The result is the emotional equivalent of an avoca­ do pit in the garbage disposal. “The primitive mind responds to the conscious mind’s ”9 desire to be with the deceased loved one by reminding you of the need to connect. I miss my dead father. My self says “connect.” It doesn’t know he’s dead. It just says “connect, connect, connect.” I am not in control of myself so I cry, cry, cry. The primitive minds in the members of our Covid-stunned, climate-anxious con­ gregations don’t know our death denial was upended by the pandemic and don’t know we have guaranteed ourselves a grim environmental future. Those minds just say “Return to blissful ignorance. Return, return, return.” We are not in control of Qmselves, so we cry, cry, cry. Connelly believes “grief happens because the mind persists in its attempt to cause the grieving individual to connect to the loved person in a way that does not and will not work.”^^ After diagnosing the problem, Connelly spends the majority of his book teaching a therapeutic method that aims to sustain a sense of connection between the living and the dead. I hope this portion of his book ignites a sea change in the therapeutic world. But as a preacher, it is Connelly’s nearly joyful attack on grief that excites me, which is to say that as preachers we are called to name what will connect the living and the dead the day this world ends. The gospels do not know grief as we understand it. They know shock in the face of death. Jesus wept over Lazarus, Mary wept over Jesus, and Peter ran in circles, telling lies. Loss is real and can drop us to our knees. But none of the disciples waited an entire year after Jesus died to make a major life decision. No one told Mary the only way to heal was to keep weeping. Reading Connelly helped me realize Jesus did not want his mother to ache and reel every time she thought of him. 11 Instead

    of grieving, the New Testament wants us to rejoice at death’s defeat. Christ’s survi­ vors face the grave with triumphant glee. “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

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    There are few chapters of scripture more luminously strange than the Gospels’ resurrection accounts. This year, the lectionary gives us one of them. What Paul says about death in 1 Corinthians 15 is too much.. .and not enough. The light of its strange glory is almost blinding. The passage has a giddy, lunatic quality: ‘‘The trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised beyond the reach of death, never to die again.” The last time I preached on the general resurrection, a trustworthy member of my church told me he found the sermon “intellectually insulting.” I understand his resis­ tance. The resurrection of Jesus is nearly impossible to believe. The resurrection of everyone is several steps beyond that. But, without the promise of its universal con­ clusion, Easter is reduced to a one-off miracle in which Jesus defeats his own death, amen. If resurrection took place for Jesus alone, it would be the only New Testament miracle rooted in His self-interest. This seems profoundly off and is a poor basis for our religion. No one celebrates the anniversary of Houdini’s greatest escape. The incarnation and the scars Jesus carried after Easter are hard to reconcile with the popular notion that you can go to heaven while your body stays behind. Soul and body comprise the self. Without both, you are not going anywhere, because without both you don’t exist. If we turn down the popular theology of an eternal soul/body dualism and listen to scripture, we find that we will not pass away before going up to heaven. We will die. After dying, we will wait. Then at the promised end, heav­ en will come down to us, this ravaged earth will be made new, and we will rise to live again. The challenge is not to make sense of Biblical logic. The challenge is to believe it. The challenge is finding a way to trust that we will be knit back together, God’s hands on the knitting needles, all of our once-dead molecules reassembled. Months before Easter, Jesus told his followers he would be resurrected. They were walking down a dusty road. I imagine that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, the other Mary, and their unnamed friend heard him say it. He would suffer, be rejected, killed, and on the third day he’d rise again. They believed half the story. He would die. Who doesn’t? They felt the threat of the forces allied against him. “I’ll suffer.” Sad but entirely proba­ ble. “And on the third day. I’ll rise again.” That sentence hung in the air. It cracked some­ thing open between the hard facts all around them and the dread inside their hearts, both of which suggested that sentence was nonsense. The women kept on walking. The lectionary also gives us the choice to use Luke this Easter. I imagine that in this version of the story, the women woke up on Easter morning having given up two days before. Jesus is dead. Death wins. This means that mortality is the most power­ ful, irrefutable, unavoidable, far-reaching, all-determining thing in existence. Which makes it God. Which means that God is negation, punishment, cessation, nothingness. Which is to say that if death wins, God does not exist. If you have not considered that possibility, you have let piety silence honesty. The women who made their way to Jesus’ grave must have wrestled with these questions. On that first Easter morning, Christ’s death and their own pain came barreling toward them. So they trudged to the graveyard. The pain inside them syncopated to the brutality around them. Death wins.

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    They walk straight into the tomb. Two men in dazzling clothes emerge. The women are terrified. The angels say, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” The women look at each other. The space Jesus’ words once cracked open is no more than a sliver between the fact of his death and the pain of their loss. But they remember it. He said it would happen. He said that he would rise again. Death has been defeated. Christ is risen. God is alive! The angels have proclaimed it. The sliver grows into a meadow, a prairie, a landscape broad and beautiful. The women leap into this new reality Easter has just broken open. And then they run. They cannot wait to tell the others. Our faith’s first four preachers go running with their proclamation: Christ is risen! Death may have a claim on you, but its grasp is weak. When it comes, the “no” of your mortality will be overwhelmed by Christ’s day-break brilliant Easter morning “YES.” They mean it. They feel it. Their words are met with disbelief. The apostles hear the women’s sermon and write it off as nonsense. These men are suffering. Jesus is dead. A sermon in the face of that fact and their own feelings? It means nothing. The women won’t be quiet: “Christ is risen. Christ is risen.” Insistent proclamation can make you doubt the strength of reason. It can push you past the limits of our logic. A sermon can gesture toward something else. It can name a third space between what pediatric psychiatrist Donald Winnicott called our “inner experience and our outer reality.”12 What if there is something else? Another kind of knowing, another kind of truth, a way of living that doesn’t automatically assume the truth is limited to facts and feelings? A good Easter sermon can crack our sense of possibility wide open by naming an approach to life that isn’t determined by the unstable turns of our own moods or the cold reality all around us. This Easter after Covid grimly marched so many to the grave, we can proclaim that Christ is risen, not as an isolated miracle, but as our jubilant grand marshal, the first person in an endless parade of resurrec­ tion. You can call yourself a Christian and never come to church. You can cele­ brate Easter by going straight to brunch. This Easter, our worshipers will come to church because they are hurting and their hurt has slipped to wonder. Are the old rumors true? They will come longing to be told that death has been defeated. We have been taught to live as if the whole of reality were confined to what we can see and to how we feel, to what our limited, blinkered science can report, and to what we might make of it. But in the realm of the really real, “the facts” can only see what we have told them to look for. What if there’s more? As the women’s proclamation echoed, Peter began to wonder. Even in his pain he wonders. Then he sprints to the tomb. Who runs to the graveyard? Before he gets there, Peter has already entered a different realm. He steps cautiously into the tomb. He sees that Christ is gone. There are no angels either. All he has is the story the women told and on the ground, Christ’s empty burial cloth. Peter picks it up, holds it, this thin thin fabric, in his hands but barely there. Sunlight

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    through the tomb’s door shines in the eloth’s gossamer weave. Peter feels its warmth on his faee. With nothing but fine lightness in his hands, it hits him. Christ is risen. Now the ears of his ears awake. Now the eyes of his eyes are opened. Christ is risen indeed, risen, as the first fruits of resurrection. I have a childhood friend who grew up on a cherry farm. I know his orchards well, but my knowledge is limited to the super abundance just before the harvest, when the boughs are heavy with the weight of sweetness and fruit nearly sweeps the ground. I asked my friend about finding the first fruit. He said that the first fruit meant excitement and a promise of abundance in the future. He said the first fruit always looked ideal. Then he said the last fruit brought relief. The first fruit defeats death. The last fruit will close the graveyard’s gates forever. My predecessor served Saint Paul’s for more than thirty years and then retired into our congregation. He was an exceedingly humble, often hilarious man. His name was Tom. He died recently after Covid and long Covid and cancer and pneumonia. We buried his ashes in the church’s memorial garden. The funeral was gigantic. The interment of his ashes was small: his two adult children, a granddaughter, me, and a church custodian who loved him dearly and dug the hole. Tom had selected a very elegant biodegradable um. He was a sharp dresser and a thoughtful man. He knew that the statute granting Saint Pauls permission to bury ashes requires us to use an environmentally safe um. If the um was not biodegradable, I would have to transfer his ashes to one that was. What he couldn’t know is that when we received his ashes from the crematorium, they were in his um, but sealed in a thick plastic bag. So I had to cut the bag open and carefully transfer Tom’s ashes back into his um. I did this in the church kitchen. I mustered up somber feelings appropriate to the occasion. I felt sad because I was supposed to feel sad. This was a grievous task. When I cut the bag open, a small puff of ash hit the air and settled on the kitchen floor. It could have been a sigh. Knowing Tom, it could have been a laugh. Either way, a breath of ashes. As these ashes settled on the kitchen floor, I began to think about the countless little chores Tom performed in the church building over his long tenure. I know these chores because I inherited them: the things that slip between the cracks, picking up stray candy wrappers, washing random dishes, folding tables, watering neglected flowers. I bent down to sweep the ashes up, then stopped myself. It seemed appropri­ ate for part of him to stay right at the heart of our church building. Not in the pulpit, but in the heart of the building. I laughed out loud, then immediately censored myself. “Oh no! Inappropriate! You’re supposed to be grieving.” At this moment, something shifted. I felt deep assur­ ance. Tom wouldn’t want me to stand in the church kitchen and feel bad on his account. He would want me to laugh at the absurd poetry of some essential part of him rising up from the church kitchen to join the rest of him, knit back together, restored and made whole before walking out of the graveyard with everyone he had ever grieved.

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    The promise of bodily resurrection raises questions before it has the chance to raise the dead. Standing with Tom’s children as we buried his dust down in the earth, I thought of my own father’s grave, and then I thought of his body: his citrus scent and the sound of his laughter, his bald head and strong hands. The molecules that made him him are going to be knit together again? And he is waiting for that mo­ ment, just as I am? We share this intimate connection, and we share it with everyone who ever lived? It seems impossible. But so does the distance of the stars or blankets of snow. So does the taste of salt and the taste of sweet. The sound of a trumpet is unlikely and so is almost every voice that ever said

    Notes 1 Kathleen Graber,

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    13 Caroline Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 1995), p. 345, footnote 81. 14 Avivah Zomberg, Moses: A Human Life (Yale University Press, 2022), p. 34. 15 John Berryman, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,” Love and Fame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 93.

  • Finding God in the Midst: A Lenten Sermon from Jeremiah

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    Finding God in the Midst:

    A Lenten Sermon from Jeremiah

    Jeremiah 30:12-22

    Kimberly Wagner

    Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey

    Lent is a beautiful and unique time in the Christian calendar. It summons us to travel the journey of the cross, beginning with Ash Wednesday and culminating in the sacred drama of Holy Week. Lent invites us towards honesty about what is really real—the truth of brokenness and the power of resurrection. In some ways, Lent asks the best out of us as people of faith. It challenges us to set aside the regular patterns of living and, for 40 days, commit to new practices that might allow us to spend time with God and grow in closer relationship to God and one another. This is all well and good. But, after the challenging and trauma-filled years that we have had, perhaps it is hard to imagine taking on one more thing. Or, perhaps, we are exhausted by the relentless news of brokenness in the world and are, instead, hungry to just rush to resurrection hope. Or, perhaps, we find ourselves pinballing between despair and hope, depending on the day, hour, or moment. In this challeng­ ing Lenten season, there may be no better companion than Jeremiah. The weeping prophet is known for being able to hold brokenness and be honest about what is hap­ pening in the world. But, at the same time, he fully proclaims the promise that God is not done yet. So, let us open ourselves to challenging and good news as found in Jeremiah 30:12-22:

    12For thus says the Lord: Your hurt is incurable, your wound is grievous. 13There is no one to uphold your cause, no medicine for your wound, no healing for you. 14All your lovers have forgotten you; they care nothing for you; for I have dealt you the blow of an enemy, the punishment of a merciless foe, because your guilt is great, because your sins are so numerous. 15 Why do you cry out over your hurt? Your pain is incurable. Because your guilt is great, because your sins are so numerous,

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    I have done these things to you. 16Therefore all who devour you shall be devoured, and all your foes, everyone of them, shall go into captivity; those who plunder you shall be plundered, and all who prey on you I will make a prey. 17For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal, says the Lord, because they have called you an outcast: “It is Zion; no one cares for her!” 18Thus says the Lord: I am going to restore the fortunes of the tents of Jacob, and have compassion on his dwellings; the city shall be rebuilt upon its mound, and the citadel set on its rightful site. 19Out of them shall come thanksgiving, and the sound of merrymakers. I will make them many, and they shall not be few; I will make them honored, and they shall not be disdained. 20Their children shall be as of old, their congregation shall be established before me; and I will punish all who oppress them. 21 Their prince shall be one of their own, their ruler shall come from their midst; I will bring him near, and he shall approach me, for who would otherwise dare to approach me? says the Lord. 22And you shall be my people, and I will be your God.

    How are you? It’s a simple question: three little words. It’s a question we ask and get asked probably a dozen times a day. And most of us, I think, have been conditioned or taught somewhere along the way to offer a short, quick one-word or one-phrase answer: “Good,” “Fine,” or “Hanging in there.” Or, in these days when it is possible to stay on mute over Zoom, we respond with a simple gesture: thumbs up, thumbs down, a smile, a frown, or just a shrug of the shoulders. “How are you?” It’s a question we have learned to brush off or slide by, assuming that the other person isn’t actually in­ terested in starting a long conversation about our wellbeing. Instead, it is often treated as a casual greeting or a prelude to something else, something more important. But then a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to catch up with a friend I haven’t connected with in a while. We got on Zoom, and I asked the question that has become all too predictable: “How are you?” I expected the quick, casual, rehearsed

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    response. Instead, she sighed deeply, looked right into the camera, and responded, “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” It wasn’t the answer I expected, and I didn’t really know how to respond. So, for a moment we just sat in silence. She final­ ly broke the silence and proceeded to tell me how much had transpired since we last spoke: the death of her grandfather from cancer, the story of her engagement to her wonderful fiancé, the fear over almost losing her mom to Covid. She told me about having to put down the family dog and the joyous news of becoming an aunt for the first time. She described the joy and challenge of her work as a fifth-grade teacher, helping kids who were deeply scarred by the pandemic or struggling to move from online learning to an in-class social situation. “So,” she said, almost out of breath after the rapid-fire update, “you asked me how I am. I don’t know. I’m all the things. It’s just… a lot.” I’m grateful for my friend’s honesty and willingness to take this question seri­ ously. After all, this kind of deep, reflective, candid accounting of our own emotion­ al, physical, mental, and spiritual state is exactly the kind of work we are invited to do in this season of Lent. In this liturgical season, we are called to journey together on the way of the cross, being honest before God and one another about where we are and how we are. So, friends, how are we? Really. It’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? And the answer certainly can’t—and perhaps shouldn’t—be encapsulated in a single word or simple shrug of the shoulders. It’s a hard question to answer, I imagine, for many of us in these days. We face so many difficult, disorienting, and traumatic realities. And the troubles seem to be tumbling one on top of the other—mass shootings, internation­ al conflicts, natural disasters, and extreme heat and flooding due to climate change. Siblings all over the country and across the globe struggle under the oppression of poverty or everyday violence. We live in a society where political divisions run deep and threaten to tear at not just our communal structures, but the very fabric of democ­ racy. At the same time, our country is being summoned to reckon with our history of oppression and marginalization as we take seriously the ongoing realities of racism, sexism, ableism, and LGBTQIA+ discrimination. And on top of all of that, we contin­ ue to be bombarded with public health crises from contaminated water to monkeypox to the ongoing impacts of Covid-19. And all this doesn’t even acknowledge the daily burdens people in our communities carry—people who are struggling to make ends meet as prices increase; people who are struggling to find meaningful or substantial employment; people mourning the loss of loved ones; people who are struggling with the daily work of parenting or caring for aging loved ones; people wrestling with men­ tal illness or addiction. The list could go on and on. Indeed, whenever I’m asked to write a Prayers of the People these days, I don’t know how to start or where to end. But also, friends, how are we when we see signs of hope? How are we when we see social media posts of children returning to school or church families able to meet in person again? How are we as we begin to witness communities honestly

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    reckoning with injustice and seeking to welcome those who have, for too long, been marginalized or alienated? How are we when we witness acts of self-sacrifice and kindness after a natural disaster? How are we when we see new life come into the world, relationships forming and growing, and find simple joys in things like fresh baked bread, puppy cuddles, or sunny days? How are we when we are able to gather with and hug loved ones, something we no longer take for granted? How are we? It’s complicated. It’s the million-dollar question. But then, right in the middle of it all swings in this (honestly) mess of a text from Jeremiah. Yes, this complicated, convoluted passage might actually be the Word we need for this moment—for these days when we are asked to hold and carry so much. This pericope in Jeremiah is the first part of a larger, three-chapter section la­ beled by biblical scholars as the “Book of Comfort” or the “Book of Consolation.” In fact, chapter 30 begins with God commanding Jeremiah to write down these words of hope and restoration for both Israel and Judah. It’s a refreshing change of pace after 29 chapters largely filled with painful prophesy and language of sin, exile, pun­ ishment, and condemnation. But it feels a bit like a fake-out, for the opening stanzas of this poetic “Book of Comfort” do not begin with hope or even comfort. Instead, the text opens with pain, anguish, guilt, and trouble. It begins with an honest wres­ tling with the reality of the community’s traumatic woundedness. Indeed, Jeremiah is writing this while the people are still in exile, while they are physically distanced from all they know and love. He is writing these words for those feeling emotionally and spiritually distanced from the God who has brought them thus far on the way. Twice in this passage, the peoples’ wounds and hurts are declared “incurable.” The community of fallen faithful are summoned to take seriously their sin—the ways they have distanced themselves from God and God’s call upon their collective lives. And within those words there is a true reckoning with what is deeply broken. Jere­ miah authors these verses with all the painful and troubling flair so well practiced in the 29 chapters that have come before, utilizing patriarchal and patronizing feminine images and pronouns to label Israel and Judah as weak, unwanted, and abandoned by friends and lovers. The first part of the “Book of Comfort” is saturated with hurt and pain, confusion and confession, oppression and patriarchy. It is a wrestling with a present reality that cannot be understood, grasped, or made sense of. So, Jeremiah scribbles down these words at God’s command, following the pro­ phetic poetic formula. It begins in the usual way: “For thus says the Lord….” Jer­ emiah then proceeds to name sin and brokenness, call out guilt and acknowledge pain, dole out shame and blame, count the offenses one after the other. “Why do you cry out over your hurt?” begins verse 15. “Your pain is incurable. Because your guilt is great, because your sins are so numerous, I have done these things to you. Therefore….” Any reader of the prophets knows what comes next. It’s time for the verdict and the sentencing. The divine, through the pen of the prophet, has assessed the damage done and now is ready to declare the price to be paid. But it is right here

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    we, as readers, encounter a surprising shift. Where we expect a sentence of condem­ nation and punishment on Judah and Israel, the therefore signals instead a word of condemnation for those nations that have been oppressing the people. At the turning of a word, the language shifts from condemnation to restoration, from past sins to future hope. It all comes crashing together in whirlwind. Grief and ruin collide into hope and expectation. Brokenness and alienation smash into restoration and covenantal connection. God’s mercy all of a sudden, without warning, exceeds and confronts God’s apparent will to punish. Compassion and confession run headlong into each other without logic or reason or even poetic consistency. Then the verses unfold into an eschatological-style vision of a restored Israel and Judah. And this vision is not one for the sweet by and by, but a tangible restoration that includes land and homes, righteous rulers and offspring, congregations praising and worshipping together again, and a restored relationship and covenant with God. And all this is declared to be true even while the people are still dealing with the realities of exile. Even more, God is in the midst of it all. God is right in the mix—in those murky waters sloshing between pain and promise. God hurts with our hurt and gets disap­ pointed and even angry when we hurt one another and do not live into the creatures or communities we were created to be. And God is present with abundant compas­ sion, inviting our confession, facilitating restoration, opening a way for peace, and welcoming our return to loving relationship. This is where Jeremiah meets us today: where good news and hard truths come crashing together. And I don’t know what’s more surprising, the vision of hope in the midst of the pain of exile or the honest accounting of pain unceremoniously dropped in the middle of a word of hope. But, as biblical scholar Louis Stulman writes,

    The very starting point for the hopeful future is the acknowledgement of brokenness, loss, refugee status, and massive upheaval.. ..For Jeremiah, any vision of the future that avoids the real world of human suffering makes a travesty of the past and can never deal with the emotional and symbolic pain of exile. It is therefore no accident that the Book of Comfort depicts the people of God as “survivors.” They have endured war, [crushed] hopes, splintered families, and the travail of a shattered world. Now, by the power of the Word, God empowers these broken and shipwrecked people to imag­ ine a future when none seemed possible.1

    God summons them towards potential restoration even as they are in the midst of the present pain of exile. This experience of the intermingling reality of traumatic truth and persistent hope is not new. This year, much of the season of Lent falls during Women’s History Month where we celebrate and remember the women who have sought to lead, work, and, yes, even preach, through, against, and in spite of the persons and systems who

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    would seek to silence them. We remember the marginalized voices that know all too well what it means to find God in the midst of hurt and hope, pain and promise. We remember Anne Marbury Hutchinson, whose call to preach in the 1630s sent shock waves through the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was a woman who knew loss and depression and yet found voice and gained spiritual authority through her work as a midwife. She was a woman who was able to “get away” with talking about the Bible at women’s meetings until those speeches were attended by almost every woman in Boston and even some men. And then, having “stept out of her place,” she was put on trial, excommunicated from the church, and banished from the colony. We remember women like Jarena Lee, who, when she experienced the call to preach was first told “no” by Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And this call physically ate away at her until, one day, when the male guest preacher made such a mess of things and lost his place in preaching the story of Jonah, she stood up and took over from the pew, proclaiming the Word given her by God for her people. Yet, even when her gifts were recognized and certified by Rev. Allen, she was forced to be an itinerant preacher, leaving behind her child, barely surviving encounters with those who would threaten her life because she was black or a woman or both. And when she dared to write down her testimony and no longer had the blessing or protection of Richard Allen, the church body, seeking legitimacy and shot through with patriarchy, called her writing a sham and refused to distribute it. We remember women and femmes like Sister Carmelita or Rev. Aimee Garcia Cortese or Barbara C. Harris or Pauli Murray or Junia Joplin or Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz , all of whom were delayed or denied pulpits and preaching spaces due to their gender or race or sexuality or all of the above. Even as we give thanks for the wom­ en and femmes who have forged a way, even as we honor those who have modeled brave, bold, and faithful leadership, even as we honor how far we have come, we still mourn and wrestle with the way patriarchy still infects our societies and structures. We continue to grieve the way—for too long—women’s voices and experiences have not been honored, especially women of color, trans women, and queer women. But we are invited to hold all these together—the gratitude and grief, the laugh­ ter and lament, the celebration and confession. After all, Jeremiah reminds us, we have a faith, a language, and a God who can hold all these things with us. We are a people of the cross. We encounter glory and redemptive love in a rejected and cru­ cified Savior. And even the holy narrative towards which we are marching in this season of Lent reminds us that in order to encounter the resurrection, we have to be willing to look into the tomb. So, dear friends, siblings in Christ, how are you? It is a complicated question, I know. And it is one to which we are invited to be honest. Do not be afraid. For we have a faith and a language and a God who holds all of this with us. We worship a God who casts a hopeful vision even as we trapse through pain and continue to

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    wrestle with the burden of patriarchy. We follow a Christ who offers us healing and wholeness for the seemingly incurable wounds of our corporate life so marred by white supremacy, oppression, injustice, and exploitative economic realities. We are blessed by the Spirit who gifts us community and covenant even as we are just be­ ginning to contend with the ways the pandemic has traumatized us and tom us apart. Thanks be to a God who holds all of this with us and accompanies us on this journey to the cross.

    Note Louis Stulman, Jeremiah, Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), 283.

  • Playing Out in a World on Fire

    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.

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    Playing Out in a World on Fire

    Susan Baller-Shepard

    Bloomington, Illinois

    When I asked my twenty-six-year-old son Drake what he was hopeful about, per the future, he replied, “The world’s on fire, what do you want me to have hope about?” I wanted to know particulars, where he found sources of hope, like the U-shape a cat makes curling up on a blanket, I wanted to know what his hope curled around. Maybe deeper still, I wanted to know if he had hope. My nieces and neph­ ews are having children, and I know they have hope for their children’s futures. But, what’s that hope abouf! As people with free will, we’ve used free will to wreak havoc on the environ­ ment, like two-year-olds at a party with tables of cake or dogs with snacks at eye level. We seem to have not cared about the wreckage. We’re watching animal species go extinct before they’re fully counted. The earth groans under the weight of 8,000,000,000 people. Zoonotic diseases pass from ani­ mals to humans as we encroach upon habitats left and right, north and south. Striden­ cy has divided us, to the point that even our “common” language has become coded with language of conspiracy and threat. During the pandemic, what shocked a lot of people was the notion that we, as humans, did not have the collective will to do the right thing(s) by each other. In this version of our universe, there were those who went above and beyond saving lives and those who seemed hell-bent on the opposite, in the name of freedom. At present, our reality globally is “at least 89.3 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 27.1 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18.”1 Can we fathom these figures for a moment? During the pandemic, there were people in awe that they lived in the shadow of the Himalayas and could see them for the first time2 because the air was finally clear. This was cause for celebration. Then the world opened back up, life returned to a new kind of normal, and the mountains disappeared in smog again, as if that story, the truth of the mountains right there—that near—as if that truth were not enough. Those glimpses of the Himalayas are like our momentary glimpses and glances of the holy. We see them, then they are gone, as if our collective will doesn’t want to hold onto the vision, as if the promises of Pentecost vanish like mountains in smog. What are we to do? Dream different dreams? See different visions? According to Harvard Professor Stephanie Burt, “The multiverse is a billion dollar industry. There’s a reason that studios plan to spend billions of dollars—more than the economic output of some countries—to mass-produce more of the multiverse : tens of millions of people will spend time and money consuming it.”3

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    There is, in stories of the multiverse, this notion that life is open-ended, that there are other options out there other than the ones we’ve chosen. Who wouldn’t want to embrace the multiverses and “many worlds” where things might be playing out dif­ ferently? These stories provide hope that things can be otherwise. This is what Pen­ tecost provides as well, hope that things can be otherwise through the power of the Holy Spirit. We pray to the Holy-Spirit-As-Disrupter to intervene. “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.4 For years I taught Major World Religions at a community college. I’d ask my sage friend Shri Chandak about destroyer Shiva in the Hindu Trimurti. Shiva is per­ sonified alongside creator Brahma and preserver Vishnu. We talked of the trinity and the trimurti. Shri would tell me, per Shiva’s destructive nature, “Shiva clears the decks. Shiva removes the clutter, clears things out for a new start.” I think of this as I consider the tongues of fire at Pentecost. What has to bum that new life can emerge? How must we change? What must happen with us that we might be pliable people in the hands of our Creator God. Must we be open to dreams, and visions, and listen to prophesy from unexpected voices? What must be spoken and seen and heard? I love Lizzo. The TV series “Watch out for the Big Grrrls” featured musician Lizzo and plus-sized dancers. As a black plus-sized woman, Lizzo has broken barriers per what a female musician “should” look like and what a back-up dancer’s appearance “should” be. Lizzo was breaking old molds with this show, reminding women to love the bodies they are in, and her show won an Emmy. As part of Lizzo’s Emmy acceptance speech, she urged, “Let’s just tell more stories. When I was a little girl, all I wanted to see was me in the media, someone fat like me, Black like me, beautiful like me. If I could go back and tell little Lizzo some­ thing, I’d be like, ‘You’re gonna see that person, but b*&%, it’s gonna have to be you.’”5 Lizzo recognized if she wanted to see change, she was going to have to be the change-maker. Are we open to seeing those who are in our midst, working to widen the circle for others, to include others in our common life together? Are we ourselves open to God working within us however God sees fit? I knew a person who truly disliked whenever people would tell kids “You can be anything you want to be if you try hard enough.” He’d respond, “No, no they can’t. Maybe they want to play on the NBA, and it’s never going to happen. They don’t have now nor maybe will they ever have what it takes. Who are they kidding? It sets up unrealistic expectations.” Sisters and Brothers and Others, what should we do?6 Pentecost can be a remind­ er God believes humanity has what it takes. It’s an interesting affirmation given what

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    we’ve done with Eden-on-Earth which we’re trashing to kingdom come. If God is among us with God’s Spirit, then why is the world awash in chemicals with the shelf life of glitter? The Spirit fills humans, and suddenly connection and communication are possible. Recently we had solar panels put in, and all of our electricity had to be shut down in order for rewiring to take place. The old would not hold. The Spirit is a master-rewire-er of both humans and circumstances. We don’t need another universe where things are different. We can work to make change here and now, together. We can work to right a sinking ship. Like Mary as the theotokos, God-bearer, we can be hope-bearers, pregnant with possibility. With Pentecost’s reversal of the tower of Babel and the anticipation that we might all understand each other again, we remember the difference between hear­ ing and understanding. They heard and understood what was being said. I can hear Italian all day, but that doesn’t mean I know what’s being said. It’s hearing and un­ derstanding, both. If we say the unlikely will be prophets, then our eyes need to watch for the un­ likely as prophets. I’ve found in my own life that God shows up in people and in ways I didn’t expect. I see this in the Holy Bible too, all over the Holy Bible, and my students in Literature of the Bible class were often struck, “God chose that person?” Precisely. It’s not our purview. It’s God’s. Big difference. Big difference. My son Alex is a musician, and a term I learned from him recently is playing out. Musicians use this term for sharing their music with the public, making connections with people, sometimes on a circuit. Playing out is what we as people of God are to be about, taking our riffs and chords and however we are strung, and taking it outside of our safe “members only” enclaves. In Acts 1:26, we see where the disciples have become apostles, the ones carrying a message, the ones sent out, playing out in a world on fire. Recently I became unexpectedly tearful as I watched Jimmer Bolden sing the song Waloyo Yamoni in Lango, along with Allie McNay. Composer Christopher Tin wrote the album The Drop that Contained the Sea,7 and Waloyo Yamoni is part of that album. The performance I watched was filmed live at Cadogan Hall, commissioned by the Orchestra at St Matthews-Pacific Palisades, and it included the Royal Philhar­ monic Orchestra, the Angel City Choral, Prima Vocal Ensemble, and Lucis choirs, with an enthusiastic Christopher Tin conducting. It felt inspired. At the end, as some stood to join in, it felt like an ascension. Ber in Lango, an East African dialect, is a traditional Lango rainmaking prayer. Ber means “It is well.” The performance felt like prayer to me, like watching Pentecost. According to composer Tin, this album is ten pieces “sung in a different lan­ guage, exploring a different vocal tradition. Each piece also deals with water in a different form, arranged in the order that water flows through the world: melting snow, mountain streams, rivers, the ocean, and so forth.” Tin believes the world will

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    be reimagined due to water in the future, who has it, who needs it, hence the use of different languages. “And let the one who believes in me drink.” As the scripture has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water. Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive, for as yet there was no Spirit because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:38-39). Can we imagine the Spirit flowing as abundantly as water in a river, water that is moving, not stagnant. How we wish for this, this Pentecost movement of the Spirit which moves things on and out and away from us, which we do not need, and fills us with what we do need—the Spirit who fills hearts enabling understanding of one another anew. This performance of Waloyo Yamoni reminds me of the first time I saw Indone­ sian bom singer/songwriter Anggun’s performance on David Byrne’s show “Ses­ sions at West 54th.” Anggun stopped me in my tracks. Her voice was lovely, inviting, in a language I didn’t recognize. I paused what I was doing to figure it out, to try to grasp what was going on. I gave Anggun’s album to a clergy friend, and we both played our CDs to the point of them wearing out. In this universe, how do we come back to God? Come back to nature? Come back to our bodies? Come back to each other, encouraging people free to tell their stories, dreams, visions, prophesies without fear? This sense of coming back reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.”

    Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always— A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.8

    Anaphora is defined as repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of succes­ sive clauses; it’s used in the Holy Bible. We see anaphora in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech: “Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”9 We go back and go back and go back. Sisters and Brothers and Others, what should we do? With the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, we do what we can. We trust that somehow the Spirit can change things, that understanding overshadows us in a way we haven’t known before, like T. S. Eliot said in this poem,

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    We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.10

    Our exploring might lead us to new understandings which are new places and old places, both/and. We find each other there, and we find we can communicate. We pray and pray some more. We go forward as hope-bearers and God-bearers as much as we possibly can. As we seek to live globally on a planet gasping, abounding with refugees, we look into others’ faces and know and understand we see the face of God.

    Notes

    1 The United Nations Agency for Refugees, https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html.

    2 https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/himalayas-visible-lockdown-india-scli-intl/index.html.

    3 Stephanie Burt, October 31, 2022, “Is the Multiverse Where Originality Goes to Die?” in The New Yorker, October 31, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/ll/07/is-the-multiverse-where-originality-goes-to-die. 4Acts 2:2-4, NRSV.

    5 Lizzo’s Acceptance Speech, https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a41181984/lizzo-emmys-acceptance -speech-transcript-2022/.

    6 Acts 2:37.

    7 Christopher Tin, The Drop That Contains the Sea, Tin Works Publishing, Decca Gold, 2014.

    8 “Little Gidding” is the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Boston, MarinerBooks: Haughton Mufflin Harcourt, 1971), 49. 9The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” Speech, https://www.americanrhetoric. com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.

    10 “Little Gidding.”

  • Social Crisis Preaching and Prophetic Responsibility

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    Social Crisis Preaching and Prophetic

    Responsibility

    Tyshawn Gardner

    Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama

    Social crisis preaching, prophetic preaching, and preaching to social issues must transcend the rhetoric of proclamation in order to be effective and impactful. The true work of social crisis preaching lies in who the preacher is. Thus, the social crisis preacher has prophetic responsibilities and must bear marks of the prophet through imagination, discernment, and envisioning. These prophetic responsibilities are ac­ tive before, during, and after the social crisis sermon has been preached. Kelly Mill­ er Smith, Sr., in his book Social Crisis Preaching, refers to the “pre-proclamation functionality of the preacher.” Pre-proclamation is Smith’s first step in his delivery method of the social crisis sermon. Smith argues that the social crisis sermon begins before a word is uttered from the pulpit or even before the pen touches the paper in sermon preparation or writing the manuscript. Pastors must enter into spaces with their members where sensitive and hard top­ ics are discussed. These conversations may take place at the County School Board meetings. City County briefings, at Deacon’s Board meetings, over a latte at Star­ bucks, in hospital waiting rooms, over chili dogs while watching a playoff game, while driving to a party, or in the gym. No matter the venue, God opens the door for the pre-proclamation functionality. Pastors must be intentional, pro-active, and seize these moments of discipleship. This model is Ezekiel sitting with the exiles in Tel Aviv, and in holy resignation uttering “I sat where they sat,” (Ezek 3:15 AV). Moses exhibits this model as he ‘‘chose to suffer with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin” (Heb 11:25; cf. Ex 2:10-12). Pre-proclamation function of the preacher is perhaps the most important fac­ tor in social crisis preaching. Pre-proclamation activity is incamational in that it entails the preacher’s involvement and engagement with the people to whom they will be preaching. Pre-proclamation also calls the preacher to be informed about the social crises. Congregations are more accepting and less critical of preachers who are knowledgeable of the crises being addressed, and who have been with them in living and life through crises, than someone who is disengaged and unfamiliar with the crisis.

    Preaching About vs. Preaching To Social Crisis There is a difference between preaching about (or on or around) a social issue and preaching to social crises. Preaching about social issues is an easy escape for the preacher who feels the burden to address the crisis but lacks the courage to confront the complicity to communal crises in the pews. One can provide data and related information about social issues and the issues that evolve into crises and still not

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    address the injustices of social crises. Preaching about social crisis is addressing the symptoms of social crises, in which the congregation is comfortable condoning, because symptoms often show up in other communities, but failing to address the root causes of which we are often a part. One can preach about a social crisis and not provide the congregation with specific, meaningful, practical application to tackle the injustices that impact everyday people whom we are called to love and serve. All it takes for this approach is for the preacher to skim the surface of the preaching text, sprinkle some news headlines, affirm God’s love, and give the benediction. Preach­ ing about .social crises leaves many parishioners asking “now what?” or “so what?” Preaching to social crisis is the hard work of leading the church to become what Sally Brown calls “agents of redemptive interruption.”^ Preaching to social crisis is about more than providing information, remaining neutral, or affirming long held but false assumptions and stereotypes about “the other.” Preaching to social crisis involves digging deep into the text, finding the social tensions that the text address­ es, naming them, shedding light on the contemporary parallels, delivering decisive application, then trusting God with the results. Preaching to social crisis is moving congregations beyond fear and bigotry to new, refreshing, and redemptive spaces where they are compelled to extend the radical mercy of God. Preaching to social crisis is helping the church membership to realize that they have been recipients of radical mercy. Preaching to social crisis, then, goes beyond transferring information to the depths of experiencing the Christian faith. In The Responsible Pulpit^ James Earl Massey lists five components of the Afri­ can American preaching tradition that “help any preacher from any tradition to sense more clearly how to keep the verbal witness of the pulpit both virile, engaging, and effective.”^ The five sermonic components are functional, festive, communal, radi­ cal, and climactic. While one may detect traces of each component in social crisis preaching, the sermonic component most consistent and impactful in social crisis preaching and prophetic responsibility is the radical component. Historically, radicality has been the most critical and constructive response to racism from the black church, and radicality has been the common thread among the Old Testament prophets. Courageous social crisis preaching confronts sin every­ where. Massey contends, “Radicality in the sermon engages the hearer. It makes him know that he is being confronted, that necessity is being laid upon him to respond. True preaching is always confrontational.”^ Social crisis preaching is not an eloquent diatribe that simply identifies problems and introduces solutions. To the contrary, it demands that the hearer break from any and all political, racial, economic, or theo­ logical loyalties that are complicit in social crises. Luther D. Ivory notes, “A critical prophetic voice must be accompanied by confrontational prophetic action.”^ Just as the nerves in our body alert us to confront the serious illnesses lurking in our organs, social crisis preaching takes prophetic action to confront the pain caused by the sin of social injustice. Social crisis preaching requires the pastor/preacher to take on

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    the activity of the prophet. The man or woman who stands to effectively proclaim the Gospel of Christ against the social injustices in our world must commit to a life of prophetic being. Thus, the embodiment of the prophet transcends and extends beyond the rhetoric of proclamation to responsibilities reflective of one who is con­ scious of the devastating impacts of social crises on the lives of image bearers. One must see and discern the causes and connections of social sins and imagine and pro­ claim a world where redemption and renewal are new realities for the least of these.

    The Social Crisis Preacher as Old Testament Seer Historically, preaching which addresses social issues has been referred to by a variety of labels: liberation preaching, preaching on social issues, justice preach­ ing, social gospel preaching, the political pulpit, or civic proclamation. The term most commonly used to describe the functionality of preaching that addresses social issues is prophetic preaching. It is the preaching exercised by the Old Testament prophets. Social crisis preaching has elements of prophetic activity. In the Old Testament, a common word used to refer to and reflect the prophet’s function is seer (1 Sam 9:9, 9:11; 2 Kings 17:13; ro’eh). The prophet is one whom God grants spiritual insight into His will and the purposes He has for His people (Ex 3:7-10; Jer 29:11; Ez 37:1-14). The seer possesses a pathos of prophetic imagination and envisioning, both enabled by the Spirit of the Lord (Isa 61:1). The seer, then, can discern the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the times), and has the foresight to capture possibil­ ities of justice and human harmony while possessing the wherewithal to see through the forces that attempt to thwart those possibilities (Ezek 8:5-18; Amos 5:18-24; Zep l;Zech 7-8; Mal 4:1-6). Since the prophet is one who sees, it is not surprising, then, that some scholars, such as Walter Bruggeman, contend that prophetic preaching is rooted in the prov­ ocation of the preacher’s imagination, an envisioning rooted in God’s vision for His people. In prophetic activity, seeing (insight and understanding) precedes speaking. First, the prophet’s mental and optical faculties align with that of Yahweh’s (Isa 6:13 ; Jer 18:1-2). Then insight, understanding, and perception are granted to the prophet (Isa 6:4-7; Jer 18:3-4). Only then is the prophet permissioned to speak on behalf of Yahweh (Isa 6:8-13; Jer 18:5-6). For example, Jeremiah saw the potter working a vessel of clay on the wheel and discerned the meaning (Jer 18:3-4), then he said, “Then the word of the Lord came to me: ‘House of Israel, can I not treat you as this potter treats his clay?”’ (Jer 18:5-6). Discerning, seeing, imagination, perceiving, and envisioning come before speaking. The reason envisioning and imagination are indispensable aspects of social crisis preaching is because the prophet, as well as the preacher, must be able to understand clearly what causes injustice and then see how those injustices harm and hurt people who are created in the image of God. The Holy Spirit is the preacher’s MRI (mag­ netic resonance imaging) that enables the preacher to clearly identify the precise location of the cancerous root causes of crises, so that a proper diagnosis can be giv-

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    en and a cure prescribed. The preacher who engages in prophetic preaching, by the power of the Holy Spirit, has the ability to capture God’s vision for His world with imaginative insight. The prophets performed this divine activity through foretelling and forthtelling. Foretelling is future oriented, whether for blessings or for doom (Isa 9:1-7; Dan 5:17-30; Zech 14). Forthtelling, however, is confronting sin in the here and now, with the word from the Lord (2 Sam 12; Je. 7:l-7ff; Mal 1). Imagination and envisioning God’s vision enables the prophet to articulate that vi­ sion with picturesque language to the people of God. Social crisis preaching encompass­ es this component of envisioning, in essence, seeing with the eyes of God. Like the seer, the prophet’s ability to visualize empowers them to speak with vivid imagery and sharp artistry. Old Testament scholar R.B.Y. Scott precisely describes the prophet’s unique re­ sponsibility. He states, “The grasp of the moral and spiritual realities of a given situation, coupled with the certainty that he [the prophet] must proclaim them in unmistakable terms, marked off a prophet like Micah or Amos.”^ It is no wonder then that the prophets spoke with such poetic language. Seared in the prophet’s mind is a vision they could only capture in figurative, symbolic, and metaphoric language. Like the Old Testament proph­ ets, the African American preaching tradition, known as exemplars of prophetic preach­ ing, often employs the creative use of language to capture such visions. The Afiican American preacher’s use of creative language, according to homiletics scholar Cleophus J. LaRue, “[was] intended to free the poet in the preacher and allow the presence of God through the power of language to lift the sermon to higher heights.”^ This ability is not confined or limited to Afiican American preaching; it is extended to all who will submit their hands, feet, heart, mind, and ear to the Holy Spirit. All of this means the social crisis preacher cannot be blind, gullible, or naïve. The ability to perceive and understand the political and economic manifestations of greed, racism, national idolatry, and xenophobia and the subtle consequences on communities is as paramount as grasping God’s impartial love for all creation. Bibli­ cal social action is an extension of being regenerated. According to the Baptist Faith and Message, “All Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme in our own lives and in human society. Means and methods used for the improvement of society and the establishment of righteousness among men can be truly and permanently helpful only when they are rooted in the regeneration of the individual by the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ.”^ Through God’s redeeming sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we are compelled to love God and our neighbor as fellow children of God. Whenever these sins mark the believer, they rob God of His glory, which is meant to be manifested in His creation. Moreover, these sins are idolatrous responses to the impartial love of God. The social crisis preacher must be as “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16). Social crisis preachers must not be easily fooled, manipulated, or easily lulled to sleep by charming grins and polite concessions, the steady drip of anesthesia that causes loss of sensitivity and aware­ ness in the Body of Christ.

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    Likewise, this preacher must be conscious and aware, possessing understanding and exercising discernment, and not be easily moved or distracted by the luxuries in the king’s palace or flattered by the invitations to banquets and blessings. Daniel was able to say to Nebuchadnezzar

    Walter Brueggemann and Prophetic Imagination

    caWalter Brueggemann casts the envisioning element of the prophet by stating Prophetic utterance is offered in circumstances dictated by dominant imagination but its utterance that contradicts what is taken for granted. Such imagination refuses to accept accepted explanations for present circumstances.=’ The social crisis preacher who is in tune with God’s vision for humanity articulates a vision that may seem impossible, unattainable, foreign, and out of reach for those unable to grasp what can be, for being gripped by what has always been. Social crisis proclamation introduces the hearer to

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    Kenyatta Gilbert and Vision in Exodus Preaching Kenyatta Gilbert refers to preaching that dismantles evil structures and ushers free­ dom as Exodus preaching. Exodus preaching contains attributes of the seer. Exodus preaching involves the ethics of envisioning because it employs the imagination to both cast and capture a glimpse of God’s design for creation. Gilbert states, “Exodus preaching does not take place in a vacuum, nor is it self-generated discourse; rather, it is daring speech that offers a vision of divine intent. It reveals a picture of what God intends and expects of God’s human creation….”11 When social crisis preaching or prophetic proclamation wanes, one must ask, is it because we have failed to hold the decaying spiritual and social condition under the light of divine intent? What did God intend before the fall? What beauty does the hope of the eschaton offer? In the African American preaching tradition, preaching is dialogical. During the preaching moment, the pulpit and pew engage in call-and-response, intuitive antiphonal expressions in vocal spontaneity. For example, when the preacher’s illustrations illumi­ nate the interpretation of the biblical text through their “sanctified imagination,” often from the pews someone will call out to them “Paint the picture. Reverend!” or “Make it plain!” which means the preacher is using such vivid language sufficient for the con­ gregation to see what they are saying as if an artist is painting a picture. The social crisis preacher must employ evocative pronouncements so that the congregation can visualize and see the intended economy of Eden on earth, and so that one can picture the hope of the coming Kingdom amidst communal despair. This very act of imagining the divine intent correlates with the way Jesus taught His disciples to pray “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10). The Holy Spirit inspires the social crisis preacher to visualize God’s intentions for His people through social crisis proclamation. The social crisis preacher, standing in the role of the prophet/seer, envi­ sions exodus from tyranny and oppression to venues of hope and liberation.

    Conclusion Social crisis preaching requires the acceptance and embrace of prophetic respon­ sibilities. Among the most vital of those responsibilities, like the seer, is the ability to see, discern, and imagine. Luke Timothy Johnson notes, “The prophetic word can be considered as God’s vision for humanity, which more often than not comes into conflict with humanity’s own vision for itself.Though Judah’s outlook for their own future was bleak and was in conflict with God’s exilic vision for them, the seer, Jeremiah, proclaims God’s vision for the exiles of Judah in Babylon:

    For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. (Jer 29:11-14)

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    In the years following the Civil War, the prophetic proclamation of Daniel Payne and Henry McNeal Turner was a bastion of resistance against lynching and gov­ ernment-sponsored disenfranchisement against Blacks because, like the seer, they imagined a better reality. Responding to the dehumanizing realities and emotion­ ally destructive ordeals of the Jim Crow Era, Martin Luther King, Jr., Adam Clay­ ton Powell, Sr., Fred Shuttlesworth, Reverdy Cassius Ransom, and countless others forged America to a new era of human progress and hope. Leading the charge in almost every period of social change are preachers, responsible as prophets, who are committed to the principles of social crisis preaching, biblical proclamation that develops congregations to intentionally care about and confront the crises in their neighbor’s community through the power of the Holy Spirit.

    Notes 1 Sally A. Brown, Sundays Sermon for Monday’s World: Preaching to Shape Daring Witness (Grand Rapids: William B. Herdmans Publishing Company, 2020), xviii. 2 James Earl Massey, The Responsible Pulpit (Anderson, IN: Warner Press, 1974), chap. 6, Kindle. 3 Massey, The Responsible Pulpit, chap. 6. 4 Luther D. Ivory, Toward A Theology of Radical Involvement: The Theological Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), 90. 5 R.B.Y. Scott, The Relevance of the Prophets: An Introduction to the Old Testament Prophets and Their Message (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944), 92. 6 Cleophus J. LaRue, The Heart of Black Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 10. 7 1963 and 2000, Baptist Faith and Message, “XV. The Church and the Social Order,” https://bfm. sbc.net/comparison-chart/, accessed January 29, 2022. 8 Pre-proclamation of the social crisis preacher is one of Kelly Miller Smith’s seven components of the social crisis sermon. The seven components are: pre-proclamation function of the preacher, devel­ opment of content, words used, the perceptual powers of focus, the structure, delivery of the social crisis sermon, post-delivery function of the preacher. See Smith, Social Crisis Preaching, 80. 9 Walter Brueggeman, The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 41. 10 Kelly Miller Smith, Social Crisis Preaching: The Lyman Beecher Lectures 1983 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), 53. 11 Kenyatta Gilbert, Exodus Preaching: Crafting Sermons About Justice and Hope (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2018), IX. 12 Luke Timothy Johnson, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic Church: The Challenge of Luke-Acts to Con­ temporary Christians (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 72.

  • Lenten Sermon

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    Page 37

    Lenten Sermon

    Luke 19:45-46

    Bill Lamar

    Metropolitan AME Church, Washington, D.C.

    It was 1997—it was a long time ago. I was in my second year of theological preparation for ordained ministry. I felt inadequate, wholly unprepared, and com­ pletely out of my depth. We met at an on-campus restaurant, you know the type-food and ambience great­ ly lacking, but a high convenience factor. I had been chosen from among my fellow students to share a meal with a towering theologian, one who had made an impact on generations of scholars and practitioners. He was kind, he was cordial, he was courtly, and much to my chagrin, he was curious. He was genuinely curious about a twentytwo -year-old seminarian from his vaunted perch of intellectual accomplishment. He asked me what I was reading. I was flummoxed; I had prepared and memo­ rized questions for him, but I never got to ask one of them. He was the one asking the questions. He sensed my reticence. He asked me whose books I was reading, what was I reading. I said, “I am reading Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited.” I be­ came more comfortable and more talkative. I told him, “I love Thurman’s question about what Jesus offers to a people who live with their backs against the wall?” He looked at me kindly, but with great concern. He said, “I knew Dr. Thurman,” and I was like, wow! He said, “I admired him deeply – as a man.” And then I knew some shoe was about to drop. I felt the atmosphere shifting in that bad campus restau­ rant. He said, “But you shouldn’t spend much time reading Mr. Thurman. He is not orthodox. People argue about Thurman’s Christology. Most say he had a low Christology ; but I say he had no Christology at all. You should read someone else. A promising young seminarian like you should read a real theologian.” I was shattered. He was the authority; I was not. He was a teacher, a renowned scholar; I was a student. I was deeply affected. A man whom I admired greatly had said to me that I should not admire another man whom I admired greatly. With one swift rhetorical kick, my interpretive table came crashing to the ground. I am learning something, and I believe that many of you are learning this as well. I am learning that the practice of ministry, service in the church of God, service among and with the people of God, preaching and teaching-these things are far from static en­ terprises. As a matter of fact, stasis is the opposite of ministry. The Spirit is constantly blowing you, and constantly blowing me, into interpretation and reinterpretation. The Spirit incessantly moves me toward deeper examination of myself (and that can be painful), deeper examination of my tradition. That is painful, deeper examination of our context, deeper examination of our world. The Spirit unceasingly nudges me to see what I refuse to see and to acknowledge that which I would rather deny.

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    As I reflect upon what happened when I was 22 years old, and as I consider now that I am 46 years old with nearly 22 years of pastoral experience, I am now asking different questions. Who has the authority to interpret text and world? Who has the authority to tell me or you what books to read? Who has the authority to judge our theologies and praxes? I would not handle the event that occurred when I was 22 the same way at 46. I gave that towering theologian authority then that I would never give him today. I let him stop me from being free enough to read and to interpret for myself. I let him stop me from being free enough to allow the Spirit to blow me into theologians he thought unworthy. I believe that God’s Spirit is calling us to a new interpretation-calling me to a new interpretation-of what it means to be generous: generosity beyond our culture’s penchant for atomization and individualization, generosity beyond merciful respons­ es to deep human pain that only justice can address, generosity beyond being sen­ timentally moved by the dehumanization of our siblings and the destruction of the planet that sustains us. Hear me, generosity beyond sweetness, generosity beyond niceness, and generosity beyond kindness. To that end, I want to assert a different interpretation, a Spirit-driven herme­ neutical leap, if you will. What Jesus did in the temple on that day may have been one of the most generous acts of his entire ministry This is a confrontational gen­ erosity. This is dangerous generosity. This is the kind of generosity that is attended by ongoing teaching and formation. This is the kind of generosity that God’s peo­ ple deeply crave-and I say this without diminishing the works that we are all doing in our communities. Allow me to read again,

    Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there. He said, “It is written, my house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it into a den of robbers.” Every day he was teaching in the temple, the chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard. (Luke 19:45-46)

    Herod’s Temple was a marvel. It sat gloriously atop the Temple Mount, an area of 35 acres. All but priests were forbidden from entering the temple itself. Only men, Jewish men, could enter the courtyard closest to the Temple. Men and women together could occupy the next court, and the court farthest from the inner sanctum was where the Gentiles gathered. Faithful Jews came to the Temple from all over the world to offer sacrifices during the Passover. Now, traveling with animals to sacrifice on these long, arduous journeys would have been unwise and impractical, and so, they must have been good

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    Americans because a market sprang up to meet the needs of the people. We are clear that Roman currency, with its imperial imagery and propaganda, could not be used for exchange in the temple, and so, there was a currency exchange, the exchanging of Roman currency for temple currency without imagery, without imperial propaganda. Now this trading itself was not an evil; it was necessary. The people needed to purchase animals to sacrifice. The people needed to exchange Roman currency for temple currency. The problem arose when religious entrepreneurs found a way to charge exorbitant rates of interest on exchanging the currency. The offerings of the poor, pigeons and doves, were marked up beyond reason. And the people who want­ ed to worship God could not worship God without being exploited. The worship of God-in the text, and unfortunately in the worship of God in too many places in our contemporary moment—is tied to exploitation of the vulnerable. Jesus enters Jeru­ salem in this account. Jesus enters the cities where United Churches of Christ are in ministry in Wisconsin, and the text tells us that Jesus weeps. He sees how in our day the worship of God is entangled in exploitation and extraction, and Jesus heads straight for the temple. Luke’s gospel is a gospel of pneumatological confrontation. According to my teacher, the great Ron Allen, the scholar of Luke and Acts and homiletician, the Holy Spirit drives Jesus into confrontation in this gospel. In Luke 4, the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness where he is confronted by the devil. The evil without him and the voices within him are trying to stop him from leaning into the Spirit’s vision for his life. This same Spirit drives him, I believe, drives him to the temple-and I want to assert that the same Spirit is trying to drive us. Allen taught us that that word was literally the same word that people used when they described what they were doing to their oxen to get them to plow in the fields. It is to be driven, to be forced in a direction you might otherwise not go. I believe that I’m not the only one who feels the Spirit driving me in a direction that I would prefer not to travel. When Jesus is driven into the temple, he then drives out of the temple those who had taken what was necessary-the market of selling animals for sacrificing. It was a necessary thing, but they made it into a tool of oppression. Our world is filled with necessary things that have become tools of oppression. The poor must eat, yet food, healthy food, is more expensive in their neighborhoods than in the neighborhoods of the affluent. People need housing, and we’re on the front line of this work in Washington D.C., yet the poor pay more of their income, more of a percentage of what they earn, to house themselves than many of us do. People desire to worship God, yet many churches continue to baptize the worst ex­ cesses of capitalism-and domestic and global imperial overreach. What does generosity look like here? It looks like interruption; it looks like disruption. Jesus disrupts the commerce, the exploitation, as a sign to them and a sign to us. God knows, God sees, and God is calling for something different. This is confrontational generosity. What would confrontational generosity look like in my

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    ministry? What would confrontational generosity look like in your ministry? This is not only confrontational generosity. Beloved, this is a dangerous generosity. Cor­ porations grow richer from the world as it is. We have seen how the wealthy among us and corporations made more money during the pandemic than during “normal times.” We see how many churches also have grown wealthier and more powerful in these days. Luke is clear. We cannot read this text any other way. This kind of generosity, this kind of generosity that interrupts and disrupts sys­ tems of oppression, causes religious and secular leaders to crank up the machinery of death. The text says that after Jesus did what he did in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the leaders looked for ways to kill him. We must again ask the question that Bonhoeffer posed to us: “Are we willing to pay a price, a cost, to be disciples?” They are looking for a way to kill him, no sentimentality here, the ma­ chinery of death. And I admit to you, and maybe you must admit to yourself, we must admit to one another, that I have a deep and abiding fear that the cost of follow­ ing Jesus will be our own cross. The cost of following Jesus will be our own deaths. The cost of following Jesus will be the end of our careers. We must ask ourselves if this fear of death and death’s machinery is stronger than our desire to follow Jesus. We fear for our careers. We fear for our churches. We fear the loss of comfort. How can we move beyond our fear? Let’s be clear that Jesus staged this moment for maximum impact, but he also understood the threat that it would be to those who held power. This is a generosity willing to pay the price of discipleship. I am clear that I have tried and failed discipleship. I am clear that I have tried and failed discipleship. I have tried again, and sometimes I have succeeded. I know what it means to be excluded in the career moves of ministry because of things that I have said, decisions that I have made, but I hold fast to the story told so eloquently by Father Richard Rohr. What good is it to spend your ministry climbing the ladder, when you look down and realize forty years later the ladder was leaning against the wrong building? And many of us know that the successful trappings of ministry—large church, large salary, large influence – are often the clothing of death arrayed in the gift of a strong church. Jesus’ generosity led to crucifixion. How many will continue to be crucified if we refuse to be generous in this way? This kind of generosity is confrontational. This kind of generosity is dangerous. This kind of generosity also destabilizes and requires ongoing teaching. I am reading Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism by Kathryn Tan­ ner, and I recommend it to you all to help you to understand-she is helping me to understand-the textures of how the kind of financialized capitalization under capitalism in which we find ourselves is very, very dangerous. One of the things that she mentions in that book is that people are always asking, “If we need a new system, what will it be? Shall we be socialists? Shall we be like the Scandinavian countries? What must we do?” And she says when people get into the level of

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    granularity, what they are really doing is admitting their fear and lack of imagina­ tion toward being and doing differently. I do not want us as followers of Jesus to become paralyzed about clearly defining every next step. The spirit will blow us if we are willing to go. The question for us is one that Tanner raises in her essay, “Are we faithful enough to think the break?” I want to say that one more time: are we faithful enough to think a break from the world as it is constructed? The world in which we live is something that we have imagined, and together we can also imagine something new. When our imaginations are fossilized, ossified, calci­ fied such that we cannot think of a break from what is, we must question our devotion to the ministry of this Jesus who was blown by the Spirit. I am concerned with encour­ aging you and encouraging me to think about new possibilities, and the text says that even after Jesus had done what he had done in the temple, every day he kept showing up teaching because it was not enough for him to perform that amazing sign of driving out the exploiters. He had to come back and teach the people what the break would mean, because not only have the wealthy and powerful grown more wealthy and more powerful because of the way the world is ordered, but those who are exploited have become used to such an order. They have habituated themselves. We have habituated ourselves to such oppression. He showed up day after day teaching the people, encour­ aging them to engage their imaginations and to unite their bodies with the movement of the Spirit that something new might dawn in time and in space. This is the kind of generosity that confronts. This is the kind of generosity that is dangerous. This is the kind of generosity that requires ongoing teaching. But pos­ sibly, most blessedly and most encouraging, it is the fact that the text says that the people were spellbound by this kind of generosity. The powerful were trying to elim­ inate Jesus, to kill him, but they could not kill him because he had the support of the people, and their lives also depended upon that same support. They would not kill him then for fear of how that would affect them. What I want to posit now is that if we are engaging, as churches and people of faith in generosity that confronts, in generosity that is dangerous, in generosity that continues to teach and to think and live the break, the people will join us. The people are waiting for the church to exhibit the generosity that our Lord exhibits. The peo­ ple are waiting for us to show the signs, to live in the discomfort, to pay the price. Our greatest evangelization will be following Jesus in this kind of confrontation­ al, dangerous, ongoing teaching generosity. The people will follow. The people are waiting. The text says they were spellbound by what they saw. They knew they were witnessing one who was filled with God’s power. And when we, though haltingly, move in the direction of this kind of generosity, our communities will stand up and say, “We have been waiting for this kind of display of generosity.” In this day, we must rethink generosity. I firmly believe the Spirit is moving us here. I don’t believe I am the only one feeling the prompting of God’s Spirit. I will

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    no longer let others interpret for me. Wall Street does not get to interpret generosity for me. The Democratic and Republican parties do not get to interpret generosity for me. The United States of America does not get to interpret generosity for me. My own denomination does not get to interpret generosity for me. I will no longer let others interpret for me when I know that God’s Spirit is blowing and pushing. I am no longer that person who at 22 could allow some well-known theologian to interpret for me and change my trajectory, because I understand that faithful ministry depends upon my following the blowing of the Spirit into places of confrontation and danger and teaching and gathering together with God’s people who await our faithful display. And so I have returned to reading Howard Washington Thurman, and his ques­ tion is still relevant. What does Jesus have to say? What does the church have to say to those with their backs against the wall? Will we be generous enough to follow Jesus? Will we be generous enough to confront? To risk danger? To keep teaching and imagining the break? Will we be generous enough to join all God’s people in these wonderful signs of the inbreaking of God’s realm among us? My friends, they are waiting for us.

  • Giving Up On God

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    Page 54

    Giving Up On God

    Andrew C. Whaley

    Raleigh Court Presbyterian Church, Roanoke, Virginia

    It is easier to discuss declining statistics. I know the PC(USA) tradition best, but this is not a foreign story in other Christian expressions in the United States. I grad­ uated from seminary in 2011, and that year the Presbyterian Church (USA) ordained 341 people, which was down slightly from the highest in recent years of 375 in 2006. Last year, in 2021, it was 156. That’s a 59% decline in ordinations to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in fifteen years. That drop in pastoral leaders accompanies the annual membership decline of 50,000 people the denomination endures, leading to realistic predictions that in the mid-2030s, we will cease to exist as an institution. It is easier to find solutions in the immanent threats to human existence, to de­ clare a prophetic word. Green initiatives, racial justice, movements of greater open­ ness and inclusion to marginalized people, immigration reform, eradicating pover­ ty—left-leaning churches move in these ways. Gun rights, abortion restriction and elimination, male headship, school board fights—these are the immanent efforts on the right. All of these earthly initiatives put the work of the church to measurable and actionable use and avoid the creeping anxieties that lurk behind our human work. It is difficult to admit when you are the preacher who has invested your life into the calling, whose medical care and retirement benefits are contingent on the thing you don’t want to admit remaining true. College tuition is coming after all, so we can’t say the ultimate fear out loud, can we? The crisis I refer to is that no one believes in God anymore. Now, of course, that is hyperbolic. The number is not actually zero. There is still an overwhelming spirituality within the American context. But to define that God in a way other than vague generalities creates many challenges. To confess that a God beyond our imag­ ining has intersected the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and has reclaimed us for love by his death and resurrection is a preposterous claim. To declare that we trust that message because of a collection of books compiled by ancient people over several millennia who silenced the voices of opposition and who used these texts to promote purity and push people to the margins sounds backward at best. The Bible has no understanding of scientific and modem complexities of human existence. The challenge for the preacher, therefore, is how to preach when no one tmsts the text you draw wisdom from to reveal a God they have no interest in. I have observed two coping strategies preachers turn to in order to handle the anxiety that arises from these homiletic challenges. Some adopt an ‘‘influencer” mod­ el of preaching. A more culturally intelligible and internally motivated spirituality has grown among us. Ne^v York Times writer David Brooks notes that 29% of Amer­ icans believe in astrology, which is a larger percentage than all mainline Protestants.

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    Witchcraft is growing too, from 8,000 practitioners in 1990 to over 130,000 now. Mindfulness is yet another growing trend—meditation and yoga and other spaces wherein to slow the mind from anxiety.^ We see a shift from

    comes to dominate all of life, for now there is a religious component to the workplace. These

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    “cancelled.” Many progressive Christian communities adopt this rhetoric and these crusades, but without theological reflection and biblical grounding, the legalism in the secular creed comes to fuse itself into the faith community and thus the notions of grace, atonement, and forgiveness are abandoned. Both of these temptations for the preacher, self-help assurance and immanent ac­ tion for the sake of relevance, come from the unwillingness or inability to see a God beyond our observable reality. I spent the summer of 2022 on a sabbatical project exploring the life of twentieth century theologian Karl Barth and his influence upon American Presbyterian pastor and author Eugene Peterson. As I walked the streets of Basel, read sermons in the alps, stood at the university in Bonn, Germany, and visited Barth’s final home that houses his archives, I came to see that the present crisis that “no one believes in God anymore” is yet the latest expression of the conflict between the Natural Theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher and a Barthian approach. I realized in conversations and reflection that the crisis I saw in the American church is evident in Europe and European theology. My wife Rebecca and I sat at a patio table under the umbrella as the sun began to sink in the Basel sky on a beautiful May evening. We were the guests of Dr. Georg Pfleiderer, the chair of theology at the University of Basel, and Dr. Anne Louise Nielson, a post-doctoral fellow. After the wine was poured and we had raised our glasses and ordered our meal, I asked what Barth’s legacy was in theology now in Basel and in the Reformed Church in Switzerland. Dr. Pfleiderer’s answer stunned me when he confessed that Barth is not taught that much anymore, that largely theology departments have returned to the theological ideas of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Barth’s view of the Bible, his insistence on God being “other” than humanity, his emphasis on revelation from God to humanity being the only means by which we can grasp the divine can make his work appear disconnected from contemporary life. Dr. Pfleiderer expressed that the university continues to emphasize Barth’s legacy, but he admits that Barth must be read alongside other theologies. His theology alone is too pietistic, too reliant on faith and not reason. Again, this surprised me, for Barth was quite critical of the “pietists” of his own day, but I understood the point. Dr. Nielson added that for Barth, everything is an­ swered by Faith, and so there is no ability to engage in dialogue with him and other expressions of knowledge, because if there is no faith, the conversation collapses. Christiane Tietz, in the conclusion of her biography, Karl Barth: A Life in Con­ flict, notes this turning away from Barth in European theology: “In recent years in the German-speaking world there has been an extensive turning away from Barth’s theology.. ..In today’s era there is a call for a post-Barthianism that once again picks up on the liberal theological projects of the nineteenth century, implying that Barth’s ”3 theology would offer too few linkages to culture and scholarship. On June 22, 2018 in Princeton, New Jersey, Eric Peterson stood before the an­ nual Barth meeting at Princeton Seminary. He was there because his father’s rapidly

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    declining health would not allow him to attend. Eugene Peterson’s memory was failing terribly, he was physically decaying, but in his last year of his life, his very final project was to prepare a lecture for this symposium on the influence of Karl Barth on his work, his pastorate, his writing, and his passion for the word of God. And so in that lecture, he quotes a line from Barth’s first sermon to the congregation in Safenwil, Switzerland: “I will not speak to you of God because I happen to be a pastor, but that I am a pastor because I must speak of God if I am to remain true to myself, that is my better self” One hundred seven years after it was first spoken, it was being called upon once more. That old conflict between trust in a God beyond us and the self was revived. Eugene Peterson drew on that quote because he knew what had become of the church in the past one hundred years, the crisis in which we sit today. He had seen the American church rise to prominence and expose its many failings and sins, falling out of line with the justice, mercy, humility, and grace of Christ. He had witnessed the ever-increasing secularism, materialism, commercialism around us and the am­ bivalence most people had to any kind of deeply meaningful existence committed to anything other than the next distraction. And so in that same lecture, Peterson writes, “The vocation of pastor has been subverted by strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. Continuity with pastors in times past is virtually non-existent. Men and women who are pastors in America today find that they have entered into a way of life that is in ruins. We are a generation that has to start from scratch to figure out a way to represent and nurture this richly and all-involving way of life of Christ to people who ‘knew not Joseph. What, therefore, could the preacher emphasize in this crisis moment? Is there an alternative word, a new word, a powerful word that is not simply endorsing the loudest words we hear in the media or the voices with the most Twitter followers? In the same piece about Instagram Influencers, Leigh Stein reflects on the state of her soul: “I have hardly prayed to God since I was a teenager, but the pandemic has cracked open inside me a profound yearning for reverence, humility, and awe. I have an overdraft on my outrage account. I want moral authority from someone who isn’t ”5 shilling a memoir or ealling out her enemies on soeial media for elout. Reverence, humility, and awe, these are not things we find in ourselves. These are not things we “achieve” through the correct practices or following advice. They are gifts, surprises, moments of grace. That grace begins by challenging the notion of trusting in the “self. 99 Barth was worried that the “self’ was becoming the new

    name for our God. He is famously known for saying “You cannot say God by saying Man in a loud voice!” In one of his early sermons in Safenwil, Barth states, “When we look at our­ selves, we have to say we are what the family in which we were bom has made us; we are what the education that we enjoyed and the social conditions in which we grew up have made us; we are what good and bad influences have made us—and we

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    affirm all this as our personal history… .In any case, however, when God looks at us, God does not see God’s own mirror image, but a stranger, a being that has become completely unlike God. The divine origin in us is concealed, buried, and forgotten.”^ And this theme does not dissipate over time, for forty years later, he speaks of it again in a sermon to those in the Basel prison: “We cannot believe in ourselves, and we cannot hold on to ourselves. For the harassed, the dark and dangerous world lurks in my own ‘proud heart.’ In what sense could we then say: ‘Nevertheless I am continually with myself?’ The Bible calls it sin when man wants to be with himself. Certainly where this is the case, there is no freedom. Barth saw the elevation of the self as delusion, as a refusal to see the holiness of God and thus to know our need for repentance and forgiveness. The reliance upon ourselves ultimately leads to exhaustion, depression, anxiety, and fear. At worst it leads us into war and prejudice and injustice. Only coming to know who we are in God through Christ can we enter a new way of living in the world. For Barth this dealt with the atrocities of World War I, the rise of the Bolsheviks, the nihilism of Fredrich Nietzsche, Darwinian evolution, and unchecked capitalism that leaves workers destitute. Eugene Peterson lived in a different culture in a dif­ ferent era, but in the suburbs of Baltimore, he saw the American culture as one that drove us into consumerism, individualism, segregated living, and destructive compe­ tition. The conditions were different, but the threat of trusting in ourselves persisted. According to Peterson, “The voices that command the largest audiences in our American culture are spokesmen for the ego, sometimes the religious ego, but never­ theless the ego. Deep-rooted, me-first distortions of our humanity have been institu­ ”8 tionalized in our economics and sanctioned by our psychologies. He returns to this theme frequently in his preaching: “In the culture we have grown up in, all of us have been exposed to a good deal of concern that we develop a healthy self-esteem so we can live whole and satisfying lives. In the process, the term identity crisis has entered our vocabulary as a key element in self-understanding. Who am I? What does it mean to be me?”^ These questions and concepts lead us to higher depression, anxiety about the future, fear of our neighbor, and seeing each other as a threat to our success. The self cannot be trusted. For both Barth and Peterson, therefore, the new life revealed in Christ and met in the scripture is a radical alternative direction. Dying to the self becomes central to the theologies of both men because the power of the self is the power to destroy. It cannot be rehabilitated or manipulated. In the lived experience of humanity, the “self’ destroys. The cross of Jesus reveals this truth, for those with strong self-es­ teem crucify the Lord of Glory. Only as we die to that self can we welcome the joy, the hope, the fullness, the beauty, the grace that God always freely offered but that our “self’ rejects because we want to prove our worth. We want to say “Watch this! and perform our perfection. We want a resume, a bottom line, an investment port-

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    folio to replace the grace of God. The cosmic power of self-reliance drives our sin. We must die to it in order to live. This is what Jesus as God reveals. This is what the scripture points out again and again. This is what the embodied community of Jesus is called to do in contemporary lives continuously. Life, then, comes from God’s grace in Christ, and the sermon is the moment of rev­ elation to a community of preaching. Preaching in the crisis of self-assurance, self-re­ liance, and self-affirmation becomes paramount, for in this moment a truly Good Word might be proclaimed. For Barth the sermon is the place where the Word of God (Jesus Christ) revealed in the written word of God (the Bible) encounters the hearer in a way that they hear the summons, “Follow me!” By the Power of the Holy Spirit, the ser­ mon becomes the Word of God addressed to us. There is more power in the preaching moment than in the TikTok video, the podcast release, or the op-ed column. And the Bible, with all of its flaws and ancient prejudices, is the text from which we hear this word of life. To speak this life-giving word, however, the preacher speaks not about the scripture but through it. Barth understood the power of the scripture beyond the historical-critical method of interpretation he was taught. “The historical-critical method of biblical investigation has its right: it points to a prepa­ ration of understanding that is nowhere superfluous,” writes the theologian. “Never­ theless, all my attention has been oriented toward seeing through the historical spirit into the spirit of the Bible, which is the eternal spirit.”10 And speaking of the power of the Bible to shape the church, he says, “Again and again, the church has had the experience that God made these texts to be the Word of God, in that through them human beings began to believe. And the church lives from the hope that God will do this again.”11 Eugene Peterson takes this form of biblical interpretation and speaks about the Bible as being livable’. “Everything that is revealed in Jesus and the scriptures, the gospel, is there to be lived by ordinary Christians in ordinary times. This is the su- ”12 pematural core, a lived resurrection and Holy Spirit core, of the Christian life. Peterson does not speak here as living all the supernatural elements of the Bible at all times, but that the way of Jesus Christ revealed to us in the scriptures is livable by ordinary people today. Confession of the self to drive us to despair, anxiety, isolation, and violence, as­ surance and hope that comes from beyond us in the Word of grace that is alive even now—this message of grace and hope possesses incredible power and potency in a moment of cynicism. Reverence, humility, and awe—there is longing for these pow­ ers. The preacher stands in the unique space to speak of this power in the person and work of Jesus Christ. The preacher declares the power of the Gospel to save, redeem, and empower human lives. We speak of God not because we are preachers; rather, we are preachers because we must speak of God if we are to be true to ourselves, that is our better selves. So speak of God. There are still souls longing to believe.

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    Notes 1 David Brooks, “The Age of Aquarius, All Over Again!” The New York Times (New York), June 10,2019. https://www.nytimes.eom/2019/06/10/opinion/astrology-occult-millennials.html. 2 Leigh Stein, “The Empty Religions of Instagram,” The New York Times (New York), March 5, 2021, https://www.nytimes.eom/2021/03/05/opinion/influencers-glennon-doyle-instagram.html. 3 Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021), 410. 4 Eugene Peterson, “Karl Barth: An Appreciation” (Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey, June 20, 2018). 5 Leigh Stein, “The Empty Religions of Instagram,” The New York Times (New York), March 5, 2021, https://www.nytimes.eom/2021/03/05/opinion/influencers-glennon-doyle-instagram.html. 6 Karl Barth and William Willimon, The Early Preaching of Karl Barth: Fourteen Sermons with Commentary by William H. Willimon ( Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 42. 7 Karl Barth, Deliverance to the Captives (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2010), 16. 8 Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire (New York: Waterbrook, 2017), 68. 9 Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire (New York: Waterbrook, 2017), 16. 10 Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021), 88-89. 11 Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021), 365. 12 Winn Collier, A Burning In My Bones (New York: Waterbrook, 2021), 87-88.

  • Advent Worship: Songs and Singing

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    Advent Worship: Songs and Singing

    Eric Wall

    Austin, Texas

    If there is a time of year for strong feelings about music—in or out of the church— December is it, when we are surrounded by songs and sounds. Those sounds may transfix or confuse, thrill or aggravate, inspire or distract. Yet here we are, called to prepare worship, to trust the Spirit’s presence in words and in art, and to journey with communities as they hear, tell, and enact a story, and we know that music looms large. Like seasons, music occurs in and over time; it comes and goes. It changes our perception of time. Music unfolds; sometimes we’d like it to last longer or to be finished more quickly. Music and poetry contain room and make space; they walk through the door to be among us, even as they invite us in. Music probes our inner selves as well as the public space of community. For five people, music may work in fifty ways, in communal reach and personal resonance. It is laden with meanings; it is both mysterious and exact. Music does what it will do and bids us to attend, wheth­ er song or symphony, inscribed or improvised, authored or anonymous. What does music in worship offer to the people of God for the unfolding of seasons of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany? An image that springs to mind for this triple season is one of space: an immense room made into three sections by columns (not walls). The columns invite sight, sound, and movement to flow and echo among the sections. Such a fluid space might be a counterpoint to the calendar. Scripture and story move us sequentially from Ad­ vent to Christmas to Epiphany. The songs of these seasons, like all our rituals, take us through that progress:

    Come, thou long expected Jesus … Away in a manger … What star is this …

    Songs may also have fluidity, as though swirling around columns and echoing through the immense triple space these seasons create. After all, the lectionary’s texts, stories, and wonders are journeys through time, yet multi-directional. The adult Jesus speaks in Advent before being bom at Christmas. Mary sings during Advent of the mighty put down from their thrones, even as Christmas and Epiphany arrive in the shadow of a tyrant very much in power. But we don’t need the lectionary to confirm what we know in the life of faith: that yearning, new life, and sudden light are often interwoven. There are Advent glimpses of Epiphany light, and Advent yearning may not dissipate when the page is turned to Christmas. Turning the pages and scrolling the databases of our hymn collections, we usual­ ly find Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany sections, with songs organized by topics to

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    complement scripture, preaching, ritual, or the over-arching journey. These songs are often textually specific—to waiting, birth, light, or biblical characters and settings— and musically specific, in mood, expression, and ethos. That precision lands them in the topical sections of hymnals. It also lands them in all-too-familiar territory, when with the ever-circling years come ’round the ever-circling questions of “Christmas carols or not” or other questions about music in December. Those questions can feel tired, as stale as last year’s Advent calendar chocolates. We reach for easy answers (“no Christmas hymns until after the fourth Sunday of Advent” or “Christmas carols are beloved and expected this time of year”), but we know it’s more complicated. Songs in worship at any time of year are a complex of theological-homiletic-artis­ tic-pastoral-communal meanings. Songs in worship are claimed by the community, and for preparers of worship this means that the question is not just “What shall we choose?” but “What shall we sing?”—two related yet distinct questions. In fact, the questions—and strong feelings—are usually phrased in terms of singing.

    Less likely: “When will you play Christmas carols?” More likely: “When will we sing carols?” or “We sing Advent hymns during Advent. 11

    It is not just generic phrasing for an even more generic idea of “music in wor­ ship.” It shows the instinct toward singing as a human activity: the need to give voice to the language of the soul, to take part in beauty, to make the sighs and sounds too deep for words. Pre-worship song choices are also in-worship enactments: we read and sing words. Ritual is not abstract choice or “on paper”; it is participation, the instinct to to do. So questions about songs are questions of embodiment, and asking what we sing during these seasons leads to deeper questions:

    What happens when we sing certain songs? What work are songs doing in the liturgy and in us? What causes songs to chime, to ring true? What kinds of spaces do they make? What prayers do they evoke? What glimpses do they reveal?

    Consider an archetypal Advent hymn: “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” If you know it, find it in your inner ear now—not the quick mental keyword search we nat­ urally do with familiar hymns {limmannel-equals-God-with-us, rejoice, thine Advent here, heaven s peace, shall come to thee—put it in the bulletin’) nor a quick charac­ terizing of the music {a solemn song since w ‘re weeks away from joyful Christmas) nor the quick reminders of habit (we usually sing this one on Advent 1; three verses is ”enough Make time for the song itself, right now: find it, hum it, sing it (even if you are singing along to a recording or video), in real time, several stanzas …

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    pause for music

    That is the way to choose songs for worship: not just reading them, but hearing them and singing them. That way, we attend to their unfolding. Otherwise, it is like choosing visual art by glance instead of gaze. We just proved it by taking time with “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Did it respond to any of those deeper song questions above? Maybe it brought to mind well-loved worship, reliable year-by-year. Maybe it kindled energy for planning this year’s Advent worship. Perhaps text and music were a strange, all-too-relevant contrast to this day’s headlines, evoking a needed prayer. Perhaps time felt altered, reality different—the glimpse of Something Else we have when art captivates us. Or maybe this hymn has never “worked” for you; tune or text, maybe it seems dull, stale, uninteresting. We should never forget that these are also responses to music. We should also never forget that all these responses, to this and other songs, are like­ ly present in our congregations. So here we are, worship planners with another Advent-Christmas-Epiphany be­ fore us. We are faced with the specifics of scripture, preaching, themes. We think of the realities (so-called) of congregational expectation and custom. A calendar of liturgy lies before us, which we hope to set against the wasteful, gluttonous calendar that threatens to undo us every December. The world totters, our own feet stumble, and we look to the sovereign power of God. Our task is preparing worship—includ­ ing singing—that, against all odds and evidence, makes space for hope and trans­ formation; that, against all noisy gongs around us, makes room for love and nour­ ishment; that, against all immediate and plastic demands for jollity, takes seriously our lament, sorrow, patience, and impatience; that, against all virtual unreality and mega-falsity, claims greater reality and truthful incarnation; and that, against death, dares to imagine birth. What might this mean for the specifics of worship preparation and song choices?

    Beyond “Keywords” The words of songs, after all, are portable theology: we carry them around in books and hearts. Hymn texts shape faith into words, with remarkable beauty, clarity, and memorability, and these are the qualities of poetry (no more fearsome a word than theology). Sometimes, though, we make prosaic choices about poetic hymns. We are after words that give strong textual underlining to scripture or sermon; some­ times we end up with words that may not go beyond a kind of surface correspon­ dence. If, for example, a preaching text is Psalm 23, we’ll probably do more than a simple keyword song search for “shepherds” or “sheep,” since the psalm is more deeply about other things, such as companionship, nourishment, trust, or home. So in Advent, if Isaiah 40 is a focal text for Advent 2, hymns with phrases like “prepare the way” or perhaps a larger paraphrase like “Comfort, Comfort Now My People” are possibilities. But we also ask questions, beyond those specific

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    correlations, about the fullness of preaching and the entire liturgy, so that songs emerge in relationship to Isaiah, not just as re-statements of Isaiah—not just what Isaiah says but what Isaiah means. As an example, consider two possible approaches to Isaiah 40 and “preparing the way.” One could be a focus preparing a way for God’s justice and peace in the world around us. A specific Advent hymn like “Prepare the Way, O Zion” is Isa­ iah-specific and big-picture specific:

    his rule is peace and freedom, and justice, truth, and love tidings of salvation proclaim in every place

    But ‘‘non-Advent hymns” (not found in an Advent section, that is) may work also. In “Cuando el pobre,” we find this stanza by José Antonio Olivar and Miguel Manzano:

    Cuando un hombre sufre y logra su consuelo, cuando espera y no se cansa de esperar, cuando amamos, aunque el odio nos rodée, va Dios mismo en nuestro mismo caminar.

    or in translation by George Lockwood:

    When at last all those yvho suffer find their comfort, yvhen they hope though even hope seems hopelessness, when we love though hate at time seems all around us, then we know that God still goes that road with us.

    Comfort resonates in the words and in the gentle, poignant music, and the road is nuanced as a place where God travels with us. Another song, “Canto de Esperanza/Song of Hope/May the God of Hope Go with Us,” includes these words by Alvin Schutmaat:

    Dios de la justicia, mdndanos tu luz, luz y esperanza en la oscuridad. May the God of justice speed us on our way, bringing light and hope to every land and race.

    Here, “way” is a place we are sent, and “every land and race” echoes Isaiah’s vi­ sion: “all people shall see it together.” Musically it is lively and open-ended, inviting spontaneity, repetition, adventure. A second approach to Isaiah 40 might be interior: preparing a way within our­ selves of prayer, repentance, or love. “Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates” is musical­ ly grand and bold, but its language, by Georg Weissel and translated by Catherine Winkworth, has inwardness:

    Fling wide the portals of your heart; make it a temple set apart

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    from earthly use for heaven s employ, adorned with prayer and love andjoy. Redeemer, come! I open wide my heart to thee; here. Lord, abide. Let me thy inner presence feel; thy grace and love in me reveal.

    Or, again, a “non-Advent” choice: “Spirit, Open My Heart,” by Ruth Duck, with the gentle, tender tune called WILD MOUNTAIN THYME. Those three words alone in the refrain—open my heart—immediately evoke Isaiah …

    Spirit, open my heart to the joy and pain of living. As you love, may I love in receiving and in giving. Spirit, open my heart.

    … as does the second stanza, where we hear “glory” in relation to our own liv­ ing:

    Write your love upon my heart as my law, my goal, my story. In each thought, word, and deed, may my living bring you glory.

    Of course, Isaiah 40 might be more likely preached with both approaches—and others—which means that songs like these would form an even richer conversation within the fabric of a service.

    Beyond Words at All When words are the default driver of choice, music is relegated to a secondary role. Worship planning conversations may probe lots of ideas, and words become a typical entry-point for song choices, as we ask if a song ‘‘goes with” a sermon or theme. Chosen thus, songs may “hang around” in an idea-stage on worship-planning documents and in our minds, like bulletin-boarded theological nuggets, with less consideration of music and of what might happen when songs are actually sung in worship. What energy will songs bring? What mood? How will congregational voices bring the song to life? Will the one-time singing of a song in worship make clear the theological point that, in worship planning, took an hour’s discussion to materialize? We may think of words as a primary theological carrier, but words do not do all the theological work. One way we know this is to think of a time in worship when a hymn was chosen because the words seemed exactly right and yet the worship moment fell flat because of something musical. Perhaps the music’s emotional fla­ vor didn’t respond to the moment, or the tune was unfamiliar and the people were unprepared to sing it. Better, though, is to remember a time when music bore witness to something transcendent in and beyond the words it carried. Music can lift words or hinder them. That is part of music’s theological work. But music, by its sheer sound and its own communicative language, is also cre­ ating theological space. It makes room for prayer, breath, and centering. It awakens energy and beauty. It kindles imagination, suggests possibility, gives glimpses. It

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    isn’t hard to get a feel for this. Imagine a service in which the five hymns above are sung, or just imagine the songs in any recent service. Imagine or listen to the music without the words (your church musician can help you!) and note what you hear:

    Is there a variety of mood? volume? character? Or does everything sound the same? Is there a sense of rise and fall? Are there peak moments and subtle ones? Is there familiarity and surprise? Joy and lament? Are you invited in?

    Deepening Imagination Sometimes we explain Advent at the expense of simply doing it or being in it. We tell congregations yet again that “Advent means coming.” We recycle yet again last year’s Advent wreath liturgy, sometimes with minimal attention to the howwhere -why of it or to a real preparation of readers and candle lighters. Do we do the same with songs, plugging in the same few “familiar” ones during Advent or the same core batch on Christmas Eve? Hymns, as we know, have power and presence, and our worship preparation should include generous time and imaginative attention to how hymns or songs can take place in worship, asking those underlying questions of what might happen when songs are sung. With Advent and Christmas hymns, we sometimes under-imagine or over-instruct . The repertory of Advent hymns, for instance, is incredibly rich, varied, and life-giving. A brief nod to a mere one or two of them early in the season, only to move on to Christmas songs, may deny the people of God the possibilities of singing the full prayerful and prophetic range of the Advent season. We live grief, despair, rage, and fear: dare we paper over it by side-stepping songs that can be deep wells for saying and singing—to God and to each other—our prayers, confessions, and hopes? It is also possible, in another direction, to reduce those same Advent songs to a matter of “correctness.” Do Advent hymns exist to satisfy a calendar discipline, or do they exist to help us sing the language of the soul? Do Christmas carols exist for seasonal cheer and reliability, or do they exist to help us sing the mystery, beauty, liveliness, and intimacy of incarnation? The section names of hymnals or song collections (“Advent,’ 99 CC”‘Promised Com-

    ing; 99 46’Birth,” etc.) may be columns revealing interacting spaces, rather than walls

    defining single rooms. The solemnity of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” may be the precise song for Advent 1, with the season’s long journey; it may also be the right song as we stand rejoicing at the stable door or with angels on Christmas Eve. (Remember that its words are based on the ancient “O Antiphons” that traditionally began on December 17.) It may also be imagined as the Magi’s song as they (and we) follow the Epiphany star: in the shadow of all Herods, past and present, the vision of the star may call for weighty songs no less than lively ones.

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    Likewise, songs can offer glimpses of manifestation in Advent. The lectionary, for Advent 1 in Year B, appoints Isaiah 64: “Oh, that you would tear open the heav­ ens and come down,” cries the prophet. It is a call for God’s inbreaking, a lament over sin, a hope for reconciliation and peace. Though it has come to be a “Christmas song,” the words of “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” offer one glimpse of an answer to Isaiah’s plea. After all, it isn’t a nativity song at all: no birth, no stable, no Holy Family, no Jesus. It is, in fact, a song of inbreaking: the angels’ sudden arrival and their song of glory and peace. Its five-stanzas confront the world’s misery and exhort reconcili­ ation. The caution, of course, is the music, which risks yanking us into a “holiday” space far from Isaiah’s words. But the music can become part of a bigger conversa­ tion if the song is contextualized, woven into worship’s totality of prayer, scripture, preaching, sacrament. Here again are the questions: What is happening when we sing these songs? What is possible? What might be imagined?

    Evocation and Invocation Songs in worship do both: they invite prayer and make prayer. In this particular triptych of seasons, music appears to assist our prayer and faith, to help us attend to story, to help us give ear and give voice. That physicality of song may, ironically, be a conundrum of incarnation. Music in this season is brimming, even bursting, with incarnation. Songs are embodied in our own singing, and they are alive with the meanings, helping us enact past-present-future and sounding beloved memory and fresh wonder. They are deeply familiar and strangely new, holy surprise and ancient wells. They are forerunners: pointing toward something else with a fullness that can be mysteriously close and disconcertingly powerful. Again we ask: What happens when we sing? What are words and music doing? What glimpses could they reveal? Conclude your time in this article not by reading words but by hearing a song. Find a song for Advent, Christmas, or Epiphany:

    Listen. Hum or sing. Remember or learn. What is it doing? What might it do in the place you will worship in the new liturgical year?

  • Preaching in Concert with Professional Companions

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    Preaching in Concert with Professional

    Companions

    David J. Schlafer

    Bethesda, Maryland

    In initial encounters with fellow preachers, I’ve learned it can be wise to mask my identity as a preaching teacher. Case in point: as faculty in one of my denom­ ination’s seminaries, I was attending a Sunday service at the university where it was associated. The preacher had recently made a well-publicized, highly regarded presentation to my denomination’s senior clerics, and he delivered what I deemed an outstanding sermon. After the service, I went to express my appreciation. “I’m the homiletics professor here,” I began—and got no further. The preacher’s face went ashen. The high anxiety in her eyes spoke volumes. I quickly moved to share specific appreciation for her sermon—which was politely received with obvious relief. Yet the apprehension in her eyes never abated. She had been accosted by someone she presumed would be a sermon judge, intent upon rendering a negative verdict! I had intended to engage her as a colleague and companion (not to mention fellow Christian). My ill-considered lead-in had, in two seconds, rendered that connection impossible. It wasn’t hard to “learn my lesson.” (I’ve never committed such a blunder since.) But the lesson beneath the lesson was larger. Preachers often confess, “I don’t mind preaching to my congregation; but I’m afraid to preach to colleagues.” Why should that be daunting? Standard practice among professionals in many disciplines is to seek the company of colleagues, not simply to trade “shop talk” and tell “war sto­ ries,” but to share information, observations, insights, and to invite informal peer re­ view—all in the interests of advancing individual and corporate expertise. (Imagine the long-term impact on the effectiveness of physicians who sought to avoid regular conferences and consults. Imagine the impact on their patients!) Why the often-encountered reticence (or at least ambivalence)—the uncon­ scious or well-masked feeling of competition with other preachers? To some extent this hesitation may derive from unfortunate experiences accumulated in seminary preaching classes, where tentative sermons from fledgling preachers are subjected to dissections akin to scalpel incisions conducted in zoology laboratory classes. Criticism from professors and student peers, even well-intended and gently of­ fered, can sometimes come across as “cutting,” particularly since not just time and energy, but heart and soul have been poured into the preparation of sermons shared— then immediately subjected to “evaluation.” (I once visited a seminary where a re­ quired “senior sermon” became the occasion of what the preacher could only expe­ rience as ritual hazing. After sermon presentation in the seminary chapel before the full seminary faculty, everyone adjourned to a conference room where the preacher

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    was required to listen without comment, as one by one, faculty members informed the student preacher “what was wrong” with the sermon!) I suspect, however, that the sense of mutual defensiveness preachers encounter arises from a deeper source. To stand before God and God’s people—to speak on behalf of the Former to the latter—if there is not some sense of inadequacy and vulnerability, there should be. “Have I gotten it ‘right’ about what God has said and is saying to God’s people?” No amount of preparation can assure an unequivocal answer “yes’!” “Have I found the right way to share that word? Will what I have heard be what my listeners hear? If, for whatever reason, they don’t like what they hear, will they slay, or at least discount, the messenger?” So one might think preachers would seek one another out. Some do. They come together in study groups to share questions and insights about upcoming Biblical texts. They exchange sermons previously preached (perhaps rejoicing with col­ leagues who rejoice and weeping with colleagues who weep). Preachers attend top­ ic-focused continuing education sessions. They might occasionally send out SOS signals to deeply-trusted colleagues: “This isn’t working; got any good ideas?” Still, there is an irreducibly solitary dimension to the act and ministry of preach­ ing that can be isolating and insulating, especially over the long haul. Building pro­ fessional colleague relationships takes time that parish ministers find hard to find. Feeling never able “to do enough” in preparation, or never being sure if or how one’s sermons are being heard, received, or responded to—these factors can make it less and less likely that preachers will avail themselves of what they need more and more—the ears and voices of discerning colleagues, those who “know what it’s like” to enter a pulpit. Perhaps the critical case arises when preachers are working at the same time on the same Biblical texts. The creative process of one preacher can “get in the way” of another. Preachers may not wish, or feel it right, to use material or approaches their colleagues are employing. Comparisons might be mutually helpful, but even named and disavowed, sermon competition is difficult to keep at bay. Competition can in­ sinuate itself into sermon comparison in several ways:

    1) My sermon is not as good as my colleague’s! I should have done that; but, not having the time or skill, I can’t. 2) My sermon is better than my colleague’s. Perhaps I’m not a bad preacher! 3) My colleague and I arrived at pretty much the same place—maybe that’s good (I’m not as inadequate as I think!); but maybe not so good—my ap­ proach wasn’t as original as I thought!) 4) I like what both of us are doing, though each sermon is different. Maybe I can work some of my colleague’s sermon into mine. 5) The approach of my colleague is different from mine; perhaps I can go that route when next I preach on these texts.

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    The patterning effect in the first two comparisons further isolates preachers from each other and insulates them from the vital Spirit-ed Conversation that preaching can and needs to be. Response Three brings into bold relief the “approach-avoidance /promise-peril” tension that preachers may experience in sermon interchanges. This tension can be “retreated from” into further isolation and insulation. It can also, however, be “moved through” to a place where comparison is freed from the specter of competition. The best way to achieve “breakthrough” is closer attention to the per­ ceived similarities of approach and expression: how does each preacher particularly nuance both? Where, amid similarities, are differences—differences not accurately or helpfully described as “better” or “worse”? Responses Four and Five are more promising. There may be clarifying, illumi­ nating, enriching alterations one preacher can make in an unfinished sermon draft that are fostered by reviewing the sermon-in-process of another preacher. Even if preachers keep their sermon drafts essentially intact, retaining the sermons of col­ leagues on given texts in a folder with one’s similarly based sermons can nurture the kind of collegiality preachers need, even if the “payoff’ regarding sermons on these texts isn’t immediate. There is another possibility for fruitful sermon comparison—one offered me by a preaching colleague with whom I have, for several years, traded insights, strate­ gies, sermon drafts, and texts. We were both preaching on the same texts (the tempta­ tion of Adam and Eve in Genesis, and the temptation of Jesus in Matthew). She was preaching as school chaplain to early adolescent boys; I was preaching in my home parish where I serve as pastoral volunteer. Her approach to these texts was exploring how temptations frequently involve a transgressing of boundaries perceived (and presented by the Tempter) as unduly restrictive—when those boundaries are actually life-preserving and freedom-foster­ ing. My approach (in a congregation well-educated but Biblically ill-informed) was describing the nature of evil metaphorically—a cancerous growth, a counterfeit coin, a conjuring trick, the last of which the devil deftly employs. Clearly, these two ap­ proaches were complementary but incompatible in either single sermon. Having read my draft as she was preparing hers, in an email, my colleague wrote: “I will take these ideas (of yours) not into my own text, but into how I perform my sermon.” She was more than acknowledging the value in my approach. She was af­ firming two implications of our interactions:

    1) That in her preaching, I could stand with her (and she with me in mine) as Aaron and Hur stood with Moses (in the Old Testament story, when Aaron and Hur hold aloft Moses’s arms as he intercedes for the people). In colloquial terms, my colleague was saying that in our own preaching we could “have each other’s back.” This was more than saying simply “we’ll pray for each other as we preach.” Rather: “In specific ways, in our respective settings, with our shared Scripture texts, we will each stand to preach with the other.”

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    2) That in her preaching, my approach to the Scripture texts would serve as ‘‘background music”—not directly audible to the ears of her listeners, but in her own ears as she preached. And this would make a difference in her sermon delivery as an act of worship and proclamation.

    What difference, exactly, did that make for her and for me as I continued to pre­ pare my sermon? That is impossible to quantify, of course. I know, however, that led by her insight, as I continued my preaching preparation, I had a palpable sense that the demonic trickster was, with Adam, Eve, and Jesus, appealing to their understandable desire to “spread their wings” into infinite space—a lure that the Tempter was employ­ ing to disorient them. With regard to the temptations of Jesus, I was able (remembering my own “boundary testings” at various life stages) to identify with Jesus as a “Beloved Son” who nevertheless had to discern for himself what that identity consisted in, what its freedom-fostering limits entailed. To name all this in my sermon would have been distracting, but these insights, derived from my colleague’s sermon, were “there” in the act of my preaching in ways that made a difference, subtle but substantial. My colleague’s sermon was part of a more complex, multidimensional worship experience. It involved, in her school chapel service, incorporating into its delivery the use of props and student actors who played out brief dramatic scenarios as she spoke. In checking back in on “how it went,” my colleague noted that she had held in her mind and imagination the interpretive angle on the text that I had taken. She allowed that it had illuminated the scenes from each text while she directed and staged them. She wrote: “It enriched those decisions and at no point felt as if it were in competition with the approach I’d chosen and that you had affirmed as valid.” She proceeded to list examples in which some of her specific decisions were “enriched,” resulting in the actors, students, and school faculty colleagues listening intently. She described post-preaching responses and interactions from listeners in­ dicating that as her sermon ended, it was, in their engaged imaginations, just getting started. Summarizing her experience in preparation and delivery, she concluded:

    Because I had heard your interpretation of this text before performing my own, I knew exactly how I wanted to deliver my narration and interpre­ tation and how I wanted the boys to act the scenes. In short, your hearing my sermon gave me confidence to direct and per­ form it with clarity and leadership, and brought theological depth and under­ standing to the way I directed and performed sections of text that supported my own focus “out of bounds vs. respecting bounds.” Because I had read your sermon, I approached the texts with more curiosity and imagination than I otherwise would have.1

    The gift for me, in this exchange between trusted colleagues, extends beyond how our sermon-shaping analogously informed each other’s. I have worked with (lit­ erally) “generations” of preaching students, always advocating that they listen close­

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    ly to each other (evaluation allowed only after attentive, extensive, communal “thick description”). I regularly encourage student preachers to work as colleagues rather than as competitors for a grade. I have shared sermons with preaching peers, inviting and offering observations, reflections, and suggestions (not “Change X to Y,” but “What would happen if…”). What I had never considered was that an orchestration of aural/oral theological artistry by one preaching composer could resonate helpfully “in tuneful accord” with that of another preaching composer. It is, perhaps, possible for solo preachers to survive. It is very difficult for solo preachers to thrive. But why should preachers go it alone, when the alternative can, for them and for God’s peo­ ple, be so much more fruitful and so much more enjoyable?

    Note 11 am deeply grateful to The Rev. Leslie Chadwick, Chaplain of St. Alban’s School in Washington, DC, for sharing in the interchanges around our two “temptation” sermons, for her willingness to be a co-participant in this essay, her participation with me as a preaching colleague, her practice as a consistently excellent preacher, and for her witness as a faithful Christian who practices what she preaches.

  • Preaching Easter Hope and Pentecostal Peace in Trying Times–and Via New Media

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    Preaching Easter Hope and Pentecostal Peace in

    Trying Times—and Via New Media

    Peter M. Wallace

    “Day 1” radio/podcast program, Atlanta, Georgia

    The pandemic has certainly done a number on the church, hasn’t it? But then, every aspect of our lives—our work, our communities, our politics, even our enter­ tainment—has been affected, perhaps permanently, by the ongoing assault of Covid 19. Then, fold in an utterly venomous political situation exacerbated by relentless argument, false social media memes, and news media bias, and stir: it’s a toxic stew absent any nourishment—flavored only by cynicism, mistrust, exhaustion, and skep­ ticism at every level of our society. Now, with the seasons of Easter and Pentecost upon us, we preachers face the daunting task of proclaiming peace with God and with one another, and of offering God’s hope in the midst of it all. And while evolution may have taken billions of years, it seems that we are being forced to evolve as preachers immediately, because of rapid changes in delivery platforms, technical capabilities, congregational expec­ tations, and message relevance. What can we say—and how best can we say it—to cut through the gloom and kindle within our listeners a fresh fire of the Spirit and a renewed and hopeful faith?

    Building on a Legacy of Preaching For twenty-two years I’ve had the blessed opportunity to listen to a total of some­ thing like twelve hundred sermons by a diverse assortment of preachers representing the broad range of the mainline Protestant denominations. That’s because I produce and host a weekly program called “Day 1,” which airs nationally on two hundred radio stations, on our Dayl.org website, and on podcast apps. Formerly known as “The Protestant Hour,” our program has been produced since the end of World War II, when peace and hope were breaking out all over after a hideously destructive war waged by an evil megalomaniac. The lessons of that time are just as needed today. “Day 1” seeks to proclaim the good news of God’s hope for a divided world. Each week we present a preacher who shares a sermon crafted from a lectionary text to give us hope, to challenge us to love and serve God and our neighbors, to offer peace in the storms of life, and to share guidance for living a life of faith that seeks justice and equality for all. But in recent years our mission seems more difficult than ever to achieve: en­ trenched cynicism, destructive division, and deep hatreds have resulted in a cultural landscape littered with bodies, mostly of innocent victims. How did we get to the place in our nation where we fear speaking to a neighbor or colleague because of sus­ pected political or religious differences? How can we preach what we believe deep

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    in our bones without fearing the wrath of the vestry, session, administrative board, or major pledgers? We can blame any number of causes for this present darkness. But how can we be part of the solution?

    How Then Shall We Preach? In the wake of rapidly declining church membership, the pandemic has indeed hit the church hard, and among other effects has upended preaching practices in ev­ ery church. Preachers have been forced not only to employ new avenues for preach­ ing and worship via the internet on Zoom, YouTube, or Facebook, but also to adjust their sermon content and preaching style, moving from preaching from the pulpits in our naves—large, open, often transcendent spaces—to standing alone in front of an iPhone camera in our living rooms or chapels. Without the live congregational experience of the preaching moment, many preachers have foundered in making an authentic connection to their ofiten-unseen audience. Now that most churches have returned to in-person and often hybrid worship experiences, preachers are having to balance communicating both to those congregating for live worship and to those watching and worshiping online, often from far locales. Our production of “Day 1” programs usually involves the preacher doing “pick­ ups” in their presentation when they stumble over their words, or retakes of para­ graphs to improve delivery or fix problems. This sort of sermon editing was entirely foreign to our preachers prior to the pandemic, but now that most of them have expe­ rienced the frustration of blown lines and having to retake portions of their sermons while videotaping them, I’ve found that preachers these days are more than aware of the need to redo some things. (Over my years as host, we’ve had perhaps only a dozen “one-take wonders” who have required no retakes or pick-ups!) In my conversations with our “Day 1” preachers in recent years about the impact of the pandemic on their preaching, most have expressed deep frustration, not only about the technical requirements and accompanying frustrations of this new world of preach­ ing, but also a sense of theological lostness and confusion when it comes to grasping and exemplifying what effective and relevant preaching really should involve now, par­ ticularly when addressing listeners in person, but also virtually. How can a preacher proclaim authentic hope and peace in these dual live and virtual contexts, with listeners who have been worn down by our trying times, regardless of how they’re listening?

    Equipping Preachers for the New Reality The preachers I’ve talked to are wrestling with these questions individually and with colleagues in various ways. I’m pleased and grateful that a major four-year grant to “Day 1” by Lilly Endowment Inc., as part of their Compelling Preaching Initiative, will fund several new activities that we hope will knowledgeably address these issues and provide guidance. One of these activities is a careful and expert curation, with oversight by Atla, of our seventy-eight years (and counting) of weekly “Protestant Hour” and “Day 1” sermons, and making these archives available online

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    for preachers, students, scholars, teachers of preaching, and anyone else interested in the sociological, historical, theological, and stylistic evolutions of homiletics. We also plan research and resources for equipping lay persons, not only to assist their pastors with skilled and effective sermon feedback, but also to enable search com­ mittees to evaluate candidates’ sermons responsibly for their church contexts. The third and most relevant activity for this discussion, however, is to equip pastors for preaching in this age of new media and virtual audiences. Those crafting sermons for media dissemination must understand that it may be consumed syn­ chronously or asynchronously, and across any number of platforms in any number of contexts by communities or individuals. Some must record sermons days in ad­ vance for digitally edited worship services. The use of these new forms of media for preaching obviously raises issues of best techniques, but they also pose challenging questions beyond the merely technological. Just as the most skilled preachers on “Day 1” have discovered through the years, effective preaching on the radio involves more than simply delivering the sermon to the microphone in the same way as it would be delivered in a pulpit to a gath­ ered congregation. A change in medium necessitates changes in preaching methods, styles, and relationships to the sermon hearers. Edmund Steimle, the accomplished Lutheran preacher and pastor who taught for many years at Union Theological Sem­ inary, and who preached on the “Protestant Hour” some two hundred fifty times, grasped the unique challenges of radio preaching, and his powerfully intimate ser­ mons landed deeply in listeners’ hearts and minds. Radio, by changing the means of delivery, also changes the methods and the content of the sermon as well. These distinctions hold true today in preaching via new media or virtually.

    Preaching That Reaches All Our Audiences Many “Day 1” preachers I worked with prior to the pandemic expressed frustra­ tion not only with retakes and pick-ups, but with the fact that they could not see their audience and thereby gain feedback in the preaching moment, whether verbal or visual. And in crafting their sermons, they felt a bit adrift in understanding their au­ dience, because it was so much broader and mostly unknowable as opposed to their own familiar congregation. They realized that inside jokes, current congregational events or issues, even timely references to the news could not be incorporated, and they felt the resulting sermon for such a broad audience lacked something important. Now, most preachers are struggling with the same frustrations in preaching in their virtual or hybrid contexts. It’s clear that much work must be done to explore and resolve these concerns. In preparing for our grant proposal, our planning team, which included Dr. Katie Givens Kime, Dr. Thomas G. Long, Dr. Micah Jackson, Atla representatives, and other luminaries, discovered a critical gap in research and teaching resources related to these enormously important and timely questions around the impact of this rapid evolution in preaching.

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    Dr. Richard “Bo” Adams, director of Candler School of Theology Pitts Library, who also assisted our planning team, has regularly taught a course called “Hacking Ministry: The Work of the Church in a Digital Age,” and it has been my honor during several semesters to lead a session on effective preaching on the radio or by podcast. Adams spends the first segment of the course, as it is currently structured in the wake of the pandemic, on exploring these vital questions and the noticeable gap in the literature. In order to help fill this gap in teaching tools and in robust theological engage­ ment of the dynamics of new media preaching, we are assembling an advisory team of homeliticians, pastors, teachers of preaching, theological librarians, and effective “Day 1” preachers to review relevant literature and craft an educational program of best practices for new media preaching that reflects the shifts and learnings of the pandemic age. As part of this Compelling Preaching Initiative activity, we also plan to create teaching sessions and instructional materials to communicate and train preachers in these best practices. Deliverables could include pedagogically informed insights, scholarly pieces on the theological issues raised, and audio/video podcast conversations on these issues with experts.1 Other organizations and seminaries are pursuing similar goals to help preachers of all kinds think through the theological ramifications of this new age of preaching, and effec­ tively proclaim the gospel message through new and emerging media—some platforms of which are only being dreamed up as we speak. As I face my own retirement later this year, I can only hope and pray that “Day 1” will continue to be in the forefront of these efforts to preach the good news effectively in this confusing and often horrifying age.

    Becoming Part of the Solution But this brings us back to the content of the sermon. No matter what media platforms or theological approaches today’s preachers employ, how can we break through the depressing darkness of these times and offer genuine hope, peace, and joy? How can we be part of the solution? Recently we recorded a “Day 1” program with the Rev. Monica Mainwaring, rector of St. Martin in the Fields Episcopal Church in Atlanta. In her sermon she said,

    My bishop, Rob Wright, in tribute to the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said that for Tutu, “Jesus was his center, not his border.” Isn’t that how it should be for all of us? Jesus at our core. Jesus at the center of our being, motivating our cry for justice, our call to mercy, our work, which for Tutu was toward the end of apartheid. The name of Jesus shouldn’t be a border, a boundary, a line in the sand. The name of Jesus is not meant to divide and to delineate, but to welcome and to enfold…. Wouldn’t it be remarkable if we could all say, in the name of Jesus, I am figuring out how to love my enemy? In the name of Jesus, my neighbor is dialoging with me across difference. In the name of Jesus, my nation is pursuing peace.2

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    Is this peace really possible? Do we dare hope for it? If so, how can we experi­ ence true peace in our hearts, our family life, our nation and world? And then, how can we preach that peace in the midst of a skeptical, cynical, and even violent soci­ ety? Despite all the frustration and exhaustion life brings us, true peace is possible if we can better understand what it looks and feels like, what its purpose is, and how it changes things. And Easter and Pentecost offer the preacher the ultimate expressions of how God can inspire a resurrection-sourced hope and a Spirit-powered peace. The beloved song “Let There Be Peace on Earth, and Let It Begin with Me” was written for a youth choir in 1955, a time that seems so innocent in hindsight and yet was fraught with as much inequality and injustice as we seem to witness today. Even so, the song’s message remains true: peace starts with each one of us. The lyricist, Jill Jackson-Miller, once spoke to an NPR host about how the song came about: “When I attempted suicide [in 1944] and I didn’t succeed,” she said, “I knew for the first time unconditional love—which God is…. I had an eternal moment of truth in which I knew I was loved, and I knew I was here for a purpose.” The song, with a tune composed later by her husband, was introduced during a youth retreat in Cali­ fornia. The young people attending represented “a wide variety of religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic background.. ..The song’s focus on peace and God made it easy to cross many boundaries.” Those young people returned carrying this song—and its heartfelt reality—to their homes, schools, and churches? I pray that we can follow that example not only in our preaching, but in our everyday lives.

    Jesus as Our Model for Peacemaking Though fully divine, Jesus experienced a wide range of fully human emotions when he walked the earth.4 Regardless of his circumstances, which were difficult and divisive if not life-threatening, he seemed to walk on a bedrock of peace. Not an otherworldly, ethereal, new age cloud of empty silence—the peace Jesus knew and lived through was solid and real. It was a peace that fueled his passionate work. And that peace is available to us as well. Peace on earth begins with each one of us. In an adult formation class I taught on peace, a dear 90-year-old churchgoer said she enjoyed just staying home and praying—that was her peace. She added, “It’s in­ teraction with other people and outside forces that destroy my peace!” Someone else responded, “Well, for those of us who still have to interact with the rest of the world, a lot of it is about knowing you are where you’re supposed to be, accepting that, and being confident in what you’re being called to do. Even when the world around you is going nuts, you know this is what you’re supposed to be doing. I think that’s how Jesus experienced peace—there was turmoil around him, but he knew what he was about.” I believe we preachers can relate to what they are saying and, beyond that, we can find that center core of peace as well, if we intentionally open ourselves up to it. But there is much work we must do to experience and to proclaim this peace in our world.

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    I’m encouraged by the amazing amount of work that is being done now by or­ ganizations, seminaries, churches, and other entities to help us genuinely grasp the challenges we are facing and figure out ways to overcome them in order to free preachers to proclaim wholehearted hope and lifechanging peace in these difficult days. I’m grateful that “Day 1” can play a small part in that effort, and I invite you to follow us as we work to that end. My prayer for you, fellow preacher, echoes the one attributed to St. Francis: “Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light….”5

    Notes ‘Some of the material concerning the “Day 1” Compelling Preaching Initiative grant activities is adapted from our proposal to Lilly Endowment, Inc., which was originally written primarily by our project director, Dr. Katie Givens Kime. 2Monica Mainwaring, “God’s Name for You,” “Day 1” sermon for January 1, 2023, https://dayl.org/.

    3Dr. C. Michael Hawn, History of Hymns: “Let There Be Peace on Earth,” June 12, 2013, accessed at https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-let-there-be-peace-on-earth. 4I love exploring Jesus’ emotions and have done so in my books A Passionate Jesus: What We Can Learn from Jesus about Fear, Grief Joy, and Living Authentically (SkyLight Paths, 2013) and Heart and Soul: The Emotions of Jesus, an edited and annotated version of Robert Law’s lost 1915 devotional (Church Publishing, 2019).

    5https://www.loyolapress.com/catholic-resources/prayer/traditional-catholic-prayers/saints-prayers/ peace-prayer-of-saint-francis/.

  • One New Book for the Preacher

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    One Neyv Book for the Preacher

    Jennifer Watley Maxell The Ministry Collaborative and The Breakthrough Fellowship, Smyrna, Georgia

    Tyshawn Gardner, Sacred Anthropology: Prophetic Radicalism for Pulpit and Peyv (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022)

    ”And immediately all the doors were opened and everyone s bonds were unfastened. ” Acts 16:26

    Tyshawn Gardner is a pastor, preacher, and prophet who now works in the Acad­ emy as a restorer of the hopefulness of the Gospel in a time when cynicism and disorientation appear to rule the day. In this book. Sacred Anthropology: Prophetic Radicalism for Pulpit and Peyv, Tyshawn moves gracefully across the disciplines of sociology, theology, and homiletics in a way that is accessible for, as the title suggests, clergy and laity. It is a necessary addition to the library of anyone who is seriously curious about discerning what God is up to in this season. Our country is more polarized than ever, and while this statement may be un­ comfortable for some, or too pointed for others, very few can deny its validity. While some blame social media and its influences on culture, and others point to conspiracy theories, foreign

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    Prophetic radicalism happens when Christians engage in Christian proclama­ tion and living that exposes the root cause of injustice while advocating for God’s redemptive justice and simultaneously acting as agents of disruption in accord with the life and ministry of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. In other words, prophetic radicalism demands both faithful declaration and fervent demonstration of the Gospel in ways that expose and dismantle oppressive systems. But it does not stop there. The goal is transformation for the oppressed as well as the oppressor and the seeding of a new community where justice and equity are not simply ideals, but reality. This liberative proclamation identified by Gardner as social crisis preaching is biblically rooted. Spirit-enabled proclamation that develops and drives congrega­ tions to compassionately care for and radically confront social crises in the commu­ nities where their neighbors live, work, worship, and play. The term was coined by Kelly Miller Smith, Sr., in the 1984 Lyman Beecher Lectures entitled

    Easter 2023

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    the power of the Holy Spirit. Speaking truth to power transforms the powerful and liberates the powerless. Hard truths must be shared to expose injustice, to inspire personal responsibility, and to address self-harm within the community. Pastoral preaching courage is what we encounter in the prophets but see embodied by Jesus to dismantle systemic evil and injustice. Gardner compels his readers to engage this work from a deep spiritual well, recognizing the weariness and self-destructive practices that often accompany jus­ tice work and advocacy. Gardner also draws deeply on the embrace and exercise of time-tested spiritual disciplines of spiritual detachment, togetherness, and worship that replenish the soul and have sustained those given to such daunting work. Gardner’s work is a deep well that inspires faithful risks, that can alter the pres­ ent reality and present a hopeful view of the future!