Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1989
AJM Nov 99 [Extracts, not notes.]
We preach mostly to believers. Yet the gospel is too readily heard and taken for granted, as though it
contianed no unsettling news and no unwelcome threat. What began as news in the
gospel is easily assumed, slotted, and conveniently dismissed. We depart having
heard, but without noticing the urge to transformation that is not readily
ocmpatible with our comfortable believing that asks little and receives less.
The gospel is thus a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a
truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane. Partly, the
gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. But
morethan that, our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem,
transforms assurance into certitude, revises quality into quantity, and so
takes the categories of biblical faith and represnets them in manageable
shapes, p.1-2.
Preaching among us
happens in this context in which truth is greatly reduced. That means the
gospel may have been twisted, pressed, tailored, and gerrymandered until it is
comfortable with technological reason that leaves us unbothered, and with
ideology that leaves us with uncriticized absolutes.... We shall not be the
community we hope to be if our primary communicatiosn are in modes of
utilitarian technology and managed, conformed values, p.2.
To address the
issue of a truth greatly reduced requires us to be poets that speak against a
prose world. P 3. By prose I refer to a world that is organized in settled
formulae... By poetry I mean language that moves, that jumps at the right
moment, that breaks open old worlds with surpise, abrasion and pace. Poetic
speech is the only proclamation worth doing in a situation of reductionism...
Such preaching is not moral instruction or problem solving or doctrinal
clarification. It is not good advice, nor is it romantic caressing, nor is it a
soothing good humour. It is, rather, the ready, steady, surprising proposal
that the real world in which God invites us to live is not the one made
available by the rulers of this age. The preacher has an awesome opportunity to
offer an evangelical world: an existence shaped by the news of the gospel...
Because we live so close to the biblical text, we often fail to note its
generative power to summon and evoke new life. Broadly construed, the language
of the biblical text is prophetic: it anticipates and summons realities that
live beyond the conventions of our day-to-day, take-for-granted world. The
Bible is our firm guarantee that in a world of technological naivete and
ideological reductionism, prophetic construals of another world are still possible,
still worth doing, still longingly received by those who live at the edge of
despair, resignation, and conformity.
Our preferred language is to call such speech prophetic, but we might
also term it poetic. p 3-4
Von Balthasar: God needs prophets in order to make himself
known, and all prophets are necessarily artistic. What a prophet has to say can
never be said in prose.
In this book, then, I
want to consider preaching as a poetic construal of an alternative world. The
purpose of such preaching is to cherish the turht, to open the truth from its
pervasive reductionism in our society, to break the fearful rationality that
keeps the news form being new... After the engineers, inventors, and
scientists, after all such control through knowledge, ‘finally comes the poet’.
The poet does not come to have a say until the human community has engaged in
its best management. Then perchance comes the power of poetry - shattering,
evocative speech that breaks fixed conclusions and presses us always toward new,
dangerous, imaginative possibilities. P.6.
Preaching the text: it
is not time for cleverness or novelty. It is not time for advice or scolding or
urging, because the text is not any problem-solving answer or a flat,
ideological agent that can bring resolve. This moment of speech is a poetic
rendering in a community that has come all too often to expect nothing but
prose. It is a prose world for all those who must meet payrolls and grade
papers and pump gas and fly planes. When the text, too, has been reduced to
prose, life becomes so prosaic that there is a dread dullness that besets the
human spirit. We become mindless conformists or angry protesters, and there is
no health in us. We become so beaten by prose that only poetic articulation has
a chance to let us live, p.9.
The preacher is called to weave an artistic connection between the text in its elusive, liberated truth, and the congregation in its propensity to hear the text in forms of reductionism. That task requires articulation of a great truth in the text that may be unnoticed reality in the congregation - unnoticed, or noticed and rejected, or routinised. Preaching makes it possible for something that has been closed to be powerfully disclosed... In addressing the theme of guilt and healing, the preacher has a threefold task of articulation. First, the preacher is to explicate the reality, power, destructiveness, and hurt that comes with sin and its accompanying guilt. That reality is more powerful and more destructive than we are wont to imagine. Second, the preacher is to construe an alternative. The biblical text trsuts and asserts that reconciliation, forgiveness, and restoration are indeed possible.... The third task of articulation for the preacher is to trace and voice the delicate, tortured, dramatic way in which God moves for and with us from one world to the other, a move wrought in love and faithfulness, but also wrought in grief and humiliation... this threefold task of articulation is so difficult preciesly because these claims are already known in the church. They are, howedver, frequently known in such reductionist ways. The whole drama of guilt and forgiveness .. is present and discerned in two terribly destructive forms [guilt and punishment, or cheap grace]. ...13-15
So who is out there? People with layers of alienation that
result from sin and that are experienced as guilt. The gathered congregation
includes those who are profoundly burdened with guilt, who lives are framed by
deep wrong, by skewed relations beyond resolve, shareholders in the public
drama of brutality and exploitation. ..Heaviness; and yet yearning... Sunday
morning is, for some, a last hope that life need not be lived in alienation.
We need not dwell on the sin that produces alienation. Suffice with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud to say that sin characteristically is manifested in distorted relations to sex and money, in lust and in greed, in abuse of neighbour and int the squandering of creation. 13-15
We bury [the alienation and the guilt]... in order to get on
with our life as best we can... Bury alienation and guilt in numbness and after
a while one does not notice .. The preacher must address that which is buried,
because even when hidden, the alienation remains powerful and destructive.
Guilt lingers unnoticed. It reduces us to automatons: weary, cynical, resigned.
Resignation causes failed communication. Not only do we not talk to Fidel
Castro, having ended diplomatic relations, but we also do not talk to wife or
husband or chidlren either. We have been over the same ground of buried guilt
so many times and accepted it in our lives so long we have labeled it normalcy.
We come on Sunday morning with a desperate yearning to move past that lingering
immobilization. Guilt, unaddressed, with finally kill.17
Believers whose faith is greatly diminished may utter a
truth greatly reduced: ‘smile, God loves you.’ Does God love because God is
engaged in some cover-up with us and does not know about the alienation?
Because if God knew, God would not meet me with a smile, but with a deep, deep
cry for life run amiss. The alienation is heavy, serious, and burdensome for
us, because it is heavy, serious and burdensome for the alienated father God,
for the mother God who grieves for us while we are too numb to grieve... Over
time, what happens on Sunday morning is an artistic rendering of a new
truth-filled world n which many people may come to live and begin to function
again with the freedom that belongs peculiarly to God’s children... But not
until the poet comes, the one who speaks honestly about the incongruity, who
speaks buoyantly about the alternative. 17
Evangelical
preaching is invited to break out of the conservatism that makes God function
mechanically, for such a scholastic God has no power to save. Preaching is invited
to break out of the liberalism that believes we finally can manage on our own,
for managing never gives life. Preaching has to do with a life poured out for
us to deal with the residue of guilt left untouched by reparations, p. 36. ..
Such and inscrutable resolution of guilt must be articulated poetically,
becasue the reality of God’s self-giving outruns all our capacities to speak
about it. .. Unless we speak poeticlaly, we invite terrible reductions. Unless
we speak poetically, God’s self-giving transformation will be heard as a form
of cheap grace that costs God nothing becuase God simply overrides. Our poetry,
however, helps us articulate how costly our new life is for God, p. 37.
Every aspect of what is urged here as a biblical way of understanding and transforming guilt runs against the ideology of our culture. We have made a series of theological affirmations that the owrld does not easily embrace: that there is real guilt; that God is serious in anger and anguish; that reparations are required; and that the residue is resolved. All these claims violate our presumed world of modernity.
The problems of praise in the modern world are acute and obvious. Praise is difficult for those caught in reductionism. Praise becomes problematic for those who perceive life as technique, and live life as a series of problems to be solved. Our relation with God is niether a problem to be solved, nor a technique to be practised. For children of modernity, technique and manipulation finally silence all serious conversation. For us to be summoned to and permitted in a serious conversation is awesome, transforamtive, and frightening. It is the gift of the text and the world of the preacher to lead the congregation past the reductions to praise, which is in fact communion, p.73.
The preacher faces people whose life and faith are greatly reduced - not wrong, but sadly reduced. On the one hand the reduction is to an autonomy that ends in isolation. We have come to believe in self-fulfilment and have discovered that even a ‘filled’ life, if alone, results in an empty self. On the other hand, the reduction is a weary, resigned trust in God’s justice that collides with too much dissonant data.... The news entrusted to the preacher.. is that we are willed and destined to a more candid, passionate, transformative conversation where our lives are given us again. That more candid, passionate, transformative conversation begins with protest. It ends in praise, the final act of our true selves... The dare of preaching is to open and sustain a conversation without which we cannot live; a conversation perceived among us as subversive... The work of the poet is to permit a fresh conversation among those who are too modern, too buoyant, to desperate, too obedient.75
In addition to our epistemology, our economics also make listening problematic. The great fact of the Western world, and therefore the circumstnace of our preaching, is that we gather as restless, greedy chldren of disproportion, cuaght in an ideoogy of acquisitiveness. That is, social goods, social access, and social power are not equally distributed. Some have too little. Some have too much. That some have too much is intimately related to the fact that some have too little. While there are economic differentiations in the Christian community, the main body of our Western church constituency consists of adherents to and benefactors of the great Western disproportion. We have too much. We have more than our share. We have what belongs to the others, and now they want it back. This economic relaity among us impinges on our capacity to hear and respond when we are addressed by God’s voice of command, p.82.
Paul Ricoeur has seen as well as anyone that obedience follows imagination. Our obedience will not venture far beyond or run risks beyond our imagined world. If we wish to have transformed obedience (ie, more faithful, responsive listening), then we must be summoned to an alternative imagination, in order that we may imagine the world and ourselves differently. The link of obedience to imagination suggests that the toughness of ethics depends on poetic, artistic speech as the only speech that can evoke transformed listening. Even concerning ethics, ‘finally comes the poet’. It is poetic invitation that holds the only chance of changed behaviour, a point understood and practiced by Jesus in his parables, which had such ethcial bite, but such artistic delicacy. p. 85
In the ancient world.. the primary reason for prison was to contain poor people who are locked up for indebtedness [on Isaiah 61/Lk 4]. Cancellation of debts permits reentry into public life with dignity and freedom. The jUbilee year is the intervention of God, who breaks the vicious cycle - indebtedness and poverty - which is kept going by inhumane pracitces of land, taxes and debts, p.105.