Preachers must move into that place where the cross of Christ bridges the distance between rich and poor.

Consideration of the context in which a biblical text is preached is central to the practice of preaching and to the contribution homiletics makes to theological education.  Although this seems obvious to me on one level, I am only coming to discover the vast implications of the context by which and into which we preachers are engaging the word of God.  Only recently have I come to realize how little time we preachers devote to reading the other “texts” of the world before us and understanding not only what should be said to the world but also how these texts are shaping our reading and proclamation of the Gospel.  Social location and our awareness of it matters.   Certainly this is true when it comes to thinking carefully about preaching and poverty.  In general we preach hope to the poor and charity to the rich, but I want to propose preaching solidarity to the whole church, rich and poor.

Consider the words of the prophet Isaiah re-engaged by Luke in his Gospel account:
A voice of one calling: “In the desert prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.  Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain.  And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all humankind  together will see it. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
(Is 40:3–5; Lk 3:4–6)

If this is news about a divinely reconfigured humanity, how is one to receive this news?  Is the leveling of every high place and the raising of every valley to be received as good or bad news?  If we were to be perfectly honest, wouldn’t we say that whether one receives this announcement as good or bad news depends on where you find yourself in the current social arrangement?  For those in “high places,” surely this is not good news.  For those located advantageously in the current social and economic arrangement, news that this sort of leveling work is taking place is not readily embraced.  Indeed, it could very well be perceived as bad news.   But for those in “low places,” surely this sort of announcement rings with hope.  Social location matters.  In fact, the lively image of valleys and mountains offered to us by the prophet provides a useful metaphor for rethinking preaching and poverty.

We are well aware that the sermon on poverty will sound different in the barrio than the suburbs.  I have experimented with this a bit in my twenty years of preaching.  By and large, most of my preaching has been done from “mountain places,” churches whose demographic profile consists of white-collar, upwardly mobile, middle- to upper-middle-class people.  On occasion, however, I am invited to preach in the “valley.”  For a while, I made regular trips to the State Penitentiary just outside the city where I lived.  Inside the walls of the prison, I would often take up as the text for preaching the same text as preached in my local congregation.  Though from the same text, these sermons were quite different.  The texts did not change, but the Gospel proclaimed from them did.

The social location of the prison turns the sermon on poverty toward the poor, assuring them that God has not forgotten them and that his favor rests upon them.  Preaching for the poor is unmistakably filled with hope.  Jürgen Moltmann’s “theology of hope” has shaped much contemporary liberation theology.  In his classic The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, he put it this way: “The messianic hope was never the hope of the victors and the rulers.  It was always the hope of the defeated and the ground down.”   Preaching hope to the poor never ignores the reality of the powers of death manifest in poverty, but emerges from this place.  From the “valley,” the sermon preaches the church up.

In much the same way, the location of the community of faith which resides in social, political, and economic places of power will obviously influence the sermon on poverty.  From this place, social location turns the sermon on poverty toward the prosperous, reminding them of God’s favor toward the poor and calling for an ethical response on behalf of the poor.  Rather than sounding the theological theme of hope, these sermons speak more of the obligation of discipleship and the ethical imperative to share one’s prosperity with the poor.  If one were to survey collections of sermons over the last fifty years, I suspect that the vast majority of sermons on poverty would move in this direction — to preach the church down.

While it may be true that the social location of our preaching will shape the sermon in significant ways and there may very well be occasions to preach the church up or down, preaching like this is inevitably hierarchical.  Sermons on poverty that only move up or down follow a patron-client social hierarchy that too often reinforces the division of persons by virtue of classism.  Though it may not be the preacher’s intent, preaching from above or below (as we are describing it here) objectifies the other on the basis of socio-economic status.  The poor are objectified and rendered a charitable project, or the rich are objectified as those possessing God’s blessing.  I would like to suggest that preaching on poverty can acknowledge the socio-economic disparity among us without participating in the hierarchical structure created by such distinctions.  Can we preach the church together?
Upon returning from a week among the impoverished of Ciudad Juárez with a group of university students, one of the members of my congregation stood before the church and said, “We went there thinking that we were going to take the love of Jesus to these people.  What we found was that it was already there.”  I think that says it well.  Our assumptions were that we possessed something that the poor of Mexico needed — the gift of our time, our money, our work as expressions of the love of Christ.  Our assumptions were manifestations of a patron-client social hierarchy that said we had something to give that they needed to receive.  What we discovered was that the good news of God emerged precisely at the point where we moved toward each other in mutual human solidarity.  The truth is I received the love of Jesus in the embrace of the people I had come to visit.  They had as much to offer me as I had to offer them.  The Gospel emerged as we were able to transcend the social hierarchy that rendered us either patron or client.

I would like to imagine that preaching on poverty could also transcend the patron-client hierarchy that moves either up or down to preach the church “together.”  Stanley Saunders and Charles Campbell have imagined this possibility in their experience among the poor of Atlanta, Georgia, as recounted in The Word on the Street: Performing the Scriptures in the Urban Context.  The story they tell and their reflections upon it are a good place to begin thinking about preaching about poverty in ways that move “together,” toward solidarity.   The movement in preaching up or down ultimately serves this togetherness, this solidarity.

Many sermons merely moralize upon the problem of poverty and thus objectify the poor.  The problem in these sermons, it seems to me, is related to the question of distance and immediacy or what Chaim Perelman in “The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning” has identified as absence and presence.  Perelman argued that a speech act is persuasive and effective to the degree which it is able to move from absence to presence.  He wrote, “Yet if things distant— from the past or future — are more relevant to the argument, they may be lent presence through specific rhetorical figures.”   If preaching on poverty is to move beyond moralizing and objectification to solidarity, both preacher and sermon must function to make that which is absent present.

Preaching that moves toward solidarity in the social structures that constitute our world will begin within the person of the preacher.  For this to take place, the preacher finds her or his place in the central space where the cross of Christ reconfigures all relationships. This implies that the preacher sufficiently bears within herself or himself the frailty and brokenness of socio-economic division.  Preachers must move into that place where the cross of Christ bridges the distance between rich and poor.  Such a move is more than an ideological one: it is connected to physical presence as well.  To stand in the uncomfortable and sometimes painful space that divides people is the first and essential move to any authentic preaching on poverty that will bring the church together.
As the preacher proceeds from the location of the cross of Christ, she or he does well to attend to the way in which the sermon functions to move rich and poor toward each other.  I mean to suggest here some very specific and concrete ways in which the sermon on poverty moves toward solidarity by making that which is absent present.  Fred Craddock once said, “I feel it’s my responsibility as a preacher, if I am in a little-bitty church in Turpentine woods of South Georgia, it is my job to introduce the people of that congregation to the population of the kingdom of God.”  How does the preacher make such introductions?  How does the sermon make the “other,” rich or poor, authentically present?

Perelman suggests that things absent may be lent presence in the speech act through specific rhetorical figures.  Among those rhetorical figures suggested by Perelman in his book The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, two seem especially useful for preaching toward solidarity: the use of direct speech and the figure of hypotyposis.   Rather than talk about the “other” in the sermon, if the preacher were to allow the “other” to have voice, that “other” will be allowed presence.  The use of direct speech moves beyond description to the conversation itself and is one way in which the sermon might allow that which is absent to be present and so move toward solidarity.  In the same way, the use of the rhetorical figure hypotyposis serves to make that which is absent present in the sermon.  Hypotyposis is literally “to sketch the impression or form” and has to do with the lively description of an action, event, person, condition, or passion used for creating the illusion of reality.  By using both direct speech and careful description which attends to detail and specificity, the sermon may allow that which is absent to be present.  Certainly these are not the only ways in which preaching on poverty moves toward solidarity, but they do provide a promising start.  When the preacher stands before the people of God to proclaim the coming kingdom of God, may the social reconstruction of reality accomplished in Jesus Christ be realized in that preaching so that the glory of the Lord is revealed – and all humankind will see it.