Preaching for Days to Come
Preaching isn’t what it used to be. Probably, it never was.
Recently, I had the assignment of giving lectures to pastors on the nature of prophetic preaching, focusing on the case of the book of Amos. Seminary professors routinely do such things in the hope, however illusory, that our efforts at connecting biblical scholarship with the life of the parish will help somehow. Perhaps it does.
Yet in this case, the more I probed the question, the more difficult it seemed. The available models seemed too politicized, too enmeshed in the assumptions of regnant Christendom, in short, too “Sixties” to be convincing to a younger audience. Here I am, preparing lectures on Amos and prophetic preaching, unsure of both my audience and my subject, facing more questions rather than the certitudes one expects of prophecy. What makes preaching prophetic? How can pastors find time to be prophetic amid their labors of raising funds, chairing committees, visiting hospital beds and funeral homes, and competing for a place in the universe of meaning-making, not only with philosophers and psychiatrists, but with such upstarts as wedding planners and life trainers? Even if one believes, like that wild-eyed rancher cum prophet, Amos of Tekoa, that God has roared like a lion a message of indictment and hope, still, finding the nerve and stamina and necessary external support of a friend or two requires an effort of will and a streak of independence. Yet, these are precisely the qualities that seem in short supply, or rather, sequestered somewhere in the church crypt.
What shall I say about prophetic preaching?
Perhaps we should begin with a definition or two, a surefire professorial place to start. By prophetic preaching, one might mean an encounter with the texts of the biblical prophets, the tangled together words of hope and doom that those who remembered the prophetic oracles created out of what survived the calamity of Babylonian invasion and deportations. The definition is correct, but inadequate, because a talented enough preacher can domesticate even the most hair-raising text.
Another attempt: prophetic preaching challenges the most cherished assumptions of the listeners, forcing them to question even, or rather especially, whether their theology has become a narcotizing drug masking the pain in the world. Again, a correct answer, but not sufficient. If the biblical prophets, at least as remembered by their disciples, offer any model, it is one that juxtaposes indictment with hope, posing the hearers a choice between self-indulgence in fear and hatred and other-indulgence in the good news that God seeks the well-being of all.
What Is Prophetic Preaching?
What then is prophetic preaching? It has, I think, four elements. The first is the willingness to call into question cherished assumptions. Second, prophetic preaching offers alternative visions of reality, in which justice rolls down like waters, but the waters do not drown the unwitting while bringing life to the lucky. Third, these views of reality have an explicitly religious cast, or rather, they seek their grounding in the dignity of finite creatures in communion with an infinite God. And, fourth, prophetic preaching shapes the preacher, and his or her church, in ways that allow them to be an alternative community. Let me unfold these ideas a little.
Challenging cherished ideas and practices is a delicate business. The first challenge is to decide whose ideas we interrogate, since omni-criticism may leave nothing unscathed. The best place to start is with whatever severs ties between human beings as participants in divine shalom. Sometimes these sources of evil coincide neatly with the structures of power, and sometimes they do not, since individual human beings do not follow the scripts predicted by the social scientists, except in the aggregate. Curiously and maddeningly, our most insightful analyses of the human condition can become tools of oppressors, as we make the sources of evil the other (the gays, the patriarchal establishment, the Communists, late capitalism, and so on, according to one’s lights), forgetting that ultimately there are no others, just us.
The prophetic preacher can draw on the postmodern highlighting of a discovery of the modern period: all ideas have histories and social locations. Thus we can deploy analytical categories such as class and gender construction in an effort to understand. Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we merely put ever more recondite labels on complex behaviors as a substitute for understanding them. Sometimes, tragically, we even reinforce the abuse of power by insisting that, since all ideas have histories, we cannot ultimately choose which ideas are better than others. Fear of our location in history crimps our ability to make a commitment except to indiscriminate mockery, the last resort of the ineffectual.
Biblical Insights
But mostly we learn what St. Paul had already learned from the biblical prophets: “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” (Rom 3:23) One could easily add that all fall short of the intended glory of human beings as well. Knowing this about ourselves requires us, like an Amos, to work and pray for the healing of all, even the oppressors. As Amos put it, “Who of Jacob can stand — he is so small.” (Amos 7:2)
Social analysis that leads to indictment is tricky business in a society that has seen everything and that consumes everything, including lives and experiences. It is particularly risky to point out a shortcoming when that society is outraged most fully only by those who question its self-proclaimed goodness. We are tempted to think that perhaps preaching can no longer engage in the business at all, and we must leave social criticism to the proliferating Christian hard rock bands and still independent movie makers. Still, it seems a shame to do so, since a dose of stiff criticism of ourselves might save us from narcissism. Hence statements in Scripture such as, “Ah sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly, who have forsaken the Lord…. Why do you seek further beatings? Why do you continue to rebel?” (Isa 1:4-5) Or this: “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:21, 24) Or this: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.” (Lk 4:24-25) Pick a page, any page. It is there again and again.
So also, however, are words of hope and longing for something better. Previous generations of biblical scholars often tried to distinguish between the allegedly authentic criticisms Jerusalem by Amos or his contemporary Isaiah and the softening of their stark message of moral rectitude by words of hope from later disciples. Such a procedure rests on the assumption that indictment and hope are incompatible, and perhaps that the latter inevitably tends toward self-congratulation and complacency.
Nowadays, such an approach seems less convincing. There is no question but that the biblical books as we have them came together in a long and not well understood process of editing and augmentation. But it is also clear that this process responded to a real need to make already old words relevant to new situations, or rather, able to address ongoing human realities. The creators of the prophetic books recognized a dialectical relationship between doom and hope, such that indictment always presupposes superior alternatives, while promises of relief assume that we need to be relieved of something. Yes and no always converse together.
Thus we read the startling promise at the end of Amos (9:11-15), which follows hard on some of the most searing and frightening revelations of divine indignation at human injustice, “In that day, I shall erect again the fallen hut of David.” Not a palace or dynasty this time, just a hut, a booth, thus a token of impermanence and dependence on God. “The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who ploughs shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.” At one level, these words appeal to an audience of hungry people robbed of dignity by the powerful elites who have subverted even religion so that they can sleep peacefully at night with no longer living consciences.
At a more profound level, however, the visionary language of this text and those of the Second Isaiah and whoever gave us Jeremiah 30-33 work at the edge of what can be said. They point us to a transcendental vision that cannot easily be realized. They skate dangerously close to the edge of utopianism, as the final editors of Isaiah realized when they added the book’s final chapters to distance Second Isaiah’s stunningly hopeful prose from over-identification with an emerging political system, the Persian Empire. Yet in choosing language that cannot be reduced easily to political programs or ideology, they help us recognize that dreams of human wholeness function best as a standing challenge. Theological programs that try to secularize and thereby manage words of God as though they were merely human words risk, as Walker Percy put it so trenchantly, making theological proposals that “sound like a set of resolutions passed at the P.T.A.” (The Message in the Bottle, 114). Radical chic becomes no less Victorian and primly stultifying than Elmer Gantry.
Prophetic Preaching Must Call Us to God
So, what gives life to a preacher or listeners willing to hew to a dialectic of judgment and hope? For Christians, of course, the answer is clear enough. Faith in God.
Here, things become sticky in a hurry. Some may assume that a call for faith in God means taking the easy way out, seeking refuge in obfuscatory feel-good language that makes meaningful change impossible. This assumption would prove that one simply did not know what the words mean, for faith in God is as demanding and rare today as it was when Luther fought indulgences as a means of grace or Wesley tried to make an aristocratic church responsible to the needs of spiritually starved Christians. Or, for that matter, when Amos pled with God to forgive a nation that was “too small,” while Israel, for its part, shouted down his doom saying and commenced deportation proceedings against him. Faith is hard, and preaching that calls to faith calls us to something at once impossible and absolutely essential.
Faith in God is hard precisely because it calls upon us to imagine things we cannot see. Much of our preaching has become domesticated, our preachers afraid to challenge our too comfortable assumptions about ourselves and our most cherished symbols, national, economic, or religious. (And who can tell the difference, anyhow?) The televangelists promise that God will give you what you want, even if what you want shows no more imagination than a gold MasterCard. Preachers who would not be caught dead in the company of such slick operators often preach to congregations who need not ask for more, since we have quite enough already. In all of us, the ability to imagine a different world in which our wants conform to God’s is severely attenuated.
Puzzlingly, it has even proven possible to separate a Christian commitment to justice from faith, as though justice were the highest Christian virtue, or even its sum total. Thus a seminary struggling for funds justifies its perhaps quite reasonable merger with a nearby secular college by saying, “Well, after all, we’re both interested in social justice.” This is said as though the church espoused no particularly transcendent values, as though we were an all-purpose reform network of do-gooders, and as though sin and redemption and love and faith were mere matters of human programs and policies.
Prophetic preaching must do more than call us to social justice. It must call us to God.
Sustaining Prophetic Preachers
This brings me to the fourth, and the most difficult, aspect of prophetic preaching. For the church to exercise a prophetic voice, we must call and sustain prophetic preachers. Seminaries can do many wonderful things, but they cannot create prophets. No course or field education unit can instill courage, insight, and a radical commitment to building communities of hope. The most those of us who teach in seminaries can do is to point to models, ideas, and texts and to build networks of support. The church as a whole must refocus some of its energies toward the creation of women and men who will help us articulate a vision of humankind made whole.
The character of the prophet deserves more attention than we have given it. Previous generations of biblical scholarship, influenced by German idealism, saw the prophets as singular geniuses of moral insight. Most of us have gotten away from such an emphasis on the great actors of history, focusing instead on the prophetic books as community productions or on the social location of prophecy. Perhaps we are also nervous about an overly close attention to the personal lives of the prophets, since some, like all of us, have skeletons in their closet. Then again, “character education” has gotten a bad name because some of what passes for it seems based on an overly individualistic, overly conservative notion of what a human being of integrity should be.
However, the inattention to character, broadly conceived, dissociates the action from the actor, underestimating the importance of vigorous leadership in the shaping of communities. Thus we are left with restless masses vulnerable to the machinations of entertainers and demagogues or, more likely, simply prone to leave sharp moral questioning to others more resolute.
Again, however, the biblical prophetic books offer us a way forward because they create a character that we may call “the prophet,” who may or may not be much like the historical person of the same name. This person is an artist, a singer who sees past human illusions into the realities of the divine realm. He or she has stood in the council of Yahweh. As Margaret Atwood put it her poem The Poets Hang On:
They know something, though. They do know something. Something they’re whispering, something we can’t quite hear. Is it about sex? Is it about dust? Is it about fear?
Such an experience stimulates reflection and alters a person’s existence. Discontentment with the powers that be coupled with an energetic hope for an alternative world of justice and peace shapes the prophet’s words, relationships, and actions. The prophet becomes a pioneer of the new world he or she proclaims.
And, since character does not exist in some hidden part of the soul — or at least not just there — but in the social life with others, the prophetic preacher must help foster, and draw strength from, the prophetic church. The need is not merely for brave denominational bureaucracies — a true miracle, if ever there was one — but for congregations that take risks of faith and service. This must extend beyond just to taking care of a designated group (“the poor,” “the marginalized”) to whom we assign labels and thus making them into the other, but to welcoming others into the church as it pioneers the in-breaking Kingdom. Pastors who can lead the way will preach differently.
Prophetic Preaching and Identification
Finally, ruminations about prophetic preaching are one thing, and the preaching is another. To do the latter, we can begin to see what has gone unseen, to hear those who have been unheard, to ask what has seemed answered long ago. We can change our language, for when we ask, “What shall the church do for the poor?” all is lost. The church must be the poor, not a paternalistic benefactor of “them.” Prophetic preaching requires identification.
And to do it well, we must anticipate rejection, or rather bewilderment. The recent, briefly but luridly discussed, case of Reverend Wright is instructive. His critics focused on his most outrageous statements, though one hears more silly and outrageous things on talk radio every day. The difference is that his critics appeal to our pride and our fears, while he dared challenge our overly comfortable assumptions about ourselves and asks questions we have grown unaccustomed to hearing.
But perhaps still a deeper truth lies here. A society that believes it has everything lacks reason for hope. It dies slowly in its own luxuries, because it cannot dream of something grander still. So, as Margaret Atwood has put it with regard to poets, we say to prophets,
Go away, we say—
and take your boring sadness.
You’re not wanted here.
You’ve forgotten how to tell us
how sublime we are.
How love is the answer;
we always liked that one.
You’ve forgotten how to kiss up.
You’re not wise any more.
You’ve lost your splendour
Yet this desperate action is not the only option. We may choose to hope.
So, what to say about prophetic preaching for the next audience that asks for a talk on Amos or Isaiah? Just this: the days are coming, the days are coming. And so they are.
