Preaching God’s Superabundance from the Margins
NRSV
The abundant grace of God is one of the major theological topics for preaching. More accurately, it is the core message of the good news proclaimed by the Christian church. In the tradition of Reformation theology, in particular, God’s grace—a special favor or an unmerited gift of God granted to undeserving human beings—was understood based on the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and it became the theological foundation of the Protestant church. Many passages in the Pauline and other pastoral letters have been interpreted to support the doctrinal concept of God’s abundant grace (cf. Rom 2:4, 6:1, 9:16; 2 Cor 4:15, 5:21; Eph 2:7; Heb 2:9; 1 Tm 1:14;Ti 3:5-7, etc.). Protestant preaching rooted in Reformation theology has used the dialectical approach to proclaim God’s abundant grace by sharply contrasting God’s grace with human sins and then calling individual listeners to be born again as new creatures through faith in Jesus Christ. Later, in the Reformed tradition, the dialectical approach contributed to making the Protestant pulpit a place for moral teaching and evangelism.
Most preachers might admit that their role as a Christian preacher is to proclaim God’s abundant grace in Jesus Christ. It is, however, crucial for them to consider what it means to preach God’s abundant grace in our contemporary context. We live in a highly complex, globalized world in which the divide between the center and the margins is more conspicuous than ever before in human history; the neo-colonial global economy has created a gap between the haves and the have-nots that is wider than ever before; advanced information and transportation technology have opened our eyes to observe more closely the lives of those who live on the margins; and the postmodern condition of cultural diversity and religious pluralism in society has driven our lives to become too complex with conflicting issues to coexist with others peacefully.
This contemporary situation demands that preachers reconsider preaching the grace of God beyond personal conversion and moral teaching for individual believers and challenges them to stretch their imagination to search for God’s abundant grace in a “radical” sense. God’s radical grace can be seen as “superabundance.” A dictionary definition of superabundance is “more than sufficient” or “exceedingly or excessively abundant.”1 This meaning implies that while we understand that God’s abundant grace is sufficient for the justification of our sins, God’s superabundant grace is to be searched out beyond our fragmentary experiences of God’s grace, for superabundant grace is grounded in God’s free will to improve our lives beyond our limited understandings and expectations (cf., Jn 10:10, “I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly”).
Therefore, we cannot comprehend God’s superabundance through “the analogy of being” between God and humanity. It is rather God’s unique quality of otherness. God’s radical grace is more abundant than what we have experienced in our personal and communal lives because it surpasses our expectations and is even granted to those whom we may deem as unqualified to be beneficiaries of grace. As Paul, the Apostle says, “We are so moved by the will of God, which has been abundantly proved ‘good, and acceptable, and perfect’” (Rom 12:2).
In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann clarifies the biblical concept of God’s abundance by differentiating it from affluence or satiation. He compares contemporary life in the United States with its high standard of living and affluence to that of the Solomonic affluent regime, the dynasty with incredible well-being . The American consumerist society, according to Brueggemann, has not shared its affluence and prosperity democratically, and it has been indifferent to the plight of the other 90% of the global population whose labor has been exploited to “live well off the efforts of the others.”2 God’s abundance, however, is radically different from the American consumerist concept of affluence that makes people feel anxious and insufficient. It is offered, says Brueggemann, where scarcity is severely experienced as “the wondrous gift” that is the good news “that brings the new future to effect and the new energy to birth.”3 In other words, God embraces those who live in lowly places and grants “excessively abundant” grace to them. God’s engagement with them through “vulnerable solidarity”4 (2 Cor 8:9, “. . . though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”) makes the margins of society the loci where we witness God’s superabundant grace. God invites us not to the center of affluence and satiation but to the margins in scarcity to experience the richness of God’s superabundance and to be endlessly amazed and grateful for that.
For many reasons, God’s superabundance is incommensurate with mainstream American churches whose congregations are in the middle or upper middle classes socially and economically. For these churches, preaching God’s superabundance is not easy because that requires an act of imagination that is saturated in the dominant culture of satiated affluence. Through imagination, however, we preachers can hear the voices of people long silenced and marginalized. Through empathetic imagination, we can experience the superabundance of God, i.e., what God is doing on the margins in order to “make and keep human life human in the world”5; through analogical imagination, we can recognize what God wants us to do for justice, freedom, and peace for our global community.
The Gospel of Matthew, which is included in the Lectionary, Year A, offers many witnesses to God’s superabundance. When we read the passages from the angle of the margins of society, they amaze us with incredible stories about God’s superabundant grace. The story of Jesus’ birth in Mt 1:18-25, the Gospel reading for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, is one example. Many sermons based on this passage focus on either the incarnation of God in Jesus through his divine conception or the righteous man Joseph’s generosity to adopt Jesus as his son. Yet, reading the Gospel from the margins of society helps us realize that Mary is not just in a supporting role, but the main character of the story. She was the marginalized in her patriarchal society and has been marginalized in most interpretations of the passage.
The story begins with Mary’s unusual pregnancy without a relationship with her betrothed husband Joseph. Unlike Luke who elaborates on her condition by having the angel Gabriel foretell her pregnancy (Lk 1:26-38), Matthew inserts a brief statement about her pregnancy, “. . . she was found with child from the Holy Spirit” (v.18). How, then, could she be pregnant? Whose interpretation is it that her pregnancy was from the Holy Spirit? What does that mean? The storyline does not provide answers. to these questions. Considering the socio-political situation of first-century Judea, where women were extremely vulnerable to sexual and military violence under Roman imperialism, it is possible to imagine that Mary might have been a victim of sexual assault. In that case, how did she feel when she realized her pregnancy? How could she tell that horrible truth to her husband? No matter what the circumstance, Mary’s pregnancy was considered immoral in accordance with the moral and religious standards of her male-centered society. Women like Mary should be given social disgrace and physical punishment (cf., Deuteronomy 22:23-24).
Matthew says that Joseph, a righteous man, learned about her condition and was quietly attempting to divorce her. At that critical moment, the angel appeared and commanded him to accept Mary and her son into his life. And then Matthew makes the climax of the story when the angel blesses the child by announcing that he is “from the Holy Spirit” (v. 20) and by giving him a name, “Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (v. 21). In the denouement, Joseph obeys the angel that he should be a divine instrument through which God’s superabundant grace might be granted to Mary. The radical grace of God was granted to Mary, a radical sinner, through God’s direct (and unexpected) intervention. This amazing story of God’s superabundance is the beginning of God’s salvation story in and through Jesus Christ according to the Gospel of Matthew. It is about sinners from the beginning. Even if Mary is vindicated by the angel, her pregnancy is obviously inappropriate socially and religiously; Jesus is an illegitimate child born out of wedlock, even if he is adopted by Joseph. They are “sinners” according to their society’s norms. Yet, God’s salvation story connects with these two “sinners” on the margin of society.
The liberating message of God’s radical grace to sinners might sound distant from the real life of American Christians. Many of them are living in socially and economically secure environments in which sexual assault or bearing children out of wedlock happen far less than on the margins of society in scarcity. The message of God’s superabundance, however, helps them stretch their imagination to search for God’s radical grace beyond their safe havens in the center of society and build “vulnerable solidarity” with those who are living on the margins as victims of sexual assault and, as a result, as sinners in their communities. They are found locally as well as globally. According to some statistics, every 2 minutes someone in the United States is sexually assaulted, and each year there are over 200,000 victims of sexual assault in our society.6 Moreover, 2 million women in the world are forced into prostitution, and among them, over fifty-thousand women are trafficked into the United States as sex slaves every year.7 Furthermore, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reports that there are twenty-five thousand rape-related pregnancies each year in the United States.8
In our society, the victims of sex trafficking, sexual assault, and domestic sexual violence are judged immoral and branded as “sinners.” They are often pushed into the margins of our society even by the church that consciously or unconsciously regards itself as a community of the righteous rather than of sinners. To these women, the angel’s announcement, “. . . the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (v. 20), is indeed God’s superabundant grace that embraces their current situations with love and compassion.
God’s superabundance is also good news to “righteous” Christians who live in the center of society. Just as God called the righteous man Joseph to be instrumental in bringing God’s superabundant grace to Mary, so God’s salvation story keeps inviting “righteous” believers who live in the center of society to engage with the suffering of “sinners” by obeying the voice of the angel. Preachers who proclaim the superabundance of God’s grace are the angels through whom God intervenes in our divided world, the center, and the margins.
Notes
1. E.g., http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/superabundance?, viewed on August 16, 2013.
2. Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, Second Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 26-27.
3. Ibid., 75.
4. Ibid., 112.
5. Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 85.
6. These numbers are not accurate because 54% of sexual assaults are not reported to police (“Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network,” www.RAINN.org/statistics, viewed on August 19, 2013).
7. “Sex trafficking in Cambodia-YouTube”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEclmPZZKh8, viewed on August 19, 2013.
8. Andrew Solomon, “The Legitimate Children of Rape,” The New Yorker (August 29, 2012), quoted from http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/08/the-legitimate-children-of-rape.html, viewed on August 19, 2013.
