Biblical Preaching in Babel: Preaching in a Post-Christian World

The Rev. Barbara K. Lundblad and the Rev. Peter J. Gomes were the Hein Fry lecturers at the eight ELCA seminaries in 2002. Well known preachers, they were asked to address the future of their craft in a culture that is post-Christian or at least post-Christendom. This they did with energy and enthusiasm, and with a good deal of hope, all of which makes us happy to share their efforts in this issue. All who trudge up the steps of the pulpit on Sunday mornings or all who drink in what is there being served will be heartened by this report on the state of the art—its challenges, opportunities, and mission.

In her first lecture, Barbara K. Lundblad observes that the theme for these lectures was chosen in part because people don’t know the Bible, even inside the church. The words of the Bible linger on the page until they are spoken and heard and received in faith. The Bible is often messy, confusing, confounding and contradictory. There is always a danger that we will insist on shaping the Bible in our own image. Even our confessions may tame the life out of the Bible. The movement is not always from the biblical text to the present situation; we bring our present situation to the biblical text as part of the interpretive process. Our biblical prism of justification has often failed to hear the strong biblical call for justice. God is not only “mercy” for sinners and outcasts, but “manna” for everyone. Is Babel only a place from which to flee or a place from which to listen? God is calling us to hear those gathered inside the sanctuary and those scattered outside the church doors. This isn’t only a matter of evangelism but of rightly understanding the biblical texts themselves. The culture could teach us how to be more visual in our preaching. Isaiah 2 speaks about a word the prophet saw. Biblical preaching in Babel is difficult not only because of the secularization of America, but because of the Americanization of Christianity. Biblical preaching calls us to pay attention to the portents of death masquerading as success and the tokens of resurrection hope in the midst of despair.

In her second lecture, Barbara K. Lundblad discusses “full-gospel” preaching. We can hear both old and new if we listen to the ongoing conversation between First and Second Testaments, as well as what is new in our own time of history. The words written down invite us to see more than the words written down. In the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, Philip preached the good news of Jesus beginning with Isaiah—though Jesus name was not in the text. The Reformation gospel—you will know the truth and the truth will make you free (John 8:31-32)—looks different when we hear it in the context of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). Full-gospel preaching could not happen without paying close attention to both the scripture text and the community text. In the story of Pentecost Luke gives us that glorious list of hard-to-pronounce places reshaped into a community of understanding, and what comes next? Biblical preaching. Full-gospel preaching must speak of both manna and mercy, pointing to God’s provocative alternatives rather than the priorities of the world. Preaching that shapes and reshapes individuals and congregations doesn’t remain inside the church walls. Can we translate Full-Gospel preaching into the language of the web? Teenagers may be our best translation partners if we dare to ask them for help. Full-gospel preaching is for all the gathered and scattered children of God.

In his first lecture, Peter J. Gomes suggests that the paradigm that is dead is the paradigm of modernity and its absolute sense of self-confidence and self-assurance. That makes today the most exciting, demanding, and thrilling time for preachers. This may well be the first time the world is ready and even willing to hear the good news, because it has lived so long with bad news. If you have a congregation of very intelligent people who know nothing about the Bible, you have arrived in homiletical heaven. This is a teaching moment; it is even a listening moment. We have custody of the Bible because the culture by and large is not all that interested in it. It is ours, ours to open, to proclaim, to teach from, as it were, for the first time. The Bible comes to life where people are in a position to appreciate both the reality of tribulation and the reality of a hope that transcends that tribulation. We live in that difficult valley between history and hope. Our journey is not to go back to some previous moment; it is to take the momentum of those previous moments and be pushed forward to that great and perfect day which is yet to come. The sermons that will last are those that suggest how to learn to live in the middle of adversity, not in prosperity. Hope is what you have left when everything else, including optimism, has been taken away from you. God doesn’t love us because we are valuable, but we are valuable because God loves us. Our vocation as preachers is that place where our great joy meets the world’s great need.

In his second lecture Peter J. Gomes challenges the idea that the sermon itself is no longer a suitable or appropriate device with which to communicate in this age of communication. Short sermons are sermonettes for Christianettes. Such a thin diet creates people who are anemic, both scripturally and doctrinally. A long sermon is not necessarily a good sermon, but neither is a short sermon necessarily a good sermon. Is it better to have a long bad sermon or a short bad sermon? One of the reasons Bill Clinton so charmed his friends and bedeviled his enemies was that, as a Southern Baptist, he understood the power of words and language, and was far more exciting and interesting and compelling than—to take a name out of the air—Bob Dole. Your people will listen for fifty minutes if you have something to say for fifty minutes and say it well for fifty minutes. We are saved by our metaphors and not by our metaphysics. That means that we offer salvation not through our explanations but through the invitation to an experience. It is the irrationality, the unacceptability, the incredibility of our faith that is its chief attraction and our chief asset. If you are going to have a sermon at all, it must be a sermon that invites people into an experience, a relationship, and not simply into an exposition or an explanation. Emmaus is the perfect paradigm of the triumph of experience over explanation, but too often it is the road to Emmaus rather than the dinner in the upper room that consumes us. The hardest element of trust is to trust yourself—that you have been called, invited, or provoked into this great calling, that God, for reasons that you cannot explain, has seen in you something of value in this process.

We also include a sermon by Peter J. Gomes entitled “Good Shepherd, Good Sheep.”

My triplet grandsons are now two and a half and have mastered the skill of climbing out of their cribs in the middle of the night and bugging their parents with their nascent insomnia. In desperation, their parents had them memorize “rules for bedtime” which they are happy to recite upon request: 1. stay in bed; 2. close your eyes; 3. go to sleep. These rules don’t work of course, just as there are no rules that make for good preaching. But I am heartened by the encouragement of our essayists, who tell us that our best preaching is still ahead of us and that our present context is a kind of homiletical heaven. When our message is that God is mercy for outcasts and sinners and manna for everyone, how can we not preach? And how can we not preach well and effectively? Memorize this rule: Just do it!

Ralph W. Klein, Editor