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Issue
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Volume 6 No 1 February 2000 >next>
Issue 27 |
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Be Ye
Hearers of the Word and Not Doers Only Ralph C. Wood The
Sermon as the Center of Baptist Worship The Sermon as the Center of Baptist Worship The Uses of
the Imagine for Imagination in Preaching the Gospel The Uses of the Imagine for Imagination in Preaching the Gospel Be Ye
Hearers of the Word and Not Doers Only This series of sermons and lectures in honor of Warren Carr has been established in the conviction that we live amidst a great famine of the Word. We are a famished people because there is so very little preaching and hearing of the Gospel. This may seem to be a strange claim. Our churches as well as our television stations and our radio networks seem quite well-nourished with preachers. Indeed, we are bloated with them. Yet for all our religious fatness, we remain a skinny, even an emaciated people. We are anorexics and bulimics of the Word. We stuff ourselves with preaching, but then we put our finger down our throat in sickness at these thousands of words which are no real Word. This anorexia and bulimia of the Word marks our great divide from Jesus himself. He was physically famished after his forty days of temptation in the Wilderness. Satan promised him power to turn the desert stones into nourishing bread, if only he would bow down and worship the Prince of this world. Jesus replied that there is a starvation far worse than having nothing to eat. He tells the devil that men will die if they try to survive on the foodstuffs of the world. Only the Word that proceeds from God will nourish of our souls. Eight centuries earlier, the Hebrew prophet Amos made a similar prediction of our late 20th century condition. Amos prophesied that God would send a time of dearth and drought on sinful Israel. It would be a famine that would make mere hunger and thirst seem nourishing. God would unleash, instead, a famine that would devastate his people at their very core: a famine of “hearing the words of the Lord” (8:11). I believe that something similar has happened in our time. I believe that God has sent a terrible famine of the Word. Why would the good God do so horrible a thing? Why would He prevent the hearing of his Word? God is no capricious and arbitrary deity who acts without reason, much less a monster-god who delights in our misery, tearing the wings off flies to see them squirm. As always, God acts for our good, even when his actions seem hurtful. He sometimes takes good things away from us to awaken us to their real value and thus to prompt our eager return to them. We often learn the privilege of health only when we’ve fallen sick, the value of money when we’ve gone broke, the sweetness of victory when we have suffered the bitterness of defeat, the blessedness of hearing when we’ve become deaf. The 19th century Danish poet and prophet Søren Kierkegaard explained the matter well. He declared that God would take the Gospel away from Europe--and America, we would add--as the final way to convince us of its truth. I believe that Kierkegaard has proved right: God is deliberately starving his churches and his people in order that we might learn to feast upon his true Food. My purpose in this sermon is to identify the reasons for this awful famine that God has sent upon us, this awful famine of the Word. For if we can discern why we have grown deaf to the voice of God, we might yet again become hearers of his holy Word. In religion as in medicine, diagnosis is two-thirds of the cure. In Romans 10, the Apostle Paul wrestles with the problem of his own people’s deafness to the Word: why his fellow Jews refused to receive Jesus as the Anointed of God--as the Messiah of Israel and thus of the whole world. Paul poignantly confesses, in the very first verse, that “my heart’s desire and prayer is that [Israel] may be saved.” Earlier Paul has admitted, in one of the darkest lines in all Scripture, that he would be willing to be damned if Israel could be brought to redemption (9:3). His people have rejected Christ, Paul says, not because they are so wicked but because they are so good. This is usually the case: we are undone by our virtues far more than our vices. We sin against God and man more often through our strengths than our weaknesses. The intelligent person looks with scorn on the stupid, the courageous man despises the cowardly, the beautiful woman has contempt for the ugly. Our blessings become our curses. So it was with ancient Israel: she became deaf to God’s Word precisely because of her obedience to the Law. God had given his elect Nation the precious gift of the Law to be the means of her salvation. Unlike all other races, Israel was set apart as the one People whom He would graciously enable to live in faithful obedience to the Law. Thus would Israel become ever more reliant on God, since the Law could be fulfilled only through the Covenant of forgiveness that God had made with her. Israel could not keep the Law of her own accord, but only by means of God’s own goodness and power. This explains, by the way, why an Alabama judge is wrong to think that posting the Ten Commandments on his courtroom wall will make the people there more righteous. It may have the opposite and terrible effect of making them self-righteous. For if we think we can make the state do the work of the church, as if we could obey God’s Law by our own might--apart from the worship and service of Jesus Christ--then we are indeed damnably mistaken. Israel made exactly this mistake. She came to regard the Law as something that she had to do, as an activity that she could undertake on her own. Israel could not hear Word of God because she was so busy doing it. So it is with us. We Americans are nothing if not doers. This can-do spirit is our great national talent. Living in Europe will quickly make you wish you had someone who can do something and not just stand there. After spending a year in Italy, my family and students joked that the Italian national gesture is a quizzical shrug of the shoulders, and the national motto is Forse domani: perhaps tomorrow. Yet as I have said, our virtues become our vices. We Americans make long lists of things we have to do--as if the world would cease to turn if we stopped our desperate doing. Even middle-schoolers now carry calendars to keep up with their busy schedules. Parents wear themselves out running the taxi-service that takes their kids from one activity to the next. When we adults greet each other by asking how we have been, what do we nearly always reply? Exactly so: “Busy.” Our busyness comes in two kinds, the unworthy and the worthy. Our frenetic activity often constitutes a secret attempt to fill our emptiness. We hurry and scurry, lest we might have to stop and reflect upon the bustle of furious activity that we have become. Warren Carr taught me, early in my years at Wake Forest, that people always find time to do the things they really want to do. The 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal also saw how our busyness is a cover-up for some hidden malaise. “Most of the world’s misery,” said Pascal, “derives from our inability to sit still in our rooms.” To sit still is to wait, to watch, to listen, to hear a surprising and uncomfortable word, perhaps even the Word of the Lord himself. I confess to being one who cannot sit still in my room: I have to be up and about, hurrying to and fro, wanting to get something done, and to get it done not tomorrow but yesterday. Surely this fine line from Alice in Wonderland was meant for all of us: “Don’t just do something: stand there!” There is a second kind of busyness that is even more dangerous because its activities are constructive rather than self-interested and escapist. Surely you will ask what is wrong with constructive activity, especially when it occurs in the church? What is wrong with the father who gives up his entire weekend to work on a Habitat for Humanity house? What about the mother who surrenders her vacation week to accompany the young people of the church to summer camp? What about high school and college students who devote their spring break to helping storm victims clean up property devastated by tornado or hurricane? What about the family who is here every time the church doors open? Surely these are all worthy activities, and surely they are to be commended. Yet such noble doings are strangely dangerous. They threaten to become substitutes for what must always come prior to them: the hearing of God’s Word. We should be active only and precisely because Christ acts, not in secret fear that God will do nothing unless we ourselves get busy. I shall always remember, in this regard, an admission made by a middle-aged couple after I had lectured at a Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania. When I had finished my lecture, this husband and wife confessed that, if their marriage ever ends in divorce, they ought to sue their church--so totally have its activities consumed their lives. They have become such over-eager doers of the Word that they are in danger of not hearing God at all. Like many of us, they are doing themselves out of the Gospel--and perhaps out of their marriage as well. My first call, therefore, is for us to slow down and to listen, to hear God’s word before we too eagerly do it. Jesus Christ is the steady center of our lives, the stable stackpole around whom the harvested grain of our lives is to be gathered. He is not a helpless bystander to our furious activity, a mere hanger-on to our godless striving. We cannot work our way into the Kingdom, though we most certainly can work our way out of it. We are saved not by our works--not even by the noblest of activities--but by grace through faith, as hearers of the Word and not doers only. If busyness and activity are the first reason that God has sent a famine of the Word upon us, then our noisyness is surely the second. Ours is an age frightened of silence. We can’t even shop in the stores, or be put on hold as we use the telephone, without the ever-present racket of Muzak in our ears. When I complained about the high-decibel background music in a local grocery store, the manager told me that it was required by company policy. We fear the prospect of being silent and alone with our thoughts, much less with our prayers. And so we fill our lives with constant noise. We leave the television on, even when we are not watching or listening to it. Young people turn up their car radios so loud that the whole machine shakes--do all other cars in the vicinity--ith the deafening erotic throb of the music. Yet we adults are no better able to withstand silence. Many of us now use sleep machines to make the soothing noises that help us drop off at night. How ironic that the silence which once was the precondition of sleep has now become its dread enemy! Yet it is not only mechanical noises that make us very poor hearers of the Word. It is also our own noisy voices that silence the voice of God. We gab and rattle about everything and nothing. Again it was Søren Kierkegaard who gave the right name to our time when he called it the Talkative Age. He meant that, in our age, everyone has an opinion about nearly everything, but few of us have convictions about much of anything. We are eager to attitudinize about this and that, but we are reluctant to take a stand--to live and to die--for the sake of the Gospel. We can all give our opinion about Al Gore or George Bush, about Tiger Woods or Deion Sanders, about rock stars and movie stars. But when it comes to our convictions about Jesus Christ as God’s saving Word incarnate, we hem and haw and stew and stumble. Or if we are professors or preachers, we are likely to chatter endlessly about those awful fundamentalists or those terrible liberals. Thus do we become noisy gongs and clanging cymbals--not only because we lack the love of God, but also because we have not listened to the God of love. To hear God speak we must first fall silent. The Bible puts considerable emphasis on silence. Elijah hears the voice in God, not in the tornadic winds, not in the thunderous earthquake, not in the crackling and consuming fire. God speaks to Elijah out of the silence that enables him to hear “a still small voice” (I Kings 19:12). Because God does not shout, we must first be quiet if we are to hear his own quiet Word. “Be still, and know that I am God,” declares the Psalmist (46:10). Hebrew scholars tell me that this is a polite rendering of a rather harsh declaration that should better be translated, “Shut up, and listen to me.” To know that God is truly God--our Father, not our Daddy--we must first stop our mouths, sit still, and listen. St. Thomas Aquinas wisely declared that “Silence honors God.” When we are noisy, God refuses to speak. He sends, instead, a terrible silence of the Word. But when we stop prattling and rattling, God will indeed speak. And when He speaks, He will enable us both to hear and to do his Word. There Are Not Many Preachers of the Word We fail to become hearers of the Word not only because we are too busy and too noisy, but also because there are not many preachers. Here, I believe, the fault lies less with us laypeople than with our ministers. To say that there are not many preachers may seem an odd claim. In the Baptist South, there often seem to be more preachers than believers. It is obvious that I am using the word in St. Paul’s special sense when he says that “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the preaching of Christ.” There are not many pastors who preach nothing but Jesus Christ and him nailed. Yes, there are many story-tellers who string together interesting narratives and call it preaching. Yes, there are many expositors who make verse-by-verse commentary on Scripture while the congregation faithfully takes notes, as if the church were a lecture-hall. Yes, there are many counselors who offer psychological help to the hurting, by feeling our pain and telling us how to accept our victim hood. Yes, there are many social reformers who lead their churches to engage in worthy projects for the poor and the needy. Yet these are all preacherly substitutes for the proclamation of the Word, even as our own activism and noisyness are similar substitutes. I receive occasional requests from Baptist churches to recommend preachers to fill their empty pulpits. It’s always an embarrassing moment when I have to confess that I know only a handful of preachers. I quickly add that I know dozens of ministers who would make fine denominational servants and excellent administrators, who would visit in the hospitals and counsel the troubled, who would become well-regarded citizens of the community, who would join all the right civic clubs and be seen in all of the right places, who would smile a lot, shake a lot of hands, slap a lot of backs, and offend absolutely nobody. But one doesn’t need to be a preacher to do any or even all of these things. I contend, on the contrary, that one had better not be a preacher if one believes that this is what it means to proclaim the Word. “How shall they hear without a preacher?” asks Paul. The answer is that God will send a famine of the Word against those who preach without having anything truly redemptive and revelatory to say--against those who preach without preaching the Gospel. Who, then, is a true preacher of the Word? It is a man or a woman who has been encountered by the crucified and risen Christ, who has been saved by God’s grace from all busy and noisy activity (albeit of the worthiest kind), who has been called and commissioned to announce the Only News that can redeem the world from sin, death, and the devil. True preachers of the Word are those men and women who wrestle daily with the dangerous God of the Gospel. Thus do they have a Word to declare which we can hear from no one else. They refuse to repeat the tired and boring (or even the fresh and interesting) truths that we can learn from television or from the public schools and the universities. They confront us with the Good News that, while we were yet sinners, Christ has died for us, that he has risen from death’s bonds to set us free from our busy and noisy lives, that he reigns at the right hand of God to put real life in us--new life, abundant life, eternal life. With uncommon self-restraint, I have refrained from quoting the man whom this preaching series honors. Since nearly everything I know about the Gospel I have learned from him, this amounts to an almost miraculous silence. Yet I cannot end without this single personal reference. Warren told me recently that many people, especially those strange folks who calls themselves moderates, want to salute him for having been the first Southern Baptist pastor to ordain a woman to the Gospel ministry. They want also to honor him for having been one of the first Southern white preachers to insist that we must not deny black people their rightful place in society. Already in the 1950s Warren was preaching that Negroes are our fellow human beings created in the image of God, and also that most of them are our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. So it is with women: in Jesus Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female. In him alone are we all one. It is a gross sin against God, Warren preached, to exclude blacks and women from their rightful place in our churches and in our society. Warren Carr has been such a faithful doer of the Word because he first heard it. Hugely important as the liberation of women and blacks remains, Warren confesses that this is not the thing that he most wants to be remembered for. He explained the matter recently by telling me about a phone call from a pastor in Charleston, South Carolina. This man had come under the influence of Warren’s preaching many years ago, at the Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina. Through Warren’s ministry there, he himself was called to become a minister of the Gospel, to proclaim and to enact the saving Word of God. “That,” said Warren, “is the witness I hope to be remembered for.” The preaching and the hearing of the Gospel redeems human life, Warren was confessing, as the grandest ethical ideals do not. The liberation of women and blacks is hugely important, as is the overcoming of all the other sundry and sorry forms of oppression and self-absorption. But racial and gender justice will not endure forever. The one thing that remains the same yesterday, today, and forever is Jesus Christ: He is our only justice because He is our only mercy. God will lift our present famine of the Word, therefore, when we cease from our busyness and noisyness, when we sit still and listen to this one Voice, and thus when we all become hearers and therefore doers of the Word. The
Sermon as the Center of Baptist Worship I have argued that we live in a time of famine, a famine of the preaching and the hearing of God’s Word. I have summoned us to be less busy doing and less noisy talking in order that we might become hearers of the Word, but that we will not be able to hear unless we have preachers who believe that their first and last call is to proclaim the Gospel. Everything else derives from this fundamental fact that we cannot hear and know Jesus Christ without the proclamation of his Word by authentic preachers: “How shall they hear without a preacher?” For this reason I hope that churches will learn to speak again of the Pulpit Committee rather than the Pastor Search Committee, since the pastor’s many other responsibilities and privileges spring from and center upon this pulpit-act of preaching. My aim in this lecture is to show that worship is the proper context for the hearing of God’s Word, and that the sermon lies at the center of our worship as Baptists. This is not true for other traditions. Catholics and Orthodox, Episcopalians and even Lutherans, have a fixed liturgy as the heart of their worship. Like Methodists and Presbyterians, all these traditions also have the creeds to carry the weight of worship. We have no formally prescribed liturgy, and we do not recite the creeds. We often suffer, therefore, from a liturgical lack. Our services of worship frequently have a homemade air and rather crude quality about them. We need to do better by way of our pastoral prayers and congregational responses, so that they are not mere off-the-cuff effusions. Notice how predictable and trite most “spontaneous” prayers prove to be: “We thank Thee, O Lord, for the privilege of gathering in thy house on this beautiful day (even if it is raining cats and gerbils!) to worship Thee…” etc. The congregation needs also to be carried into the presence of God by the choir’s anthems and the congregation’s singing. Worshipful music should thus complement the sermon rather than displacing it, as so often happens in our time. Our classic hymns must not be abandoned, chiefly because they serve as our Baptist creeds, the real carriers of our beliefs. When I find myself in a moment of extraordinary glory or terrible crisis, it is the hymns of Watts and Wesley, of Fanny Crosby and B.B. McKinney, that come pouring forth. “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “I Know Whom I Have Believed,” “O Jesus, I Have Promised,” “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand.” This explains why the displacement of traditional hymns by so-called praise music has such deadly theological consequence. Our people will eventually come to have a faith, I fear, that is as trite as our music. True preaching, by contrast, should always find its appropriate echo and reinforcement in hymns and anthems that glorify rather than trivialize God. It’s interesting that Scripture lays such great stress on hearing rather than seeing God. Notice well the biblical claim that no man shall see God and live. From Adam and Abraham to Noah and Malachi, nearly every major Old Testament character hears God, though none ever sees him, except Moses-who spies only God’s hind end as He passes by, while Moses is hid in the cleft of the rock. So it is in the New Testament: there we who are the new Jews called Christians are instructed to walk by faith rather than by sight, to listen to God rather than to behold him face to face. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29). Only in the life to come will sight of the holy God bless rather than destroy us. It is in “this hope [that] we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it in patience” (Romans 8:24-25). Why is God invisible? Wouldn’t it be better if God were palpable, so that we could see and touch him, and thus know that He is real and not merely imagined? Most pagan religions indeed make their gods visible by creating statues and images of them. In Acts 17, we hear that the Athenians have erected an idol even to an unknown God. Such visibility is what the God of Israel and Jesus Christ expressly forbids: Thou shalt not make a graven image of me. God wants to be heard rather than seen. A visible God would be a tyrant. There would be no room for faith or trust, no place for doubt or struggle, if God were open to view. The young Samuel does not request, therefore, that God show himself. Such a sighting would make Samuel’s obedience compulsory rather than voluntary. “Speak, Lord,” we hear Samuel pleading, “and thy servant heareth.” A visibly undeniable God would be a dictatorial deity. And we would hate him for being such a silent Bully. There may be a strange link between the decline of audibility and the rise of unbelief. Ours is a supremely pagan and thus a supremely visual culture. Almost everything important comes to us through the eye, almost nothing through the ear. It is not by chance that rock music issued in MTV: it is not sufficient to hear but also to see erotic music enacted. That the lyrics are mangled and indecipherable does not matter. Gyrations and other visual stimuli take their place. The literary critic Irving Howe once said that we Americans have become virtual mushrooms: we grow only in the dark, by the light of a flickering screen. George Will doubts whether we grow very much. Will once observed that there is more mental work in reading any cheap Harlequin romance or detective thriller than in watching the most sophisticated movie. Film is a lazy and passive medium insofar as it requires no imaginative labor but forms our images for us. Such sensory bombardments enervate both the intellect and the imagination. Because we are the passive recipients of such relentless stimuli, we come to believe that the rest of the world operates in similar fashion-passively-and thus that whatever is, is right. All moral and religious discernments and distinctions thus are glazed over by a film of visual stimuli. In the Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis speaks of the dread modern triumph of the eye over the ear. The cosmetic and fashion and advertising industries celebrate this mighty victory of seeing over hearing, as we come to have increasingly superficial notions of beauty and attractiveness. It is not the human face that reveals our souls, Lewis insists, so much as it is the human voice. Thus do I encourage my students to fall in love not only (or even chiefly) with another’s image but with his or her voice, for it is in the voice that lasting friendship and commitment and true love lies. The Greek word for person comes from the giant masks that actors wore in performing the great public dramas of Athens and other Greek cities. Person literally means “to sound through.” We are what we declare, what we speak, what comes sounding through us. Our ancient Christian forebears understood the primacy of hearing over seeing. Thus did the saints of the early church practice what they called “the discipline of the eyes,” being even more careful about what they saw than what they heard. Why is the spoken and heard word so much more important than its written and read versions? It is interesting to note that neither Jesus nor Socrates, the two most famous teachers in world history, left anything in writing. They both failed to publish, wags have said, and therefore they perished. Both men were indeed killed for their action-inciting words. Speech is our unique gift, the very image of God in us. Animals can do everything that we humans can do, except the most important thing of all: they cannot speak. This explains why, given the awful choice between sight and hearing, the wise and courageous person would choose sound-giving up the enormous ease and pleasures of the visible world for the irreplaceable world of the human voice. Winston Churchill was not the first to note that deafness is infinitely more isolating than blindness: it cuts us off from true human communion. We ought therefore to reverse the trite aphorism about sticks and stones. They merely break our bones, while words can truly help or hurt us. A word of care and kindness can heal the deepest of wounds. A word of spite and deceit can rankle and fester forever. Once words are out of our mouth, we cannot retract them, any more than we can unscramble an egg or put toothpaste back in the tube. Their effects are permanent, for good or ill. Words are so powerful that the Epistle of James calls the tiny tongue the most dangerous of all bodily organs, far more hazardous than the genitals. A single word therefore-most especially when it is the Word of God-is worth more than a thousand pictures. When Luther and Calvin and the Anabaptists revolted against the medieval Roman church, they did so in protest that the proclaimed Word had been eclipsed by the same works-centered religion that Paul opposes in his Letter to the Romans. The Reformation was thus a preaching-movement intended not to create a special branch of Christendom but to renew the whole church in the doctrines of grace. The sermon thus became the Protestant sacrament of grace, our equivalent of the Roman mass, the very center of the worship and praise of God. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann argues, in fact, that Israel understands God in fundamentally verbal terms. It is not God’s miraculous acts in history nor his divine being in himself that matters so much as it is the unique Word that issues from God’s revelation to Israel. Scripture refers far more often, in fact, to God’s speaking than to his doing. God is indeed a doer-the Maker and Redeemer of the universe-but He acts chiefly by his speaking. In the first chapter of Genesis, God speaks the cosmos into being. God doesn’t take things into his own hands and fashion the world out of something prior to it. He says instead, “Let there be.” We know, of course, that Genesis 1 is a theological story and not a scientific report. God is not a material being but the divine Spirit. He has no mouth or tongue, and he doesn’t speak Hebrew or Greek, English or Ebonics. God speaks through his people Israel and finally through his Son Jesus Christ, the One Man in whom he has fashioned his own image. The sermon is the center of our worship, our veritable sacrament, because there we encounter Christ himself in the heard Word. The Swiss Calvinists of the 16th century went so far as to declare (in the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566) that “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” The Gospel is not something to be preached, therefore: the Gospel is preaching itself. This is a radical claim, but I think it is exactly Paul’s point. Fides ex auditu. “Faith cometh by hearing,” we remember from the King James, “and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:8). Note exceedingly well what St. Paul doesn’t say: He does not say that faith comes by seeing, and that what is seen comes by writing, and that what is believed comes through reading. In his second letter to Corinth, Paul explicitly warns against an overemphasis on the merely written word. There he says that the word which is written down often serves to kill-while the Spirit, acting through the proclaimed Word, gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6). We can close our eyes to what is seen. We can put down a book and either daydream or go change a light bulb. We cannot so easily dismiss the spoken and the heard Word. We have eyelids for shutting out pictures and scenes that we don’t want to see, but the ear has no flap for fending off the words of men or the Word of God. Our ear lobes are meant to increase our hearing, not to close it off. Jesus does not say, “Let those who have eyes, see,” but rather “Let those who have ears, hear.” “Stick your eyes in your ears,” said Luther, “when you hear the Word of God preached.” Luther calls us to see in a new way, through the proclaimed Word. We thus learn to look rightly at the world when we have first truly heard the Word. It follows, said Luther, that “the church is a mouth-house, not a pen-house.” At church we don’t write essays or take notes, lest our scribbling become a clever and pseudo-academic means of stopping our ears to the God who engages us as we listen rather than write. It needs to be said that we Baptists run a great risk in focussing on the sermon. Christian worship centered on the proclamation of the Gospel is not the safest but the most perilous activity of the week. The worship hour is the hour of great risk. Something splendid occurs when we come to hear the Word proclaimed, or else something terrible. When the Word is not preached, everything else fails. Indeed, an awful sacrilege has occurred. Nothing can salvage a service that is void of true proclamation. Someone has described Hell as a perpetual church service minus the presence of God. I would add that Hell is an interminable sermon without the proclamation of the Gospel. Faithful preaching is even more dangerous than its unfaithful counterpart. Calvin confessed, for example, that the truly proclaimed Word makes the world at once better and worse off. “For while there was no preached Gospel,” he declared, “all the world was without care and at rest. There was little to argue or dispute about.” The world remained at ease in its ethical slumbers. But with the true preaching of the Gospel, Calvin added, “the world is plunged into conflict.” Faithful preaching-Calvin is saying-permits no neutral response, as if we had attended a civic club luncheon or PTA meeting. It makes us either hugely glad or unbearably sad. It either saves or else it damns. To hear God’s Word is gladly to acknowledge his grip on our lives. It makes us eagerly seize the brass rung of grace for all we are worth. It prompts us joyfully to practice the Faith every day and every night until our last day and last night. Or else it forces us to turn away in wrath and scorn, spitting and scoffing at this call to devote our lives to Jesus Christ and to none other. There is no convenient middle path between these drastic extremes. Whether we know it or not, we are either hearers of the Word or else we are haters of the Word. The early British Baptists were so convinced of what is dangerous and drastic about the proclaimed Word that they became suspicious of the merely written Word. Lest the Bible become a substitute for hearing the living Word, these our foreparents in the Faith prohibited worshippers from bringing their Bibles to church. They knew that in worship we come to hear the Word of God, not to look at it. The man whom this lecture-series honors never asks the congregation to follow along in their Bibles when he reads the sermon text. Such a request would mean, as he wittily says, that we don’t really trust him to read it aright. Like an apostle, he declares simply but forcefully: “Listen.” When we truly hear, the sermon becomes God’s Word. Sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the joint of bone and marrow, it rends our hearts and cleaves our souls. It wounds us to the quick, lancing the suppurating sores of sin, in order that it might heal us forever. Most of us could not truly confess Jesus Christ if the sermon had not been the focus of Baptist worship. Yet few of us could honestly declare that our faith has been similarly formed by the Lord’s Supper. My own childhood church observed it only quarterly, and then on Sunday evening, as if to admit that it wasn’t very important. A friend who belongs prominent Baptist church in my city complains that there has not been a single communion service there during her two years of membership. How much wiser was Karl Barth to insist that the sermon is inseparably linked to the Table, that preaching proclaims the meaning of communion, even as the Supper gives dramatic and embodied life to the sermon. I wonder whether the slappy-happy, sloppy-agape atmosphere that prevails in much Baptist worship today is not the result of our low regard for the Lord’s Table. If there is to be a recovery of preaching in our time, it must be accompanied by a recovery of the second and much-neglected sacrament of the Supper. We come to a final claim that is as simple and drastic as it is startling and dangerous: the voice of Jesus Christ is none other than the voice of the one who proclaims his Word. The faithful preacher, I again repeat, is the voice of the living Lord. The first and still the greatest Protestant, Martin Luther, said it sharply: “When the Holy Spirit enables me to preach the Word of God, it is no longer Martin Luther but Jesus Christ who speaks.” John Calvin, our other chief founder, made a similar case. “The Word of God,” said Calvin, “is not distinguished from the words of the Prophet.” The God of the Gospel, Calvin added, “is not separated from the minister.” The preacher of the Word actually does God’s own work. These are perilous sayings indeed. We all know preachers who think that they not only proclaim Jesus but that they have become Christ himself. Thus do they lord it over their people according to this terrible self-perception. They swagger and bully and dominate their flock, as if they were not only the audible but also the visible God. We who are not fundamentalists have become so afraid of their heavy authoritarianism that we have sadly diminished the role of the preacher. We are reluctant to speak of our pastors as having primary authority within our Baptist churches. We saddle them with such smarmy euphemisms as “servant-leader” or--God forbid!--“congregational facilitator.” These are weasel phrases that dodge the true primacy of the preacher. Warren Carr has often noted the result: there are very few preacher-jokes. We make fun only of those things that we take seriously. Notice, therefore, that most of our jokes are sexual--sex being the one pseudo-vocation that our culture takes with utmost seriousness. To diminish the primacy of the preacher is to ignore the fact that--in a tradition like ours which makes preaching the central act of worship--the preacher is bound to be the center of the church’s witness and its religious life. Willy-nilly, he or she is the shepherd of the flock, the preacher of the Word, and thus the primary figure in the congregation. My friend, the British theologian Daniel Jenkins, sums up the matter well. The Protestant pastor, says Jenkins, serves as the exemplary Christian. He or she is set apart by the local congregation to do directly and full-time what the other church members are able, because of other exigencies, to do only indirectly and part-time: to proclaim and enact the Word of God. Yet let us be ever so clear that the preacher is not the political but the spiritual head of the congregation. When the church is in conference, the Baptist preacher is indeed one among equals: one man, one vote. Even so, I confess that I always eagerly await the pastor’s point-of-view about any important matter that we are voting on. Richard Neuhaus makes a similar claim about the primacy of the preacher in his splendid book called Freedom for Ministry. Neuhaus argues that ministers are called to serve as a virtual lightning rod: to receive fire from both God and man. Precisely because of the authoritative Word they proclaim in the pulpit, preachers are the singular individuals through whom the divine presence is brought to earth, even as they are the people through whom the hard human questions are clarified and rendered creative rather than destructive. A former student who is now a Methodist minister illustrates the point powerfully. He tells about a drunk running down and killing two members of his congregation, a mother and father who innocently walked along the roadside. Four children under the age of thirteen were instantly orphaned. Great was the grief and distress of the family and friends who quickly assembled. God was by no means absent from that terrible scene. Prayers had already been made, and assurances had already been given, when my friend arrived. God was already at work. Yet everything changed when the preacher entered that house. Those prayers now had a single voice, and those assurances came from one who spoke not only for himself but for the God of the Gospel. Now the great grief and the furious anger had both a focus and a target: the preacher himself. There he acted as no mere servant-leader or pastoral counselor. There he became God’s own surrogate, the one through whom Christ himself was made manifest. It is not only during times of great crisis that the preacher’s primacy should be observed. It should also happen during ordinary times. Preachers who are not afraid of their own authority and primacy will have such startlingly original things to say on Sunday that we who are their parishioners will seek their counsel during the week. Knowing that we have heard what can be heard no where else on earth, we will refuse to confine our conversations to polite palaver. We will not be content with mere congeniality. We will engage our preachers in the deep and hard and joyful things of the Gospel precisely because our ministers have first engaged us in those very things. Such vital exchanges between preacher and flock will symbiotically feed our preachers’ own proclamation of the Word. No longer will they take their illustrations from television shows or sermon books but from felt and lived experience, and no longer will they preach what I call messages to the cosmos: Time-Life discourses addressed virtually to anyone and thus truly to no one in particular. Instead, our preachers will speak, as the Quakers used to say, to our condition-to our fallen and redeemed condition. “How shall they hear without a preacher?” The answer for us Baptists lies in making the sermon serve as the center of our worship. There we will help restore the priority of hearing over seeing in a culture that will soon blind as well as deafen itself. There we will give unabashed pre-eminence to the preaching and hearing of the Word. And there we will acknowledge the true pastoral primacy of the preacher in the faithful life of God’s flock. The
Uses of the Imagine for Imagination in Preaching the Gospel I have contended in the first two lectures that we are suffering from a terrible famine of the Word that God has sent on our churches. He has hardened our hearing--even as he hardened Pharoah’s heart--because our noisyness and our busyness make us unable to hear. Yet the unbelief of our preachers has also caused God to stop their mouths, or rather to fill them with assorted and sorry substitutes for the Gospel, so that the more they talk the less they have to say. If this were all I had to argue, I would have brought only the counsel of despair. Thus have I also argued that God will relent from this theological starvation-program and feed us again on “the sincere milk of his Word” (I Peter 2:2) by making us learn to listen and thus to hear amidst this overwhelmingly visual age, by making the heard Word of the sermon once again the center of Baptist worship, and by making our proclaimers of that Word the leaders of our churches in becoming faithful witnesses to the Gospel. Now I will seek to make the case that God will also overcome the famine and restore his people to the hearing of his Word through a recovery of imagination in preaching. I will begin by dealing with the Bible’s justified suspicion of the imagination. Next I will maintain that God’s decision to image himself in Jesus Christ not only permits but demands that we give primacy to the imagination in our understanding and our preaching of the Faith. And finally I will seek to illustrate such an imagination-enlivened Faith by recourse to the final scene from Flannery O’Connor’s “The Artificial Nigger” as well as to a passage from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. The Biblical Suspicion of the Imagination Nearly everyone knows that Plato regarded the works of imagination as not once but twice removed from Reality. They imitate the shadowy world that in turn reflects the divine world of the Forms: thus are they but an image of an image. It is much less noticed that the King James Bible also uses the word “imagination” in an almost uniformly pejorative way. In Genesis 5:6 we read that “God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Again in 8:21 we hear that “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Such evil-producing imagination makes God so sorry for even creating man that it prompts him to drown virtually his whole creation. Moses makes a similar use of the word in Deuteronomy 31:21 when he predicts the forthcoming unfaithfulness of Israel once they arrive in the long-awaited Canaan: “for I know their imagination, which they go about, even now, before I have brought them into the land which I sware.” So does Jeremiah warn his people against walking “after the imagination” of their own hearts (23:17). Again in the book of Lamentations, Jeremiah beseeches God to take vengeance on the prophet’s enemies for “all their imaginations against me” (3:60). In his condemnation of pagans who make a false god of the good creation, Paul declares that they “became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Romans 1:21). In his second letter to Corinth, Paul urges his fellow believers to engage in spiritual warfare against the enemy strongholds of unbelief that we erect within the human mind: “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Finally, the Virgin Mary declares in her Magnificat that God puts down the mighty and scatters “the proud in the imagination of their hearts” (Luke 1:51). Most modern versions of the Bible use terms like “stubbornness”--the deliberate plotting or devising of evil--to translate the various Hebrew and Greek words that the KJV renders uniformly as “imagination.” Yet I wonder if the old Jacobean divines were not religiously right, even if they were linguistically wrong, to link imagination with both the conceiving and the doing of evil. We cannot commit sin without first justifying it. And we cannot justify sin unless we have first imagined it not as evil but as good. Indeed, it is human fantasizing--the mental picture-making of the evils that we can justify as good--that prompts nearly all of our wanting and seizing of sinfully desired things. How well the advertisers know this sorry truth! The imagination is indeed a faculty deeply linked to the corrupted human heart and its selfish longings. Calvin called the heart a factory for the perpetual making of idols. So is the fallen imagination a workshop for the infinite fabrication of self-serving fantasies. Yet surely we must also argue the opposite case as well. As Reinhold Niebuhr taught us, all created things are characterized by a deep ambivalence. They have immense capacities for both good and evil. The imagination is capable not only of evil fantasizing but also of redemptive creativity. This is the true function of imagination that the Romantic poets sought to restore. They sought to recover the lost unity between the perceiver and the perceived. Rather than simply knowing about things through the processes of calculating reason, they wanted to get us inside the created world, to know things as they are, to appreciate the natural order in all of its wonder and glory. One hardly thinks of George Eliot as a Romantic, yet she has their positive regard for the imagination when she declares that “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” I would argue, in more mundane fashion, that all doing of good is also prompted by the imagination. Just as we sin first in pictorial thought, then in activating word, and finally in deadly deed, so must we first of all imagine the good before we can speak and do it. In order to counsel the troubled, to feed the hungry, to care for the neglected, we must first have a vision of their inherent worth, their true potential--indeed, we must learn to see the very image of God becoming fulfilled in such acts. What would these people look and act like if they were made truly whole--if they had the health and truth of God in them? It might be argued that the failure of theology in our time is a failure of imagination. The detective novelist P. D. James observes that most charitable acts are decidedly undramatic--caring for a dying person, befriending a lonely soul, even grading a set of exams. The good inherent in such actions is so quiet and unspectacular that it is ever so hard to make them artistically interesting. Murder and countless other deeds of destruction, Baroness James adds, require little facility of imagination to conceive and to gestate and finally to deliver in fictional form. No wonder that violence and pornography are so tempting to the artist as well as to the rest of us who have fallen imaginations. Yet there is a far more substantial reason for the Biblical suspicion of imagination than its moral corruptibility: Images that fertilize the mind and make it fecund with both good and evil serve, far more dangerously, to place a terrible limit on God. A god who is bound by our imaging of him is no God at all. Thus does the Second Commandment explicitly forbid the making of any image or likeness of Yahweh. God wants Israel to have no picture or statue of Him for the same reason that He will not permit his people to provide him his name: He is the God who will not be controlled and manipulated by human images and titles. God insists on his freedom to redeem humanity utterly on his own terms, never ours. The angel at the Jabbok rightly refuses Jacob’s demand that the divine being reveal his name: God gives us our name and identity, not we his. As Moses has to learn, God’s name is unlike any other: “I am who I am, I will be who I will be.” Any god whom we humans could name or image would not be God but a projection of our own desires, an idol. As usual, John Calvin puts the matter most succinctly: “God rejects without exception all shapes and pictures, and other symbols by which the superstitious imagine they can bring God near to them. These images defile and insult the majesty of God” (Institutes I, xi, i). Nowhere is the strangeness of the unimaged God made more remarkable than in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. As they razed the Temple, the Romans eagerly entered the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary of sanctuaries, the place where the pagans hoped at last to find the image of the Hebrew God and to smash it in triumphant glee. To their huge disappointment, they found no such statue or figure, but the Ark of the Covenant: a box containing mere scrolls. This bizarre religion without an imaged god was like unto nothing they had ever encountered! To the good pagan, a god who cannot be cast into bronze or carved from marble or wood is not worthy to be called a god. The early Christians encountered similar complaints. Their refusal to worship any other god than the God of Jesus Christ caused them to be branded as atheists. And on the one occasion, in the sermon at Mars Hill, when Paul sought to appeal to pagan images of the gods, he most notably failed to make many converts. Yet Scripture’s rightful suspicion of the imagination is neither permanent nor absolute. Precisely in order to correct our many false images of him, God has revealed his own true image in Jesus Christ. In him the imagination can at last be redeemed to do its proper work. Christians claim, in fact, that the ancient Hebrew prohibition against images of God has been lifted by God himself. We are now free to seize everything in creation in order to make analogies and parables, to find echoes and images, of this one True Image which God has made of himself. Because God has shown himself to us in Christ, our own images can become the vehicles of the divine presence itself. This is a remarkable thing and not a thing to be taken for granted. As Calvin teaches us, God graciously accommodates his otherness and mystery to our finite categories of speech and image. It is chiefly through the sacraments of bread and wine, as well as the baptismal waters, that God sanctifies our imaginations. There, said Calvin, God reveals to our eyes what the preached Word declares to our ears. God’s imaging of himself in Scripture and in Christ contains its own inherent safeguards against abuse and idolatry. The Cross is not an image of power but of weakness, not an emblem of triumph but of defeat, not a thing of beauty but of supreme ugliness. The Old Testament signs of salvation are also strange--the life-producing genitals circumcised, the green bush set aflame, the boat built in a desert, the creation drowned by the Creator, the deliverance from slavery through a wilderness wandering, the temple no sooner built than blasted, the people given a homeland and then exiled from it. The New Testament signs are no less odd: foot washings, baptismal burials, even resurrection from the dead. We should not be surprised at Chesterton’s declaration that we cannot comprehend the God of the Gospel apart from radical paradox. Paradox, he explained, is truth standing on its head and waving its legs to get our attention. The unexpectedness of the Gospel means that our own imaginative work will need to have a surprising strangeness and an equally surprising restraint. Just as God’s own controlling image of self-identification is disharmonic and unsettling, so must our own imagination in preaching be cruciform rather than prettifying. Which is to say, of course, that it must be both inspired and limited by the Cross. An imagination cut loose from Calvary is even deadlier than an ethics thus severed, as we can witness in the terrible sacrilege at work in much contemporary worship. Flannery O’Connor was right to insist that sentimentality is to Christianity as pornography is to art. Much of what happens in our churches is but the religious equivalent of the fantasy-fed pornography and violence that are devouring our dying culture. Among the horrors of the Fort Worth church massacre not often noted is that the young people had seen so many church skits that they thought the gunman was another impersonator of the devil. They could not recognize a killer when they saw one. George Macdonald, the 19th century Scots writer who inspired C. S. Lewis and the other members of the Oxford Inklings, defined imagination quite simply as “an imaging or a making of likenesses. The imagination is that faculty which gives form to thought-not necessarily uttered form, but form capable of being uttered in shape or in sound, or in any mode upon which the senses can lay hold.” Imagination gives concrete and sensible form to abstract and disembodied thought: it makes ideas incarnate. Macdonald thus regarded imagination as the highest and holiest of human powers, the faculty whose operations are nearest to the power of God. It is indeed the creative faculty. Just as God creates the universe out of nothing prior to or other than himself, and just as He sustains its on-going life by giving its physical existence constant spiritual sustenance, so does the imagination reshape the physical and spiritual realities of the earth into forms either divine or demonic. Poet means maker in both the Greek and Celtic languages: poetés and makar. Poets fashion new worlds of terror and delight out of God’s primary creation, even as preachers create similar worlds--either dead or alive, either faithful or false--out of God’s primary act of re-creation in Christ. C. S. Lewis looked upon the imagination as a higher power than reason itself. “Reason is the faculty of truth,” said Lewis, “while imagination is the faculty of reality.” Lewis had no desire to demean truth; indeed, he was himself a rationalist. But there are varieties of truth. “Two plus two equals four” and “the boiling point of water at sea level is 212 degrees” are truths discerned by the calculating and collating powers of raw reason. Without such elemental truths to order and regulate our lives, we would dwell amidst chaos and cacophony. For most of our physical life, we utterly depend on such truthful deductions. As the beneficiary of the deductive science that produced hearing aids, I have the greatest regard for the truths of reason in this restricted sense of the word. Yet reality is a much greater thing than truth in this narrow sense. Reality is truth made personal and concrete and moral. It is the sphere where we live and move and have our being as creatures before God and our neighbors. Reality can be discerned only by the imagination through likenesses that give form to thought, not through propositions that make thought ever more abstract and lifeless. Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian writer of the 19th century, must have had something like Lewis’ distinction in mind when he declared that, “Even if it were proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it was really so that the truth were outside Christ, then I would still prefer to stay with Christ rather than with the truth.” What Dostoevsky meant by this seemingly bizarre claim is that Christ is God embodied in all of his paradoxical mystery. Christ incarnates the divine Reality which (to borrow a metaphor from C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces) is thick and dark like blood. Truth, by contrast, is often a disembodied thing whose consistency is thin and clear like water. This explains why Harvard University impoverished itself when it altered its original motto, Christo et Ecclesiae, to the banal generality of bare Veritas. The church’s Gospel gives truth its signifying shape and direction and critique. Harvard now has truth alone and sufficing merely unto itself--a small and unimaginative thing indeed. Stanley Hauerwas has declared, however, that if Baylor University ever secularizes its own motto (Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana), it will not be nearly so impoverished. For any right-minded person, says Hauerwas, will always take Texas over the truth! Truth is never abstract and disembodied for Christians. God in Christ is the truth made incarnate and living and real. As the God who has embodied himself in finite form, Jesus Christ can be known only in imagination, the embodied form of thought and experience. If we don’t know Christ imaginatively, we don’t know him at all. If we can’t image who he is and how he works in the world, our faith will be in vain. I suspect that we live in an imaginatively flaccid time chiefly because our belief in Christ has also slackened. Walker Percy claimed that nearly all of the essential Christian words have been worn slick and faceless with unimaginative use. They are coins that no longer have value. Terms like salvation and damnation have largely ceased to register. Thomas Merton once declared that the command “Love God” has come to have as little spiritual force as “Eat Wheaties.” It is just another slogan. To many evangelicals and fundamentalists, the great sacred words of Scripture are often reduced to the bland notion that we are “going to heaven” because of some momentary decision or some highly emotional experience we have had. The equally innocuous notion follows that we are “going to hell” because we have not had such an experience after autonomously deciding to “get saved.” The Gospel is accordingly reduced to a gnostic self-interest that leaves both us and the world unconformed to Christ. Ken Myers, the editor of Mars Hill Tapes, has acidly observed that most conservative Christians are “of the world but not in it.” Theirs is indeed a worldly gospel of good feelings and untroubled success that in fact makes no real contact with the deepest desires and needs of the world. Thus do I tell my students that the real aim of the Gospel is not to get us into heaven but to get heaven into us--and thus to get the hell out! The popular Christianity of our time is sappy and sentimental, in short, because it lacks the imagination of the Cross. Liberal Christians are right to reject the cheap grace of this crossless gospel. Yet in their revulsion against the easy-believism of the comfortable right, leftist Christians make their own deadly errors. Their first error lies in their obsessive need to be identified with a larger group. Embarrassed at the outrages of the fundamentalists who now control the Southern Baptist Convention, and unwilling to celebrate the glories of the local church and association, they must find some greater group to join. Rather than retrieving such a good name as “Baptist Christians,” they seek to give themselves a more satisfying title. Thus do they forget that Baptists and Methodists and most other Christian groups have rarely chosen their own names. They have been named by our enemies and then turned snide opprobrium into terms of praise. Surely it is a failure of imagination that certain Baptists are now labeling themselves as moderates. Moderation is usually a political virtue, even a necessity, but it is also often a theological vice. Even St. Thomas, the most restrained and circumspect of all theologians, confesses that there is no moderation in the love of God. Many evils spring from an immoderate love of earthly things, says Aquinas, but the love of God in Christ is by nature radical, drastic, excessive, indeed immoderate. Warren Carr reminds us that moderates are members of the church of Laodicea--the church which God promises to “spew” out of his mouth because of its lukewarmness, its blandness, its neither-this-nor-thatness, its very moderation. Perhaps he remembers Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail and its scorching use of the term “moderate.” There King charged that white moderates, in their insistence on going slow and playing safe, were far greater enemies of racial justice and reconciliation than such hate-groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens councils. King imaginatively discerned that true enemies are better than false friends. In allowing their enemies to determine their entire agenda, moderates are in danger of becoming reverse and negative fundamentalists, remaining ever so much clearer about who they are not than who they are. Worse still, liberals often let fundamentalists rob them of the Gospel. Recoiling from the fundamentalists’ unctuous use of Zion-language, moderates seek to avoid the slick and defaced terms altogether. I have noticed, for example, that the very word “salvation” is not often used in many old-line churches. Hence also the contemporary vogue for spirituality rather than religion, for vague notions of “faith communities” rather than concrete commitments to the church as the unique body of Christ. Surely we should recognize that Wicca worshippers and the Aryan Nation also constitute “faith communities.” We cannot abandon the biblical words and metaphors without abandoning the Gospel itself. Our task is to revivify such indispensable images and doctrines as justification by grace alone and sanctification through faith alone. “Liberation” and “empowerment” are poor substitutes. So is the word “dysfunctional” a pathetic psychological surrogate for describing our sin and alienation from God. Such unimaginative recoil from traditional theological language among liberals reveals, as the late Walker Percy ceaselessly iterated, that they the mirror image of conservatives. Bishop Spong and Doctor Falwell are twins without knowing it. Two Examples of Theological Imagination at Work Our remaining task is to illustrate the Gospel-discerning, sermon-strengthening power of imagination at work in two 20th century Christian authors, Flannery O’Connor and G. K. Chesterton. It should be evident that I regard written works of imagination as theologically more fruitful than films. W. H. Auden once observed that there is a link between violence and the movies that is not found in novels. He argued that a novel is not likely to incite readers to deeds of terror or lust, chiefly because the action of a novel unfolds so slowly. Fictional carnage and mayhem are usually committed with a deliberation and a moral complexity that enables readers to deepen and complicate their own moral lives. In films, and especially television, action is usually swift and often unconnected to moral reality. Thus do they coarsen our imagination and corrupt our spiritual life. This explains why I long to hear preachers take their sermon analogies from novels and poetry rather than television programs. To the objection that preachers must engage their television-watching congregations “where they are,” I reply that they also are responsible to call their members to a higher plane of cultural and thus of theological life. If parishioners find out that their pastors are serious readers, they will be likely to follow suit themselves. We will all become deeper Christians when sermons are more deeply rooted in the imaginative life that reveals how the Gospel engages the world. The task of the preacher lies very considerably in the search for synonyms: in the quest for fresh ways of defamiliarizing the familiar, of reminding us that the Gospel we take as ordinary is in fact Extraordinary. The late Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler was asked, not long before his death, to give his advice to the church. Rather than coming forth with some high-sounding theological pronouncement, Sittler offered this remarkable caveat: “Watch your language.” He was not making a call to eloquence, I suspect, so much as to imagination and precision and care in our use of the words that God can turn into his Word. Since Christ is the Word incarnate, we must be ever so vigilant about our words. Mark Twain once declared that the difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug! It is the failure of preachers to “watch their words”-to make vigorous and imaginative proclamation of the Gospel-that accounts, I suspect, for the nearly complete triumph of music over the sermon in most Baptist churches. At the end of the story called “The Artificial Nigger,” her two protagonists, the boy Nelson and his grandfather Mr. Head, have come to a seemingly awful end. They have committed sins of rejection and betrayal and vengeance that make their racist deeds seem minor evils indeed. The young boy and the old man are physically lost in a city that resembles Atlanta, they are morally lost in their alienation from each other, and they are theologically lost in their total obliviousness to God’s grace. Yet as always in her work, O’Connor offers her characters drastic images of divine grace that could transform their lives. Twice already, Nelson and Mr. Head have encountered Negroes who could have been instruments of their salvation. But they fail to perceive the grace that is pursuing them until they stumble upon a broken-down lawn jockey, a miserable Sambo-statue who looks more like the crucified Christ than a happy watermelon eater. This plaster Negro has one eye chipped out, the mouth seems to be grimacing rather than grinning, and the statue itself has tilted away from its base at a strange angle. Though neither of these country characters has ever been inside a Catholic church, they both recognize a crucifix when they see it. There at the foot of this “artificial nigger”--as they call it, though the narrator does not--they encounter what eye has not seen nor ear heard, what has not entered into the human heart by its own devising: The two of them stood there with their necks forward almost at the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets. Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. Mr. Head had never known before what mercy felt like because he had been too good to deserve any, but he felt he knew now…. Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that [mercy] grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood that [mercy] was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly he burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought of himself as a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise. Here O’Connor brilliantly perceives a common Southern artifact, an object of racial pride and hatred and domination, as an image of the Cross. In it she descries a surprising earthly analogue of our divine redemption. Without a whit of sentimentality, she shows us the Mercy and the Judgment that unite everyone--old man and young boy, rich and poor, male and female, red and yellow and brown and black and white--in a commonality that no humanism can approach. The “artificial nigger” was meant, of course, to declare the white triumph over blacks. As David Smiley points out, the South won the second civil war, as the Jim Crow segregation laws at the turn of the century enabled Southerners to be racially victorious in the battle that they had militarily lost. This Sambo statue thus becomes an emblem of God’s own defeat at the hands of human evil: every sin against man is always an even greater sin against God. Yet the great mystery of the Cross is that God defeats our sin with the sacrifice of his own defeated Son. No longer do this grandfather and grandson believe that they are too good to deserve mercy. On the contrary, the old man sees that their sin has been hidden from them lest it destroy them in its very hideousness. O’Connor has him discern that, from the very beginning, our lives are conceived in sin: as sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, we bring evil into the world with our very existence. Sin precedes us, even though we make it fully our own. Yet we are allowed to behold our monstrous evil only in the mirror of the Cross, an act of sacrifice conceived even prior to Edenic sin, a redemption determined from the foundation of the world. This redemption alone can disclose our sin without devastating us. As Martin Luther taught, it is a hard and difficult thing to discern oneself a sinner. We will mistake a thousand other things for sin if we apprehend it apart from the Cross. Sin is not theft and cheating, not adultery and fraud, not racism and sexism and narcissism, not even murder and genocide. These are dreadful sins in the plural. Sin in the singular is disclosed only in the Cross and thus in this broken Sambo. The singular Sin which gives rise to all sins great and small is the distrust of God, the refusal to live and move and have our being in his Being, the desire to be our own lords and gods. We learn the meaning of this true and terrible Sin only in this one place called Golgotha, the place where our alienation from God is at once disclosed and overcome. There, as in the case of Nelson and Mr. Head, we are indicted by our pardon. As Karl Barth liked to say, we are sentenced by being declared free. We are imprisoned as God flings wide the cell door. It is always God’s mercy that prompts our repentance, as John Calvin declared, and never the other way around. If mercy were acquired only at the price of our regret and sorrow for sin, then salvation would be strangely dependent on us rather than God. Instead, it is nothing other than this unmerited gift of mercy, never our so-called good works, that we take to our Maker. The Cross is the only place where we can truly take our stand, the one and only Grace which we can both live and die by. Our real shame lies not in our sin, therefore, but in our obliviousness to the Agony which purchased our redemption. We should burn with embarrassment at having availed ourselves so little of it. And when we see that our lives depend utterly upon such Mercy, we have already entered Paradise. What is Heaven but the reign of God’s grace, as He at last becomes “all in all”? Flannery O’Connor gets this Truth this brilliantly right and clear in images that arrest and convince and bring the reader Home in both the literary and theological sense. Our images of God’s grace need not always be so somber, though neither may they ever be silly. Consider, then, an example, of the Gospel’s sheer joyfulness and delight from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy: It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern ‘force’ that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile and full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of “levitation.” They might go further: a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly…..Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise into a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study [an act of grave inquiry and investigation]; he reaches up to the blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. [Seriousness] is really a natural trend or lapse into taking oneself gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times [editorial] than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by force of gravity. Chesterton is no less original and discerning than O’Connor, but in quite a different way. Here he is resisting the grim Nietzschean gospel of hard self-sufficiency, the anti-gospel of power and force. He likens such brute power to a dead stone that may be cast upward but must always fall downward. A living bird, by contrast, looks like the weakest and most fragile of things. Yet its very softness and airiness enable it to fly skyward rather than fall earthward. Here Chesterton gives us a fresh and vigorous way of imaging St. Paul’s declaration that “my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Lest we grow falsely pious about such a sentiment--thus turning it into something sentimental--Chesterton links the lightness of true power with the levitation which has been credited in certain saints. When Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross met in her tiny monastic cell in northern Spain, they were seen to be hovering slightly above the ground--levitating. Yet Chesterton had the remarkable imaginative power to espy not only the etymological but also the theological link between levitation and levity, and thus between gravity and sin. Sin is revealed in our heaviness, he saw, as we take ourselves all too seriously. Ever since the heavy-handed Tempter lured our aboriginal parents into becoming ever so serious about themselves, sin has flowed from us easily and naturally, like the seepage of a fetid pool. Salvation, by contrast, is something surprising like laughter. It springs forward with a transcendent leap, with a huge jump that takes us out of ourselves. It launches us into the flight of true freedom: into the life of the God who in Jesus Christ refuses to take our sin with any final seriousness, and who thus frees our imaginations to be put in the service of his Gospel.
Updated Tuesday, December 26, 2000 |
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