Karl Barth’s theological revolution began in 1918 through a close, creative reading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans -- and after a frustrating decade of attempting to preach. That which Barth received from Romans, leading to his bombshell of a book, was, “We have found in the Bible a new world, God. God’s sovereignty, God’s glory, Gods incomprehensible love. Not the history of [humanity], but the history of God!” Pauline Christology in all of its unmanageable, cosmic grandeur.
In a sermon on 1 Kings 17 Fleming Rutledge asks, “Why are the mainline churches having so much trouble?” She answers that mainline preaching is,
Not about a God who judges and redeems, who causes great movements to come to pass, who puts down the mighty from their seats and exalts the humble and meek. Instead, the messages are about human activity. They are about human potential, human hopes, human wishes, human programs and agendas…. The living God of Elijah does not seem to be in view.
Mainline, liberal preachers in my part of the world preach mostly from the gospels, rather than the earlier letters of Paul. Is that because the gospels, replete with Jesus’ words and deeds, couching Christology within narrative, appear to encourage human agency? Christ, the great exemplar of goodness, hanging out with the good country folk of Galilee, giving them a gentle nudge to love their neighbor as themselves, Christ, the beloved teacher who told stories that brought out the best in us, Christ, of use in our projects of the moment. Anthropology rather than Christology is all the rage in contemporary American preaching. This is the major reason why our preaching isn’t that interesting.
Maybe Christ as exemplar of good behavior is a First World problem. Paul, at work in 1 Cor. 15, is strikingly disinterested in details of Jesus’ birth, life, and death, as if the sheer, luminous identity of Christ overshadows his deeds and words, as if in his resurrection, Christ -- bodily presence of God’s eternal benevolence -- needs no bolstering. God raised crucified Jesus; God raised crucified Jesus; God raised crucified Jesus. This, the sermon Paul was dying to preach, news that propelled Paul all over Asia Minor, planting churches where nobody knew they needed a church. Is Paul’s “Gospel of God” (Rom 1:2-4) too hot for accommodated, well-adjusted-to-decline-and-death, self-help, bourgeois, Progressive Christianity to handle?
Years ago the errant Jesus Seminar caused a stir by attempting to isolate and identify the “authentic” words of Jesus, only to be surprised that Christians don’t worship the words of Jesus; we worship the Word. While it’s fair for preaching sometimes to offer helpful hints for persons in pain, therapeutic advice for the wounded, a reason to get out of bed in the morning, a spiritual boost for the sad, a call to arms for social activists, human helpfulness can never be preaching’s main intent because such concerns are of little concern to Jesus.
Christ’s identity makes preaching in his name is cosmic in its intentions:
You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel that has come to you…. He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God,… in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col 1:5, 13-15, 16-20)
Paul’s story of God coming alongside us in the history of Jesus Christ, Son of God, clashes with what we think about God. So the Good News bears repeating. Preaching is difficult because of Christ, God unexpected, God daring to entrust “the message of reconciliation” to frail envoys (1 Cor 5:19).
It’s fine for preachers to call out human sinfulness, screwedupness, bias, and idolatrousness. I do so frequently; helps me to feel better about my moral compromises. Yet we are not free to belabor human depravity without stressing that we are sinners to whom God in Christ has turned, “For us and for our salvation,” as the creed puts it. Moralistic, judgmental preaching “is often mistaken for prophetic preaching,” says Richard Lischer, moral hectoring rather than proclamation. The good news is not that we are making moral headway but rather that the God from whom we sinners turned away has come out to meet us.
Woe to the preacher who cuts Paul’s Christ Pantocrator down to our size. Years ago, faced with the challenge of preaching four baccalaureate services to diverse congregations (that is, congregations clueless about Christ) I took the easy way out and preached Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15) as a story about what sometimes happens when graduates at last leave home. Jesus, human relations expert. The congregations received my conventional wisdom with a collective yawn. If Paul’s claims for Christ are true, there’s no way Jesus would have told that parable for that purpose. Fretting over better family life, what to do after graduation; too small potatoes for one who on his way to a new heaven and earth.
When some challenged Paul’s preaching, Paul’s defense was, “For I want you to know,… that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:11-12). Paul’s apostolic defense applies to every preacher. Authorization rests not upon an orthodox, faithful reiteration of church tradition, ecclesiastical reinforcement, certainly not upon the expertise of the preacher; sanction is “through a revelation of Jesus Christ” or nothing.
I know. This bodacious claim of reception of revelation could lead the claimant to self-delusion in which we preach ourselves as exemplars rather than Christ crucified (2 Cor 4:5). I’ll admit that there are pompous preachers, though the world is giving most preachers less to be pretentious about. Few preachers would declaim with Paul, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). More typical is to mumble, “Ur, uh, this is just how I see it.”
In handing over what they receive (I Cor 4:7), preachers are given an assignment, commissioned as missionaries. Luther tells his flock that when we, “hear how Christ comes here or there, or how someone is brought to [Christ], you should therein perceive… he is coming to you, or you are brought to him. For the preaching of the gospel is nothing else than Christ coming to us, or we being brought to him…. Christ is yours, presented to you as a gift…. [then, after having received Christ] it is necessary that you turn this into an example and deal with your neighbor in the very same way, be given to him as a gift and an example.” Listening to a sermon risks Christ’s coming “to you, or you are being brought to him,” and being placed under compulsion to hand over Christ to the neighbor.
Paul preaches to the Corinthians as an externally authorized spokesperson for Christ: “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,. . .. . .” (1 Cor 1:1) And though he begins with praise for “the church of God that is in Corinth,…called to be saints,” Paul brags that he wasn’t sent by Christ “to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power” (v. 17). Then Paul waxes homiletical: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18). “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (vv. 23-24).
To bolster his argument for the wise foolishness of preaching, Paul appeals to the Corinthians’ experience of vocation, “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1Cor 1:27-28).
Preachers work with no foundation for preaching, no authorization, no safety net beneath our high-wire act except Deus dixit.
On the Sunday after the 2016 presidential election debacle I preached in a United Methodist church in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. The pastor expected to lose as many as thirty families—Obama political appointees sure to be purged. My text was the assigned epistle, Romans 5, “Christ died for the ungodly.” I reminded the faithful that gracious Jesus died for sinners, only sinners, and that Jesus liked nothing better than to party with tax collectors and whores.
My sermon concluded with, “OK, good for us. We have elected a lying, adulterous, draft-evading, bankruptcy-declaring, misogynistic racist, riverboat gambler with tacky gold plumbing fixtures. He is a national disgrace and [pause for effect] one whom Jesus Christ loves, saves, and for whom he gave his life. [leaning over the pulpit, looking into the whites of their eyes] Are you sure that you want to worship that Savior?”
I preached not as I pleased that Sunday and let Paul do the talking. As usual, Paul wanted to talk about Christ rather than ourselves.
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Portions of this essay are from Will Willimon, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2020).
