CHAPTER THREE

REPETITION

Therefore every scribe, who has been trained for thekingdom of heaven is like the master of a householdwho brings out of his treasure what is new andwhat is old.¹(Matthew 13:52)

When Paul preached at Antioch, people pled, “Please preach that sermon again next week” (Acts 13:42). What a curious request. Nobody ever said to me, “Great sermon! Let’s do it one more time on Monday, same time, same place, same sermon.”

It’s even more curious when one considers Paul’s sermon in Acts 13— an uncreative rehash of Paul’s previous Acts sermons. Moreover, who was the audience for this sermon? Surely it was the church. In other words, the audience already knew the content of the sermon, had already heard it all before.

And yet, they asked Paul to say it again. Perhaps the church knew, even in its infancy, that faithful preaching is always repetitious reiteration, always preaching again.

A sermon is more like a workday breakfast than a fancy state dinner. Preaching ought to stick with us for the long term. A sermon is cumulative nourishment. Most of us shun innovation at breakfast. Nobody says, “Cornflakes with milk? Again?” Breakfast is not intended to be original or life changing. (Show me somebody who expects excitement at breakfast and I’ll show you someone who … well … ) Preaching is meant to be nourishment for the long haul, life sustaining. The story that preaching tells is renewing, but not new. Jesus said he was the “bread of life,” not the flaming cherries jubilee of life. Ordinary bread sustains. One of the few things that Jesus gave us permission to pray for on a daily basis, by rote, repetitiously, without thinking about it, was bread.

That’s why a chief homiletical virtue is persistence—faithfulness over time. Preaching is not to be judged for its immediate impact but for its cumulative effect.² I’ve been the recipient of my wife’s culinary arts for what, six thousand meals? The meals I most remember are not that multifaceted meal we had one Thanksgiving or the French feast she pulled off one Saturday night. It is the daily, constant acts of love that are all the meals that she created over time. Families are held together by mealtimes, not because they are special or spectacular, but because they are so wonderfully ordinary, normal, and typical. In my experience, people with a terminal illness rarely want to see Paris or jet to Tahiti; what they most desire is a dozen more weekday breakfasts with the family.

This is similar to my response to those Methodists who whine, “But if we have the Lord’s Supper every Sunday, won’t it seem less special?”

The Lord’s Supper is the normal food of Christians. It’s not supposed to feel special. It is supposed to be the most natural thing in the world, your destiny. We therefore take care to pray the same Eucharistic prayer over and over again with the same words. This is the core story, that which convenes us. So we want to be sure that we get it right and leave out nothing of import. Besides, the Eucharist is not predicated on what you feel about Jesus but rather on how Jesus feels about you. We pray this prayer not primarily to stir up in us religious sentiment but rather to name who God is by recitation of what God does.

One of my favorite Russian authors is Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy is known for his deliberate, frequent, and sometimes exasperating repetitiveness. Literary critic R. F. Christian notes that Tolstoy repeats the same word no less than five times in a sentence in dozens of different sentences. Tolstoy also repeats a particular mannerism of a character every time he returns to that character. Sometimes Tolstoy appears to be repetitive in the interest of rhythm. For instance, in the death of Prince Andrei, Tolstoy uses the words “weep” or “wept” almost a dozen times in just a few paragraphs, almost like a refrain in a song. The repetition fixes the character in our minds while telling such a large, long, and unwieldy story as War and Peace. A more significant reason for Tolstoy’s repetition is that Tolstoy seems to be searching, probing his characters, returning to them again, redescribing them, adding to our knowledge of them with each recurring encounter. His repetition has the effect of creating another world for us in which to dwell where the literature gives us the luxury of going back to the same mysterious characters over and over in an obstinate attempt to understand.

A major function of Israel’s Scripture is the transmission of the tradition, the exercise of memory through creative repetition and reiteration. Of the statutes of Israel it is said, “We will not hide them from their children; / we will tell to the coming generation / the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might … / that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn … / that they should not be like their ancestors, / a stubborn and rebellious generation” (Ps 78:4-8). The tradition is reiterated, not simply in the interest of repeating the past but so that we might change the present and not be like our grandparents, “a stubborn and rebellious generation.”

Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut 6:6-9)

Walter Brueggemann marvels that in Israel, the urgency of transmitting the glories of the tradition is matched by supple and imaginative creativity in that transmission. The tradition was not merely handed on but reformulated in order that what was past might be vividly present. Somehow Israel managed to avoid “frozen, flattened fundamentalism” as well as “dismissive indifference” in regard to its treasured past. Israel managed to remember with wonderment.³

Early Christian preachers not only continued this Hebrew wonderment with ancient texts but added to it the astounding claim that, after Jesus, Christians understood Israel’s ancient texts even better than Israel, or at least in a radically invigorated way. On a regular basis the church gathers and hears texts that were generated over two thousand years ago, reading them as if they pertain specifically and authoritatively to us today. Richard Hays, in his masterful study of Paul’s use of Scripture, says, “The text was written by some human author long ago, written to and for an ancient community of people in Israel but original writer and readers have become types whose meaning emerges with full clarity only in the church—that is, only in the empirical eschatological community that Paul is engaging in building. Even utterances that appear to be spoken to others in another time find their true addressees in us.”⁴

“Do I contradict myself?” asks Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. “Very well then I contradict myself.”⁵ We preachers must have the confidence to do the same.⁶

I know a young man who saw The Matrix thirty times. I saw The Matrix once, found it “clever,” that is, “new” and therefore felt no need to see it again. When all you’ve got is “new,” once is enough. However, this young man found The Matrix to be revealing, deep, and disrupting and therefore delighted in seeing it again and again. He thrilled in seeing the same thing but this time seeing something that he had missed before. Sometimes he simply delighted in seeing the same secret he had discovered in a previous viewing but this time seeing the secret again as an insider who has been let in on the enigma. The repetition that made repeating The Matrix pointless to me was part of its power for him, the power of repetition rather than of dullness. Once is never enough for truth that is cataclysmic.

At the beginning of his Tractatus Logicus Wittgenstein said that he was only attempting to think what people had already thought. He claimed that his philosophical tract “will be understood only by someone who has already had these thoughts or at least thoughts similar to these thoughts.”⁷ The peculiar power of Wittgenstein’s philosophical insights is in their being so brilliantly commonplace and obvious, except that we never thought about these matters in this way until we thought about them with him. He felt that what passed for philosophy had put cataracts in our eyes so that we stood before a tree, questioning if it were really a tree when what we should have been doing is looking at the tree! In that sense, to encounter a tree is always to reencounter the tree.

Perhaps no one can communicate, in any depth, something that is not already known, at some depth. Plato said that all teaching is a form of midwifery. We can’t really think that which has not somehow already resided in us. All thought is therefore a sort of repetition, according to Plato. All thought is thought from the inside out.⁸

I see Plato’s point. We tend to move forward in our thought by way of digression. If I think in words that are English, in images and feelings that are derivative of past experience whereby I learned to use the English language, then all human thought is, to a great degree midwifery, exercise in repetition. We speak and think out of habit.⁹ Only that thought that is revelation is new thought, thought from outside of our experience. In most of our thinking, thoughts repeat themselves. This is our accustomed way of understanding—through Tolstoy-like repetition in which we circle around ideas and re-circle, circling again and again.

Sometime in 1880 Rodin returned from a trip to Italy and began work on a massive set of doors for a planned museum in Paris. Though the ​doors were never finished, a few of the figures he sculpted for the doors survive, including his massive, “Adam.” Rodin’s “Adam” is a direct quote from Michelangelo’s fresco of the creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—Adam’s massive hands, his languid pose, his body just beginning to move with life. Yet Michelangelo’s Adam is itself a quote from Jacopo della Quercia’s small “Creation of Adam” bronze panel. This is often the way of great art. Rarely is an artistic creation completely new; each work of art is beholden to another’s work. Most fine works of art involve creative quotation.

I was therefore surprised to read Norman Mailer’s notion that little good comes of repetition:

[R]epetition kills the soul… . Any number of kinds of repetition are, I will admit, crucial to the human venture. It is, after all, one of the ways by which we learn. And there is such a thing as creative repetition. Nonetheless, I’m suspicious of ritual. Where, after all, does my theology start? What occasions it? What stimulates it? I would answer that it is because I’ve worked as a novelist all my life… . Now, where in all this is the relation to ritual? Ritual is repetition, and in writing a novel you look to do the opposite. A fine novel does not keep repeating itself. That is exactly the hallmark of a dull work. So most good novelists are wary of repetition. Moreover, most people I don’t approve of tend to be masters or monsters of mediocre repetition. The politicians we despise are one example. So one develops an understanding that repetition can be dangerous when used as a tool for mediocre purposes. Unimaginative parents often know nothing better than to repeat what they say over and over.¹⁰

Mailer’s derision of repetition as soul-killing is odd since so many of his best works involve titles, plots, themes, and characters that are purloined. Perhaps his gargantuan vanity led Mailer to think that what he thought was thought up on his own.

Film theorist Bruce Kawin distinguishes between “repetitious” and “repetitive.” “Repetitious,” says Kawin, occurs “when a word, percept, or experience is repeated with less impact at each recurrence; repeated to no particular end, out of a lack of intention or sloppiness of thought.”

On the other hand, “repetitive happens when a word, precept or experience is repeated with equal or greater force at each occurrence.”¹¹ The repetitive is characterized by intention, self-awareness. Repetition counts on the listener to recognize the repetitiveness and to rejoice in that recognition. Repetition seeks to revitalize the elements of the originating ​source so that they can be seen anew. Therefore, creativity and repetition go hand in hand. It is the joy of hearing the same story retold, and realizing that the retelling is not only enlarging the story as first heard but is also remaking the story. The repetitiveness draws us in and engages us as we look for fresh interpretations of the same story. The informed listener experiences a certain degree of pleasure in being able to recognize the allusions and the inside jokes.

I figure that most of Scripture was addressed to the informed listener, the gathered congregation, those who were already practitioners of the faith. It is rare that Scripture has much apologetic interest in speaking to the uninitiated. Ernst Haenchen theorized that the Acts of the Apostles was an early “apologia to the Roman Empire,” reassuring Romans that they had nothing to fear from these Christians. I find this theory of Acts’ intent to be bizarre. It’s hard to imagine a Roman bureaucrat like Felix or Agrippa plowing through Acts out of curiosity about Christians. No, Acts is, foremost, testimony by the informed to the initiated that they may grow in their understanding and inculcation of the faith.

Apologetics tends to eschew repetition of the themes and stories of Scripture but fails to get beyond basing its arguments on the repetition of non-scriptural (pagan) arguments. I suspect that contemporary homiletics’ attempt (PowerPoint Preaching) to practice apologetics and make sermons completely comprehensible to the uninitiated is responsible for the theological vacuity of much contemporary preaching. It’s hard to get the uninitiated initiated on the basis of extrabiblical reasoning that is fundamentally at odds with the gospel. I actually heard a preacher say that he intentionally constructed his sermons so that they could be interesting and readily understood by any sixteen year old. Knowing this pastor, I’m certain that he succeeded in fulfilling his intentions.

G. K. Chesterton once said that Almighty God is a bit like a young child, saying every single morning to the sun, “Again!” Like a little child, God delights in repetition, never tires of having the world repeat Genesis 1 and creation. Each morning, with infant-like glee, God says to the world, “Do it again!”

Every discovery is a recovery. Discovery consists in the interface, within the mind, of certain old pieces of information that have been received from the past. Repeated old ideas, when they interface with one another, sometimes conflict, produce sparks, and thereby fabricate new ideas. Therefore, a major assignment for Christian preaching is constant engagement with the past, particularly past texts. In each retelling, the ​past is being remixed, remade, re-presented.¹² Paul asks repeatedly “Do you not know?” (1 Cor 5:6, 6:2, etc.). Paul implies that the Corinthians ought to know. So he reminds them in order really to know. Most preaching, even preaching as early as Paul’s, is reiteration.

The Rhetoric of Repetition

Good preachers utilize repetition as a rhetorical strategy for producing emphasis, clarity, amplification, or emotional effect in sermons.¹³ The art of rhetoric is replete with terms that point to specific sorts of repetitive speech acts (conduplicatio).¹⁴

1. We repeat sounds and letters (Evangelicals from Fuller Seminary were once masters of this):

2. We repeat words (Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King¹⁵ were masters at this, as is the Old Testament):

3. And we repeat ideas (St. Paul is a master of this):

I’ll admit that, in our rhetoric of repetition, we preachers are often guilty of tautologia (repetition of the same idea in different words in a wearisome or unnecessary way), and homiologia (tedious, inane, unvarying ​repetition), and even pleonasmus (using more words than is necessary). Of all these, I am a master.

Knowledge as Repetition

And yet, repetition may be more than a preacher trick, a savvy rhetorical strategy. Repetition may be a deep way of knowing. Søren Kierkegaard wrote a curious work on this subject: Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology (1843).¹⁶ The treatise is written in the voice of Constantin Constantius. In Either/Or¹⁷ Kierkegaard had said, “There is no such thing as repetition. The only thing repeated was the impossibility of repetition.”¹⁸ Time consumes everything. The idea of “now” is mostly a human construct to defend ourselves against the ravages of time. The present is past in an instant and what is past cannot really be made to live again. There can be no recovery.

In Repetition Kierkegaard engages in a more careful look at the nature of repetitiveness. I assume that S.K.’s purpose was to nuance the platonic concept of thinking as remembrance, the linkage of knowledge with memory, and the platonic notion that insight is retrogressive recollection. As we have noted, Plato taught that all our knowledge consists of remembrance of the eternal ideals implanted in the soul. The ideals are innate and await evocation in the mind. Education (Latin: educare) is midwifery that delivers these ideals. For Plato, when we think we have had a fresh insight, in truth we have simply remembered what we already knew.

Perhaps S.K. was contrasting platonic knowledge-as-recollection with faith as it meets us in Jesus Christ. For S.K. repetition is not some nostalgic attempt to retrieve the past; it is a means by which we become different people. Kierkegaard said that “genuine repetition is recollected forward.” I project myself into the future through recollection of the past. “Modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition.”¹⁹ By repeating some notion, I am taking it back from the past, thrusting this idea into the future. Repetition and recollection are two different directions of the very same movement: both repetition and memory involve the same action, one toward our future and the other our past.

Kierkegaard uses the figures of Job and Abraham as parables that help in understanding peculiarly Jewish/Christian repetition. Deep knowledge involves privation, acceptance, and repair. The first step toward knowing is not knowing; it is awareness of ignorance and emptiness, privation. The ​path to having is through the recognition that we are bereft. Job regains everything that was stripped from him only after his great moment of resignation that he had lost everything. Abraham gets Isaac back in the instant that he lets Isaac go. It is in the process of loss (privation), recognition of loss (acceptance), and wondrous restoration (repair) that the individual’s sense of that which is lost and regained becomes intense and authentic. Only through loss of self can we have our true selves. Abraham got his son back, but not at all in the same way that his son once was to him. Job got God back, but not really the same God, certainly not in the same relationship, as before. Privation, acceptance, and repair. This is repetition in the sense that the Renaissance was rejuvenation of classical Greece and Rome. The culture that was thoroughly lost was regained, repeated in a vivid, essential way, but only after it was acknowledged as lost.

Rising above the superficiality of the aesthete and the dreariness of the ethical, repetition, as S.K. thinks of it, is an aspect of the religious stage. Repetition is a “religious mood” that raises our way of thinking and being exponentially. Repetition is part of our will to become. It is a way of claiming the present as significant by reclaiming the past as present. We go backwards just enough truly to move forward.

We cannot know Abraham; he is lost to us. Yet, in reclaiming Abraham, through our preaching about Abraham, we regain not only Abraham but also ourselves remade. True repetition, true regaining of the past as a present that changes our future, is a gift. We cannot have the past, in this vivifying way, through historical retrieval. It comes to us only as gift. Repetition enables recognition of our selves as those who are always dying, always losing the present to the past, but without anxiety— with faith and love. What we regain is a meaning-saturated world whose power and potential exceed what could be there in the mere present. We receive an unexpected, wondrous restoration in the face of a perceived loss and this restoration brings about a considerably heightened self-consciousness. Abraham’s son was restored to him in his relinquishment of him, but restored to him in a very different way. There was a deep sense in which Abraham was no longer the same person, no longer living in the same world once he relinquished his beloved son, then received his son back. So in repetition not only the past is regained but the present as well.

Repetition is thus about becoming. Normally, says S.K., we think of imitation as the path to becoming. I imitate those whom one day I hope to be. But repetition is more dynamic than imitation. Repetition brings ​to light our predicament. Instead of bemoaning our own belatedness in knowing Jesus, wishing for some return to a sentimentally imagined religious past that is forever lost, in repetition we embrace the present and life in the present, and in so doing we discover Jesus beside us into the future. The God whom we thought was lost to us in the past is now present to us as gift, but only through privation, acceptance of that privation, and repair. To repeat: for S.K. repetition is not simply a heuristic device (something helpful for learning) but is a methodological dictum that has material consequences. He is making a theological claim here.

In a wonderful sermon on the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14) Kierkegaard highlights, not the humility of the tax collector, but rather his distance from God, indeed his distance from his fellow humanity.²⁰ The penitent tax collector is a man who has lost God and knows his loss. It is only after his breast-beating sense of lostness that the man is “justified,” brought close to God. The sinful tax collector is made right with God through privation, acceptance of privation, and repair.

This sort of recollection enables us to begin anew, to reclaim ourselves as new selves. Though Kierkegaard doesn’t, I might note that preachers thus read us into the biblical story. We are not reading ourselves back into some golden age, going backwards, but we are rather claiming our age as the time of God’s presence. Any “golden age” of faith is now moving forward.

S.K. said slyly that Repetition, if he had written it as he had hoped, would prove to be a quickly written, witty, plainspoken book that would be possibly incomprehensible to heretics. The motto of Repetition is “On wild trees the flowers are odorous, on tame ones the fruit.” Constantin Constantius—a modern, objective, analytical psychologist—takes up the “case” of a love-struck young man who, though obsessed with a young woman, cannot bring himself finally to consummate his love for his beloved by marrying her. He fears that if he married her, his love—which now is all yearning, sighing, longing, and potential—would be realized and would soon become boring. He feels more love for her in remembering her in absence than in having her presence in the flesh. Mundane, dutiful marriage might destroy his sense of romance. Marriage would force him to give himself only to one person, that is, he would be forced to repeat himself and in that boring connubial sameness, his love would wilt. He would rather be a poet, experiencing love in the abstract, than a husband, experiencing love as a quotidian commitment in time. Better, ​he thinks, to love without continuity or being caught in the humdrum repetitiveness of married life, to love her in recollection, to keep love a matter of momentary, fleeting feeling rather than to confine himself to the dulling duty of marriage. The only thing to do, therefore, is to abandon his love, not to be with her but only to recollect her, to keep her a poetic memory, relishing that moment. This must be the “heresy” that S.K. wants to assail in Repetition.

Kierkegaard implies that while the distance of recollection is sweet, true love must dare to expose itself to repetition, must attempt to survive over time if it is truly love. Thus the opening motto—wild trees have a spontaneous sweetness about their flowers; but cultivated trees produce the good fruit. Truth is that which can withstand repetition without degenerating into boredom. Truth is that thought that has the capacity continually to rise up, to refuse to be relegated to the past, but also to endure the test of time so that it is able to be fruitful, to speak, to vivify, and to not bore us to death.

In Repetition S.K. also contrasts the delusions of “hope”—“a new garment, starched and stiff and glittering, but it has never yet been worn,” a garment that may or may not look well on our frame or even fit us at all— and the contrasting delusion of “memory”—“an old garment, and quite useless, however beautiful; for it has been outgrown.” Repetition “is an imperishable garment, fitting intimately.” Hope is a beautiful woman who “slips through your fingers” and memory is “a handsome old dowager, never quite serving the purpose of the moment.” In contrast to ethereal hope or pointless memory, repetition is “a beloved wife, of whom one never tires.” Wild trees smell sweet but trees cultivated over time produce the fruit.

Yet there is even more to Repetition. After the end of the affair, when the poetic young lover picks up a newspaper and learns that his beloved has married another, he feels an odd sense of wholeness. There is loss, but also recovery. He claims his self for himself. And although he doubts anyone else would desire to be him or be in hs present condition and might even see him as discarded, he sees his soul coming back to its proper place, no longer divided, and experiences what he calls a “unified personality.” The repetition in this scene is a rebirth, a returning of wholeness to his soul. Privation, acceptance, and repair.

“I risk my life, each moment lose it, and again win it,” says the young man who now, having lost his beloved, has her again, but in a very different way. More important, he has a different self as well. Privation, acceptance, and repair. As you know, Kierkegaard depicted life as stages—the ​aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Repetition makes boredom a danger both for the ethical stage and the aesthetic stage. The aesthete tries to solve the boredom problem with gimmicks in a vain attempt to give some spice to life in order to ward off boredom. The aesthete thus flits from one sweet-smelling—but alas, quickly fading—flower to the next, never alighting anywhere, unable to preserve a feeling over time. For his part, the ethicist becomes a bore through his extreme delight in consistency and pattern. By doing his duty and obeying the rules, the ethicist attempts to give order to life, to tidy up time. Morbid boredom is the result.

Let us preachers take note that S.K. said “only the new” tires. Only the novel gets old. Only “when the mind is engrossed with the old it achieves happiness. He only finds a genuine happiness who refuses to delude himself into thinking that repetition ought to yield him something new; of this illusion boredom is the inevitable consequence.”

“Whoever fails to understand that life is repetition, and that this is its beauty,” is “lost,” says S.K. He posits that we need our repetition as much as we need food and shelter. In a real sense, repetition should be counted among our daily necessities, and we cannot be content or happy without it.

Who could wish to be subject to everything that is new and flighty, or wish forever to be the vehicle for an ephemeral pleasure? If God had not willed repetition the world would never have come into being… . In repetition inheres the earnestness and reality of life. Whoever wills repetition proves himself to be in possession of a pathos that is serious and mature.²¹

This helps explain why the practice of the Christian faith is inherently and exuberantly repetitious. Christians are those who believe that Jesus Christ is not only the way and the life but also the truth who rises from the dead and keeps coming back to us, not precisely as he came to those before us, for his resurrected self is more than a pious memory. He makes himself present to us, now. In resurrection, Christ repeats himself.

“We Can Only Repeat Ourselves”

Thus Karl Barth began his mammoth Church Dogmatics with an unashamed promise to be repetitive: “We can only repeat ourselves.”²²​Stanley Hauerwas, in his Gifford Lectures, comments that Barth’s statement is “but an indication of his discovery that the God who has found us in Jesus Christ is the subject of Christian theology.”²³ God is the true subject of theology — the speaking, vivifying subject who refuses to be silenced. Barth circles his subject (God in Jesus Christ) again and again, in ever widening re-description.²⁴ All faithful theology can be truthful re-description because God is a living, constantly revealing subject. All faithful theology must be re-description because the only thing that needs to be said about God is that which only God can speak, has spoken, and will speak.

That which happens in Jesus Christ is God “entire and perfect”;²⁵ Christ’s saving death “cannot and need not be continued or repeated or added to or superseded.”²⁶ Christ is a “unique history” that manages to be both “new and eternal.”²⁷ Christ is therefore never a “process,”²⁸ something that grows through gradual degrees and accretions. Nor does Christ need to be re-presented by some means outside himself, for Christ is not lacking in anything nor is he awaiting some further attestation.²⁹ Repetition, rather than progress or development, is the guiding metaphor for faith in Christ. Therefore, when we preachers speak of Christ, we can only repeat God’s perfect, completed, final work—Christ.

The idea of theology as repetition accounted for Barth’s definition of the preacher as herald—the preacher is the mere mouthpiece for the proclamation of the King. The preacher is conduit for the message from God to the hearers.³⁰ As Tom Long notes, “Herald preachers, … do not strive to create more beautiful and more excellent sermons; they seek to be more faithful to the message they receive in scripture.”³¹

Barth loved the music of Mozart for its circularity, the way Mozart picks up a theme, repeats the theme, adds something to it, leaves it for a time, returns to it, widens it, reiterates and explores its many dimensions. One of the functions of repetition in Barth’s theology is to slow us down in order to help us be more attentive. That is hard for us. Modern people lack hope and “don’t take long looks at anything,” said Flannery O’Connor.³²

Proust does repetition so well in his writing, and so does Jane Austin. Maybe all great writers do. It is as if they put a microscope on things, magnifying something that is very small, something liable not to be noticed, in order to illuminate the whole, in order to be more panoramic. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” sings Mary in her Magnificat. That’s what faithful theology does—takes time to attend to God and thereby magnifies God.

But we must take care to note that for Barth, repetition was more than a rhetorical stratagem—it was a theological affirmation. Barth charged that by attempting to avoid the possibility of boring repetition, we preachers are in danger of sidestepping the peculiar “God who has found us in Jesus Christ.” Barth says that in our preaching of Christ:

We can only describe Him again, and often, and in the last resort infinitely often… . We can only speak of it again and again in different variations as God in His true revelation gives us part in the truth of His knowing, and therefore gives our knowing similarity with His own, and therefore truth… . we have no last word to speak… . Jesus Christ is really too good to let Himself be introduced and used as the last word of our self-substantiation.³³

Barth suggests that there is a word for my desire to be fresh, new, and interesting in the pulpit. The word is idolatry. My homiletical attempts to substantiate God in a way that grips my audience is also another attempt at utilizing Jesus Christ in a vain effort at “self-substantiation.” My preacherly self (or the selves within my congregation) becomes more important in the process of gospel communication than Christ, the Agent of proclamation.³⁴ I attempt, through my rhetoric, to force the gospel to speak to those to whom it may have no intention of speaking. How typical of modernity to validate the message on the basis of the speaker’s intention or the hearer’s reaction, to be more interested in the effect upon the viewer than in what is viewed. Besides, all Christianity comes to us through tradition, because of the loving repetition of this true story by the saints. Since Easter, the truth that is Jesus Christ requires witnesses, someone to pass it on, someone courageous enough to repeat the story. None of us can have Jesus on our own terms. As Barth continually stressed, we must receive Jesus as he is offered to us by the tradition, as he is in himself, not as we would adapt him to be for us. “We can only describe Him again, and often, and in the last resort infinitely often.” Therefore we preachers must discipline ourselves to repeat ourselves.

True, our repetition is speaking the gospel “again and again in different variations.” N. T. Wright construes biblical authority as similar to that of a play that has five acts but for some reason the fifth act has been lost.³⁵ A group of actors attempt to perform the play as a whole, adding a fifth act on the basis of what they have learned from the first four acts. The “authority” of the first four acts of the play wouldn’t consist of a command that the actors simply repeat, over and over again, the earlier acts. ​Rather the drama would contain its own inner consistency and forward movement, to which the actors, in devising the last act, would be faithful. They would need to act with “both innovation and consistency.” Christians are those who are living into the last act of the drama that is Scripture. To be faithful to the text, there must be consistency with the intention and the direction of the text, yet there must also be some degree of innovation because the God we are repeating is a living God. Scripture doesn’t want simply to be repeated but rather to be embodied, enacted, performed in the light of Easter.

I do wonder if we preachers engage in homiletical calisthenics in our sermons, devising all sorts of intellectual props for the gospel, because we are attempting to enable the gospel to make sense apart from the living, breathing, embodied Christian community that makes Scripture make sense. In other words, are we guilty of deluding ourselves into thinking that we must work hard to keep our preaching fresh and interesting when the main thing Scripture wants to do is to be edifying to the saints who are busy being scriptural people? Perhaps our greatest need in our biblical interpretation is not a better sense of eschatology but a more active engagement in mission? The goal of preaching is embodiment, disciple-ship more than mere intellectual assent or aesthetic appreciation.

I recently watched a violinist play Vivaldi. She was utterly absorbed by the music on the printed page, her whole body in motion from what she saw with her eyes, vision being transferred through the brain to her fingers, all conveyed to the instrument she played. While she was completely attentive, ardently faithful to each note on the page, she also gave the music an interpretation that was her own—she seemed to play the piece with particular energy and heightened tempo.

I thought this violinist was a good parable of us preachers. We preach while being thoroughly attentive to the biblical text, honoring the details, bowing to the specifics, playing the notes as they are printed, so to speak. But we also give the text our interpretation, both in what we say and how we say it. We want to be original, faithful to our own gifts and insights, but we want to be even more faithful to the text as we have received it. Our preaching is “repetition” in a manner similar to the way that violinist repeated Vivaldi.

In repeating God in sermons we are following a peculiarly biblical way of presenting the truth. Scripture delights in re-presentation and reverberation. John 1 echoes and reflects, expands and reiterates Genesis 1. Creation begins with the pushing back of the dark, chaotic waters of ​the sea; Revelation ends with the complete defeat of chaos in which “the sea [shall be] no more” (Rev 21:1). There are twelve tribes in Israel; Jesus calls twelve disciples. Moses comes down a mountain with the Ten Commandments; Jesus goes up a mountain to deliver the Beatitudes. Elijah gives bread to a poor widow (1 Kgs 17); Jesus gives bread to the poor multitudes. Manna is given to Israel in the wilderness; Jesus leads the multitudes into the wilderness where he gives bread (Mark 6:30-44) and urges us to pray for “daily bread” like manna. “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us,” says Paul. “Therefore let us keep the feast” (1 Cor 5:7-8 KJV), and everyone understood the Lord’s Supper in a new way and no one in his congregation ever looked at the Passover in quite the same way ever again.

We can say the gospel again because, in his resurrection, Jesus Christ literally repeats himself. He defeats time, rises up, returns in fresh form, and addresses us, speaks as if he is redoing the gospel.³⁶ We can speak, as preachers, because Jesus Christ speaks himself anew whenever we dare to repeat the gospel. Every report of the gospel is a repeat of the gospel is resurrection of the gospel by Christ. By the sending of the Spirit, Jesus Christ makes us into “contemporaries” of his finished, perfected history so that we actually live in him here and now.³⁷ Even the eyewitnesses who came to the tomb on Easter morning did not understand the resurrection. They required the gift of faith in order to be truly contemporary with Jesus. The Holy Spirit is that which enables contemporaeity. Barth defines “eschatological” as “looking into the furthest and final future, and from there back again into the present.”³⁸

Thus Easter is the basis of preaching, the only hope for preaching’s possibility. We can preach, our people can hear because of the agent of preaching, that is, the risen Christ. Jesus said to us humble preachers: “It is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you” (Matt 10:20). “Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me” (Luke 10:16). That’s claiming a great deal for us preachers! We can and must repeat ourselves in the pulpit. We preachers can be so bold because of faith that there is only one preacher, Christ. And he will preach.

That’s why Barth said that the best we preachers can do is to just attempt to preach, try to preach, for none of us can really preach Christ.³⁹ It is only proclamation when the Holy Spirit descends and takes up the work of preaching. Only Christ can preach Christ. And he will preach.

The poet laments the difficulty of bringing difficult truth to speech:

​So here I am, … having had twenty years …

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure …

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating… . ⁴⁰

As preacher here I am, having wasted not twenty years (like T. S. Eliot) but nearly twice that many “trying to use words.” And every attempt to say again what the saints have said before is, in its own way, a “wholly new start,” as well as another failure, but failure of a different kind. We preachers keep launching weekly “raids on the articulate.” We stutter and stammer, mutter and jammer because we are trying to talk about God with such shabby, faltering equipment.

Such is our fate. And yet, by God’s grace, our fate is transformed into our vocation. Christ incarnates in human speech. Christ is raised into human time. We preachers are called to say again what the church has forgotten, to bring to speech that which, from use or overuse, has become silent. What’s lost is the gospel and, for a host of reasons, the gospel is lost again and again. But the good news is that the Good News is also discovered all over again. The gospel keeps rising from the dead, is made miraculously new each morning (Lamentations 3:22). God keeps redoing Easter. An old, old story becomes news.

Nobody needs to hear this word of homiletical encouragement more than us preachers. I look out upon my Sunday congregation and think: They aren’t listening. They are the wrong people. This church is a mistake. The conditions for the gospel’s renewal are not especially “propitious.” But when have the conditions for the advent of Jesus Christ ever been right? He must make conditions right for preaching, or they will never be. He must make his own way into the world. He must rise from the dead every Sunday. He must enable fresh hearing. He must repeat himself. And, wonder of wonders, he does and, whenever he does, the gospel is redone.

In the Cloisters Museum in New York there is a medieval lintel—a stone over a doorway into an ancient church—that depicts a Palm Sunday procession. At the head of the procession is, of course, Jesus on a donkey. Just behind and around Jesus are children and disciples waving palm branches. They are dressed in the garb of the New Testament. But then, mingled in with them we note that there are contemporary medieval folk dressed in their Sunday best. A bishop and priests and townsfolk end the procession. Get it? We are walking through that doorway ​into church. We are taking our places in the Palm Sunday procession, marching behind Jesus, moving toward the future by taking our place in the past. We are enlisted into the very same parade. This is what happens, by the grace of God, when a sermon succeeds.

“How do I keep it fresh?” is finally not the right question for preachers to ask. “Keeping preaching fresh” is, in the end, not something we do as preachers. Faithful repetition is what we do; making it fresh is God’s business. Our chief task as preachers is not to succeed but to try to preach again next Sunday, to keep at it, to keep saying the gospel, over and over again, confidently repetitious, sure in the conviction that God gives the gospel the hearing it deserves if we will stick with words akin to the God who sticks with us. We must be “Glad to be in church, one more time,” as the old spiritual sings it. For now, there is only God-blessed trying.

I know, I know. Easter is over. Yet still the church never quite gets over the inopportunity of Easter. We still keep being surprised that, whenever resurrected Jesus shows up, even in midsummer, the dead don’t stay that way.

And I know there’s no Easter in the Gospel of Mark. Mark ends abruptly with no resurrection appearances. There is a promise that hints of resurrection, but no resurrected Jesus in Mark. The last sentence of Mark, the response of the church to the good news that Jesus is raised from the dead? Fear. The women who came to the tomb in mourning left the empty tomb in fear.

Now, why would they be scared of Easter?

This absence of Easter in Mark has led some biblical scholars to say that Mark’s gospel, the earliest of the gospels, is one long passion story, one long account of Jesus—faced with constant misunderstanding and opposition—walking grimly toward his cross. There’s no resurrection in Mark, or so it seems.

Well, this Sunday we’re barely in the middle of Mark’s Gospel. Jesus has been working outside our boundaries, on the wrong side of the tracks, out over in Gentile territory. But now Jesus crosses back home, back to the faithful, the Bible-believers, back to us. Jesus is home among his own, home where he began his work, just a few months ago.

Home, as it turns out, is a place of death and dying. There is a poor woman who has been suffering sick for twelve years. A synagogue official has a dying daughter who is twelve years old. (Israel, I remind you, had twelve tribes. Jesus gathers twelve disciples. Is Mark about to tell us a story that challenges the inner circle, the insiders, us? That’s opportune because anyone who would get out of bed, get dressed, and come to church has got to be a quintessential insider! All you insiders, listen up.)

Jesus is accosted by a church official who pleads, “My daughter’s dying.” Jesus and the official, Jarius, go home together. On the way the woman, who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years, who has used up her life savings on medical bills and ineffective therapies, pushes through the crowd and touches Jesus. We don’t know her name. She is introduced as a woman who is sick and has suffered much at the hands of doctors. Her sickness has named her, dominated her, consumed her, which is what dying tends to do.

“If I could just touch him, I’d be healed,” she says. She would have an identity other than her sickness.

And she is healed. This woman, enslaved by sickness for over a decade, as good as dead, named by her dying, is healed, brought back from the dead. We don’t know what theology she adhered to, or if she was active in the Synagogue. All we know is that she reached out, touched Jesus, and received resurrection, just by touching him.

Now this healing-on-the-way is wonderful but by the time Jesus gets to Jairus’ house, it’s all over. His beloved little girl is dead. The weeping and wailing tell the sad news. Unfortunately Jesus has come too late to help the little girl.

“Why are you making such a fuss?” Jesus asks. “Mr. Lord of Life is here!” And the crowd turns from tears and mourning to mocking laughter. “Sure, like she’s only asleep!” Nice timing, Jesus. You’re late.

And Jesus touches her, announces, “It’s time to get up!” And the derisive laughter becomes shocked wonder. Jesus’ disciples, the ones gathered in this house of death, were “astounded.” And even though it’s not Easter, even though it’s the dead of summer, whenever Jesus shows up, it’s Easter. They were astounded.

We still are.⁴¹

Here is the church, the insiders, us, all adjusted to death. Stoic resignation is about the best our theology can deliver. Mainline, Protestant Christians, in our membership malaise, console ourselves with, “Everybody’s losing members.” Amen. Decline is prevalent. Amen. Death is normal, ​we say with a knowing smirk. Declining birthrates among liberal, mainline Protestants lead to declining congregations. Simple as that. Church growth? It’s a gimmick, a simplistic quick fix best suited for less progressive and well-educated congregations, we say with a progressive sneer.

“Do you think my son will ever get over his drug addiction?” she asked me. And I, as her enlightened pastor, replied, in love, “Recovery from heroin? What are the chances of that? Get serious. Get real.” Mocking laughter is the way a sophisticated, stoic disposition refers to talk of Easter.

That expression, “Get real,” translated into today’s Scripture means “adjust to death.” So when this desperate father presses in upon Jesus, when this poor, harried woman reaches toward Jesus, the home folks react with a sardonic smile. Jesus responds by offering some sufferers new life, hope, a future. Jesus doesn’t say some magical incantation, doesn’t offer some esoteric technique. Jesus just shows up. He allows the woman just to touch him. He speaks to the dead girl. And there is resurrection.

Jesus commands, “Little girl, get up!” Arise! Be resurrected! Jesus apparently resuscitated only three throughout his ministry: Jairus’ daughter, the widow’s son at Nain (Luke 7:11-17), and Lazarus (John 11:1-44). Why didn’t he raise all the dead whom he encountered in his journeys?

Of course, the reasons are known only to Jesus, but perhaps we are not to see Jesus as a spectacularly, though sporadically, successful doctor (unlike the “diverse physicians” who have plagued the poor, bleeding woman). Rather Jesus is a revolutionary, a challenger of the status quo, a teacher who teaches us how to overturn the world, a subversive who has invaded deadly enemy territory (which happens to be his own homeland) in order to wrench it from the grip of Death, conquer it and hold it for his own.

Sometimes biblical scholars point out that what we have here, in this raising from the dead, is more precisely “resuscitation” rather than “resurrection” since, though Jesus raised these people from the dead, they eventually died. The resurrection, they note, is participation in God’s eternal life, not a temporary respite from death.

Yet I think it’s fair to read this as Mark’s rendition of the meaning of resurrection. Jesus is the one who is raised from the dead. That would be wonder enough. But wonder of wonders, Jesus is the one who raises others from the dead. Whenever Jesus shows up, even in the eighth chapter, long before the time for Easter, the dead are raised. Mark just can’t wait ​until the end to tell these miraculous stories because, with Jesus, the time is always right for resurrection. By telling these stories here, resurrection gets political—a political challenge to the mocking bystanders and to the stupefied disciples. Who gets to name what’s real, what’s really going on in the world and when? Jesus refuses deferentially to wait until a more auspicious time to go on the attack. Whenever Jesus walks into town, even when he is on the way, even in the dead of summer, the time is right for resurrection. Whenever Jesus commands, “Get up!” or allows somebody just to reach out and touch him, then, even if it’s July, hot, and dry, it’s Easter.

When I was in conversation with Marcus Borg of the Jesus Seminar, Marcus asked me, “Why do you need a supernaturally resurrected body of Jesus to make your faith work?”

And I responded, in love, “Marcus, I don’t need a resurrected Jesus. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I want a resurrected Jesus. In fact, if I got one, it would be real nuisance for me, personally. I’ve got a good life, I’ve figured out how to work the world, on the whole, to the advantage of me and my friends and family. My health is good, everybody close to me is doing fine. I have the illusion that I’m in control, that I am making a so-significant contribution to help Jesus that I may be eternal on my own. No, I don’t need a bodily resurrected Jesus. In fact, if I ever got one, my life would only become much more difficult.”

When the possibility of resurrection really comes through to you, when the rumor that something’s afoot becomes a reality for you, well, you can see why the women were scared that first Easter.

At the Monday morning clergy coffee hour, one of the young pastors excitedly reported some rather spectacular growth in the past year at a megachurch in another town.

“It’s really a miracle,” he said.

One of the older, wiser pastors at the table responded with a chuckle, “It’s no miracle. That guy has gathered a little group of admirers around himself. He’s not made a church; he’s made a personality cult to himself.”

Another laughed, “He’s such a showman! Have you ever seen him perform on Sunday morning? He’s just got a good act that attracts a crowd.”

Mocking, cynical laughter is the way that death keeps control and attempts to keep Mr. Life at bay.

When I heard the size of the projected budget for the coming year (I was away on vacation when the finance committee voted), I laughed. “Let me get this straight. A church that is this year ten percent behind in ​collections for the budget is going to have an increase of ten percent for next year’s budget? Get real!”

Still, the lay leadership persisted. (Laity are often unrealistic in their expectations.) My contribution to the fall stewardship campaign was frequently to smirk, “You’ll never make that budget.”

Three Sundays into the campaign, the stewardship chair made his Sunday report. “We’ve had something of a miracle here, folks,” he said. “Just three weeks into the campaign we have met our goal.”

Spontaneous applause.

He continued, “Which is all the more amazing because next year’s budget is ten percent more than this year’s.”

Widespread applause.

“Now, as I recall, there was someone who said, when we started this venture, ‘You will never make that budget.’ Who was it who said that? Help me. I can’t rightly remember. Who said, ‘You will never make that budget’?”

“Sit down and shut up,” I said, in love.

I don’t know where there is a shadow in your life. I don’t know what dead end you are dealing with. I don’t know what you may have lost or where you might be hemorrhaging. I do know that Jesus is the Lord of Life, that he is master, even over death, anyplace, anytime.

I’m a United Methodist bishop, so a big part of my job is to send pastors to churches. Some of the churches are so difficult, or so dead and deadly, that sometimes a pastor doesn’t want to be sent there. The pastors are afraid that they might catch what the church has got. One of my District Superintendents was telling me that a pastor was resisting his appointment, protesting, “That church is hopeless! There is no way to turn around the downward slide there. It’s dead! I’ll just die if I’m sent there!”

The District Superintendent defended our appointment by saying, “Well, I’ll tell the bishop what you said. But I need to warn you, this bishop truly believes that the resurrection is a fact. He actually believes that Jesus bodily, really, truthfully rose from the dead on Easter. He even thinks that Jesus still does. So you need to know that when you say something like ‘That church is dead,’ it really doesn’t mean a thing to the bishop because he thinks Easter is true.”

It was a great compliment, probably undeserved. Still, I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “Imagine that? After sixty years of trying, this church has almost made me a Christian.”