CHAPTER FOUR

TIME DISRUPTED

Sam Wells says, “God gives us all we need.”¹ What? Considering the inadequacies of my church, the multiple shortcomings within me as a preacher, it’s a stretch to believe that we indeed have all that is required. Most of my lectures and sermons begin with the assumption of lack, the supposition of paucity and a want of faith—“Nine Reasons You Are Not Really a Christian Though You Thought You Were When You Came to Church This Morning.” If the church cannot exhaust the resources of the Kingdom, does that also apply to the church’s time in the pulpit?

Jesus told stories of divine abundance: seed that, though much of it was lost in the sowing, produced abundant, miraculous, hundredfold harvest (Mark 4:26-29). Then there was the tiny, seemingly insignificant mustard seed that grew to be a large, bird-supporting shrub (Mark 4:30-32). When a quandary arises about a depletion of alcohol at a post-wedding bash, Jesus produced 180 gallons of wine, even though just a few six packs would have sufficed (John 2). And when he fed the hungry multitude, the wonder was not just that Jesus produced enough nourishment to satisfy; the miracle was that a huge amount of food was left over (Mark 6:30-44).

I know. It is more true to the Greek in John 1:5 to say that the “light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” But I find more true to pastoral experience the old Authorized Version’s “the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” With Scripture’s fecundity, even slight mistranslations are rewarding—with Jesus there was a surplus of light, a surfeit of dawn, luminosity in such abundance that the darkness found its brilliance incomprehensible. The good news for us preachers is that in spite of the efforts of modernity, the world has not yet found the means for disenchanting the world. The world is not, thank God, godforsaken.

Over the long haul, we preachers learn to cling to the belief that the Christian faith is a self-renewing resource. Our homiletical failures ​cannot outdo the abundance of God. Because of the loquacious nature of the true and living God, there is always something else to be said, more light yet to be shed next Sunday. (Who among us can claim to have read, much less digested or proclaimed, the whole of Scripture?) We need not add to God’s revelation, make some helpful contribution to God’s self-disclosure. There is already more than we’ll do justice to in a lifetime of sermons. There is always something left unsaid about the Trinity, even after the longest of homilies. We could go on, eternally. All sermons are too short.

John Calvin argues that even the most ignorant pagan knows a great deal about the true God simply because of the abundance of God. God has left signs, traces, and evidence all over the world that even the most obtuse among us cannot ignore.² How can Calvin say that even pagans have knowledge of God when they have no Scripture, no church, to say nothing of preachers? Calvin makes this claim out of his confidence in the nature of the Trinity. It is God’s nature to reveal, not to hide, but rather to show, to divulge, constantly to communicate. Luther made a big deal of the deus absconditus, the tendency of God to be coy, but not Calvin. The whole earth is full of the knowledge of God because of who God is, said Calvin.

The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way;

The names that can be named are not unvarying names.³

Thus begins the Tao Te Ching. The divine is apophatic, ineffable, unspeakable, or it is not divine—any way that can be spoken is not really the way. Christianity takes a decidedly different view of spirituality. True, the divine is ineffable, incapable of human analogy or description. But the ineffability is because only God can speak of God. In preaching to a listening congregation, God speaks. Unlike the Tao, God tells us God’s name (Exod 3:13) then repeatedly tells us the way. Our God tells us all we need to know in order to live the abundant life, here, now.

The modern world has overdone the idea of a hidden God in an attempt to keep God quiet. We take our doubt too seriously, unaware of the stake that modernity has in convincing us that God is mute. Indeed, as I read the classical theology of Calvin, Luther, Irenaeus, Aquinas, or Barth, the major difference between them and the contemporary theology that I read (and much that I write!) is their conviction that God is abundantly revelatory. Though Luther appreciates the deus absconditus, he also seems at one with Paul in 2 Corinthians that Christ is the full revelation ​of God among those who heretofore did not know God. Now we are given the gift of being able to see God “with unveiled faces” (2 Cor 3:17-18). That which was once incomprehensible “mystery” is now mysteriously revealed (Col 1:25-28). The purposes of God have now been made plain. “And all of us [not just us preachers], with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord … , are being transformed … this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18, emphasis mine). There is more than enough revelation in Christ to go around.

Although the modern world has attempted to convince us that we are writing our own stories, the Christian faith keeps asserting that we live in stories that we did not write. We preachers have the privilege of talking people into a world where much is afoot and some Other is the author of the true story of what is going on in us and in the world.⁴ As Paul told his congregation, “You are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God” (2 Cor 3:3). God gives us all we need. By the grace of God, there is a surfeit of sermon material.

The Trinity is not only abundantly loquacious but also so complex that no matter how much we say about God, there is a surplus of meaning yet to be said. Because of this triune largess, it takes time to assimilate Jesus. This dominical complexity, this excess of meaning in Jesus, is one reason we learn the Scriptures’ meaning only over time. Preachers don’t really find our “voice” until a few years into the practice of preaching because preachers are talking about a subject—the triune God— who resists ready descriptions. It is the nature of the Holy Spirit always to slip through the hands of even our most astute characterizations of the Holy Spirit.

And yet, as we have noted, the modern world adores simple descriptions and limited characterizations. Modern methods of knowing are inherently minimalist and reductionistic. When I was taught historical criticism of Scripture, I was told to try to think about the text objectively, that is, through the practice of a sort of intentional amnesia. I was urged to strip myself of all preconceptions, to suppress my imaginative capacities, and to try to think about the text following this simple method of applied historical criticism.

At best, historical criticism kept us from arriving at the meaning of a text too soon, imposing our expectations on the text before the text could speak for itself. The result, however, has been generations of students who are fearful of finding any meaning in the text at all, listeners to scripture whose method almost prohibits them from hearing anything really ​shocking and life changing in Scripture. No wonder that preachers were among the first to notice the prejudices and limitations of the historical-critical method.

How different is the impoverished modern approach to revelation when compared with classical modes of biblical interpretation. John Calvin, a master hermeneut, marveled that even when we sleep, even in our dreams, this relentlessly revelatory God talks, gets through to us, making even our times of unconsciousness occasions for revelation by a Holy Spirit who works the night shift, a God who talks on into the night, even when we are not trying to listen, even when we yearn for silence, especially then.⁵ We thought that in sleep we were unconscious when in truth God is raising us, through nocturnal conversation, to a higher, deeper consciousness.

Rather than submit to God’s surfeit and complexity and to allow preaching to be miraculous, we preachers still hope that there is some method, some technique that will insure that preaching simply works. An important ethical quality demanded of preachers is the willingness to submit to and to be intimate with the biblical text (rather than, as historical criticism tended to teach us, to dominate and to distance ourselves from the text). In order to perform the text, we must submit to its authority over us over time. We must be willing to be seduced.

Biblical interpretation is an art rather than a science. Submission, with more than a touch of playfulness, is required of us in the art of biblical interpretation. Any good artist submits to the medium of the art. Wallace Bacon, a performance theorist, writes that when reading a poem in public, “The performer who cares more about pleasing an audience than about enactment of the poem will endanger the whole poetic experience … [there must be in the performer] an act of communion with the poem; if the reader communes with the audience but not with the poem, the audience is likely to come away with spirits unfed.”⁶ The same is true for biblical interpretation for preaching.

A major motivation for the historical-critical method of interpreting Scripture was to give us preachers a trouble-free method whereby we attained a sure and certain word to speak, a set of ideas shorn of all historical contingency, a message that was beyond the scriptural context, news that was sure to be heard anywhere and by anyone, proclamation that could be constructed by any preacher regardless of the preacher’s gifts.

It didn’t work.

Calvin was deeply convinced that the form and operation of Scripture are “derived from the character of the divine speaker.” That is why the prophets and apostles, said Luther, have “a queer way of talking” and Calvin said the prophets speak not from “their own genius or any of those talents which conciliate the faith of the hearers; nor do they insist on arguments from reason” but rather they speak out of the abundance that God has given them.⁷ All preaching in God’s name is miraculous. Preaching “works,” not because of the abilities of preacher or the hearers but only because the Holy Spirit miraculously makes it work. When faced with the impossibility of preaching, the ludicrousness of Almighty God speaking through us preachers, Barth replied that if God spoke through Balaam’s jackass (Num 22: 28-30), God was surely free to condescend to speak through preachers.

Why do I believe this with all my heart? I believe because I’ve witnessed God speaking in spite of me (to spite me?) on so many Sundays. I expect God to speak through my best sermons, the ones on which I’ve worked hard and well. But sometimes the Trinity takes a sort of perverse delight in not speaking through those well-wrought homiletical products in order to make some kind of divine point. Perhaps the point that God is making is that only God can preach. I do not intend to provide justification for poor preparation among lazy preachers. However, I am here celebrating that God is not obligated to speak through my good homilet-ical practice nor is God’s vocative activity limited by my bad sermons. Despite my compulsive preparation, or lack of it, wonder of wonders, God does preach.⁸ All preaching is ek theou, “from God” (2 Cor 2:17). God gives us all we need.

It is of the nature of a literary work as complex and demanding as the Bible, with its Old and New Testaments, to be understood cumulatively, over time. To understand Scripture we must acquire wisdom, prudence, self-discipline, and self-knowledge. This makes preaching one of the few occupations where someone usually improves with age. It takes time to cultivate, stoke, fund, and fuel the imagination. As Auden said, you don’t have to be a poet to be a Christian, but it sure helps. Neither prudence nor poetic imagination comes overnight. Older preachers, perhaps because they have been shocked or befuddled by the oddness of reality so often are possibly blessed with a more fertile imagination than young preachers who think they actually learned to master Scripture in seminary.

Marilynne Robinson is a brilliant contemporary author. And yet, she confesses befuddlement when faced with Scripture, which is “always new to me” because it is “almost entirely elusive.” Robinson declares,

I know many other books very well and I flatter myself that I understand them—even books by people like Augustine and Calvin. But I do not understand the Bible. I study theology as one would watch a solar eclipse in a shadow. In church, the devout old custom persists of merely repeating verses of one or another luminous fragment, … By grace of my abiding ignorance, it is always new to me. I am never not instructed… . The text itself always remains almost entirely elusive. So I must come back to hear it again; in the old phrase, to have it opened for me again.⁹

In the Common Lectionary, the story of Jesus blessing the children (Mark 10:2-16) is placed with Job 1:1, 2:1-10. For five or six times through the lectionary I had always focused on the Gospel, Mark 10, without any reference in my sermon to Job. But my last time through I suddenly saw the connection that heretofore had eluded me: the Jesus who reaches out and embraces weak, dependent children is one with the God who finally came back to weak, dependent Job. Neither Mark nor Job, in these episodes, “explains” why God draws near to the weak and the dispossessed. (Scripture is almost never in the explanatory mood. Scripture specializes in the declarative, the indicative mood.) Neither the vulnerable little children nor the ravaged, vulnerable Job get an explanation; they get embraced by a God who tends to come closer as we get smaller. It took me forty years of reading the Gospel to hear that message through the church’s bundling of two initially disparate biblical texts, neither of which explicitly mentions the other.

Preaching Present Tense

In her book, Marking Time: Preaching Biblical Stories in the Present Tense, Barbara K. Lundblad¹⁰ recalls how, as a theology student, she heard Frederick Buechner give the 1977 Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School. Buechner began by recounting Lyman Beecher’s inaugural lectures a hundred years earlier. Buechner told how Beecher had not been feeling well the night before the 1872 lectures. He went into some detail about how Beecher began writing the lectures in his hotel room in the middle of the night in New Haven.

The next thing the listeners knew, Buechner was talking about another insomniac, Pontius Pilate, as if Pilate were a contemporary of Beecher’s or maybe a contemporary with Buechner. Pontius Pilate lit a cigarette. He looked at the picture on the wall of his children. Pilate began thinking about his wife. Oops, Pilate cut himself while shaving that morning.

The preacher adeptly, rather slyly, moved from the nineteenth century, back to the first century, or is it forward into the late twentieth century? Without warning, the hearers are faced with two historical figures contemporized. Lundblad said it was a disarming, invigorating experience that helped direct her own preaching vocation. She knew then and there that she wanted to be the sort of preacher who moves the gospel into the present tense.

Preachers love to mix up the tenses of verbs. In their “Notes on the Translation of the Greek Tenses” in the New American Standard Bible, the translators explain:

In regard to the use of the historic present, the Board recognized that in some contexts the present tense seems more unexpected and unjustified to the English reader than the past tense would have been. But Greek authors frequently used the present tense for the sake of heightened vividness, thereby transporting their readers in imagination to the actual scene at the time of occurrence. However the Board felt that it would be wise to change these historic presents into English past tenses. Therefore verbs marked with an asterisk (∗) represent historical presents in the Greek which have been translated with an English past tense in order to conform to modern usage.¹¹

Why on earth would the translators feel the need to make these modifications in the original Greek? Perhaps the compilers of Scripture actually wanted Scripture sometimes to sound “unexpected and unjustified.” We preachers have a propensity to move, in our sermons, from the past tense of Scripture into the present tense of our congregations’ lives— which could be a major purpose of preaching.

Preachers Raise the Dead

John Calvin (in his meditations on God the Creator) marveled at the “manifold agility of the soul which enables it to … join the past and the ​present, to retain the memory of things heard long ago, to conceive of whatever it chooses by the help of the imagination.”¹² For Calvin, our imaginative ability to join past and present, to make past present is evidence of the divine within the human. I share Calvin’s wonder that we can speak and think in past, present, and future tenses. Our language is inherently temporal, arising out of some present that is now past, but also thrusting us toward the future. Our speech can represent to us something that has ceased to be and it can also create something that was not before it was uttered. Words make world.

We only speak what the past has given us, in words we did not invent ourselves, and yet, in speaking we give ourselves a different future. Language is in time but it also is the major means that we have of transcending time. Words contribute, construct, and offer us a future that is alternative to the meager one we would have had without the utterance. It is only through words that I can have a “past” or a “future.”¹³ “Jesus Christ is Lord” is a performative utterance. In saying “Jesus Christ is Lord,” Jesus becomes Lord, now. Time is undone and thereby something is done, reality is changed. In regard to what is real, it’s words all the way down.

Thus almost every statement I make is a kind of “resurrection,” a daily experience of kenotic dying to the past, miraculously rising in the present, and dramatically moving toward a future I could not have had without the words. Christians name this dynamic as Easter. Thus we preachers, in our sermons, allow God to perform, to make things live, and present that which was past or absent, even dead, as now.¹⁴ (I think this is close to Paul’s meaning when he says that the Holy Spirit is the “first installment” [2 Cor 1:22]. The Holy Spirit’s vivification of our words in today’s sermon is a preview, a promise, first installment of the general resurrection that is to come.) The Bible is not some ancient, ossified document; it is a talking book, an instrument in the Holy Spirit’s rich repertoire of means of changing the world, of making God present tense. Preachers raise the dead, sort of.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death,¹⁵ Neil Postman notes that in the current age there is a marked difference in the way people pay attention. The main factor in this change has been television. Communication gets speeded up in TV, quickly depicted, giving us the illusion that it takes little time to understand complex realities. Television gives the illusion that we are experiencing something in “real time,” that is, in the present moment. But of course we are not.

​For those of us who communicate outside of television, to people whose consciousness has been formed by television, this has significance because of the illusion that television creates. Wendell Berry has a poem in which he tells about a man going on vacation, seeing his vacation through a camera. He takes pictures of everything under the illusion that, through film, he could forever remember his vacation, seeing all the places he had been. Sadly, he would never, ever be in any of the pictures. He would have pictures of his vacation, but always without him. The camera has given the illusion of eternality to our experience and yet in a way it has robbed us of experience; we are not there, we are never, ever really there.¹⁶

When we preachers interpret Scripture, we are doing more than objectively examining a snapshot of God. We are offering ourselves to an active, free conversation between living partners.¹⁷ We are enticing the congregation to climb a perilous path with us. We are nervously unwrapping a ticking bomb. This is of course counter to the view of Schleiermacher, who said that the purpose of interpretation is to “understand the text at first as well and then even better than its author.”¹⁸ The biblical interpreter, in Schleiermacher’s characterization, attempts to reproduce what was in the mind of the original biblical writer. Interpretation is simple re-presentation of an author’s past meaning into the interpreter’s present consciousness. First figure out the minimal meaning of the text in the past, and then deliver what’s left as what the text ought to mean in the present. The Bible is a photo album, a kind of archive of what God once meant to people and the preacher must labor to make it mean something today. (How typical of the modern world to frame the matter this way: interpretation is a problem of time. The modern interpreter takes a superior position to the historical text by delivering the meaning of the text “even better than its author.”)

Schleiermacher’s view of hermeneutics reigned until Hans-Georg Gadamer’s great Truth and Method. Gadamer believed that interpretation is an engaging, potentially transforming conversation between interpreter and text. Every text “must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way. Understanding here is always application,” said Gadamer.¹⁹ Interpretation occurs when a text breaks into the life of an individual or a group and, in breaking in at that particular time and place, the text itself is amplified in that interpretation. Interpretation entails transformation. The text changes the interpreter and the interpreter changes the text. The path of interpretation is not ​straight, not forward, but circular, back and forth. We question a text, but a text also questions us. There is a real sense in which we don’t have the same Bible that our spiritual forebears read. We serve a living Christ, not a dead text.

For example, I’ve preached at least four sermons on Revelation 5:11-14 (Easter 3 in Lectionary C). My earliest sermon notes that, when the battle for the cosmos is over, when God wins, the Supreme Ruler is none other than a slaughtered lamb. What does that tell you about the world’s destiny? My second sermon settled upon the verse “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing” (5:13). That sermon took an ecological theme, speaking of the eschatological healing of all creation and God’s promised restoration. Every creature shall participate in God’s promised salvation. My third sermon was interspersed with music from the choir and characterized this earthly existence as “one long choir rehearsal” so that we might learn to sing the song today that one day we shall sing to God forever. My fourth pass at Revelation 5 marveled at the “myriad” creatures before the throne of the Lamb, the “thousands of thousands” and took a sort of universal salvation approach to the text. Salvation appears to be not for a few, but for myriads. Looking over those four sermons, it is as if I’m not talking about the same text, which in a way, I’m not. It is the same text displaying its thickness and its richness to the church as well as the same church displaying its diversity over time to the text. Thank God—for those of us who are called to preach for more than four decades—Scripture is multivalent.²⁰

Harvard’s James L. Kugel has shown that early biblical interpreters saw the entire Bible as a “divinely given text,” a rich, though mysterious, literature that provoked constant discovery of hidden meanings.²¹ Modernity attempted to reduce Scripture. Modern biblical study, says Kugel (a Jew) is indebted to Spinoza, who stressed that Scripture mainly means what it literally means. The simple, literal reading is to be preferred over the symbolic, metaphorical meaning. Scripture, said Spinoza, is not eternally true but rather is historically true, true for some people living at a certain time but without much relevance for our time. Spinoza thus paved the way for historical criticism’s treatment of Scripture as a source of information about ancient cultures. Modernity rendered us into Scripture’s examiners rather than Scripture’s hearers. Scripture as the medium for a living, speaking theological Agent is lost in favor of Scripture as a kind of archeological dig.²² Kugel gives the somber verdict ​that “modern biblical scholarship and traditional Judaism are and must remain completely irreconcilable.” Could the same be said of modern biblical scholarship and Christianity?

I find myself in the same situation as P. T. Forsyth, who said, in his 1907 Lyman Beecher Lectures, that although as a scholar he agreed with the historical critics who did not believe in “verbal inspiration” of Scripture, as a practicing preacher he had so often witnessed the fecundity and activity of Scripture that it was a struggle for him not to believe in the verbal inspiration of Scripture!²³

Bonhoeffer marvels at how the church’s encounters with Scripture

force everyone who wants to hear to put himself, or to allow himself to be found, where God has acted once and for all for the salvation of men. We become a part of what once took place for our salvation. Forgetting and losing ourselves, we, too, pass through the Red Sea, through the desert, across the Jordan into the promised land. With Israel we fall into doubt and unbelief and through punishment and repentance experience again God’s help and faithfulness. All this is not mere reverie but holy, godly reality. We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God deals with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace. It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth. And only in so far as we are there, is God with us today also.²⁴

For all of Scripture’s revelatory virtues, Barth said that even Scripture is not primary but rather secondary divine communication. Divine communication is proclamation from God. Scripture is a kind of deposit of what is left over after the lightening bolt of divine proclamation. Scripture is the residue of what once was proclaimed on human lips as preaching. In preaching, Scripture lives, we are thrust into that primal divine proclamation. In preaching, Scripture’s account of revelation to someone, somewhere in time becomes news, now. Therefore, for Barth, preaching is primary, even to Scripture, for as Paul says,²⁵ it is the sound of proclamation on human lips that saves, not its appearance on the printed page.²⁶ Faith comes through hearing.

Preaching is used by God not only to be present tense but also to render presence. Karl Barth asserted that Christian theology must honor the distinction between “primary objectivity”—God’s knowledge of God’s ​self—and “secondary objectivity”—God’s presence to God’s creatures that can only be indirect, through some finite reality (such as Scripture or another human being, or even the person Jesus of Nazareth). Then Barth stunningly asserts that this available “secondary objectivity” (Scripture, preaching, Jesus Christ) is not one bit less truth than the primary reality. When the Creator is present to us humans—as words, as the Word, the crucified Jew from Nazareth—God is truthfully, really present, though in a form that is graciously available to the creature. There is no difference in degree. The God we meet in preaching really is the God who is. There is, in Jesus Christ, no God lurking behind the God who greets us in Christ. God is with us. God’s true goodness with us in Jesus Christ is God present and God’s relational presence repeated. Preaching, as the proclamation by God of God, is presence of God.

My word … that goes out from my mouth;

it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isa 55:11)

This vivid, vivifying conviction of God’s real presence in Christ, repeated in preaching, led Barth to announce the end of all “religion.” We need not have rituals, practices, institutions to enable us—through our thought and our action—to climb up to God, to ascend to some future level of insight where we are not now, because God has become present to us now. Presence is a gift that only God can give, and in preaching, God abundantly gives.

Thus Walter Brueggemann says that the question before us preachers is not the vague, metaphysical speculation “Is God’s word powerful?” Rather, in regard to God’s word the question is: dare we embrace the word’s contemporaneity, God’s “present-tense struggle among us”? Brueggemann asks, “Can the synagogue and the church, the communities committed to this prophetic claim, do the hard, demanding intellectual, rhetorical work that will construe the world according to this memory and this discourse?”²⁷

I would characterize Brueggemann’s question as not “Can God become present?” but rather “Do we preachers have the guts to name the world, the present world, the world we’ve got, as God’s world, here, now?” This suggests that the historical—the temptation to make God’s word past tense—is always a threat to bold, present-tense speech. Brueggemann also leads me to wonder if we preachers are tempted to cast the hermeneutical ​task as one of moving from what was past to the present because we are caught in a web of commitments to—and we profit from—the old order. Thus we unwittingly become servants to the (now that Jesus has come) discredited, dethroned old world as a means of evading Jesus’ new world. Jesus somehow managed to preach the reign of God as a future advent that we anticipate and as a present-tense event that is now. David Buttrick calls this present-future orientation “the most important distinction” that is to be made about the preaching of Jesus, this invitation by Jesus to “step into the new order ahead of time.”²⁸ Eschatology keeps pressing us toward that fresh experience of future that also freshens our preaching. In preaching we are always talking about an eschatological reality that is here, now but also “ahead of time.” Of course, one way the world defends itself against such claims is to tell us that we are talking unrealistically, describing our fantasy of the future rather than the facts that are now.

Preaching Again

Most of us preachers learn various techniques, mostly rhetorical, to keep our preaching fresh. Among those that I utilize in my own ministry:

• We use the Common Lectionary as a source for our sermons. By being pushed into a wider array of scriptures than if we had been left to our own devices, by being forced to preach on texts chosen by the church rather than texts chosen by ourselves, preachers keep being challenged by Scripture in fresh ways. The Common Lectionary helps keep preaching fresh by driving us to preach what we’ve been told to preach.
• Our lives, as preachers, are constantly changing and developing. God is never done with us. So change in us becomes a stimulus for change in what we preach.
• Scripture is so diverse that, in our speaking the scriptures in sermons, we modulate, vary our tone and presentation as much as the scriptures themselves. The literary richness of the scriptures is an impetus for freshness.
• We develop disciplines like reading and weekly study to renew our minds, to put us in conversation with other preachers and ​in order to keep stoking our creativity and imagination. I keep a book of poetry at my bedside and keep a novel close by to challenge my laziness with language and to give me a better mind than I would have had without being friends with Thomas Mann and Flannery O’Connor.
• Pastoral visitation and the constant human contact within our parish work keep raising new questions and giving us new insights that are derived from our parishioners. You wouldn’t believe what God is capable of doing among ordinary people in South Carolina. On many a Thursday afternoon, stuck in my sermon preparation, I would venture forth to visit parishioners. Rarely would I return to my study empty-handed.
• We go out from the cozy confines of the initiated and the well-formed in the faith (most church folks) and evangelize, gathering a new group of listeners who have new and more interesting spiritual dilemmas and require more indoctrination and explanation than our present congregations. New believers are a stimulus to those of us who can’t remember when we were not Christian.
• We intentionally focus on that scripture that we have always found to be obtuse, boring, or offensive and take as our challenge to preach on an odd text, discovering that the resulting sermon is more interesting than a sermon on scripture that we like.
• Our boredom with our own preaching can be a gift that stimulates us to try out new styles and different methods of homiletic presentation in an effort not to bore ourselves to death.²⁹
• When we tire of talking to the same people about the same gospel, we shake the dust off our feet, try to repress the memory of our homiletical failures among them, and ask the bishop to move us to a different congregation.

While all these pastoral methods for renewal can be somewhat invigorating, none of them stirs us preachers like talk about a true and living God like the Trinity. I repeat myself: refreshed preaching is not primarily the result of astutely applied homiletic method. Refreshed preaching is ​the gift of faithful talk about, and prayerful talk with, and abundant talk by a living God. The renewal of preaching is Jesus’ job, not ours.

God, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is the key to everything. In a way, this book has been an extended meditation on the relationship of pneu-matology to preaching. The Holy Spirit may be the most neglected aspect of homiletics today. Many of the hermeneutical methods and sermon construction strategies that we learned in seminary are themselves unintentional means of warding off intrusions by the Holy Spirit. Much of our apologetic intent is an unintended means of doing God’s work for God. Some of our historical criticism of Scripture is a way of indefinitely postponing the question “Is it true?” As Gadamer noted, the modern world thinks it is using methodology to get to the truth when often method is the means of avoiding encounters with the truth. It isn’t a sermon until the Holy Spirit enters, speaks, intrudes, and makes it a sermon.

In Harold Ramis’s endlessly rewatchable movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays the most superficial of men engaged in the most inane of jobs (reporting the weather). One drab morning in a dull Pennsylvania town he awakes to the radio blaring Sonny and Cher’s whining rendition of their most pointless song, “I Got You Babe.” He then plods through his day, encountering a group of wearisome people along the way.

The next morning the radio awakens him at the same time, with the same song—Sonny and Cher all over again—and the same weather report, which he thinks a bit odd. But things become even stranger as he stumbles through exactly the same day with the same boring people as yesterday. And then the next day and the next. After the twentieth repetition of the same pointless day, Murray realizes he is in hell. In a number of vain attempts to end it all, he tries to commit suicide, leaping from a building, falling in front of a speeding truck. But after each attempt, he awakens the next day to the same song, same day, Sonny and Cher again. He then engages in a life of crime, doing all those things that he was reluctant to do before his days became gruesome repetition. After even the worst of crimes, he awakens the next morning to “I Got You Babe” and begins his day all over again.

Realizing that he has no way of escaping the humdrum of the same day hellishly repeated, he launches into a program of self-improvement. He takes up piano. He memorizes poetry. He makes love like a Frenchman. He transforms himself into an interesting person and, in the process, the people around him, for whom he once had such contempt, become interesting to him. Only then is he freed from the wheel of the eternal return.

Murray extricates himself from hellish repetition through heroic self-improvement. This is the story that the modern world (and Joel Osteen’s sermons) thinks it is now living—take charge of your life and transform yourself into someone worth loving and use your time to make a life worth living. Christians believe another story than that of Groundhog Day. A life worth living we believe to be a gift of God, time worth having we believe to be solely the work of the Holy Spirit. The unexpected, even unwanted, intrusions of the Holy Spirit keep disrupting our socially sanctioned narratives of progress or decline, suggest another story at work beyond our optimism or our pessimism. We discover, in the eschatological stories of the Christian faith, that we are part of a larger narrative whose ending is more than we could produce on our own.

I was a preacher in a university chapel for twenty years. In two decades in academia, I rarely made anyone really angry with what I wrote, or with a comment I made during a counseling session. Their anger was reserved for my sermons. To be sure, the evocation of anger is not always a test for faithful preaching, though resentment was the usual response to the preaching of Jesus. Still, their rage was revealing. A fairly typical angry rejoinder to my sermons was “You shouldn’t talk like that in front of students.”

I note in passing that Socrates was also criticized for “corrupting the youth,” though through other means.

Give my university listeners credit. They knew. Preaching is frequently used by God to assault the status quo, to disrupt our time, to rip off from the kids the future that their parents offered to them through the mechanism of the modern, first-rate, selective university. Preaching doesn’t necessarily aim to evoke anger, elicit resistance, and provoke disruption. It doesn’t have to. Just talking about and speaking for a God like the Trinity will be disruptive aplenty. It’s the typical effect a God like this has on people like us. It’s what the Holy Spirit ordinarily does.

We are, each of us, a work in progress; not our progress, of course, but rather products of the Holy Spirit. When hands are laid upon us at baptism, and the Holy Spirit is invoked, the trouble begins. God is neither a safe principle nor a noble idea; God is dangerously, intimately personified. As Bonhoeffer said, preaching is the Christ himself walking through his congregation as the word. And sometimes he stalks or runs.

God is a living, speaking, abundantly revealing, encroaching, frenetic, frequently disrupting presence who, as with Jacob, sometimes in a sermon wrestles us to the ground, half kills us, blesses us and commands us, and ​then steals back into the night as we limp away—when all we wanted was a civil conversation. Karl Barth was fond of saying, “God never rests.” God is always God in action, God on the prowl, God in motion toward us. We rarely walk away from conversations with the Trinity without a limp.

I therefore can’t help being suspicious of much of the current talk about “keeping Sabbath” and attempts to reinvigorate the Sabbath as a Christian discipline. Jesus was crucified, in part, for being a notorious, well-documented Sabbath-breaker. Jesus never got into trouble because of the time he took off to be quiet. If Sabbath keeping is taking off time to listen to God, then it’s a good thing. Otherwise, it’s a tempting diversion. I fear the present enthusiasm for the Sabbath as a “spiritual practice” to be another attempt by modern people to slow down God’s time, to somehow put a leash on the frenetic Trinity. As we have noted, much of modern thought had as its unstated goal to stabilize the world, to render time predictable, comprehensible, and safe so that we might better dominate a world now denuded of God.

Preaching dares to speak of another world, keeps a different time. Most sermons say what needs to be said and quit in only about twenty minutes. In faithful Christian preaching the preacher introduces a peculiar, particular, living God into the conversation of the congregation and then has the guts to get out of the way. As Barth said, “preachers dare.” Our peculiar daring is to be willing instruments in God’s incarnational undoing of time, to dare to have Easter redone.

The fun of being a preacher, over time—and sometimes the fear of being a preacher too—is to witness the lively intercourse between the exuberant Trinity and the poor old somnambulant church on a weekly basis. When the risen Christ gets up and walks among his people, you never know where he’ll go. I delight in watching him shadow, seek, and stalk the poor, dumb, unwary laity. I never tire of the fireworks. Even now I feel a mingling of anticipation and anxiety rise in me as I think about next Sunday at eleven. I look forward to emptying myself into the Scriptures and getting lost in a biblical text, putting on the text as if it fit and strutting about a bit as a different person. Laying the text on them and then seeing who gets hit is great sport. And yet, to tell the truth, I’m also anxious concerning what God may try to pull off in some life by means of my next sermon. After four decades of sermons, I know enough about the Trinity to know that I never know what wild stunts God may attempt through preaching.

Only God knows what I’ll be led to say in the sermon. Only God knows how the church will respond. Only God knows what God wants to do in us this Sunday. I only know for sure that God is out of my control. It is the nature of God to take over my sermons, to use me and refuse to be used by me. It is of the nature of the Trinity to say to the crucified Jesus, lying in the tomb, “Again!” The Trinity loves to reiterate itself. Preaching therefore demands kenosis of the preacher. It’s out of my hands and yours too. God will have the last word.

In preaching, death’s time keeps being undone, outdone, and Easter keeps being redone. Maranatha!

We had a great Easter, didn’t we? Rented trumpets, a bank of lilies, TV. Crowd so large that we had to bring out extra chairs. Two of you graciously phoned to tell me how much you liked my sermon—and I’m sure many, many more of you intended to call. What an Easter!

But it didn’t last. The next day I learned that American deaths in Iraq topped 4,400. Suicide bombings had doubled from the last year. While we were celebrating with Easter lilies and trumpeted “hallelujahs,” Caesar reminded us who is really in charge. The real news was not from Jerusalem, but from Iraq, where a presumptively democratic Caesar dukes it out with a gaggle of allegedly terrorist Caesars. An Iraqi man whose son was shot dead by Blackwater mercenaries cried out for revenge; an entire wedding party was wiped out by a Taliban mine in Afghanistan. It’s always the little, ordinary, powerless people on both sides who suffer for Caesar and who kill and who die for Caesar’s Empire. Caesar has outdone us. Enough of Easter.

Easter never seems to last because the powers-that-be are determined to let death be the last word.

Easter once lasted fifty days; “the Great Fifty Days of Joy” the church called it. But that was then; this is now and Easter seems shorter every year. We have these great spiritual highs, predictably followed by these dismal, mediocre ecclesiastical lows. Bright Resurrection is overtaken by Grim Reality. Easter joy wilts even sooner than the florist’s Easter lilies.

Jack Canfield is America’s success guru, telling you how you can uplift yourself, by yourself. Yet even Canfield wrote a book entitled After the Ecstasy the Laundry. I don’t care how high you jump, there is always the morning-after, the week-after, the fifty-days-after letdown.

But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the way Jesus’ great Easter success gets wrestled from his people by Caesar so shortly after our victory celebration. It is as if a powerful policing makes sure that Easter is short-lived.

Up to this point in the Acts of the Apostles we’ve had quite a ride. The Holy Spirit wildly descended upon the church at Pentecost, shaking up everything, the Word of God leaping over all boundaries, overcoming all obstacles, spreading like wildfire over the whole world. All kinds of enemies, including Church Enemy Number One—Saul—have been brought to the faith. Is anything more powerful than the Word of God? Is there anything that’s too much for the Holy Spirit?

Apparently, there is—the Empire. “About that time [that is, time just after Easter, that is, our time right now] Herod [lackey for the Caesar] laid violent hands upon … the church”—a polite Bible way of saying that Herod’s soldiers went on murderous rampage. He killed James and, when he saw that his public opinion polls took an upward turn, he decided to kill Peter, the rock of the church, too. That’s what kings do best—put powerless people to the sword. We didn’t ask Iraq if they wanted to be liberated for democracy by us. When you have got the largest army in the world, you don’t have to ask.

Herod has the largest army in the Near East (at least before Operation Iraqi Freedom) backing him up, so he doesn’t ask, he tells. Peter, premier disciple, the first spokesman for the church, is in jail. Herod is going to shut up these talkative Galileans once and for all. Herod has imprisoned Peter during Passover, Israel’s Fourth of July Independence Day celebration, just to show who’s really in charge. But this is no minimum-security, executive prison. Peter is really, really in prison.

Peter is not only in chains; he is guarded by no less than four squads of soldiers. He’s not only got guards outside his jail cell; he’s forced to sleep between guards in the cell. He’s really in jail. Peter is as good as dead.

And there’s Peter pacing back and forth in his cell, terrified? No, this is Peter, the same one who fell asleep while Jesus was in anguish in Gethsemane. He’s sleeping like a baby, dead to the world. As good as dead.

From out of nowhere an angel shows up, enters the cell, slaps Peter in the side, commands “Wake up! Get dressed!” Peter staggers about in a stupor. The angel leads him out of the cell as first one door, then another swings open before them. Peter, rubbing his eyes, now standing out in the street before the jail, says, “Hmm. I thought it was just a vision. This is for real!” (A curious comment, that one. You would think that Peter, as the “rock” of the church, would be a specialist in visions. But no, this is Peter, never noted for a surfeit of imagination.)

Peter scurries through darkened streets to Mary’s house, where earnest prayer is being offered up to God for Peter by the church. Peter bangs on the door. (What kind of organization is this that meets in unmarried women’s homes, and at night?)

While Peter bangs at the door, the little prayer group prays, “Lord, do something about Herod. And please consider helping poor Peter. Oh, Lord, please help, if it be thy will. And if it is not thy will, help us accept reality and adjust to our circumstances without complaint. Amen.”

A maid, Rhoda, answers the knock, opens the door, sees Peter, and “in her joy” slams the door and runs to tell the prayer group, “Hey, he’s loose! He’s alive! He’s here!”

And the church in unison responds, “You’re nuts, Rhoda. You get back in the kitchen where you maids belong.”

At last Peter stands undeniably before them, risen, free and then he disappears elsewhere. And the church in unison dumbfoundedly mutters, “Hmm, Rhoda was right.”

Remind you of another story that we read here last Easter? Luke 22–24? Jesus wasn’t just dead; he was crucified. Caesar at last shut him up by torturing him to death on a cross. And he wasn’t just entombed. He was sealed shut with a big stone, with a squad of Caesar’s finest to guard the tomb. (Soldiers making sure that a dead man doesn’t go anywhere? Talk about waste in the military budget!)

And women were there too. Unarmed women came out in the darkness and, to their surprise and joy, discovered that God had defeated death and Caesar. The women ran back to the boys in Jerusalem shouting, “He’s lose! He’s free! God won!”

And the church with one voice responded, “You’re nuts.”

The first Easter preachers were joy-filled women. And the last people to believe in resurrection, when we get one, is the church—until Jesus himself knocked on our locked doors (John 20) and spoke to us, leading us to mutter, “So, the women were right?”

And we thought that was the last of Easter. But here in the Acts of the Apostles what we’ve got is Easter remade, Deus redivivus, resurrection repeated. You thought Easter was a once-and-for-all thing with Jesus. Well, think again. Easter lasts.

See? You thought Easter was over. You thought we heard the last of a powerful, victorious God last Easter. Well, think again. Easter keeps happening. All over town, jail cell doors are swinging open, the military is put in disarray, and haughty women like Rhoda are spreading seditious news.

Easter lasts. Easter isn’t over until God says it’s over.

Back when Peter preached to the street mob on Pentecost (Acts 2), Peter cited the prophet Joel. In the old days, God’s Holy Spirit was outpoured upon just a few men named “prophets” who, with lively words, preached the mighty works of God, spoke truth to power, and made kings nervous. But there will come a day, said Joel, when God’s Spirit will be poured out on old people, your sons and daughters, janitors and maids (that is, people who are usually silenced by the powerful). One day the once powerless will get to stand up and speak truth to power. That promised day is fulfilled as maid Rhoda preaches Luke’s second Easter sermon entitled, “Hey! He’s Loose!”

The Resurrection is more even than the promise of eternal life for you and me after we die. Easter is the promise of the universal, cosmic triumph of God over all the forces of death and sin. Easter is whenever in the dark—out at the cemetery or at a prayer meeting at Mary’s house— God dramatically demonstrates who’s in charge. Easter is God’s justice accomplished, God’s kingdom come, God’s will being done at last on earth as it is in heaven.

Luke ends this wild, wonderful Easter story by saying that there was quite a commotion at the Roman garrison in Jerusalem. “What in the world became of Peter?” they asked. And after an official court-martial, King Herod put the soldiers to death. As we said, that’s what kings do. The only way Caesar knows to accomplish any good in the world is through violence. We are in Iraq only for good, noble reasons. It’s crazy to die for a god but patriotic to die for a government. More people died in the twentieth century at the hands of their own governments than even those who died in war. All governments kill. That’s how they do good. That’s how they stay in charge.

But then, just when we thought that death had had the last word, God moves, kicks open the iron gate, slaps us in the side, gives us a vision, leads us into the darkness and through it, knocks on the door, turns the ​key in the lock, servant women begin to preach the good news, the church laughs at itself, and the word of God continues “to advance and gain adherents.”³¹ And despite our attenuated political imagination, it’s Easter all over again.

Death-dealers, doom-doers, beware. You tried to shut Jesus up, once and for all. But you couldn’t, and you can’t. God is at last on the loose. The smart-mouthed talk continues. Prison doors swinging open; ordinary, powerless people speaking up like prophets; maids getting superior; death being defeated; and God getting back what belongs to God—and not just last Easter. Who’s that knocking at our door? Easter continues. Easter lasts!

Epilogue: all you good church people, you now weeded-out, post-Easter elite, truly committed and naturally religious ones take note. The people most reluctant to believe in resurrection—when we get one— is us.