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Sermons of Arthur C. McGill

For there is no distress like that of believing in something

which you secretly know may be false. (Sermon 6, pp. 58–59)

Arthur Chute McGill, Christian theologian, teacher, and preacher, reigned in the classroom. He was a paced master of dialectical surprise. He possessed a passionate honesty. He knew the risk of faith. McGill was intellectually tough: he would not believe something he secretly knew to be false. With no proof that the Christian faith is true, he was clear that there is no proof that it is false. But wait: “may be false”? To believe in something which you know is false: yes, grave distress. But to believe in something which you “know may be false” but which also may be true: surely such honesty belongs to the risk of Christian confession. Is the “may be false” in the quotation above probability—not possibility? Even so, probability does not rescue one from risk when the probability is of—improbability. Why, then, risk improbability? McGill’s sermons and surprises offer response to this question.

Meet McGill:

• But if you cease to hope, to live on the edge of hope, like a child alert for the coming of Christmas, then you die. (Sermon 15, p. 129)

• Because the mind is the greatest narcotic, it is extremely difficult for any of us to know our suffering, especially the deep suffering that belongs to our daily life. (Sermon 2, p. 30)

• Jesus died—he died all the way . . . (Sermon 3, p. 34)

• Any person who is not willing to be emptied, to let go of his own piety and his own faith and his own loving and his own virtue, he is full of extortion and rapacity, full of spiritual pride and greed. (Sermon 3, p. 37)

• Love is the name for the frame of mind, for the attitude which does not mind being poor. (Sermon 3, p. 38)

• You measure the meaning of letting go by the power of Christ and not by the power of death. (Sermon 14, p. 121)

• The proper speech is the deed. (Sermon 10, p. 95)

• The price of ecstasy is poverty. (Sermon 6, p. 61)

• It is always strange, this message of Jesus, to everyone everywhere . . .

(Sermon 12, pp. 106–7)

• If you love, you will be used up. (Sermon 9, p. 84)

• We do not first love our neighbor, first our neighbor loves us. (Sermon 17, p. 146)

In what might be read as a commentary on the above quotations, McGill proposes:

“Faith” is not the possession of a settled world-view [“viewpoint Christianity”], which people can interpose between themselves and the shock of experience, and by which therefore they can keep the world at an arm’s length away from them, can solve all their problems, and can arrange themselves with the “right” attitudes for every situation. On the contrary, “faith” has the effect of opening a man to the world, to his neighbors, and to himself. It deprives him of all self-conscious postures. It propels him into a living engagement with concrete experience.2

The Stuck Imagination

“American life is in the midst of some deep and obscure torment” (Sermon 6, p. 53). So preaches Arthur McGill about 1974—and about today. McGill’s words leap into our present—any present, surely—but so patently and painfully into our own. Here is McGill’s declaration in context:

Nothing makes clearer why this is a moment of deep disquiet and anxiety. For all the conflicts and frustrations which beset our life in the United States today make it difficult to face the future with assured enthusiasm. American life is in the midst of some deep and obscure torment. (Sermon 6, p. 53)

McGill speaks of “American life today” from the 1960s and 1970s, of the Vietnam War and “mimeographed reports” (Sermon 10, p. 87). “Friends, as the daily news reports to us the pains and agonies of the whole world, let us keep each other awake. Let us hope not in the future, but in the God who will [bless?] every [possible?] with the fullness of his glory and his love” (Sermon 15, p. 129). McGill suggests that “the problem of policy” in the context of Vietnam is not bound to that context:

It has to do with the general conviction in American life today that when real power is unleashed, we are beyond the realm of speech. For that reason, I would expect that if we were to become embroiled in Czechoslovakia or in the Middle East in a war of savage destruction [if we were to become embroiled . . .], we would find ourselves burdened by the same anguish. (Sermon 10, p. 90)

The “anguish” referred to is the anguish in the gap between words about and devastation in Vietnam.

William F. Lynch imagines, “In eternity there will be . . . less stuckness in the imagination,”3 indicating his own unstuck imagination. In the company of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Lynch dramatizes imagination as “trapped,” “stuck,” stuck with “no way out,” “puzzled,” “caught.”4 Lynch and the “stuck” imagination: if our imaginations were “stuck” when Lynch wrote (1970), they are downright reified today. Have our imaginations ever been more trapped?5 McGill would resonate with the idea of our stuck imaginations. His sermons may be read as attempts to unstick our imaginations, to unglue them, to open them up, to turn them loose, to set them and us—with and because of them—free.

McGill looks around in his today and in his past and ours to the poor and oppressed, the poor of Brazil, pygmies of Africa, the ancient Chinese, to the Indian, to Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, the Middle East, India, to the South, Selma, to Harlem, Chicago, Watts. What the topical references exemplify is still exemplified; what they deplore is still deplorable.

“Truth Is Meant to Save You First,

and the Comfort Comes Afterwards”

In Georges Bernanos’ magnificent novel, The Diary of a Country Priest, an old, seasoned, earthy priest, M. le Curé de Torcy, strives to help initiate a young, naive country priest of the village of Ambricourt:

Teaching is no joke, sonny! I’m not talking of those who get out of it with a lot of eyewash: you’ll knock up against plenty of them in the course of your life, and get to know ’em. Comforting truths, they call it! Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards. . . . The Word of God is a red-hot iron. And you who preach it ’ud go picking it up with a pair of tongs, for fear of burning yourself, you daren’t get hold of it with both hands. . . . when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.6

These words become powerfully ironic when, later in the novel, the country priest thrusts his arm into a fire. He is “no tongs.” So is Arthur McGill, whose dialectic is heavy on what he risks as the truth and light on the “comfort”—as if, in light of the truth, the comfort can take care of itself: “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.” The truth can be painful, which is why we are so tempted to do an end run around the truth and to go straight for the comfort. A student once gave me a poster—it was on my office door for years—which showed a rag doll with bright yellow yarn hair going through the ringers of an old-style washing machine. Her tongue was hanging out. The poster read: “The truth will make you free, but first it will hurt like hell.” “The Word of God is a red-hot iron.”

Much of the fire for McGill comes from what Karl Barth called, in the title of an early address (1916), “The Strange New World within the Bible.”7 Strangeness and newness can be fearful and frightening—and exciting, exhilarating. Barth wonders:

Whence is kindled all the indignation, all the pity, all the joy, all the hope and the unbounded confidence which even today we see flaring up like fire from every page of the prophets and the psalms? . . . We might do better not to come too near this burning bush.8

McGill risks it. Barth continues:

. . . within the Bible there is a strange, new world, the world of God. . . . The paramount question is whether we have understanding for this different, new world, or good will enough to meditate and enter upon it inwardly. . . . Time and again serious Christian people who seek “comfort” [“comfort” again] and “inspiration” in the midst of personal difficulties will quietly close their Bibles . . . the Bible . . . offers us not at all what we first seek in it.9

Barth’s essay exudes excitement and exhilaration: “It is not the right human thoughts about God which form the content of the Bible, but the right divine thought about men.”10 McGill, far from running tired or dry, exudes theological fascinations. No “apologies,” no arguments for biblical authority or truth. The real truth, the “true truth,” is authoritative and needs no defense. Defense is insult. Defense is betrayal. McGill risks and dares boldly—hence the energy and vitality of his thought.

Never is Arthur McGill far away from death. Never does it take him long to get to death; and, as we recognize however reluctantly with our apprehension of the acceleration of time with age, it does not take us long either. Death, death, death. McGill, in his “realistic,” unrelenting way is aiming at affirmation. “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.” There is death, and there is death.11 There are different concepts of death—more than two, certainly; but let us focus on two. There are destructive death and creative death. Destructive death is demonic, the death of victimization, obliteration, extermination. This is what sin and the satanic have somehow done to death. Then there is death as donative, self-giving, death as letting loose and letting go, a creative death which is essentially a part of the dialectical dance of receiving and giving which is life—as in the life of the living, Trinitarian God in whose image we are created. McGill does not like the first kind of death (any more than you and I), but he faces it in his McGillian realism in order to press through to death two:

So long as there is death, the power of God is not primary, is not Lord. Where there is death, there is not God’s kingdom. Therefore the Christian lives under death, or rather against death. Not against death by a more secure having, but against the whole logic and metaphysics of having and of the death which gives the metaphysics its proof. (Sermon 14, p. 120)

For in this perspective [“(i)n Christ”] death has become an event in the communication of life, real and true life. And that is the meaning of death in the domain of Jesus.” (Sermon 9, p. 85)

Maddening McGill

Maddening McGill. He can take us by the hand and lead us—and leave us. Or we leave him. Either way, he’s off; and we are in the dust. Who leaves whom? McGill invites one to wonder where he is going. He is a master of rhetorical tease. “People say: God will resurrect us and will bring us back to life again. Let’s hope not. Isn’t 50-60-90 years of this life enough?” (Sermon 15, p. 127). “Who of you does not live amidst failures of love?” (Sermon 15, p. 129). McGill’s disquieting honesty meets us early and often. One of McGill’s most successful themes is failure—as in “failures of love.” “Most of our love is resentment love” (Sermon 7, p. 71).12 “Love is not our primary motive. Resentment is primary and we express this as—love” (Sermon 7, p. 71):

Are we so filled with fear—fear of the hate that is in us, and fear of the hate that may be in other people—that our love has no reality of its own? . . . Thanksgivers, unless you let your God see the exasperation and outrage that you feel at the negatives of life, unless you stop making thanksgiving a mask to hide despair and resentment, how is any movement toward authentic thanksgiving even possible? . . . Thanksgiving day should be a day of truth, love and anger, of anger making claims on love by being indignant about abuse and neglect; and of love making claims on anger by forgiveness. Thanksgiving Day should never become a lie of sweetness and light. (Sermon 7, pp. 69–70, 72–73; italics added)

Sounds like a recipe for a great Thanksgiving dinner. Family gatherings can be risky. McGill’s sermon (“Be Angry”) closes with a prayer preceded by these words: “Let us have a little more openness about our animosity. Then—and only then—can we begin to receive and exercise [receiving comes before exercising] our generosity” (Sermon 7, p. 73). “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.”

Related failure: in his sermon on “Loneliness,” McGill advances the view that “. . . we try to build artificial bridges across the gap that separates us from one another, bridges made of such easy and faithless acts as the shaking of hands” (Sermon 1, p. 25). (Why should shaking hands be a faithless act?) “How we flee from God! How we seek to make a false god of our neighbor . . .” (Sermon 1, p. 25): the failure of “neighborolatry.” Failure: “We, of ourselves, do not worship God. We cannot” (Sermon 12, p. 108). Rather, one steps into—or is caught up in—the worship of the Father by the Son. We participate. Now participation can be freeing, can be fun because freeing. I join in singing the chorus but am not (thank God) the guardian of the verse. The freedom to fail is also the freedom to succeed, and both freedoms are the freedom to live.

Consider McGill’s investment in the body, the flesh:13 “How do we arise? Out of an embrace of flesh, tangents of our father’s pitiful lust, in midnight heat on dawnbed ease. The glory of our begetting was a twitch and gasp” (Sermon 13, p. 114).14 And death? “And how do we end? Always through our body and with our bodies. . . . The body is our Achilles’ heel” (Sermon 13, p. 114). “Every instant of life is therefore an advance of death” (Sermon 13, p. 114). “Death awaits us and death is total destitution” (Sermon 6, p. 61). Who leaves whom?

McGill speaks of “the deep suffering that belongs to our daily life” (Sermon 2, p. 30). Or, in the understated irony of Søren Kierkegaard’s humoristic-philosophical pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, “To be in existence is always a bit inconvenient.”15 Indeed. Next, McGill calls us to the lifelong “work and a constant learning” of coming “. . . to know our own suffering . . .” (Sermon 2, p. 30). Who leaves whom? Regarding the idea of a God who is good to us by helping us live in this world: “For everything that God gives us does not really give us life: it only fattens us for death” (Sermon 12, p. 107). Who leaves whom? “Why aren’t we furious at God and exasperated for the wretchedness of so many humans? That wouldn’t be nice” (Sermon 7, p. 69). If we have not left him, McGill prepares us to receive the wisdom in the recognition of C. FitzSimons Allison, “. . . we worship God by expressing our honest anger at him.”16

The Recognizable and the Revolutionary

“Ah, Ah!” writes—exclaims—McGill (Sermon 10, p. 93). “Ah, Ah!”—explicitly or unspoken—is at the center of McGill’s sermons; and the exclamation point is for us. Nearby are “Well!” (Sermon 17, p. 145) and “Exactly” (Sermon 3, p. 38; Sermon 17, p. 145). McGill leads us on and draws us in. He is an intellectual seducer. The “irascibility” can cloak a certain playfulness which now and then peeks through.17

McGill often begins with some form of push away from presumed expectations.18 He did not want to be “the expected,” and he was not. In listening to or in reading McGill, one comes to wonder, “Just where is he going?” because one can seldom be sure—or safely anticipate. Conversely, McGill likes to begin with the recognizable. Then comes the “revolution” sparked by such characteristic and apparently calm words as “Let us now look at the New Testament . . .” (Sermon 3, p. 34). Or: “All this sounds fine provided we do not look too closely at the New Testament witness to Jesus” (Sermon 10, p. 94). Here we go again. Just when we think we see at last where McGill is going and suppose he has arrived there, he changes direction and takes a turn to a new course, an instinctive theological quarterback. Thus, “We have missed the heart of the story” (Sermon 17, p. 145). McGill revels in offense. He is relentless. He is full of surprises—“Some Real Surprises”—and obviously enjoys being so. “Now begins your preparation for the vocation of dying” (Sermon 6, p. 62). When is the last time we heard that in a commencement address? Or: “Philanthropy is a typically evil form of love” (Sermon 14, p. 120). What? Philanthropy? “Philanthropy,” as McGill treats it, is near the top of his hate list because “giving becomes grounded on having and becomes an expression of having” (Sermon 14, p. 120). If philanthropy is out, what is next on the McGillian hit list? “Humanism”: “Humanism is another form of resentment love” (Sermon 7, p. 72). Then comes the about-face, the McGillian “flip”: “Do not ask, how can we who love also hope? Rather ask, how can we who love do anything but hope? How can we love for one moment without finding ourselves hoping for the kingdom of God?” (Sermon 15, p. 129). The bite here is harsh appraisal of present life as incentive for Christian hope; while, at the same time, “gratitude” is aligned with “life” and a powerful authorization of vulnerability. Christianity authorizes vulnerability because the Christian God authorizes vulnerability—because the Christian God is vulnerability. McGill comments on and warns against—

. . . the effort to worship an unneedy and invulnerable God. If such a God indeed excludes every possibility of needy brokenness, this God also excludes the life actualized in Jesus. For this God is not the creator of shared life but simply a product of the human outrage at evil. (Sermon 5, p. 51)

Crucial (literally) to McGill’s Christian theology is the recognition that “. . . neediness belongs properly and naturally to God” (Sermon 5, p. 51)—and hence (via imago dei) to us. Manifestation of our neediness informs the life of faith:

It might be said that those who cling to the past act of Jesus’s resurrection and those who seek a flight into heaven want too much here and now. They dislike the poverty, the religious poverty and ambiguity into which the ascension envelops us. They want to stand beyond uncertainty. But that is not possible. (Sermon 14, p. 122)

If one is looking for “relevance,” here relevance is—in McGill’s rejection of our yearning “to stand beyond uncertainty” in matters of faith:

The Christian cannot really separate himself in that way [standing beyond uncertainty or, as McGill soon goes on to say, standing with those who “. . . surpass the condition of perplexity and tension” (Sermon 14, p. 123)] from the gentile, from the polytheist who looks into his own concrete existence and sees a welter of principalities and powers [McGill has just been referring to Romans 8], sees a whole pantheon of gods manifesting their glory in his flesh and spirit—the power of war, the power of society, the power of sexuality, the power of disease—these flash their immensity in turn [note the alliance of gods and powers]. (Sermon 14, p. 122).

At times a brusque, even cryptic, writing complements a teasing and goading which pay off, challenging us to challenge ourselves with the possibility of a new way of seeing. McGill leaves us wondering, wanting to know more, newly convinced that there is more to be seen and said. And there is.

Setting the Stage for Scripture

When was the last time we heard a good sermon? What is a “good sermon”? McGill has some thoughts about this—but not much optimism:

There is no reserve, no awe in the use of words in the churches. No words are holy, pregnant with energies that might shatter our existence. . . . Speech in the church is never dark, never in riddles. You hear sermons through the weeks and months and years, and they are no different in their basic rhetoric from a classroom lecture or a radio address. Can such sermons really serve as the center for a weekly religious celebration? Do they release such power that the act of delivering them must be surrounded and set apart by a liturgical service [or must they be surrounded and set apart precisely because of their impotence?]? (Sermon 10, p. 88)

How might persons have exited worship services after hearing a McGill sermon? Puzzled? Confused? Bewildered? Rarely “upbeat”? Rarely “sent out singing”? But surely McGill sent them out thinking—and us with them. Reading—hearing—McGill can be like walking the edge of an escarpment. Or listening to McGill can seem disheartening, discouraging, glum. “Don’t we have trouble enough?” But in his determined, intrepid dialectic of perspectives, McGill can grab us and angle us into a startlingly, jarringly fresh way of seeing the same old biblical texts. Adventure ensues: “So that’s what’s going on!” The Bible: read it again for the first time—with Arthur McGill. The insights can be stunning.

McGill’s sermons are neither simple nor easy to follow. Twists and turns and surprise departures are frequent. “How does that follow?” and “How did we get here?” are all about these sermons, which were surely delivered with pace, pause, deliberation and acceleration—with timing, helping to insinuate meanings and sub-meanings. On occasion was there a hint of a self-satisfied grin?

Thus, McGill delights in engaging perspectives, enlivening them, apparently entering into them and then blasting them, exposing them as outrageously untenable, obviously existentially inadequate. But the inadequacy was not so obvious a sentence ago. Often the lost, futile perspectives are attributed to us and to our day, to contemporaneity, to the United States. In “Jonah and Human Grandeur,” McGill refers to:

God’s call to Jonah: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and denounce it for its wickedness” [Jonah 1:2] . . . We must remember this: the wickedness of Nineveh—alas!—is the wickedness of the United States, and the oppressiveness of Nineveh appears also in the United States. (Sermon 4, p. 46)

(Is something of William Stringfellow lurking alongside McGill?19)

We encounter in McGill the ability to present a bold, brash engendering of perspectives and to set perspectives in opposition. Frequently the perspective developed becomes a foil for a perspective enjoined, which is often not “developed” but alluded to, hinted at, pointed toward.20 We find the relentless redoing of a distinct perspective, often a perspective that is a surprise to us, that takes us by surprise, disorienting and disarming us. At the same time, McGill is able to evoke a familiar, all-too-familiar perspective and then to gesture toward a counter-perspective powerfully, vividly, shatteringly. He can plop a puzzling scriptural text down in that context and allow us suddenly to see the logic of it. He places it deftly where it can come alive. He need not interpret it. The perspective he has drawn does that.21 All he has to do is to watch us “get it”:

Blessed are the poor, the sorrowful, the hungry and the persecuted. These statements attributed to Jesus seem confused, if not nonsensical . . .

What Jesus’s beatitudes do is to make clear the indispensable condition for receiving. We cannot receive unless we lack, unless we are in need. . . .

In other words, if you are not willing to be one with your neediness, you cannot be blessed. (Sermon 2, pp. 27–28)

After setting the stage for scripture, McGill concludes a sermon (“On Worship”): “Let me read again the lesson from Paul’s letter to the Colossians” (Sermon 12, p. 109).

The Wind in the Tree

McGill affirms, “A technical language certainly has its place in the Christian community.”22 This warning follows:

whenever such technical language becomes an end in itself and is taken as the only true language in the church, whenever sermons and prayers are content to repeat theologically precise abstractions, then Christians are saying that their true life with God separates them from the present concrete world, and from the everyday speech that belongs to that world.23

In his sermon “Loneliness,” McGill rehearses a story (one he thinks we might know, so this is not a story originating with him) of a child who hears the wind in a backyard tree. The tree becomes a mystery, alive—and special. The tree is later blown over in a storm. The child’s parents do not understand: there are other trees. The child is alone—without the wind in the tree.

Specificity matters. In Federico Fellini’s La Strada, a nighttime metaphysical24 exchange occurs. Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) hears Matto,“The Fool,” (Richard Basehart) call her name. The conversation which follows is a mesmerizing moment in film:

The Fool: “Gelsomina.” . . . What a funny face you have! Sure you’re a woman? Not an artichoke? . . .

Gelsomina: . . . I’m no good to anybody . . . and I’m tired of

living . . .

The Fool: You like to make love? What do you like? Gosh, but you’re homely. . . .

Gelsomina: What am I here for on this earth? . . .

The Fool: A book I once read said everything in this world serves a purpose . . . Take that stone, for instance . . .

Gelsomina: Which one?

The Fool: Anyone . . . even this one serves for something . . . or this one . . .

Gelsomina: For what?

The Fool: How should I know? . . . Know who I’d have to be? God! He knows everything! When you’re born . . . when you die . . . Who else can know it? I don’t know what this stone’s good for, but it must serve something. Because if it’s useless, everything’s useless! Even the stars and even you! Even you serve some purpose with that homely artichoke head of yours.25

The Fool gives Gelsomina the particular stone he has picked up in illustrating his reflection. Gelsomina accepts the stone, attends to it carefully, caringly, nods, and beams with a new-found promise of purpose. The magic line: “Which one?” Which one? The tree blown over, the tree with wind no more.

Specificity matters:26 “Love of all mankind, love for the human race. That’s silly. Love is specific” (Sermon 7, p. 71). McGill is thinking of the words of Ivan Karamazov to his younger brother, Alyosha, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which he knew well: 27

I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbours. It’s just one’s neighbours, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance. . . . For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.28

Again the words which seem so right for McGill’s dialectic: “Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.” But there is an “afterwards”; and, in the sense that this “afterwards” is grace, in the sense that—in a different but related orchestration of McGill’s dialectic—receiving precedes giving, this “afterwards” is “before”:

But there is something in God for my loneliness greater even than His knowledge or His justice. For in God I know not only that I am truly known, and by this knowledge truly judged, but that I am understood. . . . For the person of the Son Himself became flesh like us, suffering in Himself every agony the human soul can encounter. Therefore He who knows every hypocrisy and evil in our thoughts, knows these from our point of view. And He also knows the secret beauty of the nature He gave us. He knows the deep recesses of goodness in us of which we ourselves have not the slightest knowledge.

Also God’s knowledge of us is a loving knowledge . . . which creates in us the goodness we do not have alone. . . . God’s knowledge saves and redeems us, so that if once you know that you are truly known to God, you not only experience justice, but you also experience mercy and redemption. (Sermon 1, p. 26)

McGill exacerbates (or so we might wish to believe) the negative. One must look and listen carefully for a bleep, a pinch of the positive. But it is there—or implied. This is a note not often sounded, and yet McGill is empty without it. It is a grace note.29 I recall hearing McGill conclude a lecture on agape in Seipp Alcove, Firestone Library, Princeton University, by quoting a little verse of Abner Dean titled “Grace Note”:

Remember the word—?

The one from the manger—?

It means only this . . .

You can dance

with a stranger.30

“Grace Note”: as in music, as in faith.

How near McGill’s dialectical words are to those of Barth, words he may not have known directly but words which he might have accounted for in the words of Barth reported by William Stringfellow, “We read the same Bible . . . .”31

“Eternal life” is not another, second life beyond our present one, but the reverse side of this life, as God sees it, which is hidden from us here and now. It is this life in relationship to what God has done in Jesus Christ for the whole world and thus also for us. So we wait and hope—in respect of our death—to be made manifest with him (Jesus Christ who is raised from the dead), in the glory of judgment, and also in the grace of God. That will be the new thing: that the veil which now lies over the whole world and thus over our life (tears, death, sorrow, crying, grief) will be taken away, and God’s counsel (already accomplished in Jesus Christ) will stand before our eyes, the object of our deepest shame, but also of our joyful thanks and praise.32

Where is McGill going? He is going to side with the “enemy,” in this case with our loneliness, and to turn the perspective so that the enemy may be seen in a new light as friend:

The Lord God Almighty, He alone knows us, and our loneliness is like a goad by which He leads us to Himself. . . . You see that our loneliness from one another is not an evil to be overcome or a despair from which we try to escape, but is rather the sign within us which turns us to our true Lord, to Him who truly knows and judges and redeems. (Sermon 1, pp. 25–26)

In construing loneliness in this way, McGill has led us to the famous “prayer” at the beginning of Augustine’s Confessions: “Yet man, this part of your creation, wishes to praise you. You arouse him to take joy in praising you, for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”33 So also is the witness of Arthur McGill.

The flash and flare, the fireworks, the dash and dare—the provocations—of McGill came through in classroom lectures and seminars vividly. In the words of the sermons which follow, glimpses, hints, intimations, the provocations—and theological fascinations—persist. Theological fascinations: Arthur McGill does not go haltingly, hesitantly, into theological-hermeneutical matters holding open some possibility of faith in a world so “come of age” that it begins to feel a bit aged. No limping. McGill is on the offensive, in more than one sense, as we have seen. He is aggressive. Any embarrassment of faith is an embarrassment of riches in which the paramount theme is becoming poor.

Ordering the Sermons

Presenting the following seventeen sermons of Arthur McGill in chronological order is not possible. The sermons bridge at least twenty-eight years, from 1951 to 1979. Sometimes we have specific dates, sometimes years. Sometimes we have place and no date, sometimes date and no place.

The sermons are arranged thematically; though this, too, is a challenge because the sermons return again and again to soon-familiar themes. Some sermons could be placed with others according to one theme or grouped with yet others on the basis of another theme. (How many of these seventeen sermons treat of death? All of them, directly or indirectly; directly in most.) Nonetheless, four groupings suggest themselves.

I. Good Neediness

1. “Loneliness”: Our loneliness is a goad to God.

2. “Beatitudes”: Lack, need, receiving in gratitude, and life are

identified.

3. “The Problem of Possessions”: God’s love sets poverty in a new light: love is not minding being poor.

4. “Jonah and Human Grandeur”: Hunger for grandeur yields

oppression; acceptance of failure yields freedom.

5. “Suffering”: Neediness belongs to God.

6. “Needed—An Education in Poverty”: Commencement is a time to own the vocation of dying.

II. Kinds of Power, Love, and Death

7. “Be Angry”: Dare to face truth, love—and anger at God first of all.

8. “Palm Sunday Sermon”: Jesus is not a victim but agent of death as self-expenditure bearing the fruit of life.

9. “Eucharist”: The meaning of death in the domain of Jesus is the

communication of life.

10. “Harvard Convocation”: Proper speech is the deed of self-

expenditure.

11. “Tower Hill Graduation—Against the Expert”: Make your actions, suffering—and your death—your own.

12. “On Worship”: We participate in the worship of the Father by

the Son.

III. Qualitative Hope

13. “The Centrality of Flesh”: Look out Lent: Christianity is a festival

of flesh.

14. “The Ascension”: In uncertainty, risk measuring the meaning of

letting go by the power of Christ and not by the power of death.

15. “The Goal of Our History”: Hope not in the future but in God.

IV. Grace

16. “Jesus and the Myth of Neighborliness”: The good Samaritan is

Jesus Christ.

17. “The Good Samaritan”: The good Samaritan is Jesus Christ.

Perhaps these last overlapping, complementary sermons are appropriately placed together in a section on “Grace.” As suggested, grace may seem to be a “Grace Note”; but it motivates the whole of McGill’s theology. McGill’s treatment of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) as our neighbor so that we can “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37) not out of our own power, our surplus, our “philanthropy,” but out of God’s gracious giving—“We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19); receiving precedes giving—may be regarded as McGill’s central theological theme.34

■ ■ ■

Editorial Note

I am most grateful to Lucy McGill for entrusting to me, on the recommendation of William F. May and Paul Ramsey, the papers of Arthur McGill so long ago, for her transcription of sermon manuscripts—and for her patience; to William F. May for his role in granting me “the McGill files,” for his patience and encouragement, and for graciously contributing a “Foreword” to this collection; to Paul Ramsey for his caring and kindness; to Chuck Balestri and Egbert Giles Leigh, Jr., friends since Princeton undergraduate days (some forty-

six years); to Chuck for so many rewarding McGill-catalytic or McGill-catalyzed conversations at Princeton, 1960–1963, when we were both under McGill’s spell; to Egbert, Biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Barro Colorado Island, Panama, for his enduring interest and encouragement; to Cindy Toomey, Administrative and Program Specialist, Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion (CPR), University of Mary Washington, who has indeed been a “specialist” in sundry ways; to JeanAnn Dabb, Associate Professor of Art and Art History, UMW, for introducing me to ARTstor; and to Wipf and Stock Publishers and Ted Lewis, Jim Tedrick,

K. C. Hanson, Heather Carraher, and associates for their investment in Arthur McGill.

When Arthur McGill penciled, often rapidly—one can see the acceleration of the writing in his hand—a vast paper trail of theological fascinations, he did not know that persons someday would struggle to decipher his difficult and often minuscule hand. He was about his own present, pressing, and remarkable intellectual adventures. Still, the paper clips attaching little sheets to larger sheets to note cards in sometimes thick and puzzling disarray are thwarting. And the abbreviations . . .

The concern here is to respect the text. “Man” and “he” and “him” are untouched. Commas and semi-colons posed a temptation: add some, subtract others. With rare exceptions, punctuation-wise, spelling-wise, capitalization-wise and otherwise (and apart from possible misreadings of the manuscripts), the texts have been permitted to stand. When manuscript baffles or temptations triumph, there are brackets [ ]—different kinds and a “non-kind”: 1) [word?] means this is an uncertain but best-guess reading; 2) [?] means there is a word, but I haven’t a clue; 3) [??] means more than one indecipherable word; 4) no brackets means either no need for brackets or that possibly there were brackets which have been removed because the reading is likely and because the reader needs to be spared endless, distracting brackets. When the manuscripts become outline or word-notes, I have risked making coherent connections, again within brackets. Originally, every added “a,” “the,” “we,” “our” and infrequently added punctuation mark was dutifully placed in brackets. Brackets, brackets everywhere. I decided to do away with the brackets in the case of articles, etc., but retain them in the case of other additions. There are too many brackets, and every set of brackets is (for now)35 a defeat. References given by McGill are in parentheses. Added references are in brackets. Often the manuscripts slip into “inverse paragraphs”: instead of indentation of the first line, lines under the first line are indented. This accounts in part for many of the short—and one-sentence—paragraphs; though at times I have created paragraphs. Then there are the dreaded outlines and infinitesimal marginal notes.

McGill uses different translations of scripture, the King James Version (identified in the text as KJV), the Revised Standard Version (RSV), and, quite often, The New English Bible (NEB). Sometimes there seems to be no exact fit, and no translation is designated. The version may well be MM = McGill’s Memory. When a text is indicated but not quoted by McGill, the RSV is used—unless McGill’s words operate off of another translation.

David Cain

University of Mary Washington

1 Sermon 17, p. 141. McGill is referring to the so-called parable of the good Samaritan: “Tonight we will concentrate on one parable of Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is not only an interesting story, but it has some real surprises.” I apply his phrase to his sermons. References to McGill’s sermons are hereafter in text: (Sermon #, p. #).

2 Arthur C. McGill, The Celebration of Flesh: Poetry in Christian Life (New York: Association, 1964) 14; see 187–90, “Against Spiritual Pride.”

3 William F. Lynch, SJ, Christ and Prometheus: A New Image of the Secular (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970) 136.

4 Ibid., 85, 87.

5 A temptation is to look about from “today” and to sound a myopic or at least immediate alarm. But when does “temptation” become obligation?

6 Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1983) 54.

7 Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957) 28–50.

8 Ibid., 30, 32.

9 Ibid., 33, 37, 39.

10 Ibid., 43.

11 See David Cain, “Arthur McGill: A Memoir,” Harvard Theological Review 77 (1984) esp. 106.

12 James Breech grasps this: “This view of love which tolerates everything and which does not see things as they are is rooted in the contemporary hatred of actuality, in resentment”—James Breech, The Silence of Jesus: The Authentic Voice of the Historical Man (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 206. See 13–18. With the help of Max Scheler, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others, this fine book is pervaded with McGillian perception, as Breech’s “Acknowledgments” acknowledge (ix).

13 See The Celebration of Flesh.

14 McGill invites us to “[c]onsider our attitude toward romantic love. According to the popular songs [do they render “our” attitude?], the final truth about love is that it will leave us. However real it may be now, the day will come when we will ‘wonder who’s kissing her now . . .’ . . .” See McGill, “Reason in a Violent World” in Wesleyan University Alumni-Faculty Seminar, The Distrust of Reason (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University, June, 1959), 43.

15 Johannes Climacus (Søren Kierkegaard), Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 452, Kierkegaard’s Writings, XII.1, translation altered. The Hongs translate, “To be in existence is always somewhat troublesome . . .” See also Johannes Climacus (Søren Kierkegaard), Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 404: “For to be in existence is always a somewhat embarrassing situation . . .” ).

16 C. FitzSimons Allison, Guilt, Anger, and God: The Patterns of Our Discontents (New York: Seabury, 1972), 88.

17 See Cain, “Arthur McGill: A Memoir,” 100–101.

18 For example, “At the present moment [ca. 1975] witchcraft and Satanism are enjoying a mild popularity in the United States. It seems to me that these are simply faddish archaisms, and as such they will not concern me here,” “Structures of Inhumanity” in Alan M. Olson, ed., Disguises of the Demonic: Contemporary Perspectives on the Power of Evil (New York: Association, 1975), 116. Or: “Let me begin with some preliminary remarks which will indicate certain directions that I will not follow,” “Human Suffering and the Passion of Christ” in Flavian Dougherty, CP, ed., The Meaning of Human Suffering (New York: Human Sciences, 1982), 159.

19 Stringfellow is working with the book of Revelation: “If America is Babylon, and Babylon is not Jerusalem—confounding what, all along, so many Americans have been told or taught and have believed—is there any American hope?

“The categorical answer is no.” William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973; reprinted, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 155.

After including this reference, I found among McGill’s papers (474 file folders of mainly handwritten notes and manuscripts—McGill liked pencil, note cards held together with paper clips, and any size sheet of paper at hand), a folder (#200) identified in McGill’s hand as “Demonic: Misc notes.” Rather than miscellaneous notes, the folder contains but one reference on a 5” x 8” sheet: “On demonic principalities Stringfellow, An Ethic for Xians & Other Aliens in a Strange Land [no underlining of title] 1973.”

20 Characteristically, the perspective at which we might wish to get a closer look “breaks away” from the text. The tease again. McGill leaves us wanting more, but this is also an invitation for us to do some work. For an analogy, see David Cain, “Notes on a Coach Horn: ‘Going Further,’ ‘Revocation,’ and Repetition” in Robert L. Perkins, ed., Fear and Trembling and Repetition (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1993), 341–42 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, 6).

21 Is this “perspective” language finally too tame? Is injustice done to the boldness, the radicality of McGill? Finally, he is not proposing one perspective rather than another but pointing: open your senses and hear, touch, smell, taste, see. By “perspective,” I mean way of entertaining (I almost wrote “seeing,” but McGill wants all senses; see The Celebration of Flesh, 22–23), not what McGill denounces as “viewpoint Christianity”(see Celebration, 13–14, 187–90, p. 2 above, and n. 26 below). I am grateful to William F. May for calling my attention to this matter—and to others.

22 The Celebration of Flesh, 36.

23 Ibid., italics added.

24 A whisper of redundancy . . .

25 Screenplay, Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, with Ennio Flaiano, La Strada, 1954. I am transcribing these words from a soundtrack, so the punctuation—and italics—are mine.

26 McGill labeled file folder #188 “Concrete.” Inside are seven 8 ½” x 11” lined sheets (but eight pages—the first sheet contains writing on both sides—and all but the last sheet are numbered) with one 5 ⅜” x 8 ½” sheet originally paper-clipped to page 7. The heading is “The Concrete.” Here are a few suggestive excerpts: “Cultural difference, ie. differences in what people in different cultures think & see, are really determined by concrete features of their environment; they are not just developments coming out of internal collective history. Cf Wallace Stevens on exchanging person in [?] African jungle with [?], on meaning of sounds, on whole imaginative apperception. One source of cultural relativism is fact that the concrete impact of sensory exper[ience] is left out of view: culture is looked at too wld [world]-viewishly, too generally, too internally. The dynamic of life wrestling constantly with the concrete as such is neglected. Why? A common assumption that the concrete is wrestled with only derivatively & secondarily; the real wrestle is with whole wld. Here is fund[amental] princ[iple] for me: to locate human venture not at level of whole wld or God . . . but at level of wrestling with the concrete. That is where the creative edge of human exs [existence] always is. Hence primacy of phenomenology. . . . What ethics are involved in this attention to the concrete? . . . Here’s where ethical impact of eschatology on relations to the concrete comes into play.

“The focus on the concrete means that art has a fundamental & indispensable role. . . . Art finds a form to recover the concrete as we newly & freshly experience it. Cf Celebration of Flesh Chap. 1.

“But obviously, to make a case for the centrality of the concrete for theology, I must be able to translate the basic & obvious theological categories—sin, salvation, judgment & grace, God, JX [Jesus Christ]—immediately into concrete experiences. That ‘immediately’ is

crucial. . . .

“The concrete exper[ience] is not self-enclosed [or need not be self-enclosed; this is one of the grand intimations—and realizations of art: tapped in certain ways, the concrete can touch the universal] . . .

“Does Ritual belong to the concrete exper or not? . . .

“How is naiveté related to concrete experience? Naiveté is the acceptance of concrete experience . . .

“Concrete exper[ience] has an appalling inadequacy about it. Eliot ‘Portrait of Lady’ ‘Gerontion’ Eliot identifies this with transiency. The theoretical way is a response to this inadequacy. But it is a false response. Question: Does JX [Jesus Christ] give us another focus away from concreteness, involving renunciation of the world? Cf Eliot ‘Ash Wednesday.’ Or does he establish us in a relation to God that requires concreteness, in its inadequacy? Humility, acceptance of our littleness & transiency. Does the inadequacy of concreteness direct us elsewhere in JX? Or is it to be accepted in JX by virtue of letting God be our glory?” As often in McGill, “inadequacy” is the way to the adequate—or to the more than adequate.

27 McGill says much when he writes in his “Confession of Faith,” “. . . I came through readings in American literature [with a little Russian literature on the side], curiously enough [or not], to the shattering apprehension of the reality of God . . .”—see below, p. 148. Literature implicates specificity. See the reference to literature again, p. 154. In this statement, McGill writes also of “the positive acceptance of the other person . . .” (p. 152). This, again, is specificity. Appropriately enough, much in this “Confession” helps to prepare one for the sermons. The sermons help to explicate the “Confession.”

28 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 1950) 281. James Breech quotes and comments on this passage in The Silence of Jesus, 18.

29 McGill affirms, “Victory . . . is the decisive and final fact of human existence”— “Reason in a Violent World,” 47.

30 Abner Dean, Wake Me When It’s Over (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955) 59.

31 Stringfellow gives this account: “I raised with Karl Barth during his visit [to the United States, 1962] the matter which is basic here. Again and again, in both the public dialogue and in our private conversations, it had been my experience that as Barth began to make some point, I would at once know what he was going to say. It was not some intuitive thing, it differed from that, it was a recognition, in my mind, of something familiar that Barth was articulating. When this had happened a great many times while I listened to him, I described my experience to him and asked why this would happen. His response was instantaneous: ‘How could it be otherwise? We read the same Bible, don’t we?’”—William Stringfellow, A Second Birthday (1970; reprinted, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2005) 151–52. Hermeneutics! The point must be: we read the same Bible because we read the Bible in the same way.

32 Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 488 (italics added).

33 The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 43.

34 See McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 99–111; chapter 6, “Resting in Our Need.”

35 Often I have stared at a word with magnifying glass for extended times over days—and over years. Then, suddenly, the word is clear and unmistakable: no brackets of any kind. A little victory. Lucy McGill has been responsible for many such victories.