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By Rev. Dr. Robert Allen Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel, Boston University

Professor Wesley Wildman here offers students, colleagues, fellow preachers and teachers, and the wider reading public, a selection and collection of his sermons, a most welcome offering. The nine sermons here assembled he identifies as “meditations,” following on the Scripture texts on which they were based. In that spirit, we too might want to meditate on the sermons herein, especially as they provide insight and perspective with regard to the gospel and truth, with regard to Scripture and the preaching tradition, and with regard to designs for preaching.

Professor Wildman’s sermons, to begin with, challenge us and cause us to meditate carefully on what we judge to be true, the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, about God and the gospel. Not long ago, for instance, a vigorous debate emerged about the importance of going to church. The initial proposition affirming required attendance in worship and the spiritual centrality of worship, the judgment that for the Christian person worship is not optional, came from a group who emphasized the healing and healthy social aspects of worship. A sense of belonging kindles a sense of meaning, which develops into community and issues into a feeling of empowerment. It is good to go to church, for there you find friends, thoughts, intimacy and strength. One does well to affirm all of this, and one has a hard time denying any of it.

But from another corner, during this recent debate, came voices in opposition: One said, I do go to church, and I do value belonging, meaning, community and empowerment. I am a better person for having prayed, sung, listened, gathered, and given. However, in the long run, many of us, perhaps most of us, will not continue to attend if we judge what we hear, in preaching, is not based on solid theology and philosophy. Another similarly responded, It is tempting to disjoin learning and vital piety, but it is not loving or wise to disjoin learning and vital piety. They go together. The God of Creation is the very God of Redemption. Their disjunction may help us cling for a while to a kind of faux certainty. But their conjunction is the confidence born of obedience. A sermon collection like the one you are now holding, entering, and soon reading, reminds you of your childhood in creation and redemption. Not your youthful past but your childhood: You are a child of God. Howard Thurman famously concluded his masterpiece, Jesus and the Disinherited, with just this thought. To allow such gracious sensibility to live, though, requires all the heavy thought and truth telling we can muster, in preaching. A laywoman from California, Judith Mang, in a 2008 New York Times letter to the editor, put it this way: “It is likely that nothing will match the reassurance of a Sunday morning spent in church. But for an ever-growing number of Americans, the conviction that the church is built on shaky philosophical grounds is more powerful than the longing for unconditional comfort.” The two, learning and piety, perhaps in the long run cannot finally be disjoined. Nor can the religious longing ever easily be written out of human life: whatever introduces genuine perspective is itself religious, to paraphrase John Dewey.

Professor Wesley Wildman has compiled a welcome collection of sermons meant to advance genuine religious perspective and to address the issue of shaky philosophical foundations. His sermons, from various angles of vision, and out of a variety of moments in Scripture and experience, together raise a challenge for the contemporary preacher. Do you believe what you are about to say, in all its complexity and opacity? Is what you are saying reasonable? Are the words taken from tradition and Scripture, and lifted in preaching, “good tradition or bad tradition”—“the living faith of dead people or the dead faith of living people” (as Jaroslav Pelikan put it)? Is it true? Better to be too true to be good than to be too good to be true, on this estimate. Better not to use a word at all, unless you are confident of its meaning and of your capacity to convey that meaning in a true, in a reasonable, in a defensible way. Wildman’s work affords us the opportunity to meditate upon the gospel and truth.

The sermons here also cause us to meditate on Scripture and traditions. The reader of these nine sermons will soon sense the apophatic inclination of the collection. Yes, there is a struggle with a respect for Scripture, but not a wooden allegiance to revelation in the raw. So too with traditions and experiences, cited but not worshipped for their own sake, much as St. Paul put his faith origin “by revelation” (Gal 1:12) beyond both. At heart, or at bottom, there is here a stark admission that for many things we are in the dark, alone, and will need to do the best we can, working things out for ourselves, by our own best light, however dim. Still, like Paul Tillich before him, Wildman does not abandon Scripture and its outgrowths in history, though his own full understanding of the authority of Scripture is left unstated, meant perhaps to be gleaned directly in the reading of the sermons. He stands in the pulpit, with tradition. He reads from Holy Writ, with inherited custom. He blends his reason and experience with others. He does so at a time when, still, 38% of the US population denies evolution, the origin of species by natural selection through random mutation, in the Darwinian perspective. Wildman will have none of that. What we now know of nature, we now know, and we must move forward in our preaching. The universe is 14 billion years old. The earth is 4.5 billion years old. 500 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appeared in the Cambrian explosion. 400 million years ago, plants sprouted. 370 million years ago, land animals emerged. 230 million years ago, dinosaurs appeared (and disappeared 65 million years ago). 200,000 years ago, hominids arose. Every human being carries sixty new mutations out of six billion cells. Yes, evolution through natural selection by random mutation is a sturdy, robust, reasonable hypothesis. You love the mind, the reason. You love the prospect of learning. You love the life of the mind. You love the Lord with heart and soul and mind. You know that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. You love the reason in the same way that Charles Darwin, a good Anglican, loved the reason. (Marsh Chapel hosted a series of ten sermons on the theme “Darwin and Faith,” offered by preachers from around the country, one included here from Professor Wildman (“God is Creator”) during the summer of 2009).

In the same way, we might continue to meditate, we cannot preach as if the last 250 years of biblical scholarship, historical critical study of the Bible, have not occurred and have not yielded solid results. They have and they have. Wildman’s sermons here give careful attention to this body of work, and several moments of exemplary rendition and interpretation of the Scriptures, understood in historical and critical perspective. So, where we need to admit our unknowing, our wandering within the clouds of unknowing, our origin and destination in the dark, so be it. After all, the psalmist led the way: Yes, the heavens are telling the glory of God, but so too the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Yes, day to day pours forth speech, but also, and more so, night to night declares not only speech but knowledge (Psalm 19). Dr. Ray L. Hart has well exposed this dual healing fulfillment in interpretation in his recent book, God Being Nothing (2016). In Wildman’s collection, we take note of the reliance on various texts, and the occasional references to other philosophers and theologians who have touched and influenced this preacher. We might especially meditate along the way on his use of Job, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, other Wisdom passages, and Samuel.

Furthermore, we cannot expect to gain a hearing, to see by grace the assembly of an addressable community, over time, without rigorous attention to form as well as content, to sermon design as well as sermon theme. In fact, these sermons invite us particularly to look hard at sermon design. Professor Wildman’s sermons offer exemplary modes of design, an often under-attended aspect of preaching. Meditate as you read on the varieties of form in the design, and on the rhetorical structures of the sermons. They have a great deal to offer both to the younger and to the older preachers among us. They have movement and range. Notice the way the sermon forms and designs advance the gospel affirmations.

In “Mystery,” the design is definition: how shall we understand this single word, mystery, this phrase, holy mystery. Further, the sermonic mode is warning: Words are always inadequate; we tend to trivialize the divine mystery; we need to be aware of the inadequacy of our theological language. Here the author evokes Rudolph Otto and the Mysterium Tremendum. We are held in a terrifying tender hand. And, as Ralph Sockman emphasized, using lakeshore imagery, “The larger the body of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery that surrounds it.”

In “Friend” the design is the flow of a stream, in which the hospitality of reality discloses itself with vivid concreteness. We must face that we are running the sociopolitical show ourselves. We need not minimize the ravages of the human condition. The price of freedom in the world is extremely high (a similar argument to that of Erich Fromm in his classic, Escape From Freedom). To violence this sermon makes multiple, repeated references. The truth is that suffering mostly crushes. Face the rage of the Psalms. Editing our hearts is betrayal.

In “Waiting,” the design is a good old two-point sermon. Here are two kinds of waiting: Joy in life and dread before the bizarre lottery of fate, a fine dialectic reminiscent of Helmut Thielecke’s “The Waiting God.” Wildman affirms, here and elsewhere, “This God is the very Ground of Being, the depth structures and dynamic flows of life, the cosmic Dao and the God beyond God of our beloved mystics. This God waits for the unfolding of nature itself, of our very lives.”

In “Hope,” the form is a fine, venerable design, yet one sadly far less used today than a generation ago; not this, not this, not this . . . but that. Personal transformation, social justice, life after death, and the Kingdom of God are not forgone conclusions. Notice what we and our world are like, first. Here the reader finds one definition of revelation: revelation can be understood as the disclosure of what we are not (and so what we can be) through the experience of what we are in the context of the mysterious, divine depth of our being, in divinely supported space, with both absence and presence (ever a crucial homiletical dialectic). We are not surprised here to have a reference to “the divine incognito” (of Søren Kierkegaard.)

In “Coming,” the design is a question, raised and answered: “Ask yourself this.” More sermons should perhaps take this form, a question raised and answered, by way of a method of correlation. We are challenged to face what is daunting: disaster, danger, devastation. We are cautioned here to beware of both semi-biblical distortion and semi-biblical fiction—different misrepresentations of God. We are admonished here to abide by the First Commandment. God’s coming is multifaceted and hard to pin down. We need a more robust theism, so that “we can love more truly, live more simply, care more deeply, fight more fairly” (a choice phrase if ever there was one).

In “Monarch,” the design is intended to follow the text, though not in a rigidly exegetical sense. Here, as often elsewhere in the sermons, there is a primary emphasis and reliance on the Hebrew Scripture, in its layers of interpretation, from the voice of Samuel, to the shaping of the narrator, to the editing of the redactor. Here we are reminded of the importance of institutions (such an immediately timely word), with a reference to Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism. The Divine monarchy relativizes all others. Christ the King is the only King. Institutions! You can’t live with or without them! Here as so often in the sermons there is steady emphasis on dialectical thought and expression.

In “Wisdom,” the design, the rhetorical movement, is from similar to different, from familiar to less familiar, relying on Psalm 19 and Proverbs 1. The sermon begins with playful references to dozens of English words for “fool.” Here is a good, direct sermonic reminder, for the preacher, to engage the hearer by moving from similar to different, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, as here, from our own interest in wisdom, seen in language, to that of the Hebrews.

In “Death” (the one sermon of these in the collection I heard live in 2007), the design is an imagined conversation with a deceased friend, a meditation on “The God of Untimely Death.” Wildman confesses: “I instinctively reach for the Hebrew Bible’s wisdom literature” when facing the endless train of death, the vagaries of “cavalier liberal brethren” and the inadequacy of Personalism:

If I have to believe in God as a personal, aware, active creator, then I need an ancient worldview to match. I would gladly serve a God who creates the way Genesis hints, lovingly making each creature, fully formed, responsive to God’s gift of life. If God has to be a big and powerful person, then give me Genesis or give me nothing! To hell with the countless death pits of our planetary history, to hell with the meandering experimentation of evolution, and to hell with coincidence and bad luck and pointless suffering and meaningless murder and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, to hell with untimely death. If God has to be a super-person who knows and cares and protects, then give me a world where evil acts of mass murder are never the outworking of mental illness and social torture but always simply the wicked deeds of bad people. Give me a God with a plan, even though I can’t grasp its purpose. Give me Ecclesiastes!

Here Wildman reminds us of Edmund Steimle, of blessed memory, and particularly of sermons like his classic, “Address Not Known.” Like Steimle, Wildman has in his sights “many theological liberals.” For Wildman, again, God is best pictured as “the Ground of Being—the depth structures of nature and the wellsprings of value.” Yet, we sense that his deceased friend (whose voice we do not hear in the sermon) might, we could imagine, respond thus to Wildman: “There is a kind of presence in God’s absence. There is a power in personhood though God is before and beyond personality. There is ever the power and possibility of love though God has given us the ‘freedom to go straight to hell if we so choose’ (Tutu). There is mystery, aplenty, in all creation. There is creation, even though there is more and fuller evidence of fall. But there is also new creation, though the pains of the old creation are ever so evident.”

In fact, the careful design of the sermon not only invites, but also requires us, to some measure, to imagine what his dear, silent, deceased friend might have said. Or what we might say.

In “Creator,” the design relies squarely on personal experience. The rhetorical form of the sermon is reflection upon personal experience, Wildman’s experience as an “evangelical liberal.” Note his irenic spirit, speaking of liberals and conservatives: “We do have a great deal in common, including our love of children, our celebration of our mothers and fathers, our preference for peaceful neighborhoods, our quest for health and happiness, and our conviction that life is best lived in relation to an ultimate reality that suffuses everyday events and transcends everyday concerns. But despite these shared life goals, mutual suspicion and hostility are very real.” Reality, authority, history, church—all these split liberals from conservatives. And speaking of personal experience: “To Darwin, God gradually seemed less personal, benevolent, attentive, and active. Either God or evolution must go. That revelation demands not atheism—not for Darwin and not for us today either—but a different conception of the divine.” This sermon, out of experience, rejects a personal, benevolent, attentive, active God—because of the evolutionary harshness of the process of creation. All preachers, younger and older, will do well to try to wrestle with the ways this preacher is himself wrestling with the traditions of Christian preaching, and its theological architectures and structures. At all events, these sermons give us the opportunity to meditate on their various designs, and so on sermon design in our own work.

A dear friend, a venerable and now superannuated preacher, the Rev. Gordon Knapp, one of the consistently best Methodist preachers of his era and area, recently wrote in an unpublished essay, “The Preaching Tree”:

Historically, there are Roman Catholic and Episcopalian priests, Lutheran pastors and Methodist preachers. However, the designation preacher does not sit well with many contemporary United Methodist clergy. Most prefer to be known as ministers or change agents or CEOs or pastoral counselors or religious enablers. With the popular connotation of the word “preach” being the presentation of boring, banal and unwanted advice, little wonder clergy dread to be known as preacher. Despite the negative image, preacher continues to remain an honorable designation, signifying someone who espouses and presents the Christian faith. Even with the plethora of today’s electronic gimmickry, preaching continues to be the primary means by which Christianity is kept before those who claim to profess it, those who wish to fine tune it, and those in need of hearing its demands and promises. The late William Barclay (that wonderful old Scotsman) suggested that four essential aspects of preaching are captured Greek in words: kerygma, didiche, paraklesis and homilia. To me, these terms suggest the analogy of a tree; a Preaching Tree with its roots, trunk, blossoms and fruit of the Gospel message.

Professor Wildman holds onto the designation, preacher, and preaches under the shading, luxurious branches of such a preaching tree.

In all, it is a happy, welcome moment to have the pleasure to welcome Professor Wildman’s sermons, in print. Herein he does challenge us to know and speak the truth, or what truth we know to speak. Herein he does wrestle with the traditions within the Great Tradition, the various days within the great and lasting Day of God. Herein he does school us in the varieties of sermon design, of forms in rhetoric, many of which can themselves be used in other sermons, by different preachers in different voices (and, of course, novel content, with quotations and citations as necessary). Herein he does carry us into ranges of Holy Scripture, some familiar and some less, against the backdrop of seasonal and lectionary readings. Herein, with vigor, Wildman announces the Gospel of the God Who Is: “This God is the very Ground of Being, the depth structures and dynamic flows of life, the cosmic Dao and the God beyond God of our beloved mystics. This God waits for the unfolding of nature itself, of our very lives.”