Читать книгу Preaching That Makes the Word Plain - William Clair Turner - Страница 4

Nearly twenty-five years ago, not long after completing my doctoral work, Dr. C. Eric Lincoln, who chaired my committee, suggested that I write a book entitled, “Why I Preach.” He said there should be an introduction about preaching, followed by a collection of sermons. I could not see it then, as I had just completed the dissertation and was looking to launch a scholarly project. He saw what I could not see. Preaching is my passion. For me it is the seminal interaction between the living God through the scriptures, embodied in one who lives among the people of God.

Coming through the civil rights, black power, and Vietnam War eras forced upon me the issues of prophetic critique and ministry that is relevant to the cries of the oppressed. It is fair to say that the theological critique prompted by these movements is what permitted my continuing embrace of the Christian faith. The themes of those times reinforced the centrality of the gospel and the power of the Christian pulpit (for good and for ill). The strengths and weaknesses of the church pivot on the interrelationship between theology as a critical discipline and the dispensation of the gospel in the crucible of life. It is the dispensation that shapes the lives of persons and communities as faithful witnesses to the Son of God, or fashions imposters that bring shame to the name of Messiah Jesus.

The intervening years have been punctuated by an active schedule of preaching and teaching in the areas of theology, black church studies, homiletics, and ministry. The exercise has been one that is characterized by tension. Indeed, it fits the description Jacob gave for Issachar when he blessed his sons—namely, the blessing of being balanced by two burdens. There is the burden of preaching to the people of God, hearing their cries, and carrying them before God. Then there is the burden of teaching others how to do the work of ministry. For me there has been balancing grace to fight against the tilt toward unreflective ministry on the one hand, and teaching and research not grounded in the life of the church on the other.

An administrative appointment in Black Church Affairs opened latitude in teaching not afforded while on a tenure track in theology. While under that appointment an opportunity arose to shift into homiletics and ministry. The result was that the practices of ministry became the focus for my ongoing interests in pneumatology and the critical study of the African American church. It opened the way for me to teach what I practice, and to probe the practices of ministry as content (text) for reflection.

Along with reading texts on preaching, teaching preaching, and doing the work of preaching, I have taken time to reflect on some of the preachers who had foundational impact on me. At the time I had no clue regarding how their spiritual fingerprints were being used of God to shape a malleable lump of clay. On occasions it is as though I can hear their voices in the background, carrying on a conversation over my shoulder as I do my work. It is like some sort of spiritual protoplasm, or formative DNA has been left with me like a mystical residue, leaving a sense (sensus) for how to listen to the word for the sake of having something to say to the people. It is as though I ask the question raised within myself more than forty years ago, namely, how did they go from that text to that sermon? Below is a Short Roll Call.

James Forbes came to pastor my home church (St. John’s United Holy Church of America, Richmond, Va.) while I was a teenager. Excitement filled the air and the church wherever he preached or spoke for any reason. It was nothing short of amazing what this young, brilliant, theologically trained Pentecostal preacher could do with a text, and how he could make the pulpit come to life like his predecessors. He made you want to listen to him, but even more, listen to the text. He could take the old traditions of the church, find the doctrinal and scriptural roots, and breathe new life into them. He had a gift for making the word oh-so-relevant—contemporary, fresh, and insightful. In his hands, preaching was far more than prohibitions, and hellfire, which was fairly standard for holiness-Pentecostal preaching of that day. Later I learned how the content was culled out by meticulous exegesis and refracted through the theology of Paul Tillich and Karl Barth—to name two of the more prominent theologians of the mid twentieth century. This was true of many seminary trained black preachers in the latter third of the twentieth century.

We had heard his father. A former pastor, Bishop W. M. Clements, would invite him to preach revivals and for other special occasions. Clements called him Professor Forbes, and when he came the place was buzzing with great anticipation. Forbes the elder preached in a clear and powerful way that could not be forgotten. Forbes the younger joined with other luminaries of Richmond during that era. The list includes Samuel Proctor (who imprinted a generation), Robert Taylor, Y. B. Williams, David Shannon, Paul Nichols, and others whose names need to be enshrined for posterity.

The time was the sixties. We had heard from Martin Luther King Jr. and those prophetic strains could not be dismissed from our ears. More, we had heard from Malcolm X as well.1 He was insightful, critical, analytical, and compelling as an orator. The only problem was that we didn’t hear enough from him about Jesus, and we could not reconcile Adam with Yacub. For me the preaching of Forbes was like a prescription. It was most appealing and critical in opening space for a teenage lad to remain in the church with a Christian option to Malcolm.

Then there was Miles Jones. He came to Richmond in the sixties as well, and he pastored in the community where we lived (Providence Park). Never could a man do so much with the word! He could take a word given in the text and examine it, cross-examine it, look into it, listen to it, and wait for it to yield treasures. The question with which I was left on a constant basis was, “How in the world did he get so much out of a word we all had heard so many times?” The patience with which the work was done was astounding. There was not the “moan” or the tune that was standard for older preachers and often heard from younger ones as well. The preaching was full of inspiration and packed with information. And some of the people would still shout.

A man came from Brooklyn to install Miles Jones. He was not known around town before he came. But those who heard him never forgot him. So clear was his presentation, so forceful were his words, so relevant were his applications. His was preaching that was refreshing beyond measure. It took us a while to get it, but the name of the man was Sandy Ray (The Reverend Dr.). And we understood better why Miles preached the way he did.

Philip Cousin, a young pastor in Durham, was a rising star in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who later was elected a bishop. I attached myself to him as a college student and later as a seminarian. He was insightful, polished, full of knowledge and inspiration. His preaching was charged with contemporary relevance. He was astute to the tenor of the times, and his involvement as an activist was a mirror on the word he proclaimed. Actually, he taught me the only “formal” course I ever took in preaching, and he also taught black theology at Duke University Divinity School.

In him was a distillation of African Methodism. This theological tradition was populated with names I had never heard. Names like Richard Allen, Daniel Payne, Henry Turner, Reverdy Ransom. Cousin represented the tradition of preaching that was bursting forth under the nomenclature of black theology. Indeed, from the outset black theology was the essence of reading the scriptures through the interpretive lens of the African American pulpit.

The fingerprints of the black church that are all over the seminal statements coming from the National Committee of Negro Churchmen (later National Committee of Black Churchmen) were antecedently on him. This theology had roots that went deep into the soil and soul of the black independent church movement of the 1900s. It was tethered to the activism that birthed the church’s investment in abolition, emancipation, and the twentieth-century struggle for social justice. This preaching oozed with the passions (yea, the harmonies) of liberty, and was wedded to the strong and unapologetic call for conversion. Later I learned that this synthesis was at the very root of the faith into which I was born and from which I drew natal nurture.

A. W. Lawson influenced me as the quintessential churchman, whom I watched preach for the nurture, building, development, and molding of a congregation and a connectional church (the United Holy Church of America). I spent five years under his tutelage following the completion of my MDiv at Duke. A man full of wisdom, he exegeted within the tension of the worlds converging inside him. But more, he had a keen sense for where the church was being carried by the Spirit. A bishop in the United Holy Church of America with uncommon prescience, his intention was to join the power of the pulpit to a theology of the Spirit that moved it beyond the constrictions of fundamentalism and experiential dogmatism.

Bishop Lawson possessed uncommon theological sense for reading out what was given in the text to the destination embodied in living, breathing Christian communities. He was able to make doctrine come to life in a manner that was neither shallow nor denominationally limited. He stood in a tradition of great but lesser known preachers like H. L. Fisher, J. D. Diggs, G. J. Branch, E. B. Nichols, and J. W. Houston.2 While being “the theologian” of the United Holy Church, he was also the teacher and mentor for a vast number of young preachers in Durham and from various church traditions in eastern North Carolina. The influence remains strong within churches that were influenced by these pastors who still credit him for their initial studies, and the grounding he supplied in the practical wisdom (phronesis) that gives guidance and stability to the church.

It was from serving as his assistant that I was introduced to the wonderful discipline of lectio continua. We would select a book from which to preach and listen to what the writer had to say for a sustained period. Normally we preached from the Old Testament in the fall (an extended Advent), the gospels from the first of the year (Epiphany and Lent), and from an epistle following Easter (Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time). It is from this seminal, life-giving, mutual interpenetration between the word and the life of God’s people that good preaching emerges. This is the humus of pulpit theology that must remain as the anchor of the church, and the vital interlocutor for all other discourses that claim to do any reasoning about God.

When I went to the administrative track I felt free to teach what was in my heart. I never stopped preaching regularly for any significant period of time. First I taught an elective course in preaching. It was fun, and it seemed to go well. Eventually I taught the required course, to fill some gaps in coverage. That turned into an even more exciting venture as well.

Nearly twenty-five years later I have come back to the point suggested by the sage C. Eric Lincoln. Along the way there have been numerous points in the pilgrimage that have proved essential for the task. Without these stations I could scarcely give an account that would be clear to me or intelligible to anyone else. It is only in the crucible of preaching with regularity, and teaching in the fields listed above, that enough mist has lifted to understand and talk about this challenging work. And there is every hope to understand it even better bye and bye.

The distant background for my reflection on preaching (which informs my teaching) is the emergence of the black theology project in the second half of the twentieth century. There one can see the beginning stages of theology as an academic project rooted in the life of the church. It is a stage at which the church “lifts the voices” of those who do its reflective work and keeps them in a dialogue of mutual accountability. To be sure, this is not a moment without parallel in the long history of the church. But it is a moment deserving special notice in the American church.

This moment is one in which the church demanded to be heard—not just the church whose structures overlapped with those of the state, not only the church whose priests were approved by the king, but the church of former slaves, sharecroppers, and wage earners. Official theological tomes were rejected where they did not heed the God of the oppressed, follow the Lord who preached good news to the poor, and walk in the Spirit who gives liberty. The norm that emerged was the tension that required that if the voice of the academy deserves to be heard, it must see the interests of suffering humanity and hear from those who proclaim good news to the poor at every point. My quest as a preacher, a teacher of preaching, and a homiletical theologian is to privilege the tension as the methodological starting point and set it at the center of the practice of preaching as theological practice.

Essentially the method of black theology in its inception is what Henry Mitchell reiterated in Black Preaching. With an explicit interest in preaching, he looked at the thought of African American preachers, as Benjamin Mays did previously in his classic study, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Thought. The same trajectory is followed for the sake of doing ethics in Peter Paris’ The Social Teachings of the Black Churches. In other words, for groundbreaking work in systematics, preaching, and ethics there is a return to the same source. Close attention was given to how the African American Church (with the pulpit at the center) read the bible and reflected on the meaning of its life in God.

Knowledge of God from the scriptures—refracted through the experience of oppression, suffering, and triumph—was the standpoint in judgment from which to critique the formal theologies, especially those that served the ends of bondage rather than liberation. This work was not done outside of conversation with others doing theology, especially those of like mind. But discriminating taste was used to fashion a norm by which to know what was “a trick of the devil” under the guise of theology.

I am reminded here of what Howard Thurman said of his grandmother, who could not read herself, but would not allow him to read from Paul. In her judgment the slave-owners construction of texts instructing slaves to obey their masters was not consistent with the God she had come to know. Indeed, she was so bold as to question whether any such passage was in the bible at all.

Along with the skill for how to interpret the scriptures is the “sense for how to preach.” The question is how to deliver the word so that it has life and power. But alas, this sense for how to preach is not separable from how to read the scriptures. Reading and interpreting the scriptures for the sake of preaching is more than a technical exercise in exegesis.

One might even go so far as to employ the term coined in some circles as “interpretating the bible.”3 That is the employment of the “sanctified imagination” in the acts of reading, meditating, seeing into, and “chewing the scroll.” It is “tasting to see,” it is “seeing the voice,” it is being “touched by the fire” of the word. The sense here is that one must see and feel something before having anything to say that is worth hearing. The word is no dead letter; it is spirit and life. One could even hear the old preachers say at a point in the sermon, “I see something here.” Or, they would call upon a character from the scriptures as a witness—e.g., “Come here John, and tell me what you see.”

The sense of preacher as one who sees and hears is taken up in the oracles transcribed in J. W. Johnson’s God’s Trombones. The prayer for the preacher was that God would “Pin his ear to the wisdom-post, / . . . Put his eye to the telescope of eternity, / . . . turpentine his imagination,” so that his words might be “sledgehammers of truth.”4

Now the question is, how do you write about—and more, teach—such an art form so that there is integrity in the word that is being declared? I can recall oh-so-clearly the conviction that came upon me for the short-lived effort to sacrifice the content for the style during a period when I believed I did not have time for all the preparation I was led to give to the sermon. The consequence was colossal failure that was obvious to me first of all. I can only assume how painful it was for those who listened.

These are the “methodological currents” that go into my reflections on preaching. They are not contrary to other formal statements concerning preaching found in the standard texts. But these texts do not get to the heart of the project as I have experienced it being done. How shall I say it? They are good for what they are and what they do. But something goes on in the Black Pulpit that is well nigh mystical. I could expand this to all pulpits that are alive with vitality.

Writing about preaching reminds me of the conversation between the angel and the captive beside the river in Babylon. The captive had serious questions regarding the suffering of Israel, and he wanted some answers. After much of the evasion of the angel (or so the captive thought) the angel came back with questions of his own. He asked the captive to measure a pound of fire, a bushel of wind, to call back a day that was past, and make visible the shape of a human voice. Then he would give the explanation.

O preacher, how do you do your work? Take me into your workshop, into the workspace. Let me in on the secrets. Methodologically speaking, this sort of question is what I am seeking to probe. It honors but does not accept fully the old wisdom that the art of preaching is “caught rather than taught,” or that it is “better felt than tellt.”

In the not so distant background is my memory of the anguish of black preachers in the generation that preceded me. Some died and others still live with a strong degree of regret for loosing the talent they took to seminary and being trained away from their people. Studying preaching requires taking the risk of coming out sounding like your teacher. Well into the seventies and beyond, white churches would not call a black preacher, and black churches would not have you if you could not preach with an acceptable delivery.

Equally well, I remember the general anxiety of African American congregations over subscribing to a Duke-trained African American preacher. A person (or congregation) had no idea what they might be getting. Shaw, Virginia Union, Hood, Gammon, and other black seminaries and colleges had been training ministers as part of their original mission, and their track records were clear. But what would a Duke-trained black preacher do? To put it politely, there was fear.

I will ever remember the scene following preaching to the Hampton mini-conference. A Baptist preacher rattled his jaws and said, “. . . You didn’t learn that at Duke.” On another occasion I preached for an AME Conference. The bishop “put me up . . . to see what the young doctor could do.” The Lord blessed a sermon entitled, “The Power of God’s Approval.” Some time later that day one of the younger preachers commented, “Now I’m not scared to go to Duke anymore.” Methodologically speaking, I am seeking to set forth a way of doing the work by which I have sought to prepare preachers to be effective dispensers of the word with careful regard (not disregard) for the communities from which they come and to which they will be called or sent.

In the foreground is the need to serve a generation who did not hear the elders and whose experiences are so different that it is hard to appreciate how they did their work. In the view of many, the criteria for good preaching are set by media and consumer appeal. Dominant themes for this preaching are prosperity, wealth, patriotism, and material blessing. The primary vendors tend to be academic theologians who write for each other, or self-proclaimed popular theologians who are not subject to structures of accountability.

The busy preacher can easily become the consumer of theologies that take on the guise of scientific scholarship, or that boast of not being theology at all. The underlying interest in this effort is the quest for recovering the pulpit as an arena in which responsible theology is done as source and interlocutor with the widest possible public. I do believe that is what my esteemed teacher had in mind.

Part I consists of methodological discussions that reflect on preaching as the necessary work that must be done by persons who would speak faithfully for God. Revelation and inspiration notwithstanding, human hands must be set to tasks that demand great effort.

Chapter 1 explores theological tensions in preaching that reach all the way into exegesis. Because preaching is to be understood, it can never be free of tethers that connect it to the texts that give authority, and to the times and seasons during which it is uttered. An effort is made to show how work done with integrity honors the source and destination of preaching.

Chapter 2 sets the preacher in pneumatic space—space saturated by the Spirit. The location is somewhere between art and skill, between the mystical sphere in which the word is received and the mundane tasks like scratching the papyrus or striking the keyboard. This is where tedious tasks are sanctified. An attempt is made to say with words how hard work is turned into holy habits, so that one can grow to cherish the chores of preaching.

Chapter 3 is a discussion of the mechanics involved in putting a sermon together. It identifies knowledges from which good preaching draws so they can be set in place for the necessary homiletical judgments that must be made.

Part II is a selection of sermons preached from Romans 10, which is itself a mini-treatise on preaching. The sermons illustrate the methods discussed in Part I. They are transparent to the data of life in a particular Christian community. They advance the discussion of what preaching is and how it is done by refracting the word given in specific texts through the rhythms of life.

Join me, if you will, through the pages under this cover in my quest for a wedding between “teaching what I practice,” and “practicing what I teach.”

1. As college students we listened to both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X on 33LP records. The social analyses of both were amazingly close. There was a toss-up between them when it came to their oratory. Malcolm was every bit the “fiery preacher,” who possessed enormous persuasive gifts for moving an audience.

2. See Turner, United Holy Church of America.

3. In some cases this was but a mispronunciation of the word “interpretation.” But in other cases it reflected the engagement of the “sanctified imagination” that allowed the preacher to look into the word.

4. Johnson, God’s Trombones, 14.