{"id":38,"date":"2021-11-18T11:33:17","date_gmt":"2021-11-18T11:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/?post_type=chapter&p=38"},"modified":"2021-11-18T15:58:42","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T15:58:42","slug":"naming-grace","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/chapter\/naming-grace\/","title":{"raw":"Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination","rendered":"Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination"},"content":{"raw":"Just before Christmas in 1979, Time<\/em> magazine featured as its cover article a piece entitled \u201cAmerican Preaching \u2013 A Dying Art?\u201d The author\u2019s analysis of the state of preaching in the United States at that time went like this:\r\n

\u2018The Word became flesh,\u2019 says John\u2019s Gospel of the incarnate Christ of Bethlehem. In Christmas sermons before some 75 million Americans this week, words about Christ will become flesh in the person of the preacher.\u00a0 Through their strange and marvelous craft, Christianity has been transmitted and reshaped for every age since\u00a0 Christ himself went \u2018preaching the Gospel of the kingdom.\u2019<\/p>\r\n

\u201cFor many American churchgoers, though, a Sunday sermon is something merely to be endured. Many preachers and parishioners alike think that passionate and skillful preaching has grown rarer and rarer in individual congregations in postwar years. The chilling of the word is a major contribution to the evident malaise in many large Protestant denominations these days. For Roman Catholics, the sermon has not been as important, but rather a kind of spiritual hors d\u2019oeuvre before the Eucharist.\u201d<\/p>\r\nAlmost 15 years later, the situation has not changed significantly. A sociological survey was conducted in 1988 among lay church members in four denominations in the United States \u2013 Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and Methodist.[footnote]Dean R. Hoge, Jackson W. Carroll, and Francis K. Sheets, Patterns of Parish Leadership: Cost and Effectiveness in Four Denominations (Sheed and Ward, 1988).[\/footnote] Parishes or congregations were asked to list in order of priority their highest hopes and expectations from their church and then to rate how successfully each of those expectations was met.\r\n\r\nAll four denominations listed \u201cpreaching\u201d as their first priority and \u201cspiritual life\u201d as their second. When asked how successfully their church met their expectations, all four denominations indicated their disappointment in both areas.\r\n\r\nWe who are Catholics in the post-Vatican II Church might validly protest the caricature of preaching as a mere \u201chors d\u2019oeuvre before the Eucharist.\u201d The liturgical reforms of Vatican II have certainly underscored the centrality of the homily in all of our sacramental worship (SC, 35, 53).\r\n\r\nThe documents on the roles of bishops and priests reemphasize the bishop\u2019s responsibility to see that the Word of God is proclaimed effectively in the local church and that \u201cpriests ... have as their primary duty the proclamation of the gospel of God to all\u201d (BP: LG 25, CD 12; Priests, P04, CD 28, LG 28). What is even more remarkable is the emphasis on the responsibility of all the baptized to share in the preaching mission of the church (AA 2, CD 35, GS 43).\r\n\r\nNevertheless, the concern about the \u201cchilling of the word\u201d remains. Almost 25 years ago, Paul VI identified the problem in his Apostolic Exhortation on Evangelization<\/em>: \u201cIn our day, what has happened to that hidden energy of the good news which is able to have such a powerful effect on the human conscience? To what extent and in what way is that evangelical force capable of really transforming people of this century?\u201d[footnote]Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi, December 8, 1975, no. 4.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nWhen preachers, pastors or sociologists of religion gather to identify why there is not more energy surrounding the preaching of the Church, questions of the theology and spirituality of preaching rarely are the focus of the discussion. Even the homiletic literature\u00a0to date is very limited in those areas.[footnote]In a recent survey of homiletic literature, Ronald Allen noted: \u201cPreaching is preeminently a theological act. Yet, there is a near lacuna in our literature: we give little attention to theological analysis of the preaching event.\u201d (\u201cNew Directions in Homiletics,\u201d Journal for Preachers, Easter 1993, 21.) Similar observations have been made by David Buttrick, Homiletic: Moves and Structures (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987) 486; John A. Mel loh, \u201cPublish or Perish: A Review of Preaching Literature 1968-1981,\u201d Worship 82 (1988) 506-07; and Robert P. Waznak, \u201cA Second Response [to David Buttrick],\u201d Worship 62 (1988) 273.[\/footnote] The wager of this lecture, however, is that one factor contributing to the blocking of the power of the Gospel in our day is precisely our understanding of where the word of God is located and what the preaching event is meant to be.\r\n\r\nMost theologies of preaching to date have been developed from the perspective of the Reformation traditions, usually in neo orthodox categories that have highlighted the utter transcendence\u00a0of God\u2019s Word, the sinfulness of the human situation and some form of law-gospel paradigm for preaching. Thus, for example, in his classic book, The Preaching of the Gospel<\/em>, Reformed theologian Karl Barth asserts that, \u201cIt is not the function of the preacher to reveal God or to act as his intermediary. When the Gospel is preached, God speaks: there is no question of the preacher revealing anything or of a revelation being conveyed through him.\u201d (p. 12)\r\n\r\nBarth is clear in his conviction that the proclamation of the Gospel is to be proclamation of the Word of God \u2013 not some human word. Preaching is not supposed to interpret the world or human experience religiously or to tell the stories of women and men, no matter how inspiring \u2013 it is to express the Word of God.[footnote]Molt, Church in Power of Spirit, 207.[\/footnote] The preacher is to announce what God has made known in Jesus Christ.\r\n\r\nBarth\u2019s theology of revelation is explicit: God\u2019s Word is revealed in Jesus, in the Scriptures, in the proclamation of the Church. It is not revealed in human history or human experience; neither is it mediated by the preacher or the community. Revelation is totally God\u2019s action. The preacher is the herald who bears witness to God\u2019s sovereign power and grace in Jesus Christ.\r\n\r\nWhen the authentic Word of God is preached, the Spirit of God calls forth the human response of obedience to the Word. Barth reminds us, however, that the relationship between humanity and God is \u201ceffected from on high by a divine miracle. [We are] not naturally disposed to hear the Word of God: we are children of wrath\u201d (Eph. 2:3).[footnote]Ibid., 80.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe theology of preaching that emerges from the Lutheran tradition is classically described as a law-gospel hermeneutic. The preacher first diagnoses the human situation under the burden of God\u2019s law, which we have no power to observe. As Richard Lischer, professor of homiletics at Duke University, describes it: The \u201cfirst word\u201d to be said about the human condition is the \u201cbad news\u201d of our failure to live in fidelity to God\u2019s covenant, resulting in the condition of enmity with God. We are \u201cchildren of wrath.\u201d[footnote]Richard Lischer, A Theology of Preaching (Nashville: Abing don, 1981), 50.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nHaving confronted the congregation with the law, the preacher then announces the Gospel: the good news that in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we are no longer \u201cunder the law\u201d; rather we live in the freedom of the children of God. The bottom line is, of course, Paul\u2019s famous phrase: \u201cWhere sin abounds, grace abounds still more\u201d (Rom. 5:20).\r\n\r\nThere is a profound truth to this Christian perspective on the preaching of the Gospel with its emphasis on the power of the proclaimed Word, the sovereignty of God, the radical alienation at the heart of the human condition and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. These are convictions that all Christians share, even if we don\u2019t all emphasize them in the same way that Karl Barth did, especially in his early writings.\r\n\r\nWhat I\u2019d like to explore this evening is another way of expressing the relationship between the divine and the human, what I\u2019m calling tonight \u201cthe sacramental imagination.\u201d In an age of ecumenical dialogue and significant diversity within any specific religious tradition, it becomes difficult to identify clear distinctions between Protestants and Catholics. David Tracy has suggested that\u00a0it may be at the level of \u201cimagination\u201d that the most significant differences occur.[footnote]For a very helpful overview of the distinction between the dialectical imagination and the analogical imagination, see Tracy\u2019s The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 405-445.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nWe might speak of two distinct Christian spiritualities that cannot be identified simply as Protestant and Catholic. For example, Anglicans, some Lutherans and some Methodists find themselves more at home in the sacramental imagination than in the forms of Reformation theology I have just described \u2013 what David Tracy calls the dialectical imagination.\r\n\r\nThe dialectical imagination emphasizes the distance between God and humanity, focuses on the hiddenness and absence of God, the sinfulness of human beings, the paradox of the cross, the need for\u00a0grace as forgiveness and reconciliation, the limits of any human community or institution including the Church, and the not-yet character of the promised reign of God.\r\n\r\nThe sacramental imagination (or what Tracy calls The Analogical Imagination<\/em>) emphasizes the presence of the God who is self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God \u2013 restless hearts seeking the divine, the mystery of the incarnation, grace as divinizing as well as forgiving, the mediating role of the Church as sacrament of salvation in the world, and the \u201cforetaste\u201d of the reign of God, which is present in human community wherever God\u2019s reign of justice, peace and love is fostered.\r\n\r\nIt is in terms of anthropology that the dialectical and sacramental imaginations diverge most dramatically. The 1983\u00a0ecumenical breakthrough statement from the U.S. Lutheran Roman Catholic dialogue on \u201cJustification by Faith\u201d highlights the theological differences in this area:\r\n

The Lutheran hermeneutical understanding of\u00a0justification by faith in some ways heightens the tension with Catholic positions. It does so by excluding from the Gospel proclamation all reference to the freedom and goodness of fallen human beings on the ground that this would undermine the unconditionality of God\u2019s promises in Christ.[footnote]\u201cJustification by Faith,\u201d U.S. Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue Statement, Origins 13 (October\u00a0 6, 1983), #154.[\/footnote]<\/p>\r\nIt is precisely here that a contribution to the growing ecumenical discussion of a theology of preaching might be made from the sacramental imagination that views grace as active in and through humanity and creation. Grounded in the conviction that sin never completely destroyed the created goodness of humanity, the Catholic response to the debate initiated by Emil Brunner as to whether there is a \u201cpoint of contact for preaching the Gospel of grace\u201d \u2013 in other words, is there a touchstone in people\u2019s human experience for the hearing of the Gospel? \u2013 is clearly \u201cyes.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe Catholic tradition has emphasized that grace builds on nature and that grace affects a real inner transformation of the human person. Karl Rahner has taken that insight even further in his claim that human beings always stand within the call to grace; God\u2019s offer of intimate friendship with humanity constitutes a basic orientation of every human person\u2019s life from the very beginning (in Rahnerian language, the supernatural existential). Human persons are actually constituted as \u201chearers of the Word\u201d \u2013 all human beings, in fact creation itself, has been fashioned as \u201copenness for the incarnation.\u201d\r\n\r\nBecause human persons are not pure spirit, but rather body - spirit, grace (or the invisible presence of God among us) needs to be made present in concrete, historical, visible ways. The spiritual mystery at the heart of reality is mediated in and through the ordinary events and persons of our daily lives, through human history and creation.\r\n\r\nBut that mystery of love at the core of reality remains \u201chidden\u201d or \u201canonymous\u201d unless it is brought to word. That is what both preaching and the sacraments (which Augustine called \u201cvisible words\u201d) do: they allow the grace that is the depth dimension of reality to be recognized and celebrated.\r\n\r\nCatholic spirituality and theology have traditionally emphasized the continuity, rather than the discontinuity, between nature and grace, between creation and revelation, between our ordinary human lives and the extraordinary gift of God\u2019s presence and power among us. So it seems \u201cfitting,\u201d as Aquinas would say, to speak of the continuity between human experience and Christian preaching.\r\n\r\nAny Christian theology of preaching will center on Jesus Christ as Word of God. But what if, instead of emphasizing the difference of Jesus from the rest of us and the transcendence of God\u2019s Word, we were to focus on the mystery of the incarnation \u2013 the mystery that God\u2019s fullest word has been spoken in history, in a human being, in human experience? What are the implications of believing that the Word of God is to be discovered enfleshed in human history?\r\n\r\nWhile it may not be immediately apparent, all of this has implications for the concrete process of homily preparation and feedback. Those of us who are preachers, for example, might reflect on our process of preparing a homily.\r\n\r\nDo I operate as if the Word of God is revealed to me in the biblical passage, in my prayer, and in my study of the commentaries by theologians, and think of the process of writing the homily as trying somehow to apply this Word of God to people\u2019s secular lives and a profane world? Or do I really believe that God\u2019s Word (a word of hope, of healing, of liberation, of resurrection) is being spoken in new ways today in people\u2019s concrete experiences and daily lives?\r\n\r\nIs the same creative Spirit of God who was active in the his - tory of Israel, in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in the Church of the past, and in the lives of the saints, still active among us today? If that\u2019s part of our theology of revelation, then reflection on culture, on people\u2019s lives and human experience, is necessary, not as a way to make a homily relevant or to get people\u2019s attention, but in order to even hear that the Word God is speaking today.\r\n\r\nNaming the grace that is to be found in the faith experience of the community involves listening to and learning from the members of the community. Very practical decisions regarding team preaching, communal faith-sharing, dialogic modes of preaching, invitations to preach for those whose voices are rarely heard in the community and the creation of opportunities for response to preaching all communicate an underlying theology of preaching and revelation. The word of faith that the preacher proclaims is the community\u2019s word. The preacher speaks in the name of the community and proclaims the deepest convictions of the community.\r\n\r\nThat means the preacher needs the kind of contemplative awareness that seeks God in and through all the experiences of life. Another way to say this is that our sacramental imaginations need\u00a0to be developed if we are to grasp the implications of the mystery of incarnation for a theology of preaching. The mystery of the divine has become one with creation; God has become flesh in human history; the Spirit of God is alive and active and \u201cloose in the world\u201d and dwells among communities of Christian believers who live and speak in the name of Jesus.\r\n\r\nGiven that sacramental imagination, I\u2019m suggesting this evening that we reflect on preaching as the art of naming grace in human experience. But if we are to do that, it is important to recall three things: 1) we are talking about human experience in its depth dimension; 2) in our world today, most people\u2019s experi ence of God is in the face of, and often in spite of, human suf fering; and 3) we get our clues as to how to identify grace in the human story from the biblical story and basic symbols of the Christian tradition.\r\n\r\nHuman Experience in its Depths<\/strong>\r\n\r\nNaming the presence of God in human experience requires pressing to the limits of human existence, where both the threat of radical human finitude and experiences of overwhelming meaning and joy raise the fundamentally religious question of the \u201cground of our being.\u201d At the boundaries of human life, \u201csignals of transcendence\u201d emerge within human experience. Secular language breaks its limits in trying to express \u201cthe other dimension\u201d or the \u201csurplus of meaning\u201d disclosed from the depths of human experience.[footnote]See Paul Ricouer, \u201cNaming God,\u201d Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34 (1979) 215-227, and \u201cBiblical Hermeneutics,\u201d Semeia 4(1975) 107-148; David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order (N.Y.: Seabury, 1975) 91-131; Louis Dupre, The Other Dimension (N.Y.: Seabury, 1979); Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). For Schillebeeckx\u2019s approach, which emphasizes a dialectical disclosure of the experience of grace as the basis for naming God at the limits of human experience, see Edward Schillebeeckx, The Understanding of Faith (London: Sheed and Ward, 1974), 78-101; and Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (chap. 2, n. 12) 29 -79.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nWhile revelation takes place in human experience, it cannot be identified with human experience. Rather, as Edward Schillebeeckx has noted, \u201cRevelation takes place in historical human experience in this world, but at the same time it summons us from what we take for granted in our limited world. It is\u00a0therefore not to be found in any direct appeal to our so -called self evident experiences within the world. As experience, it is the crossing of a boundary within the dimensions of human experience.\u201d[footnote]Schillebeeckx, Christ, 62. Note also Schillebeeckx\u2019s further reference to \u201cwhat proclaims itself in experience to be an astonishing and overwhelming event in reality, correcting and crossing all our plans and achievements\u201d (Christ, 64). See also Avery Dulles, \u201cRevelation and Discovery,\u201d in William J. Kelly, Theology and Discovery (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 1-29.[\/footnote] At this boundary or final limit of human experience, we either speak of God or we must remain silent.\r\n\r\nThus one of the contemplative tasks of the preacher or preaching community is to reflect on human experience in order to identify the ultimate foundation of the mystery of human life: the God who often remains hidden. The ability to make that connection presumes that preachers are in touch with the human struggle \u2013 their own and those of others.\r\n\r\nBoth the prophets in the history of Israel, such as Hosea, Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and the authentic early Christian preachers like Mary Magdalene, Peter and Paul were formed for their preaching through the profound, and usually painful, human experience of whatever aspect of God\u2019s word they were called to preach.\r\n\r\nSo, too, those who pray to become ministers of the word in our day are asking to be baptized in the experience from which that word emerged. Whether from our own life experience or from attending to the stories of others, nothing human should remain foreign to preachers if we are to grasp what it means to proclaim that all of humanity has been taken into God and redeemed in Christ.[footnote]Although he is operating out of a different anthropological basis, see Gerhard Ebeling\u2019s God and Word, trans. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967). Ebeling argues that we need the word of God \u201cto save [us] from choking on [our] own self because we no longer [have] any word with which to cry out of the depths of [our] self-contradiction and call upon that mystery that sur rounds [us].\u201d (47)[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe poet Rainer Maria Rilke knew well that the authentic word can flow only from the depths of life experience. As he wrote to a younger poet:\r\n

For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities,\u00a0 people and things. One must know the animals, one must\u00a0feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which\u00a0 the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able\u00a0 to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected\u00a0 meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to\u00a0 days of childhood that are still unexplained ... to days in\u00a0 rooms withdrawn and quiet, and to mornings by the sea,\u00a0 to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel ... and it is not\u00a0 yet enough if one may think of all this. One must have\u00a0 memories of many nights of love ... of the screams of\u00a0 women in labor .... But one must also have been beside\u00a0 the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with\u00a0 the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not\u00a0 yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget\u00a0 them when they are many, and one must have the great\u00a0 patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet\u00a0 the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to\u00a0 blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no\u00a0 longer to be distinguished from ourselves \u2013 not until then\u00a0 can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a\u00a0 verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.[footnote]Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malie Laurids Brigge, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (N.Y.: W.W. Norton and Co., 1949), 26 -27.[\/footnote]<\/p>\r\nThe contemplative embrace of life that Rilke describes as essential to the creative writer is all the more necessary for the preacher who is called to make the word a home, to dwell in the Word of God that is a word enfleshed.\r\n\r\nSome would argue that this naming of grace that is already present in human life does not do justice to the power of the word to bring about salvation, not just to name it.[footnote]See, e.g., Gerhard Ebeling, God and Word (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966) 42.[\/footnote] But because human persons live according to the meanings we perceive and construct, the naming of grace is no small matter.\r\n\r\nBringing a deeper dimension of human life to awareness and conscious responsibility has serious implications. A friendship forms before it is fully recognized and claimed, but when friends or partners explicitly claim the bond of love between them, they also deepen their commitment to one another and make decisions that will affect future choices.\r\n\r\nCommunities and individuals act in outrage and response when the innocent are violated, but meetings that clarify and analyze the structural evils that perpetuate individual crimes deepen the participants\u2019 anger and their commitment to justice. A change of perception or worldview is essential to a radical change of life. Even on the level of human words, we know the power of words to deepen or even create what they signify. What happens when someone speaks words like:\r\n

I love you.<\/p>\r\n

This relationship is over. I want a divorce.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019m sorry to have to tell you, your cancer is inoperable.<\/p>\r\n

Here I stand; I can do no other.<\/p>\r\n

You are hereby sentenced to life imprisonment.<\/p>\r\n

I, Martha, take you, Juan, to be my husband.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019m sorry your services won\u2019t be needed any longer.<\/p>\r\n

You are forgiven.<\/p>\r\nThose kinds of words open up new futures \u2013 or cut off the future. They are not \u201cjust words\u201d; they are symbols that evoke a deeper mystery, whether of love or possibility or belief or com - mitment or death. The relationship of love was there before the words were spoken. The problems in the relationship were there before any mention of divorce, but somehow with the words the reality of the relationship or commitment is deepened or changed.\r\n\r\nIn a real sense, those kinds of words have the power to create a new experience. Our world is not the same before and after words like that are spoken. We might call those words revelatory words, because they disclose levels of the mystery of human life that are too deep for words. When we are talking about preaching as naming grace, we are talking about a \u201cnaming\u201d that has that kind of power.\r\n\r\nNaming Grace in the Midst of Suffering<\/strong>\r\n\r\nOne of the fundamental challenges to any preacher of the good news that God is with us, however, is all the evidence to the contrary. Whether we turn to Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, our own city\u00a0streets, battered women\u2019s shelters, the AIDS hospice, the unemployment line, the most recent story of child abuse, or the more daily struggles of families and individuals gathered for Sunday worship, stories of suffering abound.\r\n\r\nIs it really possible that grace abounds still more? Is the power of resurrection really active among us? Does the Spirit of God continue to raise the dead to life? As we listen for a word of God from that context of global suffering, believers continue to wrestle with what Karl Barth identified in 1922 as \u201cevery hearer\u2019s question\u201d about the good news: \u201cIs it true?\u201d\r\n\r\nBarth remarked on the contrast between what the liturgy proclaims and people\u2019s concrete lives:\r\n

The whole liturgy says: God is present. The whole\u00a0 situation witnesses, cries, simply shouts of it, even if in\u00a0 the minister or people there arises questioning,\u00a0wretchedness, or despair .... But what does \u201cGod is\u00a0 present\u201d mean in the face of the great riddle of existence? ... Is it true? \u2013 this talk of a loving and good God who is more than one of the friendly idols? \u2026 A passionate\u00a0 longing to have the word spoken that promises grace is\u00a0 the desire of every church-goer no matter how they\u00a0 express their want in so-called real life.[footnote]Karl Barth, \u201cThe Need and Promise of Christian Preaching,\u201d in The Word of God and the Word of Man (N.Y.: Harper and Brothers, 1957) 107-09. Note also Nathan Scott: \u201cOf all the myriad issues of life which the Christian pulpit is required to handle there is none so pressing, so inescapable, and so burdensome for the preacher as the problem of suffering, the mystery of iniquity, the strange and brutal haphazardness with which as it seems at times, acute misfortune is distributed amongst persons.\u201d Nathan A. Scott, \u201cThe Burdens and Temptations of the Pulpit,\u201d in Preaching on Suffering and a God of Love, ed. and with a foreword by Henry J. Young (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978) 7.[\/footnote]<\/p>\r\nThe word of grace that all human beings, not only church-goers, long to hear cannot be spoken too quickly, however. Hope in the resurrection cannot be experienced as a radical experience of grace unless the cross of Jesus is seen for the profound sign of contradiction that Paul reminded us it is. Preaching the incarnation \u2013 which includes the whole paschal mystery \u2013 in the midst of a world of suffering is only possible if we take seriously contemporary experiences of anguish, impasse and the absence of God.\r\n\r\nHow can we continue to proclaim Jesus as universal savior in a world where so many human beings are deprived of basic human rights and the ecosystem is being rapidly destroyed? The ongoing experience of the crucified of this world calls for a rethinking of the mystery of the cross if preachers and communities of faith are to proclaim an authentic word of hope in the power of the resurrection in the midst of human suffering.\r\n\r\nIn a world of suffering, the last word about the cross may be that it is indeed a mystery of divine love, fidelity and solidarity, but the first word that must be spoken is of its scandal, injustice and absurdity. Not only political and liberation theologians, but most theologians reflecting on Christology today emphasize that the cross must be put in the context not only of the resurrection, but also of the life and ministry of Jesus.\r\n\r\nAs many have noted, it is no coincidence that Jesus did not die in bed. Jesus was executed as a political criminal and a religious\u00a0blasphemer as the consequence of his \u201cdangerous preaching\u201d of the reign of God.\r\n\r\nHis healing ministry and His inclusive table companionship threatened traditional boundaries that distinguished insiders from outsiders in both religious and political realms. Jesus shocked religious authorities as He announced the forgiveness of sins, the prerogative of God alone. He touched lepers and spoke with Samaritans. He formed bonds of friendship with, and invited into the circle of His disciples, women and tax collectors who collaborated with the oppressive Roman Empire.\r\n\r\nA faithful Jew, He radically reinterpreted Jewish tradition and laws of Sabbath observance and ritual purity. The reign of God He announced in His liberating lifestyle and His shocking parables and beatitudes, the unconditional compassion of God that He embodied in His person and style of relating, even the joy and freedom He invited others to embrace, was a profound challenge to religious and political structures of the day.[footnote]See John Dominic Crossan, \u201cThe Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant,\u201d The Christian Century, Dec. 18-25, 1991, 1194 -1204, regarding the profound social and political challenge of Jesus\u2019 eating and healing patterns. For a synthesis of critical scholarship from a historical-critical perspective, see John P. Meier, \u201cJesus,\u201d New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 1316-1328. See also Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity, rev. ed. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1992); Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (chap. 3, n. 20); Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, trans. John Drury (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1978).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nIn the end, the one whose entire life proclaimed \u201cGod\u2019s \u2018no\u2019 to human suffering\u201d[footnote]Edward Schillebeeckx\u2019s phrase, Jesus (chap. 3, n. 20) 178.[\/footnote] was betrayed by an intimate disciple, abandoned by many of His closest friends, handed over to the empire by religious leaders, sentenced by a political leader who knew Him to be innocent, mocked and tortured by soldiers, and executed as a criminal, dying on a cross between two thieves. The one who preached absolute trust in the reign of a compassionate God was left in darkness to face rejection of His mission and the utter silence of God. Some theologians even speak of Jesus as abandoned by God.[footnote]See J\u00fcrgen Moltmann The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), and \u201cThe Crucified God: God and The Trinity Today,\u201d in New Questions about God, Concilium Vol. 76, ed. J.B. Metz (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972) 26-37; and Sobrino, Christol ogy at the Crossroads; for \u201capparent abandonment\u201d see Edward Schillebeeckx, \u201cThe \u2018God of Jesus\u2019 and the \u2018Jesus of God,\u2019\u201d Jesus Christ and Human Freedom, Concilium Vol. 93, ed. E. Schillebeeckx and B. van Iersal (New York: Herder, 1974) 110-126; Robert J. Schreiter,\u201d \u201cThe Crucified God,\u201d The Bible Today 28 (May 1990), 159-64.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe cross of Jesus, like all human suffering, raises profound questions about God and God\u2019s fidelity and, to use the language of\u00a0tonight\u2019s lecture \u2013 about naming grace in human experience. But one of the very reasons why we need the language and symbolism of the cross is to name the depth of human pain as religious, to show that the human struggle with suffering is ultimately a spiritual crisis. Jesus\u2019 cry continues in our world: \u201cMy God, my God, why have you forsaken me?\u201d\r\n\r\nIn an age of massive and senseless suffering, including two world wars and the Holocaust, Edward Schillebeeckx wants to reject any version of suffering as \u201cGod\u2019s will\u201d \u2013 instead he underlines the scandal of the cross. He has even suggested that, in one sense, we are saved in spite of the cross of Jesus, rather than because of it. Nevertheless, in the end, Jesus faced the cross as the final consequence of fidelity to His preaching mis sion with a radical hope in the compassionate God He knew as Abba.\r\n\r\nHe filled an experience that was in itself meaningless and absurd with meaning, love and a sense of solidarity with all the innocent who suffer. He filled what was utter disgrace with grace. What Christians celebrate is not the cross, nor the sufferings of Jesus, but the power of a love that is faithful even unto death. The triumph of the cross is the triumph of God\u2019s mercy bursting the bonds of sin and death.\r\n\r\nIt is not the cross that Christians preach, but the entire paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus. What Christians celebrate is that death and evil do not have final victory; the power of God does. The earliest Christian preaching was the good news that the death of Jesus was not the end.\r\n\r\nIn and through Jesus\u2019 love and fidelity, God has taken on the evil and suffering of this world and broken their hold, once and for all, with the stronger power of love. What is impossible for us is possible for God. Hence the mocking tone of Paul: \u201cO death where\u00a0is your victory?\u201d The Christian hope remains that God can and will bring life out of death, that like Jesus, we and those we love will be vindicated and transformed.\r\n\r\nBut the dynamic of hope, like the power of resurrection, is beyond human control or possibility. Only God can restore the dead to life. Do we as Christian preachers too often resort to self help or human wisdom because we are afraid to attend to the lament of our congregations and to entrust the pain to God? Do we believe that God can and will bring life beyond death?\r\n\r\nIf our liturgies and preaching are to draw us more deeply into the paschal mystery that constitutes our daily lives, we need ways of remembering and ritualizing the scandal of the cross, as well as the victory and hope of resurrection.\r\n\r\nFor the sake of authentic faith in our day, we need to allow more dissonance in the harmony of the sacramental imagination and celebration. Lament disrupts the mood of praise and thanksgiving, but liturgy is meant to reflect as well as transform human life.\r\n\r\nDavid Power proposes a serious challenge for Christian liturgists and preachers:\r\n

In the present time of cultural disorientation and\u00a0reorientation, there seems to be place for a fuller use of\u00a0 lament in Christian assemblies, but this requires the\u00a0 courage to let beliefs about God and about Providence be\u00a0 questioned. We may indeed grieve over suffering and\u00a0 oppression, bewail the calamities of the Jewish people,\u00a0 weep over the raped earth, look with sorrow on the\u00a0 church\u2019s treatment of women, but do we ever allow this to\u00a0 be a complaint against God?[footnote]David N. Power, \u201cWhen to Worship is to Lament,\u201d in Worship, Culture, and Theology (Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1990), 165. Note Power\u2019s further question: \u201cDoes not the very sacramen tal tradition in which we say Christ and the paschal mystery are represented seem at times to have been less than adequate? What has God got to say? Where is God, if not there? And if there, why in so clumsy a way?\u201d (166).[\/footnote]<\/p>\r\nThe first step toward overcoming suffering is finding a language that leads one out of the prison of silence, finding the language of lament and tears.[footnote]See S\u00f6lle, Suffering (note 7), 61-86. \u201cPeople\u2019s lives actually depend on putting their situation into words or rather learning to express themselves ...\u201d (p. 76); \u201c\u2026 \u2018learn to suffer without complaining\u2019 is bad advice. Nothing can be learned from suffering unless it is worked through\u201d (p. 126).[\/footnote] Naming the pain and grief and sin is part of the dynamic of naming grace. The double challenge for Christian preachers and communities gathered around the Word is to attend to the importance of lament, but at the same time, to witness to Christian hope in the power of resurrection.\r\n\r\nAll of this is to suggest that, when we listen to human experience in both its grace and disgrace, we listen for an echo of the Gospel, which brings us to the final section of our reflections. On what basis do we name grace in human experience? Where do we find the clues for recognizing, proclaiming and celebrating grace?\r\n\r\nNaming Grace from the Perspective of Christian Symbols and Stories<\/strong>\r\n\r\nWe cannot talk of grace occurring in human experience without recalling that human life is interpreted, and therefore experienced, through a variety of filters. We do not have raw human experience apart from some framework for understanding or perceiving. We interpret our lives in the context of multiple traditions \u2013 the traditions of our personal histories, our family stories, our ethnic roots, our culture.\r\n\r\nWe may modify, change or even reject those traditions based on new experiences, which do not seem to fit, but initially we stand within, and are formed by, traditions. We are formed in the context of meanings, which have been handed on to us. We are given language and cultural symbols; we do not create them.\r\n\r\nIn speaking of recognizing grace at the depths or limits of human experience, we are talking within the framework of a faith tradition which alerts us to a deeper dimension in our experience\u00a0and gives us a language to name that dimension. We stand within the living tradition of the Christian community. Those who have gone before us in faith have handed on their story, their pattern for understanding and living human life. It is the story of Jesus as recounted in the Scriptures, as remembered, lived and celebrated in the community, and as retold uniquely in every age and culture.\r\n\r\nWhat forms the sacramental imagination \u2013 that profound confidence that God is with us, the deep trust that where sin abounds, grace abounds still more, the radical hope that in the end \u201call will be well\u201d? What enables Christian communities to proclaim: \u201cDying you destroyed our death, rising you restored our life, Lord Jesus, come in glory\u201d?\r\n\r\nWhat Walter Brueggemann has called the \u201chopeful imagination\u201d[footnote]Title of Brueggemann\u2019s book. Note also Prophetic Imagination, where Brueggemann is discussing the texts of hope in Deutero-Isaiah: \u201cHe gives people back their faith by means of rearticulating the old story. He gives them the linguistic capacity to confront despair rather than be surrounded by it\u201d (77).[\/footnote] is formed by symbols, stories and lives that subvert a culture of death and despair. In an age of individualism and hatred of the stranger, Christian communities gather at an inclusive table and promise to attend to the needs of the poor and the sick.\r\n\r\nIn an age of apathy and despair, Christians gather to give thanks and praise, to sing songs of joy and resistance. At both the beginning and the end of life, Christians gather around symbols of\u00a0the tomb and proclaim that the Spirit of God brings new life out of death. When sick ness threatens to alienate us from all that we have known and loved, Christians keep vigil at the bedsides of the sick and the dying. In a culture that cannot imagine faithful relationships sustained over time, Christian communities witness covenant promises of fidelity and speak words of forgiveness beyond betrayal.\r\n\r\nIn a culture of power and domination, Christian communities anoint leaders ordained to wash feet and to call forth the gifts of others in the community. As human celebrations, even the most\u00a0basic symbolism of the Church can, of course, be manipulated and used to reinforce, rather than subvert, systems of injustice, but our trust is that the power of the basic Christian symbols finally escapes any human control.[footnote]David N. Power, \u201cSacraments: Symbolizing God\u2019s Power in the Church,\u201d Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 37 (1982), 50-66, and Mary Collins, \u201cIs the Eucharist Still a Source of Meaning for Women?\u201d in Origins 21(September 12, 1991), 225-229, and \u201cLiturgical Spirituality in a Pluralistic Culture,\u201d Doctrine and Life 41(1991), 59-67.[\/footnote] For precisely that reason, the symbols are also dangerous to any system; they hold the power to reform the human imagination.\r\n\r\nSo, too, is retelling the Christian story dangerous. Explicitly calling to memory human suffering and the passion and death of Jesus is already part of the process of engendering Christian hope. Those memories are considered \u201cdangerous\u201d precisely because they move us to action and solidarity with those who suffer.\r\n\r\nTo express anger or lament over the violation of human dignity or of the earth is implicitly to express hope that the future can be different from the present. Shared stories fuel hopes, forge solidarity and empower action. But retelling the story of Jesus is \u201cdangerous\u201d for an even deeper reason.\r\n\r\nThe ultimate claim of Jesus\u2019 life, ministry and death was that the compassion of God is the power at the heart of human history and of the universe \u2013 the reign of God is at hand. Christians are con vinced that tragedy can be transformed precisely because the death of Jesus was not the end of His story. In the resurrection, the Spirit of God has broken the power of the bonds of sin and death and does indeed \u201cmake all things new.\u201d\r\n\r\nThat same Spirit has been poured out on all creation, holding open future possibilities in the most desperate of circumstances, sustaining the human capacity to endure and to hope, empowering a core of freedom in the depths of the human spirit. That hidden power of God that exceeds human capacity or imagination, the power of love at the core of all creation, is the grace that \u201cabounds\u00a0still more\u201d in the face of human suffering and injustice. Because its source is always the utter freedom of God, not any human accomplishment, this mystery of God\u2019s presence and power among us is always a source of surprise.[footnote]For different theological expressions of how the Spirit of God holds open future possibilities and engenders human freedom, see Karl Rahner, \u201cTheology of Freedom,\u201d Theological Investigations VI (New York: Seabury, 1974), 178-96; Edward Schillebeeckx, \u201cI Believe in God, Creator of Heaven and Earth,\u201d God Among Us (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 91-102; J\u00fcrgen Moltmann, \u201cCreation as an Open System,\u201d The Future of Creation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 115-30; and God in Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985).[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThe symbols and stories of Christian hope \u201ccapture the imagination,\u201d however, only when they are proclaimed by authentic witnesses, like the first witnesses to the resurrection who risked rejection and even death in light of what they had experienced. The same symbols and stories will continue to capture the imagination today only if they are enfleshed again in living communities of hope and resistance.\r\n\r\nJesus did not proclaim the reign of God only in words; he enfleshed the good news He announced. Christians claim that in the resurrection of Jesus God\u2019s power has been poured forth in the\u00a0world in a radically new way. The Spirit of God holds the future open and is active in the world, fashioning a new creation, making all things new. The sacramental imagination reminds us that God\u2019s Spirit is active precisely in and through creation and human communities.\r\n\r\nIf the Christian hope that death is not the end is to be a source of hope for a young person whose life is being cut off by the AIDS virus, for example, they need more than to hear the Gospel proclaimed. The sacramental embodiment of Christ\u2019s compassion is expressed not only by a community gathered for anointing and healing, but also in faithful families and friends who \u201ckeep vigil\u201d and do not leave them to die alone, in those who promise to remember their life through fashioning a piece of the AIDS quilt, in those who work to change discriminatory legislation and attitudes that isolate the sick and dying, in those who work to find\u00a0a cure for AIDS, in those who console the grieving and listen to their pain, and in those who help them to find ways to be reconciled, to remember joy and to hope in the face of death.\r\n\r\nThe stories of resurrection are born amidst loss and pain, but they end in joy and hope \u2013 signs of a presence and power that go beyond the human imagination. To celebrate the presence of God in the face of suffering is to say that pain and evil shall not have the final victory. To celebrate that hope authentically is to be drawn into living witness, to do everything in our power to counter evil with love.\r\n\r\nIn Amy Tan's novel, The Joy Luck Club<\/em>, four Chinese women gathered every week for the sharing of stories, feasting and for remembering \u201cgood times in the past and good times yet to come.\u201d One of the women recalls, \u201cPeople thought we were wrong to serve banquets every week while many people in the city were starving .... Others thought we were possessed by demons \u2013 to celebrate when even within our own families we had lost generations, had lost homes and fortunes, and were separated, husband from wife, brother from sister, daughter from mother .... How could we laugh, people asked.\u201d\r\n\r\nShe explains that \u201cit\u2019s not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost .... So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us .... We feasted, we laughed, we played games .... We told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy.\u201d[footnote]Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (New York: Putnam\u2019s, 1989) 11-12.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nChristian communities gather each week and celebrate not a new year, but the end of time \u2013 the feast of the eighth day. It\u2019s not\u00a0that we have no heart or eyes for pain. But in the face of it all, we gather to celebrate the resurrection, to hear again \u201cGod\u2019s great joke.\u201d We feast, we celebrate rituals and we tell the best stories.\r\n\r\nThose symbols and those stories enable us to speak boldly about the grace that lies ahead of us in the darkness. In the words of an early Christian Eucharistic prayer, we proclaim: \u201cWe remember your coming in glory.\u201d That<\/em> hope is our deepest joy.\r\n\r\nTo tell the story of Jesus is to tell the final truth about the human story, and to tell the human story in its depth, as Jesus did, is to point to the mystery of God at the heart of human existence, to \u201cname grace.\u201d In offering the good news of the Christian story,\u00a0we offer not an interpretation of human life, but rather an invitation to \u201ccome and see\u201d and to \u201cgo and do likewise.\u201d We invite others to make Jesus\u2019 story their own and, in doing so, to experience ordinary human life as graced.\r\n

This is what we proclaim to you:\r\nwhat was from the beginning,\r\nwhat we have heard,\r\nwhat we have seen with our own eyes,\r\nwhat we have looked upon and touched \u2013\r\nWe speak the word of life. (1Jn. 1:1)<\/p>\r\nAn earlier version of some of this lecture appeared in the article, \u201cNaming Grace: A Theology of Proclamation,\u201d <\/em>Worship 60 (1986) 434-448. A fuller development of the central insights is now available in <\/em>Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (NY: Continuum, 1997).<\/em>","rendered":"

Just before Christmas in 1979, Time<\/em> magazine featured as its cover article a piece entitled \u201cAmerican Preaching \u2013 A Dying Art?\u201d The author\u2019s analysis of the state of preaching in the United States at that time went like this:<\/p>\n

\u2018The Word became flesh,\u2019 says John\u2019s Gospel of the incarnate Christ of Bethlehem. In Christmas sermons before some 75 million Americans this week, words about Christ will become flesh in the person of the preacher.\u00a0 Through their strange and marvelous craft, Christianity has been transmitted and reshaped for every age since\u00a0 Christ himself went \u2018preaching the Gospel of the kingdom.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cFor many American churchgoers, though, a Sunday sermon is something merely to be endured. Many preachers and parishioners alike think that passionate and skillful preaching has grown rarer and rarer in individual congregations in postwar years. The chilling of the word is a major contribution to the evident malaise in many large Protestant denominations these days. For Roman Catholics, the sermon has not been as important, but rather a kind of spiritual hors d\u2019oeuvre before the Eucharist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost 15 years later, the situation has not changed significantly. A sociological survey was conducted in 1988 among lay church members in four denominations in the United States \u2013 Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran and Methodist.[1]<\/sup><\/a> Parishes or congregations were asked to list in order of priority their highest hopes and expectations from their church and then to rate how successfully each of those expectations was met.<\/p>\n

All four denominations listed \u201cpreaching\u201d as their first priority and \u201cspiritual life\u201d as their second. When asked how successfully their church met their expectations, all four denominations indicated their disappointment in both areas.<\/p>\n

We who are Catholics in the post-Vatican II Church might validly protest the caricature of preaching as a mere \u201chors d\u2019oeuvre before the Eucharist.\u201d The liturgical reforms of Vatican II have certainly underscored the centrality of the homily in all of our sacramental worship (SC, 35, 53).<\/p>\n

The documents on the roles of bishops and priests reemphasize the bishop\u2019s responsibility to see that the Word of God is proclaimed effectively in the local church and that \u201cpriests … have as their primary duty the proclamation of the gospel of God to all\u201d (BP: LG 25, CD 12; Priests, P04, CD 28, LG 28). What is even more remarkable is the emphasis on the responsibility of all the baptized to share in the preaching mission of the church (AA 2, CD 35, GS 43).<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the concern about the \u201cchilling of the word\u201d remains. Almost 25 years ago, Paul VI identified the problem in his Apostolic Exhortation on Evangelization<\/em>: \u201cIn our day, what has happened to that hidden energy of the good news which is able to have such a powerful effect on the human conscience? To what extent and in what way is that evangelical force capable of really transforming people of this century?\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

When preachers, pastors or sociologists of religion gather to identify why there is not more energy surrounding the preaching of the Church, questions of the theology and spirituality of preaching rarely are the focus of the discussion. Even the homiletic literature\u00a0to date is very limited in those areas.[3]<\/sup><\/a> The wager of this lecture, however, is that one factor contributing to the blocking of the power of the Gospel in our day is precisely our understanding of where the word of God is located and what the preaching event is meant to be.<\/p>\n

Most theologies of preaching to date have been developed from the perspective of the Reformation traditions, usually in neo orthodox categories that have highlighted the utter transcendence\u00a0of God\u2019s Word, the sinfulness of the human situation and some form of law-gospel paradigm for preaching. Thus, for example, in his classic book, The Preaching of the Gospel<\/em>, Reformed theologian Karl Barth asserts that, \u201cIt is not the function of the preacher to reveal God or to act as his intermediary. When the Gospel is preached, God speaks: there is no question of the preacher revealing anything or of a revelation being conveyed through him.\u201d (p. 12)<\/p>\n

Barth is clear in his conviction that the proclamation of the Gospel is to be proclamation of the Word of God \u2013 not some human word. Preaching is not supposed to interpret the world or human experience religiously or to tell the stories of women and men, no matter how inspiring \u2013 it is to express the Word of God.[4]<\/sup><\/a> The preacher is to announce what God has made known in Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

Barth\u2019s theology of revelation is explicit: God\u2019s Word is revealed in Jesus, in the Scriptures, in the proclamation of the Church. It is not revealed in human history or human experience; neither is it mediated by the preacher or the community. Revelation is totally God\u2019s action. The preacher is the herald who bears witness to God\u2019s sovereign power and grace in Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

When the authentic Word of God is preached, the Spirit of God calls forth the human response of obedience to the Word. Barth reminds us, however, that the relationship between humanity and God is \u201ceffected from on high by a divine miracle. [We are] not naturally disposed to hear the Word of God: we are children of wrath\u201d (Eph. 2:3).[5]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The theology of preaching that emerges from the Lutheran tradition is classically described as a law-gospel hermeneutic. The preacher first diagnoses the human situation under the burden of God\u2019s law, which we have no power to observe. As Richard Lischer, professor of homiletics at Duke University, describes it: The \u201cfirst word\u201d to be said about the human condition is the \u201cbad news\u201d of our failure to live in fidelity to God\u2019s covenant, resulting in the condition of enmity with God. We are \u201cchildren of wrath.\u201d[6]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Having confronted the congregation with the law, the preacher then announces the Gospel: the good news that in and through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we are no longer \u201cunder the law\u201d; rather we live in the freedom of the children of God. The bottom line is, of course, Paul\u2019s famous phrase: \u201cWhere sin abounds, grace abounds still more\u201d (Rom. 5:20).<\/p>\n

There is a profound truth to this Christian perspective on the preaching of the Gospel with its emphasis on the power of the proclaimed Word, the sovereignty of God, the radical alienation at the heart of the human condition and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. These are convictions that all Christians share, even if we don\u2019t all emphasize them in the same way that Karl Barth did, especially in his early writings.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019d like to explore this evening is another way of expressing the relationship between the divine and the human, what I\u2019m calling tonight \u201cthe sacramental imagination.\u201d In an age of ecumenical dialogue and significant diversity within any specific religious tradition, it becomes difficult to identify clear distinctions between Protestants and Catholics. David Tracy has suggested that\u00a0it may be at the level of \u201cimagination\u201d that the most significant differences occur.[7]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

We might speak of two distinct Christian spiritualities that cannot be identified simply as Protestant and Catholic. For example, Anglicans, some Lutherans and some Methodists find themselves more at home in the sacramental imagination than in the forms of Reformation theology I have just described \u2013 what David Tracy calls the dialectical imagination.<\/p>\n

The dialectical imagination emphasizes the distance between God and humanity, focuses on the hiddenness and absence of God, the sinfulness of human beings, the paradox of the cross, the need for\u00a0grace as forgiveness and reconciliation, the limits of any human community or institution including the Church, and the not-yet character of the promised reign of God.<\/p>\n

The sacramental imagination (or what Tracy calls The Analogical Imagination<\/em>) emphasizes the presence of the God who is self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God \u2013 restless hearts seeking the divine, the mystery of the incarnation, grace as divinizing as well as forgiving, the mediating role of the Church as sacrament of salvation in the world, and the \u201cforetaste\u201d of the reign of God, which is present in human community wherever God\u2019s reign of justice, peace and love is fostered.<\/p>\n

It is in terms of anthropology that the dialectical and sacramental imaginations diverge most dramatically. The 1983\u00a0ecumenical breakthrough statement from the U.S. Lutheran Roman Catholic dialogue on \u201cJustification by Faith\u201d highlights the theological differences in this area:<\/p>\n

The Lutheran hermeneutical understanding of\u00a0justification by faith in some ways heightens the tension with Catholic positions. It does so by excluding from the Gospel proclamation all reference to the freedom and goodness of fallen human beings on the ground that this would undermine the unconditionality of God\u2019s promises in Christ.[8]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

It is precisely here that a contribution to the growing ecumenical discussion of a theology of preaching might be made from the sacramental imagination that views grace as active in and through humanity and creation. Grounded in the conviction that sin never completely destroyed the created goodness of humanity, the Catholic response to the debate initiated by Emil Brunner as to whether there is a \u201cpoint of contact for preaching the Gospel of grace\u201d \u2013 in other words, is there a touchstone in people\u2019s human experience for the hearing of the Gospel? \u2013 is clearly \u201cyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Catholic tradition has emphasized that grace builds on nature and that grace affects a real inner transformation of the human person. Karl Rahner has taken that insight even further in his claim that human beings always stand within the call to grace; God\u2019s offer of intimate friendship with humanity constitutes a basic orientation of every human person\u2019s life from the very beginning (in Rahnerian language, the supernatural existential). Human persons are actually constituted as \u201chearers of the Word\u201d \u2013 all human beings, in fact creation itself, has been fashioned as \u201copenness for the incarnation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because human persons are not pure spirit, but rather body – spirit, grace (or the invisible presence of God among us) needs to be made present in concrete, historical, visible ways. The spiritual mystery at the heart of reality is mediated in and through the ordinary events and persons of our daily lives, through human history and creation.<\/p>\n

But that mystery of love at the core of reality remains \u201chidden\u201d or \u201canonymous\u201d unless it is brought to word. That is what both preaching and the sacraments (which Augustine called \u201cvisible words\u201d) do: they allow the grace that is the depth dimension of reality to be recognized and celebrated.<\/p>\n

Catholic spirituality and theology have traditionally emphasized the continuity, rather than the discontinuity, between nature and grace, between creation and revelation, between our ordinary human lives and the extraordinary gift of God\u2019s presence and power among us. So it seems \u201cfitting,\u201d as Aquinas would say, to speak of the continuity between human experience and Christian preaching.<\/p>\n

Any Christian theology of preaching will center on Jesus Christ as Word of God. But what if, instead of emphasizing the difference of Jesus from the rest of us and the transcendence of God\u2019s Word, we were to focus on the mystery of the incarnation \u2013 the mystery that God\u2019s fullest word has been spoken in history, in a human being, in human experience? What are the implications of believing that the Word of God is to be discovered enfleshed in human history?<\/p>\n

While it may not be immediately apparent, all of this has implications for the concrete process of homily preparation and feedback. Those of us who are preachers, for example, might reflect on our process of preparing a homily.<\/p>\n

Do I operate as if the Word of God is revealed to me in the biblical passage, in my prayer, and in my study of the commentaries by theologians, and think of the process of writing the homily as trying somehow to apply this Word of God to people\u2019s secular lives and a profane world? Or do I really believe that God\u2019s Word (a word of hope, of healing, of liberation, of resurrection) is being spoken in new ways today in people\u2019s concrete experiences and daily lives?<\/p>\n

Is the same creative Spirit of God who was active in the his – tory of Israel, in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in the Church of the past, and in the lives of the saints, still active among us today? If that\u2019s part of our theology of revelation, then reflection on culture, on people\u2019s lives and human experience, is necessary, not as a way to make a homily relevant or to get people\u2019s attention, but in order to even hear that the Word God is speaking today.<\/p>\n

Naming the grace that is to be found in the faith experience of the community involves listening to and learning from the members of the community. Very practical decisions regarding team preaching, communal faith-sharing, dialogic modes of preaching, invitations to preach for those whose voices are rarely heard in the community and the creation of opportunities for response to preaching all communicate an underlying theology of preaching and revelation. The word of faith that the preacher proclaims is the community\u2019s word. The preacher speaks in the name of the community and proclaims the deepest convictions of the community.<\/p>\n

That means the preacher needs the kind of contemplative awareness that seeks God in and through all the experiences of life. Another way to say this is that our sacramental imaginations need\u00a0to be developed if we are to grasp the implications of the mystery of incarnation for a theology of preaching. The mystery of the divine has become one with creation; God has become flesh in human history; the Spirit of God is alive and active and \u201cloose in the world\u201d and dwells among communities of Christian believers who live and speak in the name of Jesus.<\/p>\n

Given that sacramental imagination, I\u2019m suggesting this evening that we reflect on preaching as the art of naming grace in human experience. But if we are to do that, it is important to recall three things: 1) we are talking about human experience in its depth dimension; 2) in our world today, most people\u2019s experi ence of God is in the face of, and often in spite of, human suf fering; and 3) we get our clues as to how to identify grace in the human story from the biblical story and basic symbols of the Christian tradition.<\/p>\n

Human Experience in its Depths<\/strong><\/p>\n

Naming the presence of God in human experience requires pressing to the limits of human existence, where both the threat of radical human finitude and experiences of overwhelming meaning and joy raise the fundamentally religious question of the \u201cground of our being.\u201d At the boundaries of human life, \u201csignals of transcendence\u201d emerge within human experience. Secular language breaks its limits in trying to express \u201cthe other dimension\u201d or the \u201csurplus of meaning\u201d disclosed from the depths of human experience.[9]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

While revelation takes place in human experience, it cannot be identified with human experience. Rather, as Edward Schillebeeckx has noted, \u201cRevelation takes place in historical human experience in this world, but at the same time it summons us from what we take for granted in our limited world. It is\u00a0therefore not to be found in any direct appeal to our so -called self evident experiences within the world. As experience, it is the crossing of a boundary within the dimensions of human experience.\u201d[10]<\/sup><\/a> At this boundary or final limit of human experience, we either speak of God or we must remain silent.<\/p>\n

Thus one of the contemplative tasks of the preacher or preaching community is to reflect on human experience in order to identify the ultimate foundation of the mystery of human life: the God who often remains hidden. The ability to make that connection presumes that preachers are in touch with the human struggle \u2013 their own and those of others.<\/p>\n

Both the prophets in the history of Israel, such as Hosea, Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and the authentic early Christian preachers like Mary Magdalene, Peter and Paul were formed for their preaching through the profound, and usually painful, human experience of whatever aspect of God\u2019s word they were called to preach.<\/p>\n

So, too, those who pray to become ministers of the word in our day are asking to be baptized in the experience from which that word emerged. Whether from our own life experience or from attending to the stories of others, nothing human should remain foreign to preachers if we are to grasp what it means to proclaim that all of humanity has been taken into God and redeemed in Christ.[11]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke knew well that the authentic word can flow only from the depths of life experience. As he wrote to a younger poet:<\/p>\n

For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities,\u00a0 people and things. One must know the animals, one must\u00a0feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which\u00a0 the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able\u00a0 to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected\u00a0 meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to\u00a0 days of childhood that are still unexplained … to days in\u00a0 rooms withdrawn and quiet, and to mornings by the sea,\u00a0 to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel … and it is not\u00a0 yet enough if one may think of all this. One must have\u00a0 memories of many nights of love … of the screams of\u00a0 women in labor …. But one must also have been beside\u00a0 the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with\u00a0 the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not\u00a0 yet enough to have memories. One must be able to forget\u00a0 them when they are many, and one must have the great\u00a0 patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet\u00a0 the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to\u00a0 blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no\u00a0 longer to be distinguished from ourselves \u2013 not until then\u00a0 can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a\u00a0 verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.[12]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The contemplative embrace of life that Rilke describes as essential to the creative writer is all the more necessary for the preacher who is called to make the word a home, to dwell in the Word of God that is a word enfleshed.<\/p>\n

Some would argue that this naming of grace that is already present in human life does not do justice to the power of the word to bring about salvation, not just to name it.[13]<\/sup><\/a> But because human persons live according to the meanings we perceive and construct, the naming of grace is no small matter.<\/p>\n

Bringing a deeper dimension of human life to awareness and conscious responsibility has serious implications. A friendship forms before it is fully recognized and claimed, but when friends or partners explicitly claim the bond of love between them, they also deepen their commitment to one another and make decisions that will affect future choices.<\/p>\n

Communities and individuals act in outrage and response when the innocent are violated, but meetings that clarify and analyze the structural evils that perpetuate individual crimes deepen the participants\u2019 anger and their commitment to justice. A change of perception or worldview is essential to a radical change of life. Even on the level of human words, we know the power of words to deepen or even create what they signify. What happens when someone speaks words like:<\/p>\n

I love you.<\/p>\n

This relationship is over. I want a divorce.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry to have to tell you, your cancer is inoperable.<\/p>\n

Here I stand; I can do no other.<\/p>\n

You are hereby sentenced to life imprisonment.<\/p>\n

I, Martha, take you, Juan, to be my husband.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry your services won\u2019t be needed any longer.<\/p>\n

You are forgiven.<\/p>\n

Those kinds of words open up new futures \u2013 or cut off the future. They are not \u201cjust words\u201d; they are symbols that evoke a deeper mystery, whether of love or possibility or belief or com – mitment or death. The relationship of love was there before the words were spoken. The problems in the relationship were there before any mention of divorce, but somehow with the words the reality of the relationship or commitment is deepened or changed.<\/p>\n

In a real sense, those kinds of words have the power to create a new experience. Our world is not the same before and after words like that are spoken. We might call those words revelatory words, because they disclose levels of the mystery of human life that are too deep for words. When we are talking about preaching as naming grace, we are talking about a \u201cnaming\u201d that has that kind of power.<\/p>\n

Naming Grace in the Midst of Suffering<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the fundamental challenges to any preacher of the good news that God is with us, however, is all the evidence to the contrary. Whether we turn to Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, our own city\u00a0streets, battered women\u2019s shelters, the AIDS hospice, the unemployment line, the most recent story of child abuse, or the more daily struggles of families and individuals gathered for Sunday worship, stories of suffering abound.<\/p>\n

Is it really possible that grace abounds still more? Is the power of resurrection really active among us? Does the Spirit of God continue to raise the dead to life? As we listen for a word of God from that context of global suffering, believers continue to wrestle with what Karl Barth identified in 1922 as \u201cevery hearer\u2019s question\u201d about the good news: \u201cIs it true?\u201d<\/p>\n

Barth remarked on the contrast between what the liturgy proclaims and people\u2019s concrete lives:<\/p>\n

The whole liturgy says: God is present. The whole\u00a0 situation witnesses, cries, simply shouts of it, even if in\u00a0 the minister or people there arises questioning,\u00a0wretchedness, or despair …. But what does \u201cGod is\u00a0 present\u201d mean in the face of the great riddle of existence? … Is it true? \u2013 this talk of a loving and good God who is more than one of the friendly idols? \u2026 A passionate\u00a0 longing to have the word spoken that promises grace is\u00a0 the desire of every church-goer no matter how they\u00a0 express their want in so-called real life.[14]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The word of grace that all human beings, not only church-goers, long to hear cannot be spoken too quickly, however. Hope in the resurrection cannot be experienced as a radical experience of grace unless the cross of Jesus is seen for the profound sign of contradiction that Paul reminded us it is. Preaching the incarnation \u2013 which includes the whole paschal mystery \u2013 in the midst of a world of suffering is only possible if we take seriously contemporary experiences of anguish, impasse and the absence of God.<\/p>\n

How can we continue to proclaim Jesus as universal savior in a world where so many human beings are deprived of basic human rights and the ecosystem is being rapidly destroyed? The ongoing experience of the crucified of this world calls for a rethinking of the mystery of the cross if preachers and communities of faith are to proclaim an authentic word of hope in the power of the resurrection in the midst of human suffering.<\/p>\n

In a world of suffering, the last word about the cross may be that it is indeed a mystery of divine love, fidelity and solidarity, but the first word that must be spoken is of its scandal, injustice and absurdity. Not only political and liberation theologians, but most theologians reflecting on Christology today emphasize that the cross must be put in the context not only of the resurrection, but also of the life and ministry of Jesus.<\/p>\n

As many have noted, it is no coincidence that Jesus did not die in bed. Jesus was executed as a political criminal and a religious\u00a0blasphemer as the consequence of his \u201cdangerous preaching\u201d of the reign of God.<\/p>\n

His healing ministry and His inclusive table companionship threatened traditional boundaries that distinguished insiders from outsiders in both religious and political realms. Jesus shocked religious authorities as He announced the forgiveness of sins, the prerogative of God alone. He touched lepers and spoke with Samaritans. He formed bonds of friendship with, and invited into the circle of His disciples, women and tax collectors who collaborated with the oppressive Roman Empire.<\/p>\n

A faithful Jew, He radically reinterpreted Jewish tradition and laws of Sabbath observance and ritual purity. The reign of God He announced in His liberating lifestyle and His shocking parables and beatitudes, the unconditional compassion of God that He embodied in His person and style of relating, even the joy and freedom He invited others to embrace, was a profound challenge to religious and political structures of the day.[15]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In the end, the one whose entire life proclaimed \u201cGod\u2019s \u2018no\u2019 to human suffering\u201d[16]<\/sup><\/a> was betrayed by an intimate disciple, abandoned by many of His closest friends, handed over to the empire by religious leaders, sentenced by a political leader who knew Him to be innocent, mocked and tortured by soldiers, and executed as a criminal, dying on a cross between two thieves. The one who preached absolute trust in the reign of a compassionate God was left in darkness to face rejection of His mission and the utter silence of God. Some theologians even speak of Jesus as abandoned by God.[17]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The cross of Jesus, like all human suffering, raises profound questions about God and God\u2019s fidelity and, to use the language of\u00a0tonight\u2019s lecture \u2013 about naming grace in human experience. But one of the very reasons why we need the language and symbolism of the cross is to name the depth of human pain as religious, to show that the human struggle with suffering is ultimately a spiritual crisis. Jesus\u2019 cry continues in our world: \u201cMy God, my God, why have you forsaken me?\u201d<\/p>\n

In an age of massive and senseless suffering, including two world wars and the Holocaust, Edward Schillebeeckx wants to reject any version of suffering as \u201cGod\u2019s will\u201d \u2013 instead he underlines the scandal of the cross. He has even suggested that, in one sense, we are saved in spite of the cross of Jesus, rather than because of it. Nevertheless, in the end, Jesus faced the cross as the final consequence of fidelity to His preaching mis sion with a radical hope in the compassionate God He knew as Abba.<\/p>\n

He filled an experience that was in itself meaningless and absurd with meaning, love and a sense of solidarity with all the innocent who suffer. He filled what was utter disgrace with grace. What Christians celebrate is not the cross, nor the sufferings of Jesus, but the power of a love that is faithful even unto death. The triumph of the cross is the triumph of God\u2019s mercy bursting the bonds of sin and death.<\/p>\n

It is not the cross that Christians preach, but the entire paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus. What Christians celebrate is that death and evil do not have final victory; the power of God does. The earliest Christian preaching was the good news that the death of Jesus was not the end.<\/p>\n

In and through Jesus\u2019 love and fidelity, God has taken on the evil and suffering of this world and broken their hold, once and for all, with the stronger power of love. What is impossible for us is possible for God. Hence the mocking tone of Paul: \u201cO death where\u00a0is your victory?\u201d The Christian hope remains that God can and will bring life out of death, that like Jesus, we and those we love will be vindicated and transformed.<\/p>\n

But the dynamic of hope, like the power of resurrection, is beyond human control or possibility. Only God can restore the dead to life. Do we as Christian preachers too often resort to self help or human wisdom because we are afraid to attend to the lament of our congregations and to entrust the pain to God? Do we believe that God can and will bring life beyond death?<\/p>\n

If our liturgies and preaching are to draw us more deeply into the paschal mystery that constitutes our daily lives, we need ways of remembering and ritualizing the scandal of the cross, as well as the victory and hope of resurrection.<\/p>\n

For the sake of authentic faith in our day, we need to allow more dissonance in the harmony of the sacramental imagination and celebration. Lament disrupts the mood of praise and thanksgiving, but liturgy is meant to reflect as well as transform human life.<\/p>\n

David Power proposes a serious challenge for Christian liturgists and preachers:<\/p>\n

In the present time of cultural disorientation and\u00a0reorientation, there seems to be place for a fuller use of\u00a0 lament in Christian assemblies, but this requires the\u00a0 courage to let beliefs about God and about Providence be\u00a0 questioned. We may indeed grieve over suffering and\u00a0 oppression, bewail the calamities of the Jewish people,\u00a0 weep over the raped earth, look with sorrow on the\u00a0 church\u2019s treatment of women, but do we ever allow this to\u00a0 be a complaint against God?[18]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The first step toward overcoming suffering is finding a language that leads one out of the prison of silence, finding the language of lament and tears.[19]<\/sup><\/a> Naming the pain and grief and sin is part of the dynamic of naming grace. The double challenge for Christian preachers and communities gathered around the Word is to attend to the importance of lament, but at the same time, to witness to Christian hope in the power of resurrection.<\/p>\n

All of this is to suggest that, when we listen to human experience in both its grace and disgrace, we listen for an echo of the Gospel, which brings us to the final section of our reflections. On what basis do we name grace in human experience? Where do we find the clues for recognizing, proclaiming and celebrating grace?<\/p>\n

Naming Grace from the Perspective of Christian Symbols and Stories<\/strong><\/p>\n

We cannot talk of grace occurring in human experience without recalling that human life is interpreted, and therefore experienced, through a variety of filters. We do not have raw human experience apart from some framework for understanding or perceiving. We interpret our lives in the context of multiple traditions \u2013 the traditions of our personal histories, our family stories, our ethnic roots, our culture.<\/p>\n

We may modify, change or even reject those traditions based on new experiences, which do not seem to fit, but initially we stand within, and are formed by, traditions. We are formed in the context of meanings, which have been handed on to us. We are given language and cultural symbols; we do not create them.<\/p>\n

In speaking of recognizing grace at the depths or limits of human experience, we are talking within the framework of a faith tradition which alerts us to a deeper dimension in our experience\u00a0and gives us a language to name that dimension. We stand within the living tradition of the Christian community. Those who have gone before us in faith have handed on their story, their pattern for understanding and living human life. It is the story of Jesus as recounted in the Scriptures, as remembered, lived and celebrated in the community, and as retold uniquely in every age and culture.<\/p>\n

What forms the sacramental imagination \u2013 that profound confidence that God is with us, the deep trust that where sin abounds, grace abounds still more, the radical hope that in the end \u201call will be well\u201d? What enables Christian communities to proclaim: \u201cDying you destroyed our death, rising you restored our life, Lord Jesus, come in glory\u201d?<\/p>\n

What Walter Brueggemann has called the \u201chopeful imagination\u201d[20]<\/sup><\/a> is formed by symbols, stories and lives that subvert a culture of death and despair. In an age of individualism and hatred of the stranger, Christian communities gather at an inclusive table and promise to attend to the needs of the poor and the sick.<\/p>\n

In an age of apathy and despair, Christians gather to give thanks and praise, to sing songs of joy and resistance. At both the beginning and the end of life, Christians gather around symbols of\u00a0the tomb and proclaim that the Spirit of God brings new life out of death. When sick ness threatens to alienate us from all that we have known and loved, Christians keep vigil at the bedsides of the sick and the dying. In a culture that cannot imagine faithful relationships sustained over time, Christian communities witness covenant promises of fidelity and speak words of forgiveness beyond betrayal.<\/p>\n

In a culture of power and domination, Christian communities anoint leaders ordained to wash feet and to call forth the gifts of others in the community. As human celebrations, even the most\u00a0basic symbolism of the Church can, of course, be manipulated and used to reinforce, rather than subvert, systems of injustice, but our trust is that the power of the basic Christian symbols finally escapes any human control.[21]<\/sup><\/a> For precisely that reason, the symbols are also dangerous to any system; they hold the power to reform the human imagination.<\/p>\n

So, too, is retelling the Christian story dangerous. Explicitly calling to memory human suffering and the passion and death of Jesus is already part of the process of engendering Christian hope. Those memories are considered \u201cdangerous\u201d precisely because they move us to action and solidarity with those who suffer.<\/p>\n

To express anger or lament over the violation of human dignity or of the earth is implicitly to express hope that the future can be different from the present. Shared stories fuel hopes, forge solidarity and empower action. But retelling the story of Jesus is \u201cdangerous\u201d for an even deeper reason.<\/p>\n

The ultimate claim of Jesus\u2019 life, ministry and death was that the compassion of God is the power at the heart of human history and of the universe \u2013 the reign of God is at hand. Christians are con vinced that tragedy can be transformed precisely because the death of Jesus was not the end of His story. In the resurrection, the Spirit of God has broken the power of the bonds of sin and death and does indeed \u201cmake all things new.\u201d<\/p>\n

That same Spirit has been poured out on all creation, holding open future possibilities in the most desperate of circumstances, sustaining the human capacity to endure and to hope, empowering a core of freedom in the depths of the human spirit. That hidden power of God that exceeds human capacity or imagination, the power of love at the core of all creation, is the grace that \u201cabounds\u00a0still more\u201d in the face of human suffering and injustice. Because its source is always the utter freedom of God, not any human accomplishment, this mystery of God\u2019s presence and power among us is always a source of surprise.[22]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The symbols and stories of Christian hope \u201ccapture the imagination,\u201d however, only when they are proclaimed by authentic witnesses, like the first witnesses to the resurrection who risked rejection and even death in light of what they had experienced. The same symbols and stories will continue to capture the imagination today only if they are enfleshed again in living communities of hope and resistance.<\/p>\n

Jesus did not proclaim the reign of God only in words; he enfleshed the good news He announced. Christians claim that in the resurrection of Jesus God\u2019s power has been poured forth in the\u00a0world in a radically new way. The Spirit of God holds the future open and is active in the world, fashioning a new creation, making all things new. The sacramental imagination reminds us that God\u2019s Spirit is active precisely in and through creation and human communities.<\/p>\n

If the Christian hope that death is not the end is to be a source of hope for a young person whose life is being cut off by the AIDS virus, for example, they need more than to hear the Gospel proclaimed. The sacramental embodiment of Christ\u2019s compassion is expressed not only by a community gathered for anointing and healing, but also in faithful families and friends who \u201ckeep vigil\u201d and do not leave them to die alone, in those who promise to remember their life through fashioning a piece of the AIDS quilt, in those who work to change discriminatory legislation and attitudes that isolate the sick and dying, in those who work to find\u00a0a cure for AIDS, in those who console the grieving and listen to their pain, and in those who help them to find ways to be reconciled, to remember joy and to hope in the face of death.<\/p>\n

The stories of resurrection are born amidst loss and pain, but they end in joy and hope \u2013 signs of a presence and power that go beyond the human imagination. To celebrate the presence of God in the face of suffering is to say that pain and evil shall not have the final victory. To celebrate that hope authentically is to be drawn into living witness, to do everything in our power to counter evil with love.<\/p>\n

In Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club<\/em>, four Chinese women gathered every week for the sharing of stories, feasting and for remembering \u201cgood times in the past and good times yet to come.\u201d One of the women recalls, \u201cPeople thought we were wrong to serve banquets every week while many people in the city were starving …. Others thought we were possessed by demons \u2013 to celebrate when even within our own families we had lost generations, had lost homes and fortunes, and were separated, husband from wife, brother from sister, daughter from mother …. How could we laugh, people asked.\u201d<\/p>\n

She explains that \u201cit\u2019s not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost …. So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us …. We feasted, we laughed, we played games …. We told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy.\u201d[23]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Christian communities gather each week and celebrate not a new year, but the end of time \u2013 the feast of the eighth day. It\u2019s not\u00a0that we have no heart or eyes for pain. But in the face of it all, we gather to celebrate the resurrection, to hear again \u201cGod\u2019s great joke.\u201d We feast, we celebrate rituals and we tell the best stories.<\/p>\n

Those symbols and those stories enable us to speak boldly about the grace that lies ahead of us in the darkness. In the words of an early Christian Eucharistic prayer, we proclaim: \u201cWe remember your coming in glory.\u201d That<\/em> hope is our deepest joy.<\/p>\n

To tell the story of Jesus is to tell the final truth about the human story, and to tell the human story in its depth, as Jesus did, is to point to the mystery of God at the heart of human existence, to \u201cname grace.\u201d In offering the good news of the Christian story,\u00a0we offer not an interpretation of human life, but rather an invitation to \u201ccome and see\u201d and to \u201cgo and do likewise.\u201d We invite others to make Jesus\u2019 story their own and, in doing so, to experience ordinary human life as graced.<\/p>\n

This is what we proclaim to you:
\nwhat was from the beginning,
\nwhat we have heard,
\nwhat we have seen with our own eyes,
\nwhat we have looked upon and touched \u2013
\nWe speak the word of life. (1Jn. 1:1)<\/p>\n

An earlier version of some of this lecture appeared in the article, \u201cNaming Grace: A Theology of Proclamation,\u201d <\/em>Worship 60 (1986) 434-448. A fuller development of the central insights is now available in <\/em>Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination (NY: Continuum, 1997).<\/em><\/p>\n

  1. Dean R. Hoge, Jackson W. Carroll, and Francis K. Sheets, Patterns of Parish Leadership: Cost and Effectiveness in Four Denominations (Sheed and Ward, 1988). ↵<\/a><\/li>
  2. Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi, December 8, 1975, no. 4. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  3. In a recent survey of homiletic literature, Ronald Allen noted: \u201cPreaching is preeminently a theological act. Yet, there is a near lacuna in our literature: we give little attention to theological analysis of the preaching event.\u201d (\u201cNew Directions in Homiletics,\u201d Journal for Preachers, Easter 1993, 21.) Similar observations have been made by David Buttrick, Homiletic: Moves and Structures (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987) 486; John A. Mel loh, \u201cPublish or Perish: A Review of Preaching Literature 1968-1981,\u201d Worship 82 (1988) 506-07; and Robert P. Waznak, \u201cA Second Response [to David Buttrick],\u201d Worship 62 (1988) 273. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  4. Molt, Church in Power of Spirit, 207. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  5. Ibid., 80. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  6. Richard Lischer, A Theology of Preaching (Nashville: Abing don, 1981), 50. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  7. For a very helpful overview of the distinction between the dialectical imagination and the analogical imagination, see Tracy\u2019s The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 405-445. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  8. \u201cJustification by Faith,\u201d U.S. Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue Statement, Origins 13 (October\u00a0 6, 1983), #154. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  9. See Paul Ricouer, \u201cNaming God,\u201d Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34 (1979) 215-227, and \u201cBiblical Hermeneutics,\u201d Semeia 4(1975) 107-148; David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order (N.Y.: Seabury, 1975) 91-131; Louis Dupre, The Other Dimension (N.Y.: Seabury, 1979); Langdon Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God-Language (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). For Schillebeeckx\u2019s approach, which emphasizes a dialectical disclosure of the experience of grace as the basis for naming God at the limits of human experience, see Edward Schillebeeckx, The Understanding of Faith (London: Sheed and Ward, 1974), 78-101; and Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (chap. 2, n. 12) 29 -79. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  10. Schillebeeckx, Christ, 62. Note also Schillebeeckx\u2019s further reference to \u201cwhat proclaims itself in experience to be an astonishing and overwhelming event in reality, correcting and crossing all our plans and achievements\u201d (Christ, 64). See also Avery Dulles, \u201cRevelation and Discovery,\u201d in William J. Kelly, Theology and Discovery (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 1-29. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  11. Although he is operating out of a different anthropological basis, see Gerhard Ebeling\u2019s God and Word, trans. James W. Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967). Ebeling argues that we need the word of God \u201cto save [us] from choking on [our] own self because we no longer [have] any word with which to cry out of the depths of [our] self-contradiction and call upon that mystery that sur rounds [us].\u201d (47) ↵<\/a><\/li>
  12. Rainer Maria Rilke, Notebooks of Malie Laurids Brigge, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (N.Y.: W.W. Norton and Co., 1949), 26 -27. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  13. See, e.g., Gerhard Ebeling, God and Word (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966) 42. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  14. Karl Barth, \u201cThe Need and Promise of Christian Preaching,\u201d in The Word of God and the Word of Man (N.Y.: Harper and Brothers, 1957) 107-09. Note also Nathan Scott: \u201cOf all the myriad issues of life which the Christian pulpit is required to handle there is none so pressing, so inescapable, and so burdensome for the preacher as the problem of suffering, the mystery of iniquity, the strange and brutal haphazardness with which as it seems at times, acute misfortune is distributed amongst persons.\u201d Nathan A. Scott, \u201cThe Burdens and Temptations of the Pulpit,\u201d in Preaching on Suffering and a God of Love, ed. and with a foreword by Henry J. Young (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978) 7. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  15. See John Dominic Crossan, \u201cThe Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant,\u201d The Christian Century, Dec. 18-25, 1991, 1194 -1204, regarding the profound social and political challenge of Jesus\u2019 eating and healing patterns. For a synthesis of critical scholarship from a historical-critical perspective, see John P. Meier, \u201cJesus,\u201d New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 1316-1328. See also Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity, rev. ed. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1992); Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (chap. 3, n. 20); Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, trans. John Drury (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1978). ↵<\/a><\/li>
  16. Edward Schillebeeckx\u2019s phrase, Jesus (chap. 3, n. 20) 178. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  17. See J\u00fcrgen Moltmann The Crucified God (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), and \u201cThe Crucified God: God and The Trinity Today,\u201d in New Questions about God, Concilium Vol. 76, ed. J.B. Metz (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972) 26-37; and Sobrino, Christol ogy at the Crossroads; for \u201capparent abandonment\u201d see Edward Schillebeeckx, \u201cThe \u2018God of Jesus\u2019 and the \u2018Jesus of God,\u2019\u201d Jesus Christ and Human Freedom, Concilium Vol. 93, ed. E. Schillebeeckx and B. van Iersal (New York: Herder, 1974) 110-126; Robert J. Schreiter,\u201d \u201cThe Crucified God,\u201d The Bible Today 28 (May 1990), 159-64. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  18. David N. Power, \u201cWhen to Worship is to Lament,\u201d in Worship, Culture, and Theology (Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1990), 165. Note Power\u2019s further question: \u201cDoes not the very sacramen tal tradition in which we say Christ and the paschal mystery are represented seem at times to have been less than adequate? What has God got to say? Where is God, if not there? And if there, why in so clumsy a way?\u201d (166). ↵<\/a><\/li>
  19. See S\u00f6lle, Suffering (note 7), 61-86. \u201cPeople\u2019s lives actually depend on putting their situation into words or rather learning to express themselves ...\u201d (p. 76); \u201c\u2026 \u2018learn to suffer without complaining\u2019 is bad advice. Nothing can be learned from suffering unless it is worked through\u201d (p. 126). ↵<\/a><\/li>
  20. Title of Brueggemann\u2019s book. Note also Prophetic Imagination, where Brueggemann is discussing the texts of hope in Deutero-Isaiah: \u201cHe gives people back their faith by means of rearticulating the old story. He gives them the linguistic capacity to confront despair rather than be surrounded by it\u201d (77). ↵<\/a><\/li>
  21. David N. Power, \u201cSacraments: Symbolizing God\u2019s Power in the Church,\u201d Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 37 (1982), 50-66, and Mary Collins, \u201cIs the Eucharist Still a Source of Meaning for Women?\u201d in Origins 21(September 12, 1991), 225-229, and \u201cLiturgical Spirituality in a Pluralistic Culture,\u201d Doctrine and Life 41(1991), 59-67. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  22. For different theological expressions of how the Spirit of God holds open future possibilities and engenders human freedom, see Karl Rahner, \u201cTheology of Freedom,\u201d Theological Investigations VI (New York: Seabury, 1974), 178-96; Edward Schillebeeckx, \u201cI Believe in God, Creator of Heaven and Earth,\u201d God Among Us (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 91-102; J\u00fcrgen Moltmann, \u201cCreation as an Open System,\u201d The Future of Creation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 115-30; and God in Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985). ↵<\/a><\/li>
  23. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (New York: Putnam\u2019s, 1989) 11-12. ↵<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"author":3,"menu_order":2,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":["mary-catherine-hilkert-op"],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[65],"license":[],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/38"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/38\/revisions\/61"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/38\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.palni.org\/martenlecturesvol1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}