Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: It is our pleasure to welcome to this conference, Dr. Edmund Steimle. He has done a heroic work of coming from the cool climes of Vermont down here and we had not anything better to offer you than this warm day, but we have a warm reception for you within our hearts. We are happy that you are here. As you are all aware, Dr. Steimle is the Brown professor of homiletics at Union Theological
Seminary, our sister seminary in New York City. Sir, we welcome you and call upon you at this time, and then at the close of this and each lecture, there will be opportunity for discussion, so if you have questions, please prepare them and have them ready and we will discuss or answer questions as long as it is appropriate, then we will draw to a close and go on to the next preacher. We wait upon you, sir.
STEIMLE: Thank you, Mr. Byers. We are you know to "preach the word in season and out of season." I am proposing that those of us who engage in preaching now are doing it out of season. In an examination of some of the renewal literature, which will become apparent as we go through these three presentations, exhibits considerable lack of interest in preaching,
very little is said about it. Some things that are said about it are less, I think, than helpful. At any rate, these presentations will take the form of a kind of dialogue with some of the materials that have come out in recent years regarding the renewal of the church. I suppose we might well start with the basic question, is there still a place for preaching? I am thinking now in these lectures, primarily in the form of proclamation in the context
of public worship. Is there still a place for this kind of mono logical presentation of the Word of God in the pulpit in the context of public worship? I have assumed, however, that those of you who are here are already engaged in this, and if that question bothers you, it can be raised later on either after this or after some other session. So, I am going to assume that there is still a place, and if there is still a place for the pulpit
symbol of the sermon in its traditional setting in the context of public worship go on from there, then first of all, what is supposed to happen when a sermon is preached and heard? What is its focus? What do the people hear week after week after week? I am thinking in this first lecture primarily of the course of preaching over a period of time rather than any particular single sermon. Tonight we will zero in more
on the problem of the problem of the particular single sermon, but should be the major thrust of preaching week after week after week in days like these? [Callum Williams?] in We're in the World has struck a fundamental note in the literature dealing with the renewal of the church when he stresses the fact that the forms of the renewed life in the church must be allowed to grow around all the shapes of worldly need. This is a familiar quotation.
In addressing ourselves to the focus of preaching, we shall therefore need to address ourselves to the shape of worldly need, to which preaching is addressed. This simply reaffirms an old homiletical principle that the identification of human need is part and parcel in determining what the word of God has to say today or in any age. And I also want to make it clear at the beginning that I view the pulpit as
only one among a number of forms and structures in the church through which the word is proclaimed or communicated in one way or the other, including the sacraments, small groups, the educational program, counseling, community involvement, opportunities for dialogue and discussion, even music, drama, and the dance. It is obviously not a case of either or with respect to any or all of these forms and structures, but of both and. It is our
contention, moreover, that the focus of preaching is quite restricted because of its place in the context of public worship and also because as Martin Marty has pointed out, preaching is overburdened in an over worded world. I am not unaware of the power of the spoken word from biblical times until today as an indispensable vehicle of God's promise and demand. Faith, says Luther, is an acoustical affair
, but I am also aware of the fact that we live in an over worded world, where eyes and ears are assaulted from every side by sales pitches, propaganda, rumors, hearsay, big lies, little lies, facts, and fantasy, as well as by the message as it is so often called from the pulpit on Sundays. This message, of course, not to be confused with the periodic message, same word, which sends millions of Americans to beer
cans and bathrooms every 15 minutes during the evening set to. Interesting that we use the same word for both. If the preached word is to make any sense in an over worded world and culture we had better, I think, be clear in what ought to be going on when the word is preached. So let me mention, therefore, at the outset two restrictions to be imposed on the focus, the major emphasis in preaching, which really need no theological under girding
which could readily be supplied, but merely common sense. First, I think, there ought to be a permanent moratorium on the institution centered sermon. Some have objected that this is no longer a serious problem, I am not so sure. Certainly, denominational and interdenominational bureaucracies assume that promotional sermons will be preached in the interests of various causes and concerns of the institutions from church school curriculum, and church colleges,
and seminaries, and stewardship in the narrow sense of raising the budget or raising benevolence, or in the interests of special financial appeals, or evangelism in the narrow sense of fattening the membership rolls, or medical projects. Even some renewal sermons often have the strengthening of the individual institution, the congregation or the parish as their target. This is not to imply that institutional church, along with its
proper institutional concerns is not important. Theologically, the institutional church is a direct consequence of the incarnation. Our concern is simply to correct if only by silence, the impression that the pulpit is the catchall for every cause under heaven, ecclesiastical or otherwise. And more important to correct again the impression even if only by silence that the church at worship is still primarily concerned with its own
institutional life. Again, this is not to deny the claims of the institution, but rather to lean over backward lest we continue to give the false impression that the church is in the world to serve itself, rather than the world for which its Lord gave His life. And then second, I think we ought to recognize the limitations of the preaching of the sermon with respect to prodding the assembled community to specific social action or community action.
Again, I do not want to be misunderstood. Social action, community involvement is as far as I am concerned a primary concern of the church, and sermons will be concerned with social issues and community problems as we should have opportunity to note tonight. The question is simple whether the sermon is the most effective tool for securing specific action with respect to specific social and community problems. Martin Marty observes
that sermon is a frail or false instrument for most political action. Harvey Cox makes a similar observation. People simply cannot be expected to see or react responsibly to emerging social political problems merely by hearing sermons or reading articles. Common sense would indicate that other structures would be far more effective in this regard. The seminar, the cell group, panel discussion, structures which would provide opportunity for questions, discussion, clarification of
complicated and often controversial issues. Time Magazine, a couple of years ago I guess it was, made quite an issue of the fact that although practically all the churches in California were backing the open housing legislation, the legislation failed, and they pointed to this as showing the weakness of the pulpit. I do not think so at all. This is not how you get legislation passed, by preaching about it. It takes far more concentrated
action, one to one telephoning, small groups, and that sort of thing. Experiments have been carried on in some churches where a kind of open forum or a dialogue sermon directing itself to a controversial social issue or community problem has replaced the more traditional mono logical approach at least on occasion, and I certainly believe such experiments are worth trying and maybe useful at times. Though I question whether that single shot device in and of itself will actually motivate
to specific action, though it may prompt thoughtful discussion, if that is all desired, then well and good. But then it is also questionable as a regular practice whether worship in the form of discussion and debate can adequately carry through the quality of celebration which in my judgment should characterize a community of worship. Certainly, we need a lot more experimentation and research at that point.
At any rate, a great deal with the disillusionment with the pulpit these days has resulted from using it as a catch all, I believe, an all-purpose device used in cliche in response to any headline, cause, passing thought, new book, play, novel, movie that you want to preach a sermon about. So let us attempt to narrow down more specifically the focus of preaching in its traditional setting of common worship, its major thrust over a period of time.
The focus will be determined by the nature of revelation itself, it seems to me. The theological accent under girding the nature and function of the sermon as far as I understand it, is incarnational. God comes to man where he is and identifies Himself with man as he is, and we will come back to this accent over and over again because as I listen to sermons and hear them, from students and from
others in preaching workshops and so on, so often it is practically impossible to see the preacher identifying himself with these people so that he is one with them, yet this is how the word comes to us. God does not blast away; He comes down incarnati, in the flesh, with us. Identifies Himself with us, and there makes His offer of love,
which is also His demand. But the demand is always in the context of grace. The setting out, the acting out in history of God's saving word in the biblical record, grace is always prior in time. This is not to split God up into a schizophrenic acting in love one moment and judgment and demand another, but simply so that we may understand the essential character of God as a God of grace, rather than a God of law, of wrath, of judgment.
The Exodus, therefore, precedes the giving of the Law. God comes to earth as the child in Bethlehem and places Himself at our disposal in all weakness before the child grows up to deliver the Sermon on the Mount with its impossible demands. The invitation to the wedding feast precedes the demand for the wedding garment. Law is understood within the context of grace not the reverse.
Now this gives us a biblical vantage point from which to observe a strange distortion of the nature of the gospel with reference to the focus of preaching in some of the recent renewal literature. To be sure, the tradition Lutheran distinction between law and gospel can often become mechanical and wooden, but it also can still be, I think, a useful device in coming to terms with the precise role of preaching in the renewal of the church. [Andre Cox?] for example, refers several times to the gospel
as a summons to assume responsibility, to frame with his neighbor a common life suitable to the secular city, and that sounds to me like law rather than like grace. Richard Leakey in New Meanings for New Beings, I have great respect for Leakey, but speaking of the sermon, he writes "A fresh understanding of the scriptures as opened by Christ and applied by the Spirit
also reveals the need and the possibility of something more than the teaching accompanying the gospel, of the word addressed to the faithful in their own situation, demanding the obedience required in that situation. Such a word is needed if there is to be any genuine obedience. The sermon is the place where that more specific demand find utterance." Again, the specific focus of preaching is seen as demand,
as law. One further reference, Callum Williams describes a freedom movement as a case study in the missionary's structure of the church and notes the place of preaching in it. In the Monday night meetings preparing for action, there is often powerful preaching, a word brought into touch of the concrete issues before them. The biblical drama is heavily used, here is a call, he says, to total commitment, a readiness to give one's life in the cause of true community.
But a call to total commitment, if that is the major burden of preaching is theologically the preaching of law rather than grace. I suspect this heavy emphasis on law rather than grace in contemporary references to the focus of preaching grows in part out of a frantic frustration regarding the place of the church in the world. What after all do you do, you know, with a complacent suburban or small town congregation satisfied with its comfort and security
not wanting to be changed or disturbed. Or what do you do with an embattled minority group itching for justice to gird them for action in a fast moving revolutionary world, but preach the law, get out there and fight, call them to obedience, call them to discipleship, call them to total commitment. A part of the reason for preaching the law in an age like ours may result from a curious optimism which pervades much
of the recent renewal literature. Optimism not with respect to the institutional church, heaven knows, but with respect to man come of age. Harvey Cox, for example, sees the secular city as an opportunity for glorious liberation in the very anonymity and mobility, the ruthlessness so many preachers find is a cause for alarm, he writes, "Despite its pitfalls, the anonymous shape of urban life helps free a man from the law." Now it is perfectly true
as he points out in the anonymity of urban culture, far from the fishbowl of town life, modern man experiences both the terror and the delight of human freedom more acutely. The question is whether the man of our time is equipped with the maturity necessary to experience the delight rather than the terror. Surely, if our attitude toward the wave of secularity is predominantly optimistic because of our
assessment of the human situation than the preaching with inevitably tend to the preaching of the law because all that is needed for the individual when God is already active preemptively in the world is to be prodded to get out in the world and join up. Whether we are shamed into it, exhorted into it our, or called into it, the theological basis for the approach is law rather than gospel. Perhaps to counteract the optimism engendered by the possibilities within the secular revolution
it would be well to listen to the late Samuel Miller's sober estimate of the situation "It is thus" he writes "that the double meaning of secularity makes itself known. Unity is lost." and then he illustrates by philosophy turning from the attempt to see things whole affirming the coherence of things and resting content in logic, largely the syntactical logic of language. Unity is lost.
and with it the coherent pattern of meaning it sustains. And yet, the loss is characterized by a tremendous burst of energy expressed in the diverse forms of cultural activity in art, science, government, and religion. Secondly, he goes on "superstition is swept clean with the coming of secularity, yet with the loss of superstition, there also goes the mystery by which existence is deepened
and reality in its total aspect respected. Finally, the impact on man himself is indicated by the fact that he becomes independent, achieves a notable freedom, fulfills his individuality, and yet at the same time feels himself alienated, an outsider, alone in a world to which he does not belong. Secularity, therefore, he sums up, thus has double meanings
and is in itself not a solution to the religious problem, it is in an essence only a restatement of the problem. Without such a sober view of the parallels, the promise of secularity, preaching will be heard as law, as demand, rather than as gospel, as promise. This in fact is what laymen actually hear in many a sermon according to Reuel Howe, laymen from their side see the failure of communication to lie in the fact that
preachers' sermon for example on the free gift of God's love is often heard by them as a new and harsher demand to be good. The preaching of grace is heard as a demand of law. This is scary when you consider how often people hear what they expect to hear rather than what we are trying to say. The primary focus, therefore, its fundamental content week after week
will be determined by a man's anthropology, the kind of analysis we make of the human situation, just as our assessment of the nature of the gospel itself will be determined by what a man believes about the human situation. Now, I have lived long enough to see the change from the optimistic view of human nature at the end of the nineteenth century and coming into the twentieth century, result in in a watering down of the gospel,
and the reaction two world wars and depression a deeper sense of the evil in man resulting in neo orthodoxy and moving on to existentialism and now to the theology of hope, each one a response to an assessment of the human situation at the time. If the man to whom we preach is experiencing essentially the possibilities of a glorious liberation
as a result not only of secularity, but also because of the rapid change and the revolutionary character of our times, we will preach one thing, but if the man to whom we preach finds life more perplexing, confusing, bewildering, defeating, we will obviously preach another. What, for example, will preaching of the law do for Celia in T. S. Eliot's cocktail party when she says "I want to be
cured of a craving for something I cannot find, and of the shame of never finding it." First, I must tell you that I should really like to think that there is something wrong with me, because if there isn't, there is something wrong with the world itself and that is much more frightening, that would be terrible, so I'd rather believe there is something wrong with me that could be put right.
In any case, as R. C. Brown has indicated in his little book The Ministry of the Word, each minister of the word must in the end draw his own sketches and paint his own pictures of the modern situation. He will have to make countless sketches and no single picture will satisfy him, or his knowledge of himself through self-examination, and the growing knowledge of the lives led by others individually and groups will cause him frequently to modify the conclusions he comes to about the pattern of
communal living. Now we know in part, and partial knowledge only produces tentative conclusions, but tentative conclusions are sufficient for meaningful speech and action. Find the precise focus of preaching in days like these we need to sketch in a picture to whom we preach, and the picture Brown points out, is tentative, it is qualified by the awareness that no single sketch or picture will
fit every man or even the same man under different circumstances. Sin, for example, wears many faces. As David Roberts has vividly indicated in his psychotherapy in the Christian view of man. Moreover, we are not unaware of the danger of fitting the picture to predetermined assumptions with regard to the nature of redemption, so Richard Leakey again warns us again of the danger of informing comparatively happy people that they are really unhappy
currently healthy people that they are really sick, and constructively busy people that they are really in despair snuffing around in corners for cobwebs and in closets for skeletons in order to convert people there. I don't know how many times I have listened to student sermons prized to get me into Kierkegaardian existential despair inside of thirty-five seconds. Well, you know, sometimes a man comes to church and he is not about to be in despair.
Maybe that he got a raise last Friday and a promotion, and that morning for once everything went well and breakfast and he comes to church on top of the world, and he is not about to get into Kierkegaardian despair inside of thirty-five seconds. Recognizing the limitations and dangers, some analysis of the contemporary situation is necessary for the preacher if he is to understand the man to whom the message is addressed. As we noted earlier, God comes to man where he is
An examination of the biblical record will disclose that different situation evoke different emphases in the word addressed. Amos, for example, spoke to a people in an age of peace and prosperity, an age in which religion enjoyed a tremendous boon, to a people who were proud, arrogant, corrupt, and devoted church goers and tithers. There is not much comfort in the book of Amos, as you know.
The emphasis on judgment, "I hate, I despise your feasts and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies" and so on. To be sure, the judgment is enfolded in grace, even in Amos "you only have I known of all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." But the grace in which the judgment is declared is muted in the face of a people at ease in Zion.
The prophecy of Amos would seem to provide a very suggestive analogy for the plight of the church in America today, and some would add, especially in suburbia, but it applicable only, I believe, at a superficial level. The situation to which we address ourselves today seems to me to be far closer to that of the people in exile in Babylon to whom the unknown prophet speaks "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, speak ye tenderly to
Jerusalem." You can now draw on your own homiletical imaginations to provide the contemporary parallels for the situation to which the prophet addressed himself a message predominately of comfort, of grace. There is judgment, of course, in Isaiah 40-55, chapters on idolatry and so on, but the basic groundswell of that prophecy, that magnificent prophecy, is hope.
Comfort. Gospel. So here they were, a people in exile, uprooted from the land which had provided a measure of stability and security, separated from the tangible symbols of God's presence and sovereignty, the land, the hills, the temple, surrounded on every side by the very tangible and overwhelming symbols of Babylon's power and self-confidence. From the fabulous
hanging gardens to the Babylonian gods which dotted the oriental sky above them at night. For fifty years, that would take us back to shortly after the close of the first world war, almost two generations, they had lived in this magnificent but flat land as exiles, sure that God had forgotten them, and even if He had not forgotten, equally sure that His power localized in the
distant land of Judah could not possibly do anything about their situation in far off Babylon. God was not dead; He was simply impotent, a quaint anachronism symbol of the good old days, who was remembered with nostalgia and homesickness. They were not theoretical atheists; they were practical atheists, convinced that God could not do anything about anything where they were.
So some of them sat by the waters of Babylon and sang their sad songs. While others, encouraged by Jeremiah, made a go of it in this alien land, and it sometimes turned out to be a very prosperous go. But underneath it all was the restlessness, the uneasiness, the homesickness, all born of a lack of faith that Yahweh was still powerfully active in the world or that He cared at all for what was going on in the world and particularly in the world of the
exiles. Now that seems to be to be a pretty fair picture of the situation for most of us and most of our people. The [rootlessness?] is evident in an age of mobility and devastatingly rapid change. The disintegration of the family as an institution providing identity, security, and continuity. The ethical revolution with its resultant anomaly or normlessness, suggests God
far off in time, symbol of the good old days. A deeper and far more pervading is the haunting fear that life today, like the life of the exiles, makes no sense. As Celia suggests, that would be terrible, and so it is. To what purpose is God's long silence in Babylon if He is a good and gracious God? To what purpose is suffering of children, then or now?
So Camus as the spokesman for the contemporary exile declares, "I share with you, Christians, the same revulsion from evil, but I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die." It is perhaps here, at the point of theodicy, theodicy not as a rational explanation of the paradox of evil and a good and loving God, but
theodicy as a term distinguishing the essential question at the root of human existence. So John Courtney Murray in the Problem of God writes, "If God is, and if He is what He is, not only the Creator, but the Pantocrator how can the world be what it is? A place of manifold evil, and area of human misery?" Then he goes on, "No man escapes the problem
it is put as a test to every man. The test is not put to man's intelligence, but unlike the metaphysical problem which admits a manner of philosophical resolution the problem of evil utterly defeats philosophy. The test" he says "is put to man's freedom. The temptation is to reject the reality of God's presence in the world as its benevolent and provident ruler, in the rejection of the evil that is present in such dreadful reality.
Man's questions here are not philosophical, but historical existential, where is my god? Is He the living God or not?" Richard Aardenburg comes to the same conclusion with respect to the simple problem of men in our time, when he says "The question for faith and unbelief in our day is to wrestle with what some have called theolocy, and what I call the logic of reconciliation
to divine omnipotence and divine goodness." See, how can a man be motivated to participate with God at work in the world, to use one of the most familiar phrases in renewal literature, until this basic question is dealt with honestly, frankly, candidly, and over and over again. Professor [Hokendike?] formerly of Holland, now at Union Seminary, calls this man today with which we have to do the forth man whose symbol is
no longer Prometheus, the undaunted revolutionary who has dreamed up a new future for mankind and is now going to bring it about, of course, the symbol of Prometheus would fit a large number of activist students and the young, but he says "The forth man, whose symbol is no longer Prometheus, but Sisyphus the hero of absurdity, who muckingly plods along,
although he knows that the whole business does not contain a single promise." I suspect you will not actually find that articulate forth man in your churches engaged in prayer, praise, and listening to sermons, but I suspect that underneath the surface of your deacons, elders, and a good many of the dear old ladies, you will find the lurking suspicion that the forth man has the right of it after all. I do not share Cox's view
when he writes "The existentialist claim that our culture is meaningless or purposeless is simply wrong." and I find no hope in his assurance when he writes "Our culture is a teleological or purpose oriented culture, and man is the fashioner of purposes." I simply cannot share his anthropological optimism. I believe the old cliche, an age of anxiety is still to be taken seriously.
Scratch the surface of one of those apparently self-righteous, confident, purposeful Pharisees in our churches and you find an anxious Pharisee. Scratch the surface of a narrow, prejudiced deacon or elder and you find a frightened deacon or elder. Scratch the surface of a rebellious teenager and chances are you find a scared kid. I suppose most of you have seen that TV documentary A Time for Burning, study you recall of a Lutheran parish in Omaha where the pastor attempted a minimal
breakthrough, minimal, with respect to the race problem by promoting the interracial visits between members of his all white congregation and of a nearby negro congregation. He failed and felt called upon to resign, but the camera if you recall, the camera made abundantly clear what the problem was, it was fear. Just plain fear. It just came out in the faces of the people. Now I grant you, the surface covering
fear made be made of pretty touch, scratch resistant materials. Our preaching has to take that into account too of course as in Amos, and no doubt the man will resist with all his being having the surface scratched for fear of what might happen were his insides exposed. And what we are doing when we attempt to scratch the surface and attack the exposed nerves through the preaching of the law, is to break through what may well be a lifetime of working out some MO
to use TV detective jargon, some kind of modus operandi by which man can some to some kind of terms with a rough, tough competitive world that is impersonal, often brutal, and unbearably frightening, a world in which there is no observable ground of existence. There is not bottom anywhere so far as he can see, and the only god that is visible to him has become the private deity of the churches, not the God
of grace who is actively in control of this tough, brutal, and often frightening world. But the surface which covers up the heart of darkness, hard and impervious as it may be, and necessary as it may be to deal with it on occasion, that is not the basic problem as I see it. Sin is not pride or rebellion essentially or even sloth as Harvey Cox so cogently suggests in his I'm Not Leaving It to the Snake,
these are cover ups. These are ways by which man takes matters into his own hands to come to terms with life when because of his anxiety he loses faith in God. Samuel Miller again throws further light on the contemporary situation when he says "Few of us live in this age, or at least, we live only in partly in this age, some of age are Paleolithic in art, iron age in politics, Victorian in morals and only modern
in the gadgets and the plumbing we love and the cars we drive. There is some difficulty," he says, "in moving entirely into the twentieth century. We love so much that is no longer true of the world that we cannot bear to give up the fiction, and the question is why we cannot bear to give up the fiction." So we return to one of the recurring themes in the renewal literature, that the forms of the renewed life of the church must be permitted to grow around the shapes of worldly needs.
I would most heartily agree, but surely one of the shapes of the world's need is fear. Fear of change. Fear of loss of meaning. Fear of the fundamental uncertainty, which is the dominant mark of our age. And preaching in the context of common worship should be shaped, I believe, around this overwhelming need just as it was in the message of second Isaiah with opening
and predominant theme of "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people." Callum Williams puts his finger on the throbbing need in another statement in What in the World, when he writes, "The church must understand, seek to understand, how we can speak to the need of man for a basic security from within which he can be free for a change." The focus of preaching, therefore, will be to
under gird constantly this fearful man of today with assurance of who God is, that God loves him if we can constantly get that across in any meaningful terms, and in that context, calls him to participate in the life of the new being and the new society coming into being. Because it is only as he recognizes that he is free in some sense at least from his deep fears and deep seated anxiety will he be free to
answer the call to participate and to involve himself in the changes in this fastly changing world. Again, let me be clear, preaching alone cannot bring this off, you know. No single aspect or structure in the life of the church can enable a man to be free for change, he will need the support of a community of mutual concern. He will need opportunity for having
questions discussed, debated, and perhaps even answered. He will have to learn to see that there is no comfort apart from claim, but as a community gathers for common worship in that setting, I believe, the impact of preaching should be predominately gospel, assurance, hope. As Hokindike emphasizes "The gospel that is preached must be made understandable as a message of hope.
Sisyphus is the symbol of hopelessness. Here hope will have to be learned again out of the bankruptcy of all human, in this situation, we a [may announce?]" he goes on "that through Christ's sake, the morning will come that we can look forward to the morning and may expect much from it. Hope," he says, "is here the liberating but strange message. So strange, says McGee somewhere in a moving poem that God must be constantly amazed when people
still can hope." Now the problem for the preacher is how to keep the focus of his preaching on assurance and hope without letting it slop over into a vacuous portrayal of cheap grace, called a cheap reassurance, a vapid peace of mind and all that, thus cut the artery of responsible response. Part of the answer, I think, will depend of the fabric of the sermon, which we will discuss tonight
but in addition, the preacher sensitive to the basic human situation, will also recognize that biblical hope has its roots in the bankruptcy of all merely human hopes. Thus, while under girding modern mans need for assurance, he will also be conscious of the necessity of exposing all false hopes and proximate securities as the potential idols which they really are. Preaching that is focused
on biblical hope will not be toothless. It will not necessarily be easy to listen to. What we are attempting to stress here are the underlying groundswell of preaching today, its ultimate or dominant theme of focus rather than the thrust of a particular sermon which may well be devastating, which may well be the preaching of the law, pure and unadorned, rather than reassuring in its immediate impact
Meanwhile, if the forth man is lurking beneath the surface of the people in our congregation, harboring the suspicion that all life has to say that to them ultimately is no, then I think it is well to recall Joseph Sitler's pregnant phrase "Ultimate negations generate a strange addressability by ultimate affirmations." He then illustrates the point
by reference to Salinger's Holden Caulfield in the [Roxie?] Gallery watching the Rockettes make their peculiar obeisance to the nation in a tinsel Christmas routine. You may recall when he says "how the boy lonely and honest submits the gurgling delight of the audience remark good old Jesus would [appeal it?]." It may very well be that the man today sees more clearly than we do the inadequacy of our celebration
of the Christ event, thereby reveals his openness to its actual depths. This, at least, is a ray of hope on the horizon for preaching fallen into decay and may give added zest to Paul's familiar lines "The night is far spent, the day is at hand, now is our salvation nearer than when we believed." And here ended the first lesson.