Jennifer L. Lord, The Dorothy B. Vickery Professor of Homiletics and Liturgical Studies Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary March, 2014 Moderator s 3 rd Colloquium on Ecclesiology, Fuller Seminary, Pasadena This material is work in progress and is copyrighted material. Do not duplicate or cite without expressed permission from the author. Preaching for Liturgical-Missional Congregations Introduction This paper focuses on preaching in connection to broader conversations about the relationship between Christian worship and mission. Preaching plays a part in any conversation about the relationship between the church of Jesus Christ s liturgy and the church s mission. Preaching is integral to corporate worship and therefore preaching plays a role in missional work. Though there are a variety of ways to talk about the nature and purpose of preaching I will focus on preaching as one of the central actions of the gathered Sunday assembly (the local congregation on the Lord s Day) and propose particular ways that the preacher can shape the sermon to serve preaching s purpose in the assembly which in turn serves the assembly s self-understanding of its participation in the mission of God for the sake of the world. Approach Before turning to focus on preaching I ll highlight terms and descriptions that locate my point of view and, then, enlist the help of a liturgical scholar to set the stage for my homiletical inquiry. Regarding terms: as I use the words liturgy and worship I use them interchangeably but to refer in the same way to the repeated actions we gather to do each Sunday, trusting in the triune God s presence and work through those things (means of grace) and among us (2 or more gathered), and that this work that we do with God in 1
the local worshiping assembly on the Lord s Day is itself already a public instantiation of God s mission in the world and for the world. Additional descriptive comments follow. The church, by God s grace and Christ s Spirit, has been invited into God s missional work and is itself a sign of God s mission in the world. To use liturgical theologian Aidan Kavanagh s shorthand: in the church s liturgy we are doing the world as the world ought to be done. How do we do the world as it ought to be done? We do certain things, given by God, again and again, trusting in God s presence and use of them for us. The central things I have in mind are scriptural, historical, and ecumenical and include gathering, reading and interpretation of scripture, prayers, bath and table, and sending. The gathered assembly is itself one of the central things. These central things are surrounded by other (secondary) actions that amplify and nuance them, and they assist in the ways that the central things are done in very different manners according to local culture (including what culture means for trans counter cross//and what might be counter culture). Preaching is one of these central things. It is a form of gospel proclamation, most commonly still done through one voice authorized by the assembly to speak, and in the liturgy it follows the reading of scriptures and leads us to sing, acclaim, pray, greet in peace, offer, feast, and go forth. At times I refer to these actions as our common work. This is to emphasize that they are things done, things we do, actions that themselves are loci of God s work in our midst. The use of work is in contradistinction to any sense of works-righteousness; these actions are God s work among us in Jesus Christ that we then enact as sign and participation in God s mission to the world. Three Approaches 2
I am helped in thinking about the relationship between liturgy and mission by Thomas H. Schattauer s work, Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission. (t)he assembly for worship is intrinsically connected to the mission of God in Christ for the sake of the whole world (missio Dei), and consequently worship is integrally related to every form of the church s mission of witness and service. 1 Schattauer provides a threefold taxonomy of the relationship: Inside and Out; Outside In; Inside Out. He writes, In the first approach, liturgy is understood and practiced as the quintessential activity for those inside the church community. Mission is what take place on the outside when the gospel is proclaimed to those who have not heard or received it or, to broaden the notion of mission, when the neighbor is served in acts of live and justice. The relationship between the inside activity of worship and the outside activity of mission is portrayed thus: worship nurtures the individual and sustains the community in its life before God and in its life together, and from where Christians go out to serve the church s mission as proclaimers and doers of the gospel. They return to worship, perhaps with a few more folk gathered by this witness, and the cycle begins again. In this model, worship spiritually empowers those inside the church who take up the church s mission in the outside world. 2 Though worship does not do the same thing as missional work it sustains and propels us toward this work because of our repeated encounters with the means of grace in the Sunday gathering. According to this first approach, Inside and Out, the spheres remain separate, we are sent forth to do this missional work. The second classification is Outside In. By this Schattaeur refers to two different ways additional agendas become central in the Sunday assembly. The sacred precinct of the liturgy becomes one of two things either a stage from which to present the gospel and reach out to the unchurched and irreligious, or a platform from which to issue the call to serve the neighbor and rally commitment for social and political action. 3 According to this model the church s worship takes on a slightly different focus and purpose than what I ve mentioned above the focus is turned to evangelism of those who have gathered or to transformation of the social/political commitments of those gathered. 3
Mission may continue outside of the church building but it happens in these particular ways during the Sunday assembly. The third category is Inside Out. This approach locates the liturgical assembly itself within the arena of the missio Dei. The focus is on God s mission toward the world, to which the church witnesses and into which it is drawn, rather than on specific activities of the church undertaken in response to the divine saving initiative. The missio Dei is God s own movement outward in relation to the world in creation and the covenant with Israel, and culminating in Jesus Christ and the community gathered in him. This community is created by the Spirit to witness to the ultimate purposes of God, to reconcile the world to God s own self (2 Cor. 5:18-19). The gathering of a people to witness to and participate in this reconciling movement of God toward the world is an integral part of God s mission. The visible act of assembly (in Christ by the power of the Spirit) and the forms of this assembly what we call liturgy enact and signify this mission. From this perspective there is no separation between liturgy and mission. The liturgical assembly of God s people in the midst of the world enacts and signifies the outward movement of God for the life of the world... The judgment and mercy of God enacted within the liturgical assembly signify God s ultimate judgment and mercy for the world. Like a reversible jacket, the liturgy can be turned and worn inside out, and by doing so we see the relationship between worship and mission inside out. 4 It is this third approach that I chose as the imagined context for my discussion of preaching in the liturgical-missional church, in liturgical-missional congregations. It s harder to pin down than the other two. The first two are instrumental in the first, worship enlivens us, empowers us, energizes us, focuses us to go forth and share the good news, to do unto others, neighbor and stranger, deeds of good news. In the second, worship is the place where we act out certain tasks of mission, evangelism and social change, in the worship event itself (these may continue outside but, as compared to Schattauer s first and third categories, are particular works done within the worshiping assembly). Preaching According to These Approaches 4
We can think specifically about preaching within these categories. According to the first category, Inside and Out, preaching would serve this relationship between worship and mission when the preacher identifies textual-gospel ways that we are sent forth to preach the gospel ourselves, (per St. Francis), with or without words. Preaching that fits this category would include sermons that end with and so let us go forth and or have some language directing listeners to move out in word and deed to spread the gospel as a result of what has been preached. Preaching according to this category includes illustrations, stories, and other showings 5 of ways that the faithful live gospel lives in the world through service and witness. These showings, and the language of the sermon, may or may not emphasize a corporate response to the liturgy. Sermons could include emphases on both corporate and individual response to gospel in the world. According to the second category, Outside In, preaching could be one of two things: for the purpose of instruction/conversion or for the purpose of information/change of heart. In this construal of the relationship between worship and mission the sermon either serves the broader purpose of evangelism in worship or serves the purpose of facilitating a social/political change of heart of those present. Preaching according to this category could take many forms but will aim to convert the hearers to faith, to recommitment, or to particular social or political allegiances that carry out the gospel in the world. The preaching might very well have a more didactic, thematic, or topical quality than the preaching that occurs in the other categories. Most likely the sermon will be focused to the individual if its aim is conversion, though corporate language may be used as example or invitation. If the sermon s aim is instruction or change of heart and 5
action with regard to social/political change the sermon could focus either individually or corporately through pronouns, showings, and overall sermonic focus. I think the nature and purpose of preaching is clearer in the first two of Schatteaur s categories though I do not attempt to exhaust the possibilities through the descriptions I ve offered. I am most interested in what preaching looks like in Schattauer s third construal of the liturgical-missional assembly, Inside Out. What is preaching in the midst of liturgy understood as that which enacts and signifies the outward movement of God for the life of the world? 6 It certainly shares traits with the sort of preaching that occurs according to the other two categories (because no categorization is pure). But what is going on with preaching that occurs in this understanding of liturgy? In this view of the liturgical-missional relationship as it occurs in the Sunday assembly? In this essay I ll highlight three aspects of preaching that I see fitting for sermons according to this understanding of the liturgical event. Again, I don t think the homiletical characteristics are pure for any category (the way preaching occurs in the other instances is shared here, too; the preaching that occurs here can be shared in the other instances). Yet this distinctive understanding of the nature and purpose of the liturgical assembly and its relationship to God s mission shapes a particular way of preaching in that context. The homiletical remarks that follow undulate between what is done and what ought to be done for this context. Hodie Preaching Liturgical scholar Anton Baumstark noted the use of the word Hodie in liturgical song. It is that Latin word meaning today and points to what happens as 6
phrases of prayers and stanzas of hymns are languaged in this way that conflates time in a certain manner. For instance at Christmas we sing Christ is born today. We know we do not literally mean this but symbolically (which is another form of truth telling) we do mean this: Christ is born today; Christ dies today; Jesus Christ is risen today. Liturgists speak of this conflation of time in particular ways: the past and future become present by our ritual actions. This folding in of the past is anamnesis (Greek for remembrance) and is the way that our actions make a past event a present true claim on us. In the same fashion God s promised future is already breaking in upon us now; it is prolepsis. It is the foretaste of all that is to be. While we live between the already and the not yet (the already of the full revelation of God through Jesus Christ and the not yet of the consummation of all things) the not yet breaks into our midst. God s kairos has taken up chronos and these things are possible. There is a manner of reading texts according to this sense of Hodie. There is a way of preaching that comes from this way of reading scripture. It is a bit mercurial but let me try to describe it. Using short hand I would say it is preaching in the present tense. This is different than preachers who take us back in time to the time we imagine for various bibilical texts. In these sermons the preacher tends to describe the scene back in time which in turn has us as listeners engage in time travel backwards to that scene. Often the sermonic claim is about God acting back in that time. Sometimes the preacher helps us see that God is still acting in the same ways now in our midst but often we are asked to believe, have faith, grow in the likeness and image of God because of what God has done in the past for us. 7
Preaching in the present tense, this Hodie sense of preaching, is different. It neither solely locates God s actions in the past or in the future but announces these past actions and future promises in a manner that claims us in the present. Homiletician Richard Lischer gets at this sense when he speaks about different ways of reading texts. He names three that he will set aside. He begins with what he calls a flat reading, in which every verse of a text is as important as every other verse. This type of reading, he says, misses the theological and emotional curve of the text and therefore its transformative power. Next he speaks about the convenient reading, readings that easily find useful ideas in the text. 7 The problem is that the ideas do not come from a gospel center of the text, For example, if Jesus wept over his friend Lazarus, perhaps it is also good for us to show our emotions more freely. 8 Thirdly Lischer speaks of an ironic reading, This approach focuses on the distance between God and humanity but does little to bridge the gap. Humanity appears doomed to live in the ironic discrepancy between its own pretensions and the majesty of God. 9 What Lischer proposes instead gets at what I call present tense preaching or Hodie preaching. Lischer calls preachers to theological exegesis and says We read it as if it were addressed to our particular community and as if our lives depended on its conclusions, yet also with the conviction that its authority stretches well beyond our little congregation to the church of every time and place. 10 He would have us read in continuity with the church, one, holy, apostolic. Preachers read on behalf of the contemporary church and they read the church s book. This is to say that God s presence, faithfulness, and action are contemporaneous and that scripture witnesses to this God. We do not have to look to the past or the future for God s actions, we proclaim 8
the present tense truth and claim of God s deeds (past, present, future) on us Hodie, today. This is Luke 4:21 preaching: Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Homiletician Paul Scott Wilson instructs all preachers to fashion a three word statement for every sermon. The statement itself may or may not appear in the sermon but it is the sermon s orientation and focus. While many homileticians suggest such a focus statement, Wilson instructs preachers to prepare the three words as: Subject (The Trinity, God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit), Active Verb, Object (Hearers, the World, the church local or beyond). You can see that this construct requires us to put our focal proclamation in the present tense and in a form that proclaims and action done by God presently to us/in our midst. We are never the subject. And the verb is always active. A very good practice, I think, to help sustain Hodie preaching. Preaching to the church Preaching to the church is different than preaching to an aggregate of individuals. When preachers do the work to prepare the sermon they keep the identity of church at the forefront of their preparations rather than individual persons or even the bottom line of shared humanity. This means to be mindful that our gathering as church is really the thing, and preaching serves (among other things) to remind us who we are and whose we are and to calls us again to faith. This requires that preachers think with baptismal sensibilities: we preach to the local manifestation of the body of Christ and also, perhaps, to those not yet incorporated into the body through the sign and seal of baptism (we practice open baptism, all are invited to the waters). We preach to continue to form the faithful in baptismal identity and to invite those not yet incorporated to come to faith. Lischer again, 9
Once we learn to read with the church, we will honor the church in our sermons. Linguistically, the sermon will create a symbolic world over time in which the reality of the people of God is central. It s odd, but we gather every Sunday as a group, pray for one another, receive the Eucharist shoulder to shoulder, and sing our hymns in unison. We read from a book that records the history of a people. The sermon is a word from one church to another mediated by the common use of Holy Scripture. It is a church word... The common denominator between Christians is not human nature but the church, which, as always, can be found gathered around lectern and pulpit, where it listens attentively for a word from the Lord, and scattered throughout the world, where it attempts to perform the word with integrity. 11 It is one thing to conceive of preaching so to give succor or direction to gathered individuals, though preaching surely does this. But it is another thing altogether to preach in order to shape the church, strengthen the church, remind us the church our life in the crucified-risen One. Individual needs and sorrows are given their place in the larger narrative of the life of the church, which is to say in the paschal mystery, the dying and rising of Jesus Christ. Our preaching tells the gathered church who we are, already, in the grace and mercy of God through Jesus Christ. This shift from a sermon focus on the individual or aggregate of individuals to church becomes clear through sermonic language (pronouns), showings, and even sermon focus and theological claims. Primary and Secondary Mystagogy By the fourth century great preachers were instructing the neophytes (newly baptized) in the mysteries of the church which they had received for the first time at their baptisms. Cyril of Jerusalem, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Ambrose of Milan are three well-known mystagogical preachers. After the baptisms of the Great Paschal Vigil (the Easter Vigil) the newly baptized would hear special sermons instructing them after the fact in the mysteries (sacraments) of baptism and eucharist. 10
Today we might preach such sermons to instruct the newly baptized and their families. But we also can preach in ways that reference not only these primary things but also the secondary things that support these primary actions of the Sunday gathering (confession of sin, assurance of pardon; passing the peace; prayer of illumination; the offering). Preachers can make connections to the different things and actions of the Sunday gathering to help all see that through these repeated corporate actions we are formed in being signs of God s work in and for the world. There are several dots to connect here for why would a preacher refer in the sermon to something we have just done or are doing in that Sunday s worship? Because what we do is enactment of the promises of scripture, because what we do repeatedly patterns our behavior and beliefs, because what we do on a Sunday morning is the Christian life in ritual form. Robert Hovda said this so well: (W)hat is most important about public worship is that we gather the sisters and brothers together for a festival, a special occasion, a celebration of the reign of God (not yet terribly evident in daily life nor in the institutions of society), that helps all of us feel so good about ourselves, so important, so dignified, so precious, so free, so much at one.. not as escape, not merely in distinction to daily routine, but in judgment, in the Lord's judgment on those ways and institutions. A celebration of the reign of God that goes way beyond the tight, drab, rationalistic, verbose, pedagogical exercises we sometimes try to make of it - all those dreadful 'themes' we love - into a large, broad fully human landscape, where Jesus is truly the firstborn of a new humanity, and where our other liturgical tools (festival excess and colors and tastes and textures and odors and forms and touches) penetrate the Babel of our words and points and arguments to heal the human spirit and to raise it up in the covenant community's vision of new possibilities. Good liturgical celebration, like a parable, takes us by the hairs of our head, lifts us momentarily out of the cesspool of injustice we call home, puts us in the promised and challenging reign of God, where we are treated like we have never been treated anywhere else... 12 Hovda s words open up what Schattaeur has said about the third approach, Inside Out: what happens in the Sunday assembly is already the sign of and participation in the 11
mission of God. It is our public enactment of the world as God intends for the world to be. We don t just rehearse it here, for it is already the real thing, a proleptic sign of what will be by the judgment and mercy of God. Preachers, mindful of the day s texts and the season of the church s year, can name connections between the texts and our actions and those things to the current needs of the world, all to help us see how we are already both sign of and participant in God s mission, God s reign. Much more can be said about preaching that serves this Inside Out approach to the relationship between the church s liturgy and the church s mission. But here is a start: it is spoken in the present tense. It is Hodie, preaching. It is focused on the life of the church. And it makes connections to all of the ritual ways that we enact, in the Lord s Day gathering, what is most true about neighbor, stranger, God, and us. 1 Thomas H. Schattauer, Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission 2 Ibid., 2 3 Ibid., 3 4 Ibidl, 3 5 Homiletician Chuck Campbell uses the word showings to identify various ways that preachers use evocative language (story, metaphor, images, analogy, simile, other descriptive terms) in sermons. Personal conversation, August, 2011. 6 Ibid., 3 7 Richard Lischer, The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 64. 8 Ibid., 65 9 Ibid., 65-66. 10 Ibidl, 68-69. 11 Ibid., 74-75. 12 (Robert Hovda, The Vesting of Liturgical Ministers," in John Baldovin, ed., Robert Hovda: The Amen Corner (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994), 220." 12