Hitmen and Midwives: Session Two

Here’s the second session (and Q/A) I offered on Grace and Proclamation recently at the Anglican Church of Canada’s Bishop’s Clergy Conference.

Here’s the nub of my argument:

Preaching needs to be more than theological or even kerygmatic. For grace to heal, preaching needs to be eschatological. Yes, God is on the move, at work in the world, but the one place God has promised to be found in the world is in a particular word that first spells the death of you. The sermon must be an existential crisis, an address that ends you yet makes you Easter new, and for that event—encounter— to occur you need not a word about God but a word from God. The actuality of revelation, what Karl Barth emphasized as an antidote to liberal anthropology, must be actualized in the lives of people who hear and believe. Sermons that are simply about God are sermons still stuck in the third person. Rather than using the texts to talk about what God might doing in the world, preachers must do the text to their hearers, for this is a doing that God has promised to be up to in the world. The pulpit is not a platform. It is a doing. It is a doing of God just as surely as if God had torn a hole in the roof of your church and lowered the listeners down to you, one by one, on a stretcher. For sermons to be eschatological, for preaching to rise to proclamation, preachers must make themselves the subject of the sentence and dare to utter an unflinching promise on behalf of the God who has called them. Such a first person promise requires the absolute conviction that though “I” am the speaking subject the active agent at work is altogether not me.