My friend Ken Sundet Jones preached for my congregation today on the lectionary Old Testament text, Genesis 12.1-9.

And here’s a photo of him cutting a video for the Iowa Preachers Project at the On Message Inc political campaign office of a dear friend, Brad Todd— subscribe to his Substack while you’re at it!

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Let us pray. Gracious Lord, by your embodied Word, Jesus Christ, you have staked out our lives as the place where you will pitch your tabernacle tent. Come to us today and make your home with us. Amen.

In 1983 the British blue-eyed soul singer Paul Young released a cover version of Marvin Gaye’s song “Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home),” and it reached the top of the British charts. The song is about a heartbreaker who drifts along, never able to commit to a relationship:

For I’m the type of guy / Who gives a girl the eye

Everybody knows

But I love them / And I leave them

Break their hearts / And deceive them

everywhere I go

Don’t you know that I’m the type of man

Who is always on the roam

Wherever I lay my hat that’s my home.

In our reading this morning we hear a story about laying down one’s hat and finding a home. This story of God’s call of Abram and Sarai was one of the most important in shaping the identity of the Israelites, of Jesus and the disciples, and of Christians across the ages. In it we discover a God who is no roaming heartbreaker a la Paul Young and Marvin Gaye, but instead comes to us in a way that we never have to go looking for a place we can lay our hat and call home.

Abram and his wife Sarai are better known as Abraham and Sarah — the names God gave them after this story. They started their lives in Ur of the Chaldees among pagan people in the land that today is southern Iraq, somewhere along the southern end of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

The whole extended Abram and Sarai bin Terah clan became nomads and pulled up roots to find a better life. It was a journey that traced the ark of the Fertile Crescent (the name we attached to the apartment complex at my seminary in St. Paul that housed young married students on the verge of creating future theological offspring). Abram and Sarai and their extended family took a caravan route through the arable land along the Euphrates River, the 600 miles to Haran in southeastern Turkey. Whether by camel, on donkey-back, or by foot, it was a long way to go.

Both back home in Ur and now in Haran where the core of our story takes place, Abram and Sarai had a pantheon of pagan gods available to them. Just in the city of Ur there was a family of gods that included a moon god named Sin and a sun god named Shamash, along with a god of love, passion, and war named Ishtar. And that’s just the start of the list. Individual cities had their own gods and so did individual families. No matter the god, though, worship and prayer and sacrifices revolved around the blessings of prosperity, which were always connected to fertility. That meant the abundant production of crops and livestock and human children. The Bible tells us that, at the time of our story, Abram and Sarai were childless at about the ages of 75 and 65, respectively. Their infertility marked them as ill-favored by the gods and always occupying a hollow home.

Something had gone wrong, and whatever god or gods they worshiped had not looked on them with kindness. No one thought Sarai would ever have a baby bump or that her fellow old ladies would throw a baby shower for her. In Abram and Sarai’s tent there was no need for the ancient equivalent of the currently hot Babyletto Yuzu convertible crib and the required bedding in jewel tones. No baby, no how. The sorrows of infertility are no fun — trust me, my wife and have been there: miscarriages, two tubal pregnancies, and years of trying. Our forebears in Haran had walked decades on that painful treadmill, never getting anywhere.

With silent gods and an age-wizened womb as complicated facts of life, it must have been a shock for Abram to hear the voice speaking to him in our story. Abram heard a singular god speaking, the god whom you know as God — with a capital G, the God of Jesus and his disciples, and (if you’re baptized) the God in whose Triune name you were baptized. The divine voice intoning in Abram’s ear — and by Sarai second-hand — promised this two-person family of LINKs (little-income-no-kids) a new home and many descendants: “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” This was a future being promised, prosperity and fertility. In two little words, babies and home.There was a spark of hope that there was a place they could lay their hat and find a home.

Because of these promises, Abram and Sarai’s journey continued in an easterly fashion toward the Mediterranean and down the rift valley where you find the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River, and the Dead Sea. The idea of the Christian life as a journey has roots in this trek. Hundreds of years after the barren-but-hopeful couple settled in Canaan, the land God promised them, ancient early Christians gave us the idea of faith life as a journey. Some immense figures like the Cappadocians Fathers and Saint Augustine were influenced by neo-platonic thinking. The neo-platonists developed this picture of Christian living as a lifelong journey out of the sinfulness of the world and an eventual return home to the bosom of God.

That idea was still prevalent in 1678 when John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. The word progress is important. You can’t stop long enough to put down roots. And you certainly can’t stay at Ur of the Chaldees where you started. If you’re not moving forward, getting better every day in every way, then you’re as barren and unfavored as Abram and Sarai. You have to keep your eyes on the prize. But it’s not easy keeping your eye on the goal. The distractions are many, the temptations are great, many other gods want your attention, and there’s never any let up. The question for Sarai and Abram was whether the vocal God who was making promises was the right one among all the gods available to them. Which one could they count on to deliver the home they’d longed for?

I’m dead certain that no one in this room has ever worshiped Baal or Ishtar or Astarte (although perhaps the dreamboat Thor would be a possibility). But you and I do have our own pagan gods. We’ve fallen for the gods that have been marketed to us from our first breath: power, control, status, money, stability, hotness, sex, and the self. Whether ancient gods or the ones we know intimately, every other god’s pitch always says, “If you act as I bid you, then I will reward you.”What’s asked for could be a sacrifice or a donation or a religious action or moral change or weight loss or filling in the correct oval on your ballot on election day.

What we desire or perceive that we need — a baby for Abram and Sarai, kids that turn out, a hefty 401k, or the end of my belly fat — whatever it is, the result always depends on our action. But the God who makes promises to Abram and Sarai is different. This God is the one who does all the acting. What Abram heard was a promise where God is the subject of all the verbs. God says,“I will do this for you.” That promise created the faith in our ancient parents that drew them from the familiar same-old same-old and into a new future.

Abram and Sarai heard God’s promise and God’s call to a new home, and God has continued to make promises. Because 2000 years later a woman who was one of the descendants of their child brought forth her own child in another unlikely pregnancy story. In John’s gospel we learn that “The Word [Mary’s boy Jesus] became flesh and made his dwelling among us. (John 1:18). In the original Greek, the verse says God “pitched a tent” with us. That’s an even better promise than the one Sarai and Abram were given in Genesis, because it means you don’t have to go looking for home or worry about getting there without GPS. Your earthly home may change, but the crucified,risen, and ascended Jesus is always home with you.

In ancient Haran, God had taken up a relationship with Abram and Sarai. Their trek along the Fertile Crescent saw them aching for a place and a way to make their home — even without a baby. But starting with the promise spoken in our story, it was God who was making it all happen. In the millennia that followed, their descendants encountered God making a home with Moses and the freed Hebrew slaves in the 675 square feet of the Tabernacle in the wilderness. God took up residence in the Holy of Holies in 3600 sq. ft. of the Temple in Jerusalem. That most sacred space contained the Ark of the Covenant. It was divided from the rest of the Temple by a 60-foot tall curtain. God was at home there, but it was so holy that only the high priest was allowed in once a year.

The neo-platonists who argued for life as a journey toward God would have been right. With God staying in a 30 X 30 room, you had to go to the Temple for your true home. But the same deep desire and good pleasure that brought God to offer a home to Abram and Sarai moved God out of the Holy of Holies. As Jesus’s body was torn on the cross, the Temple curtain was ripped in two from top to bottom. As mine and Jason’s late professor Donald Juel argued, it wasn’t to allow people who ventured all the way to Jerusalem to go into God’s chamber. The Temple curtain’s tear signalled a new location for God’s home and yours. God will not be restricted to square footage, not even at the altar A ram built. No longer is it “Come, make your home with me.” Now it’s I am making my home with you. I’d guess that would be a sweet word if you were a pastor in the Methodist system whose bishop has announced a move away from a familiar Haran to an unknown land. Peter, you’re heading to a place, but your home travels with you. It’s what your intern Chapman carried with him as a world nomad. And it’s true for you graduating seniors, too.

For Peter and the rest of us, because the crucified Christ is both risen and ascended, he makes himself known whenever and wherever his deep desire and good pleasure lead him. We see it in all his post-resurrection appearances in the Gospels and Acts: in the locked room to breathe on the disciples, at the lakeshore to fry a few fish, on the road to Emmaus, and to the bounty hunter Saul on a highway to Damascus. Jesus is the shaker and mover. He travels light and is just fine bedding down on the hardest surfaces, including our hearts.

The promise of home comes with God’s commitment to you in Baptism. And it’s not merely spoken as nice words over a baby. In Baptism, it actually happens. God’s relationship with you is sealed. Christ attaches himself to you in a way that won’t change. Home is yours. No wizened, barren future for you. That promise is something Abram and Sarai could count on: You will go astray and lose our way. Your straying eyes and fickle heart will no doubt break God’s heart. But on account of Jesus, wherever you lay your hat, that’s God’s home. And he announces to you that dinner’s on the kitchen table. He wants the children born of him to feast. In his home, at this table, table grace goes, “Come, my children, be my guest. Let these gifts to you be blessed.” Amen.

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The lectionary epistle for this Sunday is Romans 4.13-25, in which Paul points back to Abraham as the archetype for God’s dealings with all, allowing the apostle to assert, “…to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.” Recalling that righteousness and justification are English translations of the same Greek term, we can ask an obvious if oft-neglected question.

How does faith make us righteous?

How does trust justify us apart from obedience of any kind?

It is regularly supposed that, on account of Christ, God imputes to sinful believers a righteousness that they do not in fact possess. That is, God calls the ungodly good though they are not so. The Lord credits the fruits of Jesus’s obedient, atoning work to those in whom the Spirit finds faith. Despite what God sees when he looks upon sinners, for Christ’s sake the Father judiciously declares us righteous. As Robert Jenson notes, “Of course what God declares to be so is in fact so; nevertheless, this fact obtains only within the mystery marked by that “despite.”

The challenge inherent to this allegedly tradition answer is that it amounts to God calling wicked good.

Martin Luther’s treatise The Freedom of a Christian is the Protestant Reformer’s response to this question posed by Paul’s epistle; however, in it, Luther does not supply the answers so readily attributed to him.

First, Luther answers the question (How does faith make us righteous?) in a straightforward fashion. Since the gospel is a word that gives us Christ, when we believe the gospel we receive all the salvific gifts that belong to Jesus (righteousness, peace, joy, love, etc).

Still—

How does this work?

How does what belongs to Christ come to be ours as well?

Luther’s first answer to this gospel question brings us back to the law.

Namely, Luther reminds us that believing someone is the most straightforward manner to honor them. In the gospel, God promises, “In Christ, by sheer incongruous gift, I am unthwartably determined to make you my own.” Not to trust God’s commitment is to dishonor him.

As Jenson writes:

“As ecumenical theology has always supposed, obeying the second table of the law is the natural result of obeying the first, however slowly or with however many setbacks this may take place. If we trust God, we will seek to fulfill his stated will.”

Just as good works are the fruit of an authentic faith, their absence is evidence that a declaration of faith is a lie. As the catechism teaches children to answer, “We should fear and love God; so that…”

Luther’s second answer to this gospel question directs us to the word of God generally.

Simply through audition, the gospel shapes us into righteous persons. Luther appropriates Aristotle’s epistemology but shifts the means of knowing from seeing to hearing. Where Aristotle said that we become what we see, Luther said that we become what we hear. According to Luther, when it comes to my righteousness, what is addressed to me. Or rather, I become more like the one who addresses me in his word.

How does faith make us righteous?

It’s about attention more so than imputation, reading over reckoning.

Summoned to the word by faith, the word communicates to us the good things that belong to Christ. Thus, justification is not a “legal fiction,” as critics sometimes charge. It’s a statement of fact.

As Jenson puts it:

“When God declares those who hearken to the gospel righteous, this is a judgment of faith. When the sinner Jones is grasped by the gospel, “Jones is righteous” is straightforwardly true; the puny sins with which Jones still tries to shape his life cannot stand against God’s righteousness inhabiting him. Justification of the sinner is a mystery but not a paradox or a fiction.”

The third step enabled by Luther’s Freedom of a Christian is a theological move.

God’s person and God’s attributes are the selfsame reality.

Therefore, to receive God’s righteousness by hearkening to the word is nothing less than “the ruling presence in the soul of God himself.”

And because the gospel is the word of God in which God gives us Christ, the believer’s soul just is the throne of Christ. Luther made it a slogan of his theology, “In ipsa fide Christus adest: “In such faith, Christ is present.”

Finally, the Reformation slogan (“We are justified by faith apart from works”) makes sense in light of the ruling presence of Christ who inhabits our souls through faithful hearkening to the gospel.

We need no good deeds because Jesus has already unpacked his suitcase in our soul.

Our neighbor, however, sure needs them.

(Anselm Kiefer 'Book with Wings')

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The New York Times recently ran a profile of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, the home congregation of James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate who has made his Christian faith the centerpiece of his campaign. The piece was admiring, and Talarico himself appears a man of genuine conviction. However, what the article actually describes, without intending to do so, is a congregation in the advanced stages of what Robert Jenson calls “emptied theology.”

For instance, the pastor, Jim Rigby, does not use male pronouns for God because it constitutes a kind of “violence.” Neither does he use the word “Lord” for it is classist, conjuring a wealthy European male. Just so— as is vogue today— he prefers “kin-dom” over kingdom. He does not much care for the word “God” either, preferring, in at least one sermon, “the creative impulse of the universe.”

Beyond the embarrassments of the faith’s language, its claims too require repackaging. The resurrection is, in Pastor Rigby’s account, “mythological, not historical.” What remains, once you have evacuated the particular content from those particular words, is not a more inclusive gospel; it is no gospel at all. It is, to use Jens’ term, an “ideology;” that is, it is a screen of words created to conceal the absence of anything beneath them.

I thought of the Times article earlier this week when I reread an early 1961 essay by Jenson, “Proclamation without Metaphysics.”

The essay does not need revising.

As in the case of Saint Andrews Presbyterian, the situation he assessed over sixty years ago has only become more visible.

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I often think the surest way to convert an unbeliever to the truth of the gospel would be to charge him or her with preaching from the scriptures for a set of Sundays. If the LORD Jesus had not already called me to preach, he surely would have called me to faith through preaching. Once you dare to hold your gaze upon the text, the claims it makes are both dizzying and astonishing, absolutely upending “conventional” Christianity.

For instance, having worked with the Gospel of John from Ascension to Trinity Sunday, I simply cannot recover from the promise Christ makes to us prior to his departure— I suppose I never truly sat with it long enough for the gospel of it to saturate me. Through the Spirit, Jesus tells his disciples, both and his Father will come and make their home in us.

Not in heaven.

In us.

You.

Me.

The dwelling place of the Triune God is not a location above the clouds at a cosmological remove. The heaven of the Father and the Son is each one of us in whom the Spirit has taken up residence. Which means, as I tried to proclaim on Sunday, eternal life does not begin when you die. It begins when the Spirit arrives, alighting upon you— as Jesus prays before he goes to the garden— in the knowledge of and faith in the Triune God’s name. Thus pentecost is not only the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise, it is the answer to his prayer.

But the promise does more than answer the prayer of Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim. As Robert Jenson notes in his essay “Triune Grace,” it also resolves, or reconfigures, one of the oldest and most intractable debates in the history of Christian theology.

The question: whether grace— that is, the Holy Spirit— is resistible.

Calvin says no.

Arminius says yes.

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Trinity Sunday — John 17.1-11, 17-23

I spent last week teaching and preaching for the Uniting Church in Sweden, a merged denomination made up of Methodists, Baptists, and Evangelicals. On Saturday, I had a few hours to myself so I went shopping in Stockholm’s historic district before heading back to Saint Peter’s Kyrka.

I crossed the crowded street from the old town into the city’s commercial district, and immediately I heard contemporary worship music playing from a portable speaker system— the praise was in English. When I made it to the other side of the crosswalk, I spied earnest-looking young people holding out pamphlets in the hopes that passersby would take one.

I ventured a few paces further into the pedestrian mall where I saw a woman with a microphone who was speaking into a bulky video camera braced on a man’s shoulder. Somewhere else on the block I could hear her partner preacher hollering about the wrath of God and hellfire for sinners. The woman with the microphone was wearing a brown wool pantsuit and had the looks of a news anchor. As I attempted to sneak past her, she somehow knew to switch from Swedish to English.

“If you died today,” and she gestured for her partner to aim his camera at me, “Do you know where you would spend eternity?”

I looked at her.

Next I looked at him.

Then I looked at my reflection in the lens of his video camera.

And then I smiled.

“Whatever else you want to say about Jesus,” I said, “You can’t say he doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

“Excuse me?” she asked.

She looked confused. Evidently her gospel-at-gunpoint approach had not yielded many comments about the LORD’s good humor.

I set my shopping bags down on the pavement.

“Jesus has a sense of humor— you’ve got to give him that,” I said, “I mean, I’ve come all this way to an allegedly godless, secular Sweden and the first thing that happens to me in my free time is that a street preacher tries to evangelize me. I had to come all the way to Scandinavia to find myself in a Flannery O’Connor story.”

She cracked a confused smiled.

“Yes,” she said and then tried to reignite her fire and brimstone, “If you died today, do you know where you would spend eternity?”

I bit my lip, adjusted the flat cap on my head, and I replied, “Heaven is not a place and therefore cannot be addressed with a where question. Heaven is a person not a place.”

She looked over at her cameraman to see if it registered with him how lucky they were to have stumbled upon such an odd sort of pagan.

“You must not be saved?” she said to me, “Because if you’re not saved…”

But I interrupted her, “Yes. Yes, I am saved.”

She nodded, yet still was not satisfied.

Thus her where question became a when question.

“When were you saved?”

I smiled and gave her the when and the where.

“When was I saved?” I asked.

She nodded, waiting.

“In 33AD” I answered.

“On a Friday afternoon on a hill outside Jerusalem— around teatime.”

I picked up my shopping bags. And as I started to walk away, it occurred to me that I should not have accepted the premise of her first question. After all, according to Jesus, not only is heaven not a place, neither is eternal life a future reality.

Of course, everything depends on whether Jesus can know truly what only God can know.

The Bible begins with the LORD issuing commands. “Let there be light,” God says. And strangely, before anything that has ever been is, the LORD’s command is obeyed. Someone who is other from God— but who has the power of God— makes it so, “And there was light.”

Later in the Bible’s first book, at Sarah’s insistence, Abraham casts out Hagar and Ishmael into the desert where the mother and child fall into despair and desperate weeping. According to the scriptures, a voice speaks to Hagar from heaven. Strangely, the voice at first refers to God in the third person, “God has heard the voice of the boy.”

But next, without any break in the revelation, the voice shifts into the first person and speaks for God, “I will make a great nation of him.” The voice who speaks a word of comfort to Hagar simultaneously speaks of God in the third person and in the first person. The voice is both one who is other than God and also one who is identical with God. Indeed he is God’s speech-act.

It is just as strange at the Burning Bush in the Book of Exodus. A voice first summons Moses to the bush that is ablaze with God’s glory but not consumed by it. “The voice appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush,” Moses testifies. But strangely, the voice next self-identifies as none other than the LORD himself, “When the LORD saw that Moses had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!”

During the exile in Babylon, God elects a priest to become a prophet on his behalf. And the LORD gives Ezekiel a vision as the context for his call to prophecy. God shows Ezekiel a heavenly prototype of the cherubim throne; that is, a vision of how the throne of God appears eternally.

And strangely, Ezekiel sees seated on the throne of God “a figure who has the appearance of a man.”

The man is charged with the same glory that constitutes the throne.

That is, the man is both other from God but also God.

The New Testament is no less strange. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, for instance, the Risen Jesus claims for himself what only God can assert, “All authority on earth and in heaven belongs to me.”

The LORD tells Moses that he has summoned him to the Burning Bush precisely to identify which God he is and to reveal to Moses his personal name— a name too holy and too incomprehensible— too strange— to be uttered in the meantime. Not until the end of the Gospel, when the Risen Jesus commands the apostles, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Triune Name,” does the strangeness of the scriptures finally have a name.

The church universal abides a theological maxim which originates in the early 400’s— a generation after the formulation of the Nicene Creed. Prosper of Aquitaine was a fifth century theologian and student of Saint Augustine of Hippo.

Prosper of Aquitaine engaged a bitter debate with Pelagians— those who opposed Augustine’s insistence that salvation is by grace alone and argued instead that God’s grace must be accompanied by cooperating human works. Against the Pelagians, Prosper defended Augustinian grace by appealing to a maxim.

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

In English, “the law of prayer governs the law of belief.”

That is, what the church prays and proclaims is what the church believes.

Prosper pointed to the church’s intercessory prayers, particularly her prayers for the conversion and salvation of all people, especially unbelievers, as evidence that the church already implicitly confessed the necessity of God’s one way love.

You cannot pray for someone’s conversion and simultaneously hold that they must cooperate with God’s grace to be saved. Thus Prosper argued that, quite apart from any doctrinal debate, the church’s liturgical life already established the error of the Pelagian view.

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

What the church prays precedes what the church believes.

Our praise and petition and proclamation determines our doctrine.

Not the other way around.

In other words, today is Trinity Sunday not because the Three Person’d God is the product of theological deduction or ecclesial negotiation but because the scriptures give us no other way to speak of God but as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

We identify Israel’s one and only LORD as three persons not by a feat of philosophy (“substance” and “being,” “begotten not made”) but because long before the church had either a testament or a creed, she was baptizing catechumens in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

Jesus has dispatched me to declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins. Only God dare utter such a promise; just so, we attest that Mary gave birth to her Maker and therefore we call the LORD by the name Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit.

What the church prays and proclaims determines what we believe.

We pray to the Father, in the power of the Spirit, and by the authority of the Son. We do so not because this is a clever way to convince ourselves that we are not polytheists but because this is precisely the manner in which Jesus prays.

Not only is this the manner in which Jesus prays, it is in the context of such prayer that Jesus gives his most concrete definition of eternal life.

Forget the Romans Road— Jesus tells you what constitutes salvation.

He does so in prayer.

On the night he hands himself over, after he washes his friends’ feet at his final supper, when he is finished teaching them that he alone is the way to the Father, once he has promised the grace of the Holy Spirit— and promised that through the Spirit the Father and the Son will make their heaven in you— before he goes to the Garden of Gethsemane where he will be betrayed by a kiss, Jesus prays.

Jesus prays a prayer that takes up the entirety of chapter seventeen of the Gospel of John— twenty six verses in all. Jesus prays a prayer that expands but nonetheless follows the prayer he taught his followers to pray— only one petition is new. Unlike the LORD’s Prayer, however, the LORD’s LORD’S Prayer begins not “Our Father” but simply “Father.” The Son’s relationship with God is unique to him. Jesus’ relation to God is as simple as it is intimate.

As convoluted as we make God’s Triune Name, God is not complex to Jesus.

“Father,” the Son prays in the Spirit.

John reports that, so praying, Jesus lifts his eyes upward. That is, God establishes an other to whom he may address as God. Yet praying, Jesus does not simply petition his Father. Jesus tells God what only the latter can know if the former is a mere mortal, the arrival of his “hour of glory.” In other words, Jesus addresses God as an other from himself but then he proceeds to tell his Father what only God can know, “The hour has come. Glorify your Son; so that, your Son may glorify you.”

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

We confess that the name of the LORD is Trinity if for no other reason but that the prayer of Jesus gives us no other way to speak of God. Notice— verse six, Jesus says that his own name somehow manifests the distinct name of the Father; that what belongs to God simultaneously belongs to Jesus. “All mine are yours,” Jesus prays in verse ten, “And all yours are mine.” Next— verse eight— Jesus confesses that the words he has handed over to us are nothing other than what the Father has said to him.

But that does not mean Jesus is a mere a delivery device for God’s word; he is God’s word.

As Jesus prays in verse eleven, the Father’s name is Jesus’ own name, “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me.”

God the Father’s name is also the name of Jesus. Meaning, he is the Son of that Father. Thus does Jesus close his prayer by affirming the irreducible union of the Father and the Son in their Spirit, “Just as you, Father, are in me, I am in you.” The one seated on the throne of God was “a figure who had the appearance of a man.”

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

Even more extraordinary than the fact that Jesus prays from within the Trinity, Jesus says that knowing the Triune Name constitutes nothing less than eternal life itself.

The author of the recent book Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth is a British novelist and poet. Previously an environmental activist, Paul Kingsnorth is a former atheist and self-described pagan. In a 2021 essay entitled “The Cross and the Machine,” Kingsnorth recounts the long and winding path by which he discovered “a truth I could surrender to.”

As a fifteen year old boy, Kingsnorth snuck into the old, medieval church in his neighborhood and decided to write in the visitor’s book. ““I WILL DESTROY YOU AND ALL OF YOUR WORKS! HA HA HA!” Then he signed it, “SATAN.” A few days later he returned to the church with his friends and scrawled in the visitor’s book, “DIE, NAZARENE! VICTORY IS MINE!” Growing up, Kingsnorth writes, there were two distinct flavors of Christianity, both of which he tried to avoid.

He writes:

“One flavor was the fusty old Church of England variety. You would see this when a vicar was invited to give a sermon at school. The vicar would be a slightly Victorian figure, an older man almost dainty in his manners, trying his best to speak in a dying tongue to a generation of kids…The second flavor was the trendy vicar. Unlike his predecessor, the trendy vicar had a clipped beard and wore jeans and sang folk songs about how Jesus was our friend, and gave awkward, vernacular sermons.

Despite his good intentions, the trendy vicar was much worse than the stuffy vicar. At least the Victorian sermons were in some way otherworldly, as religion should be.”

Despite the mandatory religious education classes of his schooling, Kingsnorth writes that the age of his upbringing imposed an altogether different faith, “Religion was irrelevant. It was authoritarian, it was superstitious, it was feeble proto-science. It repressed women, gay people, atheists, anyone who disobeyed its irrational edicts.” As a man in his forties, after dabbling in Eastern spiritual practices, Kingsnorth discovered a surprise. He wanted not to practice for himself but to worship an Other. “Something was calling me,” he writes, “But what?”

Or who?

Soon after, dreams besieged him.

He writes:

“I dreamed of ­Jesus. The dreams reminded me of something strange that had happened a few months before. My wife and I were out to dinner, celebrating our wedding anniversary, when suddenly she said to me, “You’re going to become a Christian.” When I asked her what on earth she was talking about, she said she didn’t know; she had just had a feeling and needed to tell me.

After the dream, it began to make sense. Suddenly, I started meeting Christians everywhere. An African man even contacted me to tell me he had had a dream in which God had told him to convert me. It kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, God to the right. The Spirit before me and behind me. Like C. S. Lewis, I could not ignore “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.”

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

What we do— or what happens to us— just is what we believe.

“It turns out,” Paul Kingsnorth confesses, “that both the stuffy vicars and the trendy vicars were onto something.” For whatever their faults, each made an extraordinary claim in naming God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Looking back on his life of unbelief, Kingsnorth insists, “I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true…Someone inhabits me.”

That someone is, in fact, three persons.

“And this is eternal life,” the Son says to the Father in their Spirit, “that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

I had picked up my shopping bags from the Stockholm pavement and I had started to walk away. But then I repented— literally. I turned around and I walked back to the pant-suited street preacher and I apologized.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry?” she repeated as though she suddenly didn’t recognize the word.

She furrowed her brows and looked at me and then she looked at the camera.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, “My answer to your questions. It may have been correct but it was cute. Because I was judging you— your message and your methods.”

She looked defensive, like she was about to argue with me. So I held up a conciliatory palm and admitted, “I was wrong. I might still disagree with your methods and your message, but I was wrong about you. You are not the weird ones; we are.”

She looked me over.

And then she looked over at her cameraman.

She looked confused.

“Think about it,” I said, “If eternal life is not somewhere far off in the future but starts here, is accessible now— in the knowledge of God’s Triune Name— then you are absolutely right and rational to be out here shouting that news to anyone who will listen to you. We are all beggars, and you know where to find bread! Of course you’re out here. It’s all the rest of us, who amble blithely by such a claim, that are actually insane.”

“Maybe tone down the brimstone,” I said, “But otherwise— yeah, you’re on to something.”

And I gestured to all of the hundreds of shoppers about us, myself included, “We’re the crazy ones— not you.”

Here is what Jesus says eternal life is.

Not where.

Not when.

Jesus refuses both of the street preacher’s questions because Jesus does not share her assumptions.

“This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Know.

Present tense.

Not will know.

Not shall receive.

Know.

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

Follow the prayer all the way down and you discover something astonishing.

Eternal life is not waiting for you somewhere ahead.

Eternal life has already found you.

For on that same night, before he prayed this prayer, Jesus made a promise. He promised the Holy Spirit. He promised that through the Spirit the Father and the Son would come and make their home in us.

Not above the clouds.

Not at the end of history.

In us.

And Jesus keeps his promises.

The Father and the Son have made their heaven in you.

You may not always feel it. You may doubt it. You may run from it. You may forget it. You may spend years trying to silence it.

But the life of God has laid hold of you, and the God who has taken hold of you does not let go.

You have called God “Father.”

Perhaps confidently.

Perhaps desperately.

Perhaps through tears.

Perhaps through clenched teeth.

Perhaps not for a very long time.

Yet every time you have uttered that name, you have been drawn into the prayer of Jesus himself.

Every prayer gathered into his prayer.

Every cry gathered into his cry.

Every whispered “Father” received by the Father who receives the Son.

You have been living inside this promise longer than you knew.

And because the Father and the Son have made their home in you through the Spirit, there is nowhere you can go where eternal life is not already present.

Not in grief.

Not in failure.

Not in sickness.

Not even in death.

For death may interrupt your heartbeat, but it cannot evict the God who has chosen you as his dwelling place.

The life that inhabits you is older than creation, stronger than sin, and more stubborn than the grave.

So come to the table.

Lex orandi, lex credendi.

Here at this table the church confesses what she has always confessed:

That Jesus tells the truth.

That the Father has answered the Son’s prayer.

That the Spirit has come.

That eternal life is not merely promised here.

It is given here.

The bread you are about to receive is not a reminder of a distant salvation.

It is the hospitality of the Triune God.

So come.

Come with your doubts.

Come with your fears.

Come with your unfinished prayers and your unanswered questions.

Come because the Father desires you.

Come because the Son has made a place for you.

Come because the Spirit has brought you here.

We are all beggars.

And here is the bread.

The body of Christ.

Given for you.

Eternal life has found you today.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

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Hi Friends,

And, by “friends” I do mean it. I think of you all as a community, a congregation within a congregation. Therefore, I wanted to share an otherwise personal moment for me. David (AKA: “The Minion”) got married today to a woman perfect for him and for whom I have nothing but respect and joy. I’m grateful that God has finally provided someone as interested in antique sewing machines as my wife.

My relationship with David extends nearly the length of my ministry in Virginia, which is the bulk of the total. He has seen me mature, nearly die, and get older. I have watched him flourish. Ministry leaves behind few tangible effects. Thus far, he is one. Whatever else, he does preach like me. He had no other choice.

I simply do not understand colleagues who tell me they cannot befriend people in their congregation. I have friends, like David, I would never have befriended were it not for something called church.

In the spirit of community, here is the wedding sermon I offered based on one of the many texts (seminary students!) they wanted in their service. By offered, I mean…this is what the manuscript said a few days before the wedding… There have been more than a few already, but this wedding hit me hard in the feelings wheel.

John 17:1–11, 17–23

In God’s good humor, I have had the privilege of serving as David’s pastor since he was six years old— that started twenty-one years ago. David has been a friend for a shorter but still considerable time. I trust him now to be a colleague, and my wife and I look forward to our friendship with Emma. Which is to say, not only do I know David quite well, he unfortunately knows me too. He also knows the wife to whom I am a husband and the sons for whom I am a father. Ergo, more so than anyone else whose marriage I have celebrated, David knows that I have absolutely no advice to offer two sinners about to say “I do” to one another. Even if David did not so know me, Ali is here and she would laugh me out of the room if I attempted to assume the posture of wisdom-dispenser.

Thankfully, Emma is also too theologically sophisticated to expect a preacher to hand over the kind of advice you can tape to the refrigerator.

I have heard all of it. I have tried all of it. My therapist can tell you how maladroit I am at that last one.

The slogan I typically trot out at weddings comes from my mentor Stanley Hauerwas:

“The ability to love your enemy is often the necessary precondition to loving your spouse.”

It’s funny and it’s true, but it’s still advice. Such slogans, no doubt, offer sound counsel. The challenge today, however, is not that I lack strong advice. The challenge is structural, and it not only gets at the difficulty of relationships, it strikes at the very mystery of the Three Person’d God in whose name we have gathered.

Since you two are about to make promises you cannot— strictly speaking— keep, you deserve to hear the truth about why you two cannot possibly keep the promises you are about to pledge one another.

Given that this my first occasion of marrying two verifiable theology nerds, I can— without fear or apology— cite Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. David and Emma have both spent enough time in dusty classrooms to know Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, or at least to have successfully avoided it. Permit me to make use of it now. If you didn’t get dressed up today for a little Hegel, then fake it and consider your pretense a gift to the bride and groom. Because Hegel, whatever his other liabilities, diagnosed the human situation with uncomfortable precision.

Here it is.

David, you are a subject.

That is not a compliment; it is a description. You know and will and address the world from inside your own irreducible first-person perspective.

Here’s the rub.

So does the person standing next to you.

Emma— you are a subject too.

Which means that the encounter that is supposed to be love— the face-to-face where love must happen if it is to happen at all— is structurally a standoff. Each of you is, for the other, simultaneously a subject who does the knowing and an object who gets known. And for Hegel, to be made the object of another’s knowing and willing is precisely the definition of and experience in slavery.

The will to possess and the will to give make mischief at their intersection, and the result, as Sartre eventually conceded, is that hell is other people— not crowds but exactly this face-to-face where love would occur if it could occur at all.

The obvious remedy is that each of you simply decide to let the other make you an object— to relinquish the will to dominate, to convert yourself from the inside out. Hegel recommends something like this mutual submission.

My teacher Robert Jenson said this is the same stuff as a bad pietist sermon:

“Only believe, which is all very well, but how does one do that without already believing?”

The act of self-conversion must itself be an act of the same dominating will it means to overcome. That is, you cannot lift yourself by your own collar. Neither can you decide to let another subject make you an object.

What’s worse, there is a further difficulty, one that arrives even before Hegel’s problem. To love is not to give something. To love is to give yourself. All the patience and kindness and constancy you may offer your beloved are but tokens. The only thing I actually have to give Ali, and the only thing she can can truly receive, is me.

David, what will wound Emma are not your absent roses.

It will be your absent mind, which their absence signifies.

But how do you give yourself, Emma, to David?

Here is the crux the ancient vows make plain.

You are going to die.

None of us is getting out of life alive, and therefore none of our promises can be truly unconditional, because they are all conditioned by death. The future is the one thing we cannot promise. And so we cannot truly give ourselves to another— not finally, not in the way the vows demand. The French philosophers who followed Nietzsche saw this without flinching and drew the obvious conclusion. To love is simply to die, and to call another to die, and eventually everyone obliges.

Leave the God who raises the dead out of the equation, and they are correct.

So here we are.

Hegel’s face-to-face makes love structurally impossible. Death makes the gift of self ultimately exhaustible. And the remedies on offer— pure self-abnegation, the abolition of distinct selfhood into some undifferentiated union, the postmodern celebration of eros as will-to-power dressed up in honest clothes— each only confirms the equation of love with death.

This is an honest account of the thicket into which you step today.

Stanley Hauerwas puts his finger on still another complication that deserves a hearing before we turn to the gospel.

He writes:

“We never know whom we marry. We just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. Marriage, being the enormous thing it is, means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.”

This is true.

And it is clarifying.

Hauerwas is right to say it.

But notice what it still assumes: that marriage is constituted solely by the two of you. That the strangers in question are simply bride and groom— two subjects, face to face— discovering across the years how thoroughly they have misread each other. Which leaves us, once again, with Hegel’s problem and no way out of it. The stranger to whom you find yourself married is still the other whose otherness you posit for your own sake.

Thankfully, graciously, this is not the last word.

In the Gospel of John, at the end of his Farewell Discourse and just before his Passion, Jesus does a strange thing. He prays. Jesus prays to the Father, which is itself unremarkable except that he prays as the Son, from within a relation that is the original instance of the very problem identified by Hegel. The Father begets the Son. The Son is begotten by the Father. Each addresses the other as a subject. Each is for the other an object. And the question the religions of the world have almost universally answered with violence— with the son killing the father, the sibling killing the sibling, death at the heart of deity— the gospel answers otherwise.

Why are the Father and the Son not locked in Hegel’s mutual struggle for domination? Because there is a Third: the Spirit, whose scriptural role is precisely that he is freedom and love.

• The Spirit intends the Father and the Son to love each other.

• The Spirit frees the Father to let the Son go, which is what it means to beget without devouring, and so actually to love him.

• The Spirit frees the Son from servility to the Father, and so actually to love him.

And the Spirit does not himself fall into the same face-to-face trap with either of them, because the Spirit exhausts himself entirely in the gift he gives.

The Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son.

And nothing else at all.

There is no remainder of selfhood standing over against the ones he frees.

This is what Jesus prays from within when he says, “That they may be one, as we are one.” And then, impossibly, Jesus adds, “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.”

Jesus is not describing relationship wisdom. He is not offering a template for communication between lovers. He is announcing what is actually happening. That you— you two, you too— are being caught up into the life of a God who has already solved, from within himself, the problem that makes your love impossible.

And he does it through a Third.

“I do not ask on behalf of these alone,” Jesus prays, “but also on behalf of those who will believe through their word.” Which is to say, Christ’s prayer includes you two, standing here today, because the mission of the Son always arrives through a mediating chain of address— the apostle to the congregation, the congregation to its children, and so across the centuries until two seminary students in this room heard something that made them think eternity might be as plausible as Tuesday.

The Spirit who frees the Father and the Son to love each other is the same Spirit who animates Jesus’ risen body, the church. And in the church, every third party who reconciles two people locked in the face-to-face standoff does not do so in their own name, but in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

On the occasion of your marriage, we simply must be as arrogant as is the New Testament. The love of which Jesus speaks in John 17— that they may be one as we are one— is not an ideal toward which you are advised to aspire. It is a new commandment given to a new kind of community.

Its condition of possibility is not your romantic love.

It is certainly not your marital effort.

Its condition of possibility is the Third.

This is what Stanley Hauerwas’ slogan neglects. Your marriage is not constituted by two people each learning to love a stranger. Your marriage— Christian marriage— is constituted by three, and the Third is the one who does not fall into the face-to-face trap, for he exhausts himself entirely in the gift he gives. The stranger to whom you find yourself married across the years is not someone you must somehow, by heroic acts of attention, come to love again. The stranger is someone the Spirit already intends you to love, and goes on freeing you to love, as he freed the Father to love the Son across the infinite difference of the one who begets and the one who is begotten. Which means Hauerwas is right about the stranger, and right that you will marry one. He is simply wrong to leave the Spirit out of the arithmetic.

Let me make plain what is happening today.

David, Emma— you cannot love each other, not finally, not in the way these vows demand. But the Third can love through you two. The love you are pledging today is not yours to generate. It is the Spirit’s to give. What makes your marriage possible, then, is not that there are two of you. It is that there are three.

And this is why I am not here today to offer you advice. I am here— by Christ’s authority alone— to lay my hands upon you and give you what makes your love possible. The traditional vows retain a rude conclusion that no amount of romance or decoration can suppress, “Until we are parted by death.” The Future remains the one thing you two cannot promise one another. Which is why, the wedding liturgy begins with a remembrance of your baptism— the event in which you died, already, with Christ. The one in whom you died now says to you, “Because I live, you also will live.” Your future is his, and he gives it to you to give to each other. Only because his promise precedes you, can your promises to each other be pledged at all.

Just so, the love to which you are called goes further than patience and kindness, though your patience will often be in short supply and your kindness will prove intermittent. The love to which you are called is specified by the one who, on the night he was betrayed, broke bread with those he knew would betray him. Who said to them, in the midst of their betrayal, “I call you friends.” Who gave his life not for the good but for the ungodly, and thereby established— once, for all— the only standard by which Christian love is measured. As every married person here already knows, the ability to love your enemy is often the necessary condition for loving your spouse.

The way Love has loved you is nothing like the way you love even yourselves; nevertheless, the Love who lives with death behind him insists you can so love.

This claim is intelligible only if we are willing to be as arrogant as the New Testament requires, and say that the church is the body of the Risen Jesus and the temple of his Spirit. From this day forward, your marriage is an outpost of that body. Your relationship is constituted not by two people navigating the Hegelian face-off through heroic acts of mutual self-donation, but by three— and the Third is the one who exhausts himself in the gift he gives, who is nothing other than the love between the Father and the Son, who is now and will abide as the love between you.

Which means I have, after all, one piece of counsel.

Do not be afraid.

The story you will call us is not the story of two people slowly learning to love the stranger they discover inhabits their home. It is the story of two people who were caught up, in water and the Spirit, into a life that was already the answer to the problem before they knew there was a problem. Whatever the Author of your story has in store— and the way forward cannot be known, which is what makes this a beautiful risk and a leap of faith— hear what the Lord says so often in the scriptures, and what I say to you now on his authority alone.

Do not be afraid.

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With Pentecost now our present everyday reality, this Sunday is the bane of many preachers and those who suffer them in the pews.

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday.

I have long thought the problem with preachers understanding and proclaiming God’s proper name is that seminaries …

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If Christianity is “faith seeking understanding through argumentation,” then the history of Christian theology is, in no small part, also a history of flinching. This is Robert Jenson’s contention in his compact essay “Jesus in the Trinity.”

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On the liturgical calendar, this week the church observes Trinity Sunday. Having passed through crib and cross, Easter and Pentecost, the church now celebrates the gift of knowing the LORD’s per…

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Pentecost

I am camping this weekend and free of the preaching task. Nevertheless, my vocation is now in its twenty-sixth year; the rhythms of the liturgical year and its accompanying texts are seldom far from my mind. This Sunday is Pentecost — Shavuot on the Jewish calendar, …

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Sunday is Pentecost.

No less than today, the gift of tongues, which enlivens the Easter believers, produces puzzlement among the pilgrim onlookers. The apostle Peter, finally finding his voice, accounts for the wonders of the Spirit’s outpouring by pointing to the prophet Joe…

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Hi Friends,

We will conclude our study of Robert Jenson’s “The Holy Spirit” on Monday at 7:00 EST. Here is the link to join us live. And here is the reading:

Cosmic Spirit

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Pentecost

Israel’s God is the creator of all things. This is not a pious addendum to the more interesting material about redemption. It is a dogmatic constraint. If the Holy Spirit is God— and the church’s confession is that the Holy Spirit is as much God as Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim— then the Spirit’s wind blows on and through everything. The Spirit alights not only on word and water, wine and bread, but through the whole groaning, lurching, beautiful, violent pageant of history and nature. To say the Holy Spirit is confined to the believing community is, ultimately, to say the Spirit is not God.

Quite simply, a Spirit who cannot reach beyond the church’s walls is an idol, however devout.

This is the logic that compels what Robert Jenson calls cosmic pneumatology in the final chapter of his essay “The Holy Spirit.” For Jenson, the danger is not that we will say too much about the Spirit’s scope but that in widening the scope we will dilute the specificity. We might begin with “the Spirit of Jesus” and conclude, through a thousand small qualifications, with something like “the spiritual dimension of human experience.” The task is to say that the Spirit who animates all things is the particular Spirit of the particular man Jesus of Nazareth, raised from the dead and now ascended. This is not a claim the Western intellectual tradition handles gracefully. It means asserting the universal potency of events in one little religious community. It means nothing less than, as Jenson puts it, “the arrow of time is Jesus’ breath.”

Jenson identifies three modes in which the tradition has attempted to name this cosmic reality of the Spirit, and each one goes astray in roughly the same direction: it loses Jesus. Our task is to follow the tradition’s genuine insight while reattaching it to its proper object.

No thinker in the Western tradition has taken the biblical evocation of the Spirit as a key to universal reality more seriously than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel’s wager is that reality is not, at its heart, mind; that is, reality’s heart is not static consciousness that registers its object while leaving it unchanged, the way a mirror receives a face. Reality is, Hegel contends, at its heart, Spirit— consciousness that grasps its object by transforming it, and is in turn transformed. Thus, history has its own inner sense, the sense of a community’s lively argument or a lifelong love. History has a meaning that is won not despite conflict but through it. Thesis meets antithesis, and from their collision something new appears that neither party could have produced. The result is a synthesis, a genuine novelty, born of freedom rather than necessity. The force generating this novelty is what Hegel called Spirit— God understood not as the Unmoved Mover but as the Lively One who moves through history’s contradictions toward their resolution.

Hegel’s debt to the gospel is obvious, but so is the alienation. In Hegel’s system, the world plays the trinitarian role that belongs to Jesus. The Father finds himself in the world as his object, as the Son. In the “Cosmic Spirit,” Jenson attempts a surgical amendment to Hegel. Absolute Consciousness, he argues, finds its meaning in the one historical object, Jesus, and so posits Jesus’ fellows as its fellows and Jesus’ world as its world. The freedom that appears when genuine reconciliation breaks through genuine impasse— when new love freely appears out of contradiction— is the lordship of the Risen Jesus. This is what it means that the Spirit of Jesus is the freedom of universal history. This is not a general metaphysical principle that the church then endorses, but the specific action of the specific one who is risen from the dead. Living in the actuality of contradiction, we recognize therein the very sort of situation appropriate to the action of one whose freedom is that he is risen from the dead.

We acquire a hope.

And we acquire, Jenson insists, the right to the believer’s incorrigible retrospective piety: the situation was hopeless, but then the Lord.

This elicits a question about nature as distinct from history. We tend to understand natural processes in terms of cause-and-effect determinism; such that, if we knew all there is to know about the world at any given moment, we would possess the power to predict its entire future. This supposition is, among other things, Jenson asserts, a quiet denial of the third article of the creed. All scientific knowledge is fundamentally statistical, yielding at the level of the individual event nothing more than odds. And odds exert no pressure on the actual occasion. There is a residual freedom in every event that the prior state of the world does not determine. That freedom is not mere chance. It is someone’s freedom— the freedom of the risen Lord, of the Holy Spirit, of the very Spirit we address in both petition and praise.

This is why petitionary prayer is not an appeal to an agent merely exterior to the machine we call creation. The one to whom we pray is not exterior to natural process. All actual occasions occur not mechanistically but in freedom, and this freedom is someone’s freedom, which means that Someone can be addressed. As Jenson writes, the rain will or will not fall in a freedom that belongs to the risen Christ, and he can be petitioned and praised accordingly. If God can do nothing about the crops, there is nothing for which to praise God in the harvest.

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Is Pentecost a peer of Easter?

Or does Pentecost merely display what Easter already reveals?

The question is relevant if unexamined; in that, this coming Sunday the church recalls the visitation of the Word to the prophet Joel and the fulfillment of Joel’s consequent vision upon the disciples in Jerusalem:

“And suddenly there came upon them a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared to them and rested upon each one of them. And they were each of them filled with the Holy Spirit…”

— Acts 2

For the Ascension, Jesus makes a promise most of us pass over too quickly. Speaking of his imminent departure and the subsequent arrival of his Spirit, Jesus promises, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” The alighting of the Holy Spirit signals a still more intimate arrival— the Father and the Son making each and every believer alike the ark of Mary’s womb. Pentecost not only occasions the outpouring of the Spirit, it signals the Trinity taking up residence in each of us. This is either a non sequitur or the most compressed piece of pneumatology in the New Testament.

Despite our prejudice towards the former, the straightforward teaching of the scriptures is the latter. That is, Pentecost is neither the rippled after effect of the empty tomb nor a redundant revelation. Pentecost is Pascha’s peer.

As my teacher Robert Jenson reads St. Augustine’s On the Trinity, the Spirit’s identifying predicate must be “Gift of God.” God— the Father and the Son— are the only relations that appear in the name is when the Holy Spirit is said to be given. The Holy Spirit, says Augustine, “is a certain ineffable communion of the Father and the Son,” the bond of their mutual love, proceeding from the first and second of the triune persons. In other words, the Holy Spirit is the Gift of God— God, given by God; the gift necessarily presumes, a priori, a recipient. But then, if the Holy Spirit’s very identity is constituted by being given to an other, how does the Spirit exist as a divine person before there is any recipient to receive him as grace? How is the Spirit eternal if the Spirit’s identity depends on the existence of creatures?

To call Jesus the Son, in other words, is already to posit his relation to a Father. To refer to the Spirit of either the Son or the Father is to suggest a fourth identity to whom the Spirit is given. If God is sheer monad— if the Father is without the Son, then God has no need of his Spirit. If the Father and the Son are without a covenant people, they likewise require no bond but the relation between them. As Jenson writes, summarizing the teaching of the church in the West as bequeathed it from Augustine and Aquinas, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of a relation constitutive of his very identity— the love of the Father and Son in their processions outward.

The Holy Spirit cannot be identified without reference to the community toward which that love moves.

Just as we should not want to specify the Son’s identity without Jesus, we should not want to specify the Spirit’s identity without the Israel God gathered to himself, Mary’s boy in whom that gathering became flesh, and the church in whom that flesh is distributed in loaf and cup, water and word.

Which means, the Holy Spirit’s existence already encodes election.

Just as preachers perpetually (and mistakenly) present the incarnation as a solution in time to a world gone wrong rather than the primal decision of God not to be God without us, the church just as often speaks of the Spirit as the presence later dispatched by God to manage the relationship begun with Israel. This linear, causal ordering is incoherent if God’s proper, personal name— the name revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush— is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Rather, the Spirit who proceeds eternally cannot be hypostatically identified apart from the community toward whom that movement was always already aimed. That in Jesus Christ God determined not to be God without us means that God likewise determined not to be God except as the Holy Spirit.

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Here is the sermon I preached for the saints at St Peter’s Kyrka in Stockholm, Sweden. I very much enjoyed my time with their leaders and members.

Ascension Sunday — Acts 1.6-14

For a decade now I have suffered a rare, incurable cancer in my marrow. It relapsed with a vengeance a year and a half ago. Two side effects of the chemotherapy I now ingest twice a day are high blood pressure and brain hemorrhages, which is why exactly twelve months ago a thunderclap headache so waylaid me I thought my head was going to crack apart like an egg. Convinced I was about to have a stroke, I drove myself to the emergency room.

After being pricked and prodded and overwhelmed with paperwork, I lay in an exam room and watched the arrow on the monitor hover stubbornly in the red — critical territory. And I prayed. My heart was racing and my head was pounding and my spirits were falling. And I prayed. I have no idea how much time elapsed. Eventually my whispered prayers turned to anxious breathing and both finally yielded to resignation. An ambulance arrived at the hospital and summoned attention away from me. I was all alone.

Or so I thought.

Then suddenly I heard a voice. As clear and close as Carl said god morgon to me an hour ago, I heard a voice say to me, “It’s going to be alright.”

“It’s going to be alright,” the voice said.

“It’s going to be alright,” said God.

“It’s going to be alright,” the LORD said to me.

From where exactly?

Above me? Beside me? In my imagination?

Such a presence is too good to be true, right?

For that matter, it is also too strange to be managed. In its sheer inconceivability, the Ascension is a hammer that shatters our every idol. Every safe, reasonable image of Jesus for which we comfortably settle, the Ascension refuses. The Ascension will not let us make Christ Jesus small enough to comprehend.

Which is precisely how we know this text is telling us the truth.

As a friend of mine writes, “The doctrine of the Ascension does not make our lives easy to interpret. The doctrine of the Ascension makes the living of our lives endurable.”

Or rather, the promise of the Ascension makes our lives endurable.

In some ways, Christ’s ascension is an item of dogma on the slimmest of basis. Of the four Gospels, only Luke mentions it, and he does so twice. Read in isolation, the account in the Book of Acts could create the impression that Jesus spent the forty days after his resurrection on terra firma, but this is straightforwardly not the case. Luke tells us that the Risen Jesus encountered two disciples on their way home to Emmaus. Cleopas and the unnamed disciple did not recognize their traveling companion until “he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him…” Coincident with the instant of their recognition, Luke reports, the Risen Christ “vanished from their sight.”

Luke does not say, “Jesus walked off into the distance.”

No — he vanished from their sight.

An odd body indeed.

Later that night, the disciples are hiding behind locked doors when at once the Risen Jesus is standing among them. He does not knock. He does not step through the door. He is simply and suddenly there.

Diane was a member of my first congregation in New Jersey. The first funeral I ever preached was for Diane’s father, who came home from work one afternoon, went down to the basement, and committed suicide. Before the police were able to reach Diane and break the news to her, Jesus came to her.

“He was standing in the kitchen, on the linoleum floor, in front of the microwave and toaster oven. I don’t know how I knew it was him, because he didn’t say anything, but I knew he wanted to comfort me for some reason. Jesus wanted to comfort me, and here I was embarrassed by all the dirty dishes in the sink.”

“How did he leave?” I asked her.

“How did he leave?” She stammered. “I don’t know. He just, you know, suddenly wasn’t there anymore.”

The Ascension is a hammer that shatters all our idols; it swings the hammer with the questions it elicits.

For example:

If the risen Jesus ascends forty days after Easter, where was he in between his appearances? He did not rent a room at the Super 8 in Jerusalem. He was not glamping in Galilee. He did not couch-surf in Samaria.

He appeared. And then he vanished from their sight.

Whatever else the Ascension means, therefore, it does not signal a change in spatial location. The risen Jesus was not exclusively located on earth during the forty days after his resurrection, just as the ascended Jesus is assuredly not now located “up there.”

Nesteron lived in Iran and belonged to an observant Muslim family, yet one day the risen Jesus appeared to her.

“What was it like?” my friend asked her.

“It wasn’t like an audible voice, but it wasn’t like a voice in my head either. It was something altogether different but altogether real.”

Unbeknownst to Nesteron, at this same time, her sister, studying in Europe, had received the gospel from a classmate and been baptized. Jesus later appeared to her sister and told her to go home and share his gospel with Nesteron and their family. When the sister arrived, Nesteron greeted her by saying, “I know — you’re here to tell me about Jesus. I believe in him. I’ve met him.”

If not “up there,” then where?

And given that wherever — how is he also here?

Actually, the Ascension is not about a where.

It’s about a when.

The Ascension is not about space.

The Ascension is about time.

Luke uses spatial imagery to proclaim Jesus’s whither because the truth is almost impossible to conceive. Where Luke gives us a picture, the rest of the scriptures rely on the concept of time. The risen Christ in the Book of Revelation attests that he is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last.

Jesus talks about himself in terms of time!

The risen Christ, Paul writes, is the first fruit of the new creation; that is, he is the first moment of God’s promised Last Future.

The question is not, “Where is Jesus?”

The question is, “When is Jesus?”

The Father raised Jesus from the dead and immediately translated him to the first moment after the End of this old aeon. The Ascension is simply the demonstration of what was already true forty days earlier. The mystery is that God raised Jesus into the future. And the good news is that this Future is, by grace, your future.

His Easter appearances are exactly what the Gospels would have us conclude— ghostlike yet not ghostlike, embodied yet different than before. They are so because the risen Jesus comes from the Future. Resurrection translates Jesus from one point in space-time to another without interrupting the Triune life. Much like folding a piece of paper and piercing it with a pencil, leaving two holes that permit you to pass directly from one end to the other, Christ’s body can pass from one location in space-time to another without interval.

Hector was an inmate at Trenton State Maximum Security Prison where I once served as chaplain. He came to see me one hot summer day, his olive skin blanched white from fright.

“Man, no joke, Jesus Christ was just there—in my cell—last night before lights out. He told me everything I done is all forgiven. And then he told me my kids are going to be alright. Preacher, don’t you get it? Everyone up in here is trying to get out, and Jesus Christ up and broke in to tell me I’m forgiven!”

Hector looked terrified.

But it didn’t stop him from asking me to baptize him on Sunday.

A thousand years ago, Bernard of Clairvaux— he was not a Swede; he was a Frenchman, but at least I got a European in here—preached a sermon entitled “The Three comings of Christ.”

In his homily, Bernard proclaimed:

“We know that there are three comings of the LORD. The third lies between the other two. It is invisible, whilst the other two are visible. In the first coming he was seen on earth, dwelling among men…In the final coming all flesh will see the salvation of our God…In this middle coming, he comes in spirit and in power, but this intermediate coming is always hidden.”

According to Bernard— and he is simply taking Jesus at his word— what we tend to call the Second Coming will not be the arrival of a heretofore absent Christ. There is a deeply ingrained habit of mind in much of Western Christianity that reads the Ascension as a kind of pre-Copernican problem to be managed.

Jesus came.

Jesus left.

We wait.

Inevitably, on this account, the church presents the Holy Spirit as the presence of the absent Christ— an interval to be endured, a lack with which we are to cope. Thus the whole of Christian practice becomes a strategy for occasionally interrupting an otherwise chronic absence. Seldom do we notice the theology buried in this construal. Bernard— and with him, John’s Gospel— insists this is simply not true. Christ’s ascension into the Future does not announce a departure from us. It announces the arrival of a new and deeper mode of intimacy with us.

This is why Jesus says what he says in John’s version of the Ascension story, “It is good for you that I go away.”

This is not consolation. This is not a half-measured apology.

It is good.

It is good for you.

It is good for you that I go away.

Martin Luther pressed this same point with characteristic bluntness, “Christ ascended so that he might come nearer to us.”

Not farther up and further away.

Nearer.

If he did not go, if he did not ascend, says Jesus, the Comforter would not come. But if the Comforter comes, Jesus says, then the Father and the Son will come and make their home.

Where?

“In you.”

Not: they will visit you. Not: they will liven and enlighten you, grow you in grace or shower you with gifts. Not: they appear from time to time in response to sufficient spiritual effort.

The Father and the Son will make their home.

In you.

This too is a hammer that breaks all our idols.

The Father and the Son will make their home in you. Not in you as a figure of speech. Not in you as a way of saying God is generally disposed toward you. Not in you as in the Spirit occasionally moves through you, or that Christ accompanies you from a respectful distance.

The Father and the Son will make their home in you.

The promise of the Ascension is a hammer that shatters every domesticated version of grace we might prefer. God as helpful presence, shattered. God as moral inspiration, shattered. God as the force behind our better impulses, broken to smithereens. The claim today is not that God improves you. The claim is that the triune God, who deigned to be laid in a manger and nailed to a tree, takes up residence in the likes of you.

This is either the most important thing anyone has ever said to us.

Or it is intolerable.

According to Jesus— because Jesus has ascended, he is now more intimate with you than he was with Peter on the lake or the Samaritan woman at the well or Mary Magdalene in the garden. Mary could not cling to the risen Jesus. But because he has ascended— translated into the first moment of the new creation— the Father and the Son with their Spirit now cling to us.

Next week is Shavuot— Pentecost.

The indwelling of the Holy Spirit that the disciples receive at Pentecost is not a consolation prize for the loss of Jesus. Quite the opposite, it is the fulfillment of everything the incarnation was moving toward: God not merely alongside us, but with us and within us, closer to us than we are to ourselves. Like a baby in a mother’s womb— as near as breath, as necessary for survival— the presence of the Father and Son is so encompassing of us we scarcely can perceive it. Most of the time, God’s presence works in our lives as the sea does for the creatures who live in it. It holds us in being. It sustains us from the inside. And we are scarcely cognizant of it even as we are wholly constituted by it.

What we ordinarily call the absence of God is quite the opposite. In nearly every case, what we name as God’s absence is a different impoverishment entirely: a failure of attunement.

God’s presence is real. God’s presence is constant. What ebbs and flows is our awareness of him, our responsiveness to his presence with us, our willingness to live from it rather than around it. The disciplines of Christian life— prayer, the reading of the scriptures, the Eucharist, the keeping of the word— are not techniques for summoning an absent Christ.

They are practices of bringing into focus the persistently present triune God.

The Parousia we await is not the arrival of someone who has been away. It is the unveiling of a three person’d Someone who has been present all along. In the language of Emmaus, Christ will not come again so much as he will appear—present all along.

“The doctrine of the Ascension makes our lives endurable.”

Almost three years ago, the week of the Ascension, a former parishioner named Dalton sent me an email.

Dalton’s message said:

“Jason,” he wrote, “your sermon called up a memory for me. Several years ago now, I was sitting in my parked car at the bottom of a parking garage in DC. I had grown too tired and too scared to cry anymore. Barbie’s and my son was a runaway. I was a mess and miserable. We were thinking the worst but too afraid to say it to each other. But then, sitting in my car in the parking garage, Jesus came to me — I swear it. Jesus came to me and said, ‘Everything is going to be ok.’ It was like God had been in the car with me the whole time.”

Like God had been in the car with me the whole time.

Not: God arrived.

Not: God finally heard me and showed up.

Not: God broke in from somewhere else.

Like God had been there all along.

“It’s going to be alright.”

Just after the doctor pronounced the “All Clear” for me to return home, the nurse assigned to me came in to remove the electrodes from my chest and the IV from my arm.

The voice still rang in my ears.

“Say,” I said to her, “I’ve been a little out of it. Just wondering, has anyone else been in here with me?”

She looked at me like I was a sad little boy who had scraped his knee. She wiped the sweat from my forehead and said, “Honey, you’ve been all alone this whole time.”

She didn’t know it, of course. But she was absolutely wrong.

Ascension does not announce an absence. Ascension announces an accompaniment. The Ascension is not a departure from us. The Ascension is a homecoming to us. More than that, it names a stubborn refusal to leave us. Jesus has gone up into the Last Future; so that, from there, he and his Father can make their home in you.

The Ascension is a hammer that shatters all our idols, including— maybe especially— the idol of our unbelief. After all, the world tells us that it is difficult to believe God is in this broken and sinful world.

Little does the unbelieving world know that it is even harder for believers to believe that they are how God is in this world. No doubt— let’s be honest— you’re not a little incredulous that you— even you— are no different than Israel’s ark or Mary’s womb. If heaven is the space God makes to be available to his creatures, heaven looks like…

You.

You are a temple of the Triune God.

Don’t believe it?

Believe the world instead?

Then hear me.

If you cannot feel the presence of God, or if you once felt him and do so no longer; if this homecoming sounds like a beautiful doctrine that does not belong to you, or if you fear you require much renovation and many more repairs before he would condescend to accommodations the likes of you, then listen. God is yet no further from you than his word on the lips of a preacher.

Jesus goes up not to go away.

Jesus goes up; so that, God can make his home not just in you or me but in wine and bread, water and the word.

That is, the preached word.

Therefore, hear the good news.

I am not speaking about God now.

I am speaking for God.

Whatever struggle you are carrying, no matter the suffering you are bearing.

Everything is going to be okay.

If you are anxious about how to be a follower of Christ among secular peers who see you as odd, if you worry about how to be the church in a culture inoculated against the gospel, if— like me— every day feels for you like Ash Wednesday, every day reminds you that from dust you came and to dust you shall return, then hear me.

It’s going to be alright.

He has you.

Literally— he has made his home in you.

Fear not! You are not alone!

In fact, you are kind of crowded— you have a three person’d God in you!

Jesus has gone up; consequently, the Almighty is closer to you than the water was in your mother’s womb. You do not have to feel it for it to be true for you. Dalton did not feel it until he did. I did not hear the voice until I did.

His homecoming is not contingent on your holiness.

His presence is not dependent on your awareness.

His abiding is not conditioned on your faith.

Like Jesus says from his cross, “It is already accomplished.”

The Ascension puts the period to his announcement.

Still don’t believe me?

Then come to the table.

The loaf and the cup— they are just like you; they are the gate of heaven.

God is not nowhere in this world. Indeed God has made it impossible for you to believe he is not in this broken world. He is so in the bread that is his broken body and the wine that is his shed blood. The loaf and cup are hammers that shatter all our idols.

Come to the table.

Take and eat.

The God who is three persons gets inside you in more ways than one.

The Ascension does not make our lives easy to interpret.

But the ascended LORD has made his home in you.

And that makes the living of them endurable.

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Hi Friends,

Here is my fourth and final talk on proclamation at St. Peter’s Kyrka in Stockholm, Sweden. In addition to meeting with their young men tonight, I will be preaching on the Ascension in the morning. The hospitality they’ve shown me has been moving and I hope I have been of some help in doing what they asked me to do.

On Handing Over the Goods

I wish to begin with a passage from the theologian Gerhard Forde, who provided me a breakthrough in understanding the difference between first-order and second-order discourse; that is, he distinguished the difference between speaking about God and speaking for God— information versus proclamation.

In the Preached God, Forde writes:

“It seems to me that one of the biggest temptations in theology today is to confuse the lecture, the explanation with the proclamation, the primary discourse, the “I declare unto you.” When that confusion is made, what happens is that the proclamation invariably gets lost and is ultimately silenced. Without proclamation, there will be no systematic theology— at least not proper systematic theology. If systematic theology does not understand the place of proclamation, and realize that its purpose is to drive to proclamation, then it will overstep its bounds and try to usurp proclamation. Systematic theology, that is, has to recognize that there are definite limits to the enterprise, boundaries to our explanations. It has to realize that proclamation is not the practical application or popularizing of systematic theories, but that it is itself the last move in the theological operation, the last step in the argument. If done properly, systematic theology leads one to the point where the only move left is to leave the lectern and enter the pulpit. The only point, finally, in saying so loudly and persistently as we do in our systematics that grace, faith, and all those things are free and unconditional gifts is precisely to give them.

To do it.

To say it.

To do God to sinners.

That is what God is up to in this world.”

In the Preached God, Forde describes a temptation, but he might just as well be describing a fait accompli. The confusion he names, between the lecture and the proclamation, between explaining the gospel and speaking it— doing it listeners, has become so habitual in so many of our churches and seminaries that we have largely stopped noticing it. The sermon has become a TED Talk in theological drag. The preacher has become what preachers must not be, communicators. Meanwhile, theology, freed from its obligation to drive toward proclamation, has become a discipline that converses primarily with itself, generating sophisticated revisions of Christian doctrines and dogma that are never quite cashed out into first-order discourse.

The cost is not merely homiletical. Forde’s claim is that when proclamation is silenced, theology itself eventually collapses, not dramatically, but by slow starvation. A theology that does not know what its proper purpose loses its object. It can continue to produce discourse for a considerable time on institutional momentum alone, but it is no longer doing what theology properly aims to do, which is to think in service of the church’s announcement that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead. When that announcement ceases to be the telos of the theological enterprise, theology fills the vacuum with other ends: relevance, critique, therapy, ethics, the management of intellectual respectability.

All of these are easier than proclamation.

None of them is actual theology.

I was tasked to reflect upon the role of theology for preaching, but I want to reject the very premise of the request. It is not case that theology has a role in the preaching task; rather, theology’s only purpose is to equip and enable gospel proclamation. If theology does not do so, if theology does not aid preachers in speaking promises only God can promise, then theology is the opposite of proclamation. It is mere speculation. In other words, proclamation is not the application of theology but its consummation, the last move in the argument, as Forde says. And this is not a move theology can make for itself. To reach that conclusion requires understanding something about the nature of the gospel, something about the community that carries it, something about what the word does when it is genuinely spoken, and something about the limits that belong constitutively to theological discourse as such.

The Message That Must Move

Theology begins with a datum it did not generate. The church did not invent the proposition that God raised Jesus from the dead; it received it. This is why the first axiom of any adequate account of theology insists that theology is simply the church’s thinking in service of the particular evangel, “Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim is risen indeed.” The gospel is not a general religious truth, amenable to being extracted from its narrative context and deployed as a principle. It is a message— specific, particular, dateable, and located. It concerns a man, whose name we know, who was executed under the authority of another man, whose name we know. Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, lives with death behind him. And because the gospel is a message, it requires transmission.

Someone must speak it.

And someone must hear it.

There is no such thing as a gospel that travels silently. There is no salvation outside of the church because there is no such thing as salvation that does not pass from one sinner’s lips through another sinner’s ears. “Faith comes by hearing,” Paul writes, and he means it as an ontological statement, not merely a pedagogical one.

This is already a claim about the structure of theology.

If the gospel is a message that must be conveyed from speaker to hearer, then theology, the disciplined thinking of the church about the content and form and implications of that message, is always already oriented toward speech. Theology thinks so that the church can preach. It refines, defends, expands, and corrects the message not for the sake of theological refinement but for the sake of faithful proclamation.

Gerhard Ebeling put the point sharply:

“The history of the church is the history of the interpretation of the scriptures, and the interpretation of the scriptures is the history of preaching. Theology is the middle term, the act of interpretation that keeps the two ends, the received word and the spoken word, in contact with each other across time.”

This is a claim Forde would endorse with his characteristic bluntness. Theology that does not know it is in the middle, that it receives from the tradition and hands off to the pulpit, will inevitably begin to imagine itself as the destination rather than the passage. It mistakes its own refinements for the thing itself. And then the proclamation gets lost, not because anyone decided to silence it but because the theological enterprise expanded to fill the available space. Thus there was no longer any room for the first-order discourse, for the declaratory “for you” that is the primary form of the gospel’s speech.

The Swedish theologian Gustaf Wingren, whose The Living Word remains one of the most penetrating accounts of preaching’s theological significance, argues that the scriptures do not so much point to preaching as overflow into it. The same word that called Abraham out of Ur and parted the sea before Moses and raised the dead through Elijah is the word that sounds in the gathered assembly when the gospel is preached. The word of God is not a class of statement but a living act. It does not describe what God has done. It extends what God is doing. Theology is for proclamation and proclamation is the present-tense form of the mighty acts of God which do not conclude with the canon of the New Testament. Theology is for proclamation; therefore, theology that treats the acts of God as items of the past is no longer theology.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing to his students at the Emergency Pastors’ Seminary at Finkenwalde in 1935, pressed this point to its confessional extreme. “The preached word,” he taught, “is the Risen Jesus walking in the midst of his people.” Bonhoeffer claimed nothing more than what the Second Helvetic Confession confesses, “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” These are precise theological claims about the direction from which the sermon moves. The word comes not from the congregation upward toward a God who may be inclined to respond, but from God downward through creaturely speech into human ears. Bonhoeffer’s point, developed in those Finkenwalde lectures, is that the authority of preaching is not rhetorical or institutional but participatory. The preacher speaks with authority insofar as he is transparent to the Word that addresses him as much as it addresses his hearers. He does not stand above the text applying it to others from a position of mastery; he stands beneath it, already judged and comforted by it, speaking a word that has first spoken to him.

Or, as Forde might add, “And if she has only been lectured at by the text, she will only be able to lecture from it. The first person address must be received before it can be given.”

No sinner can self-apply the promise.

In order to preach, therefore, the preacher first must find a preacher of their own.

The Community of the Message

Because the gospel requires transmission, it requires a community of transmission. One does not discover the resurrection by solitary reflection. The forgiveness of all your sins will not encounter you on the golf course. One hears about it from someone who heard about it from someone who was there, or who was told by someone who was there. This chain of witness— traditioned, interpretive, embodied— is what the church is. The church is not the kingdom movement begun by the dead Jesus. The church is not the Jesus Memorial Society. The church is the community constituted by and responsible for the transmission of God’s own living word.

This is why theology can only be done inside the church.

Theology is only theology inside the church not because the church is a guild with proprietary access to certain claims, but because theology is the thinking of a community in service of a message. Without the community and the message, there is nothing to think. Or say. The moment theology tries to abstract itself from that community, to become a general science of religion or a philosophical inquiry into the divine, it stops being theology and starts being speculation. And none of us is getting out of life alive; sinners cannot afford to waste time on speculation. The God theology speaks of— we should always remember— is not the god of philosophical theism, the Unmoved Mover or the Ground of Being and certainly not the Big Guy who needed your loved one up in heaven. The God we proclaim is but the God of Israel who raised Jesus from the dead having first raised Israel from slavery in Egypt. And that God is known only by way of the witness of the community that has received and transmitted the news of what he has done.

This has a specific implication for theological method that Forde would recognize immediately. The temptation to confuse lecture and proclamation is not merely a failure of nerve; it is a symptom of theology having drifted from the community that gives it its purpose. Academic theology, conducted at sufficient distance from the church’s actual proclamatory practice, loses its feel for the distinction between explanation and address. It knows how to describe grace with increasing precision; it does not know how to give it. The language becomes third-person, second-order discourse throughout.

God is always the subject of discussion but never the speaker in the room.

When God is never the speaker in the room, the theologian has no practical reason to leave the lectern; there is nowhere to go.

And be warned: there are many theologians in the church disguised as preachers.

Robert Jenson captures the logical structure of this problem with characteristic precision. When theology departs from the pattern of the church’s prayer, its address to the one Jesus called Father, with Jesus who thus made himself the Son, in their common Spirit, it slips from its object. Theology grasps the resurrection’s particular God only by following the ineluctably trinitarian pattern of the church’s worship, which is itself a pattern of proclamation. The gospel proclaimed to the world and the gospel returned to God as prayer and praise and petition. Theology that abstracts from this pattern of proclamation and prayer has lost contact with the object it claims to study. With it, it has forsaken the reason to drive toward proclamation at all.

The Word Does Something

The confusion of lecture and proclamation rests, finally, on a mistaken account of what the word does when it is spoken. If the gospel is primarily information, true and important information, but information nonetheless, then the distinction between explaining it and proclaiming it is merely stylistic. Elaborate it clearly enough, and you have done what theology is for. But this is precisely the assumption Forde rejects, and it is the assumption the entire Reformation tradition rejects with him.

The word of the gospel is what Luther called a “verbum efficax”, an efficacious word, a word that does what it says. When the gospel is truly proclaimed, it does not merely inform the listener that sins are forgiven; it actually does the deed— it forgives them. It does not merely report that death has been defeated; it kills and makes alive. This is why Forde insists that the only point in saying so loudly and persistently is our theology that grace and faith are free and unconditional gifts is to give them: to do it, to say it, to do God on behalf of God. The theological explanation or speculation is not the handing over of the goods. It is preparation for the giving. It establishes the conditions under which the giving can happen without distortion, without the gift being confused with a loan or a reward. But once those conditions are established, theology has reached its limit. The next move is the gift itself, spoken to a particular person as though the speaker were none other than the LORD, “I forgive you all your sins.”

Karl Barth made the same claim when he called proclamation the “third form” of the Word of God. Preaching is not a lesser or derivative form of God’s word; it is the form in which revealed Word and written Word press into the present tense and address this particular community. Bonhoeffer’s warning belongs here as well, “A sermon that has not first judged the preacher will inevitably become a judgment on the congregation.” He means that the preacher who approaches the text as a lecturer— extracting propositions to convey— has never been addressed by it. The preacher has been informed by it. And he can only pass on what he has received. The congregation will thus hear explanation. They will not hear the “I declare unto you” that is the primary form of the gospel’s speech.

There is a characteristic failure mode of theologically serious churches that Forde’s diagnosis names precisely. The congregation becomes so sophisticated about theological matters that it can no longer receive the word as word. The sermon becomes a seminar. The preacher explains rather than declares. The congregation listens for ideas— or worse, advice— rather than waiting to be addressed. The theological sophistication is real, and it is, finally, a form of unbelief. The church has decided that what is needed is the refinement of understanding, not the event of proclamation. It has confused the lecture with the gift. And so the gift is never given.

Handing Over the Goods, Not Handing Over To Do’s

The confusion of lecture and proclamation does not happen in a vacuum. It tends to happen alongside, and be reinforced by, a second confusion: the confusion of theology with anthropology, or theology with ethics. When theology loses its proclamatory telos, it fills the resulting vacuum with the human subject. The sermon that no longer knows how to declare what God has done defaults to describing what the human being should do or feel or aspire to. In the liberal tradition, theology becomes the articulation of religious experience; in the conservative tradition, it becomes the enforcement of moral standards. In both cases, the indicative has been swallowed by the imperative, the gift replaced by the demand, the second-person address replaced by the second-person accusation. This is the deformation that Barth spent his career fighting, and his treatment of the Sermon on the Mount is its clearest homiletical expression. Too few who tackle Christ’s Sermon approach it in order announce the event: that the one who speaks the Sermon is the Word through whom all things were made. Therefore, the Sermon’s commands are in fact the promise of the life Jesus is already giving us. The law is the form of the gospel— but only if the preacher dares to speak not about Jesus but for him.

Proclamation is not a lecture about blessedness.

It is the declaration of its fact.

This is why the scriptures must govern theology rather than serve as a resource bank for positions already determined. The biblical drama is not a collection of religious illustrations; it is the history of God’s self-identification. The God of the Bible is not a generic divinity who happens to feature in certain ancient Near Eastern texts. He is the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, who spoke through the prophets, who was born of Mary, who was raised on the third day. His identity is constituted by that story, and any theology that abstracts from the story abstracts from God. The attempt to speak of God in general, without the particularity of Israel and Jesus, is not modesty. It is a description of a different deity altogether, one who, notably, has nothing in particular to declare.

The Word Advances Through the Nations

Gustaf Wingren writes in The Living Word that the ministry of the word advances “through the nations to the ends of the earth and through the generations to the end of time, to the Parousia.” The sentence locates the proclamation within an eschatological movement that theology must inhabit if it is to think rightly about its own task and its own limits.

The word is not a static deposit to be preserved. It is an advance: directional, purposive, moving toward a destination. The destination is the Parousia, the appearing in fullness of the one who was raised. Between the resurrection and the Parousia, the church is the community commissioned to carry the word forward through history, through cultures, through languages, through the deaths of generations. This forward movement is not the church’s achievement; it is the movement of the word itself. The church is swept up into it. And this movement is the context in which Forde’s warning arrives with its full urgency. If the proclamation gets lost— if the explanation swallows the declaration— the word’s advance is interrupted. Not permanently; God does not depend on our faithfulness for the ultimate outcome. But the interruption is real, and the people who needed to hear the “I declare unto you” in this generation did not hear it.

The eschatological stakes of getting proclamation right are not abstract.

Listening Before Speaking

Forde’s insistence on the limits of systematic theology belongs also to the category of listening. The recognition that theology has boundaries, that explanation must finally give way to declaration, that the lectern must give way to the pulpit, is not a counsel of intellectual humility in the generic sense. It is a theological claim about the nature of revelation. God’s word comes from outside the system. It is not the conclusion of the system. When theology forgets this, it tries to generate the proclamation from its own resources, to produce the words by logical extension of its premises. But the declaratory word is not that kind of word. It is received, not produced. It is spoken into the theologian first, and then spoken through the theologian to the congregation. The system can prepare the space for it, but it cannot manufacture it.

Bonhoeffer, who was living that distinction in real time at Finkenwalde, understood it at the level of sermon preparation itself. The preacher who meditates on the text is not generating insight; she is submitting to judgment. The word that will be spoken to the congregation must first be spoken to the preacher, and a sermon that has not first undone the preacher will not do much for anyone else. The authority that results from this shared exposure is not the authority of mastery but of witness; the preacher does not apply the word to others from above but speaks the word that has already arrived, ahead of her, at the place where her hearers live. This is what Bonhoeffer means by the preacher’s necessary disappearance: not self-erasure but transparency. The congregation should see through the preacher to the one who sent her.

Wingren’s test for all of this is simply, “Did Christ rise?”

It is the most concrete question that can be asked in a Christian assembly, and the answer is either “Yes” or “No.” There is no third option. If the answer is “Yes,” if the preacher stands in the pulpit as a witness to the resurrection, speaking the word that God has spoken into history, then the sermon participates in the ongoing act of God. If the answer is anything other than “Yes,” if the preacher hedges, or translates, or sublimates the resurrection into a general truth about hope, then the word has been silenced, and the sermon, however eloquent, is not the word of the gospel. It is a lecture about a gospel that is no longer being proclaimed.

In which case, as the apostle Paul proclaims, we are people to be pitied most of all.

The Last Move

It is not accidental that Paul calls the proclamation of the cross moria— foolishness, stupidity, something that makes the sophisticated wince. The gospel is not sophisticated. It does not flatter the intelligence of its hearers or meet culture on culture’s own terms. It announces a specific event— a first-century Jew was raised from the dead— and announces it as the determinative act in the history of the cosmos. This requires an extraordinary kind of courage to say without apology, and part of what theology is for is the formation of that courage.

At its best, theology clears the ground so that the offense of the gospel is the genuine offense of the crucified and risen Lord, not merely the offense of confused thinking or intellectual laziness, and equips the preacher to say what must be said: that death does not have the last word, that the powers have been unmasked, that the crucified one lives and his life is offered to you, here, now, in this bread and this cup and this spoken word.

But theology cannot perform the proclamation for the preacher. The congregation does not need a more nuanced account of resurrection theology; it needs to hear that Jesus rose. The addict does not need a careful phenomenology of grace; she needs to be told that she is forgiven and that the power of God is for her. The dying man does not need a sophisticated theodicy; he needs the word that goes down with him into the grave and comes back out the other side.

Jenson described preaching as Jesus making love to us. The phrase is almost indecorous, but it is theologically precise. Love addresses the beloved directly, in the second person; it does not offer information for the beloved’s consideration but speaks the word that changes everything. The sermon that has become a lecture has stopped being a love address. It has become a report about a past event rather than an enactment of the event itself.

This is, in the end, what Forde means by leaving the lectern and entering the pulpit. The lectern is not the enemy. It is the necessary antechamber. It is where the preparation happens, where the thinking is done, where theology does its work. But there comes a moment when the preparation is complete and the only move left is the gift— when the only thing left to do is to say loudly and in the first person what has been established so carefully in the third.

Perhaps I cannot adequately explain the difference between first-order and second-order discourse, the distinction between speculation and proclamation. But I can illustrate it for you.

Lecturing on the gospel at an event years ago, I heard the theologian Jim Nestingen share a story about how he’d been traveling long hours and many miles from conference to conference.

“As the plane was taking off,” he said, “the guy sitting next to me asked what I did for a living. I said to him, “I’m a preacher of the gospel.” Almost as soon as I got the words out, he shouted back at me, “I’m not a believer!”

“But the man was curious,” Jim said in his presentation:

“Once we got to cruising altitude, he started asking me about being a preacher. After a bit, he started telling me stories about the Vietnam War. He’d been an infantryman in the war. And he’d fought at all the awful battles and done the terrible things his country required of him. This went on the whole flight, from coast to coast, him giving over to me all the awful things he’d done. As the flight was about finished, I asked him. I said to him, “Have you confessed all the sins now that have been troubling you?”

“What do you mean confessed?! I’ve never confessed” the man replied.

“You’ve been confessing your sins to me this whole flight long. And I’ve been commanded by Christ Jesus that when I hear a confession like that to hand over the goods I’ve received and speak a particular word to you. So, you have any more sins burdening you? If so, throw them in there.”

“I’m done now,” the man next to him said, “I’m finished.”

“So I unbuckled my seatbelt and I unsqueezed myself from my chair,” Nestingen said, “and I stood up. The stewardess then— she starts yelling and fussing at me, “Sir— SIR— you can’t do that. Sit down. You can’t do that.””

“Can’t do it?” I said to the stewardess. “Ma’am Christ our Lord commands me to do it.”

Recalling the exchange, Nestingen said,

“And she looked back at me, scared, like she was afraid I was going to evangelize her or something. So I turned back to the man next to me and, standing up over him, I put my hand on his head and I said, “In the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority, I declare the entire forgiveness of all your sins.”

“You— you can’t do that,” he whispered to me.

“I can do it. And I must. Christ compels me to do it, and I just did it and I’ll do it again.”

“So I gave him the goods again. I tipped his head back and I spoke faith into him, and I did it loud for everyone on that plane to hear it. And just like that, the man started sobbing… like somebody had stuck him. Soon his shirt was wet from all his weeping and I held him in my arms like I’d hold a child.”

After the guy stopped weeping, he laughed and wiped his eyes and he said to me, “Gosh, if that’s true, it’s the best news I’ve ever heard.”

When I thought the story was over, Jim started to cry all over again and he said, “After the plane had landed, I handed my business card to him. I told him, “If you get hungry for that word in the future, call me and I’ll hand it over all over again.”

And then Jim laughed a big, deep laugh and said:

“Wouldn’t you know it. He called me every day— every day— just for me to serve up the little word of the gospel to him. So I did, every day until he died— I wanted the last words he heard in this life to be the first words he would hear Jesus himself say to him in the next life. That way, in the future he will discover he’d already met Jesus in his past— he got him in his word.”

Theology is for that kind of preaching.

That is what God is up to in this world.

Theology exists to make the absolving word intelligible.

Just so, I’d be remiss if I did not hand over the goods here at the end.

“In the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority alone, I announce to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins. The Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world and he hasn’t missed any— not even yours.”

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Here is my third talk from St. Peter’s Kyrka in Stockholm; in addition, here ^ is a photo of Olaus Petri (1493–1552), the father of the Protestant Reformation in Sweden.

I. The Question Behind the Question

There is a deceptively simple question that preachers face every time the Sermon on the Mount encounters them: What am I supposed to do with this?! The question sounds practical, even pastoral. But beneath it lies a dogmatic abyss. How the preacher answers it depends entirely upon what she believes about Jesus Christ, about the Word of God, and about the relationship between what God commands and what God promises to give. The Sermon on the Mount is not merely difficult because its ethics are rigorous. Christ’s sermon is difficult because it forces the church to decide who is speaking and what kind of speech this is.

My teacher Robert Jenson begins an essay on proclamation with an analogously deceptive question: Just how does a sermon “say the same thing” as a passage of scripture? Jenson insists the question is irreducibly dogmatic. What makes a sermon right is not rhetorical skill or historical fidelity to the text alone. It depends upon what the church confesses about who speaks in scripture and who speaks in the sermon proclaimed from it. Both Jenson and Karl Barth arrive at a shared conviction: the kind of speech constituted by preaching is determined by how we confess the Triune God is at work in the world.

You cannot answer the hermeneutical question without first answering the theological one.

Stanley Hauerwas arrives at the same threshold from the direction of ecclesiology and Christology. “The Sermon on the Mount,” he writes, “cannot help but become a law, an ethic, if what is taught is abstracted from the Teacher.” When the Sermon is detached from Jesus and treated as a free-floating ethical code, it becomes exactly the kind of independent law that Barth devoted his vocation to refusing. The ecclesial habits that have generated centuries of anxious debate about whether Jesus’s teachings are meant to be followed, Hauerwas argues, “are but reflections of Christologies that separate the person and work of Christ.” The question of how to preach the Sermon is inseparable from the question of who Jesus is.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood something about this from the inside. The Sunday after his home was firebombed on January 30, 1956, Dr. King preached to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, “Jesus never left men with such illusions. Jesus made it crystal clear that his gospel was difficult.” And in the hours before his death, King uttered— as an aside— in his final sermon, “I just want to do God’s will.”

I just want to do God’s will.

At the heart of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is an irony. The law is written on our hearts; however, apart from the gospel, this condition actually describes our captivity to sin. If we are to be freed for what Barth calls “joyful obedience,” then the law and the gospel cannot be two distinct alternatives but mutually determinative words. As Robert Jenson insists of God’s act of creation, the commandments are not an alien imposition upon creaturely existence but its very constitution. The LORD distinguishes himself from the barren deities by creating with moral intention. The law is grace. Given that the Logos who speaks creation into being ex nihilo is none other than Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim, the Sermon on the Mount cannot be the crushing burden or the accusing threat— as it often strikes us.

Even this law, especially this law, must be grace.

Contemporary preaching of the Sermon on the Mount tends to collapse into one of two errors. The first is moralism: the text becomes a higher ethical demand, a summons to heroic discipleship. The second is what Jenson calls the “centuries-besetting curse of Lutheran preaching:” the reduction of the gospel to the assurance that God forgives you anyway, allowing the rigor of the text to dissolve into sentimental reassurance. Barth, Jenson, and Hauerwas together offer a way beyond both errors. The way forward is Christological— a confession of who Jesus is and what his word therefore does.

II. The Loquacious LORD

Jenson’s starting point is a Reformation radicalism that he judges the Reformation itself has not always been bold enough to sustain. The most radical insight of the Reformers, he argues, was not their retrieval of justification by faith alone but their rescue of the Word of God not as information but as Event. To call the scriptures God’s Word is not to say that the Bible contains reliable data about divine things. It is to say that the Bible does something. The Word works what it says. When it is rightly proclaimed, it acts upon its hearers. The text is not properly understood until it has done to its recipients what it says, until it has performed its proper work upon them.

This distinction between information and event is not a modernist conceit but a deeply biblical and patristic one. The dabar of the LORD in the Hebrew prophets is not reportage; it is an effective action in history. When God speaks the creation into being, the word is not a description of what will be but the very power by which creation comes into existence. Origen understood this when he spoke of the Logos as the power that heals and illumines as it touches the soul. What the Reformation recovered, at least at its most incandescent moments, was the ecclesial and homiletical form of this insight. The preached word, when rightly proclaimed, participates in the creative and redemptive power of the divine Word itself.

Jenson draws from this the principle that a sermon is not a commentary about the text but a continuation of its address. The text as biblical text is part of an ongoing conversation, the single history of God’s self-revelation that culminates in Jesus Christ and continues in the church’s proclamation. When the preacher speaks from a text, she is not translating ancient speech into contemporary idiom; she is allowing the same Word to happen again. The sermon “says the same thing” as the text not by repeating its words but by sharing its motion— the motion of death and resurrection, law and gospel, judgment and promise.

The governing rule Jenson derives from Nicaea and Chalcedon is that all right preaching must somehow be about Jesus Christ, the one in whom God and humanity are united. This is not a Christological allegory applied to otherwise non-Christological passages but a recognition of what the text already is. If the scriptures witness to God’s single conversation with humanity, and if that conversation reaches its irreversible climax in the resurrection of Jesus, then every text participates in that climax, whether or not it names Jesus explicitly. The calling of Samuel is about Jesus, not because we must artificially import him into 1 Samuel 3, but because the world in which Samuel hears the divine voice in the night is the same world in which God will raise his Son from the dead.

The story is not yet finished when we read it.

Its finishing is underway even now.

From this, Jenson derives his second rule. All right preaching must take the form of law and gospel. Crucially, these are not two separate sections of the text or two sequential stages of the sermon. They are the dual function of every scriptural text when it becomes proclamation. A text is rightly understood only when it casts down and raises up. A sermon is a real sermon only when it enacts this rhythm. Hauerwas’s insistence that the Sermon cannot be abstracted from the Teacher is the ecclesial form of this homiletical claim. For Jenson, the text participates in the living conversation of divine address. For Hauerwas, the Sermon is intelligible only as the speech of the one who gathers a people around himself.

Both accounts refuse the reduction of the Word to information.

The Word is an event.

The event has a name.

And he has a Bride.

III. The Existence of the World is the Event of Obedience

Before the sermon can be understood as law and gospel, the law itself must be understood correctly. Jenson observes, following the creation narrative of Genesis, that the LORD creates not simply by speaking but by issuing commands. “And God said, ‘Let there be light’” — and the command is obeyed: “there was light.” In other words, in the beginning there was Torah. “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens’” — and the command is obeyed: “It was so.” Who was present prior to creation to obey the LORD’s command? The text of Genesis itself supplies the answer in the only plural the creation narrative permits: “Let us make man in our image.” As the Nicene Creed formulates it into dogma, “We believe in one LORD, Jesus Christ, by whom all things were made.” Christ’s obedience to the Father’s commands is the very means of creation. The existence of the world is the event of obedience.

The commandments are therefore not an alien imposition upon a world that would otherwise be free. They are the constitutive grammar of creaturely existence itself.

As Jenson writes in his Large Catechism:

”The commandments appear in scripture as God’s own second-person word of his intentions for his human creatures... God’s work on creatures is not random but morally purposeful. He creates and redeems us to be this and not that: faithful rather than questing, pious rather than neglectful, communal rather than autonomous, chaste rather than liberated, helpful to the fabric of community rather than harmful to it.”

To hear God’s command, Jenson insists, is “to be refreshed in my very being,” not condemned, not crushed, but restored to what one most deeply is. Thomas Aquinas formulates the same insight: “the law is the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

The commandments— and so, the Sermon on the Mount— just are the grace of the Holy Spirit.

This is utterly unlike the experience of deity that pagan converts discovered upon entering the church. They came from religious cults with no moral content, oriented to the religious needs of the worshipper. Marduk guaranteed cosmic order but issued no commands. The Roman imperial pantheon required patriotism but had no intentions for human flourishing. With the gospel, these converts entered what Jenson calls “a cult oriented not to their religious needs but to the mandates of a particular and highly opinionated God... a cult that made explicit moral demands.” The disorientation was enormous. And that disorientation is exactly the right response, not because the demands are crushing but because they reveal the kind of God with whom one is now dealing— a God who cares, who has intentions, who will not leave his creatures alone to construct their own meaning.

In the winter of 1996, anti-semites smashed the window of Judith and Martin Markovitz’s home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, destroying the electric menorah they had kept lit for Hanukkah. The Markovitzes were the only Jewish family on their street. By nightfall the following day, all eighteen of the other homes on their street were lit with their own electric menorahs. A woman named Margie Alexander had organized it. When asked what motivated her, she said simply, “I’m a Christian, a Roman Catholic.” When asked about the possibility that her home might become the next target, she said, “We can’t just give in to the world’s darkness.”

What is striking about Margie Alexander is not the heroism of the gesture but the clarity of its grammar. She did not agonize over whether the situation required a response. She knew what she was supposed to do. “We had no choice,” she said. “Most of us, we’re Christians.” The commandment oriented her. It told her that her life had a direction, that the God who made her had not left her to construct her own ethics when a neighbor’s window was shattered in the dark. This is exactly what Jenson means when he says that to hear God’s command is to be refreshed in one’s very being.

The law is not the problem.

The law is the gift.

After one of my first sermons in my first parish, a furious mother with three kids in tow demanded of me, “Do you mean to tell me that Jesus wants me to forgive my unfaithful husband?” I evaded her question as long as I could before finally stammering, “Yes, I think Jesus would want you to forgive your husband.” She nodded and said, “Good. I think so too. How? With all the chaos in my life right now, knowing what I am supposed to do — it feels like a gift.” The commandment oriented her. What she needed was not relief from the commandment but the community and the grace to keep it.

The law’s goodness was never in question. Only its power.

IV. To Preach the Sermon on the Mount is to Preach Jesus

In his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth famously inverts the Lutheran law-gospel distinction. The resulting gospel-law thesis grows directly from his Doctrine of Election, which Barth calls “the sum of the gospel.” In election, that is, in Jesus Christ, God wills to be for humanity and for humanity to be with God as covenant partner. That God is Triune means this decision precedes creation. The Word who will become flesh in Jesus Christ is already the basis of creation itself. The finger that inscribed the law on tablets of stone belongs to a nail-scarred hand.

This is the Barthian form of the same claim Jenson makes from Genesis. Barth reaches it through election; Jenson reaches it through creation. Both arrive at the same conclusion: the law has never been independent of the grace of the one who gives it. The law does not create the need that the gospel fills. The gospel, the eternal decision of God to be for his creatures, is the ground from which the law always already speaks.

The ordering matters enormously. To begin with law and move to gospel is to begin with the human being’s subjective experience of accusation and move toward divine promise as its relief. For Barth, this privileges exactly the wrong starting point. It makes the individual’s experience of guilt and need the hermeneutical key to revelation rather than God’s eternal decision in Christ. And it produces the very problem Jenson identifies in Lutheran preaching: a law that accuses followed by a gospel that merely negates the accusation. Neither word has said anything real.

Consider what happens when the law is severed from its gospel ground. Barth watched the German Church in the 1930s discover that a law independent of the gospel is a law available for any content. As Richard Evans notes in The Coming of the Third Reich, political tribalism had extended into every corner of German life: “Choirs, sports clubs, libraries, youth groups, women’s organizations, dramatic societies, even pubs, identified themselves in political terms: as Social Democrat, nationalist, Centre, and so forth.” German politics had become a lifestyle brand, a totalizing identity that supplied meaning, belonging, and ultimate significance. When the law is separated from Jesus Christ and made to stand independently, it does not remain neutral. It gets filled.

In a course on Karl Barth, my teacher George Hunsinger told us about a Christian church located just outside the walls of Dachau concentration camp. The prison guards and the camp commandant almost certainly attended that church. Every week they walked from the gas chambers and the gallows, through the razor wire, past the cattle cars, to the church where they confessed their sins, received absolution, and prayed to the God of Israel. Then they walked back to the camp and resumed their killing without thinking it contradicted their calling themselves Christians. “Such happens,” Hunsinger said, “when you reduce the gospel to forgiveness and you evict Jesus Christ from every place but the privacy of your heart.” The Barmen Declaration’s first thesis is Barth’s direct repudiation of this evacuation: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in the holy scriptures, is the one Word of God which we have to hear, and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”

Barth drew a further implication from his reading of Romans. Christians should resist the absolute claims of the state, ideological leaders, and political parties by depriving them of their pathos. “State, Church, Society, Positive Right, Family, Organized Research,” Barth wrote, “live off of the credulity of those who have been nurtured upon vigorous sermons-delivered-on-the-field-of-battle and other suchlike solemn humbug. Deprive them of their PATHOS, and they will be starved out; but stir up revolution against them, and their PATHOS is provided fresh fodder.” Political activity is important and necessary, but should be engaged “as a game that is played in full and vigilant awareness of its relativity.” To invest it with ultimate meaning, to treat any election as a Flight 93 moment, is to hand to Caesar what belongs to God alone. The Sermon on the Mount, preached rightly, becomes one of the most powerful acts of political deprivation available to the church. A community that attempts earnestly to love its enemies starves political ideologies of the passion they need for their own sustenance.

Hence, when the church opens the Sermon on the Mount, it cannot treat it as an independent moral code that stands alongside or over against the gospel. It can only read the Sermon as the word of the one who is himself the gospel, the Word of the Logos who was with God, who is God, and through whom all things are being transfigured into his likeness.

To preach the Sermon is to preach Jesus.

To preach the Sermon is to preach Jesus, not as an exemplary ethical teacher whose demands we are now obligated to attempt but Jesus as the one in whom God’s eternal decision for humanity has been enacted, in whom the law’s demand has been fulfilled, and from whom the law now comes as an invitation into the life he makes possible from the Last Future.

V. Law as the Form of the Gospel

The antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount are among the most demanding passages in the New Testament and among the most frequently mis-preached. The moralistic reading treats them as a straightforward escalation: the old law forbade murder; the new law forbids anger. The effect is an ever-tightening moral vice until the congregation sits in comprehensive guilt, waiting to be released by the assurance that God is merciful. This is precisely the pattern Jenson identifies as the centuries-besetting curse: law as accusation, followed by gospel as negation. You are guilty, but God forgives you anyway. No sooner has the law been announced than it is annulled. Thereby neither the law nor the gospel does its proper work.

Jenson’s account of creation illuminates what is actually happening in the antitheses. If the commandments are the grace of the Holy Spirit, if they constitute the same moral address by which God calls creatures into being, then Jesus’s antitheses are not intensifications of the law but revelations of its interior logic. Murder is forbidden not because killing violates a rule but because human life is made for communion. The world God is making is a world of reconciliation. When Jesus forbids anger that destroys relationship, he is not raising the bar; he is disclosing what the bar was always pointing toward — showing us the commandment from inside its own fulfillment, from the vantage of the kingdom whose coming reveals creation’s telos.

The antithesis on love of enemies receives the sharpest illumination here, ”Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” The command is grounded in the character of the Father, “who makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good.” This indicative about who God is and what God does is itself the content of creation. The God who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good is the same God who said “let there be light” and whose command was obeyed. His generosity toward his enemies is not a new policy but the expression of his eternal nature, his life as the one who gives without reserve. The community that has given its ultimate passion to a political cause cannot love its enemies because it has already decided that its enemies are not neighbors but threats. The Sermon on the Mount, preached rightly, is an act of political deprivation. It starves ideologies of the passion they need by constituting a community whose common life is defined not by shared enemies but by the love of the one who loved his enemies unto death.

Stanley Hauerwas illuminates exactly this movement.

He writes:

”The disciples endure injustice with the hard meekness that still hungers and thirsts for righteousness. Yet the righteousness of this new people is blessed by the mercy seen in the forgiveness that Christ showed even to those who would kill him. Such a people are capable of peacemaking because they are sustained by the purity derived from having no other telos but to enact the kingdom embodied in Jesus.”

The love of enemies is not a demand issued to solitary individuals straining after an impossible virtue. It is the description of a community whose peacemaking flows from a single End— the kingdom embodied in Jesus, the same kingdom whose constitution the Father spoke into being at the beginning.

VI. A People Has Been Made Possible

Stanley Hauerwas cuts through the two standard errors with unusual clarity. The Sermon, he argues, “is not a list of requirements, but rather a description of the life of a people gathered by and around Jesus. To be saved is to be so gathered.”

Salvation is baptism into Christ’s body.

There is no salvation outside of the church exactly because incorporation into the Christ-community just is salvation.

This reframing is not a softening of the Sermon’s demands but a relocation of them. The demands are real. But they are description, not prescription. They reveal the shape of the life that comes into being wherever Jesus gathers a people to himself.

Jenson’s account of gospel as promise clarifies what this description is pledging. The gospel is not general assurance that things will be all right. It is the assurance that this— the resurrection of Jesus and the new creation it entails— will come. Promise is speech that opens the future by referring to a specific content. Every text of the scriptures, when read as divine address, promises some facet of this same future.

The Beatitudes are saturated with this kind of promise, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” This is not a general therapeutic assurance. It is an announcement about the End, the consolation of the new creation, when God will wipe every tear from every eye, when the mourning that belongs to the old age will be swallowed up by the joy of the resurrection. The promise is eschatological, which means it is unconditional. An End cannot be conditioned. The comfort promised to those who mourn does not await their achievement of a certain quality of grief. It is given to them in the person of the comforter himself.

Hauerwas deepens this very point, “Perhaps no beatitude is more Christocentric than Jesus’s commendation of those who mourn, for they are, like him, prepared to live in the world renouncing what the world calls happiness and even peace.” To mourn in this sense is to be Christologically formed, to have one’s desires so shaped by Jesus that the world’s happinesses no longer satisfy. This is the law functioning at its most uncomfortable, not simply exposing our distance from an ethical ideal but exposing the degree to which we have accepted the world’s comfort in place of the kingdom’s.

Hauerwas makes the Christological ground of each Beatitude explicit through Paul’s letter to the Philippians.

He argues:

”The source for any understanding of the Beatitudes must be Jesus.

It is from Jesus that we learn what it means to be ‘poor in spirit.’”

Paul does not assume that the community’s poverty of spirit is

identical to Jesus’s self-emptying, Hauerwas notes, “but rather that

Jesus’s poverty has made it possible for a people to exist who can

live dispossessed of possessions.”

The Beatitude is not a demand to achieve a spiritual state. It is the announcement that a people has been made possible — a people whose existence is grounded in the kenosis of the Son of God.

The preacher’s task, Jenson writes, is to come to every text armed with the Easter question: “What future does this text license me to promise solely on the basis that Jesus lives with death behind him?” For the Beatitudes, the answer is rich and particular. From “blessed are the poor in spirit” the preacher may promise: You do not need to pretend to adequacy before God. The kingdom belongs to the empty-handed, because the king himself came empty-handed, and his empty hands were filled with the fullness of the new creation. From “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” the preacher may promise: Your longing for a world ordered by justice will not be disappointed. The one who is himself the righteousness of God has guaranteed it with his resurrection.

Jenson’s attack on the reduction of the gospel to “God loves you anyway” is pointed and necessary. The problem is not that this slogan is false but that it is empty. It cannot answer the question, “Loves you for what?” When the gospel loses its content, the law loses its partner. The law accuses you of failing to achieve something, and the gospel tells you that your failure doesn’t matter. Neither word has said anything real.

This is the theological failure behind the church at Dachau. When the gospel is emptied of its concrete Christological content, it cannot generate the visible, counter-cultural community the Sermon envisions. It can only generate private reassurance. And private reassurance is perfectly compatible with walking from the gas chambers to the communion rail and back again without noticing any contradiction. The guards at Dachau were not hypocrites in the ordinary sense. They were the product of a homiletics — formed by sermons that gave them forgiveness without giving them Christ, absolution without the kingdom, comfort without the community that the Sermon on the Mount constitutes.

Instead, says Barth, the command is the promise, for the law is the harbinger of your future self. God not only tells you what he has made you to be; God will yet make of you what he intends. The Sermon’s demands become the shape of a gift. The indicative precedes and grounds the imperative. You are a child of the Father who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good; therefore, love your enemies. You are blessed and given the kingdom; therefore, live as those who have already received it.

VII. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus Making Love to Us

One of the most important features of Barth’s gospel-law thesis is its insistence on genuine human agency. Luther’s solution to works righteousness was to insist on human passivity. Humans do nothing, God does everything. But Barth resists this. What is wrong about works righteousness is not the fact that the human does something; it is that human action stands in contradiction to grace, competing with it rather than conforming to it. The solution is not to eliminate human action but to transform it — to make it a response of gratitude rather than a condition of gift. Barth’s actualistic ontology gives this its systematic form: the human being is a being-in-becoming, constituted by doing in correspondence to divine action. God acts toward humanity in the gospel. The human being receives the good news and responds with obedience to the law. The Sermon on the Mount is not an impossible demand that only Christ can fulfill. It is the shape of the obedience that the gospel calls forth, the form of the life that the community of the kingdom is being empowered by the Spirit to live.

In his commentary on the Sermon, Bonhoeffer identifies three primary reasons the church hides its light. It fears that obedience to Christ will provoke conflict with those who do not follow him. It loves the people in its life more than it loves Christ and so will not speak the truth of the kingdom to them. And it assumes the nation in which it lives is essentially Christian, such that the church is no longer summoned to live as a visible alternative to it. All three temptations are alive and well. The preacher who softens the Sermon’s demands in the name of pastoral sensitivity, who avoids the political implications of the kingdom’s ethics in the name of congregational unity, who assumes that civil religion and Christian discipleship are close enough to be interchangeable — that preacher has hidden the light. She has, as Bonhoeffer puts it, fled into invisibility and thereby denied the call.

Jenson’s account of preaching as existential address extends this further. The Word does not address us in order to leave us unchanged. It addresses us in order to create what it announces — to produce in us the poverty of spirit, the hunger for righteousness, the merciful heart that the Beatitudes describe. The sermon is not simply the announcement of a gift received passively; it is the event of the gift’s bestowal, in which the hearer is caught up into the motion of death and resurrection that the text enacts. When the preacher proclaims the Beatitudes as gospel, she is not describing a static state. She is announcing a becoming — a transformation already underway in the Spirit, of which the obedience the Sermon commands is both evidence and instrument.

The Sermon on the Mount is not a problem to be softened. It is not a riddle to be solved. It is not a stumbling block to be squared with the cross. The foolishness of the gospel is also the foolishness of Christ’s Sermon, for the preaching of the Sermon on the Mount, on the lips of a sinful preacher, is nothing less than the event of the Sermon on the Mount. “To the extent that preachers dare,” Jenson writes, “they dare to believe scripture and sermon are how God happens to us.”

But notice what this means. If preaching is how God happens to us, then Christ’s own preaching of the Sermon on the Mount was already this. When Jesus opened his mouth on that hillside and said “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he was not merely teaching; he was doing what he came to do. He was enacting the kingdom he was announcing. That is, he was wooing his Bride into the life he was securing for her. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus making love to his church from the very first word. It is the Bridegroom describing the home he is building, the future he is guaranteeing, the life he is making possible by being who he is.

The Beatitudes are not our requirements.

They are his vows.

And because the same Jesus who preached on the hillside is alive with death behind him, his preaching has not ceased. The Word who spoke creation into being from nothing is the Word who speaks from the text when the church gathers and a preacher dares to open her mouth. In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Jenson describes preaching as “Jesus making love to us.” The phrase is deliberately provocative and shockingly intimate. The sermon is not a report about Jesus; it is an event in which Jesus is present and active, wooing the church he loves into the life he has secured for her. When the preacher opens Matthew 5 and speaks, Christ is not being described. He is being enacted. The same love that moved him to ascend the mount and open his mouth moves through the proclamation of his church, because the church’s proclamation is his own continued speech.

In the Sermon on the Mount, through the lips of a preacher, the Bridegroom promises his Beloved that he will not leave her in her poverty of spirit. He will not leave her in her hunger. He will not abandon her to a world parched of righteousness. Like the Lover in the Song of Songs who comes near and pledges himself, on the Mount and in its proclamation, our Beloved describes the life we will live with him. And precisely because only one who lives with death behind him can make an unconditional promise, the future life Jesus describes is already being called into existence.

So hear the good news, even in the Sermon on the Mount. The kingdom is ours. The Beatitudes are not a list of what we must become. They are a portrait of what we are being made. He has gone to prepare a place for us, and here, in his Sermon, he has described it. He is loving us into his likeness. And he will not stop until the work is finished and the Bride is ready and the kingdom he announced on that hillside is all in all.

Here is my second talk at St Peter’s Kryka in Stockholm, Sweden.

+JM

Advice for Preachers in Uncertain Times

A few years ago, a young pastor reached out to me, soliciting advice on preaching in what felt then like an uncertain time in the United Methodist Church. I suspect for many preachers the times feel only all the more uncertain. I wanted to be honest with her in my reply. Jesus promises that hell will not prevail against his church; Christ made no such pledge about the specific denominations and traditions that comprise his Body and Bride. In our individual incarnations, the LORD evidently allows us to fracture, realign beyond recognition, or dwindle into institutional irrelevance. Indeed if the Triune God’s name is Jealousy and out of his jealous love he delivered his Israel into exile in Babylon, then the same LORD may be presently punishing his church in the west for her unfaithfulness during such uncertain times.

The church, I told her, will endure because the one who is its head is risen indeed and lives with death behind. Our idiosyncrasies will endure only as long as they serve the proclamation of the gospel. As Jaroslav Pelikan distinguished the matter, “tradition is the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” What this novice preacher termed an “uncertain time” is in fact the dying gasps of Christianities stubbornly wed to traditionalism.

Nonetheless, having been asked, I felt bound to answer her question, “How must I preach during such an uncertain time?”

I can think of no better counsel than the counsel given by Karl Barth during his only visit to America at the end of his career in the spring of 1962. Eberhard Busch, Barth’s longtime assistant, records it in his collection of the theologian’s letters and autobiographical material. During the Q&A for the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, a student asked Barth, “What one thing is necessary in this day and age not only to pastor a church but to preach the gospel to it?”

Barth replied in his typically exhaustive fashion:

“Ah, so big a question! That is the whole question of theology, you see! I should say, I hope that during your studies you have visited yourself earnestly with the message of the Old Testament and of the New Testament. And not only of this message but also of the Object and the Subject of this message. And I would ask you, are you trained to visit not only yourself now, but a congregation with what you have learned out of the Bible and of church history and dogmatics and so on? Having to say something, having to say that thing.

And then the other question:

Are you willing now to deal with humanity as it is? Humanity in this twentieth century with all its passions, sufferings, errors, and so on?

Do you like them, these people?

Not only the good Christians, but do you like people as they are?

People in their weaknesses?

Do you like them, do you love them?

And are you willing to tell them the message that God is not against them, but for them?

That’s the one real thing in pastoral service and that is the question for you. If you go into ministry to do that work, pray earnestly.

You’ll do difficult work but beautiful work.

But if I had to begin again anew for myself as a young pastor, I would tell myself every morning, well, here I am: a very poor creature, but by God’s grace I have heard something. I will need forgiveness of my sins everyday. And I will pray, God, that you will give me the light, this light shining in the Bible and this light shining into the world in which humanity is living today. And then do my duty.”

Preachers— do you like them, these people?”

Barth’s question to his listener is the question for every gospel preacher about her listeners, for it addresses a necessary correlative of the gospel that no contemporary preaching handbooks, homiletics courses, or pastoral formation programs omit. Namely, the good news is not merely that Jesus loves us; the good news is that Jesus likes us. We are no different than the disciples on the Sea of Galilee; the Jesus who can walk on water nevertheless wants to be in the boat with us. As Robert Jenson says of the gospel, “The place to begin is with astonishment.”

Jesus does not simply love you. Jesus likes you. Jesus likes you. Just so, Jesus likes every last one of a preacher’s listeners. And he— not you— likes them into his likeness. I often suspect an ailment afflicting Christ’s body is that too many of her public proclaimers appear not to like very much their hearers.

I. Our Sin is Behind Us Because Christ is Before Us

A few years ago I co-taught a homiletics course at Duke Divinity School for their doctoral program. All of the students in the class were workaday preachers from a variety of denominations. During class, a woman, a United Methodist pastor, raised her hand. Not waiting to be called upon, she interrupted, “I just can’t preach to my people. Jason, you don’t understand. I can’t stand them— they’re all a bunch of racists.”

I set the dry erase marker down on the desk and nodded.

“You’re a United Methodist pastor?” I double-checked my memory.

“Yes.”

“And you serve a white congregation?” I asked.

She nodded.

“In South Carolina?”

“Near Greenville,” she replied.

“And— let me get this straight— you’re surprised they’re racists?”

She started to speak but stopped.

A few African American students sniggered.

“Why do you think Jesus highjacked your life? Jesus love them every bit as much as he loves you. You’ve got to learn to like them, or the gospel will always land like law for them.”

“Do you like them?”

Barth’s question is deceptively simple. On its face it sounds like a temperament question, a question about whether a person is naturally warm or inclined to aloofness, energized by other people or drained by them. If that were all it meant, it would be a question for the Enneagram chart and not a question of theology. But Barth does not mean it as a personality assessment.

Barth means it as a theological question:

Do you see the people in front of you the way God sees them?

Do you look at this congregation— with its weaknesses, its pettiness, its complicity, its fears, its settled habits of self-deception— and see what God sees?

Because what God sees, according to the gospel, is not first a mass of sinners requiring correction. What God sees is humanity claimed by the one who died for the ungodly and raised from the dead for our justification. As Barth wrote during the Confessing Church’s attempts to fashion the Barmen Declaration, “Our sin is behind us because Christ is before us.” That is, the sin of every one of your hearers is already behind them because Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim is yet before us.

Quite simply, the fruit of the Holy Spirit which Paul enumerates for the churches in Galatia apply to the Spirit’s public proclaimers as well. Kindness, patience, joy: the preacher who does not like his hearers has not yet grasped the gospel— has not yet been grasped by the gospel. She may be able to articulate the gospel. She may be able to diagram it on a whiteboard. She may be able to proclaim it in some technical sense. But if she does not like the people she is preaching to— if she finds them only irritating, exhausting, beneath her, or essentially lost — then something has gone wrong not merely with her pastoral affect but with her theology. She has not understood that the people she is addressing are the ones for whom Christ died, the ones God is for, the ones already claimed and reconciled even in their wrongness.

This is why Barth’s question belongs at the center of reflection on homiletics not at its edge.

II. To Know What Time It Is

In the years since I first encountered Barth’s remark during the Warfield lectures, I have come to read it alongside another set of his reflections on preaching — the ones Angela Dienhart Hancock documented in her timely book entitled Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic. At some point during the inaugural year of the Iowa Preachers Project, I commended Hancock’s book to the cohort of preachers. In it, Hancock provides a historical account of the preaching exercises Barth taught his students off-line in 1932 and 1933. In no small part, for such endeavors, Adolf Hitler eventually exiled Barth back to Switzerland in June 1935. Barth’s underground lectures on preaching became the powerful, little book Homiletics. The theologian offered the preaching exercises because the Professor of Homiletics at his school had been an early adopter of National Socialism. Those called to proclaim the LORD, Barth believed, could not be shaped a preacher who had so compromised his own witness.

Hancock’s research provides helpful, sobering context for the sort of preaching dominant in the Protestant churches prior to their capitulation to Nazism. Most Protestants in Germany during the last years of the Weimar Republic were accustomed to the same sorts of sermons prevalent in American churches today; that is, preachers offered thematic, Wisdom-based sermons aimed at practical Christian living that often had only a single verse of scripture as their text. Having been weaned off the Word of God, it is little wonder, Barth judged, that such preachers and hearers lacked the resources to know what time it was.

To my surprise, members of the Preachers Project cohort heeded my advice and read Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic. Their response sent me back to the pages I had dog-eared, the paragraphs I had underlined, and the comments I had scribbled in the margins. In Session 7 of his preaching exercises on June 27, 1933, Barth departed from the theology of preaching to the actual design of the sermon. Here Barth infamously eschewed the sermon introduction as both unnecessary for practical reasons and anathema to belief in the Holy Spirit.

“Why do people come to church?” Barth asked his students.

“To hear a word from the LORD,” Barth answered.

In other words, a preacher’s ability to like his listeners begins with the recognition that they are there to hear. They are there to hear a word from a mouth no longer in the preacher’s possession.

Thus, preachers do not need to lure their listeners, Barth argues. A preacher’s hearers are already invested in the undertaking. And because their presence already evidences their investment, the whole worship service already leads into the sermon. After dismissing sermon introductions that seek to establish a point of contact with contemporary events or our modern time, Barth warns his students against what he calls “the negative introduction.” A familiar rhetorical move in the preaching of his day, the negative introduction is one which indulges in the description of the sins and weaknesses of humanity so the Word of God can shine all the more brightly against this background. Barth has in mind a sort of reflexive law versus gospel preaching that renders Luther’s distinction between command and promise into a mere trope. We might call such a homiletic today fire and brimstone preaching. It begins with the congregation’s defects, the culture’s pathologies, the world’s failures, and only then does it offer the gospel as the solution to a problem it has itself constructed.

Barth complained about such preaching his entire life.

For instance, in August 1960, not long before he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, the renowned Swiss theologian Karl Barth met the still-more-famous American preacher Billy Graham while they both vacationed in the Valais region of Switzerland. According to letters Barth wrote to friends, their meeting— arranged by Barth’s son Markus— was a friendly one. “He’s a jolly good fellow,” Barth wrote of Graham, “with whom one can talk easily and openly; one has the impression that he is even capable of listening, which is not always the case with such trumpeters of the gospel.” Two weeks later, Barth had the same good impression of Billy Graham after they met for a second time at Barth’s home in Basel. It was during that second visit that Graham invited Barth to be a guest at the revival he would be preaching that night in the city.

Over 15,000 showed up at the St. Jacob Stadium in downtown Basel. Hearing Billy Graham preach his message and witnessing his influence over the mass of young people, Karl Barth was not impressed. He was outraged. “I was quite horrified,” Barth wrote to his son.

Barth continued:

“Graham acted like a madman, and what he presented was certainly not the gospel. He preached the law, not a message to make one happy. He wanted to terrify people. Threats– they always make an impression. People would much rather be terrified than be pleased. The more one heats up hell for them, the more they come running. But even this success did not justify such preaching. It was illegitimate to make the gospel law or ‘to “push” it like it is an item for sale…We must leave the good God freedom to do his own work. What Graham presented was the gospel at gunpoint.”

Later, Barth clarified his complaint:

“If the gospel is to be delivered with a gun, then let the preacher make clear that he too is in its sights. Woe to the preacher who neglects to announce that the gun has already been fired and another has leapt before us to receive its fatal shot.”

The gospel at the end of a gun is no gospel at all, says Barth.

His warning against the negative introduction not merely aesthetic. It is not that the negative introduction is rhetorically clumsy, though it often is. The warning is theological. To greet your hearers primarily with an inventory of their wrongness is to risk reducing the gospel to a club you are swinging at them. It is to place yourself above them as diagnostician and judge. It is to make their sin the secret theme of the entire sermon, regardless of what the text actually says.

Barth instructed his students:

“We are not permitted to greet the hearer with a cold shower. For then the great danger develops that we use the word of the Bible only as a club, which we swing with growing passion against these sinful people.”

III. You Only Know Sin on Your Way Out of It

In that same session of the preaching exercises, a student pushed back on Herr Professor Barth. He suggested that a preacher might aim at the old Adam in people and then oppose to this old Adam the great “But now!” of God’s gospel. Whether he knew it or not, the student was appealing to the logic of law and gospel preaching, or as the New Homiletic trend of the late twentieth century framed it, Problem and Solution.

Barth more or less said, “Nein!”

To the student’s suggestion, Barth responded:

“A preacher should not see their hearer primarily in his/her wrongness. Their wrongness then becomes the secret theme of the entire sermon, regardless of the biblical text. Instead, let the Word itself show the way.”

A preacher should not see her hearer primarily in his wrongness.

The word primarily is doing real work in that sentence. Barth is not saying that the preacher should pretend his listener’s sin does not exist. He is not counseling a kind of therapeutic niceness that papers over the genuine damage that human beings do to themselves and to one another. He is not urging preachers to avoid hard texts or uncomfortable truths. Grace is real and the gospel is good news indeed exactly because the commandments are uncompromising. The Word of God is not a series of affirmations. It does not leave us where it finds us. But, for Barth— in fact, for the apostle Paul, the question is what comes first. What is the fundamental stance of the preacher toward his hearers? What is her basic disposition as she mounts the pulpit and faces the people?

Barth’s answer:

Not exposure.

But announcement.

Not the stance of one who has seen through them to their worst.

But the stance of one who has heard the gospel.

And cannot keep from telling it.

As Hancock summarizes Barth’s seventh lecture, “The preacher is not to fixate on what the hearer has gotten wrong. The preacher’s fundamental stance is not to expose the sinner but to announce reconciliation.”

There is a pastoral intuition here that runs deeper than homiletical technique. Barth is describing a kind of seeing— the kind of seeing that the gospel makes possible. You cannot see a person primarily in his wrongness if you have genuinely internalized the claim that God is not against him but for him. The moment you internalize that claim, the wrongness is still visible. But it is no longer primary. It is no longer the truth about him. It is the truth from which he is being rescued, gratis.

This is precisely what my mentor Stanley Hauerwas means when he says— a lesson learned from Barth— that “to know yourself a sinner is an achievement.” You only know sin on your way out of it. The Gospels are told retrospectively from the vantage point of the empty tomb. Saul only understood his grave, gross crimes after the Risen Christ encountered him on the Road to Damascus. The good news begins not with sin but with resurrection, and the one the Father and Spirit raised from the dead is the Son who died for the ungodly.

IV. Preach As If Nothing Has Happened

To catch the prophetic offense of Barth’s counsel, it is essential to remember when he gave it.

Barth offered these underground lectures in the winter of 1932 and 1933. He is warning his students against viewing hearers through the prism of their wrongs during a time of totalitarian propaganda, widespread complicity, and ecclesial fracture. The Confessing Church stood against the co-opted German Christians, a movement that had bent the knee to Hitler’s nationalistic theology. Barth’s homiletic project, formed in the crucible of this ecclesial emergency, was neither abstract nor sentimental. The preacher stood before congregations divided— some enthralled by Nazi ideology, others terrified, and many more complicit through silence.

What should be said to such a people?

Barth’s answer: the gospel.

Not the gospel as moral correction. Not the gospel as political judgment, even righteous political judgment. Not the gospel as the ideological platform of the Confessing Church’s program, however faithfully that program opposed fascism. No matter the time, Barth insisted his preachers proclaim the gospel as the announcement of God’s reconciling action in Jesus Christ, an announcement that addresses every hearer before either the hearer or the preacher has sorted out the issues of the day. Referring to ascension of Hitler and the appearance of SS flags in his Bonn classroom, Barth said of his work in the underground preaching exercises, “We did theology as if nothing had happened.” It would have been entirely natural, in that moment, to preach at the German Christians, to expose their capitulation, to make their wrongness the sermon’s theme, and to render the gospel their indictment. Many preachers did exactly that, and in some cases they were not wrong to do so. But Barth’s counsel points elsewhere. Even here, especially here, the preacher does not begin with the congregation’s wrongness.

The preacher begins with what God has done.

No matter what has happened, the preacher begins with what God has done.

Hancock records Barth’s own formulation:

“Preaching is not a moral lecture. It is the announcement of God’s action. It does not ignore the wrongness of the world, but it refuses to reduce the hearer to that wrongness.”

V. The Great Error of the God-Shaped Hole

Barth’s homiletical counsel and his larger theological diagnosis of the church belong together, and the connection is rarely made explicit.

The year after he conducted the underground homiletics exercises, Barth attended an international conference in Switzerland. Many of his listeners were British and American church leaders. He delivered an address collected in the volume God in Action, titled “The Christian as Witness.” The resistance his audience offered to his Word-centered perspective was, by his account, predictable: “Was he not too abstract? Too one-sided? Too focused on divine action at the expense of human responsibility?”

Barth replied by arguing that the turn from the living God to human responsibility was exactly the error that had produced the catastrophe unfolding in Germany in real time. Such Christian nationalism had merely flowered in Germany first, Barth warned his listeners. It would in due time arrive in the United States as well, for Christian nationalism is the inevitable product of liberal pietism. According to Barth, in the eighteenth century the Protestant churches of Europe reacted to a century of religious violence and dead orthodoxy. They concluded that something was missing. The Reformation had recovered the Word and the gospel of grace. It had proclaimed grace and preached Christ and him crucified. However, they decided, love was not active. Lives were unchanged. Hearts, John Wesley might have judged, were not strangely warmed toward the world. And so they committed what Barth calls the great error. Rather than listening again more carefully to the Reformation message, rather than letting God be God and Christ be Christ in an entirely different way, the church decided to cultivate the Christian life. It would supplement the message of the living God with the moral and spiritual formation of the pious human being. This sounds responsible, even Christian. It sounds like exactly what thoughtful critics of Christian nationalism today propose as the remedy.

Nevertheless, Barth traces the consequences without mercy:

“From the veneration of the pious human being there slowly but inevitably followed the veneration of the moral human being! And finally it was found that, if the human being is so important, then it is less important to speak of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and people began instead to speak of human reason.”

The gospel became something the church possessed and carried into the world rather than something that possessed and carried the church. The mission became a program, argues Barth. The program inevitably became a politics. And the politics, once untethered from the prior reality of God’s own action in history, found its content wherever the surrounding culture was willing to provide it.

This is the hollow core.

The hollow core at the heart of Christian nationalism is not a hole the Christian nationalists created. They are simply filling it. The hole was dug by two centuries of respectable Protestant theology gradually substituting a cultural program for the gospel without noticing the substitution. The church, Barth observed, had come to believe that the world and human beings must be helped by love, by what the Christians have, by what they are, by what they know how to say, by what they carry into the world as a result of their possession of the gospel.

A church that treats the gospel as a possession it carries into the world rather than a Word it receives from outside itself has already made the decisive move. The content it attaches to that possession — whether conservative or progressive, whether German nationalism in 1934 or MAGA Christianity in 2025 — is secondary. The structure is already in place. God and. God and national greatness. God and protecting democracy. God and the right kind of pious human being.

“When one begins: ‘God and…,’” Barth warned, “one throws the door open to every devil.”

VI. It Will Show In How You Preach

The pulpit is where these structural errors are either reinforced or interrupted. When the preacher mounts the pulpit to deliver a negative introduction, when the preacher surveys the sins and failures of the surrounding culture, renders judgment on the wrong side, and then deploys the gospel as the ideological property of the right side— the preacher has replicated, in the space of a single sermon, precisely the error Barth diagnoses in the larger history of Protestant Christianity. The preacher has made the gospel a possession. The preacher has made himself its agent. He has made his hearers the objects of a program rather than the recipients of an announcement. He has not noticed the substitution.

This is why the connection between the Princeton remark and the emergency homiletics is so important. When Barth asks the young pastor whether she likes her hearers, he is asking her the same question he asked the German church leaders in 1934.

Do you believe, at the level of your gut, that God is not against these people but for them?

For them.

As they are.

In their weaknesses and their errors and their passions and their sufferings.

If you believe that, it will show in how you preach.

And if you do not believe that, it will show in how you preach.

If you have quietly substituted a program for the gospel, a cultural vision for the Word, your side’s righteousness for the righteousness of God, then that will show too. It will show in the negative introduction. It will show in the sermon that is really about something other than the text. It will show in the smoldering contempt for the people who are on the wrong side, even when that contempt is dressed in prophetic language and aimed at genuinely wrong things. The preacher who does not like his hearers is not just temperamentally challenged. He is theologically compromised. He has begun with God and, and she may not know it.

VII. Just God…And Then Everything Else

In a recent editorial on Christian Nationalism, the New York Times columnist David French has argued, correctly as far as it goes, that “there is not much Christianity in Christian nationalism.” The observation is accurate. When the church blesses the project of national greatness and absorbs the enemies of the state as the enemies of God, it has departed from any recognizable form of the gospel. However, Barth’s critique is harsher and thus harder to bear, because it implies that the corruption runs deeper. Christian nationalism is not the church being too Christian. It is the church having quietly stopped being Christian in any theologically recognizable sense, having substituted a cultural program for the gospel without noticing the substitution. And Christian nationalism is merely the latest version of that substitution carried to its logical conclusion. The German Christians who were blessing Hitler’s project in 1934 were not departing from the liberal Protestant tradition. They were fulfilling it. “Even among them,” Barth insists, “there are very serious and very dear people.” They were doing what two centuries of Protestant theology had trained them to do.

David French’s framing implies that Christian nationalism represents a betrayal of authentic Christianity, a corruption of something that was otherwise sound. Barth’s critique goes further, for it implies that the problem runs straight through the tradition French himself inhabits— the tradition of responsible democratic conservatism, animated by Christian moral reasoning brought to bear on public life. The content and politics differ from German nationalism, but the structure is the same. Both, Barth would argue, treat the gospel as a possession to be assumed and the church’s mission as a cultural program. Both invoke God’s name to justify ends they needed not Jesus Christ to decide.The hollow core at the heart of Christian nationalism is therefore not unique to Christian nationalism.

The MAGA church and my own United Methodist Church are more alike than most of us care to admit. The progressive mainline church that carries the gospel as a possession in the service of social justice is formally in the same position as the conservative church that carries the gospel as a possession in the service of national renewal. The content differs. But the structure is identical. Both have made the church’s mission a program. Both have made the preacher an agent of that program. Both have filled the hole with something other than the living God of the gospel.

The either-or that Barth insisted upon— not God and, but just God, and then everything else— is the corrective. Not God and making America great again. Not God and protecting democracy. Not God and the right catechetical program for making disciples. Just God. The living God who acts in history, who speaks a Word that the church does not possess but receives, who claims hearers before the preacher gets to them, who is not the church’s ideological property but the church’s Lord.

That either-or is what the sermon is supposed to embody.

VIII. Instruction in Freedom

To be clear, Barth’s homiletical counsel is not pessimistic. The emergency homiletics exercises are not a lament. They are an instruction in freedom. When Barth tells his students not to begin with the congregation’s wrongness, he is not asking them to be less honest. He is asking them to be more honest— honest about what is actually true, which is that God has acted.

The sermon’s job is to announce that action.

This requires, as Barth says, an act of faith.

Trust not in the hearer’s innocence but in the Word’s power.

The preacher who trusts the Word’s power does not need to construct a problem to which the gospel is the answer. She does not need the negative introduction because the Word is its own introduction. She does not need to position herself above the congregation as their diagnostician because the Word does its own diagnosing. She does not need to choose a side, because the Word addresses every side from a position the preacher could never occupy.

In a sermon that is truly theological, no side is affirmed uncritically. Everyone is placed under judgment and everyone is placed under grace. This is not a message that can be co-opted by any ideology— not by the left’s pursuit of justice, nor the right’s appeal to order and tradition. In the sermon that begins with God’s action rather than humanity’s failure— named as already forgiven failure— neither the ICE agent nor the person being arrested is left untouched. Neither the senator who hawks wars he will not fight nor the progressive politician who has normalized anti-Semitism in the pursuit of other righteous causes is allowed to remain comfortable.

And neither, for that matter, is the preacher.

Who stands under the same Word he is announcing.

The sermon is not where we confirm our side is right and theirs is wrong. It is the place where God speaks a new world into being. That is more genuinely unsettling to everyone in the room than any partisan sermon, because it removes the comfortable categories. God is not against these people. God is for them. All of them. The ones who are right about politics and the ones who are wrong. The faithful and the complicit. The ones who came this morning ready to be comforted and the ones who came ready to be challenged.

In Jesus Christ, God is for them.

Tell them that.

Again and again.

Without ceasing.

The preacher who has internalized Barth’s counsel will face a particular kind of loneliness.

She will not be rewarded by the congregation members who wanted her to validate their politics. She will not be celebrated by the theological commentators on social media who grade sermons on their willingness to name names and take stands. She will lose, on occasion, the approval of the people she most admires— the activists, the organizers, the ones who are doing genuinely important work and who need the church to be, in their view, on the right side of history. She will also disappoint the people on the other side who wanted her to condemn the activists and affirm the old order. She will disappoint everyone who has come to church primarily to have their existing convictions confirmed.

Nevertheless!

She will not have abandoned the gospel.

She will not be preaching God and. She will be preaching just God— just “the God who is God,” the one who is for these people, for all of them, before any of them have earned it.

Barth told the American church leaders in 1934 that the only thing that had preserved any capacity for resistance in Germany was precisely the one-sidedness, the God-sidedness his audience was criticizing. Quite simply the message of God as the only helper. The either-or that was earlier rejected.

Most American preachers are still on the parade ground, Barth warned. We are practicing with weapons that will not work when the live-fire drill begins. The weapons that work are the ones Barth describes: not God and, but just God. The living God of the scriptures, addressed to these people, for them, in their wrongness and their weakness and their complicity and their fear.

IX. Let the Living Word have its Way with You

During that same tour of the United States in 1962, a woman asked Karl Barth, “Professor Barth— will we see our loved ones in heaven?”

The famed theologian revealed a wry smile and answered, “Ja, and not just your loved ones!”

“Do you like them?”

Just so, here is what I would say to that young pastor wondering how to preach in an uncertain time.

First, open the scriptures.

Search the scriptures, not as a quarry for illustrations, not as a proof-text arsenal, and not as a resource deployed in service of the program. Open the scriptures as the Word of God that addresses both you and your congregation, the Word that comes from outside, that you did not generate, that you cannot control, that will do things you did not plan and cannot orchestrate.

You cannot preach what you have not read.

You cannot read well what you have not prayed over.

And you cannot pray over it honestly if you have already decided what it is going to say.

Second, know the people in the pews.

Not in the sense of tailoring the gospel to their preferences— that way lies glawspel and worse— but in the sense of actually knowing them. Their fears. Their specific griefs. The particular shapes of their confusion and their hope. Barth’s question (“Do you like them, these people?”) is partly a call to this kind of attentiveness. You cannot like people you do not know, and you cannot know people to whom you are not paying attention. This is not the audience analysis that homiletics textbooks recommend. It is not strategic. It is pastoral. It is what happens when you have spent enough time with people that you can no longer reduce them to their politics or their demographics or their worst moments.

Third, see them in their rectification before you see them in their wrongness.

The posture of the preacher is not that of a diagnostician looking for pathology but of one who has been told— on the highest authority— that God is for these people, that Christ died for these people, that the Spirit is at work in these people whether they know it or not. Preach from that conviction. You will still name sin. You will still say hard things. But name sin the way a good doctor names a disease: not to condemn the patient but because naming it correctly is the first step toward the cure. Name it as already forgiven sin, as the reality Christ has already dealt with. Named that way, sin is genuinely exposed. Everyone in the room is implicated and everyone in the room is released.

Fourth, watch out for the moment when you begin with God and.

The structural error Barth identifies does not announce itself. It arrives in the most respectable disguises— responsible engagement with the issues of the day, courage, prophetic clarity.

The test is simple and one my mentor Fleming Rutledge commends:

Is God the subject of this sermon?

Or am I?

Is the gospel something I am announcing?

Or is it something I am deploying?

The moment the sermon is really about the preacher’s courage, his clarity, his righteous indignation, his vision for what the church should be — he has begun with God and, even if he has not noticed.

Finally, pray every morning that God will give you the light.

The light shining in the scriptures and the light shining into the world in which humanity is living today. Not one or the other. Both. The preacher who knows only the scriptures and not the world, Barth warns, will preach abstractions. The preacher who knows only the world and not the scriptures will preach opinion.

Barth said it simply at Princeton, “Here I am, a very poor creature, but by God’s grace I have heard something.”

Pray that.

Mean it.

And do your duty.

The church is in a genuinely uncertain moment. The young pastor who asked me this question is right to feel the uncertainty. But none of what we name as uncertainty has anything to do with whether the church— the actual church, the body of Christ gathered around the Word and the Table and the Font— will survive.

It will survive.

It will survive because Jesus has promised it will survive, and because the one who makes that promise is the one whom death could not hold.

The church’s survival, or the survival of what is recognizably Christian within it, depends on whether its preachers can recover what Barth called the either-or. Not God and the right strategy. Not God and the right theological coalition. Not God and the perfect relevant program, however thoughtfully designed and faithfully executed. Just God. God alone. The living God of the scriptures, speaking a Word that the church does not possess but receives, addressing these people in their weaknesses and their errors, for whom Christ died and rose.

“Do you like them, these people?”

If you can say yes, if you have received the gospel deeply enough that the answer is yes, then here is your calling: let the Living Word have its way with you. Just so, you will have done what Barth calls the one real thing in pastoral service.

You will have done difficult work.

You will have done beautiful work.

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Here is my first talk in Stockholm, Sweden.

Preachers Ought to be Students of the Bible

Almost exactly five years ago, just after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Fleming Rutledge, my homiletical muse, sent me a text message, “If this is not a moment of status confessionis, a circumstance in which the true church can take only one position, I don’t know what one would be,” her first text read.

She then quickly followed with another message:

“If this is not a time of status confessionis, I don’t know what is. If this is not a time for courage in the pulpit, I can’t imagine what that time would be. From the sermons I’ve watched online, all I have found is studious avoidance of the Big Lie. Jason, you must risk not being liked and take seriously your responsibility to the LORD to preach and teach the truth in this Empire of Lies. If we continue to live in an Empire of Lies and never speak out, never bear witness to the kingdom, never dare to live the difference Christ makes, we simply give lie to Paul’s promise of the Spirit’s presence with us.”

After the term status confessionis, by way of explanation, Fleming put Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s name in parentheses. In hindsight I am far from certain that my sermons met the bar she set for preachers. I am also not quite sure I agree with her assessment of the situation or what it demanded of the church. But I think Fleming’s is a challenge worth probing because it can be difficult, even exhausting, to be a gospel preacher of grace in a culture where so many Christian thought leaders and content creators challenge the church’s public proclaimers to “be like Bonhoeffer.”

I have always thought Bonhoeffer suffered from being overly famous yet selectively read. And to an extent this was true of me as well. Fleming’s texts spurred me to dive deeper into his voluminous works where I discovered a surprise. In full, Bonhoeffer was neither an activist nor a prophet. He himself recoiled at the label martyr, and in his Letters and Papers from Prison he warned that his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount was a dangerous book indeed if read in isolation from the balance of his work. Despite his fame and reputation, Bonhoeffer was not, primarily, a theologian.

Bonhoeffer was one of us, a preacher and a student of the Bible.

This is especially on display in his “Lectures on Homiletics,” which he delivered in 1935 upon taking up the role of director for the Confessing Church’s “Emergency Pastors’ Seminary” at Finkenwalde. Contemporary observers noted that these lectures bore little resemblance to the dominant homiletical texts of the period. Charles Marsh quotes a student at Finkenwalde’s recollection, “We found his lectures at Finkenwalde a revelation. We understood we were not there to learn techniques of preaching but to be initiated into a new way of being Christian.”

Crucially, these lectures are not an attempt to improve preaching but to save it. Bonhoeffer does not ask how preaching might become more compelling, effective, or relevant in a “world come of age.” He asks instead whether preaching can still be true— whether the sermon can still be the Word of God— when the church itself is collapsing into ideology, fear, accommodation, and spiritual evasions of obedience. To read these lectures as a contribution to contemporary “practical theology” is already to misread them, for Bonhoeffer offers no advice about techniques.

What Bonhoeffer undertakes is the reconstruction of the conditions of possibility for preaching after the church has lost its nerve. The crisis he addresses is not rhetorical or psychological but christological and ecclesiological. His question—sometimes implicit, sometimes brutally explicit—is simple.

If Christ himself is to speak, what must a sermon be?

The question is anything but abstract. Bonhoeffer had seen preaching that was powerful, biblical, and utterly false. Under Nazification, scripture was not denied but commandeered. Jesus was not rejected but refashioned—as Aryan hero, ethical teacher, or symbol of national destiny. Preaching had not vanished; it had been perverted.

At the same time, an opposite temptation pressed in. Faced with such corruption, many concluded that words themselves were the problem. Sermons seemed cheap in a world rushing toward concentration camps. What mattered now, it was argued, was action: resistance, courage, concrete deeds of love. Christianity needed fewer sermons and more saints. Bonhoeffer understands this temptation intimately— and rejects it without hesitation. A retreat from Word to deed is not faithfulness but cowardice. It evades the preacher’s calling to stand under God’s command and speak the Word of the LORD.

This double pressure—ideological preaching on the one hand and anti-preaching moralism on the other—forms the crucible of Bonhoeffer’s homiletics. The result is a vision of preaching as austere as it is daring. Preaching is not one activity among others in the church’s life. The sermon is the event in which Christ himself encounters his congregation as the Living Word by whom all things were made. If this claim is false, then proclamation should indeed be abandoned. But if it is true, then no political emergency excuses those called to preach. To remove the Word in favor of deeds is not to purify the church but to dismember it.

Without preaching, the church does not become faithful.

Without preaching, the church becomes mute.

This is why Bonhoeffer rejects every attempt to replace preaching with “life,” “love,” or “action.” Such proposals sound radical but are, in his judgment, deeply conservative: they protect the self. They spare the preacher the risk of speech, the exposure of standing publicly under God’s judgment. Preaching is dangerous not because it is powerful but because it places the preacher under a command she cannot control. To abandon preaching is to reclaim mastery.

The same logic governs Bonhoeffer’s account of vocation and ordination. One of his most striking claims is that the call to preach is irrevocable. A pastor may leave a parish; a denomination may disappear; listeners may reject you. None of this releases the preacher from God’s call. “One is called to preaching,” Bonhoeffer insists, “This call is irrevocable; we cannot get out from under God’s command.” Ordination bears a promise and places the preacher under command. This is why grasping after the office is sacrilege and fleeing it when it becomes costly is disobedience. The call to preach is neither validated by success nor nullified by failure. The call is a burden— one that becomes judgment or blessing, depending on whether it is borne in faith.

This severity reaches its peak in Bonhoeffer’s reflections on vocatio interna. Without inner certainty of God’s call, preaching becomes a curse. God may still speak through the sermon—divine faithfulness is not hostage to human sincerity—but the preacher herself is judged by the Word she speaks. Here Bonhoeffer invokes Judas. Judas preached. Judas healed. Judas cast out demons. And yet his commission became his condemnation because it was not received in obedience.

Preaching is never neutral.

It always places the preacher under grace or judgment.

This is the most frightening sentence in Bonhoeffer’s entire homiletics. And it is also, rightly read, the most merciful. Because the preacher who stands under grace is not the preacher who has finally gotten it right. She is the preacher who has been gotten by the gospel— whose unfaithfulness, timidity, and self-serving accommodation have been named and forgiven. The same Word that judges the preacher is the Word that was crucified for her. There is an absolution available to preachers, not because we have preached boldly, but because Christ has borne what we could not. The preacher who has softened a hard text, dodged a costly word, or hidden behind relevance is not beyond the reach of the same gospel she failed to announce. She is its intended recipient. The judgment of the Word does not drive the preacher out of the pulpit. It drives her back to the font.

Preaching is justified not by its effects but by its source and its goal. Its source is Christ’s commission through the church. Its goal is not improvement, education, or even conversion in the modern sense.

The goal of preaching is for Jesus to have himself a Bride.

The aim of preaching is the church.

With this claim, Bonhoeffer breaks decisively with both liberal and evangelical homiletics. Against liberalism, he denies that sermons cultivate religious consciousness or ethical ideals. Against pragmatism, he denies that sermons exist to produce measurable results. Preaching exists because the church exists, and the church exists because Christ continues to create it by his Word. Truth, therefore, is not something the sermon contains but something that happens.

The Word creates its own form of existence in the congregation—discipleship, obedience to Jesus Christ. Anything else— bourgeois respectability, nationalist belonging, moral heroism— is a betrayal of the church’s being.

Here Bonhoeffer brings the political stakes of preaching fully into view. The church’s life is not rooted in ethnic, cultural, racial, or national identity but in obedience to a LORD crucified by the world. A sermon that seeks proximity to a political ethos rather than fidelity to Jesus has already surrendered its authority.

Only a church that exists as discipleship can speak a word that is heard. This does not mean the preacher’s life guarantees the sermon’s truth. God is not held hostage to human obedience. But a preacher who does not stand in obedience robs the sermon of credibility. The Word still speaks—but through a life that contradicts it.

At the center of Bonhoeffer’s homiletics is his refusal to allow preaching to become expressive, instrumental, or strategic. The sermon does not arise from experience, need, or urgency. It arises from Christ’s command and moves toward Christ’s church. Anything else replaces proclamation with communication.

Speech, however eloquent, cannot bear the weight preaching must bear. In this sense, Bonhoeffer’s homiletics is finally not about sermons at all, but about whether the church still believes that God speaks, and whether it is willing to live as though that gospel is true.

Scripture as the Only Concrete Situation

If Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the sermon exists for the sake of the church sounds austere, his understanding of scripture’s role in preaching can sound, at first, almost reckless. Against the trend in Wisdom preaching that captivates the church today, Bonhoeffer denies that preaching consists in the “application” of biblical texts to everyday life. This rejection is not pedagogical but theological. The idea of application smuggles in a false anthropology and a false doctrine of revelation. It assumes the scriptures are abstract until the preacher renders them concrete, distant until the sermon bridges the gap between ancient text and modern situation.

Bonhoeffer argues for the reverse.

The text is already concrete.

The preacher’s task is not to make it relevant, but to get out of the way.

To grasp this claim, we must clarify what Bonhoeffer means by concrete. In homiletics, concreteness is most often defined by immediacy— social conditions, political crises, psychological needs, lived experience. A sermon is “concrete” when it names what hearers recognize as their real world. Bonhoeffer does not deny these realities, but he refuses to give them theological priority. They are not the decisive situation. The truly concrete situation, he insists, is always the same: sinners standing before the living God.

This conviction undergirds Bonhoeffer’s rejection of preaching that “addresses the situation.” He is not indifferent to context, but he insists the initiative belongs to the Word. The Word addresses the situation; the situation does not dictate the Word. To reverse this order allows fear or urgency to determine what may be said. In 1930s Germany, this reversal proved deadly. It produced sermons that were impeccably contextual and utterly faithless. Application assumes the scriptures are inert until activated by the preacher. Bonhoeffer finds this assumption theologically arrogant and spiritually disastrous.

As he cautions in his lecture from November 13, 1935: “Because the concrete historical situation is ambiguous to the extent that God and the devil are always at work within it, [the contemporary moment and its issues] can never function as the source of the proclamation of the word.”

The scriptures do not need to be carried into the present.

They are already present.

Because Jesus is not dead.

What, then, becomes of concreteness? Bonhoeffer’s answer is deceptively simple: exposition. True exposition is not commentary adorned with illustration. It is the disciplined letting of the scriptures say what they say. The scriptures are concrete because they speak of God’s concrete acts— creation, election, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection. These acts do not float above history. They are history.

To proclaim them is not to evade reality. It is to name reality truthfully.

This is why Bonhoeffer urges resistance to making scripture “interesting.” Interest often distracts from truth. It tempts the preacher to mediate meaning rather than serve the Word. Exposition, by contrast, requires restraint and trust— trust in the passage more than in the preacher’s ingenuity.

Underlying this restraint is Bonhoeffer’s confidence in the objectivity of God’s Word. Objectivity here does not mean neutrality but confrontation. The Word addresses preacher and congregation from outside themselves. It judges religious experience rather than arising from it. This objectivity is inseparable from christology. Scripture is concrete because it bears witness to Christ, and Christ is concrete because he has assumed flesh. The incarnation is not a metaphor for accessibility but the event in which God binds himself to human history.

God’s Word is no longer an abstract command. It is a living presence. To hear scripture preached is to encounter Christ himself.

Here Bonhoeffer’s homiletics takes on a sacramental character. The sermon is not merely about Christ; it speaks for Christ. It is an event of Christ’s promised presence. The Word does not simply inform; it works. It gathers, judges, forgives, commands, consoles. It bears the church.

This language of bearing is decisive in Bonhoeffer’s lectures. Preaching does not first instruct the congregation how to live; it places them on Christ’s shoulders. Only those who are borne can obey. Obedience is not the precondition of hearing the Word but its consequence. Thus Bonhoeffer avoids both moralism and despair. Law exposes sin to drive the sinner into Christ’s arms; gospel announces forgiveness as the ground of renewed obedience.

Because the Word bears the congregation, it also bears the preacher. The preacher does not stand above scripture applying it to others, but beneath it, judged and comforted by it. This shared exposure gives preaching its peculiar authority. The preacher speaks not as one who has mastered the Word, but as one still mastered by it.

For this reason Bonhoeffer insists on meditation and prayer as integral to sermon preparation. Meditation is not a technique for insight but submission to judgment. A sermon that has not first judged the preacher will inevitably become a judgment on the congregation.

Bonhoeffer’s rejection of application thus becomes an affirmation of responsibility. The preacher is not responsible for making the Word effective; God has taken that responsibility upon himself. The preacher is responsible only for fidelity. Such trust requires discipline, courage, and the relinquishment of control.

Ultimately, Bonhoeffer’s account of scripture’s concreteness is inseparable from his doctrine of the church. The church is not a community formed by shared meaning but one called into being by a Word that addresses it here and now. When the Word is preached, the church happens. When it is silenced, the church dissolves into religion, politics, or memory. Bonhoeffer’s Lectures on Homiletics therefore rebuke every attempt to secure relevance by other means. The church is concrete because it stands under the Word that became flesh and still dwells among us.

To preach that Word is not an escape from reality. It is the courage to name reality at its deepest level.

The Discipline of Disappearing

Bonhoeffer’s Christology forbids making homiletics exactly what it is in most seminary classrooms. For Bonhoeffer, if the sermon is the event in which Christ bears the congregation, then the question of form is no longer a matter of style or preference. Every decision about language, structure, tone, delivery— even the distinction between law and gospel— either witnesses to the objectivity of the Word or obscures it. Thus Bonhoeffer’s homiletics is relentlessly concerned with the danger of the preacher’s self intruding into the sermon— not because personality is sinful, but because the Word (who is a jealous God, after all) cannot be borne alongside a competing center. This concern explains Bonhoeffer’s suspicion of rhetoric. He rejects the subtle ways in which the preacher seeks to secure authority through eloquence, emotional appeal, or cultural cleverness.

Rhetoric, in this sense, is not a neutral tool. It is a temptation. It invites the preacher to trust the power of speech rather than the power of the Word.

Don’t forget—

The Germany of his day was saturated with oratory.

In and out of the church.

No different than today’s social media, unceasing news cycle, and AI, the pulpit of Bonhoeffer’s day was under constant pressure to compete. Preachers were tempted to match the emotional force of political rallies or to retreat into harmless piety. In his lectures, Bonhoeffer rejects both options. Preaching must neither imitate propaganda nor insulate itself from reality through abstraction. Preaching’s power lies precisely in its refusal to coerce.

This refusal shapes Bonhoeffer’s understanding of homiletical form. The sermon must be simple, not because simplicity is virtuous in itself, but because the Word does not require adornment. Complexity often masks insecurity. Excessive structure, clever transitions, and thematic overlays can function as defenses against the unsettling freedom of the text. Bonhoeffer insists that the passage itself provides the sermon’s movement. The preacher’s task is to follow, not to impose. This conviction leads Bonhoeffer to commend verse-by-verse exposition as the most disciplined form of preaching. The homily does not flatter the preacher’s creativity. It binds him to the text, forcing her to dwell where she might prefer to move on. It resists the temptation to extract “ideas” from the scriptures and repackage them for consumption. Instead, it allows the congregation to hear the passage unfolding in real time.

The effect is not dramatic, but it is formative.

The congregation learns how to listen.

Listening, for Bonhoeffer, is the hidden center of preaching. The preacher does not first speak; she listens. The preacher listens to the scriptures, to the tradition, and to the concrete Word that addresses him personally. Only then does she speak. Even then, the preacher’s speaking is a form of listening enacted aloud. This posture of listening governs the preacher’s language. Bonhoeffer repeatedly warns against language that is either overly sacralized or overly casual. Hallowed language creates distance, turning the sermon into a ritual performance. Casual language collapses the distance too much, reducing the Word to familiar speech. Both betray the objectivity of the Word. True preaching, Bonhoeffer suggests, inhabits a narrow path. The language must be human enough to be heard and strange enough to unsettle. The preacher speaks as a human being addressed by God not as a religious expert or a mystical intermediary. This is why Bonhoeffer insists that preaching must be intelligible without being explanatory.

The sermon does not exist to solve problems or clarify doctrines.

It exists to let the Word encounter the congregation.

This encounter inevitably exposes the preacher. Bonhoeffer is explicit that preaching involves vulnerability, but not the vulnerability prized by our authenticity culture. The preacher is not called to share his inner life, narrate his spiritual journey, or even voice his own fears and doubts about living up to the LORD’s commands. Such disclosures, Bonhoeffer fears, shift the focus from the Word to the self. The vulnerability of preaching lies elsewhere: in standing publicly under a Word that judges and comforts the preacher before it judges and comforts anyone else.

This vulnerability accounts for Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the preacher must not pursue personal goals in the sermon. Goals— be it moral improvement, emotional response, or political action— inevitably tempt the preacher to manipulate. Even good goals can corrupt preaching. The sermon becomes a means to an end, and the Word is subordinated to the preacher’s intention. Bonhoeffer’s alternative is radical: the preacher must relinquish intention altogether. The preacher preaches not to achieve something, but because he is commanded to speak. This relinquishment does not render preaching indifferent or detached. On the contrary, it intensifies its seriousness. Because the preacher cannot guarantee outcomes, she must trust the Word to do its own work. This trust is not naïve optimism. It is born of the cross. The Word that bears the church is the Word that was rejected, mocked, and silenced. Preaching that shares in this Word must be prepared to share in its vulnerability.

Bonhoeffer’s insistence in the lectures on discipline in sermon preparation follows directly from this understanding. Sermon preparation is not about polishing performance. It is about cultivating obedience. The preacher must submit to the scriptures long enough for it to disrupt his or her assumptions. The preacher must resist the temptation to preach what he already knows or what she assumes the congregation needs. The text decides. This decision may be inconvenient, unsettling, or even dangerous. Indeed this decision means the preacher risks seeming tone deaf or appearing out of touch. But it is precisely here that preaching becomes truthful.

The preacher’s disappearance behind the Word is not self-negation in a psychological sense. Bonhoeffer does not advocate a denial of personality or emotion. He argues instead for a self-forgetfulness born of trust. When the preacher trusts the Word to bear the congregation, he no longer needs to assert himself. His voice remains, but it is a human voice through which another speaks.

This understanding reshapes the very act of speaking. Bonhoeffer emphasizes that preaching is oral, speech that happens between people in time. This temporality matters. The Word addresses the congregation here and now, not as an abstract proposition but as a living address. The preacher must therefore speak simply, directly, and honestly. Flourishes that draw attention to themselves disrupt this address. At the same time, Bonhoeffer rejects the idea that preaching should mimic everyday conversation. The sermon, he says, is not casual speech; it is summoned speech. It carries weight because it is commissioned. This weight does not come from the preacher’s authority but from the Word’s claim. The preacher must learn to speak under this weight without attempting to control it.

All of this culminates in Bonhoeffer’s christological claim about preaching’s deepest reality. The sermon does not merely communicate Christ; it participates in Christ’s ongoing presence as Word. This participation does not abolish the difference between Christ and the preacher. It establishes it. Christ speaks through the preacher precisely because the preacher is not Christ.

The Word’s power is its willingness to inhabit frail human speech.

This is why Bonhoeffer can say, without exaggeration, that the sermon is an event in which Christ takes the congregation upon himself. The Word bears the weight of sin, fear, doubt, and resistance. It does not demand that the congregation make itself worthy. It demands that the congregation listen. Listening, in turn, becomes obedience— not as heroic action, but as consent to be borne. In this light, preaching is neither a performance nor a strategy. It is a form of suffering. The preacher exposes himself to misunderstanding, rejection, and apparent ineffectiveness. He speaks without guarantees. He entrusts the Word to God’s freedom.

And here— precisely here— the gospel is not only what the preacher announces. It is what the preacher needs. The preacher who has spoken without conviction, who has trimmed the text for an easier landing, who has been more afraid of the congregation than of God: that preacher is not standing outside the sermon’s promise. She is standing at its center. The Word that bears the congregation bears its bearer too. The mercy proclaimed from the pulpit is not withheld from the one standing in it. Christ does not exempt preachers from grace. He does not wait until we have preached faithfully before he forgives us for the times we have not. The absolution the preacher speaks over the congregation on Sunday morning is spoken over the preacher first. You are forgiven. Not because you said it well. Because he bore it.

This exposure is not accidental; it is intrinsic to preaching’s truth. The logic of bearing thus draws preaching inexorably toward the cross.

The Word that bears the church is the Word that was crucified. Preaching that seeks to avoid this scandal will inevitably seek substitutes— relevance, effectiveness, or influence. Bonhoeffer’s homiletics refuses such substitutes. It calls the preacher to stand where Christ stands: vulnerable, obedient, and free.

The Discipline of the Unspectacular

Near the end of his series of lectures, Bonhoeffer’s homiletics sound less like instruction for preachers and more like preparation for martyrdom. This is not because Bonhoeffer romanticizes suffering but because he is convinced preaching participates in Christ. If Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim is the one who speaks in preaching— if the sermon is the event in which the Living Word bears the congregation— then preaching cannot be disentangled from the fate of that Word. And the fate of the Word, Bonhoeffer insists, is not glory; it is not applause, influence, or “impact.”

The fate of the Word is the cross.

Just so, Bonhoeffer concludes his series on homiletics with a lecture delivered on January 20, 1936 entitled “After the Sermon” wherein he turns from what happens in the sermon to what must happen after it. The shift, however, remains Christological. If preaching is the event in which Christ bears the congregation, then the preacher’s great temptation is not only to control the Word while speaking it but to clutch it afterward.

To measure it.

To explain it.

To mitigate its effects.

To revisit it in judgement or in self-justification.

Bonhoeffer’s counsel to the preachers at his “new kind of monastery” is intentionally ascetical. Once the Word has been spoken, he insists, the preacher must step aside and let the sermon be what it was.

An act of obedience entrusted to God’s freedom.

This “after” is not an optional epilogue, Bonhoeffer says. It belongs to the sermon’s truth. For him, the preacher’s work does not culminate in a successful performance but in a relinquishment. The sermon is not an achievement to be secured. The sermon is a commission to be discharged. And the discharge includes a kind of holy refusal.

The preacher refuses to chase outcomes. The preacher refuses to curate responses. The preacher refuses to turn proclamation into an instrument for producing the church the preacher wants.

The Word has its own way with hearers, often hidden, often delayed, sometimes painful. To attempt to seize control of that way— by anxiety, by manipulation—is to confess that one does not trust the Word to be the Word. So Bonhoeffer presses the preacher into an unusual posture: sober watchfulness without interference.

After the sermon the preacher does not become an engineer of effects. She becomes, again, a listener— one who waits under the Word she has spoken. This is where Bonhoeffer’s insistence on “bearing” becomes concrete. The preacher must bear the anticlimax: the possibility that the sermon seems to fall flat, that no one offers substantive feedback, that nothing appears to change, that the Word judges the congregation and the congregation resents it.

Bonhoeffer says “the best sign of a good preacher is that the congregation reads the Bible;” nevertheless, the afterlife of the sermon may— or very often will— look like failure.

Bonhoeffer’s point is that the preacher must not rescue himself by translating proclamation into technique after the fact. He bears the apparent void because he trusts that the void is not empty but occupied by Christ’s promise. This also explains Bonhoeffer’s suspicion of the preacher’s “pastoral” impulse immediately after preaching— especially the impulse to soften what was hard, clarify what was sharp, reassure those who looked disturbed, or reassure himself that he “meant it nicely.”

Bonhoeffer is not forbidding the care for souls. He is warning against a counterfeit care that is really nothing more than damage control, a way of smoothing the Word so the preacher can remain liked, safe, and un-contradicted. After the sermon the preacher must resist the urge to become the mediator who stands between congregation and Christ, tidying up the consequences of Christ’s speech.

The Word does not need protection.

The preacher does.

In that sense, Bonhoeffer’s “after” is the moment when the preacher’s obedience is tested most purely.

During the sermon, adrenaline and form can carry a preacher.

After the sermon there is only the naked question.

Will you trust God with what you have said for God?

Bonhoeffer does not answer that question for us. But the gospel does. The preacher who cannot trust— who obsessively replays the sermon, who crumbles under the silence of the congregation, who has spent the week since Sunday cataloguing her failures and half-measures— that preacher is not outside the reach of the promise. She is its address. The gospel is not a reward for the preacher who has finally learned to let go. It is the only ground on which letting go becomes possible at all. You preached imperfectly. You hedged when you should have said it plainly. You said it plainly when you should have listened longer. You were more pastoral than prophetic, or more prophetic than pastoral, and you knew it even as the words were leaving your mouth. Christ was there. He bore it. He bore you. The sermon you are ashamed of was not beyond his use. The congregation you failed was not beyond his reach. This is not a consolation prize. This is the gospel.

Bonhoeffer’s answer is severe and freeing.

The preacher must return to her place under the Word, where she cannot know— cannot control— what God will do.

And yet this does not leave the preacher passive. The proper “after” is not inertness but intercession and silence. Bonhoeffer exhorts his students to prayer rather than damage control, repentance instead of performance review, humble availability instead of seeking after praise. Do not try to make sure your listeners “got it.” In his lecture entitled “After the Sermon” Bonhoeffer prescribes a difficult task for preachers; namely, the daily crucifixion of pastoral self-importance. The preacher speaks because he is commanded. After the sermon, the preacher must consent to be nothing more than what the call has made them— a servant who has delivered a message that does not belong to them, serving a Lord who does not require our supervision.

The world endures, Bonhoeffer lectures, because God has not withdrawn his Word— and that Word has a body. There is no risen Christ hovering above history, no Easter Jesus detached from flesh and time. The only Christ is the totus Christus: the risen Jesus together with his body, the church. He is not given to us otherwise. The Word bears the church only by inhabiting her; the church bears the Word only as she is borne by him.

To preach, then, is not to mediate between heaven and earth, nor to secure results, nor even to complete a task. It is to stand within this mutual indwelling—within the endurance of the world sustained by Christ’s presence in his body— and to speak a promise that cannot be mastered and cannot be revoked. The preacher does not supply Christ to the church. Christ supplies himself, through his body, by his Word.

That is why after the sermon the preacher must return back to the communion of saints where Christ continues to speak. We return to witnesses like Bonhoeffer not as replacements for the scriptures, but as members of Christ’s body whose obedience reminds us that the scriptures are sufficient. Such saints teach us that preaching is not a discrete event but a long obedience, shaped by prayer, repentance, and renewed attentiveness to the Word that still bears the church.

If a preacher is a beggar who knows where to find bread, as Robert Capon says, then preachers must also tell one another where they themselves are fed. This is what I have endeavored to do here— to point toward a member of the cloud of witnesses who can sustain us for the long haul, who has fed me these past few years. I do not know whether our moment is a status confessionis, but I do know that the way forward will not be found by standing alone but by letting Christ carry us further through his body.

So hear this, preachers. You who have stood in the pulpit afraid. You who have softened what the text demanded. You who have gone home Sunday afternoon wondering whether you believe any of it anymore, whether you have the right to keep standing there, whether your failures disqualify you from the call. In the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority alone, I announce to you are forgiven. For Christ’s sake, you are forgiven all your homiletical mishaps and failures of faith.

You are forgiven— not because Bonhoeffer’s discipline will fix you. Not because you will do better next week. But because the Word you have been given to speak has already been spoken over you: it is finished. The same Christ who bore the congregation bore the preacher who stumbles through the sermon. The call is not revoked by your failures. The commission does not expire when your nerve does. You are a sinner entrusted with the gospel, which is exactly the only kind of person Christ has ever entrusted with it.

The pulpit can feel a lonely place.

Listeners can project onto preachers messages we did not intend. The comment “Nice sermon” in the narthex can never compensate for the labor sermons entail, work few understand. Even when we attempt to live up to Fleming Rutledge’s exhortation, we will seldom be seen as courageous. Still fewer will appreciate that our failure to preach so boldly is more often than that born from our love for them. Not many of my seminary classmates are now preachers. But as Bonhoeffer put it in a lecture in the summer of 1936, “Because the word by nature bears the new humanity, it is by nature always oriented toward the church-community. The word does not want to be alone.”

Thus, in his lectures on preaching Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds you: preachers, you are not alone.

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Hi Friends,

I am in Sweden this week to teach, preach, and talk with preachers here in Stockholm. Above is the altar piece at St. Peter’s Kyrka in Stockholm— originally a Methodist sanctuary.

Ascension

The late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe puts it plainly, “There can be no succession in the eternal God, no change.” In other words, eternity is not a very long time. It is not time at all. It does not precede history or follow it. It does not run alongside history like a river beside a road. Eternity transcends time absolutely, which means there is no moment in God’s life at which the Son, the second person of the Trinity, was not Jesus of Nazareth.

There could not be.

Because there are no moments in God’s life.

This is especially difficult for us to grasp given that this marks the moment Jesus of Nazareth ascends into God’s own life.

“Do not cling to me,” the risen Jesus commands Mary Magdalene, “For I have not yet ascended to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Eastertide comes to a close when those words of promise are finally fulfilled at the Father’s right hand. Our lives are hidden with God in Christ, the apostle Paul proclaims. The Ascension is how the Triune God makes both that hiddenness and that reality true for us. Luke’s image of Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim disappearing into the heavens above the disciples— his allusion that Jesus is not only our Great High Priest but the LORD invisibly enthroned in the holy of holies— is a hammer that smashes all our idols. As much as any item of Christian dogma, the Ascension contradicts our assumptions about reality.

Our experience, tradition, and reason must be normed by the biblical narrative not the scriptures by our reason, tradition, and experience. Quite simply, Jesus is not an item our theology fits into a static image concept of reality.

Jesus is God.

As such, Jesus is the one who constitutes the reality of all things.

Jesus is the Creator and, as Maximus the Confessor puts it, Jesus creates all things by how he lives them. The Ascension is where— when— Jesus draws all things together; so that, he can become all in the all. This is a far cry from depictions of the Ascension as the departure of the risen Jesus from all things in order to send the Holy Spirit in his stead.

As Rowan Williams notes:

“If the world often feels like a world without God, then is this a sort of caution to us?Be careful not to think that God is there to fill the gaps or to solve the problems, to fit in our terms…Jesus hasn’t just gone away. He’s gone deeper into the heart of reality, our reality and God’s. He has become far more than a visible friend and companion. He’s shown himself to be the very center of our life, the source of our loving energy in the world and the source of our prayerful, trusting, waiting on God…Not one thing among others, deeper into the heart of reality, making the difference that love makes.”

Just so, the question raised by Ascension: How do we claim that Jesus remains Jesus, the particular person was born of Mary and suffered under Pilate, if he is simultaneously all in all things? Too often Ascension appears to force a choice upon believers. Either we stress Jesus in his human particularity or we emphasize his present-tense presence, in his fullness, to everyone and everything. Instead we often resort to generalizations about him, spiritualizing the ascended Jesus so that he is, in principle, human but nevertheless different from the man who drank with sinners.

That space and time are no obstacles to Jesus should indicate that we cannot bring to the gospel our predetermined understanding of reality.

We have to ask how reality relates to him.

Not how he fits inside it.

Another idol we have to allow the hammer of the Ascension to smash is our linear notion of space and time. When we attempt to plot the events of God’s life into a sequence, we tell the story of Jesus the wrong way— even if it appears we’re merely recapitulating the biblical witness.

The incorrect recitation of the Jesus story goes thus: once, there was God— eternal, unchanging, dwelling in light inaccessible. Then, at a particular moment in history, the eternal Word stepped across the threshold between deity and time, and God became a man. He lived briefly. He died violently. He rose unexpectedly. Finally, at a moment in time he crossed the threshold once more, returning from time into deity; that is, he ascended to the right hand of the Father. But now, somehow, the eternal God has a human face permanently affixed. The story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and in that end something new has entered the divine life that was not there before.

It is the greatest story ever told.

It is also mythology.

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Hi Friends,

Here is our most recent discussion of Robert Jenson’s long essay on the Holy Spirit. Here is the link for next Monday’s study of his final section, “Cosmic Spirit.” I will get the reading up on this space later in the week.

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