1 of 6
Preaching is hard. Anyone who has ever sat with the Bible open, surrounded by commentaries, with a date circled on the calendar, knows what I mean. Words don't jump to life by themselves. When it happens, it's hard to explain how it happened. When it doesn't, it's just depressing.
This set of books about preaching tells us something about the difficulty of preaching. To read great preaching is to open oneself to homiletical despair. Sure I can see that Will Willimon is hilarious, Barbara Brown Taylor gentle, Marilyn McCord Adams brilliant—but how's that make me any more likely to be hilarious, gentle, or brilliant on some upcoming Sunday morning at 11?
Adams will seem like the one who doesn't belong among these homiletical greats. She's better known as a philosophical theologian whose work on such difficult late-medieval thinkers as John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham has bailed out many a graduate student facing exams. In the best Anglican tradition she is also a priest, and has spent her teaching years at UCLA, Yale, and now Oxford, stepping in at local churches with charming names like St. Augustine's-By-The-Sea.
For a philosopher with a penchant for nominalism, Adams is a surprisingly accessible preacher. A dandy sermon on Trinity Sunday starts with the throat-catching premise from Bernard of Clairvaux that his Cistercians shouldn't preach that day. What words do we have adequate to the mystery of the triune life? Even the seraphim can only stammer, "holy, holy, holy." But this is not holiness as exclusivity, the three persons as "gated community," since we only know this God in personal, ecstatic form among us in Jesus and the Spirit. Adams concludes, "The funny thing is, Divine Being can't be literally holy. God's very nature explodes the meaning of that word. Who God is makes it impossible for God or any of us to be separate or isolated, ever. And that, my friends, is a good joke!" Parishioners poised for dry "philosophy" that morning were pleasantly disappointed!
Despite a light touch and often stirring biblical exegesis, Adams' preaching elsewhere has a kind of monotony to it. She introduces her work as "sermons preached for those who find God's Goodness problematic," and piles up vignettes about those whose experience of abuse has left them with mistrust of God as father, or the church as a place of healing. To her credit she does not simply replace one idol with another—God as mother comes in for scrutiny, and Adams loves traditional church teaching too much simply to throw it overboard. Yet she so regularly signals disappointment with the church's refusal to sanction same-sex relationships that she comes off here as something of a single-issue-preacher. By the time we reach sermons entitled, "Queer Variety," "Gay Pride, Humbled Church," and " 'Coming Out' in the Power of the Spirit," things have become a bit predictable.
An alternative to the monotone of the single-preacher collection is the multi-preacher collection, here represented by two books of sermons celebrating the university. Yale threw a preacher series in 2001 for its tercentennial, inviting some unevenness—exactly how many times do we need to hear Yale graduates invited back to preach at Yale patting Yale on the back for how religiously diverse Yale is? Especially when that diversity is limited to those inclined to praise diversity, and who have some means to pay Yale's tuition bills. Yet some of Yale's genuine theological greatness is also present in sermons by five former university chaplains, including the great William Sloane Coffin, Jr., still inspiring after all these years, insisting it is God who tells us who we are, and not money, power, America, or the Yale Corporation. One can see why he sent a hoard of students into the streets to protest various outrages and thereon to seminary.
share this page
RSS Feed
