Getting to God: Preaching Good News in a Troubled World

Introduction

This book has been a labor of love to honor Paul Scott Wilson’s many contributions to the church and academy. We were his doctoral students at Emmanuel College and have continued to appreciate his support, friendship, mentoring, and wise counsel. Although we represent different perspectives and diverse backgrounds, we share some very important theological DNA from our formation with Paul Wilson. As we worked together on a theme and direction for this book, we surveyed other former students and teaching colleagues. Very quickly, a dominant vision emerged.

Paul Scott Wilson’s work has been laser focused on keeping God at the center of preaching. For Paul Wilson, a sermon must get to God. His writing spans aspects of preaching, including history of preaching, biblical interpretation, theology of preaching, and a holistic method for sermon creation grounded in a theological grammar that uses the energy of the gospel itself. His approach to preaching uses trouble and grace to create pages of the sermon that engage the biblical text and our world with an explicit focus on God’s gracious action that moves toward us.

This book builds on Wilson’s work by focusing on the challenges and possibilities for preachers who are trying to get to God in the midst of varied contextual challenges and particularities. For the purposes of this book, a sermon gets to God when preachers explicitly name God’s action in our world through example or story. Getting to God is possible only because God is always getting to us, and our job as preachers is to bear witness as an act of confession and spiritual discipline.

In chapter 1, we frame our understanding of the purpose of preaching as getting to God, offering metaphors and naming common challenges preachers face. We also introduce our own preaching contexts, which are integral to the following chapters. We were writing this book in the spring of 2020, while the world was caught in the emerging pain, fear, and suffering caused by COVID-19. Communities around the world were also rocked by anguished protests surrounding racial injustice and the killing of unarmed Black people. These events have affected every preaching context.

In chapters 2 through 4, each author engages with her or his preaching context with a focus on getting to God. Each chapter offers an introduction to the context, challenges, and possibilities for preachers, and a case study sermon preached in that context. Joni Sancken writes about secularism in suburban Ohio, Luke Powery writes about racism at Duke University, and John Rottman writes about prison, a place marked both by despair and suffering and the presence of Christ.

Chapter 5 unfolds as a celebration of diverse ways preachers get to God in particular contexts and features many sermon examples representing a range of perspectives and backgrounds.

We can trust that God shows up in and through the lives of real people in real places of brokenness and possibility. In Wilson’s four-page sermon, page four focuses on the living God’s gracious action in our world.

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A life spent looking at the world with an eye toward page four can be profoundly transformative for preachers and congregations. God’s promises are not general news for generic people. God’s promises are good news for all people in a variety of contexts, revealing that there is still good news in a troubled world.

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. Wilson, Four Pages.

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Getting to God

Getting to God as the Purpose of Preaching

This book starts with the premise that Christian preaching should bear witness to the triune God. In fact, the entire act of preaching should be a God-soaked venture: the study of Scripture or topic, preparation, the interweaving of poetry and story, engagement with the listening community and broader context as partners in preaching, the design of worship, and the embodied act of proclamation itself. If we could condense the God-soaked journey of preaching down to one saturated and concentrated destination, it is this: preaching needs to get to God. While we cannot control the living and active God, we acknowledge that human preachers have a calling to bear witness to the gospel, the good news most fully expressed in the Christ event.

The gospel is a multifaceted jewel. It is overwhelming with its dazzling brilliance all at once, but preaching is an incremental task, a relationship that unfolds over time. Diverse angles and edges shine when sermons explore different possibilities. Sermons can teach, offer ethical guidance, rally the community to act in the face of injustice, and validate the human experience. Perhaps the highest aim, though, is to create conditions where listeners might experience an encounter with the living God to whom we bear witness.

Like a well-trained jeweler, the preacher highlights God’s activity. Sometimes the biblical text illuminates experiences in our context and at other times our lives and experiences from our world enlighten the text in a kind of mutually beneficial hermeneutical dance. Sermons that place God’s action at the heart and utilize stories and examples that show us where God is active in our world today can help to inspire hope, nurture faith, and create conditions where listeners are able to see God at work in their lives. The goal is inviting or facilitating a homiletical Holy Spirit mediated encounter with God that fortifies and transforms listeners, launching them to faithfully live out the mission of God.

While this is the high calling of preaching, it is not easily accomplished. Naming God in ordinary times is hard enough, and in times of a world pandemic and racial upheaval it may seem almost impossible. At the time of this writing, COVID-19 is sowing illness, devastation, and death as it holds the world in its grip of fear. Economic, political, social, and spiritual fallout from the virus has laid bare injustices that have long simmered in the background. On top of that, the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, three Black human beings, have incited racial anger and triggered deep trauma that is boiling over in cities and towns around the world.

In the midst of these crises, church leaders must blaze new trails in ministry, embrace technology, and tackle ever changing barriers in worship and caregiving, while managing their own fear, anxiety, grief, rage, and health. The age-old challenge of how to name God in our world looms large. As Paul Scott Wilson has written, Many of us [are] stretched to our limits and thin in resources upon which to draw, yet we are called to lead our people where none of us has been before.

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The situation we face is unprecedented but deeply resonant with the heart of the Christian gospel. Our God knows what it is like to watch his beloved Son gasp his final breath in a public lynching designed to humiliate and terrorize. Our God in Jesus Christ has also traveled the way of suffering, death, and loss. Jesus absorbed, deactivated, and ultimately defeated all forces that destroy creaturely flourishing. The crucified and risen Christ is drawing near to us even now. In the midst of deep trouble, God generates new and creative ways to break through the fear and pain to get to us even as we seek to get to God.

Getting to God and the Biblical Text

Each year seminary students and many pastors travel to the Middle East, hoping to gain insight into biblical interpretation from walking where Jesus walked. John recently traveled with a group of students to Turkey and Greece. The aim of the trip was to visit places highlighted in the New Testament. Because of his work teaching in prison, he was especially eager to see Philippi. Philippi promised possible engagement with the best prison story in the Bible, the ancient setting of God’s springing Paul and Silas from the slammer through a powerful earthquake.

The ancient sites varied in scope and degrees of development. For instance, archaeologists have been at work in Ephesus for more than a hundred years. Thus, much has been uncovered. Most sites feature ancient baths, marketplaces, temples to various gods, wrecked fountains, and giant theaters, mostly in profound states of disrepair. Most temples, for example, present only a smattering of marble foundation stones with a couple of lonely pillars reaching toward a nonexistent roof. The guide was forever encouraging the group to use their imaginations to fill in what was missing.

Unfortunately, try as they might, human excavation and imagination could not bring a living spark. Despite his efforts, John realized that these ancient sites offered little help in connecting with the divine reality mentioned in the New Testament. When his group arrived in Philippi, John was initially thrilled to see the prison where Paul and Silas famously sang the night away.

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A small sign identified the prison site, with carving in the side of the rock. The thrill died away moments later as the guide dismissed the location as doubtful. The visit did very little to bring John or his students closer to the biblical text or to the jailer who probably never worked there, let alone the God who shook the place to its foundations. Getting to God, even God back then, faced insurmountable obstacles.

Historical criticism has taught preachers to excavate biblical texts with similar hopes for bringing them back to life. Preachers were prompted to sift through biblical texts from a growing distance of nearly two thousand years, to unearth historical details and use them as best they could to imagine what might have been. The idea was to clear away centuries of theological debris in an effort to get back to ancient historical biblical foundations. And with the minimal rendering of what they unearth, this prompted preachers to see themselves mostly as cautious tour guides of these excavated biblical texts.

Worshippers may come hoping to encounter God or meet Jesus, but often the morning sermon leaves them with little more than a historical rendering of a text bereft of its life and vitality, without much or any mention of God.

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One of us heard a listener comment recently on such a sermon in the church basement after the service. Wasn’t that a wonderful sermon, she cooed. I learned so much about Pontius Pilate. Those who had longed for an encounter with the living God were not helped by such a sermon. Particularly today, when our world is racked with pain, illness, injustice, and upheaval, listeners deserve more.

If preachers too often offer their listeners only the barest possibility of accessing God through the portal of the ancient text, looking for God in particular contemporary contexts might leave both preacher and listener even more daunted. Contexts matter because, at their best, preachers must work not just to understand a biblical text, but also to use that text as a potential means by which the Holy Spirit might address the lives of the listeners in diverse contexts, even ones full of trouble.

Thin Places and Getting to God

In times of deep trouble, getting to God by naming and experiencing God through ancient practices, symbols, and ideas can bring comfort and strength. The Celtic theological concept of thin places may offer a fruitful way to describe God’s presence with us amidst the deep challenges unearthed by the global coronavirus pandemic and the global social virus of racism.

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Celtic Christianity employs tensive theological metaphors to describe how God’s presence draws near to us and reflects the mystery of divine revelation. As Scripture teaches, in complete freedom God can make any place a place of holy encounter, yet God also promises to be near to us in particular places and circumstances.

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Celtic Christianity emphasizes the essential goodness of nature, with a divine spark existing within all of creation.

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Early Celtic spirituality embraces a sense of God’s presence completely interwoven in all of human life.

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This belief is depicted symbolically in the interwoven lines of the Celtic knot.

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Yet Celtic spirituality also describes the theological concept of thin places. Thin places refer to geographic locations where people feel closer to the divine; the distance between heaven and earth or God and humanity seems to be shorter. Celtic religious and spiritual practices were historically local in nature and reflected a deep sense of spiritual connection to nature and particular