The Overshadowed Preacher

Mary, the Spirit, and the Labor of Proclamation

Jerusha Matsen Neal

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467459976
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Ministerio cristiano

TheOvershadowed Preacher breaks open one of the most important, unexamined affirmations of preaching: the presence of the living Christ in the sermon.

Jerusha Matsen Neal argues that Mary's conceiving, bearing, and naming of Jesus in Luke's nativity account is a potent description of this mystery. Mary's example calls preachers to leave behind the false shadows haunting Christian pulpits and be "overshadowed" by the Spirit of God.

Neal asks gospel proclaimers to own both the limits and the promise of their humanness as God's Spirit-filled servants rather than disappear behind a "pulpit prince" ideal.It is a preacher's fully embodied witness, lived out through Spirit-filled acts of hospitality, dependence, and discernment, that bears the marks of a fully embodied Christ. This affirmation honors the particularity of preachers in a globally diverse context—challenging a status quo that has historically privileged masculinity and whiteness. It also offers hope to ordinary souls who find themselves daunted by the impossibility of the preaching task. Nothing, in the angel's words, is impossible with God.

CHAPTER 1

Uneasy Borders, Tricky Definitions

It is morning at Davuilevu Theological College, the oldest pastoral training school in the Fiji Islands. The wooden “lali” beats a slow, distinctive rhythm, as the preacher walks with measured steps from the back of the chapel and takes his place at the pulpit. The drum beat stops. Except for the wake-up calls of birds, there is no noise. The community is still and holds a collective breath. The choir leader gives a soft, vocal pitch, and a four-part chord rises from every corner of the room. “Ni voleka mada na Karisito,” the students sing, slow and certain. Their eyes are shut. Their bodies, seated. It is a song they have sung in morning and evening devotions since childhood. I join them, finding my way. Expectancy hums in the tight harmonies, like hope held close to the chest. The words are an iTaukei translation of a hymn brought to Fiji by Methodist missionaries over 180 years ago. “Jesus, stand among us in Thy risen power,” the hymn begins. And on this particular morning, I believe he does.

Reflections on a chapel service at Davuilevu Theological College

I came to Fiji as a mission partner during a season when my own country, the United States, was in turmoil. During the years of Ferguson and Charleston, the exhausting whirlwind of the 2016 election, the 2017 Women’s March and ICE immigration raids, I sat every morning in the chapel service described in the epigraph and wondered what it meant that “Jesus stands among us in his risen power.” In certain ways, those services seemed far removed from the angst in my own nation. The communal performance of faith, the careful repetition of words passed down, and the present-day promise of gospel hope seemed a world set apart.

But, of course, beneath their performances of morning worship, these future leaders of the Fijian church had their own fears, brought about by turmoils of similar scale. In the nation of Fiji, things once taken for granted—things like tides and seasons—were shifting because of climate change. Globalization created new conversations but also new divisions and silences, as communal traditions struggled to remain relevant. Distrust between the largely Christian indigenous population and their Hindu and Muslim neighbors had erupted in a series of political coups. A military dictatorship created doubt in the trustworthiness of the political process. Even in the hymn so beautifully rendered by the Davuilevu students that morning, borders of identity, agency, and tradition were shifting. The hymn was a reminder of the community’s Western missionary past, but also a resistance to the encroaching cultural otherness of social media, secularity, and foreign-funded megachurches. It was a performance of adaptation and stability in light of a vulnerable community’s ambivalence about change.

Davuilevu performed more than singing technique that morning. Through its worship, it was negotiating complicated questions about the community’s autonomy, freedom, and vocation, questions that are deeply theological. When I speak of a preacher’s performance in the pulpit, I speak of a similar labor. A preacher’s performance is more than elocution and eye contact. Performance is what Ronald Pelias calls the “dialogical engagement” between text, performer, audience, and event.¹ It pays attention to bodies not only as objects in space but as events in time. It attends to their contexts and commitments, and in so doing, it makes visible the uneasy, relational borders that give definition and movement to human persons and histories.² Preaching’s performative borders press us toward a rearticulation of the Holy Spirit’s critical role in the work of proclamation and toward a fully human embrace of God’s world. More than this, the uneasy borders of performance become sites of physical testimony to an embodied Savior. His presence is the vibrating hope at the heart of that Fijian hymn.

The Uneasy Promise of Resurrection

Ours is a world of uneasy borders. We live in a season marked by global migrations, religious and nationalistic violence, and the hegemony of a larger-than-life economy. Rising sea levels erode island coastlines, and higher temperatures compress the acreage of arable farmland. But geographic borders are not the only borders shifting. Over the course of a generation, the borders that separate self and other, subject and object, normative center and exotic edge have blurred.³ Borders of race and gender, once thought self-evident, have been refigured as provisional and performative.⁴ Human agency seems overrun by discourses of power.⁵ The borders of our natural world and the borders of our own understanding cannot be taken for granted.

It is from this uneasy place that the Davuilevu community sings its witness: Jesus stands among us on these borders of change. This is more than just a pretty turn of phrase. Jesus’s bodily presence in Christian worship is the Spirit-mediated solace of the faithful. It is the promise that sets Christian preaching apart from preaching in other traditions or, for that matter, in the ubiquitous TED Talks.⁶ Jesus stands among us. It’s not that Jesus doesn’t show up in other rhetorical performances. But Christian preaching promises something specific. The promise may be parsed differently by different traditions, but it is tangled deep in the roots of our faith. Through the ordinary actions of human preachers and the faith of those gathered, the Spirit makes the risen Jesus present—as surely as he’s present in the Eucharist.⁷ It’s why preaching was so precious to the Protestant Reformers. And it’s what we mean when we say that Christian preaching is grounded in resurrection. It’s not just that Christian preachers proclaim that the resurrection happened. They preach in relation to a risen Lord.

But affirming Jesus’s bodily resurrection has a cost. It means that Jesus stands among us in an uneasy, performative way. To have a body is to be both known and hidden; bodies cannot be conjured or stripped of their mystery. Jesus is no shape-shifting ghost—nor is he simply communal memory, as if our talk of “presence” was a manner of speech. Resurrection means that Jesus is not safely enclosed in tombs of tradition and narrative so that “ecclesiology smothers eschatology.”⁸ We do not own him, nor do we replace him. To claim that Jesus stands among us as a resurrected body is to claim that he is both present with us and absent from us, that he is Other than us while performing in relation to us.

A great deal is at stake for preachers in figuring out what this presence and absence mean for their sermon performances. Even more is at stake for the church. This book will not come at that problem through a rehashing of sacramental debates,⁹ though one can discern their echoes. Nor will it parse the issue by comparing theologies of ascension¹⁰ or analyzing biblical examples of divine embodiment across the Judeo-Christian tradition.¹¹ Instead, it will describe the mystery of Christ’s presence and absence by comparing the biblical narratives of Acts’s preachers and Mary’s pregnancy—both examples of how Christ’s body marks the borders of faithful human action through the Spirit’s power.

These biblical descriptions of Spirit-empowered action are critical because the consequences of Jesus’s presence and absence are not always clear, particularly when it comes to the simple question of what the preacher is to do in the sermonic act. What is her job description? The preacher, like those Fijian seminarians, also stands in shifting borderlands of identity, agency, and communal norms. She is also vulnerable and, quite often, ambivalent. What does it mean to embody the promise of Jesus’s risen power in her performance? My fear is that homiletic instruction has not always provided preachers appropriate training to the task.

It is a frightening thing when the boundaries that establish who we are, what we can accomplish, and where we belong grow visibly uneasy. Nationalist politics and quests for ecclesial purity respond by building walls on these borders, trading vulnerable relation for rigidity. Homiletic training—particularly in relation to the messy work of rhetoric—has its own version of this trade. It can respond to the uneasy borders of the world and the uneasy borders of Christ’s resurrected presence by flattening a preacher’s performance into practices that can be mastered, passed down, and counted on. These human definitions of “excellence” create manageable descriptions of an impossible job. But time-honored practices can also exclude preachers who do not fit the mold. They can make the church’s borders and homiletic practices invulnerable to time and context, and more critically to Jesus himself. The danger is not only that a preacher’s Spirit-filled witness will be muted by these homiletic norms or even that a changing world will leave preachers behind, sequestered in increasingly outdated homiletic forms. The danger is that the promise of Jesus’s resurrected body, present in power and inaccessible to our manipulations, will be replaced with a body safe and solid—an unchanging body of knowledge that is more statue than flesh. If that is the preacher’s comfort, then Jesus is truly absent, for this body resembles no-body at all. Jesus’s living performance of salvation is replaced by rhetorical norms that are crisply under our control, and we are left substituting our performances for his.

The gamble at the heart of this book is the performative gamble that the Reformers took centuries ago in their reconfiguration of sacramental theology—a gamble we will touch on in this opening chapter. In letting go of an ecclesial guarantee of Christ’s bodily presence, the Reformers put their trust in a lived-in-time, Spirit-mediated relationship. What would a similar risk look like in the labor of preaching? How might this posture shape the questions of our discipline, the expectations of our congregations, and the testimonies of our lives?

Given what is at stake, it’s only fair that I show you my cards. Defining one’s terms is tricky business, and before you sign on for the journey, you should know where I stand.

Tricky Definition 1: Preaching

I am standing in front of my speech communications class in a United States seminary—a required course for all incoming students.

“Are there any questions?” I ask.

It is March. We have been together for over six months. We have talked about performative exegesis and the vocal interpretation of Scripture. We’ve talked about inflection and emphasis, phrasing and rate. We’ve talked about volume, poise, and internalization; about eye contact, gesture, and stage fright. But now the question comes.

A woman in the front row raises her hand and asks it—tentatively, almost sheepishly—as if she should know the answer and doesn’t.

“What do you think we are doing when we preach?” she asks. “I mean—what are we really doing? What do you think it means when we say that we speak God’s Word?”

The entire class turns to me with expectant eyes and pencils poised. They have been waiting for someone to have the courage to ask.

Journal entry, March 22, 2011

It should be an easy question for a preaching instructor to answer.

But the student isn’t looking for isolated doctrinal principles. She has asked her question in a practical theology classroom, not in the systematic theology course she took last term. Her question grows out of her bodily frustrations with preaching and the unchartable borders of text and body, Word and words, Spirit and flesh that make up preacherly performance.

Heinrich Bullinger wrote the definition of preaching I learned as a seminary student: “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.”¹² It’s a terrifying claim for congregations, as there are any number of bad sermons. But I think the claim is more terrifying for the preacher, particularly when the great disclaimer at the statement’s heart is laid bare. Be clear. Preaching is not the Word of God. Preaching of the Word of God gets that distinction, which means that what preachers do—what...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Luke A. Powery
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Uneasy Borders, Tricky Definitions
• 2. Dangerous Deliveries: The Queen of Heaven and the Pulpit Prince
• 3. Starting with the Body—the Resurrected Body
• 4. The Spirit-Filled Handmaid
• 5. Fully Human Preaching
• 6. Conceiving: The Labor of Hospitality
• 7. Bearing: The Labor of Dependence
• 8. Naming: The Labor of Discernment
• Epilogue: The Overshadowed Preacher
• Bibliography