In the same way, we might continue to meditate, we cannot preach as if the last 250 years of biblical scholarship, historical critical study of the Bible, have not occurred and have not yielded solid results. They have and they have. Wildman’s sermons here give careful attention to this body of work, and several moments of exemplary rendition and interpretation of the Scriptures, understood in historical and critical perspective. So, where we need to admit our unknowing, our wandering within the clouds of unknowing, our origin and destination in the dark, so be it. After all, the psalmist led the way: Yes, the heavens are telling the glory of God, but so too the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Yes, day to day pours forth speech, but also, and more so, night to night declares not only speech but knowledge (Psalm 19). Dr. Ray L. Hart has well exposed this dual healing fulfillment in interpretation in his recent book, God Being Nothing (2016). In Wildman’s collection, we take note of the reliance on various texts, and the occasional references to other philosophers and theologians who have touched and influenced this preacher. We might especially meditate along the way on his use of Job, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, other Wisdom passages, and Samuel.
Furthermore, we cannot expect to gain a hearing, to see by grace the assembly of an addressable community, over time, without rigorous attention to form as well as content, to sermon design as well as sermon theme. In fact, these sermons invite us particularly to look hard at sermon design. Professor Wildman’s sermons offer exemplary modes of design, an often under-attended aspect of preaching. Meditate as you read on the varieties of form in the design, and on the rhetorical structures of the sermons. They have a great deal to offer both to the younger and to the older preachers among us. They have movement and range. Notice the way the sermon forms and designs advance the gospel affirmations.
In “Mystery,” the design is definition: how shall we understand this single word, mystery, this phrase, holy mystery. Further, the sermonic mode is warning: Words are always inadequate; we tend to trivialize the divine mystery; we need to be aware of the inadequacy of our theological language. Here the author evokes Rudolph Otto and the Mysterium Tremendum. We are held in a terrifying tender hand. And, as Ralph Sockman emphasized, using lakeshore imagery, “The larger the body of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery that surrounds it.”
In “Friend” the design is the flow of a stream, in which the hospitality of reality discloses itself with vivid concreteness. We must face that we are running the sociopolitical show ourselves. We need not minimize the ravages of the human condition. The price of freedom in the world is extremely high (a similar argument to that of Erich Fromm in his classic, Escape From Freedom). To violence this sermon makes multiple, repeated references. The truth is that suffering mostly crushes. Face the rage of the Psalms. Editing our hearts is betrayal.
In “Waiting,” the design is a good old two-point sermon. Here are two kinds of waiting: Joy in life and dread before the bizarre lottery of fate, a fine dialectic reminiscent of Helmut Thielecke’s “The Waiting God.” Wildman affirms, here and elsewhere, “This God is the very Ground of Being, the depth structures and dynamic flows of life, the cosmic Dao and the God beyond God of our beloved mystics. This God waits for the unfolding of nature itself, of our very lives.”
In “Hope,” the form is a fine, venerable design, yet one sadly far less used today than a generation ago; not this, not this, not this . . . but that. Personal transformation, social justice, life after death, and the Kingdom of God are not forgone conclusions. Notice what we and our world are like, first. Here the reader finds one definition of revelation: revelation can be understood as the disclosure of what we are not (and so what we can be) through the experience of what we are in the context of the mysterious, divine depth of our being, in divinely supported space, with both absence and presence (ever a crucial homiletical dialectic). We are not surprised here to have a reference to “the divine incognito” (of Søren Kierkegaard.)
In “Coming,” the design is a question, raised and answered: “Ask yourself this.” More sermons should perhaps take this form, a question raised and answered, by way of a method of correlation. We are challenged to face what is daunting: disaster, danger, devastation. We are cautioned here to beware of both semi-biblical distortion and semi-biblical fiction—different misrepresentations of God. We are admonished here to abide by the First Commandment. God’s coming is multifaceted and hard to pin down. We need a more robust theism, so that “we can love more truly, live more simply, care more deeply, fight more fairly” (a choice phrase if ever there was one).
In “Monarch,” the design is intended to follow the text, though not in a rigidly exegetical sense. Here, as often elsewhere in the sermons, there is a primary emphasis and reliance on the Hebrew Scripture, in its layers of interpretation, from the voice of Samuel, to the shaping of the narrator, to the editing of the redactor. Here we are reminded of the importance of institutions (such an immediately timely word), with a reference to Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism. The Divine monarchy relativizes all others. Christ the King is the only King. Institutions! You can’t live with or without them! Here as so often in the sermons there is steady emphasis on dialectical thought and expression.
In “Wisdom,” the design, the rhetorical movement, is from similar to different, from familiar to less familiar, relying on Psalm 19 and Proverbs 1. The sermon begins with playful references to dozens of English words for “fool.” Here is a good, direct sermonic reminder, for the preacher, to engage the hearer by moving from similar to different, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, as here, from our own interest in wisdom, seen in language, to that of the Hebrews.
In “Death” (the one sermon of these in the collection I heard live in 2007), the design is an imagined conversation with a deceased friend, a meditation on “The God of Untimely Death.” Wildman confesses: “I instinctively reach for the Hebrew Bible’s wisdom literature” when facing the endless train of death, the vagaries of “cavalier liberal brethren” and the inadequacy of Personalism:
If I have to believe in God as a personal, aware, active creator, then I need an ancient worldview to match. I would gladly serve a God who creates the way Genesis hints, lovingly making each creature, fully formed, responsive to God’s gift of life. If God has to be a big and powerful person, then give me Genesis or give me nothing! To hell with the countless death pits of our planetary history, to hell with the meandering experimentation of evolution, and to hell with coincidence and bad luck and pointless suffering and meaningless murder and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, to hell with untimely death. If God has to be a super-person who knows and cares and protects, then give me a world where evil acts of mass murder are never the outworking of mental illness and social torture but always simply the wicked deeds of bad people. Give me a God with a plan, even though I can’t grasp its purpose. Give me Ecclesiastes!
Here Wildman reminds us of Edmund Steimle, of blessed memory, and particularly of sermons like his classic, “Address Not Known.” Like Steimle, Wildman has in his sights “many theological liberals.” For Wildman, again, God is best pictured as “the Ground of Being—the depth structures of nature and the wellsprings of value.” Yet, we sense that his deceased friend (whose voice we do not hear in the sermon) might, we could imagine, respond thus to Wildman: “There is a kind of presence in God’s absence. There is a power in personhood though God is before and beyond personality. There is ever the power and possibility of love though God has given us the ‘freedom to go straight to hell if we so choose’ (Tutu). There is mystery, aplenty, in all creation. There is creation, even though there is more and fuller evidence of fall. But there is also new creation, though the pains of the old creation are ever so evident.”
In fact, the careful design of the sermon not only invites, but also requires us, to some measure, to imagine what his dear, silent, deceased friend might have said. Or what we might say.
In “Creator,” the design relies squarely on personal experience. The rhetorical form of the sermon is reflection upon personal experience, Wildman’s experience as an “evangelical liberal.” Note his irenic spirit, speaking of liberals and conservatives: “We do have a great deal in common, including our love of children, our celebration of our mothers and fathers, our preference for peaceful neighborhoods, our quest for health and happiness, and our conviction that life is best lived