A dear friend, a venerable and now superannuated preacher, the Rev. Gordon Knapp, one of the consistently best Methodist preachers of his era and area, recently wrote in an unpublished essay, “The Preaching Tree”:
Historically, there are Roman Catholic and Episcopalian priests, Lutheran pastors and Methodist preachers. However, the designation preacher does not sit well with many contemporary United Methodist clergy. Most prefer to be known as ministers or change agents or CEOs or pastoral counselors or religious enablers. With the popular connotation of the word “preach” being the presentation of boring, banal and unwanted advice, little wonder clergy dread to be known as preacher. Despite the negative image, preacher continues to remain an honorable designation, signifying someone who espouses and presents the Christian faith. Even with the plethora of today’s electronic gimmickry, preaching continues to be the primary means by which Christianity is kept before those who claim to profess it, those who wish to fine tune it, and those in need of hearing its demands and promises. The late William Barclay (that wonderful old Scotsman) suggested that four essential aspects of preaching are captured Greek in words: kerygma, didiche, paraklesis and homilia. To me, these terms suggest the analogy of a tree; a Preaching Tree with its roots, trunk, blossoms and fruit of the Gospel message.
Professor Wildman holds onto the designation, preacher, and preaches under the shading, luxurious branches of such a preaching tree.
In all, it is a happy, welcome moment to have the pleasure to welcome Professor Wildman’s sermons, in print. Herein he does challenge us to know and speak the truth, or what truth we know to speak. Herein he does wrestle with the traditions within the Great Tradition, the various days within the great and lasting Day of God. Herein he does school us in the varieties of sermon design, of forms in rhetoric, many of which can themselves be used in other sermons, by different preachers in different voices (and, of course, novel content, with quotations and citations as necessary). Herein he does carry us into ranges of Holy Scripture, some familiar and some less, against the backdrop of seasonal and lectionary readings. Herein, with vigor, Wildman announces the Gospel of the God Who Is: “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.”
Preface
Sermons may never hope to capture the reality or the richness of God. A series of sermons may attempt to draw out balancing insights, but a single sermon must be one sided if its point is not to be lost in the concept-mocking richness and distinction-defying simplicity of the divine life. It follows that the preacher must resist the temptation to try to say everything, out of respect for the limitations of language and competence. Since my faith is fixed upon the God beyond God—that is, on the ultimate reality beyond all beings, including beyond all divine beings, indeed beyond all Being—I am particularly hard pressed by limitations of language and competence. This book represents an attempt to grapple with this profound challenge, without meekly (and probably wisely) surrendering to silence. In these sermons, fragment by fragment, angle by angle, I attempt kaleidoscopically to conjure the mystery of life, the purity of grace, the bliss of surrender, and the God beyond God. To me, this is the most profound part of Christianity and it resonates with profound insights of other wisdom traditions.
The season of my homiletical journey covered in these sermons began in September 1993 when I transitioned from parish ministry into the very different world of seminary teaching. In my first month of teaching at Boston University’s School of Theology, I accepted an invitation to preach at the seminary’s service of worship in Marsh Chapel. I announced my radical mystical theology with a sermon titled “God Is . . . Holy Mystery.” A year later—with preaching having become an uncommon adventure—I preached on the flip side of that coin with “God Is . . . Friend.” From that time for several years, I occasionally preached on facets of divine reality, beginning the title of each sermon with “God is . . .”—thus the title of this book.
Many of these sermons were difficult and demanding for hearers. I abandoned my long-standing pattern of using concrete illustrations, exegeses of Scripture readings, a smattering of funny stories, “Peanuts” cartoons, and feel-good one liners, which help to lighten the burden of listening. Instead of my usual extemporizing, I followed a text to optimize control over my language. Instead of moving around and engaging my listeners, I stayed fixed in the pulpit and limited movement to hands and face. I showed no mercy to my listeners! Those present were sometimes faced with strange theological reflection and mysterious poetic images. But they always had a text available for consulting afterwards.
These are not sermons for beginners in the journey of faith, nor sermons I could have preached in the churches to which I have ministered. They were sermons for a place dedicated to striving after intellectual and spiritual maturity, or at least poor excuses for such sermons. As my friend and former colleague Tony Campbell said of one of them, “It would not fly outside these walls, brother . . . but it did fly in here.”
We should be thankful that there are pulpits where we can strive after expression of our deepest and hardest thoughts about ultimate reality; places where each of us can preach to one another, unencumbered by the all-too-real constraints of much parish preaching; places where we can bring our longing for understanding and wholeness and lay it unabashedly upon the altar.
Marsh Chapel’s preachers and Boston University School of Theology’s community of worshippers has been that for me. I treasure that distinctive pulpit, with its harsh delights and never-ending stream of odd-ball occupants. I urge seminary students to treasure it also. They should treasure it while they can, for when in due course they leave the seminary haven for the joys and frustrations of preaching and listening to sermons in churches, they will remember, perhaps with ambivalent amazement, that many of the sermons preached in their seminary would not fly outside its walls, whether because they were difficult or bad or both—and maybe they will even long to be in such an adventurous place once again.
The Sermons
All readings are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
God Is . . . Holy Mystery
Marsh Chapel, Boston University, Seminary Worship Service, September 30, 1993
Readings: Job 8:20–9:20; Revelation 19:11–21
Text: “He would crush me with a storm” (Job 8:17a)
God Is . . . Friend
Marsh Chapel, Boston University, Seminary Worship Service, October 20, 1994
Readings: Isaiah 52:13–53:12; Psalm 35; Mark 10:35–45
Text: “I went about mourning as though for my friend” (Psalms 35:14a)
God Is . . . Hope
Marsh Chapel, Boston University, Seminary Worship Service, February 1, 1996
Readings: Isaiah 51:1–11; Romans 8:18–25
Text: “And sorrow and sighing will flee away” (Isaiah 51:11e)
God Is . . . Monarch
Marsh Chapel, Boston University, Seminary Alumni Reunion Service, May 17, 1997
Reading: 1 Samuel 8:1–22