LITMIR.BIZ

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a bishop. I attached myself to him as a college student and later as a seminarian. He was insightful, polished, full of knowledge and inspiration. His preaching was charged with contemporary relevance. He was astute to the tenor of the times, and his involvement as an activist was a mirror on the word he proclaimed. Actually, he taught me the only “formal” course I ever took in preaching, and he also taught black theology at Duke University Divinity School.

      In him was a distillation of African Methodism. This theological tradition was populated with names I had never heard. Names like Richard Allen, Daniel Payne, Henry Turner, Reverdy Ransom. Cousin represented the tradition of preaching that was bursting forth under the nomenclature of black theology. Indeed, from the outset black theology was the essence of reading the scriptures through the interpretive lens of the African American pulpit.

      The fingerprints of the black church that are all over the seminal statements coming from the National Committee of Negro Churchmen (later National Committee of Black Churchmen) were antecedently on him. This theology had roots that went deep into the soil and soul of the black independent church movement of the 1900s. It was tethered to the activism that birthed the church’s investment in abolition, emancipation, and the twentieth-century struggle for social justice. This preaching oozed with the passions (yea, the harmonies) of liberty, and was wedded to the strong and unapologetic call for conversion. Later I learned that this synthesis was at the very root of the faith into which I was born and from which I drew natal nurture.

      A. W. Lawson influenced me as the quintessential churchman, whom I watched preach for the nurture, building, development, and molding of a congregation and a connectional church (the United Holy Church of America). I spent five years under his tutelage following the completion of my MDiv at Duke. A man full of wisdom, he exegeted within the tension of the worlds converging inside him. But more, he had a keen sense for where the church was being carried by the Spirit. A bishop in the United Holy Church of America with uncommon prescience, his intention was to join the power of the pulpit to a theology of the Spirit that moved it beyond the constrictions of fundamentalism and experiential dogmatism.

Bishop Lawson possessed uncommon theological sense for reading out what was given in the text to the destination embodied in living, breathing Christian communities. He was able to make doctrine come to life in a manner that was neither shallow nor denominationally limited. He stood in a tradition of great but lesser known preachers like H. L. Fisher, J. D. Diggs, G. J. Branch, E. B. Nichols, and J. W. Houston.2 While being “the theologian” of the United Holy Church, he was also the teacher and mentor for a vast number of young preachers in Durham and from various church traditions in eastern North Carolina. The influence remains strong within churches that were influenced by these pastors who still credit him for their initial studies, and the grounding he supplied in the practical wisdom (phronesis) that gives guidance and stability to the church.

      It was from serving as his assistant that I was introduced to the wonderful discipline of lectio continua. We would select a book from which to preach and listen to what the writer had to say for a sustained period. Normally we preached from the Old Testament in the fall (an extended Advent), the gospels from the first of the year (Epiphany and Lent), and from an epistle following Easter (Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time). It is from this seminal, life-giving, mutual interpenetration between the word and the life of God’s people that good preaching emerges. This is the humus of pulpit theology that must remain as the anchor of the church, and the vital interlocutor for all other discourses that claim to do any reasoning about God.

      When I went to the administrative track I felt free to teach what was in my heart. I never stopped preaching regularly for any significant period of time. First I taught an elective course in preaching. It was fun, and it seemed to go well. Eventually I taught the required course, to fill some gaps in coverage. That turned into an even more exciting venture as well.

      Nearly twenty-five years later I have come back to the point suggested by the sage C. Eric Lincoln. Along the way there have been numerous points in the pilgrimage that have proved essential for the task. Without these stations I could scarcely give an account that would be clear to me or intelligible to anyone else. It is only in the crucible of preaching with regularity, and teaching in the fields listed above, that enough mist has lifted to understand and talk about this challenging work. And there is every hope to understand it even better bye and bye.

      The distant background for my reflection on preaching (which informs my teaching) is the emergence of the black theology project in the second half of the twentieth century. There one can see the beginning stages of theology as an academic project rooted in the life of the church. It is a stage at which the church “lifts the voices” of those who do its reflective work and keeps them in a dialogue of mutual accountability. To be sure, this is not a moment without parallel in the long history of the church. But it is a moment deserving special notice in the American church.

      This moment is one in which the church demanded to be heard—not just the church whose structures overlapped with those of the state, not only the church whose priests were approved by the king, but the church of former slaves, sharecroppers, and wage earners. Official theological tomes were rejected where they did not heed the God of the oppressed, follow the Lord who preached good news to the poor, and walk in the Spirit who gives liberty. The norm that emerged was the tension that required that if the voice of the academy deserves to be heard, it must see the interests of suffering humanity and hear from those who proclaim good news to the poor at every point. My quest as a preacher, a teacher of preaching, and a homiletical theologian is to privilege the tension as the methodological starting point and set it at the center of the practice of preaching as theological practice.

      Essentially the method of black theology in its inception is what Henry Mitchell reiterated in Black Preaching. With an explicit interest in preaching, he looked at the thought of African American preachers, as Benjamin Mays did previously in his classic study, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Thought. The same trajectory is followed for the sake of doing ethics in Peter Paris’ The Social Teachings of the Black Churches. In other words, for groundbreaking work in systematics, preaching, and ethics there is a return to the same source. Close attention was given to how the African American Church (with the pulpit at the center) read the bible and reflected on the meaning of its life in God.

      Knowledge of God from the scriptures—refracted through the experience of oppression, suffering, and triumph—was the standpoint in judgment from which to critique the formal theologies, especially those that served the ends of bondage rather than liberation. This work was not done outside of conversation with others doing theology, especially those of like mind. But discriminating taste was used to fashion a norm by which to know what was “a trick of the devil” under the guise of theology.

      I am reminded here of what Howard Thurman said of his grandmother, who could not read herself, but would not allow him to read from Paul. In her judgment the slave-owners construction of texts instructing slaves to obey their masters was not consistent with the God she had come to know. Indeed, she was so bold as to question whether any such passage was in the bible at all.

      Along with the skill for how to interpret the scriptures is the “sense for how to preach.” The question is how to deliver the word so that it has life and power. But alas, this sense for how to preach is not separable from how to read the scriptures. Reading and interpreting the scriptures for the sake of preaching is more than a technical exercise in exegesis.

One might even go so far as to employ the term coined in some circles as “interpretating the bible.”3 That is the employment of the “sanctified imagination” in the acts of reading, meditating, seeing into, and “chewing the scroll.” It is “tasting to see,” it is “seeing the voice,” it is being “touched by the fire” of the word. The sense here is that one must see and feel something before having anything to say that is worth hearing. The word is no dead letter; it is spirit and life. One could even hear the old preachers say at a point in the sermon, “I see something here.” Or, they would call upon a character from the scriptures as a witness—e.g., “Come here John, and tell me what you see.”

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