Christmas Day: 25 December 2011

The last time Christmas Day fell on a Sunday was 2008. In that year, John H. Barden suggested to readers of Homily Service that they should take a minimalist approach to the sermon.

With Christmas falling on a Sunday this year, those of us who come from traditions that don’t normally have Christmas Day services have both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is to celebrate in a creative way a day that is normally given over to family gatherings, unwrapping of presents, and television watching. The challenge is to hold the attention of a congregation that is unaccustomed to attending worship on what is often, strangely, considered a family holiday, rather than a religious holiday. With that said, this is not the time to make some theological point or reveal the insights of your latest research on Christology... It is a time for playfulness and awe and wonder and poetry. Instead of reading the Isaiah text, have a soloist sing the aria “How Beautiful Are the Feet,” from Handel’s Messiah, or have the choir sing the Bach hymn “Break Forth O Beauteous Heavenly Light” (found in most hymnals)... If you are in a tradition that doesn’t require a homily, read the Hebrews text and the prologue to John and proceed directly with the powerful liturgy of the Lord’s table.

Are you planning to preach on Christmas Day?

Homily Service vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 49-50.

John H. Barden is a Presbyterian pastor serving as the director of admissions at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas. He is the author of ‘Postle Jack Tales.

Christmas Eve: 24 December 2011

One of the most inspirational Christmas Eve stories in western history is the account of the peace which broke out in the no-man’s-land between the lines of battle during the First World War on Christmas Eve of 1914. In 2008, Fritz West used the “Serving the Word” section of Homily Service to help readers reflect upon the Christmas Eve scripture lessons as illustrated by this historic subversion of human power.

The passage from Isaiah hopes that the newly born heir to the throne of Judah will rule with the justice of God. The Gospel passage speaks of both Caesar Augustus, the king of Rome, and Jesus, the king of kings. Caesar Augustus initiated the Pax Romana, which brought the Roman Empire centuries of relative peace; a period without serious unrest. Jesus Christ initiated the peaceable kingdom, reconciling rather than repressive, the kingdom that has no end.

We find the same tension on the battlefield of the First World War. The events of Christmas 1914 alarmed the generals. This was no way to fight a war... How could the generals fulfill their military objectives with their men out of the trenches playing soccer with the enemy? Next year, as Christmas approached in 1915, they took decisive action. Strict orders came down the chain of command: “Stay in your trenches. Anyone caught fraternizing with the enemy will be shot!” And so the peace of the earthly kings reigned once again, similar to the Pax Romana of Caesar Augustus - that forced Jesus’s family to go to Bethlehem to be registered by the Roman authorities. Control! Oppression! Power!

As preachers, pastors and liturgists, we are persons who hold no small degree of power over the worship lives of congregations. Additionally, contemporary disagreements over the character of Christian worship has often been characterized as “Worship Wars.”

What would it look like if the people of God decided to declare a truce between the competing “sides” in the current conflict over worship? Would you, as one of the generals, object?

Homily Service vol. 42, no. 1, p. 56.

Fritz West is pastor of St. John’s United Church of Christ in Fountain City, Wisconsin. He is author of Scripture and Memory: Te Hermeneutic of the Three-Year Lectionaries, and serves as the presiding member of the Association for Reformed & Liturgical Worship.

The Fourth Sunday of Advent, 18 December 1022

The stained-glass windows in the sanctuary at Urbana First United Methodist church portray successive scenes from the life of Christ, beginning with his birth and ending with the Apocalyptic image of Christ enthroned as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. One of the functions of the season of Advent is to give christians time to contemplate the mystery of God’s sovereign self choosing the humiliation of becoming incarnate in the most helpless of all creatures: a socially marginalized infant.

In 2008, Lucy Bregman invited readers of Homily Service to join her in reflecting upon the paradox of power inherent in the incarnation.

The power of Jesus the king will be of an utterly different kind from Herod’s - but he will still be a world-ruler as well as world-savior. Spiritual power is real power, in other words. Even though the only crown Jesus ever literally wore was the crown of thorns, he is still eternal king.

This strand of Jesus’ identity fell under such a heavy weight of criticism in the last century, it may be difficult for us to retrieve. For Bonhoeffer, “God is weak in the world,” and all images of power, sovereignty, and divine rule are suspect. “We should not worship the executioner,” cried Dorothy Söelle, meaning any God who mimics the power of the state of life and death. Were these views to hold sway, “Jesus as king” should be utterly discarded. “Spiritual power” becomes a kind of oxymoron.

But it is not. The Gospels (and the Buddhist legend) are not as simple as this. There are different kinds of power; there is some link between divine rule and that of humans. This fact creates a choice between two really different paths, while the total rejection of all kingship language makes this choice impossible to conceptualize at all.

As a preacher, how do you find ways to communicate the paradox of God's ultimately non-coercive power?

Homily Service, 14 December 2008, vol. 42 issue 1, p.38.
Lucy Bregman, professor of religion at Temple University, is the author of several books including Death and Dying. Spirituality and Religions. She is a member of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Norwood, Pennsylvania.

Naming the Monster

In the current issue of Liturgy, dealing with the topic of liturgy in times of crisis, Carol Norén offers a discussion of the homily and its functions within the larger context of crisis-occasion liturgies. As her fine article considers various sorts of crises: personal, local, national and global, she opines that an essential task of the preacher is the accurate naming of the crisis at hand.

Joseph Jeter makes some suggestions for the structure of the crisis sermon and the tasks that must be accomplished through it, but Jeter’s primary focus is homiletical, not liturgical. His first suggestion is that the preacher ‘‘name the monster,’’ that is, acknowledge the crisis in which worshipers find them- selves.11 He harkens to the ancient belief that naming something gives one power over it, such as in Genesis 32 when Jacob tries to force the angel to reveal his name. Acknowledging the crisis may not be as easy and straight- forward as it sounds; it can require theological discernment and courage to name the monster accurately. For instance, American troops were recently massacred in Afghanistan, allegedly in response to a Christian fundamental- ist pastor in Florida burning a copy of the Koran on March 20, 2011.12 How does a pastor speak about this in a crisis service, and name the monster? Should the spotlight be on the troops, the terrorists, religious intolerance in the United States and Afghanistan, or U.S. foreign policy? Homiletically speaking, one may have to lance the boil—a painful act—before healing can begin.

The current social landscape in the United States is characterized by an extreme degree of polarization, which exists, in many cases, even within the community of faith. This polarization makes it difficult to “name the monster” in ways that do not end up alienating half of those assembled to worship. How should preachers address the difficulty of “naming” in congregations of severely mixed opinion?

“Crisis Preaching and Corporate Worship” Liturgy, vol. 27, no. 1, p. 48.

Carol M. Norén is a United Methodist minister, and the Wesley W. Nelson Professor of Homiletics at North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois.

Third Sunday of Advent, December 11, 2011

Themes of return and rebuilding are foremost in the mind of many American Christian leaders, as they seek to address the church’s precipitous loss of status in recent decades. In 2008, Lucy Bregman addressed the pitfalls that such themes can hold, when they are examined with naiveté.

First, because with anything that is ‘‘re-,’’ the image of a glorious past haunts the whole project. Once Jerusalem was intact and mighty, but now it is a ruin, a dismal reminder of what once was. There is something innately depressing about ruined, abandoned structures. The larger and grander they once were, the more their ruins will serve to mock and belittle any recent efforts to build modest but livable shelter. Transfer this to the allegorical ‘‘rebuilding’’ of the church, and we find nostalgia for the glorious age of faith, when giant cathedrals were filled with worshippers, when Christian faith and values dominated everyone’s lives. Guided by this misleading idealized picture, we miss the tale of what things were really like, and what really went wrong. We also miss the value of current accomplishments.
Second and related to this, what does get restored can be a caricature of what was once a complex reality. One Louisiana resident complained that New Orleans post-Katrina was likely to turn into ‘‘a theme park version of itself.’’ We can find numerous examples of this where ‘‘the restored New Testament Church’’ is actually ‘‘the nineteenth-century frontier American edition’’ of the church, rather than anything approaching the historical actuality of the first Christian century.

Homily Service, 14 December 2008, vol. 42 issue 1, p.28.
Lucy Bregman, professor of religion at Temple University, is the author of several books including Death and Dying. Spirituality and Religions. She is a member of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Norwood, Pennsylvania.