The shape of full-gospel preaching.

Several questions lingered at the end of the first lecture. How do we listen attentively to the wild, untamable text in light of Jesus, the Word? How does the Bible as sacrament of the "Word of God" take on flesh among us? How do we hear the scattered voices with the counterspeech of God in our ears? How can full-gospel preaching be as tangible as the taste of bread in our mouths, as life-giving as water?

Full-gospel preaching shapes a peculiar community

Biblical preaching is, in many ways, a word for insiders. It is a word passed down over centuries of time within communities of faith, as St. Paul wrote: "For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you...." This particular word is not written on the mountains and the hills or upon the collective subconscious. Indeed, we often divide the first eleven chapters of Genesis from all that follows: Babel ends the "primitive history" of creation and flood shared by people of many religious traditions. The story of a particular revelation begins after the people have been scattered, when God calls Abraham and Sarah. Babel ends in confusion and scattering because no one can understand the other. Pentecost gathers the scattered people from many nations and reshapes them into a new community where each one hears and understands, even though their language is not the same. From beginning to end, the biblical story is a community-forming story.

Full-gospel preaching as shared story

When the people crossed over into the promised land, Joshua commanded people to carry stones from the river to set up at Gilgal. So when their children asked in days to come, "What do these stones mean?" they could tell their children about the day the people of Israel crossed over the Jordan on dry ground, about the time God delivered their ancestors who were slaves in Egypt, about Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and all their kin. These stories not only made for good listening around the fire, they also shaped a peculiar people. The telling of stories is no small thing, especially in a time such as ours when generations no longer live in the same place and shared stories have become rare.

Stephen Dunn speaks of this longing for stories in his poem "At the Smithville Methodist Church." The parents in the poem have sent their little daughter off to Vacation Bible School. "It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week," the father says, "but when she came home with the 'Jesus saves' button, we knew what art was up, what ancient craft." (1) This father seems to be a good person. He and his wife want good things for their daughter. I know these people, even though I don't know their names. They teach their children to be fair; they sing songs like "You can get good milk from a brown-skinned cow, The color of your skin doesn't matter anyhow. Ho, ho, ho! Can't you see? The color of your skin doesn't matter to me." But they had long ago ceased to believe in anything or anyone as specific as God or Jesus. They are modern people, holding out for "random acts of kindness." After a few days of hearing his daughter sing and tell stories, the father admits, "Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes. You can't say to your child: 'Evolution loves you.' The story stinks of extinction and nothing exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have a wonderful story for my child. And she was beaming." (2)

He didn't have a story for himself either.

It may be that people in our congregations don't know the biblical stories because we haven't told the stories often enough. If we don't know where else to start, we might start with the human drama of Old Testament stories, gathering people in the sanctuary around the fire. Even those who aren't familiar with the Bible can see their own lives reflected in these very human stories...

* the pain of Abraham and Sarah, fearing that God's promise to them was null and void: Where have we given up on the promises of God?

* the pathos of Hagar and Ishmael sent out into the wilderness by Abraham and Sarah: How is the racism of this story played out in our own country?

* the anguish of Esau standing beside his dying father: "Is there no blessing left for me? Has God only one blessing?" Have you felt that way within your own family?

* the power of jealousy among siblings so tangible in the stories of Joseph and his brothers--the audacity of his self-centered dreams, the deception of his brothers, the unfathomable forgiveness when they are all reunited: What has jealousy provoked within our families or our congregation? Have we ever experienced such unearned forgiveness?

* the boundary crossing of the three women at the river: the Egyptian princess, the Hebrew mother and her daughter, and the baby in the basket: What would it mean for women to conspire across the lines of race and class?

* the strong pull of sexual desire as David looks out from his balcony at Bathsheba: Do we ever speak about the power of such strong sexual feelings?

* the poignant and passionate love between David and Jonathan, perhaps the most beautiful story of love and commitment in the Bible: Have we revisited that story since second grade?

There are many, many more. Perhaps preachers can reserve a block of Sundays during Ordinary Time to tell these moving human stories. Perhaps the month of September could be a storytelling time for all ages to listen together in the sanctuary. Perhaps the Sundays of autumn could tell the great stories of the faith as a way of leading up to Jesus' birth so that people understand more deeply the stories that shaped Jesus. The untamable texts are crammed with stories for people who don' t have any--and for those who haven' t heard them in a long time.

Full-gospel preaching as a conversational circle

But the Bible is more than a book of human stories. It's also a book of poems and liturgies, letters and theologies. It is a collection that often portrays a world very different from the one in which we live. Many things in the Bible are difficult to understand. What does the Bible say? Listen: It doesn't say anything. The Bible doesn't talk. As Krister Stendahl reminds us, "The Church and the Scriptures live by interpretation, not repristination. Faithful interpretation is faith-filled creativity." (3)

The Bible itself has given us clues for interpretation. Because the various books are all bound together in one tidy volume with chapters and verses, it' s easy to forget that these books were written over many centuries. Over time, texts responded to other texts. Favorite texts especially were expanded. Sometimes, different versions of the same story were left standing side by side. We are given many glimpses of how biblical writers interpreted and reinterpreted the texts, including how New Testament writers related to Pentateuch and prophets.

Mary Boys encourages Christian interpreters to find an alternative to the supercessionary patterns that have lead people to believe that the "New" Testament has replaced the "Old." Rather than a straight line leading from Old to New, Boys invites us into a "conversational circle" between the testaments: "At times this may mean using the Old (First) Testament for clarification; on other occasions, it may mean drawing upon its images or using it to bring out a particularly important dimension of God's self-revelation." (4)

Such a conversational circle offers clues for interpreting biblical texts in our own time. Here, it's helpful to remember the words of Jesus in Matthew 13. After telling several parables, he turns to his disciples and asks them, "Have you understood all this?" They answered, "Yes." Then Jesus said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old" (Matt 13:51-52). We can hear both old and new if we listen to the ongoing conversation between First and Second Testaments, as well as what is new in our own time of history. These conversations may help us learn what it means to be faithful scribes.

One example of this interpretive model is the conversation between Acts chapter 8 and Isaiah 56. Both of these chapters appear in the lectionary, but we never hear the full text from Isaiah. (You can tell by the commas: Isaiah 56:1 [comma] 6-8. It might be fun sometime to preach a sermon series on the verses in the commas!) In the lectionary, Isaiah 56 is paired with Matthew's story about the feisty Canaanite woman who insists that Jesus heal her daughter--"even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table." Because she is a foreigner, the portion of Isaiah 56 about foreigners is read. This is what's left out, the verses in the comma:

   ... and do not let the eunuch say,
   "I am just a dry tree."
   For thus says the Lord:
   To eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
   who choose the things that please me
   and hold fast my covenant,
   I will give in my house and within my walls,
   a monument and a name
   better than sons or daughters;
   I will give them an everlasting name
   that shall not be cut off. (Isa 56:3-5)

How could Isaiah say such a thing to eunuchs? Surely he knew the holiness code as written in Deuteronomy: "No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord" (Deut 23:1). Why would Isaiah say this after the exile, when the survival of the remnant people was at stake? when begetting children would have been a priority? when purity and boundaries seemed critically important? In just such a time, the prophet wrote these words--foreigners and eunuchs would be welcome in the household of the Lord. Could it be that the Spirit of God didn't wait until Jesus picked up the scroll of Isaiah in the temple? The Spirit hovered over the text and over the writer, bringing forth a different word, a word that overturned the exclusionary word.

Would such a thing ever be true? Would there be a time when foreigners and eunuchs would be not only welcome but given a name "better than sons or daughters"? Luke believed that time had come when he wrote the book of Acts. Surely it cannot be happenstance that Acts 8 tells the story of an Ethiopian eunuch, bringing the two categories of Isaiah 56 together in this one person. Luke is steeped in the writings of Isaiah from that day in Nazareth when Jesus read from Isaiah's scroll to this day on the desert road when an Ethiopian eunuch is reading from Isaiah 53: "About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or someone else?" It was a good question, a question Isaiah never answered. But Philip answers anyway: "starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus." But Jesus wasn't in the text! We believe Philip was continuing the work Jesus began on the Emmaus road, opening and interpreting the scriptures.

Yet, the church has had problems with this story--primarily because there seemed a need to affirm Cornelius as the first Gentile convert, and that story doesn't come until chapter 10. Was it because the Ethiopian was an African man, a dark-skinned man, and Cornelius was an Italian cohort? More than one of the early fathers claimed that at his baptism, the Ethiopian was made white! (5) Some protested because the Ethiopian made no profession of faith before baptism (though such a profession was part of some of the ancient manuscripts).

Or was the problem that this Ethiopian was also a eunuch--a sexual misfit, a high official in the court of the queen, but clearly prohibited from entering the assembly of the Lord? As they traveled along, suddenly they came to some water. "What is to keep me from being baptized?" the eunuch asked. "Everything!" we might shout. The words written down, the fear in our bones, the need to limit God' s household to "our own kind." Yet here was water--water on a desert road. Both of them went down into the water, splashing in the scroll of Isaiah.

What are the implications of such a model for us as preachers? for us as teachers as we embark on the current study on homosexuality within the ELCA? Can we open up a hermeneutical space where similitude is imagined and concrete experience helps us interpret biblical texts? (6) The conversation between Isaiah 56 and Acts 8 provides a model for working with Scripture that can be more beneficial to us than current debates over verses in Leviticus, Romans, and Corinthians. We have reached an exegetical impasse. How many times can we exegete malakoi and arsenokoitai? Isaiah and Acts point our way to seeing that the words written down invite us to see more than the words written down! It happened when Second Isaiah heard a word of newness out of exile. It happened when Philip preached the good news of Jesus beginning with Isaiah--though Jesus' name was not in the text. The Spirit keeps hovering over the lingering text, calling us to roads we'd never imagined!

Full-gospel preaching looks for clues in the shape of the canon

Preachers in our time have been invited to see the whole canon as it stands. The early days of historical-critical biblical studies moved away from seeing the canon as a whole and began to dismantle it. Many of us spent time in seminary isolating the strands of J, E, P, and D in the Pentateuch and identifying the Q source in the Synoptic Gospels. We traced redactors' work with different colored highlighters through the book of Genesis, though we weren't quite sure what to do with this knowledge in our first parish! Much of this historical-critical work has been lifegiving to biblical texts and to listeners. But we know there were also times when preachers took the biblical text away from people in the name of higher criticism. In recent years such dismantling of the text has been called into question even as we acknowledge that there is no way to read the texts as our ancestors did.

It's a wonderful time to be a preacher, for in many ways the texts have been returned to us. The wild, untamable canon and the intricate textures of texts have been given back to us after years of being dissected. Biblical scholars have taken us deep into the texture of the texts using rhetorical criticism. Voices of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians have heard things in the texts that we had missed. Feminists and womanists have unearthed stories that had been completely disregarded. We now ask not only, What is the history of this text? or How did redactors reshape this text? but also, What does it mean that this text is here at this place in the canon?

Two texts, one from 2 Kings and another from John 8, give examples of such canonical clues.

* 2 Kings 4: War interrupted by shalom. This chapter is part of the Elijah-Elisha cycle of stories. Two of the stories in 2 Kings 4 clearly parallel earlier tales told about the prophet Elijah: the never-ending supply of oil and a dead boy brought to life by what appears to be artificial respiration. No doubt many redactors took a hand in shaping this chapter from stories in the oral tradition. But we miss a great deal if we don't pay attention to where this chapter now stands within the canon. Chapter 3 ends with the king of Moab sacrificing his firstborn son, desperate, as the battle turned against him. Chapter 5 tells the story of Naaman the Syrian warrior. Chapter 4 interrupts the cycle of never-ending war with stories of wholeness and shalom: (1) a never-ending supply of oil for the repayment of debts; (2) a mother who insists on life for her child (and gets Elisha, the holy man, to come down from his mountain); (3) poisoned stew made good; (4) barley loaves to feed a hundred with some left over (echoed later in the Gospel of John).

The longest and most detailed story in this chapter is the story of the Shunammite woman persisting to save the life of her son. In Jewish congregations this story is the haf-tarah reading alongside the sacrifice of Isaac. (7) Could this story be a midrash on that story? A mother's insistence on God's prophet saving her son from death filling Sarah's absence in the earlier story on Mt. Moriah? How might this canonical interruption speak to the unending cycle of holy war in our world today?

* John 8: A tensive conversation between the center and the margins. Every year we Lutherans hear a portion of John 8 as the Gospel text for Reformation Sunday: "If you continue in my word," says Jesus, "you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.... If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed" (Jn 8:31-32). What sort of truth is this truth that sets us free? For a long time the first verses of John 8 weren't even there! They were in the footnotes, sometimes in brackets or italics. Yet the story remained and now stands within the canon in the same chapter as the Reformation Gospel. What might a conversation between these two texts tell us about the truth that sets us free?

The religious leaders bring to Jesus a woman caught in the very act of adultery. (Evidently, the man--who must also have been caught in the very act--got away!) The law of Moses is on the accusers' side: it was written down. She should be stoned to death.

Jesus is silent. He bends down within the vicious circle and writes on the ground. Did he write the truth? Did he name the sins of those in the circle? "Whoever is without sin throw a stone at her," he said. Then he bent down again.

You will know the truth and the truth will bend low, entering the world of those accused. You will know the truth and the truth may contradict what is written down. You will know the truth and the truth does not condemn but transforms women and men for life abundant. Truth looks different when we hear the Reformation Gospel in conversation with this story from the margins. Thankfully, the canon has placed both stories within the same chapter of John' s Gospel, begging us to pay attention.

Full-gospel preaching is present tense

Interpretation isn't only a past-tense enterprise, seeking to know what the text meant long ago. We recall the question Michael Fishbane brings to the text: "To what does this matter compare?" Answering that question "opens a hermeneutical space in which similitude can be imagined." (8) Our own experiences and the situation of our time give concreteness to the text as living word.

One of the most compelling examples of this kind of present-tense preaching was heard in Chicago in November, 2002, at the installation of Bishop Mark Hanson. Pastor Heidi Neumark looked at the city of Jerusalem laid waste, its temple in ruins, most of its citizens taken into exile. "To what does this compare?" she asked.

The world-renowned city that seemed invincible-attacked and capsized by terror. Towers collapsed in rubble, bronze temple pillars broken into pieces--the glorious architectural feat and economic seat in the great city, crashed and burning. Jerusalem 587--New York 9/11

Survivors in exile from all that was expected and secure ... displaced people without foothold or language, wondering where is the Word that failed to stay this chaos--as tons of paper and all the words scatter and dissolve in ash. We don't even have the alphabet. Jerusalem 587--New York 9/11 (9)

Neumark opened up a hermeneutical space in which similarity could be imagined. The text is no longer "back there" or "out there," but here and now. So, too, she brought our present situation to the ravaged city of Jerusalem and to those who were left behind in the city:

The captain of the guard left some of the poorest people of the land to be vinedressers and tillers of the soil.... So there, in what was considered the waste places of Jerusalem, you had a blend of North Dakota and the South Bronx all in one. A first-call delight! (10)

Neumark was doing something far deeper than making Isaiah' s text"relevant" to the congregation. She helped the congregation see Jerusalem by bringing to the text our present situation. The struggling farmers of North Dakota and people from the poorest neighborhoods of the South Bronx are brought into the text. We hear the text itself in fuller and more concrete ways.

Full-gospel preaching as counterspeech

Such preaching could not happen without paying close attention to both the Scripture text and the community text. As we listen carefully to both texts, we will often hear the dissonance between the text's "provocative alternatives" (11) and the texts of this world. Walter Brueggemann calls such preaching "counterspeech." (12) It is like the preaching of Jeremiah and Isaiah who see the inequities of the marketplace and dare to name them aloud. It is like the anointed preaching of Jesus in Nazareth bringing good news to the poor and release to the captives, never afraid to call attention to where this vision falls short.

Such preaching shapes a community that practices a different way of life, people shaped by Pentecost. What sort of faith community comes into being at Pentecost? Acts 2 begins in fear: the doors were locked--for fear of the authorities, both religious and Roman. A locksmith cannot change things; a rush of wind is needed to break through the door and bring these dry bones to life. The Spirit descends like tongues of fire upon all people: women and men, old and young, even upon those at the very bottom, maidservants and menservants. The confusion of Babel is transformed:

How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites and the residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the part of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs--in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power. (Acts 2:8-11)

That glorious list of hard-to-pronounce places is Luke' s attempt to gather up all the nations, not scattered in confusion but reshaped into a community of understanding. Then, what comes next? Biblical preaching! In the power of the Spirit, Peter stands up to preach in the public square. His results are the hope of every preacher: three thousand people were baptized that very day! But that's not the end of the story. To know what kind of community is shaped on Pentecost we have to read all the way to the end of the chapter:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. (Acts 2:44-47)

Mercy and manna! Manna and mercy! Wind and fire and bread on the table. Fullgospel preaching must speak of both manna and mercy, pointing to God's provocative alternatives rather than the priorities of the world.

But how do we preach these provocative alternatives? Imagine 116 people gathered on Sunday morning in First Lutheran Church. What sort of counterspeech does the preacher bring? The preacher looks out at the 116 faces. Grounded in the prophetic tradition and attuned to socioeconomic analysis taught in seminary, she preaches about the systemic evils of racism, sexism, and classism. He names the hegemonic oppression of white, male, patriarchal domination. She points out our captivity to global consumer capitalism. What he says may be true. What she says is backed up by the data. But it's too overwhelming! People jot down notes on their bulletins ... then find them folded up in pocket or purse two months later and feel guilty that they haven't done a thing.

Sometimes, we preach on a stage far bigger than the sanctuary. The people sitting there don't know what to do about these huge systems. The answer is not to be silent or to be complacent about evil but to find words fitting for the stage on which people live their lives.

* Connect back to memories of September 11--the commitment people expressed for setting different priorities: more time with family, more time for prayer, attentiveness to religious questions, no more business as usual. What has happened to that resolve to live in a different way? Why is it so hard?

* Help people practice provocative alternatives. Learn to talk about checkbooks and credit card bills, about luxuries and necessities. The book Practicing Our Faith can be a helpful resource. (13) As the title suggests, we need to practice our faith, because God's provocative alternatives don't come naturally.

* Shape congregational life in ways that take economics seriously. Do we spend money only on ourselves? Do we remember the whole Pentecost story, including how the chapter ends?

Preaching God's provocative alternatives has the power to shape and reshape our lives as individuals and our corporate life as Christian congregations. But such preaching needs to be down to earth, where people live their daily lives.

Full-gospel preaching in the public square

Preaching that shapes and reshapes individuals and congregations does not remain inside the church walls. This was surely true of most preaching in the Bible--it took place outside the sanctuary: Isaiah in the courts of the king, Jonah on the streets of Nineveh, Jesus on the hillside or by the sea, Paul on the areopagus in Athens.

As noted earlier, biblical preaching in the Babel of this country presents unique challenges. It's difficult not only because of the secularization of America but also because of the Americanization of Christianity. God is not completely absent from the public square, but the God who lives there seems peculiarly American. It' s hard to get a full-gospel word in edgewise.

But we must try. We are called to speak not only as open-minded people, as liberal or progressive people, as justice-seeking people, but as people of God. As Christian people: "Dear Senator, As a Christian I'm deeply concerned about the detention of children who entered this country as undocumented people. They remain in prison, often without legal counsel, even though they have done nothing wrong."

We need to be concerned with both manna and mercy, asking the kind of theological questions the biblical prophets often asked in the public square--questions such as:

* Why is this child starving?

* Why do we spend more to imprison youth than to educate them?

* Why is that man sleeping in a cardboard box on the street?

* Why are wealthy corporate farms being subsidized while family farmers are forced to go under?

Preaching in the public square can take many forms. We might risk preaching on the streets like seminary students in downtown Atlanta. We might follow the Stations of the Cross in public as Pax Christi does every Good Friday, walking across busy 42nd Street in Manhattan, from the Hudson River through Times Square to the United Nations. We might write letters to the editor or to Congress. Perhaps we could encourage people by printing up postcards for them to use:

NO ONE IS ILLEGAL WITH GOD (Isaiah 56:3)

WHEN WILL YOU VISIT ME IN PRISON? Signed, Jesus (Matthew 25)

GOD SO LOVED: (a) AMERICA or (b) THE WORLD (see John 3:16)

Preaching in our time happens on the computer screen as well as in the pulpit. What is the word on the Internet? Luther was not reluctant to use the new technology of his time. Can we translate full-gospel preaching, both manna and mercy, into the language of the Web? Teenagers in our congregations may be our best translation partners if we dare to ask them for help.

The odd testimony of Scripture draws us beyond the sanctuary, even as it continues to shape those on the inside. Biblical preaching cannot be limited to forging communal identity within the Christian church; it draws full-gospel preachers and lay people into the marketplace, where people are scrambling to make a name for themselves. Biblical preaching is not only for the sake of the church. It is a word spoken for the sake of the world. The water of Baptism cannot be bottled up or it will become stagnant. The manna cannot be hoarded or it will go bad.

The prophet Ezekiel gives us a wondrous image for the mission of the church. Ezekiel's guide brings him to the front of the temple, where he sees water flowing out under the doors. He wades in the water. It's up to his ankles, then to his knees, then his waist and up to his neck, and finally he has to swim, for the water has become a great river. The river flows toward the east, and wherever it enters stagnant waters, they are made fresh. Fish are teeming, and trees on the banks of the river are lush and green. "And everything will live where the river goes" (Ezek 47:9b).

Can you see this word? The water spills out over the baptismal font, drenching the minister and the acolyte holding the green book. The pages of the book will never quite close again, forever crinkled as they are with holy water! The water runs down the center aisle, soaking the new carpet, then out under the church doors and into the streets: "And everything will live where the river goes."

I saw that river not long ago when I took my preaching class to Transfiguration Lutheran Church in the South Bronx. There, on the front doors of the church, the water was flowing. Young people of the parish had painted the doors to replace the graffiti that had long been scrawled there. On the left-hand door, a boy had opened a fire hydrant and the water was flowing in a wide arc into the baptismal font on the right. Beneath the flowing water, a table was set: a cup, a loaf of bread--a roast chicken and a quart of milk. Sacraments of life on 156th & Prospect Avenue. Manna and mercy in the South Bronx. The water was not only on the doors but flowed out under the doors into the streets: eight hundred units of Nehemiah housing, a new high school going strong and five more planned, children learning to read in the after-school program, and African American young men being mentored into adulthood. "And everything will live where the river goes."

That's where the biblical canon ends--at that lifegiving river. Babylon with its seductive materialism and oppressive politics does not have the final word. John borrows Ezekiel's vision for the last chapter of the last book of the Bible:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations (Rev 22:1-2)

Even more expansive than Ezekiel's vision, the leaves along Revelation's river are for the healing of the nations. Shaped by God's global vision, full-gospel preachers are called to lead the people in singing a new song:

God bless the world we love, Stranger and friend, Go before us, restore us With a hope that despair cannot end. Ev'ry people, ev'ry nation, Mighty oceans, heaven's dome! God bless the world we love, Our only home. God bless the world You love, Our only home.

"And everything will live where the river goes." Manna and mercy for everyone. Full-gospel preaching for all the gathered and scattered children of God.

(1) Stephen Dunn, Local Time (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1986), 53.

(2) Dunn, Local Time, 54.

(3) Krister Stendahl, "Memorandum on Our Bible and Our Sexuality" (Letter to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, February 28, 1994), 3.

(4) Mary Boys, "How Might We Interpret Our Scriptures for Preaching?" Unpublished resource paper. For fuller treatment see Boys's helpful book, Has God Only One Blessing? Judaism as a Source of Christian Self-Understanding (New York: Paulist, 2000).

(5) One example of the Ethiopian's change of color comes from Ephraem Syrus, Hymns, trans. J. T. Sarsfield et al., in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace, 2nd ser., 13, pt. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1964), 295. "The Lamb of Light met the dark man from out of the water. While he was reading, the Ethiopian was baptized and shone with joy, and journeyed on! He made disciples and taught, and out of black men he made men white."

(6) Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5.

(7) I am indebted to Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig for our conversations about 2 Kings 4, including the reading of this text in the Reform Jewish worship.

(8) Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination, 5.

(9) Heidi Neumark, "Words for a Bishop Elect: Follow Those Feet!" sermon preached at the installation of Bishop Mark Hanson (November, 2001), published in Currents 29:1 (February 2002), 5.

(10) Neumark, "Words for a Bishop-Elect," 9.

(11) Larry Rasmussen, unpublished lecture on "Jesus and Power." Rasmussen lifts up three aspects of Jesus' power, including "The power to forge provocative alteratives."

(12) Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 3.

(13) Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for Searching People, ed. Dorothy C. Bass (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997). See especially Chapter 1: "Times of Yearning, Practices of Faith" by Craig Dykstra and Dorothy C. Bass, and Chapter 4, "Household Economics" by Sharon Daloz Parks.

Barbara K. Lundblad

Joe R. Engle Associate Professor of Preaching

Union Theological Seminary, New York