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Foreword: Between News and Good News

Somewhere between the land of the Bible and the world of The New York Times, we preachers make our home. The preacher works that sometimes tensive, sometimes near, usually quite expansive gap between then and today, between the Times's world of news, high fashion, money, political gossip, and carnage and the Bible's world of Good News, politics, money, carnage, and Easter.

There are sermons when we grope for connections, similes, some illustrative bridge to link these two disparate worlds. The difficulty of finding something to say which will communicate between here and there is often our greatest homiletical challenge. So we hope by means of some engaging metaphor, some undeniably relevant linkage thereby to connect what the Bible says with what our congregations today may be able to hear. We so want, we preachers, to be heard.

Did not our Lord himself, in so many a sermon, begin with, "Now the kingdom of God is like..."? Might Jesus' own grope for metaphor indicate that he is able to sympathize with us preachers in our contemporary efforts to bridge by rhetorical device that great expanse between the Bible and The New York Times?

At one time, I thought so. We've got this big problem with the old, culturally conditioned, sexist, violent, Jewish, premodern Bible and its distance from our fresh, modern, enlightened world where we get our news from the pages of the Times, not angels. It is typical of modernity to conceive of itself as standing upon the pinnacle of human development.

If the gap between us and Scripture were mainly one of time, history, that gaping abyss (as Lessing called it) between our age and that of Jesus, then why did Jesus seem so ardent a maker of metaphor too? What was all that parabolizing and search for simile ("The Kingdom of God may be compared to a woman who...") if Jesus the preacher had no gap of history or time between him and his hearers?

I think there was trouble for Jesus the preacher because the preacher was Jesus. The Kingdom of God was hard to render into speech, not because it was old, primitive, prescientific, but because it was not the kingdom of The New York Times. The hermeneutical gap was not between modern and premodern but between truth and lies, between God's Messiah and Moloch. The world would like to believe that it can't understand what Jesus is talking about because he's dated, Jewish, male, unmarried—or because of any of the other worldly labels by which economically controlled media like the Times attempt to keep the Risen Christ at bay. No. The reason why it's tough speaking of Jesus is much the same reason why they kicked him out after his first sermon at Nazareth—Jesus spoke of and enacted a Good News which assaulted our settled definitions of news.

The Reverend Fleming Rutledge works well that same conflicted, risky ground between us and the gospel. Her sermons are vivid demonstration that, all reports to the contrary, faithful biblical preaching is alive and well, interesting, engaging, demanding, and residing, of all places, in the Episcopal Church. Each of her sermons here takes seriously our contemporary congregational difficulty in hearing the gospel. Yet they are chiefly remarkable because her sermons take even more seriously the peculiar word to our time which is called Good News. That is, although she often begins by quoting the Times, very quickly in her sermons we realize that she is allowing the Bible to confront, unmask, and defeat the Times and everything it believes to be news.

Even her arrangement of these sermons, in good Episcopal fashion, keyed to the movement of the church year, is a clue to her homiletical intent. She does not want just to speak to our world; she wants to change it. She wants to reorder our time, to reconfigure our year into the church's year of grace. Not taking the world of The New York Times too seriously seems an important task for a faithful preacher. With playfulness, wit, a thorough acquaintance with what's going on today, she loosens the authoritarian grip of the now, in order to bring to speech what God in Jesus Christ wants us to be tomorrow.

Is this preacher conservative? feminist? evangelical? liturgical? Fleming Rutledge challenges our conventional labels. I believe the word for which we're groping to describe her is Biblical. In no dry or heavy-handed way, she keeps reconfiguring our ways of construing the world into a new world. She may begin a sermon by quoting the Times, but she never ends a sermon until she has let the Bible have the final word.

That word, as these sermons demonstrate so well, is word unto life, and that abundantly.

William H. Willimon
Duke University Chapel
Pentecost, 1998