Am now half way into The Word on the Street: Performing the Scriptures in the Urban Context also by Charles Campbell as well as Stanley Saunders. In it they flesh out what Campbell explore in The Word Before The Powers, as they share thoughts, essays, sermons and stories from their work amongst the homeless people on the streets of Atlanta. They use Scripture to read the streets and the streets to read Scripture, which both inspires and challenges me. It's good to know I am not alone though, for it challenges and inspires them too ... after all they are seminary professors, Christians, theologians and human. Their honesty is in a sense liberating, and their stories moving.
In it all you get a sense of what Campbell talks about at the end of The Word Before The Powers. In the final chapter of the book he writes about the four virtues that ought to characterise preachers in addition to love: truthfullness, anger, patience and hope. This is how he concludes his section on hope, and indeed the book itself:
"… In the places of death, hope becomes radical hope in God, for no shallow, domesticated hope will do.In the places of death, hope itself finally becomes a form of resistance – a defiance of the powers that pretend to rule the world. In the face of the powers, hope is no passive, wishful longing for a better day. Rather, it is a form of resistance to the principalities that masquerade as common sense; it challenges the closed definitions of reality that offer no alternative future. Where hope is present, the powers have lost control, and their reign has been broken. The future opens up, and life becomes possible even in the midst of death.
As preachers enter the reality of Jesus’ resurrection, immerse themselves in the memories of the community of faith, and cultivate hope in the places of suffering, they are prepared to preach with hope on Sunday mornings. They are empowered to enter the pulpit and non-violently resist the powers with the redemptive Word of the gospel. They are prepared to speak the Word that helps set the church free to live faithfully in the face of the powers of death. And grounded in such hope, preachers may even find themselves preaching with joy – the joy that comes from the assurance of God’s redemption and the confidence that we are at least in the right struggle." (p. 188)
And so on Sunday morning I go to preach hope. When I go to work on Monday morning I go 'preaching' hope. As we journey together as preachers in college, we do so preaching hope.
Whatever else may be said
Christ died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again.
The powers do not have the final say. The final say is reserved for God, and God is the God who speaks, puts flesh on and enacts hope. And in resistence to the powers and in awe of God we preach that hope.
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