The Academy of Homiletics

276 Pages·2006·1.48 MB·English

The Academy of Homiletics

2006 Annual Meeting

Marriott Hotel
West Palm Beach, Florida

“Preaching for Renewal, Transformation and Liberation”

Hosted by:
Palm Beach Atlantic University

Terriel Byrd
Gerald Kisner
Joseph Webb

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Table of Contents

Introduction to the Papers of the Annual Meeting…………………………………………….5

Hermeneutics and Biblical Study
James Nieman and Wesley Allen, Conveners

Conveners’ Note…………………………………………………………………………………..6

Dislocated Exegesis
Charles Campbell…………………………………………………………………………7

Reading Drunk in Search of Naked Truth: A Care for Ideological Commitments
Lincoln E. Galloway……………………………………………………………………..12

In What Ways Is the Bible Relevant to Our Context and Concerns?
Dawn Ottoni Wilhelm……………………………………………………………………17

History of Preaching
Joey Jeter, Convener

Erasmus and the Renewal of Preaching
Michael Pasquarello III…………………………………………………………………..20

“More Mobile Than Any Motion:” A Liberative Approach to the Operative Theologies
of Disciple Preaching
Kay Bessler Northcutt……………………………………………………………………30

W are 4 Keep this Place: The Preaching and Missionary Activities
of Arthur Wellington Clah
Robert P. Hoch…………………………………………………………………………...42

Learning from History: a homiletical approach to a divided church
Raewynne J. Whiteley…………………………………………………………………...53

Justice, Ethics and the Preaching Task
Christine Smith, Convener

“Helpin’ Me Resist and Refuse:” Class-Consciousness and Preaching
Brooks Berndt……………………………………………………………………………63

Hearing the Eunuch’s Children: A Study of Sermons Preached in Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual and Transgendered Communities
Mark Lee…………………………………………………………………………………73
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Preaching the Promised Land for the Canaanites
Duncan Macpherson………………………………………………………………..........83

What I Now Think vis-à-vis Homiletic Theory
John S. McClure………………………………………………………………………….91

Embodying Wisdom and Preaching Justly: Reconsidering Matthew 26: 6-13
Katy Rigler……………………………………………………………………………...101

Preaching Ethnic Atonement: A Homiletic Study of Ephesians 2: 11-18
Noel Schoonmaker……………………………………………………………………...112

Narrative and Imagination
Thomas Troeger, Convener

Journey to Mt. Horeb: Cognitive Theory and I Kings 19: 1 – 18
J. Dwayne Howell and Susan H. Howell……………………………………………….121

Woe to Those that Are at Ease in Zion: Preaching in the Black Church and
the HIV/AIDS Epidemic
Marvin A. McMickle…………………………………………………………………...127

A Positive Theology of Imagination for Preaching Renewal, Liberation and
Transformation
Thomas H. Troeger……………………………………………………………………..135

Collaborative Re-Authoring: the sermon and narrative epistemology
Tanya Wittwer………………………………………………………………………….145

Pedagogy
Andre Resne, Convener

LI OYUNE (I am Here): Gospel Brought Alive in Mayan Indigenous Community,
and Implications for Homiletic Pedagogy in the United States
Deborah A. Organ………………………………………………………………………155

Preaching and Worship
Craig Satterlee, Convener

The Work of Our Hands: Listener Involvement in Liturgical Preaching
Jim Schmitmeyer……………………………………………………………………….165

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Rhetoric
Robert Reid, Convener

Art Has Its Reasons: The Emerging Role of the Arts in Protestant Congregations
Lynne M.Baab………………………………………………………………………….172

The Rhetoric of Remembering: One of These Days Someone’s Going to Need
this Sermon
Peter W. Rehwaldt……………………………………………………………………...182

Rhetorical Situation and Asian Theology for Transformational Preaching
Richard H. Park…………………………………………………………………………191

Dancing at the Edge of Rhetoric
Robert Stephen Reid……………………………………………………………………199

Horizontverschmelzung (Horizon Fusion), Katallage (Reconciliation) and the Odyssey’s
Inverse Smiles: A Gadamerian/Pauline Reading of Penelope’s and Odysseus’ Exchange
P. Christopher Smith……………………………………………………………………209

Theology and Preaching
Joseph Webb, Convener

Removing the Barriers between Black and White Churches
Terriel R. Byrd………………………………………………………………………….219

Quantitative Empirical Studies of Preaching: Do Sermons Persuade?
Cliff Guthrie…………………………………………………………………………….229

Preaching and the Church’s Participation in the Life of God
L. Roger Owens………………………………………………………………………...239

Economy according to the Trinity – a particular challenge for preaching
Arthur VanSeters……………………………………………………………………….247

“The Large and Boundless Chamber:” Long-Term Memory and the Future
of Contemporary Preaching
Joseph M. Webb………………………………………………………………………...257

Preach the Text or Preach the Gospel?
Paul Scott Wilson……………………………………………………………………….267

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Introduction to the Papers of the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Homiletics
West Palm Beach, Florida: November 30 – December 2, 2006

Perhaps this year’s annual meeting theme would be appropriate for any time in history. Yet,
there seems a special urgency at the present hour to focus our attention on “Preaching for
Renewal, Transformation, and Liberation.” Those of us who live in the United States are
painfully aware of the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our hearts have broken many times
over as we have gazed at photographs from southern Lebanon, northern Israel, Gaza, and a tiny
Amish school house in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. We hear God’s name spoken in the public
square but wonder who this God is who sanctions violence and calls for revenge. What word
shall we speak in the midst of such a world? What shall we teach our students as they move out
from classroom to pulpit? What words of challenge and encouragement can we share with one
another as this year comes to an end?

Thankfully, the Academy of Homiletics has never been called “The American Academy of
Homiletics.” Our membership extends far beyond the United States, including not only Canada,
but reaching far beyond North America. You will see that this year’s academy papers come from
as near as our host school in West Palm Beach, Florida and as far away as Australia, South
Korea and London. We again anticipate Academy members from Scandinavia joining us as well.

In the pages that follow you will find some papers that directly address the conference theme,
“Preaching for Renewal, Transformation, and Liberation.” Other papers relate more closely to
themes of particular working groups, though connections to the theme may also be heard. As in
the past the papers are grouped according to Academy working groups with conveners named in
the Table of Contents. Hopefully, you will have a chance to read many of these papers before
coming to West Palm Beach.

Grateful thanks to each person who wrote a paper for this year’s meeting. This gratitude is
extended to full-time faculty as well as several graduate students who have written papers this
year. Even a quick reading of the Table of Contents should whet your appetite to open the files
and see what in the world a certain writer had in mind (even if that writer isn’t part of your work
group).

Now as the days turn colder, as leaves are falling here in the northeastern part of the United
States, and 22 inches of snow have already fallen on Buffalo, we look forward to spending a
warm weekend together in West Palm Beach, Florida. We hope you will be there to engage this
year’s timely theme, to greet colleagues from across the world, and perhaps – at least once – to
walk barefoot on the beach.

Barbara K. Lundblad
First Vice President

Note: The copyright of these papers belongs to the individual authors.

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HERMENEUTICS AND BIBLE STUDY

Note from the Conveners

For the last few years, the Hermeneutics and Bible Study Group has attempted to develop
roundtable conversations around various topics by inviting a panel of scholars to develop short,
provocative papers as conversation starters. The following topics have been considered:
2003.....................The Authority of Scripture for Preaching
2004.....................Teaching Exegesis for Preaching
2005.....................Homiletical Approaches to Contrary Biblical Texts
This year’s discussion topic involves the issue of the social location of the preacher and
the congregation in the connection between biblical interpretation and preaching. Our three
panelists—Charles L. Campbell, Lincoln E. Galloway, and Dawn Ottoni Wilhelm—approach the
topic from different perspectives, promising an engaging session.

O.W.A. and J.R.N.

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Dislocated Exegesis

Charles L. Campbell
Columbia Theological Seminary

Have you ever read a chapter from the book of Revelation out loud in a mall? How about
the Sermon on the Mount in the unfinished attic of a church? Or the Gospel of Mark on a city
bus? Although the importance of social location (e.g. race, gender, and socio-economic status)
for biblical interpretation has been widely recognized in recent years, less attention has been
given to the importance of physical location—the actual physical spaces in which people,
including preachers, read and interpret Scripture. However, as I hope the above examples
suggest, the physical spaces in which we read texts color the ways we interpret those texts, as
well as the ways those texts interpret the world around us. Indeed, in the different physical
locations through which we move in life, elements of “social location” may take on different
priority and meaning. In addition to “social location,” greater attention needs to be given to
“physical location” in biblical interpretation.1
About a decade ago, my New Testament colleague, Stan Saunders, and I began to explore
the importance of physical location as we team-taught courses and struggled to help students
engage with Scripture in fresh ways. We noticed that when students (and professors!)
interpreted texts in the classroom, the interpretations tended to be rather abstract and academic;
students even seemed to distance themselves from Scripture as they formally analyzed the texts.
As we moved into other spaces, however, we noticed that perspectives on the texts began to
change. When we read sections from Revelation, for example, on the steps of the state capitol
building, at the Coca Cola museum (officially called, “The World of Coca Cola”), in malls, and
at homeless shelters, we engaged with those texts in different ways than when we read them in
classrooms or in the seminary chapel.
Through such experiments we became convinced that physical location plays an
important, though often neglected, role in biblical interpretation. As a result, we have continued
to explore what we call the practice of “dislocated exegesis,” which involves reading and
studying Scripture in odd, even jarring spaces. Such a practice, we believe, can help people
engage both text and context in fresh and creative ways. Different physical locations help us read
the text in new ways, raising different issues and questions, or raising them with different
immediacy and priority. In addition, Scripture engages and interprets the world around us in
fresh ways when it is juxtaposed to certain physical locations.
Such dislocation is critical as a means of setting us free from the taken-for-granted
presuppositions we often bring to the text. Because our “vision” is so shaped by the contexts,
including the physical spaces, in which we live, we regularly need to move out of those spaces in
order to see both Scripture and the world in new ways. Consider, for example, the primary
spaces in which most people read Scripture and the possible implications of those spaces. People
read Scripture in church, and most people are comfortable doing that. But in that space,

1 For a fuller discussion of the importance of physical location for biblical interpretation, see “Street
Readings/Reading the Streets: Reading the Bible through the Lens of the Streets, Reading the Streets through the
Lens of the Bible,” in Stanley P. Saunders and Charles L. Campbell, The Word on the Street: Performing the
Scriptures in the Urban Context (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 86-94.
This chapter focuses on interpreting Scriptures on the streets of Atlanta, often among homeless people. I have not
repeated examples from this chapter here, but have chosen examples from other class situations.
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Scripture can often take on primarily “religious,” “churchy” or “spiritual” meanings. People also
often read Scripture in their homes as part of their personal devotional life. And, accordingly,
Scripture often is interpreted individually and personally. Finally, for many of us—students and
professors alike—the study or the classroom or the library becomes the primary space in which
we read Scripture. In these spaces, as I noted earlier, interpretation can often take on a rather
academic and abstract feel, which can lead to rather academic and abstract sermons, as most of
us have undoubtedly experienced.
All of these spaces are important locations in which to read Scripture. We need the
interpretations that emerge when Scripture is read in church, home, and study. However, if these
are the only spaces in which students, professors, and preachers read Scripture, then we may
miss important dimensions of the texts, and we may also miss the urgency and immediacy of
these texts for the world around us. We may even remain captive to angles of vision that are
reinforced when we always read Scripture in the same, familiar places. When we begin reading
Scripture in strange locations, however, a different kind of engagement with Scripture may begin
to emerge.
Time and again, I have seen this happen as students have been challenged to read
Scripture in new spaces. And I’ve had this experience myself on numerous occasions. Recently,
students took a class on an adventure that began on a MARTA train (Atlanta’s public
transportation). As we sat on the train, one student, much to my surprise, suddenly stood up and
began walking up and down the car reading the Beatitudes out loud (Matthew 5:3-12). She
wasn’t proselytizing or preaching. She simply stood up and began reading the Beatitudes
humbly and respectfully amidst passengers who came from the margins of Atlanta society: poor
working people, homeless people, exhausted people, several of them sleeping. “Blessed are the
poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God,” the student read.2 “Blessed are those who
mourn, for they will be comforted.” “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for
they will be filled.”3
I was stunned. I had never experienced the Beatitudes the way I did at that moment—and
it was all because of the physical space in which the student was reading. For the first time I
experienced the Beatitudes not primarily as a series of demands, but as a series of radical,
comforting, subversive blessings addressed to those on the margins, outside the centers of
privilege and power. In my head, I had known they were such blessings for a long time, but
never had that reality entered my heart and soul until I heard those words spoken on the MARTA
train.
I have often referred to the following comment about preaching written by Soren
Kierkegaard:

Sermons should not be preached in churches. It harms Christianity in a high
degree and alters its very nature, that it is brought into an artistic remoteness from
reality, instead of being heard in the midst of real life, and that precisely for the

2As Warren Carter has argued, this beatitude does not “spiritualize” poverty. According to Carter, “the
poor in spirit ... are those who are economically poor and whose spirits are being crushed by economic injustice.”
Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis
Books, 2001), 131.
3On translating this beatitude in terms of righteousness/justice, see Carter, Matthew and the Margins, 133-
34.
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sake of the conflict (the collision). For all this talk about quiet, quiet places and
quiet hours, as the right element for Christianity, is absurd.4

Now I often think Kierkegaard’s words could be adapted to apply to biblical interpretation:

“[The Bible] should not be [read] in churches. It harms Christianity in a high
degree and alters its very nature, that it is brought into an artistic remoteness from
reality, instead of being heard in the midst of real life, and that precisely for the
sake of the conflict (the collision). For all this talk about quiet, quiet places and
quiet hours, as the right element for Christianity, is absurd.

Although Kierkegaard’s comment is extreme and overstated, he makes a critical point: the Bible
takes on new life when it is interpreted in new and different spaces.
This insight should not come as a surprise. As we see in the New Testament, the earliest
Christian interpreters of Scripture often do their best work in public spaces. In the New
Testament, people do not simply interpret Scripture in the synagogues or homes or classrooms.
They interpret Scripture in public spaces, where they discern the Spirit of God at work. Jesus
interprets Scripture on town streets, in fields, on mountaintops, in houses, and on highways. And
the early Christians follow his lead. Philip interprets Scripture with the Ethiopian eunuch in a
chariot out on a highway. And as a result he comes to a new understanding of the boundary-
breaking implications of Jesus as the Suffering Servant. And Paul does some of his most
impressive interpretive work while in prison, where he gained special insight into the nature and
urgency of the gospel. The New Testament itself probably would have looked very different if
all of the biblical interpretation had taken place in the library or the classroom. As Kierkegaard
suggests, the New Testament pioneers interpreted Scripture in the midst of real life—which often
resulted in “collisions.”
An acquaintance of mine, who regularly engages in dislocated exegesis, told me that he
had been reading the Bible in the emergency room of Grady Hospital—Atlanta’s public hospital.
He noticed that the people in that emergency room were the very people he was reading about in
the Bible: those who were poor, lame, ill, and suffering. And he came to a critical realization: “I
really don’t have to take the ‘old’ Bible from ‘way back then’ and force it to be relevant to our
world today,” he said. “My God,” he continued, “the world of the Bible is our world—as we
will discover if we just read it in the right places.”
In most of our preaching classes at Columbia Seminary we now require some form of
dislocated exegesis. For example, in the introductory course we give the following assignment:

Please spend at least one hour reading Mark 5:21-43 [the story of Jairus’
daughter and the hemorrhaging woman] in one of the following locations:

Waiting room (auditorium) of Pratt Street Pharmacy, Grady Hospital5
MARTA (train, bus, or terminal)
Woodruff Park6

4Soren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon Christendom, trans. Walter Lowry (Princeton Univ. Press, 1944; Beacon
paperback edition, Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), viii.
5Grady Hospital is the public hospital in Atlanta. There is a large auditorium at the Pratt Street Pharmacy,
where people often wait for hours to have a prescription filled.
6Woodruff Park is a highly “contested” space in downtown Atlanta, where many homeless people spend
the day.
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Phipps Plaza7
Pharmacy waiting area at the VA Hospital
Main Lobby of the Marriott Marquis Hotel8
Emergency waiting room at DeKalb Medical Center
A night shelter

You may do this assignment in pairs or small groups, though you will need to take
into consideration the location you have chosen (e.g. a group in the emergency
waiting room might be too disruptive).

If you would like to use another location, please check with your small group
leader.

When we gather in small groups to discuss the texts, students share their experiences of
“dislocated exegesis.” For some students nothing significant happens. And that is to be
expected. Dislocated exegesis needs to be a regular, repeated practice. It is not a magic formula
that guarantees something extraordinary will happen on every outing.
Other students, however, often share not only new insights into the text, but new
excitement about it. “We dressed in our sloppiest clothes and went and read the text in the lobby
of the Marriott Marquis,” one student shared. Everyone avoided us. Some people stared
disapprovingly at us. The security guard kept an eye on us. And we suddenly realized: that’s the
kind of life the hemorrhaging woman endured every day for twelve years. And Jesus stopped to
have a conversation with that very woman. That was a very radical action. And the social
dynamics in the text are very much alive today.” The students began to explore not only the
physical healing in the text, but the radical social implications of Jesus' actions.
In addition to such insights, students also begin to reflect on their uneasiness (even
embarrassment) reading Scripture in public spaces (especially when the assignment requires
them to read the text out loud!). They have to explore this discomfort and why the Bible seems
“out of place” in a ritzy hotel or a mall or the MARTA station. Scripture becomes public again,
and all of us are forced to wrestle with the ways in which we often prefer to keep it private and
personal.
Finally, the text often takes on a new urgency for the students, whatever their specific
interpretation may be. They gain a renewed sense of the aliveness and significance of Scripture,
and often a new realization of the social character of the Bible. Scripture (and hopefully the
resulting sermon!) becomes engaging and relevant in powerful ways. In the process, that
mysterious “gap” between text and sermon often closes. Students no longer have to “force” the
old text into the contemporary world, but sermons are born in the surprising “collision” between
the biblical text and the physical location. And when that happens, the homiletical implication of

7Phipps Plaza is an upscale mall in Atlanta.
8The Marriott Marquis is an upscale hotel in midtown Atlanta.

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