sees it, which is hidden from us here and now. It is this life in relationship to what God has done in Jesus Christ for the whole world and thus also for us. So we wait and hope—in respect of our death—to be made manifest with him (Jesus Christ who is raised from the dead), in the glory of judgment, and also in the grace of God. That will be the new thing: that the veil which now lies over the whole world and thus over our life (tears, death, sorrow, crying, grief) will be taken away, and God’s counsel (already accomplished in Jesus Christ) will stand before our eyes, the object of our deepest shame, but also of our joyful thanks and praise.32
Where is McGill going? He is going to side with the “enemy,” in this case with our loneliness, and to turn the perspective so that the enemy may be seen in a new light as friend:
The Lord God Almighty, He alone knows us, and our loneliness is like a goad by which He leads us to Himself. . . . You see that our loneliness from one another is not an evil to be overcome or a despair from which we try to escape, but is rather the sign within us which turns us to our true Lord, to Him who truly knows and judges and redeems. (Sermon 1, pp. 25–26)
In construing loneliness in this way, McGill has led us to the famous “prayer” at the beginning of Augustine’s Confessions: “Yet man, this part of your creation, wishes to praise you. You arouse him to take joy in praising you, for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”33 So also is the witness of Arthur McGill.
The flash and flare, the fireworks, the dash and dare—the provocations—of McGill came through in classroom lectures and seminars vividly. In the words of the sermons which follow, glimpses, hints, intimations, the provocations—and theological fascinations—persist. Theological fascinations: Arthur McGill does not go haltingly, hesitantly, into theological-hermeneutical matters holding open some possibility of faith in a world so “come of age” that it begins to feel a bit aged. No limping. McGill is on the offensive, in more than one sense, as we have seen. He is aggressive. Any embarrassment of faith is an embarrassment of riches in which the paramount theme is becoming poor.
Ordering the Sermons
Presenting the following seventeen sermons of Arthur McGill in chronological order is not possible. The sermons bridge at least twenty-eight years, from 1951 to 1979. Sometimes we have specific dates, sometimes years. Sometimes we have place and no date, sometimes date and no place.
The sermons are arranged thematically; though this, too, is a challenge because the sermons return again and again to soon-familiar themes. Some sermons could be placed with others according to one theme or grouped with yet others on the basis of another theme. (How many of these seventeen sermons treat of death? All of them, directly or indirectly; directly in most.) Nonetheless, four groupings suggest themselves.
I. Good Neediness
1. “Loneliness”: Our loneliness is a goad to God.
2. “Beatitudes”: Lack, need, receiving in gratitude, and life are
identified.
3. “The Problem of Possessions”: God’s love sets poverty in a new light: love is not minding being poor.
4. “Jonah and Human Grandeur”: Hunger for grandeur yields
oppression; acceptance of failure yields freedom.
5. “Suffering”: Neediness belongs to God.
6. “Needed—An Education in Poverty”: Commencement is a time to own the vocation of dying.
II. Kinds of Power, Love, and Death
7. “Be Angry”: Dare to face truth, love—and anger at God first of all.
8. “Palm Sunday Sermon”: Jesus is not a victim but agent of death as self-expenditure bearing the fruit of life.
9. “Eucharist”: The meaning of death in the domain of Jesus is the
communication of life.
10. “Harvard Convocation”: Proper speech is the deed of self-
expenditure.
11. “Tower Hill Graduation—Against the Expert”: Make your actions, suffering—and your death—your own.
12. “On Worship”: We participate in the worship of the Father by
the Son.
III. Qualitative Hope
13. “The Centrality of Flesh”: Look out Lent: Christianity is a festival
of flesh.
14. “The Ascension”: In uncertainty, risk measuring the meaning of
letting go by the power of Christ and not by the power of death.
15. “The Goal of Our History”: Hope not in the future but in God.
IV. Grace
16. “Jesus and the Myth of Neighborliness”: The good Samaritan is
Jesus Christ.
17. “The Good Samaritan”: The good Samaritan is Jesus Christ.
Perhaps these last overlapping, complementary sermons are appropriately placed together in a section on “Grace.” As suggested, grace may seem to be a “Grace Note”; but it motivates the whole of McGill’s theology. McGill’s treatment of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) as our neighbor so that we can “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37) not out of our own power, our surplus, our “philanthropy,” but out of God’s gracious giving—“We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19); receiving precedes giving—may be regarded as McGill’s central theological theme.34
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Editorial Note
I am most grateful to Lucy McGill for entrusting to me, on the recommendation of William F. May and Paul Ramsey, the papers of Arthur McGill so long ago, for her transcription of sermon manuscripts—and for her patience; to William F. May for his role in granting me “the McGill files,” for his patience and encouragement, and for graciously contributing a “Foreword” to this collection; to Paul Ramsey for his caring and kindness; to Chuck Balestri and Egbert Giles Leigh, Jr., friends since Princeton undergraduate days (some forty-
six years); to Chuck for so many rewarding McGill-catalytic or McGill-catalyzed conversations at Princeton, 1960–1963, when we were both under McGill’s spell; to Egbert, Biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Barro Colorado Island, Panama, for his enduring interest and encouragement; to Cindy Toomey, Administrative and Program Specialist, Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion (CPR), University of Mary Washington, who has indeed been a “specialist” in sundry ways; to JeanAnn Dabb, Associate Professor of Art and Art History, UMW, for introducing me to ARTstor; and to Wipf and Stock Publishers and Ted Lewis, Jim Tedrick,
K. C. Hanson, Heather Carraher, and associates for their investment in Arthur McGill.
When Arthur McGill penciled, often rapidly—one can see the acceleration
