best defenses against God. Your job as pastor is to break up the groups, strip them naked, render them exposed and vulnerable. That way God can get to them. Besides, Jesus despised bankers and lawyers.
Willimon concludes: “Though that was opposed to just about everything that we believed at that time about ministry, and though I was mostly ignorant about what it took to be a pastor, I knew Holmer had it right.”40
Well, I am not sure he had it exactly right. People can hide in more places than groups, and in America, one of the best places to hide out is in our own “individuality.” Moreover, I don’t think God is depending on me to render sinners accessible to his grace. Still, I do think Holmer was right that by preaching the gospel we bear a far more radical witness than by becoming a “change agent.” We worship One whose love for us is not an agenda but a life, whose Word heals precisely as it wounds, lifts up as it casts down, inviting us to do something far more daring than “organizing” others. This God invites us all to follow Jesus Christ and in following him, to discover what it means to be taken from one place to another. That happens not as we become agents of change but as we become disciples. Holmer may have been a bit hard on bankers and lawyers, but he was right that the Kingdom does not come through better organizational skills. Rather there is something far more mysterious and miraculous in the gospel’s working, a grace that can transform bankers, lawyers, and even clergy into instruments of peace.
September 21, 2005
Stephen Webb has written an important book on preaching, entitled, The Divine Voice (Wipf and Stock, 2012). He argues that we show that we have understood the gospel’s message to the extent that we proclaim it. That is to say, the gospel is not just to be studied or thought about but finally intends its own proclamation. To miss that is to miss the gospel itself.
Like many of us, Webb thinks that he does not know what he knows until he says it. Our words do not just contain what we know, he thinks, they more often constitute what we know. In this respect, he thinks we are like God, whose triune life is constituted by the conversation made articulate in the Father’s uttering the Word with the breath of the Spirit. Jesus is the way God speaks, Webb writes. And grace is God’s way of uniting us to Christ so that we are included in this conversation. Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, worship itself are the means of grace by which God helps us hear and teaches us how to speak, i.e., teaches us the language of praise and witness.
If what Webb is arguing is true, then his claim must represent the most difficult challenge facing a seminary. It suggests that the learning we do here is not simply digesting vast quantities of information or even acquiring certain pastoral or homiletical skills. Rather our aim must be to enable students to speak the grace of God idiomatically, helping them to become proficient in the language of praise and thanksgiving. Truly, that is the work of the Holy Spirit, i.e., to render us articulate and courageous witnesses to the gospel, but just so our teaching and learning need to reflect this gift even if we are embarrassed at our stammering timidity in making use of it.
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