Talking About God When People Are Afraid
Dialogues on the Incarnation the Year That Doctor King and Senator Kennedy Were Killed
Edited by Keith Watkins
Foreword by Ronald J. Allen
Talking About God When People are Afraid
Dialogues on the Incarnation the Year That Doctor King and Senator Kennedy Were Killed
Copyright © 2020 Keith Watkins. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the New English Bible, copyright © Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press 1961, 1970. All rights reserved.
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We live, today, in an anxious world. Later generations will probably see our age as a time of transition from one social order to another, as we find the Middle Ages a “middle” between the Graeco-Roman civilization and the full-fledged European. But we cannot see the present that way, because what we are moving towards does not yet exist, and we can have no picture of it. Nor is the ascendancy of Europe—the concert of nations consisting of white people and their economic culture roughly coextensive with Christendom—as yet a finished act in history; but its form is broken. We feel ourselves swept along in a violent passage from a world we cannot salvage to one we cannot see, and most people are afraid.
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophical Sketches
The Preachers
Robert A. Thomas, Senior Minister, University Christian Church, Seattle
Eugene Kidder, Minister of Youth and Pastoral Counseling, University Christian Church, Seattle
Thomas R. McCormick, Campus Minister, University of Washington, Seattle
Keith Watkins, Visiting Minister-Theologian, University Christian Church, 1967–1968, Professor of Worship and Parish Ministry, Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis
Foreword
The question might come up, “Why would a reader in the early twenty-first century be interested in sermons preached in 1967 and 1968?” The answer is that the 1960s were a period of unusual cultural ferment in North America, a ferment that included changes taking place in churches and in preaching, and we find ourselves in a similar situation as the 2020s unfold. Indeed, as I write in the spring of 2020, the United States is in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic with its attendant social crises. The publication of the sermons in Talking About God When People Are Afraid opens a window into an important chapter in the history of preaching by demonstrating how preachers in the 1960s perceived and spoke about many of the existential issues and feelings facing people in the United States (especially in the Eurocentric, educated middle class). This window also prompts preachers more than fifty years later to consider how we might perceive and speak about culturally challenging issues today.
These sermons demonstrate how one group of preachers sought to help a congregation make theological sense of the force fields in the culture and the church and to imagine appropriate responses both as individuals and as a community of faith. Many sermons of the period of the late 1960s reflect similar emphases to the messages in this volume, but, in my view, the sermons here exemplify the best of that tradition in ways that surpass many other existing examples.
Not only does the book open a window on the past, but it points towards some practices for preaching that can benefit the contemporary pulpit and church. Today’s ministers cannot simply repeat what these preachers did a half-century ago, but we can draw inspiration for being as theologically responsible, pastorally sensitive, and sermonically creative as were the four preachers involved in these dialogues.
During the 1960s several great cultural forces swirled around one another in generating perceptions and feelings that were often in tension. On the one hand, these forces included the flourishing of science and technology which seemed to promise an ever-increasing good quality of life. The economy appeared to provide steady wages and benefits for many for both the present and the long-term future. There was a great emphasis on the “new”—new school buildings to accommodate growing enrollment, new church buildings to house congregations that had grown like wildfire in the previous decade, new shopping centers, new hospitals, even new and improved laundry detergents. General Electric used the slogan, “Progress is Our Most Important Product.” There was a certain experimental feeling in the air as many people were open to doing things new ways.
On the other hand, the Cold War created anxiety that rubbed against this optimistic spirit. Many high school and college students and others responded to the Vietnam War by taking to the streets. Generational conflict was common especially between the World War II generation and their Boomer children. Hippies rejected many of the values and practices of corporate culture. Many young people who did not actually become hippies still looked upon aspects of the dominant culture with suspicion. The nation became freshly aware of the extent and depth of poverty. Anti-war protests in behalf of peace were sometimes accompanied by violence. Indeed, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and Robert F. Kennedy just two months later on June 5, 1968. Among people of color as well as among many Eurocentric people in solidarity with them, the Civil Rights Movement promised a better society even as that movement unnerved many Eurocentric communities.
People in the 1960s were often simultaneously optimistic and anxious. It was a period of great creativity while also a time of contradiction and conflict. Preaching always partakes of the culture in which it is spoken, but the sermons in this volume especially do so. The preachers seek to help listeners make theological sense of the full range of the experience of the period from the standpoint of clear and cogent Christian vision. The sermons seek to interpret the interior experience of the individual as well as the more social dynamics of congregation and culture.
The sermons go back and forth between preaching that offers serious exposition of a biblical text in the traditional sermonic sense and those that are more topical in nature. In both cases, I am struck by the depth and precision of the preachers’ understandings of the people and the culture of the time as well as the acuity of the preachers’ theological analyses. These are points at which these sermons provide case studies for sermons today. To be candid, while many preachers today seek to interpret contemporary culture in theological perspective, the efforts seldom approach the substance of
