expression. It was one of the most fruitful periods of my life as professor of worship and pastoral work. As the year drew to a close, I wrote a book—still my favorite of the ten that I have published—that was based on the year’s research and my serious conversations with church people: its title, Liturgies in a Time When Cities Burn. As frontispiece, I used a paragraph from one of Susanne Langer’s books in which she wrote that we are living in an anxious world that is going through “a transition from one social order to another.” Although the old order is still with us, “its form is broken,” and we cannot yet see what the future will be. “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.”2
Half a century later, those words are still true. The old order seems even more precarious now than ever. We have little sense of what is still to come. Langer’s words, that “most people are afraid,” continue to be true. It may be that people today are even more anxious about the future than we were half a century ago when these sermons were preached. The dialogic pattern and the homiletical style we used were uniquely designed for that time and place. The specific issues we addressed differed in detail from those that confront us now as the world rushes wildly through the early years of the twenty-first century. Preachers today will probably modify the dialogical form we used as they seek to deliver the good news. Despite these differences, we can take confidence in the conviction that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8).
The Advent Dialogues
The five sermons in the Advent series read like the chapters of a short book. In the first sermon, “Bound,” Robert Thomas described the human condition. Most people come into the world bound by “internal mechanisms of control,” including emotional conflicts, physical drives, and motivations. We are surrounded by crime and environmental conditions over which we have no control, by governmental actions, and by the routines of daily life. In the final paragraph of the sermon, he turned the corner by asking the question: “What has the incarnation to do with this? Does Christ come yet to set the people free?” In two sentences, he declared the answer. “That is our faith; that in the midst of the life of the world—this world of business and organization and specialization and conformities and institutions and fear of death and unconscious powers and motivations—Christ comes. He brings liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.” In these final sentences, he told the congregation how the series would end, but he intimated that the full narrative would be revealed week by week in the sermons still to come. The next three sermons were to explore ways that people of that time were trying, unsuccessfully, to escape from their condition of being bound to a new life of freedom. Then would come the sermon that proclaimed deliverance.
In the second Advent sermon, Thomas McCormick, campus minister at the University of Washington’s main campus, described one way that some people were using to escape the bondage that had been described the previous Sunday. Using the abundant hippie community as the chief example, he described how people were dropping out in response to personal experiences, such as absentee fathers, and political issues, especially the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. Their plan of action was to “hang loose.” He reminded the congregation that many people who still live conventional lives harbored secret desires to join the hippies.
Thomas then asked the question that these sermons were intended to answer: “What does the incarnation have to do with all of this?” The answer that he and McCormick gave was that hanging loose was not the kind of freedom that we really want. Thomas quoted an entry that Dag Hammarskjöld, secretary-general of the United Nations, had written in his journal in 1961. At a certain moment in his life, he had answered “Yes to Someone—or Something—and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. From that moment I have known what it means ‘not to look back,’ and ‘to take no thought for the morrow.’”3
Thomas concluded the sermon with one of his characteristically long sentences: “That is the freedom that comes, not in isolation, not in dropping out, not in disconnection from tradition, not in irresponsibly ‘doing your own thing,’ but only through getting your history straight, and in commitment, response, and self-surrender to the God who makes himself known in Jesus Christ—‘the man for others’ who was ‘born to set the people free.’”
The third sermon in the Advent series explored one of the phrases in that sentence, “getting your history straight.” Joining Thomas on this Sunday was Eugene Kidder, associate minister of the congregation, who devoted much of his time to pastoral counseling with members of the congregation and many others from the larger community. Thomas began the conversation by asking if people really wanted to be free and Kidder answered, “Yes.” We were created with this desire and when we feel bound, we try to break loose. Forty percent of the people seeking help, he noted, come first to a minister. “They come as nomads in search of the selves they’ve never found, or lost, or left behind.” Many come “bearing on their backs the burdens of generations before them.” When they find help they are afraid—afraid that they are “destined to repeat the failures of the generations before them.”
Thomas responded that “the biblical view of history is linear” rather than cyclical. The cycles from the past are to be broken so that people can live forward into new lives. Agreeing, Kidder added that this new life is most fully possible with a counselor and with other people in “a supportive community with a common faith.” Concluding the sermon, Thomas again declared the central theme of the entire series. “Life in such a community of faith is daily experience of death, burial, and resurrection. It is creative encounter with God, self, and others that leads to ‘getting our history straight—recovering the meaning of the past, living joyfully in the present, and being hopefully expectant of the future.’ And possible at all because One was ‘born to set the people free.’”
Thomas began the fourth Advent sermon, in which I was the dialogue partner, by quoting a member of Congress who described the tiredness, frustration, and uneasiness that marked the mood on Capitol Hill. He continued by again quoting Susanne Langer’s assertion, that most people are afraid. Referring to the previous Sunday’s sermon which affirmed that we need to get our personal histories straight, he broadened the theme with the assertion that we need to understand “our Tradition as people in the Western world” and see “ourselves as part of an ongoing process that is at the same time conserving and creative.”
In my response, I pointed to efforts from within the academy and the church (including the “old guard” of every congregation of every denomination) to stifle new life. Together Thomas and I sought to distinguish between Tradition with a capital T and traditions with a lower-case t. We affirmed that the “Christian Tradition is a vision of meaning in the face of absurdity, a conviction of purpose in the natural order seemingly devoid of reason, a certainty that individual life makes sense despite the despair that so easily besets us.”
Near the conclusion of the sermon, Thomas declared that in our time “when an upheaval in history is occurring that seems more drastic than anything people have known before, when no one can see a picture of what the future will be, our need is for awareness of the reality of the deep-running stream of Tradition made known in the work of Jesus Christ in the world.”
Just as the first sermon of the series was devoted to an exposition of being “Bound,” so in the last Advent sermon Thomas described and affirmed the “Deliverance” that Christians celebrate in the incarnation of Jesus whose birth is celebrated at this time of the year. Again, he declared that people everywhere long for freedom from all that holds them in some kind of imprisonment. “The hope of salvation, of deliverance, in one form or another, has always been part of religion, and when there has seemed no basis for hope for worldly well-being, men and women have sought ‘a salvation not made with hands’ from some realm beyond earthly existence.” He noted that there are two kinds of religion—religions of escape and religions of liberation. Both tendencies,
