The Courage to Preach Christianity 101
I keep files of my old sermon notes, just like Rev. Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead. I’m retired now but still preach on occasion. The notes extend back to the early ’80s.
I have to confess I sometimes check my files years later to see whether a sermon preached on the same passage of Scripture at another time and in another place might be appropriate to preach again, adapting it to current circumstances. I’ve been doing this for a while, if only to keep track of how my ideas have changed, to see whether I read Scripture differently now than I did then. Thinking back on the occasion of those sermons—where they were preached, and when, and to whom—I have to ask, like old Rev. Ames in the novel, whether what I had to say ever made any difference to anyone, including to myself.
I know faithful people, including faithful preachers, who persist in hope for the future, against all odds, grounded in their hope in God’s steadfastness. That hope emboldens them both to hear and preach the truth of God’s compassion and of God’s justice, and to act accordingly. Their hope emboldens me.
Nine years and a political eternity ago, I was preparing to preach during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Donald Trump was running against Hillary Clinton. I unearthed a handwritten copy of a sermon I had preached in Manhattan 16 years before, on the feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday before Advent. That sermon dated from days of similar electoral tumult, in 2000 during the aborted Florida recount and on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision putting the second George Bush into office.
“Anxiety in the Air”
Those events, I said in that 2000 sermon, provided an odd counterpoint to that Sunday’s Gospel reading, which focused on Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, hailed as a king by the crowd but destined for a criminal’s death. If this were 17th-century England, I had said, the current stalemate would be understood as a portent of the end-time, when radical political groups—inspired by biblical prophecy—vied for power: Levelers, Quakers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy Men, pitted against Presbyterians, Independents, and Royalists. The result was a bloody revolution, and the beheading of the king.
I tried to assure people that we lived in a different, safer world than that of the 17th-century English radicals. “There is anxiety in the air, to be sure,” I said, “although our own anxieties come nowhere near equaling what Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush may be feeling. In these ‘end-times’ before the Supreme Court comes to judgment, I suspect that most of the country is more annoyed than anxious. … There are no fears of civil war or secession, no fear of a coup d’état, of New Model Armies assembled, no rioting to speak of in the streets.”
In 2016, when I reread these words and prepared to preach again, the fears I so confidently dismissed in the fall of 2000 were not so easily ignored. And now, those fears have deepened in ways once unimagined. The country has changed. So have I.
A Simple (and Risky) Gospel
The years since I preached about Levelers and Diggers have sobered me. I cannot bring myself to be as optimistic about the future as I seem to have been when I preached on Christ the King all those years ago. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists are more real to me now than any ghostly New Model Army from the English Civil War. The press seems satisfied to accept a resurgent Christian nationalism as the default definition of American Christianity. Compounding the crisis are the seemingly endless revelations of sexual abuse and cover-up by Christian clergy, including prelates high up in my own Anglican denomination. Like so many Christians I know, lay and clergy both, I am struggling. What are we supposed to say? What are we supposed to do? More than four years after the infamous attack on the U.S. Capitol, and in the political chaos of recent weeks and months, my view of the future is clouded, my confidence in our political system is shaken as never before. The same goes for my confidence in religious institutions, however grateful I am—and I am grateful—for the ordained ministry that my own Episcopal church has entrusted to me.
This loss of optimism is one thing. But what about hope? What of hope in God? I have to admit that my faith in the resilience of the church’s public message is not what it was when I started out in this preaching business. Not that my allegiance to the gospel is weaker, nor is my hope that, in the end, God is with us no matter what. But the way I feel compelled to proclaim such hope is different now, more urgent, and more fraught. What I feel the need to say as a preacher has become less complicated, but riskier. Sermons about Jesus’s championing of the poor, the outcast and the dispossessed once seemed anodyne and commonplace; now preaching about Jesus’s acts of compassion looks like political defiance. At a time when urging simple decency has become politically charged, it’s pretty clear to me that just preaching Christianity 101 now looks radical. Blessed are the meek and the poor. Woe to those who mock. The death threats against the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., for saying such things recently is proof enough of how much is at stake. I fear for the spiritual and mental health of active clergy, and find myself at times glad to be retired, away in a sense from the fray. But as Bishop Budde made so calmly and eloquently clear, what else is the pulpit for? The alternative is silence, a silence that reads like consent.
Clearing the Air, Clearing Our Heads
I take heart from the bishop’s courage. Whatever the unpredictable consequences of pandemic, of climate change, of mass migration, of resurgent xenophobia, of imperialist land war in Europe and the racist posturing of would-be autocrats here at home, I know faithful people, including faithful preachers, who persist in hope for the future, against all odds, grounded in their hope in God’s steadfastness. That hope emboldens them both to hear and preach the truth of God’s compassion and of God’s justice, and to act accordingly. Their hope emboldens me.
It amazes me nevertheless that people still come to church. On the bad days, and they are not infrequent, it amazes me that I do too. Yet the fact is that attendance at my local parish has not just recovered since the pandemic but increased. And it has grown since the last election. As the public square becomes more poisonous, and godless politicians appeal to people’s worst instincts, it is the shared food, shared singing, shared listening, and shared silence characteristic of churchgoing that gives people room to clear their heads and to clear the air, to rediscover both a sense of purpose and a sense of divine presence. Churches are among the few places left in the U.S. where these things can happen, and where truth can be told in relative safety. I feel this way in spite of what I know about the toxicity of Christian institutions past and present. It’s that shared sense of presence—presence both human and divine—that brought me to church in the first place and keeps me there.
The Rev. Roger Ferlo ’79 Ph.D., now in retirement after 32 years as an Episcopal priest, writes for many publications and is the author of two books, Sensing God: Reading Scripture with All Our Senses (Roman & Littlefield, 2001) and Opening the Bible (The New Church’s Teaching Series, vol. 2; Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). With a doctorate in English literature, he taught at Yale and at Virginia Theological Seminary. From 2012-2017, he was the first president of the Episcopal Church’s Bexley Seabury Seminary.