Preaching Helps: First Sunday of Advent-Transfiguration of Our Lord, series B

Currents in Theology and Mission, Oct, 2002 by Robert H. Smith, John Rollefson, Richard Rollefson

Kindness, Heroes, and Good Sermons

Bob Kerrey, former senator from the state of Nebraska now serving as President of New School University in New York City, has written a memoir called When I Was a Young Man (New York: Harcourt, 2002). In this artless narrative Kerrey traces his life from early memories of childhood and youth and climaxes his story by speaking bluntly of his experiences in Vietnam. His brief tour in Vietnam ended with the shattering of his right leg and the shattering of his innocence.

He tells of his time as a child at Bethany Christian Church in Lincoln, Nebraska. His church was an awesome place. Long after he ceased believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, he still believed that the enormous wood cross above the baptismal font was the cross actually used to crucify Christ.

Around the age of 7 or 8, he writes, he first began to listen intently and with some measure of understanding to the pastor's sermons. It was the custom at his church, as at so many to this day, to articulate the heart of the sermon in a single short sentence and to post that sentence on the sign in front of the church.

He offers these four sentences on what he regarded as a "good sermon." "Good sermons had quotations from books we all knew we should have read but hadn't. Good sermons had solid beginnings and perhaps funny stories. Good sermons told about poor souls who learned biblical lessons the hard way. Good sermons made sense and stayed with me all week" (p. 45).

His "heroes" came from the Bible in those days. He heard stirring stories of "fathers who had spared their children and about men who shared their wealth with strangers. I learned about men and women who had prayed, listened, waited, and then did what God told them to do."

At the very same time, he was learning other heroic stories every Saturday morning at the Stuart Theater downtown. "The shows we hungered for were never-ending serials about Tarzan or Zorro or some obscure cowboy character."

To Kerrey the stories he heard in church on Sunday and those he saw portrayed on the silver screen each Saturday were "parallel dramas." Stories can be vivid and memorable and therefore powerful in shaping our view of ourselves and of our place in the world. Kerrey does not ponder any contradictions or tensions between the lives of the biblical heroes and the heroes of Hollywood.

But late in his book Kerrey speaks of the shock administered to his being by his experiences in Vietnam. "I had suffered physical and spiritual loss. ... I had spent my life preparing for easy decisions and when the difficult one came I wasn't ready. Physical stamina and intellectual strength were not enough."

What is "enough"? Here Kerrey's words remind me of the "it is enough" of Article VII of the Augsburg Confession. What really constitutes the church, the people of God? What makes them? What calls them into being? What sustains them in their faith and union with God? The answer is simple. Or is it? Article VII speaks of the gospel and the sacraments, those vehicles of God's grace. God's healing touch, God's life-giving and liberating mercy. And it deliberately rejects any other "traditions or rites and ceremonies invented by human beings, however old, however interesting, or even however helpful they may sometimes be.

Kerrey was haunted by nightmare memories of a raid he led in Vietnam resulting in the killing of women and children. His minister told him he could be forgiven if only he asked God, whose capacity to forgive is absolute. He asked, hoping he could recover his childhood innocence, but it did not come.

Nevertheless, forgiveness did gradually come to him "in small doses and at unexpected moments." He felt renewed when people extended kindness to him during his long recovery from his wounds. Step by step he learned that "kindness--unselfish and unafraid--could lift [his] spirit most of all." He came to regard kindness as a bedrock reality, one to believe in and build on. And he came to believe that "giving kindness was more liberating than receiving it" (pp. 249-50).

It surely seems that "kindness" should be at the heart of our churchly storytelling. As a child, Kerrey says, he admired the way "Mary and Joseph had risked ridicule and estrangement from their family and friends to be the mother and father of Christ" (p. 45). Apparently he was told the biblical story in such a way that the Sunday story was simply indistinguishable from the heroic tales of Saturday.

Or is it that we cannot possibly know the depths of the biblical story while we still live in the time that William Blake called "Innocence"? When we have come to the time of "Experience," then our eyes are opened to hard truths about ourselves and our world. And then the power of the biblical story may begin to address us.

What a strange and powerful story it is we have to share in these days of Advent and Christmas and Epiphany. What comes? What is born? What is shiningly revealed? Isn't it the astonishing kindness that God has for us in spite of everything?