The Ministry of the Word/Tell the Next Generation
Zeik, Michael
The preacher's gift TIE MINISTRY OF THE WORD D. Cleverly Ford Eerdmans, $12.95, 253 pp. TELL THE NEXT GENERATION Walter Burghardt, S.J. Paulist Press, $6.95, 225 pp. Michael Zeik THE NEWS is...
...death of his own sexuality...
...God does not defend his policies, but insists on his mysteries:'' Where were you .when I created the universe...
...All who hear him know it, they know it 'in their bones...
...the stupidest, ugliest thing that can happen to a human being...
...Our human wisdom bankrupt, we will, like Job, turn to God for an answer...
...Aristotle defined us as rational animals...
...By obedience he risks permanent adolescence...
...Ford begins by acknowledging that for very many, perhaps most, the era of "preaching" is finished...
...Somewhere along the line, the editors of Commonweal discovered that I am (at my age...
...a closet S.A.—a sermon aficionado...
...In the first, D.C...
...In fact I am quite unenthusiastic about leaving this life...
...Yet . . . when such a man speaks there is nothing you can say or do except listen...
...By these three vows, poverty, chastity, and obedience, Father Burghardt warns him, he risks not becoming a man...
...we had better be prepared for the one he gave Job...
...There is little doubt that none of us will escape the quandary of Job...
...a half century in religious life, I have never shared the yearning of the saints to move into eternity...
...But what are we to make of these traditional doctrines...
...The very word implies a kind of smug moral superiority that we are no longer willing to accord the Professor of Divinity over some unmarried slum-mother of four, struggling to bring up her children...
...Obviously, Father Burghardt read Ford's book—how else explain the excellence of most of his sermons in this collection...
...but, paradoxically, his Lenten sermon is not...
...The category is rare and is more likely to be sensed than classified...
...Crediting Jean Leclercq for his "asceticism of humor," the writer suggests that what we give up for Lent—far sweeter than candy, and more alluring than sin—is that selfpreoccupation by which we take ourselves at least as seriously as we take God...
...All this," sums up the Senior Chaplain, "calls for involvement, though not absorption in the social and political aspirations of the day...
...That both are books which ask the hard questions is already in their favor...
...The second work, by Father Walter Burghardt, the well known Woodstock scholar, and the editor of Theological Studies, is a selection of his post-Vatican II sermons...
...The passion, death, and resurrection of Christ remain archetypes of such power in our lives, that to forget them is to forget Christianity...
...I have never looked forward to dying," writes the Jesuit scholar, and "despite...
...Death is an insult...
...Burghardt calls us "angels with an incredible capacity for beer...
...Not if he has both mastered the Commonweal: 630 scriptural and theological tools of his trade, and is deeply committed to the contemporary world in which, as always, the Gospel seed must find its soil...
...Two, of many, fine insights in the book, deserve special mention: the first, regarding the vexed question of preaching and politics...
...If you are dissatisfied with your Sunday sermons, take this book with you, and choose something appropriate for the occasion...
...He risks avoiding "the encounter with three elemental forces"—an encounter with the earth, with woman, and with his own spirit...
...It will probably be best if I just enumerate some of the ideas which most impressed me...
...It is only following an introduction like this that I am likely to find credible any conceivable sermon on dying...
...Like most readers of this journal, I enjoy Dom Helder Camara's pronouncements in Brazil more than the (recent) ones of Cardinal Madeiros in Boston...
...that they avoid the easy answers, is even more appropriate in this, the year of Our Lord, 1980...
...But the very thing that makes his book easy to read renders it difficult to review: it contains not one, but a dozen fascinating themes, varying according to the nature of the occasion, or the liturgical season in which they were delivered...
...Our religous life is surely as much tied up with politics and society, as with the religious life of ancient Israel...
...Not necessarily so, counters Ford...
...Ford, Senior Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury (and, incidentally, to Queen Elizabeth), investigates the historical development and theological basis for religious preaching, from Old Testament times, through the early days of the church, and down through successive periods of Western Christendom...
...And not, especially, if the preacher is a man of God...
...But what is the principle which ought to guide us in these matters...
...they are "tough...
...shared the bread of affliction with his flock...
...The Resurrection, in particular, "does not, it will not, go away.'' A rocky island in the midst of an ocean of reassessment and criticism, it will be there to challenge and exasperate the generations succeeding our own...
...Nor does Father Burghardt wax pious on the subject of suffering...
...Indoctrination is another dirty word...
...I submit that only someone knowing the risks is entitled to take them...
...By poverty he risks a parasitic life, living off the collectivity...
...Michael Zeik THE NEWS is out...
...By chastity he risks the...
...These two books, assigned to me as a reward for my refined taste in pleasure, are related to each other as theory and practice...
...Not if the priest or minister has himself (herself...
...I like what Ford says about these central teachings: Don't worry about them...
...Ford points out that, beginning with the Prophets of Israel, Yahweh's spokesmen have never confined themselves to "churchy" matters...
...By the time scholars like Ebeling and Fuchs, Tillich and Bultmann are through with the Resurrection, the bewildered preacher may not be inclined to add any tentative comments of his own...
...Trying, however awkwardly, to do good, we will find ourselves sometimes overwhelmed by evil, crushed by affliction...
...Grim stuff...
...Commonweal: 632...
...The Book of Job," insists Burghardt, "does not teach us how to understand evil, but how to live with it...
...all certainties are dead certainties," and the pulpit seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur...
...high praise indeed, if you accept the honesty of the statement...
...7 November 1980: 631 But if you have any remaining doubt about this priest's sense of reality, let me conclude with his advice to a Jesuit scholastic about to take his solemn vows...
...For the authority of a preacher, in the last resort, argues the Senior Chaplain, does not derive from his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, or Medieval or Marxist scholasticism, but only from his being a man of God...
...With a little distance, our heartaches and hiatal hernias may be seen in their proper perspective, and we can forget ourselves a little—bundles of contradiction that we are...
...Yes, I probably enjoy a good sermon as much as a good movie...
...the second, our contemporary nervousness with dogmas like the Incarnation and Resurrection...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 20
