Talking About God When People Are Afraid (Keith Watkins) -- A Review

 

TALKING ABOUT GOD WHEN PEOPLE ARE AFRAID: Dialogues on the Incarnation in the Year that Doctor King and Senator Were Killed. Edited by Keith Watkins. Foreword by Ronald J. Allen. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020. Xvi  + 123 pages.

                Back in the late 1960s, I was a young boy living in a relatively small town in Southern Oregon. I was more interested in model rockets and little league than the big issues of the day. My parents were politically active, and I was introduced to politics at an early age. Nevertheless, the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights struggle of the day were far from my daily routine. I might catch something on the evening news if my parents were watching, but I was more interested in cartoons. While we were very active in church, I don’t remember talking about God in relation to fear. In other words, I was present for the 1960s, but I didn’t realize how traumatic things really were. A half-century later, I’m nearing retirement from my ministry of preaching at a Disciples of Christ congregation, and I’m living through an era that seems awfully similar to that of the 1960s. There is a racial reckoning occurring. We’ve been at war in the Middle East for two decades. The political scene in America is more polarized than in any previous era, except perhaps for the late 1960s.

                I offer the above word by way of introduction to the book Talking about God whenPeople Are Afraid. The book makes available two sets of “dialogical sermons.” They were offered at Advent and then Lent over several months in 1967-1968. One of the participants in these experimental sermons preached at University Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Seattle, Washington, was Keith Watkins, professor emeritus of worship and parish ministry at Christian Theological Seminary. Keith, who is a friend and mentor to me, was on sabbatical from his teaching post at CTS in Indianapolis. He spent that academic year as a visiting minister-theologian at the church. The other three participants included the senior minister at the time, Robert Thomas, who had studied at the University of Chicago and would later lead the denomination’s Division of Overseas Ministries. He was the instigator for this series and participated in all of the dialogues. The other two participants were Eugene Kidder, Minister of Youth and Pastoral Counseling at University Christian Church, and Thomas McCormick, campus minister at the University of Washington. The congregation itself, which was at one time among the largest in the denomination, but has since closed, was theologically, politically, and socially liberal. In other words, it was open to provocative sermons. The larger community of Seattle, especially around the university, represented an “increasingly skeptical, irreligious, anti-war, and hippie constituency” (p. 3). What Seattle was then is much more the case for the rest of the country today.

                As Watkins notes, Robert Thomas proposed to his associates the possibility of preaching a series of dialogue sermons during Advent (1967). Such sermons were experimental and involved a team approach. The four members of the team worked together and wrote out the sermons in the form of a script. Thomas and one of the other three members of the team would share the scripted sermons, which were typed out and used by the preachers. It is because they were typed out and copied that Watkins had at his disposal the full text of the sermons. In the first sermon, which Thomas preached, the nature of the series was introduced. Then, each of the next three weeks featured the dialogues, with Thomas bringing the series to a conclusion on Christmas Eve. The series was titled “Born to Set the People Free,” which the team drew from the Advent hymn “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus.”

                The success of the series led Thomas to consider repeating this experiment at Lent. So, during the Lenten season, the team addressed the theme “The Tragic Vision.” The title of this series was taken from the Nathan Scott book The Tragic Vision and the Christian Faith (1967). The message here was that they were all displaced persons unable to find a place to dwell in the world. There is hope, but it requires facing the reality of Jesus’ own pain and anguish.

                So, why edit and publish a set of sermons preached so long ago? What value might they have? Is this a model we should follow today? Watkins points out that in the thousands of sermons he’s heard preached and preached himself in the decades since these sermons were delivered, he’s never heard anything quite like them. So what should we make of them?  While the style of the sermons and the way they were delivered might reflect a particular age, making these useful for understanding 1960s preaching, as Ron Allen notes in his foreword, the book does open a window that might prompt “preachers more than fifty years later to consider how we might perceive and speak about culturally challenging issues today” (p. ix). Both Allen’s foreword and Watkins’ own reflections help us understand the different contexts, but also the possibilities that these sermons offer us to consider how to address challenging times.

                In these dialogues, we encounter preachers and sermons that attempt to help the people in their church make theological sense of their world at a time when optimism and fear were intermingled. Although the details of life in the early 2020s differ from those in the 1960s when these sermons were delivered, preachers today face a similar challenge--to proclaim a Christian vision that interprets the interior experience of listeners and the dynamics of the outer world where strife, epidemic disease, and global warming dominate the news. These sermons show how preachers can draw upon their own insights and upon biblical scholarship, history, theology, ethics, philosophy, and psychology as they proclaim their gospel message. What is helpful here is not only the sermons but the introductory material that helps us make sense of the sermons and their context. Watkins notes, for instance, that these sermons didn’t draw as much from scripture as we would want today. They are more dependent on cultural and intellectual insights. Allen notes that these sermons rarely include stories to not just illustrate but to carry the sermons’ message. He also notes that the length of the sermons—which would have run thirty to forty minutes—doesn’t fit our time frame today. One thing that stands out here is that, while this was a very liberal/progressive congregation, standing on the cutting edge of social concerns, one person was excluded from the team. That person was a woman on the staff of the church. She was a seminary graduate and had led a department in the denominational missions office. Despite her stature, she was not asked to preach. Yes, even liberal churches in the 1960s had not gotten with the women’s movement.  

                Sometimes it’s helpful to step back and consider how earlier churches and preachers handled issues of the day. We might not exactly replicate what was done then, but we might learn something from the attempts here to address issues of great concern in the year when Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy were assassinated, even as we address concerns about God and the world in an age when people are afraid. As Watkins writes of these sermons, “two generations after these ‘Dialogues on the Incarnation’ were preached, the names and places have changed, but we are still living in a time that needs sermons that can offer hope to distraught people” (p. 24). We might not approach this task in the same way (the experiment in dialogical preaching never really caught on), but the task itself has not changed. So, I believe you will find Talking About God When People Are Afraid to be a most thought-provoking read as we seek to be faithful to God and creation.

Comments

Popular Posts