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.
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