This problem becomes even more complex when we consider that the appropriate justice-seeking defensiveness¹⁰ inherent in homiletical practices of prophetic resistance mirrors and supports precisely the defensive orientation of the semiotic function required by hegemonic semiotic interpellation. Paradoxically, practices of prophetic resistance support precisely the defensive identity-preservation-through-boundary-cutting way of using language that semiotic interpellation relies upon in order to function properly as an interhuman structure.

Here we confront, on a contiguous track, an insidious double-bind in the way that cultural hegemony, the language "center" in society (our common sense language), actually requires the language of resistance to further its own purposes. The heart of the problem is this: the center (semiotic hegemony, set of dominant ideologies) in a society requires the margins in order to be the center. This creates a double-bind, because any struggle against the center (re-scriptings, re-languaging, inclusive language, etc.), indeed all of our strategies of resistance, paradoxically prop up the center as the center. All of these efforts ultimately only set off the center in more bold and striking relief.

To use only one small example, this is what has happened to the inclusive language movement in worship and hymnology on many seminary and college campuses. It appears that these good efforts at resistance and the reclamation of language have had the reverse effect in many situations, reinforcing a dominant idea of the language-center or tradition. In some instances efforts at re-scripting have spawned a powerful backlash from people representing the language center against so-called "politically correct" language, and against those representing the language margins who insist upon such language.

What preachers and liturgists are up against is this: the lived experiences and language of everyone are only made sense of from the cumulative linguistic vantage point of an all-defining center. The realization of this, of course, elicits a deeper and more volatile struggle from many who are a part of the speech and language resistance. This resistance is sometimes met by an increasingly strident response from those who choose to represent the center as language police. And so preachers and liturgists find themselves deeply within a spiraling double-bind, a situation in which they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. We know now that no matter how re-scripting is done, it doesn't go far enough. It leaves the deeper, unconscious problem of defensive self-securing in relation to what is "other," and the parallel problem of the language center and language-margins, virtually untouched.

Preaching as the Language of Jubilee

In the face of this double-binding problem, it is possible that a new opportunity for preaching, and perhaps for liturgy and music, can emerge from listening to marginalized persons in society who have, out of many years of experience, created ways to unravel this self-perpetuating center-margin double bind and the malignant defensiveness that underpins it. In homiletics we have begun to ask with real seriousness: What do persons of color, women, and other so-called marginalized folk have to say that might help us to deal with this larger unconscious and pervasive problem that is co-opting even our best prophetic strategies of communication?

To summarize, these friends are teaching us that our languages of resistance can and should be re-framed entirely by being placed within the larger context of liturgical and homiletical languages of jubilee. Jubilee is an opening or space within social and semiotic reality in which there is an opportunity and a vision for repair. It is a language-constructed "time out" in which a reorientation within language becomes possible. In our case, what is to be repaired is the violent rhythm or double-bind that exists between the center and the margins, the same and the other, that dominates human speaking. And what is reoriented, ultimately, is the human semiotic function itself, the way that we speak and "language" our lives, from a defensive and self-securing orientation, to an orientation toward others in compassion.

Within homiletics today, there seems to be some convergence by those who are seeking to identify this language-redemptive form of proclamation around the word "testimony."¹¹ This is not simply personal testimony, at least not exclusively. Testimony is a powerful speaking out of the context of one's life, but it is done on behalf of an entire community who are struggling for speech, for words, and for the acknowledgement and reception of new traditions of interpretation and meaning beyond the center-margin double-bind.

There is a crucial theological difference at the heart of this kind of testimony that is not found in most preaching today, including prophetic preaching, a difference that is important for undoing the largely unconscious double-bind between the language-center and the language-margins. At the deepest possible level, testimonial preaching relies on a very different understanding of the Word of God than we find in our usual theologies of preaching. Typically the Word of God is closely associated with a particular core message of preaching, the kerygma: the identifications and representations of the Word of God in and through Christ as disclosed in Scripture and the Church's proclamation (what the theologian Karl Barth called the threefold form of the Word of God). One implication of this has been the powerful impetus toward Logos as the hub of a comprehensive set of rhetorical topoi (Newman), a dogmatic system (Barth), a cultural-linguistic totality (Lindbeck), and supervenient models of rheotorical rationality and truth (Murphy).¹²

For those within testimonial traditions of preaching, however, Logos is understood not so much as an "ordering" element as a re-ordering, converting, and re-creating element in human speech. Its rhythms are less appropriate to myth, epic, and the beautiful, and more inclined toward the parabolic, the ironic, and the sublime.¹³ Rebecca Chopp has done an admirable job of re-defining how the Word of God is understood within so-called marginal traditions of testimonial speaking. She calls the Word of God a "perfectly open sign,"¹⁴ and places it within the economy of an infinite God's infinite ethical re-ordering of human life.

Why is it important in a world of increasing center-toward-margins violence that the Word of God be considered a "perfectly open sign" within an ethical infinity, rather than the guiding force of rationality and order within a theological system seeking comprehensiveness and totality? The primary reason is that as an open sign the Word refuses to secure referencing for God's redemptive activity in Christ to only one hitching post liturgically, existentially, theologically, socially, etc. The "perfectly open" dynamic within the Word introduces a wholly non-defensive, "othering" (kenotic) way of signifying God's redemptive relationship to the world.¹⁵ Emmanuel Levinas has argued that it is God moving toward humanity under the aspect of "infinity," rather than God moving within and toward God's own being under the aspect of "totality," who determines testimonial speech inasmuch as it has the power to interrupt dangerous linguistic and structural totalities.¹⁶ In short, the Word of God as perfectly open sign is a word of shalom to others, a sign that opens itself toward an infinity of human others and their ways of speaking and hearing the redemptive activity of God in (and into) the world. This is not simply a word of "inclusion" in a pre-established system of communication. It is rather recognition that there are, and indeed always have been, others (other faces, other voices, other words) on the originary Logos-scene, on the scene of verbal-linguistic representation itself. This means nothing less than recognizing all other origins of speaking, and speaking of God, in this world, a deeper and richer intertextuality and heteroglossia¹⁷ than is usually admitted, and thus other origins of distinctively Christian speech, beyond and beneath those usually heard.

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