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Anna Carter Florence makes use of Rebecca Chopp's language to describe what she thinks is happening throughout the history of women's testimonial speech with respect to the homiletical appropriation of this kind of Word. Speaking of the testimonies of women, and her own life, Florence asserts that "our lives are not the testimony, and our lives do not prove the testimony; rather our lives are sealed to the testimony [and here's the crucial part of the sentence], sealed to the narrated and confessed freedom the testimony proclaims: the Word as perfectly open sign."18 In other words, women's testimonial speech is sealed to a Word of jubilee that is absolutely free from the violent rhythm that exists between the center and the margins. When women preach, there is a tacit understanding among the women who preach and listen that the Word that they are speaking and hearing is open, "testifying" them, along with an infinity of others far and near, into God-speech. This testimonial Word opens up a new space in worship and preaching, not simply a space in which to re-script faith and reclaim symbols, but an infinite space of interhuman proximity (being with), or affinity19 that makes the space occupied by the defense-driven warfare between the center and the margins seem small, insignificant, even irrelevant. In this space there exists no longer any center and margin, same and other, just the faces and words of "others" and of other others: sheer, infinite, interhuman proximity such as one might experience within a huge cosmic conversation. In a different way, African-American homileticians have highlighted a kind of absolute freedom or openness that accompanies the liberating Word, a freedom that marks the "celebration" that occurs within many traditions of black preaching. Part of what is happening in these moments of celebration is that the infinity of the Logos (indicated, but not exhausted, in things like spiritual glossalalia and ritual ecstasy) is intervening and shattering all forms of linguistic and communicative totality. Similar to Florence's idea of "sealing" preaching to the Word as a perfectly open sign, Henry Mitchell speaks of a deep "internalization" of and "saturation" by God's liberating Word.20 Warren H. Stewart calls this a deep and sudden awareness that God is involved in one's "wholistic liberation."21 Olin P. Moyd tells us that this experience at the heart of preaching is literally unstoppable, another way of expressing the infinite and expanding welcome at the heart of this understanding of God's Word.22 These forms of testimonial preaching open up something like what is described in the Bible as jubilee.23 Testimonial preaching creates a new non-defense-driven, "othering" context for the use of language, a context in which there is a divinely sponsored freedom for repair, especially freedom to repair the double-bind that exists between the center and the margins, and in the space of that freedom, a place in which perhaps the defensive orientation of the human semiotic function itself can be redeemed. The Language of LoveWe now need to ask if yet another language can emerge within the context of repair opened up by language of jubilee. This would be a language that actually releases the human semiotic function from its defensive posture and brings it onto the ground of others and otherness. Is there a language that we would speak in preaching and worship that can transform the way that we use language from boundary-cutting, grasping, and self-securing functions in relation to others, into a "letting be," a "letting flourish" compassionate aspect with others? Can preaching harbor a separate non-defensive, or defense-transforming, language that can even transfigure the self-securing aspect residing within the language of prophetic resistance? Is there a language that may draw forth the kenotic, self-giving aspect of the prophetic word within a new freedom from the center/margin double-bind brought into existence by the perfectly open sign? The answer to this question is this: This almost unspeakable language is the language of love, because it is love that seals preaching to the Word as perfectly open sign. We are not here talking about a verbal language, or not that only, but about a particular "signing" of love. This signing of love is desperately essential if we are to keep the human semiotic function turned toward its deepest purpose—the one that is waiting on the other side of its defensive posturing.24 This signing, or what can now be called "the testimony of love," is a direct and in most cases simultaneous extension of the jubilee-testimony that brings the perfectly open sign into preaching.25 The testimony of love exists as the final signifying form that is assumed by the divine infinity that invades preaching when it is sealed to the perfectly open sign as the Word of God. The testimony of love exists as a largely passive language through which our preaching becomes a signing or saying to others of love, of our proximity to one another, our infinite and mutual exposure and vulnerability. When this signing of love begins to appear in preaching, it signals that in this moment the semiotic function, the way that I "language" myself and the world, has turned—turned away from self-securing idolatry toward the faces of others, and toward the God who passes by every time that turning, the turning of love, occurs. The signing of love in preaching signals a disruption and undoing of the double-bind between the semiotic center and the semiotic margins. It is a signing of our freedom from the power of the double-bind and of our ability, as those whose lives are sealed to the Word as perfectly open sign, to use language solely as a means to respond to one another in love. How can our preaching become a testimony of love? In many respects this is the fundamental question behind the tremendous turn toward the listener in recent homiletic theory. These homiletic theories are straining, sometimes in a kind of excessive, overdrawn way, toward the other (meaning toward all others) in the preaching event and beyond. Recent efforts go far beyond the measured move toward the listener in Fred Craddock's inductive method, which intended, through a kind of Burkean identification, to bring the hearer into a more participatory role in preaching. Ronald Allen and Lucy Rose have created different forms of conversational and testimonial homiletics;26 Nora Tubbs Tisdale works to integrate congregational studies and local theology into homiletics in order to promote a kind of folk dance between preacher and listener;27 Chuck Campbell and Stanley Saunders take preaching students into the homeless shelters and onto the streets of Atlanta where they preach to the powers;28 Kathy Black encourages preachers to listen to the lives of those who are most marginalized in society and congregations, especially persons with disabilities;29 Christine Smith urges preachers to stand in solidarity with the oppressed, especially victims of classism, ageism, homophobia, and sexism;30 and I have supported methods of collaborative preaching in which lay people, and even the un-churched, are involved in sermon brainstorming.31 All of these are attempts to bring the barest glimmer of shalom into the preaching process, shalom that has the potential, in some cases, to signify love. These are, of course, only methods. They require certain forms of character and rhetorical ethos, as well as attention to a new range of emotions or pathos in preaching. In short, we in homiletics have only begun to scratch the surface of how a signing of love might be "mid-wifed" into preaching (or worship). In conclusion, in a world increasingly shaped by violence toward others, preaching can and should pay close attention to the business of reshaping our experience as users of language, speaking agents, at the deepest possible levels. Preaching can help us to consciously resist the scripts of greed, violence, and loveless power that dominate our interpersonal, social, and political consciousness. But most important in our generation, preachers will have to begin to address these deeper questions: How can preaching become a form of speech that unravels the violent rhythm between language-center and language-margin? And how can preaching help to shift the balance and turn the ways that we use language away from strategies of self-securing defensiveness toward ways of speaking that will foster jubilee and signings of love? |
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