Sermons of Arthur C. McGill. Arthur C. McGill
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and he was not. In listening to or in reading McGill, one comes to wonder, “Just where is he going?” because one can seldom be sure—or safely anticipate. Conversely, McGill likes to begin with the recognizable. Then comes the “revolution” sparked by such characteristic and apparently calm words as “Let us now look at the New Testament . . .” (Sermon 3, p. 34). Or: “All this sounds fine provided we do not look too closely at the New Testament witness to Jesus” (Sermon 10, p. 94). Here we go again. Just when we think we see at last where McGill is going and suppose he has arrived there, he changes direction and takes a turn to a new course, an instinctive theological quarterback. Thus, “We have missed the heart of the story” (Sermon 17, p. 145). McGill revels in offense. He is relentless. He is full of surprises—“Some Real Surprises”—and obviously enjoys being so. “Now begins your preparation for the vocation of dying” (Sermon 6, p. 62). When is the last time we heard that in a commencement address? Or: “Philanthropy is a typically evil form of love” (Sermon 14, p. 120). What? Philanthropy? “Philanthropy,” as McGill treats it, is near the top of his hate list because “giving becomes grounded on having and becomes an expression of having” (Sermon 14, p. 120). If philanthropy is out, what is next on the McGillian hit list? “Humanism”: “Humanism is another form of resentment love” (Sermon 7, p. 72). Then comes the about-face, the McGillian “flip”: “Do not ask, how can we who love also hope? Rather ask, how can we who love do anything but hope? How can we love for one moment without finding ourselves hoping for the kingdom of God?” (Sermon 15, p. 129). The bite here is harsh appraisal of present life as incentive for Christian hope; while, at the same time, “gratitude” is aligned with “life” and a powerful authorization of vulnerability. Christianity authorizes vulnerability because the Christian God authorizes vulnerability—because the Christian God is vulnerability. McGill comments on and warns against—
. . . the effort to worship an unneedy and invulnerable God. If such a God indeed excludes every possibility of needy brokenness, this God also excludes the life actualized in Jesus. For this God is not the creator of shared life but simply a product of the human outrage at evil. (Sermon 5, p. 51)
Crucial (literally) to McGill’s Christian theology is the recognition that “. . . neediness belongs properly and naturally to God” (Sermon 5, p. 51)—and hence (via imago dei) to us. Manifestation of our neediness informs the life of faith:
It might be said that those who cling to the past act of Jesus’s resurrection and those who seek a flight into heaven want too much here and now. They dislike the poverty, the religious poverty and ambiguity into which the ascension envelops us. They want to stand beyond uncertainty. But that is not possible. (Sermon 14, p. 122)
If one is looking for “relevance,” here relevance is—in McGill’s rejection of our yearning “to stand beyond uncertainty” in matters of faith:
The Christian cannot really separate himself in that way [standing beyond uncertainty or, as McGill soon goes on to say, standing with those who “. . . surpass the condition of perplexity and tension” (Sermon 14, p. 123)] from the gentile, from the polytheist who looks into his own concrete existence and sees a welter of principalities and powers [McGill has just been referring to Romans 8], sees a whole pantheon of gods manifesting their glory in his flesh and spirit—the power of war, the power of society, the power of sexuality, the power of disease—these flash their immensity in turn [note the alliance of gods and powers]. (Sermon 14, p. 122).
At times a brusque, even cryptic, writing complements a teasing and goading which pay off, challenging us to challenge ourselves with the possibility of a new way of seeing. McGill leaves us wondering, wanting to know more, newly convinced that there is more to be seen and said. And there is.
Setting the Stage for Scripture
When was the last time we heard a good sermon? What is a “good sermon”? McGill has some thoughts about this—but not much optimism:
There is no reserve, no awe in the use of words in the churches. No words are holy, pregnant with energies that might shatter our existence. . . . Speech in the church is never dark, never in riddles. You hear sermons through the weeks and months and years, and they are no different in their basic rhetoric from a classroom lecture or a radio address. Can such sermons really serve as the center for a weekly religious celebration? Do they release such power that the act of delivering them must be surrounded and set apart by a liturgical service [or must they be surrounded and set apart precisely because of their impotence?]? (Sermon 10, p. 88)
How might persons have exited worship services after hearing a McGill sermon? Puzzled? Confused? Bewildered? Rarely “upbeat”? Rarely “sent out singing”? But surely McGill sent them out thinking—and us with them. Reading—hearing—McGill can be like walking the edge of an escarpment. Or listening to McGill can seem disheartening, discouraging, glum. “Don’t we have trouble enough?” But in his determined, intrepid dialectic of perspectives, McGill can grab us and angle us into a startlingly, jarringly fresh way of seeing the same old biblical texts. Adventure ensues: “So that’s what’s going on!” The Bible: read it again for the first time—with Arthur McGill. The insights can be stunning.
McGill’s sermons are neither simple nor easy to follow. Twists and turns and surprise departures are frequent. “How does that follow?” and “How did we get here?” are all about these sermons, which were surely delivered with pace, pause, deliberation and acceleration—with timing, helping to insinuate meanings and sub-meanings. On occasion was there a hint of a self-satisfied grin?
Thus, McGill delights in engaging perspectives, enlivening them, apparently entering into them and then blasting them, exposing them as outrageously untenable, obviously existentially inadequate. But the inadequacy was not so obvious a sentence ago. Often the lost, futile perspectives are attributed to us and to our day, to contemporaneity, to the United States. In “Jonah and Human Grandeur,” McGill refers to:
God’s call to Jonah: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and denounce it for its wickedness” [Jonah 1:2] . . . We must remember this: the wickedness of Nineveh—alas!—is the wickedness of the United States, and the oppressiveness of Nineveh appears also in the United States. (Sermon 4, p. 46)
(Is something of William Stringfellow lurking alongside McGill?19)
We encounter in McGill the ability to present a bold, brash engendering of perspectives and to set perspectives in opposition. Frequently the perspective developed becomes a foil for a perspective enjoined, which is often not “developed” but alluded to, hinted at, pointed toward.20 We find the relentless redoing of a distinct perspective, often a perspective that is a surprise to us, that takes us by surprise, disorienting and disarming us. At the same time, McGill is able to evoke a familiar, all-too-familiar perspective and then to gesture toward a counter-perspective powerfully, vividly, shatteringly. He can plop a puzzling scriptural text down in that context and allow us suddenly to see the logic of it. He places it deftly where it can come alive. He need not interpret it. The perspective he has drawn does that.21 All he has to do is to watch us “get it”:
Blessed are the poor, the sorrowful, the hungry and the persecuted. These statements attributed to Jesus seem confused, if not nonsensical . . .
What Jesus’s beatitudes do is to make clear the indispensable condition for receiving. We cannot receive unless we lack, unless we are in need. . . .
In other words, if you are not willing to be one with your neediness, you cannot be blessed. (Sermon 2, pp. 27–28)
After setting the stage for scripture, McGill concludes a sermon (“On Worship”): “Let me read again the lesson from Paul’s letter to the Colossians” (Sermon 12, p. 109).
The Wind in the Tree
McGill affirms, “A technical language certainly has its place in the Christian community.”22 This