How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon

by Frank A. Thomas, William Barber II (Foreword by)

Overview

Learn to use four characteristics of "preaching with moral imagination" to proclaim freedom for all. The author describes the four characteristics using examples like Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,Prathia Hall, and the Moral Monday Movement, along with musicians and other artists of today. Moral imagination helps the hearer to see what they cannot see, to hear what they cannot hear--to inhabit the lives of others, so that they can embody Christ and true freedom for those others.

This book equips and empowers preachers to transcend their basic skills and techniques, so that their proclamation of the Word causes actual turnaround in the hearts and lives of their hearers, and in their communities.


"Frank Thomas has written a
passionate summons: amid the current destructive chaos of our society
there is an urgent need for moral imagination. Such imagination is the
antithesis of “diabolic” and “idolatrous” imagination that is all to the
fore in our public discourse and practice. Thomas fleshes out “moral
imagination” with close reflection on the practice of Robert F. Kennedy
and Martin Luther King. Before he finishes Thomas shows how the urgency
of “moral imagination” belongs peculiarly to the work of the preacher.
This book is a welcome call for gospel-grounded courage and truth about
the neighbor issued in a way that refuses the self-serving fakery that
dominates our public life." --Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary

"Timely and prophetic, How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon
presents a homiletic essential for our churches today. Thomas insists
that it is up to the preacher to recapture and reclaim the moral
imagination of our nation so that the Gospel’s message of freedom is
true for all people. With attention to specific figures whose witness
models the qualities and characteristics of moral imagination, Thomas
inspires the preacher toward powerful proclamation that both challenges
and critiques any speech that subjugates or subordinates. How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon
is must read for preachers to recover and reimagine the leadership role
of the church for the sake of justice for all." --Karoline M. Lewis,
Associate Professor of Biblical Preaching and the Marbury E. Anderson
Chair of Biblical Preaching, Luther Seminary; author of She: Five Keys to Unlock the Power of Women in Ministry.

"In this lucid and compelling book, Frank Thomas plumbs the depths of
American moral rhetoric for insights that will help preachers. How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon
provides new and dramatic ways in which the moral imagination in a
democratic society can be nurtured by visionary, empathic, wise, and
artistic preachers."--John S. McClure, Charles G. Finney Professor of Preaching and Worship, Vanderbilt Divinity School


"Warning: Preachers, if you are comfortable with the status quo of
white privilege, patriarchy, hetero-normativity, and classism, do not
read this book. If you are comfortable with sermon series that reduce
the gospel to self-help acronyms, don’t read this book. But if you have
the courage to look honestly at our landscape and bring the moral
imagination of the Christian tradition to bear on it, open these pages
and your sermons may never be the same again. But then again neither
will the church--or the world--be the same anymore, if enough of us
follow Thomas’s advice." --O. Wesley Allen, Jr., Lois Craddock Perkins
Professor of Homiletics, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist
University

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501856846
Publisher:	Abingdon Press
Publication date:	02/20/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	379 KB

About the Author

Frank A. Thomas currently serves as Nettie Sweeney and Hugh Th. Miller Professor of Homiletics and Director of the Academy of Preaching and Celebration at Christian Theological Seminary of Indianapolis, Indiana.

Frank A. Thomas, PhD, serves as the Director of the PhD Program in African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric and the Nettie Sweeney and Hugh Th. Miller Professor of Homiletics at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana. Thomas is the author of How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon and Introduction to the Practice of African American Preaching, released by Abingdon Press respectively, February, 2018 and November 2016.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

RACE AND SHRINKING WHITENESS:

FOUR QUALITIES OF THE MORAL IMAGINATION OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY

Identity politics has come to be associated with minorities and often a patronizing undercurrent as though to refer to nonwhite people motivated by an irrational herd instinct. White people have practiced identity politics since the inception of America, but it is [after the 2016 presidential election] laid bare and impossible to evade.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In the introduction, I expressed the view that what has and always will hinder the moral imagination of America is the white supremacy that reserves the rights and benefits of America to only a few. I want in this chapter to put the discussion of race front and center: specifically, the relationship of brown, black, and excluded white people with the phenomena of "whiteness" in America. Henceforth, most often, I will say race and whiteness because usually when race is discussed, it is assumed that the speaker is exclusively considering black or brown people. I will use race and whiteness to encompass all of the identity politics of America. My basic argument in this chapter is that we need increased moral imagination to discuss and effectively deal with the perennial issue of race and whiteness, including the phenomena of shrinking whiteness. The moral imagination of Robert F. Kennedy in his famous speech on April 4, 1968, the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., is an excellent model from which we might learn qualities of the moral imagination for preaching. To officially begin our discussion, even though I considered moral imagination in the introduction, I want to return to it again.

Moral imagination was coined by Edmund Burke and occurs in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke laments the revolutionaries' disregard for moral imagination indicative of the strong and sudden changes being brought to customs and institutions of civil society. Burke said:

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All of the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our own naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

In an article titled "Defining 'Moral Imagination,'" Jonathan Jones gives a fuller explanation of the concept:

To be a citizen is not to be an autonomous individual; it is a status given by a born existence into a world of relations to others. To be fully human is to embrace the duties and obligations toward a purpose of security and endurance for, first and foremost, the family and the local community. Success is measured by the development of character, not the fleeting emotions of status. Thinking "sacramentally," (meaning humans are connected with a sacramental order of creation, a configuration of the mind in communion with the divine and beyond the rational) this is a sense that nature was created in such a manner that humans can draw "true analogies," wisdom inaccessible by scientific method.

Combining this discussion of moral imagination with discussions in the introduction, I would define moral imagination as the ability of the preacher, intuitive or otherwise, in the midst of the chaotic experiences of life and existence, to grasp and share God's abiding wisdom and ethical truth in order to benefit the individual and common humanity. To make moral imagination come alive in our contemporary moment, I look at race, the ghetto, and public resources in America.

Race, the Ghetto, and Public Resources in America

Race and whiteness lurk within and under every aspect of American life. Race and whiteness is one of the most chaotic subjects and experiences of the American experiment, and one often wonders how much of our discussion is helpful, if we discuss it at all, given that in our media, politics, economics, and religion, there is so much heat and so very little light. How does one constructively preach about the taboo subject of race and whiteness? How does one preach beyond the extremes of Pollyanna, "kum by yah" platitudes based on scriptural truths that sound syrupy and sweet, or the condescending sacred prophetic judgments offering the common currency of blame and damnation? How do we preach to the twin dynamics of empire, the awesome release of creative energy that is America, and also the unparalleled violence and oppression? In many pulpits, we do not preach about race and whiteness at all, given its explosive potential to polarize and divide. When we do not choose productive options and constructively confront issues of race and whiteness, the issues do not go away. I have learned through experience what a teacher once taught: "buried feelings do not die." There are so many buried feelings around race and whiteness in America, and they often surface — sometimes at the most unfortunate and inopportune times — and create even more havoc by adding additional layers to the buried feelings that do not die.

America is fond of believing that the country has made significant racial progress in the last fifty years, and in many places, given the dismal and awful stations we started from, we have. What we are often not prepared for is the reality that this progress often comes as two steps forward and one step backward. While I had hoped that the presidency of Barack Obama would move us forward toward being "post-racial," the disappointing fact is that some of the responses to Obama's presidency have been the most grotesque features of whiteness, racism, and othering, such as Trump's five-year campaign of "Birtherism." Much of this — amidst other legitimate critical and important global, economic, and religious factors — has led to the rise of Donald J. Trump as president. Laced with white supremacy and white nationalism, the alt-right brand (white supremacist right) of paranoid politics, including pettiness, vindictiveness, misogyny, xenophobia, discrimination against minorities, conspiracy theories occupies the highest office in the land with Trump's presidency. And while there is much complexity in motivations for voting that led to his election, I cannot dismiss the fact that dog whistle appeals to whiteness was a major theme of his campaign. What is so dangerous is that in the successful campaign of Donald J. Trump, normal white supremacist thought, or whiteness, by many average Americans morphed with the paranoid style of the white nationalist racist fringe of America to deliver him into the White House. I did say the normal and everyday mainstream white supremacy, or whiteness, so let me explain myself.

When I suggest everyday and normal white supremacy and whiteness, I concur with Thomas Kane who, in his article "Bringing the Real: Lacan and Tupac," suggests the following:

By white supremacist, I don't mean to suggest that the entire nation is wearing Klan gear or painting graffiti swastikas; instead, I intend the term to connote a de facto white supremacy, where the privilege of whiteness is assumed and perpetuated across generations so that taking the historically long view, the majority of property, wealth, and material goods are owned and operated for white profit. This inequality is embedded in our society by generations of choosing the comfort of apathy over genuine challenge of equality — material, political, rhetorical, and representational.

As I said in the introduction, most Americans are not using the N-word, and the signs of white and colored are long gone, but the conscious and unconscious acts and intentions of white supremacy, particularly in its institutionalized expressions, ensure that the majority of goods, services, and resources be owned and operated for the profit of persons of European descent. And I do mean white supremacy in its form of visible racial hostility and its hidden and passive form of racial indifference. Racial indifference is just as real and dangerous as racial hostility because it sets a complicit atmosphere for the racial hostility of white supremacy to thrive and grow. Or, as I continue to lament, racial indifference made it possible for the alt-right (white supremacist right) to occupy seats of influence at the table in the White House. The paranoid alt-right has gone from the fringe to the center of American political discourse with the complicity of racial indifference.

I opened the introduction with Langston Hughes's quotation, that "freedom is a strong seed planted in a deep need." I did not explicate what I meant by "freedom," and so let me do that now. Consistent with the aforementioned definition of white supremacy as the majority of property, wealth, and material goods owned and operated for white profit, there is a connection between the administration of public resources and freedom. Freedom could be defined as what public resources are provided to one group of people and not provided to another. Freedom is a form of privilege.

Because public resources flow to some communities in their freedom, they experience quality housing, health care services, economic development, decent insurance rates, effective policing, quality schools, public services, grocery stores, businesses, and concern by politicians. Public policy by virtue of biased laws and statutes, court decisions, lobbyists, school education decisions, policing practices, corporate licentiousness, and American civil religion ensure that the majority of the resources remain in the hands of an ever smaller group of "white" and privileged Americans.

Parenthetically, let me suggest that the concept of America as the land where any man or woman can succeed is coming under more and more assault and the factual evidence insists that it is not "rags to riches," but "rags to rags" or "riches to riches." What I am suggesting is that even some white people do not have access to "whiteness" of freedom. White privilege or whiteness is shrinking. Thomas Piketty suggests the source is what he calls "patrimonial capitalism." Piketty suggests that between 1977 and 2007, 60 percent of the total increase of the national income of our nation went to the top 1 percent. This is a result of a few people, who by virtue of their wealth, can buy the political system and establish governance that primarily protects and advances their interests. It is not news to anyone that as wealth accumulates in fewer and fewer hands, the very rich have power over politics, government, and society. It has always been true that black and brown people were mostly excluded from resources, but massive inequality is indicative of the fact that whiteness is shrinking. It is not just that black lives do not matter, the fact is only a few lives matter in America. There are many white lives that do not matter. Many white lives do not have access to freedom.

My point about freedom and public resources is not clear so let me further illustrate by discussing the American concept of the "ghetto." Kane suggests that one of the sites of white supremacy is the constructed mythology of the ghetto. Our national self-image is bound up in white "simulated suburban society" and small town America. Those in many black and brown neighborhoods have been historically and materially separated from this simulated reality. Segregated into certain neighborhoods, the media portrays as random the apparently senseless acts of violence that wear only a black or Latinx mask. The myth perpetuates the ghetto as a living nightmare, a place of violence and warfare, a jungle if you will. Racially insensitive institutions are therefore justified in profiling many blacks and Hispanics, such as in the policies and tactics as the "War on Drugs," "stop and frisk," and the immutable "law and order," resulting in the mass incarceration of many Black and Latinx people, including the regular and systemic shooting of so many unarmed African Americans. It is not only the police, but the District Attorneys, Review Boards, the procedures, laws of the land, the courts, the legislatures, and the Supreme Court that sanction so much of this white supremacy, often based upon the politics of fear, leading to racial hostility and racial indifference. It is interesting that prison stocks went up significantly after the election of Trump. Investors understood that based upon Trump's campaign rhetoric of "law and order" and "stop and frisk" that the prison population, of especially black and brown people, would go up. Now, undeniably there is the reality of gangs, the criminal element, and violence in the ghetto. It can be a tough place both to live in and to police. Citizens want effective community-based policing that serves to make neighborhoods safe and stable, not the racial profiling and shooting of unarmed black and brown men and women. The community wants input as to how they are policed and not the top-down paternalism of an imposed "law and order." People who have freedom have a voice in their policing, but often people in minority communities are not afforded this right.

Kane suggests that "the media's role seems to further inscribe the already centuries-old nativist and primitivistic view of African Americans and Hispanics perpetuated by white or white-thinking institutions." Donald J. Trump fits squarely in this white supremacist way of looking at the ghetto. We can discover this white supremacist mythology by looking at the appeal of Donald J. Trump to black and Latinx voters in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump offered his commentary on the state of African American and Latinx communities by saying that the government had totally failed them. Claiming that the Democrats had failed in the inner cities, Trump suggested that the numbers had gotten worse:

Poverty. Rejection. Horrible Education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crimes at levels that no one has ever seen ... to the African Americans, who I employ so many, so many people, to the Hispanics, tremendous people: What the hell do you have to lose?

As a part of Trump's commentary, he often added the reminder of the number of shooting deaths in Chicago, "President's Obama's hometown," coupled with comments about the prevalence of black-on-black crime.

There are many problems with Trump's analysis of the state of African Americans and Hispanics, such as the paternalism of when he mentions African Americans, he has to mention how many he employs. My main problem with this kind of rhetoric is it reinforces white supremacy and the mythology of white thinking institutions because it allows whites to take no responsibility for the social policy in the creation, construction, and preservation of the ghetto. America tends to assume that ghettoes just happened, often by lack of responsibility, initiative, and laziness of individuals and families. Patrick Sharkey argues that "the reality is that areas composed primarily of racial and ethnic minorities have been the object of severe disinvestment and abandonment for most of the past half century." Because only a few lives matter, ghettoes are the result of the social and public policy of America well beyond the last half century that denies public resources to certain groups of people. Normal and average whiteness does not take any responsibility for ghettoes and one neighborhood having massive resources and another having virtually none.

Where suburban communities have fared well, they have had massive support from the federal government:

Suburban prosperity, where it exists, has been facilitated by federal investment in a highway and regional transportation systems that allowed firms and workers to relocate outside of the central city. The expansion of home ownership in suburban American was possible because of federally backed mortgages, and home owners continue to be the recipients of the largest housing policy the federal government operates: the home mortgage interest deduction, which disproportionately benefits middle- and upper-income homeowners and dwarfs any housing policy targeting low-income populations.

We could make the same argument for the present resources that make possible regentrification of selected places, such as urban cores in American cities. We could also make the same argument of neglect of resources and investment in poor areas of white America.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Foreword: The Terrible Joy of Dangerous Preaching by William J. Barber II,
Preface: A Call to Conscience and a Dangerous Sermon,
Introduction: The Critical Value of Moral Imagination,
1. Race and Shrinking Whiteness: Four Qualities of the Moral Imagination of Robert F. Kennedy,
2. A Requiem — "I'm Happy Tonight": Four Qualities of the Moral Imagination of Martin Luther King Jr.,
3. Who Is the Moral Leader of Our Nation? Four Qualities of Moral Imagination and the New Moral Leadership,
4. How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon: Four Qualities of Moral Imagination in a Sermon,
5. The Final Word: The "Freedom Faith" of Prathia L. Hall (1940–2002),