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VOICING THE VISION:
IMAGINATION AND PROPHETIC PREACHING
by Linda Clader (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2003),
Paper, 168 pages, ISBN
0-8192-1932-0
Preaching is at the very center of the church’s
life. It is essential for the life and unity of the Christian community. The
greatest preachers, past and present, are held in high esteem for their
eloquence and ability to mover their hearers to faith and action. Many of us can
remember a preaching that touched us in such a way that we can only describe it
as having God as its source. In the words we heard, we experienced the presence
of God alive and speaking to our lives. We hope that our preaching will also be
open to God’s inspiration and touch people’s lives in ways we know we cannot do
on our own. For this to happen, we need a creative gift from God—we need
inspiration. And that is what this book addresses.
While Linda Clader acknowledges the serious
nature of her subject, she suggests that a path for the renewal of preaching,
for both preacher and church, could lie in preachers’ willingness to “play.”
While VOICING THE VISION is not primarily a workbook, Clader does suggest ways
to explore inspiration and imagination, which constitute the necessary
predecessors to prophetic speech. Hence the importance of “playfulness,” a
discipline that can loosen the tight reins we keep on our spirit and open us to
God’s creative impulses. Preachers must keep a very specific kind of play in
mind. This play, rich in creative possibilities, can happen only if we have made
some “Sabbath time.” Easier said than done since preachers tend to be just as
stressed-out and over-scheduled as the people who come to hear us preach. Clader
advises that we need to take the sabbath more seriously and a way to do this is
to design empty slots into our day, week, month and year. If the Spirit is going
to use us in the work of inspiring and moving others, then keeping some kind of
Sabbath is essential for our preaching.
And we know, without that inspiration, preaching becomes merely the routine we
have to do-- week after week. VOICING THE VISION suggests ways to be more
attentive to God’s Word and the gifts the Spirit has for us and our
congregations. Clader shows us how to keep a sabbath that will open us to God’s
inspiration and also renew our own preaching spirits. We preachers have only an
incomplete control over the effects preaching will have on our hearers’ lives.
We hope they will respond to what we say and, to increase the possibility of
that happening, Clader suggests our preaching preparation must be a creative
process that will open us to the inspiring breath of the Spirit. She stresses
that it is important to follow wherever the Spirit leads and to be willing to
risk the unexpected results of the divine impulse.
While creative insight can happen at any stage in
our preparation process, the first moments are particularly important and we
must be attentive to how we spend our time in these early stages.
Our part is to do what we can to be open to the mystery of the Spirit’s
activity. We can’t make inspiration happen, it is a gift, but we can
deliberately design our preaching preparation process in a way that will leave
us open and ready, should the Spirit choose to act. After all, Clader reminds
us, we are in “Holy Spirit territory,” practicing our vocation in an “exciting
and uncertain terrain.”
The scriptures guide us in our preaching
vocation. While there are extraordinary stories of prophets and leaders of the
people, the story of Jesus and the early church reveal that there is another way
to look at preaching and imagination. The Christian story shows us that through
Jesus, God has communicated with humans in the most ordinary ways, as part of
their daily lives. Thus, the Spirit’s creative gifts are available to us and
what we need to do is expand our ways of receiving what God has to say to
us---and through us, to the community.
Preaching is one way God’s Word becomes present
tense. For this to happen for our hearers, we preachers need to experience that
eternally new Word ourselves. This is a book that will challenge and feed the
spirituality of the preacher. It calls us to examine our preaching conscience:
do we include in our preparation process what we believe about preaching, that
it is a place inspiration can happen? If preaching is a vehicle for God’s breath
of new life both for us and those who will hear us, then we must incorporate
ways to be open to that breath to inspire us.
Along the way Clader brings us up to date on
contemporary preaching theory and with homileticians dealing with similar topics
— creativity, imagination, narrative, prophetic preaching, etc. If you don’t
already know them, be prepared in this book to also learn from Fred Craddock,
Richard Lischer, Eugene Lowry, Sallie Mc Fague, and Patricia Kastner-Wilson. In
addition, Clader credits the strong influence Donald Gelpi, SJ has had on her
investigations into the Holy Spirit.
Using her own experiences as a preacher Clader shares her quest for inspiration
in preaching. We hear about her busy life as a homiletics teacher, writer, wife,
Sunday preacher (she is an Episcopal priest) and a special occasion preacher at
her seminary and national conferences. Almost all the chapters show how she
prepared for a particular preaching, what happened in her daily life that
inspired her and what she did to be open to that moment of insight. The chapters
end with the resulting homily. These homilies are varied and they concretize the
theory and suggestions made in the book. I admire preachers who write about
preaching and then share their homilies with us. It takes courage!
There is nothing gimmicky about this book or the
suggestions it makes to help us be inspired and creative preachers. It addresses
mainline preachers and our need to reflect on our important ministry. After a
while preaching can seem like just part of our “job description,” something else
we must do in the course of a busy week. We can get in a rut, repeating
thoughts, stories and illustrations from long-past preachings. Linda Clader
challenges us to rethink our vocation, shake off the cobwebs and take a fresh
look at what we preachers are doing and how we do it.
What does Clader hope will happen for those of us
who read this book?
My hope is simply that the way we preach will cause some who hear us to ask some
new questions, listen a little more willingly, imagine pictures, smells or
tastes that may conjure up a memory of another alternative. (Page 160)
Click here to order this book.
— Reviewed by Jude Siciliano, OP
Promoter of Preaching, Southern Dominican Province, USA
Book Review
Archive
Just click on a book title below to read the
review.
• A HISTORY OF CATHOLIC THEOLOGICAL ETHICS •
• Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings •
• A Captive Voice: The Liberation of Preaching •
• Adult Faith •
• PREACHING IN THE BLACK CHURCH •
• A Joint Review •
• A PRIMER ON THEOLOGICAL THINKING •
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers •
• Best Advice For Preaching •
• Remi De Roo - Chronicles of a Vatican II Bishop •
• COME, HAVE BREAKFAST - MEDITATIONS ON GOD AND THE EARTH •
• Compassion: Loving Our Neighbor in and Age of Globalization •
• The Death of Innocents •
• GOSPEL LIGHT: JESUS STORIES FOR SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS •
• Great World Religions: Islam •
• JESUS and the PRODICAL SON •
• Jesus: A Gospel Portrait •
• KINGDOM, GRACE, JUDGEMENT... •
• Living With Wisdom •
• LONGING TO SEE YOUR FACE – PREACHING IN A SECULAR AGE •
• How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row •
• Christ and the Spirit: Catholic Perspectives Through the Ages •
• Mark's Passion Narrative •
• Moses in Pharaoh's House •
• ...and the Mountains Echoed •
• Preaching and Catholic Social Teaching •
• PREACHING MATTERS: A PRAXIS FOR PREACHERS •
• Preaching the Mystery of Faith: The Sunday Homily •
• Racial Justice and the Catholic Church •
• MAKING SENSE OF MYSTERY - A PRIMER ON THEOLOGICAL THINKING •
• Redeeming the Past •
• Revisioning Spirituality •
• SPEAKING WITH AUTHORITY •
• St. Dominic: A Story of a Preaching Friar •
• THE CRISIS OF BAD PREACHING •
• After Sunday: A Theology of Work •
• The Rhythm of Being... •
• This Is Our Exile •
• True and False Reform In the Church •
• The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church •
• Voicing the Vision: Imagination & Prophetic Preaching •
• We Speak the Word Of the Lord •
• Where the Pure Water Flows •
• Written Text Becomes Living Word... •
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