Why I Am Not Persuasive
Shortly after I preached at an Academy of Homiletics meeting in Oakland, California, a colleague said wryly, “I found your sermon most persuasive.” I presume he spoke tongue in cheek, having read a friend’s early critique of my rejection of ‘persuasion’ as a paradigm for Christian preaching.
Why would anyone wish not to be persuasive, especially a preacher, of all people, whose “success” depends on his or her ability to win an audience? In this endeavor the preacher follows certain biblical precedents. Jesus apparently told his parables in a religiously contested situation. Paul argued his message against a variety of opponents in the marketplace, the synagogue, and even in his own churches. Like Paul, we preach in an atmosphere of religious and cultural pluralism. Persuasion is a rhetorical necessity in a capitalist democracy. How else are you going to elect a candidate or sell a product? It flourishes in a society like ours that prizes the exercise and spoils of free speech.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
By John Updike
(from Telephone Poles and Other Poems, 1963)
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell's dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
Image: You Write What You Can’t Forget: A Conversation with Richard Lischer
Image: Given how important memoir has been in your life, I find it interesting that you seemed to fall into the genre. What accounts for your decades-long fascination?
Richard Lischer: Most memoirists write at an inflection point in their lives—which is, of course, a remembered inflection point—from which they date some new understanding of themselves. The poet and preacher John Donne pointedly wrote, “I date my life from my ministry.” I completed two memoirs about my own inflection points before developing a scholarly interest in the genre. I had no institutional purpose in writing them other than the need to tell—nothing to defend, no axe to grind, no score to settle.
Church Times review of “Our Hearts Are Restless”
Spiritual memoirs have comforted this author, says Richard Lamey.
This is an engaging and inspiring book by the writer, teacher, and Lutheran minister Richard Lischer. Partly through the lens of the pandemic, he reflects deeply on memoir and autobiography, and how that tradition of writing is a blessing to the Christian reader on their own journey. We can learn how to live well from other people’s lives. We can learn confidence in God from fellow pilgrims
America Magazine review of “King: A Life”
Martin Luther King Jr. once characterized the times in which he lived as “life’s restless sea.” His own turbulent voyage on that sea has been well documented. We know its ports of call by heart: the Montgomery bus boycott; failure in Albany, Ga.; triumph in Birmingham, Ala.; “I Have a Dream”; Selma, Ala.; Chicago; Lyndon B. Johnson and Vietnam; the Poor People’s Campaign; death at 39; “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” They are set in stone on the Tidal Basin and inscribed in the American memory. These are the chapters of every King biography—and the challenge to every biographer.
Jonathan Eig’s new biography, King: A Life, is more than up to the challenge. It will take its place among the foremost of the many treatments of King.
Comments in The New Yorker
Parul Sehgal’s essay about the predominance of “storytelling” in contemporary culture reminded me of what happened to Christianity when narrative theology began to spread through American churches in the nineteen-seventies (A Critic at Large, July 10th & 17th). To congregations that had grown tired of doctrinal and moral pronouncements, the new style—which recast the sermon as a story with which the listener could readily identify—came as a breath of fresh air. After all, the Gospel is nothing if not a narrative, and the Hebrew Pentateuch is one good story after another.
Born Again
One of my colleagues has a cartoon from the New Yorker taped to his door. It shows a distinguished-looking person in cap and gown about to deliver a commencement address. With a self-congratulatory nod, he says, “I hardly know where to begin. I know so much.” This may be Nicodemus’s problem. It’s not that he can’t conceive of being transformed by a new idea. It’s just that it’s been so long since he’s heard a genuinely new idea that he’s forgotten how to get carried away. He is trying to reposition himself spiritually, hoping to figure things out, trying to find himself, which is a bit awkward for him because he is a grown-up. He’s supposed to have found himself a long time ago. Besides, he is “a teacher of Israel,” and academics do not change their minds abruptly.
Faith & Leadership: What’s the secret to spiritual memoir? Honesty.
In his most recent book, “Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir,” Lischer engages with 21 writers of spiritual memoirs and autobiographies. They range from classics in the genre, such as Augustine, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, to James Baldwin, Emily Dickinson and Richard Rodriguez.
An academic and a preacher, Lischer spent his career at Duke Divinity School, where his work included teaching a course called “The Life of Faith” to divinity students and, on occasion, to prison inmates. He is the author or editor of 15 books, including the recently re-released “The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word that Moved America.”
He spoke with Faith & Leadership’s Sally Hicks about the art of spiritual memoir and his own writing practice.
We Have to Look: The Transfiguration of Jesus
“He was transfigured before them.” The Greek word is not fancy. It is the word “changed,” Metemorphothe. From which we get the word metamorphosis. We say, the caterpillar is changed into a butterfly. It is a metamorphosis.
That’s what seems to have happened to Jesus. The caterpillar Messiah who was poor and persecuted, who once said of himself, “Foxes have holes; birds have nests, but the Son of Man has [zero] nowhere to lay his head” is suddenly changed from caterpillar to butterfly. Suddenly, he is—beautiful—shining like the sun.
The National Book Review - Richard Lischer Talks About The Art of Spiritual Memoir
For The National Book Review, Barbara Mahany, author of several spiritual memoirs, spoke with Lischer about his new book, likening their conversation to “that long-awaited cross-campus stroll after class had ended, and the beloved professor, as always, offered more time and undivided attention.” In his powerful new book, Lischer engages on the page with more than 20 spiritual memoirs across the centuries.
Spiritual Memoir: Telling Lives
Traditionally, the memoir was the province of the “great man” who embodied the achievements of his age and helped steer the course of historic events, who now, with some leisure on his hands and in need of cash, has agreed to write about it. The chief purpose of the memoir was to provide an insider’s perspective on external events, such as wars, treaties, and scientific explorations.
Has the Pulpit Failed America?
America may no longer be a nation with the soul of a church, as G.K. Chesterton famously claimed, but there is something of “church” about America that continues to infatuate theologians, historians, and cultural commentators. We are “one nation under God,” but how and under what circumstances does this God influence the nation as a whole? Well, just about every one of the nearly 400,000 churches and synagogues in America has a pulpit or an appointed place from which a leader may speak of the Lord. Political scientist Melissa Matthes, who teaches at the US Coast Guard Academy, is not the first to identify the sermon as the key measurement of the church’s cultural and political influence.
Easter: The Third Question
On Friday evening, when we were gathered in this great tomb of a church, a single candle sent a spooky shadow up the walls. We sang "Were you there when they laid him in the tomb," and in the gloom of Good Friday we felt that we were. There.
But there is a final, unfamiliar stanza to the Negro spiritual. It goes like this: Were you there when he rose up from the dead? Were you there when he rose up from the dead. Despite our best efforts to recreate that scene historically or liturgically, we have to admit, No, we were not there. Nobody was.
Meditation on Psalm 42: “Where Is Your God?”
The Bible is a book of questions. We may prefer to read it as a book of answers, but it is both: question and answer / answer and question. Sometimes God asks the questions. Sometimes we ask the questions of God. Someone (with nothing better to do) has totaled them up in the four Gospels” Jesus asks 307 questions. In the brief portion I just read of Psalm 42, you may have heard, When? Why? and, most cruelly, Where is your God?
To Keep A True Lent.
by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
IS this a fast, to keep
The larder lean ?
And clean
From fat of veals and sheep ?
Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish ?
Meditation: Altar or Table?
This simple sixteenth-century poem sums up the trust each of us has as we prepare to receive the Lord’s Supper. We believe and we receive. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But we know the controversies regarding this sacrament have made it anything but simple. What the church optimistically named the sacrament of unity has often proved to be an occasion of disunity, setting off great arguments among Christians over the status and make-up of its ordinary elements. How can a modest piece of bread be the body of Christ? What is the best way to receive the wine? Must there be wine?
MLK: Richard Lischer and Bishop Rob Wright of Atlanta
On Monday, January 17th, 2022, we celebrate the 93rd birthday of The Preacher King, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. What made Dr. King who he is as a preacher? What are some insights on who Dr. King is as a prophet?
In this episode, Bishop Wright has a conversation with Dr. Richard Lischer, author of The Preacher King. They discuss the legacy of Dr. King, how he mobilized people to address tough problems, his preachings, and important moments in his life as a prophet. Listen in for the full conversation.
Martin Luther King’s Break-up Letter To the White Church
Sooner or later, it was a letter he would have to write. You can be abused, rejected, or taken for granted only so long before you write the proverbial “Dear John” letter. It is not a bill of divorcement King is sending to its recipients, because the White church and the Negro church have never been married. There has been the occasional pretense of love, but never the real thing. No one wanted it to end like this. Not King who tirelessly preached (and pretended) that Blacks and Whites are “brothers.” And not the recipients of his famous Letter, who, like the church bodies they represented, pretended to the same brotherhood.
A Poem/Prayer for an Uncertain Year
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “New Year 1945”
With every power for good to stay and guide me, comforted and inspired beyond all fear, I’ll live these days with you in thought beside me, and pass, with you, into the coming year.
While all the powers of Good aid and attend us, boldly we’ll face the future, be it what may. At even, and at morn, God will befriend us, and oh, most surely on each new year’s day
John the Baptist: Witness
We have a relative whose Christmas card arrives every year at about this time. It’s always the same. We think he loves us, but . . . it’s a severe love. Well, I have his card here; judge for yourselves.
“Dear Rick and Tracy, and family: You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Happy holidays! Love, John.”
Each year we ask ourselves, must we have Cousin John every Christmas? Can’t we skip a year? Is he really family? The answer is always Yes, but why?
Why? Because of all the ways we have of preparing for Christmas (and we have a lot), John’s method is the best.