Isaac Villegas is Pastor of Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Fellowship. 

Where do sermons happen? What is preaching supposed to sound like?

In the early chapters of Luke’s Gospel, we find multiple contexts for sermons.

There’s Gabriel, God’s messenger, an angel, a preacher from the heavens who spoke the good news to Mary—that she will bear a child, and that this child will be the Son of God.

There’s Mary, who sang her sermon: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

There’s Zechariah, the priest, who preached with a prophecy: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

There’s John the baptizer from the wilderness, who proclaimed the good news from Isaiah, a word of repentance: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” And there’s Jesus, who showed up for worship at the synagogue in Nazareth, and shared the gospel from the book of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”

According to Luke’s Gospel, we never know when and where the word of the Lord might happen; when and where we might stumble into the proclamation of the gospel. Sermons during worship services are familiar. But what about sermons beyond the walls of our church buildings, beyond the reach of our Christian liturgies and practices?What about sermons outside the design of church homileticians?

In a letter from prison, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked a question that is as much for our cultural moment as it was for his. “What does a church, a congregation, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life, mean in a religionless world?” he wrote in 1944, “[H]ow do we go about being ‘religionless-worldly’ Christians, how can we be ek-klesia, those who are called out…seeing ourselves as belonging wholly to the world?”[i]

Bonhoeffer’s question makes me wonder about the possibility of sermons that belong not to the church, not to Christianity, but that belong to the world—worldly sermons, fugitive sermons, God’s words to us from places we are unaccustomed to receive the gospel. Bonhoeffer calls us to leave behind the comforts of our privileged Christian milieu and instead immerse ourselves in the lives of our neighbors, near and far. He invites us to become an ek-klesia (Greek for “called out”) people, to live into our identity as people who are always called out from what we know and to venture into the unfamiliar.

The three stories I share below echo Bonhoeffer’s call. I start with a story that is thoroughly churchy, although the location of the worship service may be strange to you. The story in the middle is not quite church and not quite worldly, but somewhere in the middle of the two, a blurry landscape. And I end with a story that is unambiguously outside the domain of churchly worship—extra muros ecclesiae, “outside the walls of the church,” as the Swiss theologian Karl Barth would put it. Yet, in all three, I found myself caught up in sermonic events, moments when sermons happened around me and to me. With the last story I get to my central question, rooted in Bonhoeffer’s question. Can there be “worldly sermons”—that is, proclamations of God’s Word that have no explicit or formal connection to our faith or church life?

In the second volume of Luke’s story, the book of Acts, preaching events become all the more surprising as they increasingly take place in prisons, culminating in chapter 28 when Peter speaks the Gospel while under arrest. That’s how the book ends—with incarcerated proclamations. Because Bonhoeffer ask his question about worldly sermons while writing from captivity, and because Luke turns our attention to the carceral setting as the site of God’s Word, I follow their lead into prison and I invite you to join me, not only as I listen for the incarcerated gospel but also as an invitation for you to be drawn into the lives of your neighbors who live in prison—an invitation, as Bonhoeffer would put it, to learn how to belong wholly to them and their world.

Word made music

I stood outside the fence, waiting for Chaplain Dave to unlock the gate. He had invited me to preach at the evening service for the men in prison. As we began the service, we were informed that a beloved member of the prison community had died after a long struggle against cancer. The tone of the evening shifted as the men took turns sharing about their friend—how much they would miss him, what they learned from him.

Toward the end of the service, the chaplain invited the choir to the front. He asked them to lead us in a song to close our time together. The men stood in front, dressed in their prison attire—white shirts, green pants, black boots. “One of these mornings you will look for me and I’ll be gone,” they sang, “I’m going to a place where I’ll have nothing, nothing to do but just walk around, walk around heaven all day.” While the rest of the choir intoned those words in the background, another member stepped forward and sang of the people with whom all of us will be reunited in heaven: mothers and fathers, grandparents and grandchildren, sisters and brothers, all our loved ones who have been taken from us, including our friends, and he named the friend who had died that week. “I’m going to a place,” the lead vocalist continued, “a place where there will be no more prison clothes, where there will be no more state boots, where there will be no more count time.” Worshipers shouted their “amens” and stomped their feet and called out to Jesus, “Yes Lord, Yes Lord, Yes Lord.” The song was good news; the music of the gospel.

I was there to preach, but I became part of someone else’s sermon—a sermon sung, the Word of God as the music of God, preaching as a communal proclamation drawing together all the people gathered for worship, a song as a collection of our longings for God’s redemption. As I joined my voice to theirs, their hope became my hope, their gospel became my gospel. Our bodies sounded out a sermon as we became the body of Christ in prison—not only the Word made flesh, but the Word made music.

 Does God hear sermons?

Last year my friend Lauren and I taught a class for people who are incarcerated. Every Monday a correctional officer would escort us through gate after gate, door after door, as we passed through chain-link fences and spirals of razor-wire, down an elevator without any buttons, through cold corridors, deep into the catacombs of a maximum-security prison. There, buried, was a classroom. When we arrived, our students would welcome us with smiles, shaking our hands. Every week we would discuss the assigned readings—a book or an article or an essay one of them had written.

For one discussion, we read Will Campbell’s memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly. Lauren started our class by telling us about Campbell’s life and ministry, about who he was and what he did. At the end of her short lecture, she picked up her Bible and said that she was going to read a passage that was central to Campbell’s ministry. She stood up, opened her Bible, and found the place where Jesus’ first sermon is written. She read from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 4, where Jesus reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, declaring the good news that the oppressed will go free and the prisoners will be released. Then Lauren closed her Bible and sat down, and there was silence.

I glanced around the room, looking at the faces of the men, their eyes crying out for those words to be true, for the gospel to be true—for the doors of the cells to open so they could be free and we could walk out of there together after class. For all of us gathered in that room, the words from Scripture kindled our hope in the promises of God, promises of a reality that none of us could inaugurate. We couldn’t make the words of Jesus come true. They could only be announced, declared, proclaimed, preached—words that invite us to hope for another world breaking into this one, soon, but not soon enough.

After class Lauren and I made our way back through the labyrinth of hallways and elevators, a return to daylight and trees and grass. As I drove home, I wondered what would happen with the good news Lauren had spoken into that prison, into our lives. All of us heard the good news. But did God hear it? Did God hear the longing of the men gathered in that room, as they clung onto Scripture and yearned for God to remember Jesus’ promises? Will God fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy? Will those thick walls submit to the Word of God, now reverberating through the cinder block rooms and concrete halls, and begin to crumble?

#blacklivesmatter

The night after the news that the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death would not go to trial, I walked with my neighbor Cullen toward the drums and shouting we heard coming from downtown Durham, North Carolina. A crowd had gathered in a main street, blocking traffic. Cullen and I passed around the line of police in riot gear and made our way into the throng of protestors, chanting in unison phrases like, “We can’t breathe,” and “Hands up, Don’t shoot,” and “Shut it down.”

As the gathered community proclaimed each phrase, repeated over and over again before moving to the next, my mind jumped back to a page in my Bible that I was reading early in the day, one of the Scriptures assigned by the lectionary for that week: the third chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, the story where John the Baptist emerges from the wilderness to announce the advent of the Messiah and God’s salvific liberation. “Repent,” John roared, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

There, in the streets, with the protesters, as my mind drifted back to the text from Matthew, I heard in the chants around me the shouting of John the Baptist—all those voices crying out for justice, for the redemption of a society that hasn’t found a way out of the wilderness of the racism of the U.S. carceral system. Then, as I stood in the crowd, I noticed others around me pointing up at the building towering over us. I could see in the narrow slits of widows, far above us, shadows of heads and shoulders and arms—signs of life peaking out from the massive and ominous concrete block, the city jail.

With her arms stretching toward the prisoners looking down at us, a woman beside me started a new chant. “Brick by brick, wall by wall,” I heard her call out, “we’re gonna free us, free us, free us all.” Soon others joined their voices to hers. “Brick by brick, wall by wall…” Then, with my eyes locked on the shadows in the windows, I chanted, too, “Brick by brick, wall by wall, we’re gonna free us free us free us all.” We were voices crying out in the wilderness, chanting our prayer, words that echoed with Isaiah’s prophecy, with Jesus’ words, the Word of God, “to proclaim release to the captives,” “to let the oppressed go free.”

Wordly sermons

As a preacher, I’m always trying to figure out what to say in a sermon and how to say it. That’s what we do as pastors. But perhaps we should also think about how to decenter ourselves from the task of proclamation and to put ourselves in a position to receive the good news, to welcome the gospel in unfamiliar settings and from unexpected tongues, to dislocate ourselves and our congregations as the exclusive site of God’s Word, and to reposition our lives in order to see and hear God extra muros ecclesiae, as Karl Barth put it in a section of his Church Dogmatics.

Barth argued that the church doesn’t have a copyright on God’s Word. God isn’t a possession. Instead, God is free to speak and act however and whenever God sees fit, with or without Christians, with or without the church. The world “is not wholly destitute of the Word which the community [of Christ] has been set among it to proclaim,” Barth writes. “The community is not Atlas bearing the burden of the whole world on its shoulders.”

The world belongs to God, not the church. As God sustains the world, God provides other words, other speakers, other holy places in which the Word echoes, independent of our Christian proclamation and embodiment—God’s words “from a different source and in another tongue,” are “true words of a very different origin and character.” And those of us inside the church need to cultivate a disposition of gratitude, Barth counsels; we need to “be grateful to receive [the Word] also from without, in very different human words, in secular parables.”

Because God speaks and acts beyond the reach of the church, Barth warns against a sectarianism that shuts itself off from God’s Word made strange, God’s Word in what I’m calling worldly sermons: “Christianity must avoid any pride or sloth in face of them [secular parables]. It must be ready to hear them, and it must do so.”[ii]

Our world echoes with God’s Word—a beckoning word, drawing us into the lives of our neighbors, calling us to people and places from whom we can hear worldly sermons. God is there, speaking good news, singing the gospel, prophesying mercy and grace, protesting against all the ways our society suffocates the life of God’s children, like the violence of a chokehold.

You never know when you might find yourself caught up in a worldly sermon, Christ’s life extra muros ecclesiae, outside the church.

Isaac S. Villegas is pastor of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship. He serves on the Executive Board of Mennonite Church USA and the Governing Board of the NC Council of Churches. This article is adapted from a chapter he contributed to Fully Engaged: Missional Church in an Anabaptist Voice (Herald Press, 2015).

[i] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter to Eberhard Bethge, April 30, 1944; in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol. 8: Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by John W. De Gruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 364.

[ii] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.3.1:110-135.