Washington National Cathedral

Sam Lloyd: Good morning everyone, and welcome to our ongoing conversations about the intersection between faith and public life. I’m delighted to have with us today one of the most sought-after preachers in the country and one of our nation’s finest teachers of preaching. A few years ago, Baylor University ran a poll looking for the twelve most significant preachers in the English-speaking world, and Dr. Tom Long was ranked in that august list. He not only is a fine preacher but he is a fine teacher of preaching.

His speciality is how to talk about the Christian faith. A lot of his time has been spent helping clergy learn how to speak the faith authentically to congregations but he’s developed in his writing in recent years a focus on how not just clergy but the rest of us ordinary people—people who are lay people involved in the daily life and complexity of the world—can themselves speak about and bear witness to our faith. Tom Long has a long list of periodicals, books, writings about the Christian faith, about scripture, and about preaching, but it’s this focus on testimony, on witnessing to the faith, that I’d like us to focus on today. So, Tom Long, welcome, great to have you with us.

Thomas Long: Good to be here.

Lloyd: Great. You wrote a book just a couple, three years ago called Testimony, with the intriguing subtitle Talking Ourselves into Being Christian. We usually talk ourselves into things we’re not wholly committed to, but you’re saying that Christians are always talking themselves into being Christian. What did you mean by that?

Long: Well, I think there’s an assumption often that, if we’re going to talk about our faith, we have to have it already in place, already figured out, and then we can speak in full paragraphs about what we believe.

But I think, as a matter of fact, it’s our attempt to stammer out what we believe that helps us form an understanding of who we are. I started thinking about that when I was a parent of young children and my children would ask me questions that were at least as deep as any theological question a student would ever ask, and I wouldn’t know what to say. I would stammer forth with these things, but as I did, I became aware that I was not only sharing my faith with my children, but I was getting clearer in my own mind about what my own commitments were, and so the book is really on that whole theme.

Lloyd: So you don’t have to be certain and clear about your whole set of convictions before you try to articulate or live by those.

Long: No, I think that’s right. I think, as a matter of fact, it’s trial and error. You say things, and then you realize that you’ve made commitments that you want to draw back from, and you say it another way, and as you sort of body forth with this, you get clearer and deeper in your own faith.

Lloyd: There seems to be a certain tongue-tied quality to a lot of mainline Christians, when it comes to talking about their faith. It’s certainly true of Episcopalians. There are many different denominations here, but a fair number of Episcopalians who, I think, would be struck with a note of terror if they were asked to quickly share their faith with the person sitting next to them. Why is that?

Long: Well, I think one of the reasons is, we don’t have much practice at it. And the other reason is that we have ceded the territory to those who are overly confident about talking about the faith. And so, since we let the professional talkers, on the part of the clergy, or the evangelical talkers, who are very sure about what everybody ought to believe, including themselves, there’s a certain tentativeness on our part. We back away, because our faith has more ambiguity in it, and we think that ambiguity is a disqualifier, when it’s actually a qualifier for speaking about the faith.

Lloyd: We probably all live in dread of a moment you describe in your book, where someone comes up to an Episcopalian who happens to be a bookstore clerk, and asks to know something about their faith. Tell us about that story.

Long: Yeah, this is a story about Deborah Blye who is a sort of a Cokesbury bookstore clerk in New York City. And she opens up the store one day, one morning, and as she is opening up the store, she realizes there is a man standing at the entrance, dressed in the unmistakable garb of a Hasidic Jew, a New York Hasidic Jew, and he obviously wants to get in the store.

And she says, we don’t actually open for another hour, and then something makes her say, but why don’t you come in? Maybe I can help you. So she opens the door.

He comes in and he says to her, I want to know about Jesus. She says, we have an excellent section on Jesus. We have books by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.

No, he said, I want you to tell me about Jesus.

She said, my Episcopal soul shivered, and she pieced together whatever she could to describe her experience of Jesus.

It turned out to be a powerful interfaith conversation between the two of them. But I recognize it. My Presbyterian soul would shiver as well, and it does, because we’re not accustomed to being placed in the position where we have to bring our faith into articulation.

Lloyd: That reminds me, somewhere I heard the story of what happens when you combine a Jehovah’s Witness and an Episcopalian? Someone who knocks on the door and then has nothing to say. (laughter)

Lloyd: So we have a problem here, Tom, and you need to help us. If we would like to be more articulate about talking about our faith, how to we go about that?

Long: I think that the training ground for being able to speak more honestly and clearly about our faith is actually in worship, and if we think about worship not simply as a series of elements of things that we do—hymns and prayers and scripture—but as laboratories for learning how to talk. Those laboratories become very interesting.

For example, in most liturgies there is a prayer of confession, where we say with honesty, we have not been the people that we are called to be. We have fragmented and broken lives. Wouldn’t it be great if our politicians could learn in the laboratory of worship how to admit our failures? But all Christians can learn how to speak honestly about asking for forgiveness in moments in our lives when relationships are broken.

Or we have in worship places of praise, and if something opens up in life, whether it’s a child speaking to us or a beautiful natural scene or whatever it is, some gift that life gives to be able to say, “now thank we all our God” to be able to give it some theological and Christian articulation, and worship becomes the place to do that. All the moods of language are present there, and we practice that language as we worship.

Lloyd: Yeah, you know, there’s a real issue, it seems, of religious literacy, of knowing enough of our tradition to have some confidence. You use the image at one point of, it’s something like learning a foreign country, where you have to learn a language, you learn how they dress, how they speak, and if you stick around long enough you may begin to feel that you’re apart of the culture. There’s some of that enculturation process that we’re having a hard time getting to.

Long: Yeah. If you’re going to travel to a foreign country, sometimes you will take, at the Y or the community college, a short course in conversational Spanish or French or whatever, and maybe on the last day of class, the teacher will prepare a meal, a Spanish meal, and wear dress, local native dress, and you’re really practicing the conversation, the language, customs of the land toward which you’re traveling.

Well, worship is that way too. We’re learning how to speak in here in a way that we wouldn’t know if we were not given the gift of worship being the language school of the people of God.

We come to the Lord’s table, we turn each other and we say, the peace of Christ be with you, sister. Now, this person that we’re speaking to, we may not even know them, or, if we do know them, we may have a somewhat broken relationship with them. But we’re learning how to talk about them in different sorts of ways.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer lead the seminary at Finkenwald, he made a rule about language. In this community, he said, no Christian shall speak about another Christian in the community unless that person is present, even if you mean well by it. Now, Eberhard Bethge, who was a student at the seminary, said, we utterly failed to keep that rule, but in the attempt to do it, we learned to respect the image of God in other people in a way that we had never before. Practicing speaking about each other in redeemed sort of ways.

Lloyd: There seems something so nervous-making about beginning to use the language of Zion, the language of faith. There’s an old story—I can’t cite where it come from, but someone saying that you mention God once in a dinner party and you get awkward glances. You mention God a second time and you’re never invited back. There is something in some circles that makes people find that unseemly, undignified.

In fact, sometimes I’ve thought that my evangelical friends can talk about God too much and too confidently, but the mirror side is my mainline friends, and people I bump into generally in a world like this, who are afraid to utter the word God at all outside of church. For one hour will do it. When it’s over, it’s off the table. What are we going to do about that?

Long: Yeah. Well, I think, to recognize that the failure to speak the language of Zion at all is a failure to tell the truth about things: that there is a multilayered, multi-textured quality to life, and some of it involves the mystery of God that infuses the whole of life. And so, to simply factor out all religious speech in favor of speaking only publicly acceptable speech, is to shallow things out and finally not to tell the truth about things.

Now there’s another kind of line, and that is to speak only the language of Zion, and only the language the Zion shallows things out as well so that Christians, I think, are called to be multilingual, so that we speak the language of psychology, we speak the language of politics and sociology, but we don’t eliminate the vocabulary of faith, so that we can give the full texture of things.

I remember as a young pastor, I was visiting a family that had several young children, the youngest of whom had cerebral palsy. And when you would visit this family, this youngest child, whose name was John, was almost cut out of the family circle of light. He would look in as an outsider. And one afternoon, I went to visit this family, and only John’s mother was at home. And she wanted to tell me about a powerful experience she had had. She said she had been in the room reading or knitting; I can’t remember which now. The light was growing dim, it was late in the afternoon, and John was in the hallway watching her in the shadows.

She said she felt the room shift, and she looked, and what she said was, “I saw Jesus with his arm around John. I looked away, I looked back, and there was only John.”

Now that’s what she said. I don’t know what happened there, but I do know the two different things that we did with that.

She turned it into ethics. If you go to that town where she lived, you will find programs in the school that she started because of that vision. I had just had a course in the psychology of religion, and fortunately, just to myself, I said, “This woman is so guilty about this child, she has pushed her guilt through the symbol system of a Christian faith.” Now, notice what I’m doing. I’m taking her description of a religious event, and I’m reducing it to psychological language, so that I can manipulate it on the chessboard of manageability.

Now, if her minister does that, think what the culture does all the time to erode our confidence in the capacity to speak of things. Now, do I think something psychological was going on there? Yes. Do I think something only psychological was going on there? Not at all. Not at all.

Lloyd: So your whole notion of testimony and witnessing is largely about not trying to make a case or present an argument or have some tag lines. It’s about trying to be honest to what you are yourself experiencing, and beginning to see, however tentative that is, however unsure you are, you have a sense that God might be calling you that way, and it’s the God word that’s part of the truth you’re sensing. Or you may have a sense that you’re being forgiven and brought through a terrible moment, and you have a sense that something bigger is going on. Well, naming that is simply part of being truthful about what’s happening.

Long: I think honest testimony does not sound like, “Hey, brother, are you saved?” I think it’s woven into the fabric of everyday conversation. It takes place at the breakfast table, it takes place on the subway, it takes place at work, it takes place in the classroom, where simply an attempt to tell the truth about how we see things is interleaved into the rest of our speech and conversation.

Lloyd: Many people sense, I think, from the evangelical side that is more comfortable with this, a certain urgency about conversion. One of the things you talk about in your book is that it doesn’t seem to be the primary purpose of bearing witness to convert somebody, but to have a truthful conversation. Could you say some more about that?

Long: Absolutely. In fact, one of the images I use in there, we have a place on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, and one of the glories of that place are the magnificent sunsets. And one night, my wife and I were standing on the end of our dock, and we were watching the sun go down, and it was not a particularly good sunset. On a scale of one to ten, I’d give it a two. And so I grew a little bored with it, and I turned around and faced the other direction and started watching our beagle go through the marsh.

And suddenly the sunset had saved its best for the last, and it broke into an absolutely magnificent sight, but I wasn’t seeing it. I was looking the other way and my wife said, “Look. Look.” Now, she wasn’t trying to convert me. She just didn’t want me to miss it, and so I turned around and saw what she was pointing at. And I think Christians are not trying to get people to say, “All right, I accept the truth of what you say.” I think we just don’t want them to miss what we’re able to see from the point of view of the Christian faith and so we point at it. Look. Look.

Lloyd: You recall listening to a radio program where the radio interviewer argued that he had an irrefutable case for Christian faith, and he was going to mail it out to the person who had called in, and then she would have no choice but to convert.

Long: This is a woman named Barbara. She had called in to a Christian talk radio program. I was scanning for a traffic report and it landed on this program, and I listened to it for a minute. And Barbara had problems, and she was telling about her problems at work and with her marriage and so on, and the host said, “Barbara, let me interrupt you. Are you a believer? You know, you’re not going to solve any of these problems until you’re a believer.”

She said, “I don’t know. I’m having trouble trusting at this point in my life.”

And he said, “I’m not talking about trust. I’m talking about truth. I’m going to send you a book. And if you read this book, you will know that the resurrection is true, and you will become a believer. If I send it to you, will you become a believer?”

And she said, “Hey, look, I’m having problems with ministers right now. Don’t give me this.”

And finally, you have to admit this guy was not telling the truth. There is no irrefutable proof of the Christian faith. There is simply the trustworthiness of testimony. It began with those who came back from the tomb on Easter. It continues through the apostles. It carries on through preaching and worship, and it lives in the community of faith and the speech that we have has a kind of veracity to it. It’s not mathematics or physics. It’s the trustworthiness of speech that finally communicates the gospel.

Lloyd: So faith is really transported by this ongoing conversation about what people take to be true and what they have experienced. If God is beyond any imaging, any conceiving, there is not going to be a package that delivers God.

Long: That’s right.

Lloyd: But there is going to be the continual experience and testimony of people who’ve encountered or reflected on who God is for them in lots of different ways.

Long: If we are people of faith, and we think about how it is that we got to be people of faith, if you go back in our own history there is somebody—whether it was a parent or a friend or a church-school teacher—there’s somebody who had the courage to talk to us about it. That’s how it gets born in us.

Lloyd: And in a way, Christian faith is always one generation away from extinction. If we don’t tell people the story in authentic credible ways, this way of seeing the world doesn’t get handed on.

Long: That’s right. If Christians stop talking, then the gospel stops spreading.

Lloyd: Well let’s go back to your day job, which is teaching preaching. A postmodern, fragmented culture, people have either heard almost no sermons, or sometimes have heard too many sermons. What are you saying to people these days about the whole preaching task? And you’re speaking to people who get subjected to sermons quite a bit, many of them. What’s going on in the preaching world these days?

Long: Yeah. The preaching world is very much in flux these days, and one of the places that it’s very much in flux is right on the issue that you’ve named.

Ministers are recognizing now that they’re looking out at congregations—it doesn’t matter that they may look all the same, they are not the same. We are looking at multiple congregations on any given Sunday morning, and one of the inspirations for the kind of preaching that we’re trying to learn how to do now is actually coming from the earliest days of the church, when ministers all the time looked out at pluralistic, multicultural kinds of congregations.

For example, when Augustine preached, he explicitly addressed different constituencies in the congregation. He would say, “All right pagans, I know you’re out there. Let me talk to you for a minute.” Then he would say, “Catechumens, those who are just learning the faith, the rest of you just sit for a minute. I want to talk to you.” And it would move, the sermon would move around from constituency to constituency. I think probably we’re going to try to learn in the future more how to speak in many different voices to the multiple congregations. There are a number of other things going on, but that’s the one that’s on target.

Lloyd: Well, let’s stay with that for a minute in this. Postmodernism is even getting to be a tired word. It’s been around so much, but it talks about this reality of fragmentation, and competing stories about what life’s all about. And so the challenge is to deal with this scripture that has both been overheard and never heard, all sitting there at the same time. What’s a preacher to do?

Long: Yeah, well, there’s a debate about that. There’s a beautiful article by a British philosopher named Galen Strawson that’s getting a lot of play in university circles, and it’s called Against Narrativity. And what he argues in that is that there is this widespread thesis in theology, literature, ethics, sociology, that in order to be human, you have to have a story, and in order to be an ethical human being, you have to have a good story.

And he says, you know, that may be true about some people, but that’s not true about me. I am, he said, an episodic. I do not have a past. I do not have a future. I have a series of present tenses. Now I know I grew up and was nine years old and fell out of a boat, but that is present to me, like last Thursday’s practice is present for a concert pianist on Saturday night. I’m just a series of episodes.

Now, I want to argue with him theologically and philosophically, but I do think he accurately describes many people in our congregations today who don’t listen narratively, but listen episodically, and life feels like fragments to us, dislocated from each other.

And I don’t think that it is a good thing to do what some of the mega-church preachers do which is to play into that: my sermon this morning is eight bullet points and a video clip. That plays into the fragmentation. But rather to invite people into the baptismal Christian story, which gives to people who don’t have a story, a story that can lace up the fragments of their lives. But I think if we just assume that people can move into that story, without helping them grasp the contours of the narrative, it will be broken itself into fragments.

Lloyd: We certainly have to take time, as we try to retell the story, not just to refer to King David, but say that David was in the Old Testament, and a little bit about him, because there is no context. They don’t know who Moses is, so there a lot… We have to both tell the story freshly, but pick up enough pieces to give people the context for it.

Long: That’s right. And a lot of language that we use in worship is like pulling a piece of… a swatch off of wallpaper. You have the swatch but the pattern is lost. And so I think we’re doing more to describe the patterns that are there into which the pieces begin to fit.

Lloyd: I want to open up for questions from the audience, but let me ask you one more for a place that you’re sitting in here, a church that seeks to serve the whole nation. One continuing question is how the reality of political life intersects with church life and, in this case, what are the possibilities and dangers of preaching in a context where politics is always on the table? What’s the role of the pulpit in political discernment?

Long: Well, I think you’re in a rare and wonderful place, not because you alone have politics always on the table. It’s that this place makes visible what should be visible in the country church that we go to on the Eastern Shore. That politics is always on the table. That the notion of the reign of God is not simply the reign of God over the private part of my heart, but is the reign of God over all time and space. And I think one of the mistakes that preachers like myself make is to make the political sermon, or the prophetic sermon it’s sometimes called, an exception to the rule rather than weaving the personal, the political, the public, and the social into our preaching all the time.

Now, there needs to be a certain modesty about what the gospel demands of us politically. Some of us who grew up in the South during the civil rights era, we’re almost nostalgic for that era, because things were so clear about what the gospel demanded. And in many of the issues that we face today, we’re not in the position of saying the gospel clearly calls us to this. But we’re more in the gospel presses us to discover in this what is the will of God, to discern. To pull back from that in our faith is wrong. To press forward is what we’re called to do, and you have that advantage of being in this town, and in this kind of visible space where that happens all the time.

Lloyd: So the work is trying to guide discernment, not instruct people precisely on how to act on any particular issue.

Long: Yeah. We are a community of moral inquiry, and every now and then, we boldly stand up and say the best we can see it now, it looks like the gospel calls us to this, not this. Or the broad rubric of the gospel for peace calls us to turn away from the powers of war and death and turn toward peace.

Well, what does that look like in terms of the politics on Capitol Hill? Well, there’s where moral inquiry comes into play. We don’t have a program, we have a vision that calls us to do discernment.

Lloyd: Great. Questions from the audience, any questions?

Question 1: If you had someone who was a new Christian and they came to you and said, how do I begin to study the Bible and read the Bible, so that they could understand the context, how would you encourage them?

Long: Yeah. I would encourage them in two main ways; first of all I would encourage them to get a hold of some good information, get a good study Bible. There are a lot of bad study Bibles out there, but there are some really good study Bibles that will help them understand the background of the biblical text.

But I would also say that this is not something that somebody ought to really do alone. That studying the Bible is not a matter of extracting nuggets out of the text. It’s a matter of being in conversation with other Christians about the power of a formative narrative, and that’s best done in group. And so I would hope that there would be a Bible study group that I would trust, that I could put this person in touch with.

Question 2: Jesus said that I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the father but by me. Was Jesus a liar or is he the Lord?

Long: That’s from the gospel of John, and I do not think Jesus was a liar. Jesus was a truth teller, but I think that that particular passage is often misinterpreted. It’s taken out of Johannine context and turned into a word that says, unless you confess your faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, God has no concern for you whatsoever, that the only way to God is to become a confessing card-carrying member of a certain kind of Christian church.

In the gospel of John, what Jesus is about is opening up the avenue for the whole of humanity to become reunited with God. In fact, that famous verse that we use at funerals a lot of times—“in my Father’s house there are many mansions. If it were not so I would not have told you”—is probably better translated, “there are so many ways to abide in God you cannot believe how many there are.”

And the particular verse you quoted is… let me paraphrase it the way I understand it—if God… you look at my face, said Jesus, you look at my life, you look at my actions. If God is not like this, there is no way for humanity to get to God. But God is like what we see in Jesus. He is the way of God in the world. He is the truth of God in the world. He is the life of God in the world. And because that’s the way God is, we are invited to abide in God. It’s good news, not a lie, it’s truth.

Lloyd: Let me pick up on that, because we had a question come in off the website relating to this very same area, which is, in a world where we often are engaging certainly in an interfaith context such as this, with Muslims and Jews and Hindus and others, what does witnessing mean?

Long: Let’s put aside the… We’ve already talked about how we’re not talking about the aggressive, hostile kind of “you’re wrong, I’m right” sort of witnessing. I think the mistake that most of us in the moderate or progressive traditions in Christianity make, is that we think when we’re talking with somebody from other… talking to people of other faiths that we have to rise above our own specific vocabulary and speak a sort of religious Esperanto. You know, some kind of a generalized gaseous interfaith kind of conversation.

And I think, as a matter of fact, that’s insulting to our tradition and insulting to our conversational partners. I think, as a matter of fact, the more specifically I speak about my faith in Jesus Christ, if it is genuinely faith in Jesus Christ, the more open I become to my brother and sister, regardless of their faith tradition, because Jesus Christ was open to the other, and so specificity leads to hospitality in that particular case.

Lloyd: And so these sort of interfaith conversations are more the bringing of gifts to one another. The offering what I have seen and experienced and heard, and opening to hear what others have experienced and heard, and presuming that we can both learn things and be changed by that conversation.

Long: That’s right and we’re changed in two ways, I think, two main ways. One is, we listen to the rich faith tradition of another, and that changes us. I mean there is wealth to be offered, there are gifts that come back. But in trying to explain our own way of seeing things we get clearer ourselves about our tradition.

My rabbi friend in Atlanta called me the other day and he said, Tom, we need to have lunch. I’ve got a Christian problem. I said, A Christian problem? I said, what is it? He said, I’ll tell you at lunch.

So I went, expecting to talk about Mel Gibson or something, and instead what he wanted to tell me was that an avant-garde group in his synagogue had established an interfaith dialogue with a Christian church down the street.

I said, good. He said, no it’s not good. I said, don’t you believe in interfaith dialogue? He said, yeah, but I went to the first meeting. There isn’t enough faith there to enter. The Christians don’t know the Gospel and the Jews don’t know Torah. And he said, in fact, one of the Christians said to me, Rabbi, don’t worry, we’re not going to talk about Jesus tonight, and he said, I said to her, you’re required to talk about Jesus tonight.

He looked at me and said, somebody’s got to stick up for Jesus, I guess it’s gonna be me. But he said, I don’t want any more interfaith dialogue until the Jews come deeply out of a Torah tradition and the Christians come deeply out of the gospel. That’s when it matters.

Lloyd: That’s great. Thank you.

Question 3: How do you spread the word to religious skeptics especially in a society that’s based off of contemporary science?

Long: That’s a huge and wonderful question, and I’m going to stammer in even an attempt to respond to it. I won’t pretend that I can answer it. But I think one of the things that we… in any conversation, it’s conversation of hospitality. We share what we have, we give what we can, we don’t worry about people whether they come back with agreement or not.

In fact, when we worship here at the table, we’re saving some spaces for people who have not yet found their way to the great banquet, and we worship for them. So we’re not anxious about it.

But there is a sense in which one of the shallownesses of our technological culture out there is that it has narrowed the band of truth to the FM dial. Well, what if God is speaking on AM? An FM receiver won’t get it. And so we’re in the position not simply of trying to make a little narrow space on the FM dial for religion, but actually speaking out of a different frame of reference altogether.

If what constitutes truth is that water boils at 100o C under standard atmospheric conditions, and I can prove it in the laboratory, and if that’s the only kind of truth there is, then the gospel simply isn’t that kind of truth. And it has to come at things by saying, you know, you can’t see the sunrise if you’re facing west. You have to turn around.

That’s why repentance is such a big issue in the gospel. Repentance is not feeling sorry; it’s changing direction and looking a different kind of way. So I don’t expect a huge level of success in those conversations, but I think they are very important conversations, because they put the alternative world out there jostling against the scientific paradigm.

Lloyd: You use that marvelous anecdote from Niels Bohr as a way of opening up the sense that we are dealing with multiple levels of reality. Why don’t you repeat that quickly?

Long: Yeah, when Niels Bohr, the physicist, said that he got interested in physics when he was a boy, and he would go out in his front yard, and they had a fish pond on their land. And he would lie against the grass looking down into the pond, watching the fish. And all of a sudden it dawned on him one day, they don’t know I’m here. I’m looking into their reality from another reality. They think even when rain comes, it’s just ripples in their environment. When sunshine comes, it’s just illumination in their environment. And I am looking from a different world of reality.

And he became a physicist—theoretical physicist—because of that, but I think it’s a theological parable as well. We’re looking into an environment, and people are not aware that things are coming from another world into them.

Question 4: Hi, Dr. Long. You taught me preaching twenty years ago.

Long: Should I ask for forgiveness?

Question 4: No, I would think that would be me that would have to ask for forgiveness. Along that time, Dr. Wright became my primary mentor, Jeremiah Wright, and so from one preacher to another, as Jesus said, let those who have ears to hear, hear. In my perception, our country hasn’t heard what Dr. Wright has said. So what’s the good news for the preacher in exile, and what’s the good news for those who have yet to hear his call literally for repentance?

Long: I have a lot of empathy for Jeremiah Wright and a lot of admiration for his preaching ministry. I think he is one of the better preachers at work among us today and uses his gifts very well. One of the lessons that I draw from the hubbub around Jeremiah Wright and Obama that we’ve experienced in the last few weeks is the difference between the kind of speech that makes sense inside the house of faith and the kind of speech that makes sense outside the house of faith.

There’s this fabulous passage in the book of James, where James is doing a Jeremiah Wright kind of thing and he says, “Woe to you rich people, you have defrauded my workers and you have ripped off the poor, and God is going to bring you down in judgment…” and very strong and then at the end of it he says, “Be patient, therefore, my beloved for the day of the Lord is coming.” And it’s a non sequitur, and suddenly you realize he’s not really talking to rich people, he’s talking to poor people, and the rhetoric is not intended to condemn but to encourage those who are on the margins, that God is a God of economic justice and not the God of the tyrant and the oppressor.

Now take it outside and it sounds like condemnation; listen to it inside and it sounds like encouragement. And I think that YouTube took at piece of inside dialogue from Jeremiah Wright, put it outside, and it got distorted from what it’s intended to generate in the community. The other thing I would say is his name is Jeremiah.

Lloyd: What do you expect. Yes.

Question 5: Good afternoon. You were saying the Lord says in the Bible, I am the way, the truth and the light, nobody comes to the Father except through me. The Lord means that literally. There is only one God that’s alive. Mohammed, Buddha, the gods of stone, the pagan gods, are all dead. There’s only one God that can save us, and that’s the Lord Jesus Christ, and we’re weakening him by telling other people there’s more than one way to come through Jesus, don’t you think? My question is, that the Lord is all powerful and that there’s only one absolute and that’s the word of God?

Long: I think you’re making some very important theological points. I guess I would want to put them in a slightly different way. And what I would want to say is, in the gospel of John, the theological claim is that, when you look at Jesus and look at the pattern of his life and the way he relates to people and the things that he says, the point of it is that I and the Father, I and God, are One. That is to say, you look at Jesus and you realize what God is like, and the God that you see in Jesus Christ is a God who wishes to be raised up and glorified by all peoples. That’s what you see in Jesus Christ, and there is kind of a broad inclusiveness in the God that Jesus represents in the gospel of John. And I don’t want to take what Jesus says out of Johannine context and narrow it down when the intentionality in John is to broaden it out.

Lloyd: Final question.

Question 6: Thank you so much for your presence this morning, Dr. Long. My question is, if you were going to recommend in this idea of witnessing, what apologetics, you know, contemporary or historical, would you recommend that are kind of bringing theology and religious thinking, these religious ideas to the popular culture?

Lloyd: Things to help people make the case for Christianity themselves? Yes.

Long: I think we are beginning to see people like theologians like N. T. Wright… I’m trying now to reclaim the title of his new book that has come out in which he does exactly what your…

Lloyd: Simply Christian.

Long: Simply Christian. Where he tries to say, okay, if I want to talk about the Christian faith in ways that go at least halfway across the bridge to people who are unaccustomed with this, or maybe even have been burned by this at points, and so that… there’s a genre of those kind of books coming out, and N. T. Wright’s would be one that I would recommend.

Lloyd: On that note, we should stop for now. We would love for you all to linger for some coffee and conversation with Tom Long taking place at the west end of the Cathedral and just to your left. By all means be back for the 11:15 service today when Tom Long will be our preacher. We’ll have a chance to hear him and see him in action.

There won’t be Forum next week. It’s graduation weekend around here. But please be with us again in two weeks, when we will have with us Congressman Lee Hamilton, one of the important peacemakers of our time. Please join me in thanking Tom Long. (applause)