Dem Dry Bones: Preaching, death and hope
Luke A. Powery
Fortress Press £12.99
(978-0-8006-9822-5)
Church Times Bookshop £11.70 (Use code
CT602 )
WE LIKE to say that the gospel is good news. The claim is only
partly true. Luke Powery's passionate study of the spirituals, sung
by the enslaved black people of America, tells the larger truth,
that to preach the good news one must preach the bad news, too.
Christianity insists on the inescapability of suffering, pain,
sorrow, and death: the realities that the slaves knew only too
well. Much contemporary preaching would have it otherwise,
guaranteeing you health, wealth, and happiness if you become a
Christian. (There are conditions, of course, including the
requirement that you donate generously to the church whose pastor
may need a larger jacuzzi.) Such "candy theology" is the grotesque
mutant of Christianity peddled by American televangelists and by
countless churches in poor places that preach a "prosperity
gospel". There were many of the latter in Hackney, where once I
worked.
It would be a bad mistake to categorise Powery's fine book as
yet another study of African American spirituals. Primarily, this
is a homiletical work, a theological consideration of what must
take place if we are to preach authentically. Spirituals, heard as
"musical sermons", yield an understanding of preaching which is
unevasive about the certainty of death and all the "little deaths"
that daily afflict us. Such preaching is true to "the whole gospel
in its gory glory". Powery suggests that his book is work not done
before. It is certainly un- likely that it has ever been done as
well.
Much is made of Ezekiel 37, the passage that both inspires a
thrilling spiritual and provides the title of this book. Dry bones
- death - are the necessary context of preaching. But if death is
the necessary context, the animating Spirit (staying with Ezekiel
37) is the divine reality that enables the preacher to speak - or
to sing - hopefully. "There is" - despite it all, through it all -
"a balm in Gilead." Spirituals integrate death and hope. To be
sure, we need to listen to them sung to sense how this synthesis is
achieved, but Powery's expert analysis of their lyrics goes a long
way to showing how the slaves' valley of death was illumined by
hope.
And this is what true preaching must always be. The great
biblical themes on which the spirituals linger - above all, the
death of Jesus ("the death-threat to death", as Powery calls it)
and an eschatology that, for all its aching longing for the other
side of the river, is yet a "future present hope" - must still fire
the preacher's heart and words.
Powery starts writing his book in a library whose windows
overlook a cemetery. He ends his book by recalling another one, the
cemetery in which he buried his ten-year-old niece. He does not
duck death, as do the prosperity evangelists about whom he barely
contains his anger. Like Augustine, he contends that death,
literally and figuratively, is "the pillow, the foundation, for
Christian proclamation".
Readers - may there be many - of this important book may reflect
that it is not only the sharp-suited evangelists who promote the
heresy that Christian allegiance benefits you materially. There are
less crude ways of telling lies.
The Revd Dr John Pridmore is a former Rector of Hackney in
east London.