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Afterword: The Long and Winding Road
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Afterword: The Long and Winding Road After climbing down that embankment away from the bull and getting back into the cold white water, I ended up body-rafting for another mile or two down through the ravine until the river eventually widened and slowed, so I could swim to a nearby bank and wait for my family to catch up in the raft. By that time, I was cold, drenched, pretty tired, and truth be told, a bit chastened. But above and beyond all that, I was also exhilarated. It had been a challenge, no question, but I came out of that experience with some hard-won experience (hold the raft much tighter!) that made the rest of the trip incredibly fun. I also emerged with a keener sense of confidence in what my twelve-yearold self could do. I won’t say I left at the end of the day in love with the Roaring Fork River, but I did respect it—and myself—more than I had previously. That’s my hope for our venture into the uncharted waters of a world that is simultaneously postmodern, secular, and pluralistic: that we might allow our experience in the culture to challenge us and at times chasten us, as well as renew our confidence both in ourselves as preachers and also—and even more so—in the gospel we have been called to preach. There are times, of course, when I wish things had not changed or that I at least knew just what to do. But there are other times when I feel the same rush of exhilaration as I did on that warm and sunny summer afternoon thirtyfive -odd years ago. Because whatever world we grew up in, whatever world we were trained for, this is the world we are living in now. More than that, this is the world that God loved so much as to send God’s only Son, Jesus, to announce God’s commitment to love, bless, and save just this world. So while I haven’t given you answers, let alone quick fixes, to the questions and challenges that beset us, I do hope you sense an invitation: an invitation to lean into the mystery of this age so we might embrace it together, walking forward with confidence that if we are attentive both to the spirit of the age and the Spirit of Christ, a more fitting homiletical response will suggest itself in time. In the meantime, however, there is still much to do. Waiting upon the Spirit is not idle time. Rather, I hope you will be encouraged by my analysis, hunches, and suggestions to try out some homiletical experiments of your own 111 to see what might prompt a fresh hearing of the gospel in this day and age. But here we should be both clear and honest: with experiments come failures. So I hope you also sense an invitation not just to experiment, but also to fail. To be perfectly candid, I wasn’t trained to fail. Indeed, there are times I think that most of my education was geared toward avoiding failure. But I’ve been convinced that failure, as least smart failure, should be our constant companion and ready ally in this changed and changing world. As eminent physicist Niels Bohr once said, an expert is nothing more than a professional who has failed in every possible way in a given discipline. Little wonder, then, that many of the most progressive and entrepreneurial companies today hold as a primary motto, “Fail faster!” The quicker we are to experiment and fail, the quicker we are to learn our context well enough to succeed. So it’s my hope and expectation that if we can fashion a community of “homiletical entrepreneurs,” we will together discover the means by which to give adequate expression to the gospel of God in this day and age. Lest we are tempted at times to lose heart on this journey, it may be helpful to remember that we are only the latest in a long line of preachers who struggled to understand the context sufficiently to sound forth the peculiar but compelling promises of God. From Paul standing at Mars Hill glancing upon idols to every god imaginable to him, to the suburban preacher who looks out at graying heads and wonders where all the people went, it is both our duty and delight to survey the scene, make our wager about what constitutes...