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4 Preaching the Grandeur of God in the Everyday Given that in the previous chapter I named the dominant challenge of the secular age as a “crisis of immanence” that has resulted in a loss of hope, it may seem obvious that our challenge and call is to proclaim the transcendent promises of God in order to create and sustain vibrant Christian hope. And indeed, as I suggested, that is part of the challenge—but only part. We live in a secular world and preach to a secular people. Here I mean “secular” in its most original form: saecularis, Latin for “being of the world.” That is, for the last several centuries, we have been trained and taught to seek answers to our questions about the natural order, universe, and society through our study of the creation (science), not via reflection on the Creator (theology). Explanation, not story, is the watchword of the age of reason. In short, we live, as Auden describes it in For the Time Being, . . . in the moderate Aristotelian city Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience, And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.1 I say this with no regret or reproach. Give up medicine, technology, scientific progress, electricity, and more? Not on your life. So we are Christians, but we are secular Christians. This means, among other things, that we simply cannot go back to a version of Christianity that assumes a three-tiered universe filled with angels and demons and where God’s activity is obvious and omnipresent. That version of the Christian narrative (and it is helpful to keep in mind that it is only one version) has been on the wane since at least the Enlightenment, 1. W. H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 65 and simply trying to reinstate it will not work, at least not in most of our congregations.2 We need, then, to explore more precisely the nature of the crisis of hope we named in the previous chapter if we are to address it directly. So let me put it this way: secularism has resulted in a loss of hope not simply or even primarily in an eternal future, but rather in the value and meaningfulness of the present. Our people, that is, are not asking Luther’s question of whether they will find a merciful God in the afterlife, but rather whether what we spend our time and energy on in this life has even a modicum of enduring worth or value. Hence, more and more people search not just for hope in general but also for a sense of purpose, of meaning, and of coherency: Does the life we are constructing and living make sense? Many people, if they are willing to come clean, will confess to having experienced at some point in their lives the sense, as Walter Taylor describes, that “what previously satisfied us, gave us a sense of solidity, seems not really to match up, not to deserve what we put into it.”3 To put that in more overtly theological language, with a loss of transcendence has also come the loss of a sense of telos, a purposeful and meaningful goal toward which we strive. Once again, I believe that the Christian narrative is remarkably well poised to address this situation, but only if we can reclaim a vibrant theology of vocation. This may not seem like a revolutionary suggestion. But in the preliminary stages of research regarding Christian vocation, a team of colleagues and I discovered two significant and contradictory dimensions about our contemporary situation. First, we discovered that the graduates of the five schools working together on this project—each school representing a different Christian tradition—highly value vocation and report their commitment to teach and preach it. Second, however, we also discovered that very few people from the congregations being served by our graduates actually “feel” called.4 That is, they struggle to believe that what they do matters to God or the church. Up to this point, in other words, their faith has provided little help in discovering hope, meaning, and purpose in their daily lives. 2. In some ways, this has been the strategy of fundamentalism, to insist on a narrative and worldview at significant odds with that of the culture. But as the world grows ever smaller and such subcultures are...

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