Preaching Migrations: Introduction, Part 2

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Preaching Migrations,” guest-edited by Jerusha Matsen Neal, looks at movement of people; trajectories of social, economic, and cultural change; the impact of these changes on preaching. What follows is a continuation of her Introduction to this issue of Liturgy in which she is describing the focus of the essays, the first of them dealing with shifts in homiletical study today. –– Melinda Quivik

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Donyelle McCray’s “Playing in Church: Insights from the Boundaries of the Sermon Genre,” reflects on the generative possibilities of sermons that incorporate art, music, and dialogic performance. Speaking from the context of the Black church, McCray notes how crossing the borders of sermon genre gives her preaching students new understandings of authority and embodiment, a bi-focal engagement with scripture, and a fresh appreciation of the Spirit. My own article, “Migrating Giants: Digital Memory and Dislocation in Preaching Formation,” uses the Duke Chapel Sermon Digital Repository as an opportunity to explore the challenges and opportunities that sermons from other places and times present for the work of preaching formation. It argues that rhetorical history is dangerous as a means to homogenize contemporary practice, but helpful as a resource to dislocate preachers from unexamined norms. Through living engagement with the present, sermons from the past can deepen connections between preachers, their communities, and God. Each of these articles protests static, bordered understandings of proclamation in light of God’s expansive witness.

But “migration” is more than a metaphor; it is a lived experience. Privileged theologies and histories have only begun their processes of dislocation in light of the preachers who have experienced physical displacement. The next three articles in the issue foreground these voices. In “Displacing Liturgy: A Pacific Exploration,” Seferosa Carroll describes the brutal reality of relocation for Pacific Island Countries (PICs) facing the brunt of climate change. She notes the theological crisis of land-loss for indigenous communities and ponders the impact of liturgies and preaching oriented toward God as Primordial Migrant. Carol Tomlin’s article, “Sermon Texts in Contexts: Why and How the Preaching of the Second Generation African Caribbean Pentecostals Has Diverged from their Windrush Forebears,” examines the preaching of Caribbean Pentecostal churches in the United Kingdom. Tomlin traces how the second generation of these immigrant preachers shifted their theological foci from that of the previous generation’s eschatological themes toward themes of social justice and human thriving. Tito Madrazo’s article, “Preaching and the Wounds of Migration,” gives a rich description of a Hispanic Protestant immigrant congregation in North Carolina. He notes that, in this context, the gospel’s liberating message necessitates honoring the congregation’s transnational identity and witnessing to God’s presence and healing power in light of migration’s trauma.

The issue’s final offering is a personal testimony. Katherine Guerrero describes her journey crossing the southern border of the United States as a child and the wailing of her mother on that journey. These wails would become integral to her mother’s preaching. In “The Liturgy of a Scream,” Guerrero takes church leaders to task for their discomfort in her mother’s disruptive proclamation. She also calls teachers of preaching to attentive listening, hearing in her mother’s cries a rupture of the present, a sermon of survival, and a deep understanding of a God who is also on the move.

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All of the essays in Liturgy 36, no. 2 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Jerusha Matsen Neal is an assistant professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School.

Jerusha Matsen Neal, “Preaching Migrations: Introduction,” Liturgy 36, no. 2 (2021): 1-2.