Preaching to Heal the Wounds of Dislocation

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 an excerpt from an article by Tito Madrazo on the importance and power of preaching for those who are migrate to a new home. –– Melinda Quivik

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A few months ago, as my family was preparing to relocate from the Raleigh-Durham area, I was . . . [invited] to preach one last time at Iglesia Agua Viva, one of the principal sites of my multi-year ethnographic research project into Hispanic Protestant preaching in immigrant congregations.

Co-pastors, Esteban and Diana . . . have called upon me regularly to preach in their absence when they were taking a vacation or engaging in short-term mission work in the Caribbean. While there are certainly other views as to how Hispanic preaching might—or even should—be oriented, this preaching experience provided still more evidence of the central finding of my study—that immigrant predicadores/preachers consistently focused their proclamation on healing the wounds their hearers had received through the trauma of migration and transnational identity.

During my years of participant-observation at Iglesia Agua Viva, I had grown accustomed to their worship practices. There were long, extemporaneous prayers interspersed with the congregation’s cries of ¡Amén! and ¡Gloria a Dios! The live band, mostly teenagers and young adults, led the gathering in extended contemporary worship sets while a couple of teenagers in the back advanced the PowerPoint slides on a laptop. At about the midpoint of the service, Pastor Esteban came to the pulpit in order to recognize and welcome the visitors who had joined them for worship. This was also a time during which he typically shared a few brief announcements and mentioned recent birthdays and anniversaries within the congregation. On this particular day, however, he called forward one of his lay leaders named Moisés, explaining that he had a special announcement.

Moisés had been involved at Agua Viva nearly as long as I had and was one of the church’s most faithful volunteers. Over the last few years, he had been dating another key volunteer named María. As he took the microphone from Estéban, Moisés asked María to come forward. It was María’s birthday, he explained, and he wanted her and the congregation to know how grateful he was that she was part of his life. He began enumerating María’s many virtues and then, suddenly, dropped to one knee and pulled out a ring. In front of the entire congregation, Moisés asked María if she would marry him. . . . The entire congregation rose with shouts of approval. Cell phones emerged to capture the remainder of the moment. María nodded yes, and the happy couple embraced.

Then Pastor Esteban took the microphone back from Moisés and began telling the story of Moisés and María’s journey from a theological perspective. This was not just a human love story—it was divine providence at work. There were times along the way when Moisés had nearly derailed it, but God had been faithful, and this new union would bear witness to that faithfulness for many years to come. Esteban then turned to the congregation and explained that God offered this same gift of faithfulness to them—not just to provide them with a romantic love interest, but to call them into relationship as a family of faith for one another.

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

Tito Madrazo is a Program Director in Religion for the Lilly Endowment and the author of Predicadores: Hispanic Preaching and Immigrant Identity (Baylor University Press, 2021).

Tito Madrazo, “Preaching and the Wounds of Migration,” Liturgy 36, no. 2 (2021): 45-50, https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2021.1895633.