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During the past two decades, some homileticians were asking a question about the role of preaching in worship: "Where shall we place the pulpit?" Liturgical experts during the same period were asking, "Where should the altar be located in the nave?" And, "What kind of altar should church buildings have today in the light of a changing liturgy?" In many churches, the altar is a simple table, free-standing but located variously in the worship space. In some buildings, such as St. Stephen Lutheran Church in Williamsburg, Virginia - a "contemporary-colonial" and octagonal church built on a plan created by Thomas Jefferson for a church never built in his day - the table is central and the people are seated almost all of the way around it. In other churches, the altar-table is placed in front of the pews or chairs. The question of where to place the altar has not been fully resolved, but there is considerable ecumenical agreement that it should be in the form of a table - the "Table of the Lord."

The question of locating - or relocating - the pulpit has not yet been settled. Some are in the corners of contemporary structures, some in front of the table, others behind the table, a few are attached to the table and loom above it, and some are by the side of it. At least one liturgically-informed architect argues that the altar-table and the pulpit should be side by side, balanced, as it were, in the front of the nave so that people could see - and comprehend - the relationship of the Word and the Sacrament of the Altar. And not a few buildings have grouped together the table, the pulpit, and the font as testimony to the ways that God comes to his people in Jesus Christ. Preachers, planning committees, and architects still seem to be at odds as to where the pulpit should be placed in the church. Pulpits, practically, seem to be almost "free-floating" rather than free-standing like so many altar-tables in contemporary use.

In The Church Incarnate, Rudolph Schwarz rendered a service to people concerned about the arrangement of furniture in the church, one that was quite similar to Adrian Noceht's contribution to liturgiologists in his The Future of the Liturgy. He went back to the early church and identified four floor plans which, as they were developed, revealed the ecclesiology of the people who constructed the buildings. Each plan indicated the liturgical posture of the pastor-bishop and the people - the clergy and the laity. One, in which the pastor stands/sits before the people, pictures him/her as pastor of the flock, the person who gathers the people before the table of the Lord and tells them the stories of the faith that make sense of history and life and give meaning to their journey. He or she is also at the head of the procession of God's people in their pilgrimage through the world toward the fulfillment God has promised in the age to come. The relationship of pastor and people in worship, plus the pastor's function as preacher/presider, ought to be the determining factor in the placement of pulpit. altar, and the seats for the people. Since pulpits, particularly, are found in a variety of locations in church naves, it is obvious that the question, "Where shall we place the pulpit (and the altar, too, to a lesser degree) in the church?" has not, as yet, been answered to everyone's satisfaction.

Preaching Within Liturgical Worship

A quarter of a century ago, Reginald Fuller asked a question that is related to the pulpit-table question - and could settle it for most liturgical churches. The title of his little classic is What Is Liturgical Preaching? As worship and preaching were experiencing changes in the 1960s and 1970s, others have addressed the same question2 which Fuller raised in 1958. Liturgical preaching is being taken more seriously by greater numbers of scholars and preachers. Liturgiologists and homileticians are engaged in discussions about the relationship of worship and preaching; their professional societies have met together to share papers, discussion, and worship. Liturgical preaching is receiving more attention than it ever has before,3 and considerable progress has been made in answering Fuller's query in the light of new liturgies and new lectionaries in the churches. In the excellent little book, Word and Table, produced by the United Methodist Church to encourage and assist in the use of The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper: An Alternate Text 1972, the worship committee of the Board of Discipleship writes: "The restoration of the unified liturgy of the early churches, consisting of the reading of Scripture and proclamation, congregational prayer, praise and response, and the sacramental sign-actions of bread and wine, brings ... new theological understandings (about preaching and worship)."4 Fuller asked a theological question - not one related to ritual or ceremony - that demands theological consideration and response in all churches and from all preachers who take liturgy seriously.

The basic characteristics, or marks, of liturgical preaching were quite well established before the publication of new worship books and related materials. These are four in number:

1. Liturgical preaching is worship-related; it is done within the worship service. The setting is liturgical, not homiletical, despite the centrality of the Word - read and preached - in the Sunday (eucharistic) service.

2. Liturgical preaching is biblical. As Word and Table aptly says it: "The sermon is part of the proclaiming and hearing of the Scriptures, thus emphasizing preaching as a contemporary witness to the Word."5

3. Liturgical preaching is kerygmatic in that its perspective, throigh the church year, is from God's redeeming events in Christ - death, resurrection, and the parousia.

4. Liturgical preaching is sacramentally-oriented - to the Sacrament of Baptism as well as the Eucharist. On Sundays, a service in which the Word is preached without Holy Communion is incomplete, a "half-mass" or "torso" as some have termed it.

As the new liturgies and lectionaries began to make their appearance, a fifth mark has been identified, as David Babin and others interested in the relationship of worship and preaching have noted: The sermon "is an integral part of the liturgy" and, Babin insists, "performs a liturgical function."6 When he discusses "The Sermon as Part of the Liturgy,"7 as Paul Bosch
would address this relationship, Fr. Gerard Sloyan includes the functional role of sermon in liturgy, too: "It is always in order for the homilist to draw the worshiper into the action of the praise of God by Christ, in the Spirit, which the worshiper is shortly to do sacramentally in his role as priest."8 The preaching of the Word within the Sunday liturgy, therefore, is intended to stir up a response to the Word so that they may go to the altar-table singing their song of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, their God.

The Message of Liturgical Preaching

Genuine Christian preaching always is, and will be, the proclamation of God's activity in this world in Jesus Christ. "Preaching proclaims a message," declares Richard R. Caemmerer.

The message is from God. God wants to tell me about the life which he has for them as a gift.
Preaching tells of God's gift of life, which he gives to men through His Son, Jesus Christ, who died on the Cross and rose again that men might live.9

It was the death and resurrection of the One who "became obedient unto death" that initiated the most startling - and the best - news that humanity has ever heard. That message, repeated over and over for two thousand years, is the heart of the gospel; it is always fresh because it is addressed to people who have been -or are - estranged from God and have no hope.

With its emphasis placed upon Sunday as the "little Easter," liturgical preaching underlines the resurrection of Jesus Christ - and death and resurrection are considered to be a unitive event in this respect - in the church's celebration. "Christian preaching was born in the resurrection of Jesus," says Richard Lischer.

It happened this way: one disciple, trembling, cried out in a breaking, terrified voice, 'Christ is risen!' and the receiver of the message made it a sermon by completing the circuit and exulting, 'He is risen indeed!' ... It was the resurrection that validated Jesus' ministry, his announcement of the Kingdom, his ethical teachings, and finally his death.

Lischer seems almost to echo Gustav Wingren's exhortation (in The Living Word) when he writes: "Let the reminder for preachers be: only because of the resurrection does Christian preaching assume the significance and importance so desperately claimed for it."10 It is not surprising that Lischer joins the ranks of those who have insisted that the kerygma is the heart of liturgical preaching.11 And he is right when he concludes: "Fifty-one Sundays of the year, only dimly do preachers remember this fountain of all preaching."12 Liturgical preaching is and has to be kerygmatic, occurring as it does in a kerygmatic setting - "little Easter" - every week as the faithful followers of Christ gather in his name.

The preacher's task is to proclaim that message in such a way that it becomes a current event in the experience of God's people in this time and place, so that whenever the gospel - "He is risen!" - is announced, people might respond with certainty and joy, "He is risen indeed!" - now! H. Grady Davis suggested that contemporaneity in preaching the gospel is achieved, in part, by preparing and speaking the sermon in the present tense and the indicative mood.13 Gerard Sloyan affirms this when he discusses liturgical preaching and offers a kind of formula to preachers to assist them in grounding the gospel in life today:

1. The homily (or sermon) is spoken prose in a particular life situation; it has no proper existence apart from this situation, and in the medium of speech.

2. The homily attempts to situate the hearer in his own life through the Bible, and not in the life of the men of the Bible.14

The tense and mood of the sermon are one of the means - but not the only one - by which preachers may accomplish this.

Liturgical preaching of the gospel message begins with a dual perspective, the Christ-event (death and resurrection) as the source of the Christian oral communication and the weekly gathering of the Christian community for the worship and praise of God. The gospel must be preached to these faithful people who come together to celebrate Jesus' resurrection but who desperately need to be renewed through the Word and the Spirit. They have experienced the healing power of the gospel, but they have been wounded by life; they have known reconciliation with God and each other but have been separated once more by sin; they have everything in Christ but need the very power of God to deal with life in hope and on a day-today basis. Bishop James Armstrong, in Telling Truth,15 doesn't believe that all gospel preaching does this, and he states that "much preaching is unrelated to forms of reality most people are called upon to cope with." A dual perspective - the gospel of the suffering, dying, risen and reigning Christ over against and proclaimed to the real people who make up the body of believers at worship today - is a first step in making the sermon a relevant and contemporary message for this last part of the twentieth century. Under this pressure, the perspective of liturgical preaching takes on a sixth
characteristic: it becomes pastoral proclamation of the gospel.

The Sunday assembly of the people of the parish gives the pastor the best opportunity of the week to be pastor to most of the people he serves. Regardless of the amount of counseling he or she may do, the contacts he/she makes with people in meetings and in the work of the parish, his or her home and hospital visits, and all other ways that pastoral communication takes place, on Sunday, he/she ministers - through the Word - to more people at one time than in all of these combined. That's why Domenico Grasso says that the proclamation of the Word "is the most important thing the priest does in the mass," adding, "In preaching the Word is addressed to all who have assembled."16 And, in his opinion, that's why it is also the most difficult that the preacher undertakes; the Word has to be preached so that it becomes personal and vital to all those hearing the sermon. Pastoral proclamation of the gospel is esential in Sunday preaching.

Edification - the Function of Liturgical Preaching

In the introductions to his useful four-volume series, The Sermon and the Propers, Fred H. Lindemann17 gave an exhaustive list of the functions that preaching might perform in the liturgy. H. Grady Davis's list of "functional forms" was, on the other hand, limited to three: proclamation, teaching, and therapy. Arndt Halvorson writes, "There are only two reasons for preaching. One is conversion; the other is upbuilding." And in his theology of preaching, Proclaiming God's Message, Professor Grasso returns to three functions: missionary preaching, catechization, and liturgical preaching; he excludes the first two from normal Sunday - eucharistic - preaching, and, too, believes, that liturgical preaching should edify and build up
mature Christians in the faith. While Halvorson sees conversion as "the shifting of allegiance," Grasso envisions the preaching of the gospel as more of a "call back to allegiance to Christ" which, for him, requires the preaching of the law as well as the gospel. Halvorson might be speaking for both when he says:

In either case we preach in the hope that we can help the breakthrough to the life of faith. There is not so much difference between conversion and upbuilding. Each is characterized by an experience - seeing things in a new light, a new relativity of ideas and focus, new possibilities. Each happens through the elusive, yet always persuasive, quality we know as insight. When people are converted they say to themselves, "I am persuaded," "I am convinced," "I believe," "I trust." When people experience Christian growth they often say, "I see." "I see my sin," or "... my foolishness," or "... how he has been answering my prayers," or "... my neighbor," or "... how I must rely more solidly on his grace."18

And, again, he reminds preachers: "We must never lose sight of the delicate manner in which grace breaks through."

Pastoral preaching must also have an eschatological dimension to it that assures people that God's plan to initiate the fulness of the Kingdom in the future - through Christ - will be realized. God's will cannot be thwarted by the designs of a sinful and recalcitrant humanity, as our Lord prayed, "Thy will be done, thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven." How and when God will usher in the "reign of peace" with its justice and mercy for all people will remain a mystery until it happens. But it will occur - and that's the difference between his Story and many of our stories. Through the gospel as it is preached, that is what gives people hope "when there is no hope."

Pastoral preaching is theological preaching of the appointed scriptural selections - and in the context of the gospel - in sermons that are in the present tense, indicative mood, as in the telling of a story. Thus, Arndt Halvorson asks a rhetorical question of preachers: "Can we even do theology (in sermons) without the help of the story form and the involvement of people who are wrestling with the questions addressed by the theologian (pastor)?"19 Story offers a methodology and form to engage in the preaching of theologically-loaded sermons for the upbuilding and edification of God's people, especially as it is grounded in baptismal and Eucharistic preaching.

Until recently, baptismal preaching has been overlooked by most preachers, probably because the sacrament of Holy Communion tends to overshadow it. Communion sermons find a place in most preachers' sermonic output, sometimes as often as once a month. Their content has to do with repentance, forgiveness, the restoration of people to their God through the death and resurrection of Christ. The Eucharist renews - again and again - what has been given in Holy Baptism.

Baptismal preaching is rich theologically and, too, as story. It takes Donald Capps' theological motifs for preaching (the will of God, human responsibility and initiative, the grace of God, hope in God, truth in our relation to God, and the communal dimensions of our relation to God) and ties them into the lives of believers. Baptism not only is an initiatory rite that establishes our relationship with Christ and the Church, it also spells out our response - daily repentance and renewal - and our responsibilities (love, service, evangelism, care of the poor, peacemaking, etc.) in the world. It is best done as story preaching. See my You Are My Beloved Children [Concordia] and Plastic Flowers in the Holy Water [C.S.S.] for examples of such preaching during the Easter cycle.)

Liturgical Preaching and Pastoral Exegesis

Liturgical preaching depends upon a two-phase process for developing a biblical text into a sermon. Biblical exegesis is the first and fundamental step in the process and much has been written about that. In an article, "Preparing the Homily,"20 Reginald Fuller offers a compact method for doing biblical exegesis: translation or reading of the text in at least two different translations, reconstruction of the situation for which the text was originated by employing the tools for critical study of the Bible to determine what the text meant - and means - today, culminating in a paraphrase of the text. Exposition emerges when pastoral reflection, or exegesis (called Predigtmeditation by the Germans), engages the pastor:

The pastor has to concern himself with two poles - the original message of the pericope, as distilled from the exegesis [and] the current situation of his audience or congregation as he envisages it when they are gathered for the liturgy. Here he will have to draw upon his knowledge of their concerns (as he has experienced or perceived them in his pastoral relationship to them) ...21

The combination of pastoral care and perception makes it possible for him or her to bridge the gap between exegesis and exposition, the Bible story and the people, and to arrive at a message for this occasion. The task, at that point, is to formulate it into a sermon that will make sense to them and edify them.

In the process of the reflection that takes place after the exegesis, theology comes into play. Fuller explains:

Then he will decide how the text speaks in judgment and memory, in wrath and grace to this situation. He must ask: What is the law and what is the gospel in the text? Finally, he should envisage the result he looks for from his hearers: repentance, renewed faith, some act of devotion or some concrete act of obedience.22

Only then is the pastor ready to shape the message into a sermon that will communicate the gospel to the congregation.

The Role of Perception in Pastoral Preaching

Liturgical preaching utilizes perception in pastoral exegesis and preaching to determine the signs of the times in which people and pastors live and to shape effective and existential sermons from the Word. Perception provides insight into the human dilemma in the world and uncovers the common ground of that experience so that people and preacher might meet - through the Word - in the preaching event. It is critical to the process of reflection on the Word and the human situation to be addressed.

In the first chapter of Wind, Sand and Stars, entitled "The Craft," Antoine de St. Exupery might have been discussing the pastoral role of the preacher, instead of an airmail pilot, when he describes how he got ready for his first flight. He had gone to see his friend Guillamet, who taught him how to do the exegesis of the flight by probing the mysteries of the terrain of Spain and the Pyrenees. Of that experience, he wrote:

Little by little, under the lamp, the Spain of my map became a sort of fairyland. The crosses I marked to indicate safety zones and traps were so many buoys and beacons. I charted the farmer, the thirty sheep, the brook. And exactly where she stood, I set a buoy to mark the shepherdess forgotten by the geographers.

After that meeting, which Antoine called a "strange lesson in geography," he remarked, "Guillamet did not teach Spain to me, he made the country my friend." That suggests to me what ought to happen in biblical exegesis as the foundation of sermon preparation. "Mastery of the text" - in this case, the map of Spain - was essential to undertaking the task of an airmail pilot in the 1930s.

After leaving Guillamet, Antoine - for Wind, Sand and Stars is an autobiographical account of part of his life as a pilot and a reporter - walked through the city on "a freezing winter night" which he later describes:

I turned up my coat collar, and as I strode among the indifferent passersby I was escorting a fervor as tender as if I had just fallen in love ... These passersby knew nothing about me, (but) they were about to confide the weightiest cares of their hearts and their trade (to me). Into my hands were they about to entrust their hopes. And I, muffled up in my cloak, walked among them like a shepherd.

Again, with the perception of the pastor facing the task of preparing and preaching a sermon to his or her parish, Antoine reflects:

Nor were they receiving any of those messages now being dispatched to me by the night. For this
snowstorm that was gathering, and that was to burden my first flight concerned my frail flesh, not theirs ... My footfall rang in a universe that was not theirs.

Doesn't that sound like the lonely and difficult task that the preacher faces each week as he wrestles with a pericope and attempts to shape the lesson(s) into a meaningful message from God for the people?

And Antoine understood, as a pastor should, the world of the people he saw that night:

These messages of such grave concern were reaching me as I walked between rows of lighted show windows, and those windows on that night seemed a display of all that was good on earth, or a paradise of sweet things ... What meaning could they have for me, these lamps whose glow was to shelter men's meditations, those cozy furs out of which were to emerge pathetically beautiful, solicitous faces? I was still wrapped in the aura of friendship, expectant of surprise and palpitatingly prepared for happiness; and yet already I was soaked in spray; a mail pilot, I was already nibbling the bitter pulp of night flight.23

The business of preaching the Word is like that. The preacher needs to develop the kind of sensitivity toward people - as well as the Word - that is requisite in the preacher. Preaching, in the opinion of Paul Harms, is "more perception than conception." The preacher has to learn to see - for that's what perception is - before he or she can preach effectively to people. In his book about preaching and perception, Clement Welsh says, "Preaching is a pastoral action. Like pastoral counseling, it is intended to help the person discover the gospel for himself, and to make it his own ..." The preacher, therefore, must "see" the universe in biblical and human perspective: "To make sense of a world one must observe it, and not as an undifferentiated blur but as a collection of entities that are identifiable, and take their place in relationships that can be plotted and organized."24

Welsh believes that perception is indispensable not only in arriving at a message to the people but also in the actual construction of the sermon. Perception helps the preacher to choose language that will make people think, quicken their imaginations, and involve them in the preaching event. Too often, language does not do this:

A Sunday service with sermon can constitute a brief moment with God-talk but often the discussion at the coffee hour afterward reveals how much deep confusion has not been dealt with. The institutional results are predictable - a strong and growing biblical fundamentalism, immersed in a religion of the past; a fringe group of experimentalists, searching for renewal within the life of the emotions; and a middle group that continues on by habit, finding little that speaks to their condition, and which drifts away bodily and mentally.25

Perception will not only change language, but also excites the imagination of the preacher which might change the shape of the sermon. It urges more use of extended imagery, especially illustration that is in the form of story - not merely to gain the interest of the hearers but to get them involved imaginatively with the Word that is being preached. Pastors attempting to communicate theologically and imaginatively, thereby avoiding the dullness that seems to be built into much biblical preaching, ought to study the word of Loren Eiseley. Professor James Mays once said that every theological student and pastor should know Eiseley's writings; he interprets science through story in a manner that suggests how pastors might preach biblical theology with imagination through story - the Story - to their people. We will reserve further study of Loren Eiseley's work for a later chapter in this book. For now, it is enough to state that pastoral perception enables the preacher to see into and beyond the obvious mysteries of life in this world and enables the preacher to discover that imaginative language, especially in story form, will alter the shape of the sermon so as to invite people to participate in the sermon event in the hope of finding new and surprising encounters with the Word, Jesus Christ.

A Story Sermon that Integrates Literature and the Bible

Charles Rice, one of the three main collaborators in the conception and writing of Preaching the Story, makes extensive use of narrative in his sermons. He writes that:

Continued experience in the work of preaching has led me to think that the preacher's vocation is translation, the apt and artful presentation of the gospel in contemporary idiom. The saving grace of Christian communication today is imagination, that habit of mind which can move from one's own situation into a new frame of reference, enriching both "worlds" by the very movement.

A seminar on doctrinal preaching when he was a doctoral student at Union Theological Seminary, New York, forced him to face the question, "How does one preach on the cardinal doctrines without resorting to time-honored theological language?" He was also taking a course on "Christian Faith and Modern Fiction," and he says, "The possibility of preaching within a new frame of reference, the world of literature, only gradually came into view."26 The combination of those two sermons resulted in a sermon inspired by William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury that "remains for me the most satisfactory expression of the meaning of the doctrine of the second coming of Christ."

Some of Charles Rice's sermons could be called expository in that he retells a story, comments upon it, weaves in - at times - the biblical story, or text, and creates interesting and involving sermons. As in many story sermons, the text might be oblique, the message intriguing but abstract from the viewpoint of the biblical text. The reader will make judgments on his or her own about the content and the shape of the sermon which follows and integrates the doctrine of the second coming - and three biblical texts - with Faulkner's novel. Exposition of the Revelation texts is also done in story-form within the sermon and the story from literature. It might be used as an occasional shape for variety. The sermon also demonstrates the role of perception in pastoral preaching as he weaves together the biblical texts, The Sound and the Fury, and "Gabriel" on top of Riverside Church, into a message on Christ's second coming.

"The First and the Last"
Charles L. Rice

Lessons: Psalm 90; Revelation 1:7-11, 21:1-6

We meet the Compsons during Holy Week.

Their story unfolds against a backdrop of suffering and death.

But perhaps we should not speak of their story, for these people do not move through time as story does.

They are suspended in meaninglessness; unable to fulfill the time, they try either to fill it up or to escape.

Quentin Compson, frustrated by forbidden incestuous longing, tears the hands from the clock and jumps to his death in the Charles River.

Jason, who measures time by money hoarded, has no compassionate time for anyone, and in the end has neither money nor love.

Young Miss Quentin, with no one to help make sense of her past, finds each day as aimless as it is frantic with passion.

We know them all:

Quentin who sees his life merely passing, going nowhere.

Jason, who tries to number his days by his bankbook, to give substance to life by acquisition.

Miss Quentin, drifting in lonely fantasy.

It seems that Benjy, the feebleminded one, is the most fortunate: better to have no sense of time than a life which is no more than one petty thing after another.

But what is the alternative?

How do we make sense of the passing of our days?

Can we fulfill time rather than merely filling it up?

Does the church make any sense at all when, hard up against the question, it affirms the second coming of Jesus Christ?

William Faulkner's answer is elusive, and we cannot know it until we have met Dilsey.

The novel, moving toward that meeting, is well named: it is just when life seems, as it does in the Compson household, a tale told by an idiot, that we are most open to visions of the Lord coming again among his people.

In short, John on Patmos, a young man alone in a big city, Dilsey in the Compson kitchen - they are at the place for speaking to the Compsons and to us about the advent of the Lord.

John of Patmos scanned the clouds, and understandably so. Jerusalem lay plundered, Rome was a-building, and John was stranded on the very island from which the Caesars quarried stone for their eternal city on the Tiber.

But John did not languish, nor did he wring his hands over what the world was coming to.

In the past, and present, was an event which would not allow him to take the measure of the world by Rome's impressive blocks of stone.

He laid his right hand upon me, saying, "Fear not, I am the first and the last, the living one; I
died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and Hades." (Revelation
1:18)

John was as sure of the Omega as of the Alpha.

The Revelation of John is testimony to that faith, as dauntless as it is difficult to articulate, the faith of all those who in mourning over the world have waited for God's comfort.

For John it was the clouds and a new Jerusalem.

Paul had waited till the trumpet should sound and the Lord descend.

Hebrews has it simply, "Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today, and forever."

But however it is put, it is the faith we share with John of Patmos, we who amid the very beauty of the autumn countryside remember that we, with our earthly city, are passing away.

We are likely listening for no trumpet.

The sound of one would conjure up Civil Defense, not Gabriel.

Nor do we turn our radar on the clouds in anticipation of a friend.

But we understand what John means.

Let us, therefore, celebrate our common faith in God's triumph.

John says that he shares three things with us:

I John your brother ... share with you in Jesus the tribulation and the Kingdom and the patient
endurance ... (1:9)

In the midst of tribulation - and you can fill in what that means for you - we share the Kingdom.

We, like John, have seen the Kingdom of God, and consequently, we can no more be satisfied with the world than we can despair over it.

By the second coming of Jesus Christ we mean to say that in our past and present is a reality with ultimate implications.

Because we have heard the gospel, we listen for a trumpet.

The angel Gabriel stands on top of Riverside Church, his trumpet poised and his face lifted to the skies as if he were watching a jet take off from LaGuardia.

He is a parable in stone.

He stands firmly anchored to the stories past, surrounded by the bustling present, and obviously hopeful for the future.

His trumpet says that he has heard something, but his uplifted face says that he is looking for something out of sight.

His name means "man of God," herald of the Kingdom which is here and yet to come, at hand, around the corner, the city that is new, yet named Jerusalem.

For eight months I saw Gabriel every morning and night.

I went to work and play and worship, and he stood there all the while, his trumpet ready.

The foundations of the church on which he perches grab the bedrock of Manhattan as if intending to stand there by the Hudson forever.

And all the while Gabriel has his head in the clouds.

The stained glass round his feet points to the past, to faraway places and antique times.

Every Sunday Gabriel hears the same old story, told to people in well-worn pews, who expect to go to work on Monday and come back next Sunday.

They would be surprised to hear Gabriel toot his horn.

The days come and go, and Gabriel looks up into the sun and wind, sleet and snow.

He sees out of the corner of his eye that men still go down to the sea in ships, that the traffic becomes a little more hectic every Friday afternoon, and that the park turns russet autumn after autumn.

Summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, day and night, vary no more than the traffic lights.

But Gabriel keeps his horn ready.

And so it must be, that in the midst of our city we look for a city.

For the carillon plays and the people sing over and over: "Oh God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come ..."

Our future rests firmly on our past.

Because stained glass points back to a stable and a cross and three travelers on Emmaus road, Gabriel can lift his trumpet.

It is what God has done that braces us for the living of these days, though we can do no better in charting our hope for the future than to use John's clouds and trumpets.

This hope, the hope of God's kingdom, enables us to live in the present and face the future as John did, in patient endurance, in that steadfastness founded in remembering and expecting, in that grace which sustains us at the Lord's table where we remember Jesus and wait in expectation.

The table is at once our confession that we cannot live our lives in the world by bread alone and our Thanksgiving that God nourishes his people.

And so we are able to endure, doing our work in the world, because all our expectations are in God.

Disappointment and disillusion are built into merely human hopes.

So we face a discouraging world as did John, with no confidence in the world, but in "the Lord, the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth, who does not faint or grow weary."

It is they who wait upon the Lord who shall renew their strength.

I cannot say how you are to wait, for I do not know what you must endure.

It is likely, however, that we will endure by doing our duty, that we will take the world seriously without taking it with utter seriousness, that we will live out this year, and succeeding years, but not merely as 1970 that year which is 1970 anno Domini.

We will go on doing our push-ups and pushing pencils and making pies.

We will go to the dentist twice a year and do our homework, and save for our children's future.

For to wait on the Lord as if the world were of no account is to miss the Kingdom which is in our midst.

To neglect human things is to deny the First Coming, the Incarnation by which God has hallowed earthly things and made our life all of a piece.

We wait not only in work, but in rest, for to know that the world passes away does not make us frantic to stay the days or to fear the future.

We know that the Word of our God stands, and so we pass our days in quietness and peace and at night go content to our beds.

We endure time as those who know that all our times are in his hands, past, present, and future.

But while we wait in work and rest, we mourn for the world.

The very fact that Gabriel is there is a symbol of our holy dissatisfaction.

Had John been content with things as they were, how would he have seen a new city?

But all is not well, no more than in the old Jerusalem over which Jesus mourned.

And we are never so much in his company, nor so near to the pathos of Gabriel's searching eye, as when we weep over the daily newspaper, over the life of the world.

"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted."

But our weeping is not that of sentimentality or of despair, for that is not the mourning which is in itself blessedness.

It is the comforted grief of those who have seen and who wait to see the salvation of God.

For while we mourn over the world, we know the meaning of the promise, "Blessed are they that mourn ..."

We endure patiently as those who know that the valleys will be exalted and the hills made low, even as in Israel's crooked time a voice was heard: "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people."

Everyone of us has his own Patmos, and you will have to make John's vision your own, but the vision of faith makes possible our patient endurance.

Who knows this better than Dilsey, who does her duty in the world, knowing all the while that the world is coming to an end, the world where so much is wrong?

Dilsey is the old Negro servant, the mammy, in the Compson household, a family for whom life is all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Dilsey is the only person in the family who will accept suffering, who will accept life as it is.

The book closes on Easter Sunday, 1928.

Dilsey begins the day by carrying wood, getting breakfast, and trying to maintain peace in the family.

There is a strange, dogged hopefulness about the woman as she ducks her gray head and heaves herself up and down the stairs at Mrs. Compson's whim.

But Dilsey gets her work done and goes off to church with her children and the feebleminded Ben.

The path is uphill and leads among dilapidated Negro cabins.

The weather-beaten church stands against a gray Easter morning.

Inside are decorations of crepe paper and above the pulpit an old red Christmas bell, the kind that folds up like an accordion.

The people sing, and then a preacher in a shabby alpaca coat gives a sermon on suffering and Easter, all about the agony of the cross, and about the golden horns shouting down the glory.

Dilsey weeps quietly, rises, and leaves the church.

Approaching the big Compson house, with its rotting portico, Dilsey's children want to know why she weeps.

She tells them never to mind and continues to weep what seem tears of comforted sorrow.

Back in the kitchen, about her usual tasks, from which there is no escape, she talks to herself about having seen the first and the last, the beginning and the end.

And Dilsey endures.

More than that, she lives joyfully, lovingly in the world, for she knows that her personal story is overshadowed by the story of God's salvation.

So Gabriel, lift your trumpet.

For though it often does not appear to be so, to eyes of faith it is clear, especially when we wait on Patmos, or endure a world of rotting porticos, that "the Kingdoms of this world are become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever." Amen.* (* From Interpretation and Imagination by Charles Rice. Copyright (c) 1970 by Fortress Press. Used by permission of Fortress Press.)

Hymn: "O God, Our Help in Ages Past"