Biblical preaching in Babel.

Lundblad, Barbara K.

After the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001, someone said, "Our response to these events will be determined by the simile we choose. Is it like Pearl Harbor, or is it like the Tower of Babel?" But no simile or metaphor could frame that day. Though many said, "We haven't seen such an outpouring of patriotism since Pearl Harbor," it was not like Pearl Harbor. No nation sent those planes, no government could be held accountable, and those who died were not in anyone's army. We've responded with the anthems of our nation and have bought flags faster than they could be sewn. We've called upon other nations to stand with us or be branded as our enemies. "God, bless America."

But there is too much pain and heartache to speak of the day as Babel's judgment. A few tried to bring God in to explain the tragedy, but not by comparing it to Babel. The problem, they said, was not tower-building, but that some were ungodly--libertarians, homosexuals, and prochoice feminists were to blame. It didn't take long for such voices to be soundly chastised across the political spectrum, though the words couldn't be completely erased. Nothing could explain this tragedy except the very real presence of evil. It was not Babel, for that tower was not destroyed. Emotions were too raw to chastise the dead or the living for trying to make a name for themselves. It was not the time for critique, only unfathomable sadness. For many, it was also a time for revenge and a deep longing to know that the United States was still the greatest nation on earth. By Christmas time a billboard on the Westside Highway was pushing designer clothes, white letters on black: "God, dress America."

What is the Bible?

Babel and Bible. They sound so alike, Bs at the beginning and in the middle, Ls shaping the final sound. Only one vowel difference between them! Bible and Babel. Is Babel wholly profane and the Bible wholly holy? Did the fires of Pentecost reverse the confusing diffusion of Babel or call the diffusion good? Has this postmodern age taken Pentecost to the extreme: each one now hears in her or his own language so that no one can possibly preach a sermon that another could understand? (I hear what I hear and you hear what you hear, but we don't hear the same thing and there's no way we can authentically hear each other.)

The Bible is, of course, different things to different people:

* Stu Weber, writer and speaker for The Promise Keepers movement, says, "Think of the Bible as the owner's manual for your masculinity." (1)

* An unnamed homeless woman interviewed by Jonathan Kozel in Rachel and Her Children: "The Bible is what taught me to read. When I read those 'thee's' and 'thou's' I have this dream. God comes to me. He calls me 'Thee.' I call Him 'Thou.'" (2)

* The parents in Stephen Dunn's poem "At the Smithville Methodist Church" wonder what to tell their daughter when she comes home singing songs about Jesus and the Bible. The father says, "Could we tell her the Bible is a great book some people use to make you feel bad?" (3)

* ELCA Constitution: "This Church accepts the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired Word of God and the authoritative source and norm of its proclamation, faith and life." (4)

The theme for these lectures was chosen at least in part to address the present reality that people don't know the Bible, even inside the church. No longer can the preacher say, "Remember what happened to Jonah," because many people don't (or if they do, they remember something about a whale and nothing about Nineveh). No longer can we assume that the big words--exodus, exile, justification, redemption--ring any bells with people sitting in the sanctuary.

There is no common memory, so the preacher seems faced with a perplexing choice: every sermon must be a remedial course on Bible content or every sermon must leave the Bible behind in favor of contemporary human questions and longings. Thus, some "Seeker" preaching begins with dramas of real-life dilemmas rather than unfamiliar Bible passages. Even when a Bible passage is read, it is read primarily to distill a practical theme. Thus, Jesus' miraculous calming of the sea becomes How To Deal with Life's Storms" or "Help Me Make It Through the Night."

Bible as sacrament of the "Word of God"

But we are Lutherans, and most of us are lectionary preachers. Every Sunday, week in and week out, we read three Scripture texts and sing a psalm. The texts are given to us in our red Minister's Desk Edition calendar and in the Celebrate folder inserted in the bulletin. Our seminary training takes us deep into Greek and sometimes Hebrew. Seminarians take courses such as "Preaching the Gospel of John" and "Preaching Paul's Letters Today." We preach on biblical texts or from biblical texts, but seldom without biblical texts.

Yet, we don't really begin with the Bible itself. We come to the Bible with our minds made up about certain things. We speak of "preaching the Gospel" or "preaching Christ," an understanding affirmed in the ELCA Constitution: "Jesus Christ is the Word of God incarnate, through whom everything was made and through whose life, death, and resurrection God fashions a new creation." That definition precedes any reference to the "canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testament." (5) This Word is a person, not reducible to print on the page.

"Scripture, like Eucharist," says Sandra Schneiders, "is best understood as sacrament .... Sacred scripture is the sacrament of the word of God." (6) Though we Lutherans count only two sacraments, there is something helpful about Schneiders' use of the word sacrament. "The biblical text as physical object, that is, the book of the scriptures, is a religious art object. It is the stable physical entity that has continuous existence." (7) We've seen this religious art object on coffee tables, sometimes placed there when the minister comes to call. But the Bible is more than a stable art object. Schneiders continues:

The scripture as meaningful, as sacrament of the word of God, is a work of art.... It must "come into being" as meaning by actualization that occurs through reading, that is, through interpretation. Between readings it "lapses" into nonbeing. The importance of the text as physical entity is precisely that it grounds the possibility of future actualizations of the word of God. (8)

Such an understanding echoes Walter Brueggemann's notion of the biblical text lingering over time, passed down from one generation to another, tended by scribes in order to be made available to the children's children. "Out of that lingering, however, from time to time, words of the text characteristically erupt into new usage.... What has been tradition, hovering in dormancy, becomes available experience." (9) The bread lingers--flat circles in the waxed paper tubes (looking a bit like Necco wafers) or rounds of pita bread on the grocery store shelves. The water lingers--in a reservoir upstate, then through aqueducts into New York City, into the pipes in the church basement, then poured out into the baptismal font large or small. The lingering bread becomes available experience of the presence of Christ, and the water from the reservoir becomes a spring of Living Water bubbling up to eternal life.

So, too, the Bible as Word of God: the words linger on the page until they are spoken and heard and received in faith. Yet it is not the bread or the water we believe in; nor is it the words on the page. Again, Schneiders:

The problem with sacramental objects is that they always tend to two forms of distortion: First, the temptation to make the sacramental object a magical object, to invest the object itself with power.... The second temptation is more serious: to make an idol of the sacramental object.... It has become opaque, an obstacle to encounter with the divine because it has replaced the sacred. (10)

What does this mean for those who preach and for those who listen? It means, as we have said many times, that we do not worship the Bible but God who is beyond the Bible. Though we have said it many times, it still doesn't seem to get through. Many inside the church are still captive to the temptation to worship the book itself. A literal, inerrant understanding of the Bible is still demanded in some parts of the Lutheran family. The book itself becomes an object of worship, replacing the worship of God. Such an understanding denies the human character of the Bible, turning it into something Docetic, without flesh and bones, like claiming that the bread of the Eucharist isn't really bread. Or that Jesus wasn't really human.

Bible as untamable text of the untamable God

As sacrament of the word of God, Scripture is more than the words on the page. Yet, like bread and wine and water, the words themselves have weight and texture. We would know nothing about Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, without the fleshly words on the page. We frame our doxologies of praise to God the Creator, borrowing words from the psalmists and the liturgists of Genesis 1. The gift of the Holy Spirit would be very elusive without the biblical stories and images that show us where the Spirit has been moving. Does our particular Lutheran lens allow us to hear and taste the words fully, or has the prism of justification by grace through faith become too narrow?

Just as there is a problem with worshipping the words themselves, so, too, there can be a problem with a controlling metaphor that frames the words with our own formulations. The Bible is often messy, confusing, confounding, and contradictory. There is always a danger that we will insist on shaping the Bible in our own image. Brueggemann warns us about this danger when he says, "Creedal reductionism does not want to acknowledge this God who leaks out beyond good doctrine. However, the maddening leakage is there in the text, waiting to be spoken of in faith and in dismay." (11)

Echoing similar concerns, Old Testament scholar David Carr urges us to see the Bible as "the untamable text of an untamable God."

... this untamability is present in the text itself. It is even one element that enables the Bible to speak to communities separated from the original contexts of the texts by thousands of years .... If scripture is to survive as a life-giving resource ... it will be because our reading is flexible enough to address creatively circumstances that the Bible's original authors never could have imagined. It may be the very "untamability" of tensive texts ... that will enable them to be conduits of God's revelation for the future. (12)

People have sought to tame the biblical text in many ways over the centuries. Church authorities--whether pope or councils or independent nondenominational ministers--have claimed that there is only one valid interpretation of a text (usually their own). Rather, Carr urges us to honor the untamability of the text: "If we recognize that both the Bible as a whole and parts like Genesis will not submit to any one reading, then use of a confessional statement as a filter effectively means substituting the confession for scripture. " (13)

We may want to argue with Carr and point out the danger of giving all texts equal weight, fearful that texts on the margins might become the center. Yet he alerts us to the possibility that our confessions may tame the life out of the Bible. Rigid formulations can make us protective of the text, unwilling to use texts that don't fit or to consider interpretations that differ from our definitions of what is central. It is the multi-voiced character of the texts that has served many different faith communities through the ages, partly because the texts could not be reduced to any one of their traditions nor to that of any final redactor. (14)

Bible as living Word

This sense of the text's untamability fits well with our understanding of the Bible as God's "living word," not a past-tense text. New Testament professor Vincent Wimbush often startles students on the first day of class telling them the Bible is a modern book. While students protest that the Bible was written long before they stepped into class, Wimbush nudges them to see that every reader enters the text from her or his own particular time. In the moment of reading or listening, the words in the book are already being interpreted. But the movement isn't only away from the biblical text toward our present situation. It is also a movement in the other direction: we bring our present situation to the biblical text as part of the interpretive process.

In his book The Exegetical Imagination Michael Fishbane invites us into lively conversation with biblical texts:

The rhetorical question, "To what does this matter compare?" opens up a hermeneutical space in which similarity is imagined.... The significance of a similitude is thus that life serves to explain the text, and it gives a concreteness or directness to the text which it might otherwise not have.... [Meaning is] also shaped by the conceptions and concerns of one's own time and place." (15)

Fishbane isn't talking about finding a few timely illustrations to make texts relevant; rather, he proposes that our life converses with the text and brings meaning to the text. "To what does this matter compare?" is a question that hears the text in this time, which is the only time in which we can hear it.

The significance of life interpreting texts is evident in the rereading of the Bible by African American people in this country and increasingly by people of color around the world. Wimbush sketches the development of such rereading within African-American communities in the United States:

What did not go unnoticed among the Africans was the fact that the white world they experienced tended to explain its power and authority by appeal to the Bible. So they embraced the Bible, transforming it from the book of the religions of the whites ... into a language world of strong hopes and veiled but stinging critique of slave-holding Christian culture. (16)

Wimbush then poses this perplexing question: "How does a people enslaved by a people of a Book come to accept that Book as authoritative and legitimate?" He finds the answer in a meeting of "worlds"--the world of African-American slaves meeting the world of the Bible:

With its arresting stories of underdogs surviving and conquering and of a Savior figure who is mistreated but who ultimately triumphs, it is little wonder that the Bible came to be embraced by African Americans.... Again and again, the real situations of the heroes and heroines of the Bible appeared to be similar to those of the historical experiences of most African Americans. (17)

The reading of texts by European Americans may have seen the "Savior figure" in a very different light, as a sacrifice for personal sins who offers grace primarily as an individual gift. Reading texts through the prism of justification, we Lutherans have often failed to hear the strong biblical call for justice. People of Latin America, Africa, and Asia have heard biblical texts in ways far different from Eurocentric readers. Latin American theologian Juan Luis Segundo has reread the biblical texts, bringing to the text the questions and heartache of his community. There in the New Testament "he finds a radically theocentric and socially radical Jesus with a decidedly human face." (18) His picture of Jesus arises from his work with the poorest of the poor where Jesus invites everyone to eat at the table. The word "gospel" is understood as far more than forgiveness of "my sins" and has implications not only for one individual believer but for life in community.

Bible as manna and mercy

This understanding of gospel embracing both justification and justice permeates every page of Dan Erlander's book Manna and Mercy. The book's subtitle far surpasses Erlander's customary humility: "A Brief History of God's Unfolding Promise to Mend the Entire Universe." (Of course, he's speaking of God, not himself!) This book is a wonderful model for what I will call "full-gospel preaching." (I realize we Lutherans usually don't refer to ourselves as a Full-Gospel Church, but it may help us expand our vision.)

Not content to speak only of individual salvation, Erlander begins with the whole universe. Gospel is not only mercy for sinners and outcasts but manna for everyone. The meaning of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection is framed within the whole, untamable text of creation and covenant. This book is an ongoing conversation between the two testaments rather than a supercessionary line where the new overcomes the old. His attentiveness to the day of Pentecost includes all of Acts 2--from the gift of the Spirit to the sharing of property--manna and mercy for all.

This full-gospel promise is not past tense but is present now and leads us toward the future:

Refusing to give up, the Creator continues to call individuals, families, nations and cultures to pass through the watery depths, through death to resurrection. Yahweh calls them to leave the old order of death and enter the new order of life and salvation. (19)

Bible and Babel: listening to the scattered people

This Creator who continues to call us from death to life is a present-tense God. If we are to bring our present situation into conversation with the biblical texts, we need to ask, Is Babel only a place from which to flee, or is it also a place from which to listen? It's a strange story, that account in Genesis 11. God did not destroy the tower they were building; rather, God confused their language, and they were scattered. But this scattering seemed necessary to fulfill God's word earlier in Genesis, a word not only to Adam and Eve but also to Noah: multiply, increase, swarm throughout the land and fill it. The problem wasn't only building the tower to heaven but their insistence in staying all together in one place! Is there a need now to listen to the scattered voices in order to understand the text more fully?

Consider what two professors at Columbia Theological Seminary have done. Stanley Saunders and Charles Campbell were challenged by the director of The Open Door shelter for homeless people in Atlanta:

Take your body out of the air-conditioned calm and comfort of Columbia Seminary. Put your body instead in a couple of Atlanta's public housing projects.... Go sit in the apartment of a teenage mother at Perry Homes.... Put your body in the waiting room at the Grady Infectious Disease Clinic. Sit with people who have AIDS as they wait to have their bodies pricked and poked and prodded.... Take your body into the Fulton County Jail. Visit with inmates through a pane of glass, unable even to shake hands. Notice the lipstick marks on the glass, the residue of kisses which fell short of human lips--each one a cry for physical contact.... (20)

So the two professors and their students took up the challenge. They read New Testament texts with people at the shelter, and students preached on the streets of downtown Atlanta. The biblical texts began to sound different, and neither biblical studies nor homiletics has been quite the same since.

What do the scattered people tell us about the texts? How do we read the Bible outside the sanctuary, the seminary, the study?

In the Pentecost story--often paired with the story of Babel--it seems that the terrible chaos and confusion of language is reversed. The crowd was bewildered: "How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?" This was not only a miracle of speaking but a miracle of hearing. God is calling us to hear those gathered inside the sanctuary and those scattered outside the church doors. This isn't only a matter of evangelism but of rightly understanding the biblical texts themselves.

Babel is a place from which we listen. The culture is not wholly profane, but it has gifts to offer and wounds to heal. The language of the culture isn't only evil; it provides images, metaphors, and sounds that can connect the texts with people's daily lives. This was true when Jesus spoke in parables and when Paul quoted popular poets to the people gathered on the Areopagus. Ours is a highly visual age with electronic images flashing at us at an alarming rate. We may rightly be concerned about such omnipresent images coercing us to become consumers. We might also imagine that electronic images could be like moving stained glass windows. Before people could read, they learned the biblical stories in the pictures surrounding them in the sanctuary. Perhaps we need such pictures now when people can read but no longer know the stories. The culture could teach us how to be more visual in our preaching.

Do you remember back to the First Sunday in Advent, the reading from Isaiah 2? "The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.... "We expect to hear a word or read a word, but this is a word that the prophet saw. Can electronic images help us find new ways of getting the word across even as the printing press helped the reformers get the word across? We may be so suspicious of electronic communication that we cede its potential to the most conservative religious voices in this country.

Imagine what might happen if we asked our confirmation students to prepare the sermon for Pentecost using their computer expertise to help us see the word--the crowds gathered, the fiery tongues, the mighty wind, the communal sharing. What would happen on Sunday morning in the sanctuary? No doubt, some would be startled, even shocked. It might seem like capitulation to the culture. But it just might happen that some will say, "I saw the story in my own language!"

Bible and Babel: listening, but not seduced

But Bible and Babel are not the same. If we listen closely within the public square, we'll discover that God and the Bible aren't totally absent.

Since September 11, God seems to be everywhere in this country--in almost every political speech and on the bumpers of many cars. Explicitly Christian speech in the public square is usually pro-American, sometimes anti-women, predominantly anti-gay, affirming of capitalism, and often demeaning of other religions. Martin Luther King, Jr., was perhaps the last justice-seeking, full-gospel preacher to speak in God's name on the streets and the television sets of this country. (Some will count the Berrigan brothers, William Stringfellow, and Bill Coffin, but many don't even know those names.) Some 80 percent of religious sites on the Internet are fundamentalist Christian sites. Most religious radio and television programs preach biblical literalism and inerrancy. The best-seller lists include such books as the Left Behind series, and truck stops on the interstate have racks of Christian paperbacks. The Prayer of Jabez has sold six million copies and has made its way onto office plaques and coffee mugs. While some recent letters to The Lutheran insisted that the prayer's plea for "enlarging my territory" means new opportunities for evangelism, it seems likely that many were praying for increased sales and better jobs. In spite of the subtitle for these lectures, is it even accurate to call this a "post-Christian age"? It is hard to imagine a prior generation that offered more Christian music, Christian videos, Christian political movements, Christian television shows, Christian bookstores, Christian radio, and Christian tee shirts--at least in the United States.

Biblical preaching in Babel is difficult not only because of the secularization of America but because of the Americanization of Christianity. "In God we trust" marks our money, and the Ten Commandments mark some of our courthouse walls. Though the Promise Keepers movement now seems to be in decline, it is instructive to note how much that movement merges America and the Bible. Stu Weber, a key speaker and writer for Promise Keepers, takes us to the American West in his book Tender Warriors. He brings together "the frontier iconography of Manifest Destiny and biblical iconography" by using the television series Wagon Train as the centerpiece of his book. (21) He focuses on the heroic scout sent out to search for dangers threatening the community. His message seems to be summed up in the words "Be a Christian. Be an American. Be a man." Bill McCartney, founder of the Promise Keepers, is a member of a Colorado congregation whose pastor describes his purpose as "power evangelism" in which "self-conscious members of God's army are sent to do battle against the forces of the kingdom of darkness.... One is either in God's Kingdom or Satan's." (22) This sounds ominously similar to language that now shapes United States foreign policy.

The danger remains that we will try to reshape the Bible in our own image, that we will try to make a name for ourselves rather than trust God to give us a name. Strange, isn't it? This story of Babel comes between two long lists of names--Noah's descendants and the descendants of Shem. As one of my students from Jewish Theological Seminary said in a recent sermon, "They built the whole city to make for themselves a name, and there is not one name mentioned in the story." (23)

Babel/Babylon remains as tempting as it was in the book of Genesis, as seductive as the wealthy Roman empire in the book of Revelation. This seduction is not only far off in an evil country we may name "The Beast," it is also near at hand. "Come out of her, my people," cried John, "so that you do not take part in her sins." Just what were her sins? Many have a memory of "Babylon the whore" and "kings committing fornication," but we have neglected the heart of danger. As New Testament scholar Barbara Rossing reminds us, "[Revelation's] ... primary critique is directed not toward individual sins but toward an entire political economy." (24)

Revelation builds and circles 'round through seventeen chapters until the fall of Babylon is announced in chapter 18:

 Alas, alas, the great city,
 Babylon, the mighty city!
 For in one hour your judgment has come.
 (Rev 18:10b).

Then, listen to the detailed list of the material goods the city had to offer--it's almost like walking through the mall, peering longingly in the windows--

And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of g01d, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly word, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves--and human lives. (Rev 18:11-13)

Alas, alas, the great city, Where all who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth. For in one hour she has been laid waste. (Rev 18:19b)

To what does this matter compare in our own time and place?

Alas, alas! They traded and speculated, they established companies that were not, they laid up for themselves treasures of silver and gold in bank accounts far beyond this land; They built homes, one more extravagant than the next, the wealthy sold their stocks for millions while those who had little ended up with nothing. Their greed knows no end and the heaping up of wealth no bounds. See how they parade in the marketplace, putting their name on stadium and tower! And on Sunday morning they enter the sanctuary, praising God and giving alms that cannot be missed.

"Come out of her," John cried. (But they knew John was speaking about the Evil Axis--Iran, Iraq, and North Korea--for they had attended the Men's Bible Study Class on Wednesday morning in downtown Houston.)

Full-Gospel preachers are called to be seers--not fortune tellers, but those who see what is happening around them in the marketplace. Stringfellow called us to this perceptive, prophetic seeing in An Ethic for Christians:

Discerning signs ... has to do with the ability to interpret ordinary events in both apocalyptic and eschatological connotations, to see portents of death where others find progress or success, but simultaneously, to behold tokens of the reality of the Resurrection or hope where others are consigned to confusion or despair. (25)

Biblical preaching as full-gospel preaching calls us to pay attention, to see clearly and speak of what we see--both the "portents of death" masquerading as success and the tokens of resurrection hope in the midst of despair. "God, dress America" is appropriate only if it means clothing the naked. "God, bless America" is appropriate only if the song doesn't end there.

But how do we engage in such fullgospel preaching? How do we listen attentively to the wild, untamable words in light of the Jesus, the Word? How does the Bible as sacrament of the "Word of God" take on flesh among us? How do we listen to the scattered voices with the counterspeech of God in our ears? How can such preaching be as tangible as the taste of bread in our mouths, as life-giving as water on our foreheads? We turn to such questions in the second lecture. For now, I leave you with what Mary Oliver says about poems: "For poems are not words after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." (26)

So may our sermons be--fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, bread in the pockets of the hungry ... manna and mercy for the scattered children of Babel.

(1) Linda Kintz, "Tender Warriors," in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth Castelli (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 500.

(2) Jonathan Kozol, Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America (New York: Crown, 1988), 34-35.

(3) Stephen Dunn, Local Time (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1986), 53.

(4) "Confession of Faith," Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Constitutions, Bylaws, and Continuing Resolutions, 1987, 19.

(5) ELCA Constitution, 19.

(6) Sandra Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 40, 41.

(7) Schneiders, The Revelatory Text, 42.

(8) Schneiders, The Revelatory Text, 42.

(9) Walter Brueggemann, Texts That Linger, Words That Explode (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), 1.

(10) Schneiders, The Revelatory Text, 43.

(11) Walter Brueggemann, Cadences of Home: Preaching among Exiles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 76.

(12) David Carr, "Untamable Text of an Untamable God: Genesis and Rethinking the Character of Scripture," Interpretation (October 2000), 355.

(13) Carr, "Untamable Text," 356.

(14) Carr, "Untamable Text," 353.

(15) Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5.

(16) Vincent Wimbush, "Reading Texts through Worlds, Worlds through Texts," Semeia 62 (1993): 131-32.

(17) Wimbush, "Reading Texts," 138.

(18) Segundo, as cited by Larry Rasmussen, "New Dynamics in Theology: Politically Active and Culturally Significant," Christianity and Crisis (May 1988), 182.

(19) Daniel Erlander, Manna and Mercy: A Brief History of God's Unfolding Promise to Mend the Entire Universe (Mercer Island, WA: The Order of Saints Martin and Teresa, 1992), 75.

(20) Stanley Saunders and Charles Campbell, The Word on the Street: Reading Texts in Public (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 153-54.

(21) Kintz, "Tender Warriors," 497.

(22) Kintz, "Tender Warriors," 501.

(23) Ayelet Cohen, unpublished sermon.

(24) Barbara Rossing, The Choice Between Two Cities: Whore, Bride, and Empire in the Apocalypse (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999), 164.

(25) William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1976), 138-39.

(26) Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 122.