Scott E. Hoezee

“What do they want to be when they grow up?” That is a fairly common question that parents get asked about their children. In that moment, that future is far away, of course, and there is a sense that the possibilities for what the child will grow up to be and to do are, if not endless, at least pretty vast. Even a young child might start to show an aptitude for particular areas of endeavor and study. What interests the child? What quickens her pulse? What is the child drawn to and fascinated by? Recently I read the memoir of a now-famous poet, and it was fun to read that already in elementary school she discovered that she was in love with words and language. When in the fourth grade she tried her hand at her first poem, it came out pretty well. Something of what would become her vocation and mission in life was forming already then. It may take some of us a lot longer before such things begin to gel into patterns that suggest a calling, a vocation. But for most people, it happens eventually.We don’t know if anyone asked Mary or Joseph what they thought the future would hold for their newborn Jesus. But Mary at least had a firmer idea about all that than the average parent. She knew this was actually God’s Son. She knew an angel had told her that he would be great, that he would sit on the throne of David and reign over a kingdom that would never end. As new mothers go, Mary had a huge head start on that old “What do you think he will be when he grows up?” inquiry!But first, these parents needed to nurse the child, change diapers, give him nutritious food, and all that usual childrearing stuff. And despite all the high-flying predictions of who Jesus would ultimately be, his earthly father Joseph did the only thing he knew how to do: apprentice his boy to be a builder by trade. Jesus could eventually reign over a kingdom without end, if God so willed, but in the meantime he needed something to do that would help bring a little money into the household while he was at it. Being the Son of the Most High was nice, but it didn’t buy groceries!We know virtually nothing about Jesus’ childhood, and the few apocryphal stories that exist are pretty clearly flights of whimsy. Only Luke gives us even a fleeting glimpse of Jesus’ early years in the story about the time Jesus got left behind in Jerusalem, sending his parents into a panic. They find him soon enough, thankfully, but when they discover him engaging in high-level theological conversations with a bunch of religious leaders, they do not appear to have concluded, “Ah, yes, this is part of what was predicted about him, so this makes perfect sense.” Had Jesus been such an ordinary child for those first twelve years that all the big predictions about their son had faded a bit in his parents’ minds? Did even Mary forget the mission her child would have to carry out by and by? Maybe. But then, she may not be alone. Do we think a lot about the larger mission of Christ at Christmas, or are we distracted by all the outer trappings and lyric carols of the season?We have been thinking about the larger theme of mission in Reformed Worship this year, but if there are any seasons of the church year when mission seems to take a back seat to other things, they are Advent and Christmas. These seasons seem to be all about a miraculous birth, singing angels, shepherds and magi, silent nights, and glittering lights. Of course, nothing about all that would mean anything or would be worth celebrating if the child at the center of it all was not destined to save the world and then commission his followers with the task of telling the world about this salvation. And Jesus’ followers were not only to tell the Good News; they were to embody that gospel by imitating the man this child of Bethlehem grew up to be. The entity that would eventually be known as the church was to care for the poor and the marginalized, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, advocate for justice, and take care of the sick and dying. The church has the mission to notice the overlooked people of the world and have compassion on them just as Jesus did again and again.As preachers we can help keep this in front of people at Advent and Christmas. Our sermons can help people connect the dots between all the familiar elements of the Christmas story and its implications for the mission of the church. We can even make it clear that if anyone has little interest in all that mission-related stuff, then it is disingenuous to celebrate Christmas at all. We cannot sing, “Joy to the world! The Lord is come!” unless we are dedicated top to bottom to embodying the mission of that Lord whose advent into this world does indeed bring joy—not a fleeting joy, but an everlasting joy that works to transform this world from the broken, chaotic place it is into something that begins, bit by bit, to look more like that kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed over and over.In such preaching, we pastors need not come across as wagging our fingers at people who may not be thinking about the mission of God’s people during the Christmas season. Instead, as we should always do when talking about the mission of the church, we need to frame that inside the joy of grace. We want to display so much enthusiasm for the connections between Advent/Christmas and our wider mission that our zeal becomes contagious, the kind of thing others will want to share in. The mission of the church is never something that we have to do, as though it were some unhappy duty. Instead, the mission of the child of Bethlehem involves all the wonderful acts of ministry that we get to do on account of our union with Christ. People should no more need to be ordered to join in the joyful work of Christ in the world than a child needs to be commanded to enjoy an ice cream cone. The pleasure and exhilaration of it all should be automatic.Each Christmas season we sing familiar words from “O Little Town of Bethlehem”: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” That is right. All the fears and brokenness of a fallen creation gather around the One who alone offers the hope that a better day can and has come. The church has the blessed mission to tell people that good news and also to live it out. Much of that does indeed begin with the birth of the Messiah that we celebrate at Christmas.

People sometimes ask me what I see most often in sermons that struggle to gain traction with listeners. My answer is that more often than not, preachers try to do and say too much in a single sermon. As the authors of the helpful book Made to Stick observe, if in a speech (or a sermon) you say three things, you’ve said nothing. Say one thing. Make the sermon about just one main thing if you want it to stick.Paul Scott Wilson has a mnemonic device to help preachers achieve sermon unity: TTDINM, remembered via the phrase “The Tiny Dog Is Now Mine.” It’s all about having just one of each for a single sermon: one text, one theme, one doctrine, one image, one need, one mission. For this issue of Reformed Worship, it’s that last one—one mission—that I want to reflect on.As I tell my students, the church has a broad mission, but it’s carried out through a wide variety of activities, each of which contributes to the larger mission of witnessing to and living out the gospel of Christ Jesus our Lord. In preaching, however, if you want to promote the church’s mission via an example of a ministry, pick just one to highlight. That’s enough for one sermon. This week, mention the congregation’s clothing ministry. Next week discuss support for full-time foreign or domestic mission workers. The following week, highlight the weekly supper to help feed hungry children in the neighborhood. Some might point out that when it comes to the active mission of the global church or of any given congregation, preaching may seem to be a lesser part. Sermons, after all, are words on the air. Listeners have a passive posture when absorbing a sermon, but they’re active when, say, they volunteer once a month to distribute food through the Feeding America program. Sermons don’t seem to do anything. When I was a pastor years ago, our deacons started to include a boilerplate IRS disclaimer on annual giving statements: “No tangible goods were given in exchange for these gifts.” And I thought, “That’s me, the Right Reverend Intangible.”By contrast, we usually think of the mission of the church as being mostly tangible actions and outcomes. Consider Matthew 25 alone: we clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, and welcome the stranger. That’s active stuff! A sermon seems to fall into a different category. The preacher may be active for half an hour or so, but the congregation not so much. And when the sermon is finished . . . well, it can kind of disappear. I hate to admit it, but when I was delivering two sermons every week, sometimes come Monday morning when I needed to write down my sermon titles and texts from the day prior in my record book, I had to dig out the bulletin to jog my memory! If that happens sometimes to the one who wrote and delivered the sermon, how many others in the church might struggle come Monday or Tuesday to remember just what Sunday morning’s sermon was about?But because I am a preacher writing this column for fellow preachers, you know there is a “Yes, but” coming here: Yes, preaching may seem intangible or ephemeral, but I believe it can and should play a vital role in the church’s larger mission and in advancing all the activities of a congregation that contribute to that mission. Here are a few observations about how solid biblical preaching can accomplish that. 1. Preaching reminds us of the new covenant.Sermons, like the worship services in which they typically take place, participate in what John Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, calls our weekly “trinitarian new covenant renewal.” We come to worship to sing, to pray, to fellowship, and, yes, to listen to sermons, all as part of reviving us, revving us up, inspiring us, and focusing us again and again on the old, old story of Jesus and his love. We need more often to be reminded than instructed, Samuel Johnson observed, and sermons serve as ongoing reminders of the new covenant in Christ’s blood, a covenant we are part of through grace alone by faith alone. Good preaching does not aim to entertain or titillate, and it surely ought not aim to be boring or stale or canned. Good preaching helps people affirm: “Yes! This is why I am a believer! This is what I believe! This is why I want to follow Jesus again this week and help carry out his witness and mission to the world!”2. Preaching is contextual. Sermons must always be deeply contextual. A so-called “timeless sermon” that could be preached without alteration in any time or place is not a great sermon. Preaching must always take place with a keen awareness of geographical location, the historical moment the congregation is living in, and the socioeconomic conditions and challenges of the local neighborhood and its city. Preaching moves the congregation from Jesus’ semi-generic laundry list of mission activities in Matthew 25 to people with names and faces, to prisons with specific names, to targeting economic or justice needs unique to that time and place. Preaching that is thoughtful, concrete, and specific sets the table for the congregation to carry out its mission. 3. Preaching is specific.Related to the previous point, contextual sermons name and celebrate specific activities of the congregation. Talking about the Wednesday night soup supper for unhoused persons or a meeting of advocates to address a set of local ordinances that many see as unjust ought not be restricted to the announcements. Wise preachers bring in such things (just one per sermon, please!) as examples of what they are talking about in any given sermon. Call it the “application” part of the sermon, if you will—or Page Four, the “Grace in the World” part of Paul Scott Wilson’s Four Pages approach—but this is one way a sermon is not the opposite of more active ministry activities of the congregation, but a vital part of its mission.Good preaching inspires the church’s mission. Good contextual preaching equips the congregation for mission work. Good preaching names the work that needs to be done in a particular time and place. Good preaching celebrates what is already being done even as it helps people keep moving and not grow weary or lose heart when the going gets tough, as it usually does (and as Jesus himself predicted). Yes, I am more than sensitive to the fact that preachers could take all this and use it to bolster what I do not want to help bolster—namely, what a colleague calls “should-y sermons” that end with to-do lists that detract from a focus on grace. There’s a slippery slope to legalism down that path. So preachers must frame their inspiring words about mission inside the prior grace of God. Mission work and ministries of all kinds are not things we have to do; inside the liberating grace of God in Christ, these are the things that we get to do! Or, in good Reformed theological parlance, mission work is not how we get delivered from our sins; it is our response of gratitude to already having been so delivered through Christ’s saving work.With that frame of grace, preaching can indeed be a very active part of the mission of God in the world.

Is the Christian pulpit a proper place to call out what a preacher may deem the theological errors of others? This is a question that deserves due and careful consideration, and I will try to make a small start on such consideration here. But first it should be noted that a culture-war mentality has crept into the church. Some of us are merely aware that attacks and accusations against various people are happening in sermons in some churches these days. Others of us have been asked to look at and assess examples of this. Still others have perhaps heard such sermons firsthand. Whether this counts as a trend in the church today is uncertain, but it is troubling. So what should we preachers think about all this?An initial thought is that, all things being equal, the Christian pulpit is first and foremost a place from which to herald and proclaim the Good News, not a place to dwell on bad news. The main Greek verbs in the New Testament that get translated as “to preach” are literally a giving of Good News, the evangel (euaggelizein), and a heralding of Good News (kerussein). Yes, en route to proclaiming what Frederick Buechner once termed “the sheltering word” of the gospel, we may need to speak first about the bad news of our sinfulness, which has blown the roof from over our heads. We become more eager to hear a sheltering word when we are aware of our lack of shelter. So we must of course speak of sin in the pulpit or else we proclaim a Bonhoeffer-esque “cheap grace”—a gospel robbed of its punch. As John Calvin and many other Reformed theologians knew, the light of the gospel shines more brightly when seen against the dark background of our depravity and fallenness.Beyond this, however, if the people to whom we preach are exposed to ideas that are popular in their culture or even in some church circles, how do we respond when we deem such ideas to be off the mark theologically or on a trajectory to what Paul in Galatians 1 calls a different or false gospel that is, therefore, no gospel at all? At times we may deem it necessary to deal with such false notions in a sermon.Still, the wise and thoughtful preacher will weigh even these matters carefully. Not every false or loopy idea that floats around deserves air time in a sermon. When we run across false or mistaken ideologies of various kinds, it is good to ask: How many folks in my congregation are actually getting exposed to this? How many are likely to fall for these worldviews or ideas? What is the tipping point that makes calling out such things a pastoral necessity?But what about naming names in sermons? What about calling out other pastors, theologians, and the like in ways that directly (or indirectly) identify them specifically? Again, wise is the preacher who thinks long and hard about all this. Before doing this, what kinds of questions or considerations are properly on the preacher’s mind and heart? A few thoughts:First, determine whether the person in question is a well-known figure whose statements are very public. Some of us recall that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, several high-profile pastors—people with their own TV programs and people famous enough to be dogged by reporters and asked questions—proclaimed the theory that 9/11 was divine retribution for America due to its many sins in areas ranging from abortion to acceptance of homosexuality. It seems reasonable to assert that famous individuals who declare or publish statements that make the headlines in the news could be named in a sermon in case a given preacher felt the need to give an equally public correction to specious theology.Even so, we need to speak the truth in love. Insofar as it is possible, we seek to disagree with the stated position of a high-profile person without going further than is needed. We need not wholly dismiss these fellow believers or consign them to a category of someone doomed to eternal judgment or some other such summary dismissal of them as people. After all, they are folks seeking to be fellow disciples of Christ. It is not easy, but we can dislike someone’s theological conclusion while still seeking to love that person. How might we convey that clearly in a sermon?Second, is the person in question someone with whom the preacher could easily have an in-person conversation before referring to them in a sermon? Some of the more famous people alluded to above are likely inaccessible to the average preacher. But other times the people in question are easy to connect with. Maybe we knew them years ago. Maybe they live nearby, or maybe they would answer an email and be glad to have a conversation. If so, the prudent and wise preacher would set up that meeting to explore on a personal, collegial level whatever matter is at hand.Would such conversations resolve everything and eliminate the need for the preacher to call out the subject in a sermon? Maybe. Maybe not. But odds are that a personal connection would powerfully nuance any disagreement with that person. Unless such a personal encounter went very, very badly, having a one-on-one meeting would almost certainly make it far easier to speak of the other person with love in a sermon, even when signaling disagreement with that person’s ideas.In a column in The New York Times in November 2023, David Brooks noted that we live in brutalizing times and that the danger for all of us is to be coarsened by such an atmosphere. Some of this coarsening has shown up in the rhetoric of the culture wars, wherein it is not enough to disagree with an opponent. We must hate them. We must not just win a rhetorical debate over them; we must fully destroy them and their reputations.If or when this kind of coarseness toward others creeps into a Christian pulpit, the longer-term results—if not the shorter-term results—will lead nowhere uplifting and nowhere in service to the pulpit’s first and best calling: to herald and proclaim the Good News in Christ Jesus our Lord. And if that happens repeatedly, it could be that the congregation might lose its way in following Christ, perhaps even more than those whose alleged lostness was deemed worthy of a public excoriation in the first place.

Easter in the Bible is never quite what you might think. Perhaps better said, this dramatic event central to the whole gospel story is not presented as one would expect. Unlike with Jesus’ birth story, none of the four gospels skips Easter. But each gospel tells the story a bit differently—and yet with curious similarities too. True to form, Mark’s resurrection narrative is the shortest of them all. Mark opens his gospel with a bang and gets right down to business. The appearance of Jesus, his baptism, and his forty days of temptation are all dispatched within a scant thirteen verses. By contrast, Matthew writes 1,500 words (in the English Bible) before he gets to Jesus’ first act of public ministry, and Luke expends a whopping 3,800 words before Jesus first preaches. Mark gets us through all that in just 280 words. Thus, as it was in the beginning of Mark, so too in the end: the whole Easter story is a mere eight verses, and what’s more, it ends in stunned, confused silence as the frightened women flee the tomb. In Greek, the last word of Mark’s gospel is gar, or “because,” and even though a former Greek professor told me that in Greek it is not all that unusual to end a sentence with such a word, I like the idea that Mark ends with a kind of ellipsis: “The women said nothing to anyone because . . .”. The reader is left hanging. Whether or not that is the actual grammatical sense of the Greek of Mark 16:8, it most certainly has the rhetorical effect Mark intended. Mark ends with a puzzled silence. Matthew devotes just two more verses to the story than did Mark. The women whose fearful silence left things seemingly up in the air in Mark manage in Matthew to actually run into the resurrected Jesus. But here too, although the women see Jesus, clasp his feet, and worship him, Jesus’ first words are “Do not be afraid.” Once again, a primary reaction to news of Jesus having been raised from the dead is something we seldom associate with Easter now: fear. And then, oddly enough, he instructs the women to tell the other disciples that if they want to see the resurrected Jesus they need to make an eighty-mile trek from Jerusalem clear up to Galilee. (I asked Google Maps how long that trip would take to walk, and the answer was twenty-six hours!) Matthew’s Easter story has two more verses than Mark, and Luke then tacks on two more in his twelve-verse account of the resurrection event. But yet again, what we encounter here is not what we might expect, because although once again it is the women who first hear from the angels that Jesus has been raised, Luke’s initial reporting of that morning ends with doubt and confusion. The men dismiss the women’s report as “nonsense,” and although Peter was sufficiently intrigued that he went to the tomb to check things out, once he saw the empty tomb and the neatly folded burial wrappings, he walked away scratching his head. Yes, Jesus’ appearance on the road to Emmaus and then his subsequent appearance to the disciples that evening expand the story in Luke 24. But if we limit ourselves to Luke’s account of that first Easter morning, it’s pretty spare. John takes the prize for the longest account of the Easter morning events in his eighteen-verse story. But here, too, the initial reaction is confusion. John does not have the women meeting any angels and so only reports an empty (and possibly looted) tomb. This news sends Peter and John on a footrace to the tomb, and though they confirm what the women saw, they have no idea what happened, and John directly admits (in one of his hallmark parenthetical asides) that they did not know Scripture said Jesus would rise again. In one of the few recorded instances of Easter morning joy, Mary Magdalene meets Jesus, and once she realizes he is not the garden keeper, she has an outburst of the kind of joy lacking in the other three accounts. Jesus will appear to the disciples (absent Thomas) that evening as he does in Luke 24, but once more the reporting of the morning’s events is not quite what one might expect. What are we preachers and interpreters of the gospels’ Easter accounts supposed to do with what I have just summarized? Do our congregations want to hear us talking on Easter morning about how fear was a more prevalent Easter-morning emotion than happiness or joy? Is Easter morning the time to point out that what comes across in the four gospel accounts of the resurrection is mostly befuddlement and skepticism? If that were all we had to say in an Easter sermon, it probably would not go over very well. But what if we used these facts as the launching point for some other observations? For instance, to tell a triumphant story in a non-triumphant way creates a degree of irony. What’s more, those who understand this irony can then become a community of readers “in the know.” Yes, we recognize the cosmic ramifications of this victory of life over death. Indeed, we are so certain that it is true that, like the original evangelists, we see no need to glitz up the story with razzle-dazzle and exaggerations and narrative fireworks. In the comparative quietness of the gospel accounts of Easter morning, we encounter a kind of quiet confidence in our faith. There are pastoral implications here too. I love that John 20 opens with the words “while it was still dark.” Easter always begins in the darkness—not just the literal predawn darkness of that original Easter morning, but also the metaphorical and spiritual darkness we all face. What’s more, Easter is announced to people who feel afraid, uncertain, and skeptical. In the Bible, Easter creeps up on uncertain or downcast people the way Jesus came up behind the weeping Mary Magdalene and the two despondent travelers headed to Emmaus. This is where Easter finds us: in the dark, in the fog of confusion, in our doubts and skepticism, in the nitty-gritty realities of a world that can be very disorienting. The gospels’ four Easter-morning stories are not as grand, embellished, embroidered, or downright dramatic as one might guess they would be. But for those very reasons they carry with them not only a sense of authenticity, but a sense of fitting our real lives right now. We need Jesus to come up behind us, too, when we are crying, afraid, confused, or skeptical. And he does. The gospels give us an Easter morning that fits our lives. And when preaching on Easter morning, that may be a fine and pastorally sensitive thing to say.

If you bracket out Luke 2, what remains of the Christmas story in the gospels is one verse in Matthew 1:25: “But [Joseph] did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.” Yes, there is also John 1:14 on the Word becoming flesh, not to mention the Revelation 12 story about the woman and the dragon, but those are far from what anyone would define as the Christmas “story.” In the Year B lectionary that begins with Advent 2023, the focus gospel is Mark, but of course the lectionary needs to depart from Mark by the time Christmas rolls around because Mark skips everything in Jesus’ life up until the moment he emerges out of nowhere to be baptized by John. And although the gospel of John gives us a mighty big context in which to consider the incarnation of the Word of God, Christmas in our churches would look a whole lot different if John 1 were all we had to go on each December. Only Luke gives us much grist for the Christmas preaching mill.As preachers we ought to wonder about that. Does the Bible even give us warrant for making as big a deal out of Advent and Christmas as the church traditionally has done? If Mark is any indication, we know as a fact that we can have a rich and complete gospel without any birth narratives. The same cannot be said of certain other things. Admittedly, John tells us we can learn about Jesus’ ministry without any of Jesus’ hallmark parables. And all four gospels demonstrate that a full picture of Jesus can be presented without reporting every miracle. John is the most up front of the four evangelists in admitting that each of the four writers edited, shaped, and molded the raw material of Jesus’ ministry in order to produce a book aimed at fostering faith in the hearts of readers. But none of them includes everything.However, you cannot have a gospel without the passion narrative and above all without the resurrection. Since only one gospel reports the ascension, we know we can “get” Jesus without even that story. But death and resurrection are nonnegotiable. It is no wonder that the gospels have been called “passion narratives with long introductions.”But “Christmas” as we know it turns out to be very negotiable. Nonetheless, the church pours a huge amount of annual energy into Advent and Christmas—probably even more than into Easter. The biggest choir numbers and concerts, the most sustained Sunday school programs, the sheer number of people who show up for church to hear our sermons in December: all of it seems testament to the notion that the church has higher regard for Christmas than does the inspired book on which we preach each week.Did Ebenezer Scrooge have it right after all, then, with all his “Humbug!” dismissals of the season? Are we putting ourselves through unnecessary homiletical wringers every year in trying to craft sermons that somehow manage to find a fresh take on Advent and Christmas?Well, no. Or at least not certainly yes. Because, after all, by the inspiration and orchestration of the Holy Spirit, we do have Luke. By God’s divine calling of Luke, we have what Luke self-reports to be diligently researched accounts of not only the events in Bethlehem but a small slew of pre-Bethlehem events in the lives of Elizabeth, Zechariah, Mary, and Joseph. Perhaps the birth narratives are not at the very top of the list of the sine qua non of the gospels’ facts and stories, but the Spirit nevertheless made sure that we do know all those details. As usual, the Spirit has its reasons.For preachers, wondering about those divine reasons could become a source of ideas for our own Advent and Christmas sermons. Here are just two ideas:First, it is vital for us to establish the divine nature of Jesus. We sometimes forget that in the world in which the four gospels were written, none of the evangelists and few of the people to whom they wrote had any doubts about the utter humanity of Jesus. That much was a given. The disciples had spent years watching Jesus get drowsy. They’d seen him digging out a piece of parsley from between his incisors, burping after a meal, laughing at a good joke, and becoming weepy with grief.There is a reason why, even as late as John 14, Philip says to Jesus, “Show us the Father.” When Jesus replies that if they have seen him they have been seeing the Father all along, they probably responded in their hearts, “You’re kidding! I didn’t see that one coming from this ordinary human being we’ve been tagging along with!”Every December, The New York Times publishes a column from journalist Nicholas Kristof in which he interviews well-known Christian pastors and scholars. And every year, Kristof asks the same question: Is it really necessary to believe in the virgin birth to be a Christian? Every year, people such as Luke Timothy Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Tim Keller, and others have assured Kristof it is necessary, but he remains unconvinced. The Holy Spirit put Luke into the Bible to tell us that it’s vital. The Spirit also gave us Matthew’s clever structuring of his opening genealogy and the grand theology of John 1 to tell us the same thing.Second, the Christmas story’s lowly and even ignoble birth narrative—shorn of all the glitz and greeting-card sentimentality we have larded onto it—is necessary to establish the basis of the entirety of Jesus’s life, ministry, and the salvation he would bring: humility. As people such as Robert Roberts have written and observed, humility is the core Christian virtue that undergirds every other virtue and every fruit of the Spirit because humility is, hands down, the most Christlike virtue. You cannot be like Jesus without being humble.The lowliness and commonness of Jesus’ advent into this world sets the stage for our coming to recognize this bedrock moral truth. As such, in Advent and at Christmas and at all times, we cannot talk about the primacy of humility often enough in our sermons because, if we want proof of how vital humility is to Christian character and witness, we need only witness how regularly the church and its leaders fail in this regard. Somebody out there who opposes God seems to know that nothing undercuts the church more than pride, arrogance, high-handed tactics, and taking on superior airs. The fact that the forces of darkness work so regularly to undermine our humility tells us all we need to know about its importance.Yes, we can have a complete gospel and can learn all we need to know about Jesus without the Christmas story. But with the Christmas story we learn about some powerful and vital matters. Thus, we preachers present all of that each Advent with everything we’ve got!

Ours is not an easy time for a preacher to tackle the topic of justice. In some parts of the Reformed world, there has long been a certain uneasiness about questions related to how and to what extent the church should address issues of justice. Some of us have been part of conversations where the debate centered on a distinction between the church as institution and the church as organism. According to some, the institutional church has little to no business advocating for justice in any given society. The institutional church has its own distinct lane in the world—or, to use more Kuyperian language, its own particular sphere—and it ought not stray from that lane to take over justice-related matters that are best handled by government or courts. Thus, denominational offices of social justice have been regarded by some with worry and concern.   On the level of the church as organism, individual church members  may get involved in calls for and efforts to establish justice in the wider society. How any given Christian votes or what legislation she supports is an individual choice that may be influenced by concerns about justice. But that is different from the institutional church taking a stand or lobbying for particular programs. Whatever we make of all that, most of us recognize that in more recent times all of that has taken a back seat to a far more wide-reaching concern that connects a deep concern for social justice with all things labeled “woke.” Some while ago I heard a pastor who wanted to put daylight between his church and wokeness make it very clear that biblical justice and social justice are not typically—and certainly not automatically—the same thing. It seems that today “justice” is perceived to be a code word for more progressive politics, and many in some parts of the church want nothing to do with it. What’s more, according to the testimony of scores of pastors with whom I have talked, sermons in the church today are scrutinized to make sure no such code words pass the pastor’s lips. Speak one “wrong” word in a sermon—or even in the pastoral prayer—and the pastor will be written off as grinding a “woke,” partisan ax, and if that happens, trouble for this pastor may swiftly follow. So what is the preacher to do in this area and at this time? Well, let’s admit first that sometimes preachers do advocate for particular positions or policies or ideas that—whether or not they may tie in with justice—perhaps do not belong in the pulpit. Sometimes people are not wrong if they suspect the pastor is up to something. There are things a preacher could say that are not just political but downright partisan. But let us charitably suppose for most preachers this is not the case. Can this topic of justice even be mentioned today if people will immediately chalk it up to a sociopolitical agenda? Should pastors just bracket out all language related to justice if it is only going to cause trouble in this particular historical and cultural moment? No. The truth is that the Bible is so saturated with a concern for justice that a preacher in the long run can no more avoid talking about this theme than she could bracket out miracles or forgiveness. There is just too much in the Bible, in both the Old Testament and the New, to think we can preach the whole of Scripture and not bump into justice concerns semi-regularly. Establishing a just society in Israel permeates the Law of God in places like Leviticus and elsewhere. God is forever singling out the most vulnerable for special consideration in Israel. The orphan, the widow, the immigrant had the best chance of being exploited in Israel—same as in any other society the world has ever known. So God forbids it and, through things like the gleaner laws and similar provisions, mandates that Israelite society go out of its way to take proactive extra care of such persons. As with most everything else, Israel failed miserably at this. That is why more than anything else the prophets—and most especially the twelve Minor Prophets, such as Amos and Micah—assailed God’s people for their failures to ensure justice in Israel. When the people led unjust lives six days a week, God could only be nauseated by their attempts to worship him one day a week. One of the biggest justice measures God established in Israel was the once-every-fifty-years Jubilee. The Year of Jubilee was to be a giant socioeconomic reset for Israel to put the society back to something that better reflected the heart of God. As many of us know, Jubilee is the theme of Luke’s gospel; with Mary’s song in Luke 1, the book introduces the theme, which continues in Jesus’ first sermon in Luke 4 and then echoes throughout the rest of the gospel. These examples and many more I could cite underscore my main point: preachers cannot avoid talking about justice if when preaching their main job is to talk about what’s in the Bible. But if just mentioning “justice” these days gets a pastor in trouble, how can this be done? For now, just two suggestions for my fellow preachers. First, always be able to show clearly that the biblical text is both why this theme is being preached and how it is preached on. If we want to have conversations about justice, let’s have them center on Scripture first of all. Sometimes preachers, like anyone else, make mistakes such that if people complain about a sermon, it really does fall at the preacher’s feet. But sometimes when people complain about a sermon, their argument is really with the biblical text at hand, and that ought to be the focus. Second, preachers can make clear that the Bible articulates many principles related to justice that one hopes everyone in the church could agree on. Everyone, for instance, ought to have a heart for the poor. But the wise preacher will not suggest that there is ever and only one way to minister to and help the poor. Certainly the preacher ought never suggest only one particular political party has all the answers. There may be multiple avenues of ministry that Christian people of equally good conscience can pursue. No particular viewpoint, method, or certainly political persuasion has all the right answers. A preacher would be wise to convey this: “We can all agree that Issue X is a problem that God wants us to care about. Now let’s put all of our good heads together to figure out what we can do to live consistently with what the Bible reveals to be God’s heart on this matter. And all ideas are fair game!” These are indeed difficult days for preachers and congregations on many fronts, including matters related to justice. By the Spirit of God, who blows through all of the church’s preaching, we seek to be faithful and fair to the revelation of the Word and to the opportunities presented to the people of that Word, who together want to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.

“Sometimes I think I should do more pastoral care,” I said one day to a dear friend and mentor in the congregation I was serving at the time. We were having a conversation about the church, and I mentioned that thought because I had a full-time colleague who took point on visiting the homebound and the sick and convening things like grief support groups. I did not do nearly as much pastoral work. My church had created a job description that let me focus on preaching. I still regularly did hospital visits and participated in funerals, but I did not lead the pastoral aspect of our ministry. After I brought up this concern, my friend’s response was swift and forceful: “You do an enormous amount of pastoral care every week from the pulpit, Scott!” He then went on to explain why he believed that. Though I don’t recall all of his specifics, I most assuredly was arrested by his firm observation about pastoral care from the pulpit. For many of us preachers, the pastoral aspect of preaching may not have been emphasized in our homiletical training. As my colleague Danjuma Gibson observes, the academy has tended to keep preaching and pastoral care in separate silos.  Some of us were told that the main aim of preaching is to open up the biblical text verse by verse in an expository style. Others may have been trained to think of preaching as distilling out of any given text a nugget of doctrinal truth so that doctrinal purity is the sermon’s key aim. Still others of us may have been taught that sermons exist to nurture discipleship, so it’s important to conclude every sermon with a to-do list of ways to keep marriages strong or how to raise moral children or how to deepen one’s prayer life. Or maybe we were taught that each sermon should proclaim the gospel, but en route to accomplishing that we need to spend time each week hammering away at the sin and guilt we all have that make salvation necessary in the first place. But ought we have been taught instead that a key aim of preaching is to provide pastoral care—soul care? Perhaps this is not the be-all and end-all of preaching, but could we come to see it as a vital part of any sermon? Whether or not they specifically call it pastoral care, Black preachers have long known this. When asked why sermons in Black churches tended to be so long, theologian James Cone is said to have replied that six days a week society told Black folks they were of no account, so on Sunday it just takes a while to talk people back into seeing who they really are: precious children of God. More recently Otis Moss III, in his book Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World, compared preaching to the musical form of the blues. The blues, Moss noted, reach into our souls and name the things that pain us so as to create a space for healing. Preaching can and should accomplish something similar. In my introductory preaching class, using Paul Scott Wilson’s sermon-crafting category of “Trouble in the World,” I detail with students all the pains people carry with them into church each week. There are so many sources of trouble in our lives: sickness, economic distress, employment issues, family dysfunction, times of national or international crisis, war, injustice, racism, accidents. As Wilson says, some of our troubles disrupt things on the vertical axis of life and make us feel alienated from God. Other troubles disrupt the horizontal axis and make us feel alienated from one another. Some troubles manage to do both at once. In preaching, pastors need to be honest about naming these things specifically. We want to preach in such a way that when we ask an important question about life, people lean in and think, “Yes, that is exactly the question that keeps me awake from 2:34 a.m. until 5:01 a.m. some nights.” When we detail the peculiar pains that come to families, people should be able to sit up straight in their seats, sensing that the preacher could as well be describing exactly what is going on in their household at that very moment. What’s more, when preachers make clear that it is OK to lament these things to the face of God, then those listening feel they’ve been given permission to realize afresh that lament is a proper modality for people of faith. Asking hard questions, lobbing laments to God, and sorrowing deeply over losses are not signs of weak faith, but robust faith. These are not stances assumed by unbelievers, but by believers. These are not attitudes we need to hang up in the church lobby along with our overcoat, but ones that can accompany us straight into the sanctuary. Of course, naming the hurts by essentially playing the blues in our preaching is only the beginning of pastoral care from the pulpit. Wilson’s “Trouble in the World” needs to be met in preaching with a robust “Grace in the World” that brings our hurts and woes and laments into conversation with the good news of the gospel.  To appeal again to the Black homiletical tradition, this is the move to “celebration.” What brings people to their feet at the end of a sermon is not just that the preacher delivers a stemwinder of a conclusion—what in classical rhetoric might be called the “resounding peroration” of a speech or sermon. Rather, what brings people to their feet is that earlier in the sermon their own wants and needs and regrets and pains were articulated. Thus, when the gospel of power comes swooping in to make promises and offer release and provide hope, then those become my promises, my release, my hope, my celebration of God’s goodness. My recently retired homiletical colleague John Rottman used to say in class that people often come to church plenty burdened already. To make the point, he would walk in front of the class and say, “My wife may have cancer, my child is struggling in college, the company I work for is lagging and letting people go,” and with each mention of such a burden, John would stoop forward a little more until he was finally almost doubled over from the imaginary weight on his shoulders. The last thing people like this need on a Sunday, he observed, are sermons that pile on more obligations, more to-do lists to stay in good with God. When people walk into church half stooped over with worry as it is, we ought not hope they leave with their chins scraping on the floor from the additional burdens the sermon loaded onto their shoulders. We’d like them to be able to walk out of church a little more upright, a little lighter on their feet, a little (or a lot) more hopeful. Or, to put it another way, we’d like to provide some much-needed pastoral care in our preaching.

Years ago, in her book Speaking of Sin, Barbara Brown Taylor had a chapter with the curious title “Sin Is Our Only Hope.” Aside from bearing a catchy title, the chapter demonstrated that, though there is no hope per se to be associated with sin, there is a lot of hope to be found in the ability to confirm there is such a thing as sin. What’s more, the reason that’s hopeful is because it points to the God who, like the ultimate cosmic umpire, is able to call balls and strikes. God is able to see what is right and what is wrong, what is in and what is out, and in so doing to convey hope that if sin can be dealt with in some final way, then we can be delivered from it and arrive at a better cosmic day. Everyone who preaches knows that for any given sermon, being able to point to what is wrong in this world is the relatively easy part. Homelitician Paul Scott Wilson calls it “Trouble.” Eugene Lowry refers to “Oops!” and “Ugh!” Bryan Chappell calls it the “Fallen Condition Focus.” The point is that when we look at the world around us, we spy all kinds of examples of wrong, bad, and hurtful realities. Sometimes these are comparatively smaller matters, like someone uttering a cutting word that wounds you. Other times they are true horrors, like the invasion of Ukraine and the slaughter of innocent life. What people in the Calvinist tradition have long labeled “total depravity” is an empirically verifiable truth that we each encounter every day. We all desire a hope that says it doesn’t have to be this way. In the charming 1995 movie Babe, all the animals on Farmer Hoggett’s farm are given voices, and throughout the movie each kind of animal—sheep, cows, dogs—presents its own particular worldview. Each animal has a perspective on all the other animals, and when we are told how sheep regard dogs, for instance, the narrator assures us that there is nothing in the world that could change a sheep’s mind on such matters. Another narrated refrain was that “the way things are are the way things are,” and that these settled facts were immutable. Despite this film’s many charms, there is something a little depressing about the idea that the way things are in the world are immutable and will never be altered. We have to hope, in fact, that the way things are both can change and ultimately must change because a lot of what characterizes life for now falls into the category of what we would regard as sinful. And if something is sinful, then it means it deviates from a norm that exists. Being able to acknowledge what is sinful is our only hope. In John Milton’s language, if there is such a thing as “Paradise Lost,” then there must be hope of finding a way to arrive at “Paradise Regained.” We have been thinking about intergenerational worship in recent issues of Reformed Worship. Intergenerational worship implies intergenerational preaching, and on matters of sin we preachers need to recognize that generations may differ on definitions of sin and on what counts as sin worthy of mentioning in a sermon. It’s not that younger people have abandoned a sense of sin—at least not in all circles. True, Christian Smith has identified a modern belief he calls “moral therapeutic deism,” in which many people downplay the day-to-day sins that were of great concern to past generations in favor of the idea that living “pretty good” lives might be enough to pass muster. God is not paying that close of attention to our lives, many feel, and probably grades on a curve anyway. So if you are a decent sort of person who avoids really terrible activity, you are probably going to be just fine in the sweet by and by. Most would agree that this perspective guts traditional notions of sin pretty thoroughly. But I don’t think this worldview is held by most younger people in the church today. There seems to be a persistent belief that sin is real and must be dealt with. This often gets expressed in the language of justice. Anything perceived as unjust still gets people’s attention and still gets labeled as sinful and in need of rooting out. Curiously, that puts a lot of younger people in pretty close alignment with the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Many things in the Old Testament were labeled sinful, but a careful Bible reader would be hard pressed to deny that matters related to injustice are prominent. Things as serious as murder or theft or rape or abuse were treated as sinful not simply because they were sinful actions in themselves, but also because they ultimately contributed to injustice in Israelite society. This focus culminates in the writings of the Minor Prophets, in which Israel’s treatment of the poor and the marginalized and the vulnerable are assailed for all kinds of reasons, but especially because their sinful actions were, first and foremost, unjust. Treating people differently based on socioeconomic status or gender or nationality was sinful, all right, but at their core the sinfulness stemmed from the injustice of it all. In preaching and in church life generally, it is too easy to look at the perspectives of younger people and chalk them up to a lack of seriousness where sin is concerned. Often this comes out whenever a younger person is not as worried about certain things—Sabbath observance or consumption of media or attitudes toward various social activities—as were older generations. Sometimes it may be that something long regarded as a sin still is a sin, whether younger people or others label it as such or not. But although we can and should discuss these matters case by case, we should not overlook younger generations’ focus on upholding justice and combating injustice, a concern that demonstrates they’re still very serious about sin after all. How exactly this awareness translates into preaching is something I cannot fully articulate in this short column. Perhaps I could not fully articulate it in even a much longer piece! But we preachers know that people who listen to our sermons perceive our core perspectives over time. If we consistently embed language or sentiments into our preaching that convey to younger people the message that the church regards their attitudes toward sin as woefully lacking, this will tend to marginalize people who believe in their hearts that they are very serious about wanting to make the world a better place by addressing what they regard as sinful and unjust patterns in society and in the church. Sin may well be our only hope, but such hope can be sought in a variety of ways. Those of us who preach would do well to learn from how younger people in the church today look for hope: by seeking to address what is unjust in the world.

In my previous column in Reformed Worship (RW 144:43), I discussed how reading books aimed at children and middle schoolers provides preachers with an array of benefits that can improve their sermons. It goes without saying that books aimed at younger people almost universally tell stories. Picking up from there, in this column I want to talk about the role narrative should play in our sermons generally. Since this is the Advent/Christmas issue, I hope we can all make the obvious connection to the story of Jesus’s birth, too. Many preachers know that the biggest revolution in homiletics in the last century was the move from deductive preaching (think three-point sermons) to inductive preaching. Whereas deductive preaching is long on heady content and teaching, inductive preaching centers more on narrative, on stories, on appeals to shared experiences in everyday human life. It could be debated whether this turn to inductive preaching is something new (it is referred to as the “New Homiletic”) or a recovery of homiletical practices that had been lost for a time. But since we are told in the gospels that Jesus rarely taught anything without using a parable, it may be that preaching that incorporates narrative is a return to a practice established by our Lord himself. But recognizing the importance of narrative is vital for other reasons. After all, we seem to be born narrative creatures. Many researchers have confirmed in recent decades that we learn best through stories. This explains why the earliest lessons we learn in life come to us not because our parents lectured us on certain topics, but because they read stories to us that displayed various virtues. As children, we learned generosity not because our parents tacked up lists of the key marks of generosity on our nursery walls, but because they read us stories that showed generosity in action. The novelist David Foster Wallace once noted that we humans seem to need narrative the same way we need space and time—as though it is a built-in thing. As narrative theologians in the late twentieth century noted, you cannot even tell someone about how we are saved through Jesus without telling the story of Jesus as narrated for us in the gospels. “Tell me the story of Jesus,” one old hymn says. Even in heaven, another hymn claims, what we will savor the most will be “the old, old story that I have loved so long.” What’s more, the fact that narrative is built right into us can be detected if you listen in on conversations at places like Panera or Starbucks. If we want to convey to a friend what is happening in the lives of our children, we don’t reel off a list of facts; rather, we tell stories. When couples are dating and getting to know each other, they do not exchange fact sheets listing relevant information on their families or where they lived and went to school. No, they spend hours sharing their stories—funny stories, sad stories, stories that tie in with significant turning points in their past. And when we tell such stories at Starbucks or on a date, we include lots of important details, we give a sense for the drama of certain events, we speak in the first-person voice of the people involved in our stories—in short, we narrate our lives. Preachers do this too in all kinds of settings, and yet too many of us seem to toggle this narrative switch to the “off” position the moment we enter the pulpit. Even when we have a cracking good story from our Bible text, we tend to atomize it, boiling it down to some single nugget of truth that then, instead of the story, is what we talk about in the sermon. We ignore all the first-person speech in Bible stories. We drain these narratives of their drama and color and end up with a kind of “just the facts, ma’am” sort of sermon. We act as though the story itself is not important. The Bible itself ought to prevent us from doing this. As the preacher Thomas G. Long has often noted, if you ask the average person what the Bible is, you are apt to hear an answer along the lines of, “Well, the Bible is a kind of compendium or encyclopedia of doctrines and concepts about God that now and then throws in some stories by way of illustration.” That has it backwards, according to Long. The Bible is really one giant story from beginning to end. Further, the Bible is chock full of smaller stories. Doctrines and concepts about God emerge from those stories. Since the Bible is God’s book, one has to conclude that according to God’s way of looking at things, the whole universe and how it unfolds is one giant Story. God reveals himself narratively. The ancient philosopher Aristotle taught that every good story needs an emotionally engaging originating event. Every story needs to be premised on something interesting, something that is “up in the air.” The story then moves from that originating event through some escalation of that event and then finally on to some kind of resolution. To put it another way, it’s not a story until something goes wrong. Sermons need this too. Different homileticians have different names for this. Paul Scott Wilson calls it “trouble.” Eugene Lowry calls it the sermon’s “ooops!” and “ugh!” moments. Bryan Chapell looks for “the fallen condition focus” of the Bible text. Once we encounter a crisis that needs resolving, a tension that needs relaxing, a mystery that needs solving, or a question that needs answering, we are off and running with a good story. This is also why few if any church school Christmas programs are based on John 1 or the last few verses of Matthew 1. Neither Matthew nor John begins with a story (Matthew’s subsequent tale of the Magi notwithstanding). Luke, on the other hand, bombards us with stories in his first two chapters, so, not surprisingly, church-school programs and some made-for-TV Christmas movies spin out of Luke’s gospel. We like it when something comes to us as a narrative. People respond best not to a sermon that is indistinguishable from an academic lecture, but to a sermon that unfolds like a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a plot that motors the sermon along. And when we have biblical texts that are themselves good stories, we need to retell these narratives inside our sermons, highlighting and maybe even augmenting the dialogue and the drama and the characters in ways that pull people deeper into the text. When there is a good story in the offing, people everywhere lean in. As every child knows, it’s a good story when you want to ask, “And then what happens? Tell me more!” Come to think of it, we preachers would love it if that eager posture were true of every person listening to our sermons each week, too: “Tell me more!”

If a pastor spends an afternoon reading a middle-grade fiction book by Kate DiCamillo or Gary Schmidt or Kwame Alexander, does that count as work time for the church? Or is that an avocational pursuit that cannot be included in the pastor’s wider ministry? If you queried members of an average congregation on such questions, you would get mixed responses, but quite possibly there would be a number of churchgoers who would wish their pastor did not “waste” time reading books written for kids. Anyone who knows me or is familiar with the seminar “Imaginative Reading for Creative Preaching” that I have co-led alongside Neal Plantinga for nearly twenty years knows how I would answer these questions. Yes, reading children’s literature and middle-grade fiction should count as ministry time, and if a pastor is not reading such works, it’s time to start! Sermons can be enriched when preachers engage regularly with well-written books for the young. But what specifically might one gain by such reading? First, a reminder from C. S. Lewis, who might have been riffing on G. K. Chesterton: a children’s book that is interesting only to children is not a good book. Well-crafted stories for the young will be as interesting and intriguing to an adult as they are to a child. Many of us have experienced this truth through Lewis’s own Narnia novels and other books we have read to or with our children and enjoyed at least as much as they did. When the art of storytelling is done well, the precise audience for which a book was intended becomes irrelevant. I can attest that on more than one occasion after finishing a middle-grade novel—or in the course of reading one—I have been reduced to tears. The final lines of Katherine Paterson’s classic Bridge to Terabithia at once broke my heart and made it soar. When I first started Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover—written entirely in verse—I was not sure about it. But then I sat stock-still in a hotel room chair reading for two and a half hours, and when I finished the book, I wept. (That, by the way, is a nice advantage of reading middle-grade fiction: an adult can finish an entire novel in an afternoon.) If a preacher ever hopes to move another human’s heart, Neal Plantinga likes to say, then his or her own heart has to be capable of being moved first. And preachers need to recognize what it is about a story that sets their hearts racing. Stories written for the young can do that. Another advantage of reading such books ties in with the preacher’s foremost tool: language. Good middle-grade fiction features sentences that are not too long, word choices that are not too fancy, and descriptions that paint pictures in one’s mind. That is not to say the texts are simple. Rather, they possess a noble simplicity. They present example after example of how much can be accomplished when ordinary and everyday words are wielded well. Because in sermons we ought to shoot for what C. S. Lewis called “the elevated vernacular,” apprenticing oneself to masters of writing for the young makes good sense. And as Neal Plantinga always says in the “Imaginative Reading” seminar, if a preacher can craft sermons that speak to a twelve-year-old’s heart, you can be assured those same sermons will also touch the hearts of that child’s parents and grandparents and everyone else who listens. For pastors, a bonus of reading middle-grade fiction is a heightened awareness that the children and young people in the congregation are not empty containers waiting to be filled up with knowledge. Children have rich interior lives. They have fears. They have secrets. They can figure things out on their own. They don’t need to be talked down to (or preached down to); instead, they should be treated as the thoughtful individuals they are. When accomplished authors are asked how they write so well about children and adolescents, most give some version of: “I remember what it was like to be a child myself.” That is something every pastor ought to strive for. This is also why surprisingly terrible and sad things can happen in good novels for the young. Characters get hurt and sometimes die. Anyone who thinks that such books should avoid sorrow and death fail to realize that children and adolescents have to figure out how to deal with such realities, whether they encounter them in the books they read or not. Even so, authors of middle-grade fiction sometimes get pushback from parents or teachers about the sad or tragic elements of their stories. Such pushback was addressed by acclaimed author Katherine Paterson on December 25, 1988, when she published a lyric essay in The New York Times Book Review titled “Hope Is More Than Happiness.” In the essay, Paterson admits that her books—like many other middle-grade fiction books—do not often feature conventional, “happily ever after” endings. But that is because the real world in which children grow up does not regularly lead to such fairy-tale conclusions either. If we want our children to grow up with hope, Paterson writes, then we need to know that true hope “cannot simply be wishful thinking, nor can it be only the desire to grow up and take control over our own lives. Hope is a yearning, rooted in reality, that pulls us toward the radical biblical vision of a world where truth and justice and peace do prevail, a time in which the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, a scene which finds humanity living in harmony with nature, all nations beating their swords into plowshares and walking together by the light of God’s glory. Now there’s a happy ending for you. The only purely happy ending I know of.” Hope nestled amidst the weeds and thorns of a fallen world: that is biblical hope. And it is precisely the kind of hope we preachers should desire to foster in people of all ages. Perhaps seeing how such hope kindles in the young can remind us how it must be kindled and nurtured in all our hearts. A vivid example of an adolescent novel that contains an unexpected tragedy is the aforementioned classic Bridge to Terabithia. At the conclusion of Paterson’s 1988 article, she quotes a letter she received from a parent whose child had read the book: “I really respected this book. . . . You stuck to reality, and you also stuck to a dream.” Paterson then uses this quote to sum up her literary vision: “That is what hope is in my books. And, come to think of it, isn’t it, as well, what we’re celebrating when we sing of the babe ‘all meanly wrapped in swathing bands, and in a manger laid’? Aren’t we saying that in this lowly birth the One who is and will be, the author of our creation, stuck to reality and also to a dream?” Sounds like the gospel to me.