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What a great morning it has already been. I'm so, so glad all of you are here for the 2008 Midwinter Lectures. We've been electrified today, both by Dorothy Bass and by Philip Turner. Somebody told me during the break, You can tell the Kingdom of God is nearer when an Episcopalian publicly condemns gluttony.

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And so... Let's still get started with those denominational things because Presbyterians even, I know that's hard to believe, even we have a few skeletons in our closet. But this is actually, I guess by accident almost, a very ecumenical lineup this year. Dorothy Bass, an active Lutheran.

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Philip Turner, Dean Turner, a very active giant in the Anglican world. And now it is my pleasure to introduce Bishop William H. Williman, this year's Curry lecturer, United Methodist bishop.

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How does one capture Will Williman in a few sentences? Will Williman has been the bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church since July of 2004. And in this position, he leads 157,000 Methodists and 792 Methodist pastors in North Alabama. For 20 years prior to that, he was Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Christian Ministry at Duke University.

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Dr. Willeman is a graduate of Wofford College, Yale Divinity School, and he earned the Doctor of Sacred Theology degree at Emory University in the early 1970s. He has taught liturgy and preaching for seasons of his ministry at Duke Divinity School. He has lectured all over the world.

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He has written a gazillion books, books on preaching, books on pastoral care, on liturgics, on sacramental theology, on ethics, evidence of his restless intellect. And when he has not been serving the academy, he has distinguished himself in the service of a number of United Methodist churches in Georgia and mainly South Carolina, where he was born. Say hallelujah.

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For 3 years, he was an associate pastor at the Broad Street United Methodist Church in Clinton, South Carolina, at the same time that I was a college student at Presbyterian College there. In a time in my life when I was struggling with a sense of call, a sense of vocational identity, I providentially had the privilege of meeting Will Williman and thought he was one of the most exotic people I'd ever met. We had several conversations about

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the life of the church, about the life of faith, about theology, that embodied to me a model of ministry that captured my attention. It was a model of ministry that valued both the life of the mind and the pastor's heart, that appreciated the importance of discernment, that broached a sense of irreverence while not giving up on the one who deserves our ultimate reverence. In the years since, I have followed Bishop Willimon's writings and sermons and books, which I have devoured with great interest. I've appreciated his ability over and over again to challenge the Church when it is needed challenging, and to encourage the Church when it is needed encouragement.

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I've admired his quick mind, his wit, and his irrepressible courage to speak his mind when it is hard not to. Will, Austin Seminary is honored to have you here in these days. We are delighted that you are back, this time as the 2008 Curry Lecturer, and we look forward to hearing what you have to bring to us.

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Wow. Oh, it's an honor to be here in the name of this -- of the Curry family that has meant so much to the church and continues to mean to the church great. Ted's memories of our days in Clemen, a bit different than mine. I remember long conversations with this college student.

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It seemed to be mostly about women, but I forgot, I forgot, I forgot. I'm glad that Ted's interests have expanded since he was 19, but this seminary is off to its greatest days under his visionary leadership. nothing we know about Jesus is any more certain, other than that he was a Jew, than that Jesus saves. There is Jesus Christ, in word and deed, is the embodiment of the declaration in this Jesus Christ

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God was reconciling the world to God. And that continues to be the greatest challenge in saying something about the Christian faith or a word that kind of subsumes the Christian faith, salvation. Which one of you, if you lose one sheep, Will you not leave the 99 in the wilderness to fend for themselves, abandon them, and go out and you will search for that one lost sheep until you have found it, and then when you've found it, will you not put that sheep on your shoulders as if it were a child and run back to your friends and say, let's party, I found my sheep.

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Now which one of you would not do that? Which one of you women, if you lose, say, a quarter? Will you not move all the heavy appliances out on the yard and rip up the carpet, move all the furniture out of the house, and when you have found your quarter, will you not run out into the street and say, let's party, I found my quarter. Now, which one of you would not do that?

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Which one of you parents? You have a wayward child, dad, drop dead, put the inheritance into the effect, I'm going to have a party. And will you not distribute everything you've got, dump it on this son?

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And when he eventually comes back and rags, which one of you would not say to him, Harold, you wanted a party? I'll show you a party. And which one of you would not do that? Well, of course, the answer is nobody.

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would do that. No rational person would do any of that. Oh, my, well, these -- so these are not stories about us. They're stories about God.

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We've been so conditioned to generally come to church thinking about us. What do I have to do this week? What do I have to feel? What do I have to believe?

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You know, it comes as a shock to hear a Savior who won't talk about us. and who renders this strange God that salvation is a word for whoever God is, that raised Jesus Christ from the dead. That's what we're talking about. Ah, yes, and what do we have to do to convince this God to get off our backs and to leave us to our own devices?

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But then again, we're reminded that salvation is, it's whatever God is up to, not what we're doing or thinking or would like. God is not easily thwarted, it appears, from Scripture. God creatively weaves tragedy and our evil into God's purposes. oddly making our greatest sin into God's greatest triumph.

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If we're faithless, God remains faithful. God cannot deny Himself, 2 Timothy 2:13. Of what kind of God could it be said, Upon my bed at night, I sought Him whom my soul desires. I sought Him.

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I found him not. I called him, but he gave no answer. I will arise now and go about the city, into the streets and squares in the night, seeking the one whom my soul loves. I found him whom my soul loves.

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I held him. I would not let him go. I brought him into my mother's house and into the chamber of her that conceived me. I made love to my beloved in the night.

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Song of Songs 3. Wow. That's an odd thing to say about God. The closest workable analogy we have to God and Jesus Christ, to the ramblings of these two overheated adolescents in lust, in love for one another.

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This love that meets us is unbalanced and costly and consuming and fanatical in the Song of Songs. How odd, therefore, that Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Tegel prison, awaiting almost sure martyrdom by the Nazis, wrote to his friend Beth Gay and said, I've been reading exclusively from the Song of Songs. Bonhoeffer says, It is a great reassurance to know that nothing calamitous can happen to anyone who is loved by the love

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that is portrayed there. It's quite a claim that nothing calamitous, even Nazis, can shake the one who is embraced, claimed, ravished by such love. I was at a clergy conference, and I didn't really carefully note what the theme of the conference was, but the The conference was called Achieving Balance in Your Life.

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And I thought, Well, I guess we are probably not going to mention Jesus. Because, you know, people said a lot of nasty things about Jesus, but nobody ever accused Him of being balanced. This biblical testimony of God as active, passionate lover, waiting father, intrusive, searching woman that -- this is hard for us because, well, as Phil mentioned earlier, we're creations of the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment,

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Something new is invented, unknown in the history of the world before the Enlightenment, namely the individual, the sovereign, freestanding, autonomous reality that judges all reality. Human beings were said to be most fully developed when we were most completely self-sufficient, self-made, self-reliant. The truly developed person is the one who learns to shed all social connections and restraints and by God stand alone, stripped of relations.

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Now from a Christian point of view in the Enlightenment, the modern self which thought it was progressing and growing did not grow, it shrank. The thin contemporary self, a creation of the individual's choices of the moment, responsible only to itself, Having no greater project than itself, we believe is the self-shed of the very qualities that previously were thought to make us most humane. Therefore, to be told that our salvation is tethered to a God who connects, a God who's got this thing for us,

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A God whose trinitarian nature is inherently relational, communitarian, communicative, is to encounter a God who is just, this God is against everything in which we believe. But God, Ephesians 2, who is rich, out of the great love with which he loved us, even we were dead, through our sins. God made us alive together with Christ.

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By grace you've been saved. Raised us up, forced us to sit with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you've been saved through faith. This isn't your own doing.

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It is a gift of God, whether you like it or not. I added that, whether you like it or not, but still, it's an amazing, it's an amazing, I'd say the image of God I get in much of our preaching and church life is this sort of, You know, Thomas Jefferson, deistic kind of God that got the world going and then left, and a God that loves us but never gets around it actually ever showing it or doing anything useful for us, that kind of God. And we know why we have that God, because we found that you cannot have a nation without God unless you first be real sure that you get a God that is distant

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and enough from us not to ever interfere with what we plan the people now, being God in democracy, to do. And so we get that kind of God. How different is that God from the one, for instance, C.S. Lewis described, describing his conversion as that moment when God moved in on me and I was dragged, kicking, and

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screaming, eyes darting in every direction like a prodigal dragged back home. Because I'll live, you'll live too, says Jesus. John Calvin speaks of our salvation as vivification, where we first are in a sense condemned to be alive. Why does my church talk so little about something like salvation today?

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Why? A man was going down from Jerusalem, Jericho, and he was mugged, and his muggers beat him, strip him, and leave him half dead. And you look down the road, and here comes your salvation. priest, somebody in the salvation business who passes by on the other side.

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Oh, well, you know, go get 'em, Jesus. We all hate clergy, like you. Then comes down the road a pious, but not overly religious, kind of Methodist sort of layperson, and who passes by on the other side. Well, you've lost a lot of blood.

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It's getting hot out here. The robbers may come back and finish their work. And you look down the road and you see your last hope. You see your salvation.

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And it is the chairman of the PLO. It is this guy who is flamboyantly dressed and has got AIDS and it's And you say, it's only a flesh wound. I'm okay.

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Don't please, hey, hey, no, don't stop, don't stop. I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay. I'd rather die than have to get saved by you. The interpretation is that of St.

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Augustine, who said, we looked at Jesus and we said, Gospel of John, you're a Samaritan and has to demon. How does it feel to get saved by the one whom we hated so much that we had to torture him to death? That's why you don't hear much about salvation these days. And it's not only because we, it's hard for us to believe in a God who can stoop that low, but it's also hard to believe that

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We're in the ditch. My congregation likes the interpretation of that parable, which says, now, boys and girls, you all have your master's degrees. So here's what you need to do this week to save the world, since God is, like, retired. And they love that.

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But to be told, gosh, you may be damned. You're going to need a God to save you that loves to raise the dead, that has got this thing to eat and drink with sinners. And that's the kind of God we got.

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Thus, James Cone says, I think with some justification, that if you're a white North American, there is a sense in which you've got to become black. in order to be saved. Salvation comes to the empty-handed, just as I am without one plea, except that thy blood was shed for me. We sing, used to sing.

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The church is not here to produce a product, salvation. We're not here to make disciples. produce converts, win people to Christ, note the capitalist metaphors there. God in Christ is already doing that.

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We are simply, did I say simply? To point to this particular God, to testify to what has happened in the invasion of our humanity by this God, and to show the world what life looks like when a life submits to the facts of Christ. We have been shown something the world is waiting to see even if the world doesn't know it's waiting for whom it awaits. And that's our job.

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Thus, Karl Barth, thank you, Philip Turner, for bringing that up. You know, it's at the refreshment break. One of you Presbyterians came to me and said, You know, it's just fascinating to see a Methodist who reads Karl Barth. And I said, you know, sometimes my church permits me to slap Presbyterians.

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So I meant that as a compliment. I said, you know, that's what's sad about it right there. Anyway, we preachers point to a reality that is so counterintuitive, countercultural, that we don't have to be good preachers. to make it an interesting sermon, just to point with all the clarity we can get at the oddness of this God who has met us.

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I don't know about you, but when I was trained to preach, such as I was trained, I was told my job as a preacher was to make Jesus normal and to make him make sense. I know that he was a relatively uneducated first century Jew. However, you can use this.

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I can re-describe it in such a special way that you can think, yeah, yeah, that's what I've always thought. Yeah, that makes sense to me, yeah. No. In my present job, I've been doing some stuff I've never done before.

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And I got a call from this pastor saying, We're just so excited for you to be coming to our church this Sunday. And I've been meeting with this young man and he -- I've been counseling him and instructing him in the faith. And he would -- and you're going to baptize him. And I said, Great.

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And he said, Just one thing that this kid has got in his head that He really, really, really would like to be baptized by immersion. And I told him I knew that wouldn't be a problem for you, as experienced as you are. And you know the Methodist Church recognizes these different forms of baptism, and I look forward to seeing you.

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Bye. Well, I get there to the church. And sure enough, here's a pastor at a little country church standing there on the steps of the church, a little boy standing next to him. I get out of the car, and

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The pastor says, Bishop, this is Jason. And Jason, it's quite an honor to have a bishop baptize you. And Bishop Willeman is going to do that today. Jason looks up at me and he says, They tell me you've never done one of these before.

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I'd feel better if we could have a rehearsal. And I said, that was what I was going to suggest. I was going to say, I was going to say that. And so we go in there, they tell me, they've gotten, they've bought them a pool.

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rented one or something and they've got some flowers in front of it and somebody's a carpenter fixed it up, made it look good. It's in the fellowship hall because they didn't have room for it over in the sanctuary. And the preacher said, now we'll have the service and we'll all process behind the cross and here to the fellowship hall and then you'll do the baptism. So Jason says, now you'll go through the ritual.

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And you'll take my hand and help me up these steps here. You want me to remove my socks? And I said, Yes, yeah, I always do that. And then you'll lead me down and he says, Now, I want to be immersed three times.

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And I said, Really? Well, John Wesley was big on that. The Trinity? Yeah, yeah.

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So we have a wonderful service. And We -- I preach on baptism and we sing about it and pray about it. And then we all march at the last hymn, end of the fellowship hall behind the cross.

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And there's the church gathered around this pool and I go through the ritual and I say, Jason, would you like to say anything before I baptize you? And he said, Yeah. I'd like to say to this church that, you know, I'm here today because you put me here. I didn't even know about Jesus my whole life until you told me about Him.

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I didn't even know that I had something I was supposed to be doing for God until you told me. And I just want to thank all those people who put up with me on the basketball team and at the Sunday school class and the preacher for doing the class. You know, in my family -- when my parents got divorced, I just thought my world was over. And because of you, I figured out that that's not my family.

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This is my family. And I just -- it's like I've learned about a whole new world. And I'm just 14 years old. And so I just -- I'm glad you got to me soon enough, you know, so that I can

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use a lot of this. And I just hope I'll never embarrass any of you that you made me a Christian. So I'm now weeping profusely, and Jason says to me, Are you going to be able to get yourself together? I said, Yes, yes, here, let's sing a hymn, sing a hymn.

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Sing Amazing Grace. And I baptized him. Now, when Christians say salvation, that's what we're talking about. It would be fine just to say baptism, and it would cover it all.

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That's -- that is salvation. Thus, pastoral care in the church is The sustained attempt to be with people to whom this God has so erotically turned. Alas, a lot that passes for pastoral care is basically adjustment to the cultural status quo, adaptation through therapy or chemistry, to governmentally sanctioned and imposed

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definitions of reality. True pastoral care, in the name of Jesus Christ, consists in encouragement to rebel against the illusory world that is produced by the modern state and its salvations, and join God's revolution. The -- I just -- it's wonderful to watch Philip Turner unpack the Christ and Culture for us.

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I had been teaching a course last semester on Jesus at Birmingham Southern College, and I had my students read Christ and Culture. And then I asked them what they thought about it. One of the students says, I think it's remarkable the lack of any Jesus here.

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He said, Who in the heck is this Christ? It's just vague. He said, My problem with Jesus is how specific he got. He said, Do you call Jesus Christ when you're trying to get him, like, harmless?

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Is that kind of what you're doing here? Whoa, if you can't fool a sophomore, you know, Another student said, I can tell reading this book that he must have never met any women or African-Americans. And she said, Well, he talks about culture.

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And I said, Well, now culture for Niebuhr, that was his six friends at Yale. That's culture. But you're helping me read this book? Isn't it amazing?

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What a rich book to still speak that clearly to us. Karl Barth said, The mercy of God is always much more difficult and demanding than the judgment of God. To be actively loved by God, really to know that God has decisively moved in on us, is to be -- that God has taken up our cause, is to need pastoral care to help us endure such severe mercy.

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Most of the people in my church, I think, are fairly content and happy until Jesus shows up. And then the trouble starts, because salvation is intricately linked to vocation. That's one thing Barth taught me about reading Scripture, is every verse of Scripture is meant to be vocationally read.

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It is an address. It's not lying there flat on the page. It's not truth to be stared at and assented to. It is a call.

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It is a claim. Salvation is not just a blessing, it's an assignment. And that's tough. Visiting, I've got a church in Birmingham that serves breakfast every day of the week to homeless people, serves about 150 breakfasts every morning.

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And I love to just go there, just to see it, be pleased by it. I'm going in the other morning and I see this man in there washing dishes. The pastor believes homeless people ought to never be served anything by the church except on China. So he got to wash these, so the suburban churches and all kick in.

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Anyway, this guy is in there washing dishes. And I'm saying, don't I know you? And he says, we met a couple of weeks ago at Canterbury Church, our most affluent congregation in Birmingham. And I said, wow, wow, there you are, washing dishes for the homeless.

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So I said, have you always enjoyed ministry with the homeless? Has this been a part of your ministry for a long time? He looked up and he said, Who told you I enjoyed ministry with the homeless? And I said, Well, you know, you're here.

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And he said, Have you ever talked to any of the homeless? Most of them are crazy. He said, There's a reason a lot of them are homeless. Nobody wants them.

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And I said, Well, that makes all the more remarkable that Here you are washing dishes for the homeless. How did you get here? And he looked up and he said, I got here the same way you got moved to Alabama.

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Jesus put me here! That's what's hard about salvation, is that that kind of God who refuses to be God without us. Wow. And I'm saying that one reason we have pastors is to help us cope with that act of a God, that demanding a Savior.

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To be saved by this Savior is the challenge. The most controverted, tensive, challenging thing about salvation in Jesus Christ is its salvation in Jesus Christ. There's no other name by which we shall be saved, Acts 4:12. And therefore those of us who tend to hang around Jesus most know why people should resist that.

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Because we ourselves have in varying degrees felt our lives caught up in an assignment that we didn't create ourselves. And that's hard, particularly hard in a world which has taught you from birth that Your life is your own possession and your own creation, that you are your only assignment. So I'm just saying, have patience with those who reject such a message.

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I, as a Bardian, have no idea what their rejection means. You know, when they tell me they're not going to follow Jesus, I think, well, lots of luck. History is strewn with the corpses of a lot of people who thought they could box with Jesus. And, hey.

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Anyway, in the movie Crash, it begins with a disgusting scene in which this African-American couple is encountered by a couple of racist cops. And one of the cops just gropes this woman all over, presumably looking for a weapon, humiliates her, humiliates her husband who feels powerless to prevent this cop from this act of abuse. And that scene ends up in just ravaging their lives.

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Their marriage falls apart, their lies fall apart, they are both so eaten up with anger and resentment and shame. And later in the movie, you know, she has this terrible accident. And there she is lying upside down. There's gasoline dripping around her.

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She is hanging upside down in her seatbelt and her car. And an off-duty cop sees the accident, shows up, moves into action, jumps into the soon-to-explode car. and pulls a knife out and cuts her down, and she looks into his eyes, and it is the same cop that earlier has so abused her. And there is this look of terror on her face as she sees that her life is about to be saved by the person she hates more than anybody.

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He drags her to safety. and he walks away. And she stands there saved, but in terror, at realizing that she is going to have to live the rest of her life having been saved by the man she hates. It's a kind of Christian story about, sort of about what it's like to be saved by Jesus.

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Jesus didn't abuse us, but We crucified Him, and for that one to hang on the cross and say, Oh, forgive them, they don't know what... what they're doing, they've never known what they're doing. And then, you know, three days later to say, like I was saying earlier -- - before I was so rudely interrupted -- - and then to say at the end of Matthew's Gospel, And now I'm going to be with you always.

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you will never be able to get rid of me. I only had three years to hammer you before they got me, but now I'm back and I'll be with you always. And no wonder fear was the predominant Easter emotion. Salvation is complicated because of the God who saves.

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We're saved by the one we despise. And to be saved is to be enlisted, bound in discipleship to the one who's saved. One of the hardest parts about being a preacher is to be stuck with Jesus and to have to endure his idea of who is worth dying for.

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Contrary to my ideas, but sometimes I'm asked, what do you miss most about your former life in academia? And I'm asked that enough, I now have a response. What I miss most about life in the university is the Office of Admissions. That, and I criticize Office of Admissions for always, for their war against Christian students, but the only group that it's franking and the admissions pool, but

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Forgive me, because the Office of Admissions always performed the important function for the university of making damn sure that I never met anybody, I never had a conversation with anybody who didn't look and think just like me. All day long. Everybody I met had learned to manipulate the system just like I did, and that's how I got here. Well, in North Alabama, we are not permitted in the Methodist Church to have an office of admissions.

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We have to work with anybody that Jesus Christ drags in the door. And it's disconcerting. When I started ministry, I used to think my challenge, coming out of seminary in the early '70s, was, Oh, you've got these critical, sophisticated, Western-educated, modern people.

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They're all secular. How are you going to bring up God in the conversation? At some point in my ministry, I woke up and realized, no, they're all -- they love talking about God. The hard thing is the question to ask somebody, Which God are you talking about?

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And to do all I can to make sure that everybody is clear that whatever God they're thinking about or talking about, it's not the God that medicines Jesus Christ. It's other godlets that are supposed to bring salvations. We preach in this conflicted supermarket of desire and salvation, and therefore we preachers, I think we've got that assignment of having to exercise discernment and that daily joy of being shocked by the God we've got rather than the God we thought we had to have. And

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Christian salvation is not an interesting idea. It's an interesting agent. And that -- and by the way, unless I speak too negatively, in my money, this is what keeps you in ministry, is Jesus keeps breaking free of our grip and keeps making my ministry more interesting than I would make it if I -- if it were left to me. And

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just keep showing you odd things about his salvation and who he is. Who is the God I'm speaking about in my sermons? How is it that we have lives worth living and where do we get a future? I think it's because God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

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And I can just say, after this many years in ministry. I'm looking forward to retirement in many ways because, you know, I get to leave. But -- But in other ways, I regret it because this God is more than I'm going to be able to do justice to in like 5,000 sermons. It's just occurring to me.

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There's more Scripture than I can possibly do justice to. There's more meaning. There is more God here. There is more peculiarity than I'm ever going to be able to render.

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And I kind of hate walking away from the party early. So what a great God to work for. So this woman says to me, we're getting coffee together, and I said, How have things been for you? Have you had a good fall?

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And she said, Well, not particularly. Said, Our son's been putting us through hell. I said, Oh, I'm sorry. And she said, How old is your son?

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And she said, He's 18. And we have not known where he was for the last six months. We basically changed the locks on the door. We

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I pray for him every night, but we didn't know where he was. And last week, during dinner, suddenly somebody is pounding on the door. We open the door, and there he is. And he starts a string of profanity.

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And I said, look, we're eating. Come on, sit down, eat with us. And he refuses to sit down at the table. He storms back into his room.

00:45:46.400 - 00:46:20.160

He slams the door shut, and I can hear the door locked. And my husband sat there, and he got up, poured himself a drink, went out, turned on the TV. That's kind of how he handles this. And I put my napkin down, and I got up, I went down the hall, I went out to the garage, and I looked at my husband's tools, and I got this big hammer, this large hammer.

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And I walked back from the garage and the hall, I stood in front of my son's door. I asked him, Open the door, and this string of profanity. So I took that hammer, and I leaned back, and just with one good hit, I knocked the whole doorknob, locked everything just right off the door, just split the door in two. And I barged through the door, and my son looked terrified.

00:46:55.360 - 00:47:24.000

And I caught him right up under his chin like this, and I slammed him up against the headboard. of the bed and I said, I went into labor because of you. And by God, I am not giving you up. I think God is like that.

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Thank you, Will, and we look forward to the two lectures to come that you are giving us. My goodness, what do you say after a lecture like that? Amen. I guess you say amen.

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Amen. Thank you. We have a moment or two. Is there someone who might want to frame a question that, would you be willing to take some questions?

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Anybody disagree with what he just said? Yeah. David? Just to be sure you repeat the question.

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Oh, yes, thank you. Repeat the question. I'm asked to repeat the question.