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One of the many welcomes that you all are getting here to Austin Seminary. Welcome back to alums, welcome to first-time visitors, and welcome to all of you to the second Westerfeld Lecture. Just A brief word, there is a handout that's available on the table in the back there, and if you don't have it yet, please avail yourself of one of those. I hold in my hand the concise encyclopedia of preaching.

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And given that preachers like to play with words, I take it that the meaning of the word concise in the case of this encyclopedia is something akin to less than 600 pages. This book came out in 1995. It was published by Westminster John Knox Press. And

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I think it really is a kind of fine reference work that was added to our discipline. Those of you who attended last night's lecture will not be surprised by the fact that our lecturer was the person invited to write the entry in the encyclopedia on imagination. As long as I've known Paul, he's been engaged with this difficult aspect of the preaching task. And I used

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adjective difficult to refer to imagination precisely because of those daunting questions that we all have about this human faculty. Can you teach imagination? After all, people are either imaginative or they're not imaginative, right? Well, in his work, like this book, Imagination of the Heart,

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Paul Wilson has been consistently unwilling to consider the creative facets of preaching as simply natural defaults of human personality. He's boldly charted the poles between which the vital energies of the sermon jump, between biblical text and contemporary world, between law and gospel, between judgment and grace, between story and doctrine. For between these poles, theological imagination arcs, like the electricity that would dance up those Jacob ladders experiments that we did in high school physics. Homiletics as a discipline is in a debt to Paul Scott Wilson for his work in the area of imagination, and we are privileged to have him here at Austin Seminary.

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We eagerly anticipate your next lecture, Paul. looking forward to your stimulating theological analysis, and curious, very curious, about the rich young man and that cloud of dust. I give you, for the second Westerfeld Lecture, Paul Scott Wilson. Thank you very much.

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It's good to be with you again today. When I grew up, my dad's a minister in the United Church of Canada. He died just in April. But he always had

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a word that he would bring to bear on any sermon that we heard together. And he would say, what was the word of hope? What was the word of hope? And this would sometimes be a drill that we would be expected to answer at lunch after the service.

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What was the hope? And I grew up then with an understanding that when one goes to church there's a legitimate expectation of listening to the word and receiving hope that it was something that one might fairly anticipate. And thus it also came to me that if I went to church and came away angry, angrier than I was before, for instance, that the sermon had not perhaps done what it might have done.

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Well, it's partly that understanding of the hopeful nature of God's Word. Not that God's Word doesn't have the cutting edge, but the hopeful, fundamentally hopeful nature, not just of the Word, but of Christian life, that leads me to the lecture today, where we're talking about theologizing and the gracious text. Because one of my understandings is that if we look at a biblical text and we do not find grace in it,

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if we don't find a word of hope rooted in that text, that we haven't read the text sufficiently, that we haven't stayed with it long enough, that we haven't dwelled with it asking, God, what is it that you are teaching us about you and your word? In other words, I think that it's a bias that we are not trained with to look for grace in biblical texts. And yet once we have been trained to perceive grace in biblical texts, we can find it. Throughout history, the structure of the sermon typically has been seen as something separate from its theology.

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That is, a preacher chose a sermon form, and the theology one kind of poured into that form. It's a good way of making ice cubes and concrete forms, but I'm not sure that it's the best understanding for the Word of God. An expository sermon moved from exposition of the text to its application today.

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That was the basic structure. You start with exposition, you end with application. An exegetical sermon might take a text, verse by verse, phrase by phrase. A topical sermon might move up a ladder of increasingly important points, or else it might go around a diamond as looking into the very facets of the diamond.

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But theology and function were thought to be separate. The main thought given to structure was given to the logical order of the points and the sub-points, whether these points were stressed or unstressed. And with rhetorical sequencing of ideas that, for example, the strongest idea came last. The weakest idea was in the middle, and the middle

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idea in strength was the first one. But we now realize that in homiletics that sermon form does affect the theology that we preach. In an exegesis application sermon structure, the text is handled in the first part of the sermon. And what we're doing in that first part of the sermon is we're looking into the biblical text for some word of correction.

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And then we move to an application of the text, and fundamentally we get, with that movement, a word of instruction about how we are to improve our lives or to improve the lives of our neighbors or to strengthen our faith. In other words, in that exegesis application model, there is a theology that's almost prescribed, because when we go to texts, we don't immediately look for a word that pats us on the back. So the theology of that form, going into the biblical text and applying it today, is one of judgment. And it's very hard to get a word of grace

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out of judgment, not that judgment isn't grace in itself, but we often don't experience it as the hopeful word that is the fullness of the gospel. Rarely does God want us to approach scripture and rarely with the understanding that we're going to hear from God these words, oh my loved ones, whatever you do, don't change anything. just keep on the same path, because you are on the way to perfection. It's that word of correction that we're right to anticipate.

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But such sermons that go into the text only once are going to come out with that word of judgment on us, and as a result, the sermon itself will tend to be anthropocentric, looking at humanity and what we are to do. In order for sermons to avoid anthropocentrism, putting the burden, in other words, putting the burden on humanity to change, there needs to be some deliberate turn in homiletics towards God. And a sermon forum that facilitates such a movement is important. Moreover, we need a sermon forum that can help preachers

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to become better theologians. Now from the time of Paul and Augustine, and then again with Luther, two theological categories have been lurking around the pulpit. And those are the categories of law and gospel. Their limits have never been fully explored.

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Ask almost any preacher about law and gospel preaching, and you will get two typical answers. If you ask a preacher what is law and gospel preaching, they will most often say, first, it is a Lutheran form of sermon, and second, that it displays an overall movement from law to gospel. Indeed, partly because it is perceived to be a Lutheran form of sermon, many of us, in the Reformed tradition, have felt free to ignore it.

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In fact, most of us do not realize that our answers are in fact incorrect. First, law to gospel was never a Lutheran form of sermon. It was a Lutheran form of theological structure that was intended to be used in sermons and in theological reflection, but it was never prescribed as the overall movement or structure for homiletical composition.

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Secondly, Although as an overall movement for the sermon, it was anticipated in 1958 by a Lutheran, only since 1977 has it been an overall sermon movement, and largely under the influence not of a Lutheran, but of an Episcopalian. And its development in this direction has been by people from various denominations, as we will see. Now of course law and gospel are biblical terms.

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Paul wrestles with them in Romans. Augustine identified law and gospel as one of the few kinds of theological senses or lenses with which one could approach scripture and expect to receive a meaning. Law and gospel was a lens for looking at scripture for Augustine. And for the sake of time, I'm going to skip over Luther and John Wesley, neither of whom saw law and gospel as a sermon form, but both of whom said that it was absolutely essential for preaching.

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But I do want to say this about Luther, and that is that when we're talking about law and gospel, we are not making the mistake that he himself made in his early career and corrected in his later career. We are not equating law with Old Testament and gospel with New Testament. As he came to understand, law and gospel are features of God's word wherever it may be found. God's word is, like my glasses, a bifocal word.

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Always the two. Two sides of the same coin. The very word that condemns us is the same word that freeze us.

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I'm going to jump, though, to Professor C.F.W. Walthers, who was at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, in the latter half of the 1800s. And it was often the custom of Professor Walthers, on a Friday night, to give public lectures.

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These were in addition to the lectures that he gave his students through the week in the seminary. On the Friday night, he would have a public lecture, and of course the students were expected to show up. We do not know with what glee the students filed in to hear yet another lecture, and we do not know of their particular joy in anticipating this lecture instead of more mundane matters that they might have encountered downtown on that same evening.

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But they were, we do know this, that they were edifying evenings And we also know that from September the 12th, 1884, to November the 6th, 1885, Walthers devoted 39 lectures to interpreting Luther on the subject of the proper distinction between law and gospel. These lectures were published posthumously in German, in 1897 from notes that the students had made.

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They had taken stenography. Law and gospel are a means, he said, of bringing people to conversion. Law addresses the conscience and it discloses an individual sin. Walther said that without law written into the heart, the gospel cannot be heard.

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If you don't know that you've sinned, how can you know that you're saved? He says, the law exists as a threat, as with Abraham and Hagar. He says, it hands us a piece of bread and drives us out into the desert. The gospel, by contrast, he says, demands nothing at all.

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But rather, he says, invites a hungry person to come to the table, to eat, to partake of heavenly blessings. The law tells us what we must do, and the gospel speaks only of what God does. For Walther's law is to be preached to people who are confident in their sin.

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And the gospel is to be preached to people who are terrified sinners. The same word is not intended for each person. He says that gospel functions like the father of the prodigal son. The father, he says, does not in a single word refer to the son's dreadful and disgraceful conduct.

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He says nothing, at all about that, but simply embraces and kisses the prodigal, and prepares a splendid banquet for him, gospel issues no commands, but it transforms people, implants love in their hearts, and equips them for all good works. Thus, when law and gospel are preached, he says, they must be preached in such a way that the hearer is in no doubt as to whom is being addressed. But he said that this division between law and gospel isn't something that takes place in one part of the sermon and then later in another, law and gospel.

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He says that law and gospel may be contained in the same sentence. But every hearer must be able to say, that word is for me. Walthers instructs his preaching students to separate law and gospel, not to mix them up, so that no one can understand what applies to whom.

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He calls this separation of law and gospel the ultimate test of a sermon. Law and gospel exist primarily as distinct and opposing emphases in a sermon. They do not represent an overall movement or flow for Walthers. He finds them in Luther's sermons.

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On every page he finds it. And he says that he wants students to read Luther's sermons because, well, he says that they're fun. They're almost like a trip on a roller coaster at the fairgrounds to read Walther's carefully. He says, on every page, first Luther scares the living daylights out of you and hurls you down into the depths.

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But he's hardly done that when he says, do you believe that? Yes? Good. Come on back up.

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And there is thunder and lightning, and then immediately the gentle breath of the Holy Spirit in the gospel. It is impossible to resist. Luther constantly preaches law and gospel side by side so that the law is illustrated in a far more terrifying way by the gospel. And the gospel is made far sweeter

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and more consoling through the law. This, he says, is on every page. Well, some of you may know that Karl Barth spoke about the appropriate order of law and gospel. He said the appropriate order was gospel, law, gospel.

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Some homileticians have taken this to be a prescription for how it should be in the sermon, according to Barth. But in fact, when Barth was talking, he wasn't speaking about sermons. He was talking about the situation in Germany and the necessity of the confessional church to acknowledge that law needed to be an outgrowth of the gospel, because he was saying that the laws of the Third Reich were an abomination to Jesus Christ. So for him, the appropriate order was gospel, law, gospel.

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It's the first hint of someone saying that law to gospel should be a movement of the entire sermon comes in H. Grady Davis in 1958. It's a brief comment that he makes. He's referring to a sermon that he's heard on the text, apart from me, Jesus says, apart from me you can do nothing.

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And H. Grady Davis says of this sermon that he heard, the preacher's whole emphasis is that of ourselves we can neither gain God's consideration, deserve it, nor believe in it. The sermon's falseness is not that it points out our helplessness to help ourselves, but that it stops in saying this. As if that were the whole truth about our situation, or as though that was even the most important truth.

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Rather, H. Grady Davis advocates a development of the gospel from the center of the sermon. At least this is what he says, and this is the only time he says it. The apprentice must learn to make sure that the gospel is in his germinal idea to begin with.

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If it is not there, in other words, if your theme sentence of your sermon doesn't have this... idea? If it isn't there, it cannot be at the heart of the sermon where it ought to be. The gospel cannot successfully be dragged in later.

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The last point of the sermon is much too late to begin thinking about the gospel. And in a way it's natural that H. Grady Davis might have suggested this, because a) he's a Lutheran, and b) He's the first person in homiletics to talk about preaching as something that is organic in form, has its own life, inner life.

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And the form of the sermon is going to depend, therefore, largely on how the preacher is responding to the form of a text. So for him, theology was not something that one could simply pour into a sermon. Theology shapes it. I'm going to skip over Richard Kemmerer of Concordia Seminary in 1959, a year later.

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He also could be interpreted to be saying law to gospel, but he also says when a preacher can confront his hearers with law and gospel repeatedly in the same sermon without muddling his plan, then He is on a track of a good outline. In other words, the Lutheran form of preaching was a continual movement back and forth between law and gospel, sometimes in the same sentence, sometimes in the same paragraph, often many times on one page. It's not until 1977 and 1978 that two books appear that radically change the law gospel territory for preaching.

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One was by a Lutheran, Herman G. Stumfle, at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg. He wrote a book called Preaching Law and Gospel. That was a very transformative book for me.

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It was a most helpful one in terms of the development of my own preaching because I had a sense that as a preacher it was my responsibility to condemn, to bring a word of judgment. And yet being of the generation that I am, I didn't feel comfortable in that role. I didn't know how I would be a preacher effectively, because I didn't want to be the wagging finger.

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I didn't want to be the critical parent. And yet I knew that it was part of my responsibility. And yet when I read Herman G. Stumpfle, he opened up another possibility, because he said that there are two kinds of law and gospel.

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And the first kind, he says, and the kind that we normally think of is this vertical, functions on the vertical, with God up above in a position of judge, and we come down below in a position of the accused. And the trial goes on and we find ourselves condemned. It's that vertical notion of judgment that I was thinking was the one that was the only one available for preaching. And he said also that there is an appropriate kind of gospel for that.

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When someone pleads for forgiveness, the gospel is forgiveness. So the vertical is act of judgment as the law, and forgiveness is the shape of the gospel. Stumpfler then went on to make a revolutionary move for Lutheran homiletics. because he said that he found in Luther another kind of law and gospel that functions on a horizontal axis.

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And what it does is it holds the mirror up to us. So the preacher simply describes the situations that we find encountering our people. And by describing, for instance, cycles of domestic violence, or families who are unable to get off welfare, or cancer on the wards, or war, one is already describing the judgment. It is the judgment that has fallen on us through the fall, because we are sinners.

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It is a more descriptive rather than a prescriptive. It's not the finger wagging. We're all in this together. It demands identification with the problem rather than separating oneself from the people.

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And he said that kind of horizontal understanding of law that reflects back that the situation really is as bad as we might have thought it would be, there's an appropriate kind of gospel. It isn't the gospel of forgiveness. Because the gospel of forgiveness, well, if somebody comes to you and they're homeless, you don't say you're forgiven. You find them a home.

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And so the appropriate kind of gospel on this horizontal plane is the gospel that overturns the world. That says to all those powers and principalities that want to have the last say, you don't have the last say. God's got the last say. that was a very important book, Herman G.

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Stimplas, and one that I think offers a great deal of freedom to preachers. He did not say that sermons should move from law to gospel. In fact, what he said, that the dimensions of law, gospel, and the call to obedience move within each sermon in lively, unpredictable ways.

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The form of each and the shape of the whole will be unique in every event of proclamation, as with each appearance of new life. Milton Crum's manual on preaching appeared in 1977, one year before Stumfla's. And it didn't have much impact at the time of its publication. And the reason is that it's...

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Well, it has the fault of too many books in homiletics. Someone has a good idea and can't render it into something that's practical or usable. And Milton Crum's manual on preaching had many excellent ideas, but it was almost incomprehensible. By the time you got 45 pages into it,

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you kind of felt like you were looking inside a computer with the lid off. How would I ever be able to employ this? He saw sermon structure in terms of H. Grady Davis's organic movement.

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For him, the sermon starts in an area of life that needs transformation by the gospel, and it moves to a place where that transformation makes a significant difference. You can perhaps look on your handouts to see what he was actually prescribing at the top on the left. He has in mind that

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There are immediate parallels between the hermeneutical process followed by the preacher, the overall plot of the biblical story, and the possible structure of sermon design. So he's thinking that in hermeneutics, in the Bible, and in the sermon, we see a sequence of three things. This, I think, probably was a bit of an oversimplification on his part, but it's an interesting idea. Those three things that we see are situation, complication, resolution.

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That's the sequence that he found in the biblical texts, in the hermeneutical process, and what he wanted to have in the sermon itself. It would move from a situation, which is the human situation, all knocked up with sin after the fall. He's not using the word law, but we hear the word law. The complication that he talks about is in terms of people's lives.

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It's the symptom of the sin that needs transformation by the gospel. It includes the root of the behavior that the preacher needs to discover. Why is it that we keep on disobeying God's word? We have a rebellious spirit, perhaps, would be the root.

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And it also means, this complication means looking at the resulting consequences of such behavior, where it's all going to lead us. It's going to lead us to condemnation. It's going to lead us to a disaster of one form or another.

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It's going to lead us to broken hearts and separation from God. Now the resolution is the gospel content. Here comes the gospel. After you've analyzed the trouble, after you've analyzed the law, now comes the gospel that speaks, he says, to the root of behavior to effect a transformation in mind and heart.

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In other words, the gospel is something that performs something, it does something here. It affects a change. And after the gospel has been proclaimed, he says, the preacher points to new results that follow the new way of perceiving or believing, including new symptomatic behavior and new consequences which will follow if we live faithful lives. So what was before the road to disaster now is transformed and becomes

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the road to hope and sustenance. Crumb tries to keep the sermon process very fluid and free, but in trying to accomplish this, his whole process grinds to a halt. In the end, his dynamic process, what he calls his dynamic process, leaves students standing by the sermon roadside, uncertain whether to walk, hitch a ride, or steal a car.

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Now, over the next two decades, Crumb would influence or anticipate the work of Eugene Lowry, Richard Lisher, and myself. I identify these connections not to elevate Crumb or to make his work or ours more significant than it was, but it is to say that with Crumb, law to gospel becomes a legitimate movement of the sermon. And he's an Episcopalian.

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Eugene Lowry and the Homiletical Plot, Eugene Lowry is a Methodist, and he made an enormous contribution to the law-gospel discussion when he published the Homiletical Plot, The Sermon as Narrative Art Form. He published it in 1980. It met with huge response, Partly because in less than 100 pages, he made sense of the narrative movement in preaching by offering simple step-by-step direction for the sermon.

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Lowry had been instructed, he said, in what he called the engineering school of homiletics, which understood that sermons were to be engineered and have parts that fit together. But he said they seldom did. Lowry looked for an element common to story that could provide a new image for the preaching task, and the new image that he came up with was the image of plot. The plot Lowry came up with is essentially a law gospel plot that sounds like crumb.

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It is crumb clarified and simplified to be sure. He never acknowledges his debt to crumb. But he clarifies Crumb in a way that Crumb might have wished he'd been able to do himself. Clearly reducing what Crumb was saying to basic sequenced essentials.

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Upsetting the equilibrium, which is basically talking about taking a situation and turning the apple cart over, analyzing the discrepancy. What actually caused this? What's the root problem here? And then pointing to a resolution and disclosing the key to resolution is what Lowry calls what Crumb was talking about with the gospel content.

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Experiencing the gospel and anticipating the consequences. Part of the clarity of Lowry's interpretation was envisioning the plot as a loop. As you may recall, it's like an ichthus on its nose. The plot goes down and then comes swinging back up again.

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And at the bottom is that reversal point, that disclosing the key to the resolution. As with Crumb, the gospel for Lowry is an event. It's an experience, as opposed to a reception of ideas. Now, Lowry has recently revised his plot, and he's suggesting, unlike his original diagram,

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It would seem that he's recommending the reversal happen about three-fourths of the way into the sermon, not midway. Perhaps five-sixths is better. On rare occasion it may happen, he says, on the last line. And I think this is much too late.

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As much of the time as possible is needed in the sermon to make the Gospel concrete and to allow the people to experience God, both in the biblical text and in our world, and to know what God is accomplishing through them and through others. I appreciated the story that I heard from President Wardlaw. He tells the story of Professor Stuart Curry of this seminary, who was known for his quick wit.

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Some of you may have known him. But apparently this was on the way back from a football game and there were lots of crowds. And on the sidewalk up ahead of Professor Curry was a Jesus freak who buttonholed Professor Curry and said to him, God loves you and so do I. And Professor Curry, with his quick wit, said, well, at least half of that is good news.

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And I think that's how the sermon should be too. At least half of it should be good news. It's the good news that's for some reason the hardest for us to proclaim, and it's hardest because we have to venture things in faith, as though it isn't faith that allows us to identify what judgment is. But we are cautious about saying what God is doing in case we get it wrong.

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We don't want to say that that's God involved in the peace negotiations that might be taking place, because what if they fall through? But in fact, I think it's up to us when we look out on the world to identify God wherever we find God doing the things that God does. working for peace, for justice, righteousness. And if next week the peace process does fall through, then we say, well, that points to the reality of sin and evil in the world.

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But God's way is still going to win out. God is going to have the final say. Well, Richard Lisher and sermon direction is indicated there. You can see the parallel between what Crum says about the order of service of the sermon.

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Crum says that sermons will move from fallen humanity to redeemed humanity, from sin to faith, from darkness to light, from what Paul calls living according to the flesh to living according to the Spirit, from condemnation to justification, from alienation to sanctification. And Richard Lisher, who writes A Theology of Preaching, that was written in 1981. It's since been republished in 1992 and again in 2001.

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And in an important chapter on law and gospel in that book, he is a Lutheran, teaching at a Methodist seminary, He says that the movement of the sermon is going to be through one of the following sets of antitheses. Chaos to order, bondage to deliverance, rebellion to vindication, despair to hope, guilt to justification, debt to forgiveness, separation to reconciliation, wrath to love, judgment to righteousness, defeat to victory, death to life. In other words,

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Lisher is already incorporating what Stumfle was talking about as the horizontal dimension of law and gospel as well as including the vertical. The vertical was the judgment to forgiveness and the horizontal is the reflection of the world as it is and God overturning the powers of this world. One of the major contributions of Richard Lisher is that he was fixing this movement from law to gospel as a viable paradigm for preaching.

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He says, it is essential that the reader understand that what we are considering here are not design motifs for the sermon, as though we are advocating a return to the predictable three points and a poem of yesteryear, but rather those theological movements which continue to appear in sermons of every shape and design. In other words, what Richard Lisher was identifying as the movement of a sermon is what I would call a deep, a kind of deep structure for the sermon. A grammar that can operate in sermons whatever the design, whatever model of sermon you might follow. This can be the deep grammar of it.

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And I don't think that there was a need for preachers to devise a grammatical movement, a deep grammar, something that the congregation isn't going to be aware of, I don't think there was a need for preachers to be intentional about moving from law to gospel in the sermon as a whole prior to our own age. But the reason it is important for our own age, I believe, is because the time for the sermon has been reduced. We have pressure on it from different aspects of the liturgy.

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We involve the laypeople far more in the service as is appropriate. We put much more emphasis on music. But the place that all of these things draw their time in the service from is frequently the sermon itself. So now when our sermons are under 20 minutes, we need to be far more intentional about ensuring that the

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appropriate theological expression undergirds what we are talking about. That we don't just turn the sermon into a you must do this and go home. But rather it's, Yes, you must do this, but this is what God is doing and enables you to do, to work through your own ministry. It's fundamentally a hopeful encounter

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In my own work, Crum also anticipated me, my background is the United Church of Canada, and that's originally a 1925 union of all of the Methodists, of 80% of the Presbyterians, and of all the Congregationalists in Canada. And when I first wrote at length about law and gospel in 1988 in the book that Scott was holding up, Imagination of the Heart, I was thinking of it there as one of the sparks that needs to be in a sermon. I think of my grade 13 class where we had one of those telephone generators. If someone would crank the generator and you had two wires, and if you held these wires apart so that there was no relationship

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between them, nothing would happen. Someone would just crank and get tired. But if you brought the wires close together and someone was still doing the cranking, eventually at about this distance, you'd hear and see a mini streak of lightning and a crack of the sound of it jumping from one pole to the other. And as you brought the wires closer together, that electrical current became steady.

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You just saw it right there in front of you. And as you put the wires closer and closer together, it was brighter and more intense. Until you touched the wires, the current disappeared. The current was still flowing, but the excitement was gone.

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This, I think, is how language works. basically, most of our language is functioning like this, no real spark. But we get a metaphor in there, and suddenly there's a distance between the poles, and we see something happening. And essentially, it's the same thing that happens with law and gospel.

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And I have difficulty myself with those terms, law and gospel, simply because they tend to suggest Old Testament, New Testament. No matter how much you say that isn't what it is, it still comes as the association. For me, the terms that I've settled on as being the best ones that I feel most comfortable with are trouble and grace. And trouble puts the burden on us.

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This is the simplest definition that I have for the difference between them in terms of our own working on our sermons. How do I know how to distinguish them? Walther said that was the greatest test of a sermon, whether a preacher could separate law from gospel?

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Well, the greatest separation, I think, is made keeping this in mind. Trouble puts the burden on us, those of us who are sitting in the pews under the Word. And gospel puts the burden on God. And God's already accepted that burden in Jesus Christ.

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So that's the essential difference. Well, I saw I saw the sermon having a particular energy. If it moved from the beginning of the sermon in trouble to the end of the sermon in grace, by the middle of the sermon there's a real expectation.

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You're identifying where we hurt. You're naming our pain, our sin, the things that have to change. We're hungry for the word, for the good news. It's not that condemnation hasn't also been good news for us, but it strikes us as a word of judgment.

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And now you bring in the good news and start building the good news so that we understand how God is acting in relationship to that very...