Poetry, Preaching, and People

Next Sunday I am due to preach on Ephesians chapter 2, the first ten verses. For various reasons I want to focus on the last of these verses 'we are God's workmanship.' The word is 'poiema' we are God's poem, God's artistry, God's masterpiece.

This is a powerful image for me, especially in the light of Walter Bruggemann's work in 'Finally Comes the Poet' where he persuasively argues that both the poet and the preacher have a vocation to see and speak of the world differently, indeed to recreate the world into something different. It is poets and preachers alike who Bruggemann says must 'dare a new phrase, offer a new picture,' and as the liturgy of the Iona Community states, it is the task of uncovering 'things previously hidden' and discovering 'new ways to touch the hearts of all.'

And I don’t think such a poetic edge is to be restricted to our preaching. This is surely at the core of our worship ... where we discover the paths of the alternative to the empires of the world, namely kingdom of God. It is at the heart of our discipleship too where we learn together to live according to the ethical demands and spiritual support found in the community of God's Kin-dom.

This is the new reality that comes to us in Jesus, the kingdom of God he proclaimed to be among us and as Bruggemann says all this requires 'a poet to point the way not a moralist.' Because church people are just like other people, we are not changed by new rules, we are not inspired by regulations, 'The deep places in our lives – the places of resistance and embrace – are not ultimately reached by any instruction. They are uncovered and released by stories, by images and metaphors, and phrases that reveal the world differently.'

I was mulling all this over in the back of my mind this morning as I was listening to an interview on Radio 4 relating to the Oxford Professor of Poetry debacle. (Later on i found that Tim at dancingscarecrow.blogspot.com had been listening too.) Anyway my mind was only half on such things but a gut reaction of objection was provoked by the comment that somehow poetry was supposed to be above all the skull duggery alleged to have occurred between Ruth Padel and Derek Wallcott.

'No, no no!' I shouted at the radio whereupon my daughter (almost aged 2) mistook my upset to be a strongly phrased parental command! I tried telling her that Poetry is not supposed to be above anything, it is instead to be a distillation of life's realities, even those of Oxford Academics, its task is to give us all a heightened awareness of the reality of our present world, not extract us from it, but to take us deeper in. I tried to tell her that something similar could be said about church, about our preaching, our worship and our discipleship ... it's bad enough that they take God out of our world without doing it to poetry as well, but she'd already moved on, looking for a piece of toast that she had mislaid earlier. Maybe we'll pick up the conversation when she's older.

Until then I am reminded of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rymanov who once said that 'human beings are God's language.' and of the prayer which switches the metaphor but remains true to the spirit of poetry:

Christ, the Master Carpenter

who, at the last,

through wood and nail,

accomplished our whole salvation

wield well your tools

in the workshop of your world

so that we who come rough hewn to your bench

may here be fashioned

into a truer beauty of your hand

We ask it for your own name's sake

Amen