The following interview with the Rev. Fleming Rutledge, preacher and author of THE UNDOING OF DEATH (Eerdmans), a collection of sermons for Holy Week and Easter, was conducted by RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY Editor, Missy Daniel.Q: In your preaching, you make use of the texts of Christian hymns to great effect. How do hymns contribute to preaching during Holy Week and Easter and to understanding the meaning of these days?
A: I am struck by the fact that most people apparently do not pay any attention to the words of hymns. I'm always startled to realize that more often than not they haven't noticed the words; it's the tunes they like or that they are attracted to. In my Holy Week preaching, especially on Good Friday, I try to encourage people to pay attention to the words and to sing the hymns as though they were prayers.
There's one hymn in particular that has profound theological depth. The name of it is "Ah, Holy Jesus," and it shows how the believer identifies with the crowd that crucified Jesus: "'Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee, I crucified thee." It's an extraordinarily important worshipful act, especially at this time in our history, when there is so much discussion about the culpability of the Jews. Many people don't understand that Christians (if Christians are really alert to what our tradition is) are taking this burden upon themselves, not pushing it off on the Jews.
Q: The hymns are real interpretations of the story of Holy Week.
A: Well, the best ones are, yes. Some of them are a little mawkish, but some of them are really good, and "Ah, Holy Jesus" is the best one.
Q: To what extent should the events of Holy Week and Easter 2,000 years ago and the New Testament stories about them seem strange to us, stay strange to our ears? You've written about how lost the language of sin and evil is to us, but you also preach about placing ourselves back within the story to understand it. Must the past and these events remain strange and distant to us?
A: That's a very central question. As you were asking it, I was wondering to myself, do I really want to get myself back into that story, or do I want to bring the story forward to our time? I think it would be the latter. The tendency of people to be nostalgic or sentimental about faith and other issues as well is quite prevalent, and I like to try to emphasize the extraordinarily future-oriented nature of the Christian faith.
After September 11, I wrote a sermon about the fact that the cross discovered [at ground zero] really was the only symbol that could be raised there that was commensurate with the atrocity that was committed. That's why I think we can still recover the language; we just have to reinterpret it. People are just as familiar today with atrocity and horror and tragedy and wickedness as they ever were. It's just that it needs to be expressed somewhat differently because people are not accustomed to speaking about sin. But people know sin. They may not call it sin, but they know it. It's the preacher's task to show how this is a living reality.
Q: Is there anything different this year about the message and experience of Holy Week and Easter against the backdrop of world events?
A: Oh, sure. I've been preaching now for 27 years, and every year I'm struck by the fact that there is some new thing to speak of. Of course, last year and this year it was more dramatic and more geopolitical. But every year it's something.
I have been preaching steadily now for several weeks about a Christian response to the war. One of my principal themes has dealt with the problem of evil. There's been a great deal of criticism -- rightly so, I think -- of the president for dividing the world so neatly into good and evil. When the Christian faith is properly understood, we don't divide the world into good and evil. We understand, as people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, that the line between good and evil runs through each person (he specifically wrote that in THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO) and that there is a deep current of capacity for wickedness in all of us, given certain circumstances.
Many soldiers and veterans have spoken to me in recent weeks about discovering rage within themselves in combat that they didn't know was there, and it scared them. Sometimes parents discover rage within themselves when their children won't behave, and it scares them. We all have a propensity for destructive anger which we try to deny and repress, but it's there. And when people do not recognize that tendency within themselves and project it off onto other people, that's when we get into very serious trouble, and that's what's worrying critics of Bush's Christian language.
Critics of Bush's religious rhetoric are very concerned about his tendency to cast America in the role of the good, the innocent, and the virtuous and to describe other regimes as completely, irredeemably evil. A Christian doesn't do that. Our greatest presidents, Washington and Lincoln, were shaped by the preaching of the church, and they called the nation to repentance. No president today would do that, and that's a big loss, because Americans need to be conscious right now of the suffering of Iraqi civilians. Instead of that we're completely focused on the incredible capacity and power of our military, and that's not Christian -- to focus on that to the exclusion of the people suffering under the bombardment.
In some ways we can rejoice that the dictatorship has been destroyed. I'm not necessarily anti-the war in a strict sense, but I'm very much concerned about the way that we are so self-righteous about it and so neglectful of other cultures. The crucifixion speaks directly to that because Jesus in the crucifixion is taking upon himself all those traits and qualities of evil and wickedness that we ascribe to "the other." He has become "the other" on his cross, and that's why it's the most relevant thing in the world.
Q: Many people are drawn to the Easter story wanting to believe, trying to believe. In one of your sermons, you say that the Presbyterian pastor, David H.C. Read, once told his congregation: "One of the reasons I believe in the resurrection is that my mother told me. And to this day a strong element in my belief is the number and quality of the people who told me." It's such a simple reply. What did he mean?
A: People are always quoting that back to me. It seems to be a very memorable line. I wish I could think of a line of my own that people were quoting as much as that line of David Read's. I'm a little worried about it, actually, because I meant it to be just one of many, many things that I was saying. I didn't realize people were going to focus on that to the exclusion of virtually everything else.
