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From Resistance
to Jubilee:
Prophetic Preaching and the Testimony of Love
JOHN S. McCLURE
In recent years homileticians have focused a good deal of attention on ethical models for preaching that accentuate the task of prophetic resistance. In most cases these models involve esthetic or rhetorical strategies through which preaching becomes, and attempts to promote, a re-scripting of reality in order to resist the dominant materialistic and oppressive discourses of modernity in the West. While all of these ways of preaching can help preachers create sermons that do battle with significant evils in society, it will become evident in what follows that homiletical strategies of resistance leave largely untouched a deeper substratum of forces that conspire to corrupt the benign, defensive way that we use language, or what the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget calls the human "semiotic function,"1 for idolatrous purposes. Paradoxically, these forces are supported and maintained precisely by the (appropriately) defensive language of prophetic resistance. What is required, therefore, in order to overcome these forces, is sustained attention to transforming the way that we use language, including the language of resistance. This can be accomplished by re-framing the interhuman context for resistance in worship and preaching, moving from one dominated by the defensive self-securing of identity to the celebration of the self's and community's ability, in response to the Word, to move beyond the securing of identity, and to respond to others in love. Testimony helps to accomplish this because of its unique role in creating a context for the repair of speech by heightening awareness of the reality of sheer interhuman proximity (being-with, affinity) in church and society. Testimony, in the first instance, is a "language of jubilee." At the heart of this language of jubilee is a second language through which the human semiotic function is actually released from its defensive posture and reoriented toward others through the giving and receiving of signs of peace and love. This is testimony as the "language of love."
Preaching as a Language of Resistance
Christine Smith, in her book Preaching as Weeping, Confession, and Resistance: Radical Responses to Radical Evil, asserts that in our day and age preachers must learn to speak the language of resistance, of prophetic assertion. This is the language of refusal and reclamation, in which the potentially violent references and rhythms within our common language are taken to task, exposed for what they are, and re-scripted. Currently a variety of homiletical models encourage preachers to engage in prophetic resistance through re-scripting or "re-languaging." In some of these models (Black, Smith) the focus is placed on scripting an inclusiveness that will resist discourses of patriarchy, ageism, ableism, heterosexism, etc.2 In other models (Bond, McClure, Ramsay) preachers are encouraged to script new, non-oppressive theologies that will defend against theological ideas that may condone abusive power and increase the likelihood of suffering.3 In still other approaches (Hauerwas, Willimon, Brueggemann, Campbell) biblical-rhetorical metaphors such as "resident alien," "exile," and "principalities and powers" are used to evoke alternative forms of imagination that will resist prevailing worldviews.4
Another, more subtle strategy is required, however, if preachers are to resist, not only the content of discourse, but also its embeddedness within unredeemed interhuman (intersubjective, interpersonal, and social) structures.5 A large body of research that extends through the psychoanalysis of Anna Freud and Jacques Lacan, the cultural anthropology of René Girard and Eric Gans, the practical theology of James E. Loder, and the biblical theology of Regina Schwarz, indicates a profound susceptibility within the human unconscious to give over the way that we use language relationally to the business of securing the ego and its identity in the world.6 It appears that one way humans orient themselves toward and within language and speech is in a defensive and self-securing posture. Words are used to cut boundaries between people, and to attach us to things that we believe will secure us in the world. Language becomes something to ward off perceived dangers, and to link us to persons, ideas, or groups that we think will provide us with the security that we need. Although this natural defensive orientation of the way that we "language" ourselves and the world in which we live is not in itself evil or immoral, and in spite of the fact that it serves a necessary function as one tool for self-preservation, we can easily to see how this way of using language can be derailed toward any number of would-be idolatries that promise to secure us in the world: consumer goods, military or social power, racism, etc.
According to the political philosopher Louis Althusser and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, part of the trickery and deception of language within the larger social setting is the way that semiotic socialization creates a mirroring process through which the dominant ideologies within a culture "hail" or whisper to us as individuals and groups, telling us who we are or should be, and encouraging us through thousands of different attractions to identify ourselves within a certain range of self-images or identities.7 Althusser calls this process "interpellation."8 This is a kind of "fitting" process, similar to trying on clothes. As one comes closer and closer to fitting within the dominant ways of using language for becoming a "subject" within society, one feels more comfortable and secure.
Antonio Gramsci developed this further with his idea of "hegemony."9 Hegemony is simply the established set of notions that constitute common sense within a society. It includes those values, beliefs, practices, and forms of knowledge that "go without saying." This language that goes without saying constitutes a massive hidden script for all of our lives. Most important for our purposes, however, is the way that this script works in relation to the human semiotic function—what it does to the way that we think we have to "use" language. Semiotic hegemonies establish themselves, in large part, by preying upon and exploiting the natural defensive quality of the way that humans use language, promising comfort and security in exchange for allegiance or interpellation. This has the cumulative effect of establishing the defensive, identity-securing aspect of the semiotic function as primary to the way that we use language, at the expense of ways that language can be used to move beyond the securing of identity on behalf of others. At a communal or social level, this amounts to a persistent saming of language-use at the expense of its othering.
What this means is that preachers are not up against potentially dangerous everyday language scripts alone. They are also up against the myriad ways whereby a set of dominant ideologies seduces the benign defensiveness of the human semiotic function, potentially turning it into a malignant interhuman structure of self-securing idolatry. It is crucial to realize that this structure exists as the larger complex within which all of our "scripts" find themselves embedded. Regardless of the languages or scripts that we adopt and use, this deeper structure is busy undermining the way that we use language, including these scripts, toward forms of interhuman defensiveness, separation, and distance that promise to better secure us in this world. As this structure attaches itself to univocal ecclesial, racial, national, gender identities it co-opts the redemptive scripts we preach in increasingly sophisticated ways, shaping our experience toward exclusion, oppression, and violence.
Although re-scripting our language will offer some help, providing an initial line of defense against the dangerous scripts of materialism, patriarchy, racism, etc., which confront us, it does not go to the core of the issue. This is because even if we are able to re-imagine, re-script, and re-language the world in which our congregations live we cannot assume that this will adequately address the deeper unconscious binding of the semiotic function itself by this malignant defensive structure of semiotic interpellation.
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