Why Vulgar Homiletics?


Abstract:
I was asked to explain why I chose the title of this weblog.

Body:
Vulgar did not always mean "crude." It meant "common" or "everyday." When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin it was called the Vulgate - The Bible in the language of the common people. Think of it as The Message for the 400 A.D. crowd. It was intended to be as accessible as the Greek was to the early Church. Most of the New Testament isn't in formal Greek. It's in "street Greek." Vulgar Greek.

The word vulgar acquired its negative meaning through the prejudice of upper and refined classes of people. Same thing with common. Something vulgar was something associated with a class beneath yourself. Crude jokes were vulgar because they were told in pubs or other hangouts among common people, not in formal dining rooms among nobles in powdered wigs. I suppose Jesus' parable about the gardener and the tree that wouldn't produce fruit is a kind of vulgar joke, spoken the way a true farmer would say it: "just let me put some copra (shit) on it for a year, then you can cut it down." Jesus himself was an example of vulgarity - the divine Word who humbled himself as a slave. Creative tension crackles where the sacred meets the common.

Homiletics is the art, theory, and study of preaching. Homily means a sermon. But in its Greek and Latin roots, it meant something more like a friendly conversation. Homilos means a crowd. So, to me, vulgar homiletics is the art, theory, and study of religious discourse in everyday, common language. It is by its very nature scandalous, the way the incarnation is scandalous. It may cross over into the off-color, but it's not like there's no Biblical precedent for being crude.

I am fascinated by those vulgar texts that never get preached - Ehud, the left-handed assassin who made his escape through the loo, the Song of Solomon, Paul's invective that the Galatian agitators would castrate themselves. The Bible is too vulgar for us. Good Christians are embarrassed by their earthy God. We are far more comfortable with spiritual things.

I also want to resist classist notions of what is proper and decent. You can see this trend throughout history. The Vulgate became not a book for the common people, but a book for elites, and those in power resisted making it more "vulgar" so those who did not speak Latin would understand. People resisted changing from the King James version of the Bible for the same reason. In today's "worship wars," people resist contemporary music, video, and new sermon styles for the very same reasons. We fear making God too accessible, too common. In some ways, it's a legitimate fear. We need some sense that when we eat the bread and drink the wine, we're doing something special, and that it is different than what we do when we go grab a burger and share fries and a Coke. In the same way, reading the Bible is not like reading John Grisham - the Bible is a special book, a holy book, THE Holy Book. But it is so very easy to confuse a desire for holiness with a desire for being noble, privileged, and right. So easy, in fact, that I'm not sure most American Christians could tell the difference.

So. That's why.

Posted: Sat - May 7, 2005 at 01:42 PM           |

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