Be willing to 'step back,'
Preaching Days presenter advises

Preachers need to be willing to "step back and give voice to those denied a voice…"

PHILADELPHIA (June 12, 2003) – Possibly the most poignant moment in this year’s Preaching Days program came when presenter Dr. Christine Smith described a foot washing service she witnessed performed by a Catholic priest in an oppressed community in Chiapas, Mexico.

Smith, a United Church of Christ pastor who is professor of preaching at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities in New Brighton, MN, told a hushed ecumenical audience of preachers she had gone to Chiapas for 16 days recently to determine the value of the location for immersion of students of theology, and "to be changed."

Smith described how she came face to face with the "active non-violence" of the oppressed peoples of Chiapas, whom she said "suffer and die daily because of global economic and social policies." Particularly devastating to the people of Chiapas, she said, has been the North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted January 1, 1994. The treaty led to the mobilizing of the Zapatista Movement, a nonviolent indigenous civil rights effort that has been working since for peace, justice and liberation of the people of Chiapas. Many of the activists have died at the hands of repressive policies, she said.

Smith described the feeling of being invited into a worship setting despite being a "complete outsider…I was greeted with unspeakable warmth and acceptance even though my country, and I as one of its privileged citizens, directly participate in the oppression of each person who entered the church that day."

Stephenson lecturer Dr. Christine Smith, right, talks with the Rev. Dr. Janet Corpus, who was chaplain for this year’s program.

Surrounded by signs of malnutrition and poverty, she said she was "shocked" to notice how much the Italian priest, the Rev. Carlo Celli, stayed in the background during the worship service. "Instead of asserting the most power he might have asserted, it appeared to me that with great intention he stepped back so that others could exercise their long-denied voice and religious power," she said.

Smith vividly described watching Celli take a basin of water and a towel and walk toward 12 of the male elders and religious leaders of the church. "Dressed in the simple yet privileged garments of clerical status, he bent down on his knees, washed the feet of 12 indigenous religious leaders, then kissed each man’s foot with great humility and care." The memory of the moment visibly moved Smith, and her description of it touched listeners profoundly.

"It would be too wonderful sounding to say I am crying tears of inspiration, even though this is true," she said. "I wondered how I could have spent my whole life in the Christian church and never witnessed this kind of foot washing." She noted she had been a part of such observances before, but said "I had never seen the dirty, dusty, hard working, callused feet of the most marginalized of the world, washed by a person of authorized, institutional, religious power. That was radical enough, but when he bent over and kissed each man’s foot I was stunned at the mighty act of servanthood and justice. This is more than a taste of God’s commonwealth here on earth."

Smith encouraged those in the room to recall that "worship and preaching must be about sacramental honoring and blessing. With words, images, and embodied acts, preachers need to remind us to bow our heads, to receive the blessings of community, and then to humbly take our seats beside or humbly strand behind, those who have birthed us and sustain our lives with wisdom, endurance and courage."

She called for preachers in the gathering to be willing to "de-center" themselves from places of power. "Preachers need to empower and be silenced by the voices of those who have little voice and even less power," she said. "Preachers need to enable people in every context of life to notice those most marginalized and oppressed. Perhaps most importantly of all, preachers in all contexts of institutional Christianity, and those of us in countless contexts of unearned advantage and privilege, need to be the kind of interpreters of scripture, the kind of sacramental agents, the kind of religious leaders who take up the honorable and needed mantle of liberating servanthood. May our sermons bring us and the people of faith we share life with to our knees, ready and honored to wash the callused feet of those who are suffering and those we oppress, and may our preaching be inseparable from our justice acts of kissing feet."

Smith urged her onlookers "to be thought of as someone in whom life has made a home."

Smith engages seminarian Romeo K. Dabee in conversation following her lecture.

Earlier in the day, she preached on Isaiah 58: 6-14 and quoted in her sermon the poem "Like You" by the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton. "I believe the world is beautiful and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone. And that my veins don’t end in me but in the unanimous blood of those who struggle for life, love, little things, landscape and bread, the poetry of everyone."

Smith said that were Isaiah with the Preaching Days audience, "he would speak a prophetic word to us, for Isaiah is the kind of justice-seeker, visionary and agent of truth telling and transformation that many of us long to be. He longs for his beloved community of faith to love life and love justice, and he confronts them about what is required of them to do so. Loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke. Let the oppressed go free. …He is reminding them and us that we must move our feet, our bodies, our resources toward those who are most oppressed. He is calling people back to ministries that are theirs. They are ministries that have been the calling of God’s people throughout history, ministries that are hard."

Smith, the author of many books and articles on preaching, was the third presenter in this year’s June 9-11 edition of Preaching Days sponsored by the Academy of Preachers. This year’s theme was "Looking for God in Unexpected Places." Smith was the Stephenson lecturer. Earlier presenters were the Rev. Robert M. Holum (June 10), Lundin Lecturer and pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church, Washington, D.C.; and the Rev. Dr. Catherine Gunsalus Gonzalez (June 9), a Presbyterian pastor who is the Professor Emerita of Church History at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA. Gonzalez was the Somerville Lecturer.

For more than 15 years, Preaching Days has involved an ecumenical group of preachers in further honing their sermon abilities. Each presenter offers a sermon during worship, delivers a lecture and then conducts an afternoon workshop on the preaching craft. About 50 preachers attended this year’s program.