If this sounds like the stereotypical, vanilla Christian life—it isn’t. Baptism doesn’t insulate me—or anybody else, for that matter—from the doubts, conflicts, disappointments, and crushing losses that in a host of guises come to us all. Baptism in the name of the triune God doesn’t ward off the tragedies. It simply promises that when they come, we don’t face them alone, without a friend or a secure identity in relationship to God. Even if you’re like me and don’t have an instinctive aptitude for spiritual things, if you don’t light candles or have a pious vocabulary, you can still belong to God. Something of this assurance lay in the background of a memoir I published in 2013 about the death of a young man named Adam. It’s called Stations of the Heart: Parting with a Son.

As I grew up, there were many people who made faith in Christ possible for me. They were parents, Sunday School and college teachers, and friends. But the most important were my parents and my boyhood pastor. My mother read illustrated Bible stories to me every night, and both my parents prayed with me every day. They never preached to me, but it was clear that they held our pastor and the office of ministry in high esteem. They took me to church regularly; sometimes I even listened to the sermon. In confirmation class we were required to memorize Luther’s Small Catechism. His explanations of the creed and the commandments are prefaced by the phrase “What does this mean?” It was the question that got me. If this is true, I reasoned as a 12-year old, then what does everything mean? I wrote about this experience in my first memoir, Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery.

It was Luther’s question that led me to study for the ministry, first, at a Lutheran college in Milwaukee, then at another Lutheran college in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and finally at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. While at Concordia I picked up an M.A. in English at Washington University, with special emphasis on the poetry of George Herbert. I attribute my love of language and writing to my mother who loved poetry, especially the verse of Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was salutatorian of her graduating class at the largest high school in St. Louis, but it was the Depression and she never went to college. No one in my family did.

I was in college and seminary for most of the 1960s. In the middle of the decade I was married to a woman I’d known in high school since she was 14 and I was 15. Her name is Tracy Kenyon. We were both English majors in college, and she went on to earn a Ph.D. at St. Louis University. When we were young, we couldn’t have guessed that she would become a lawyer and I a professor. But after more than fifty years, here we are.

While at my conservative Lutheran seminary I became interested in the liberal-leaning Christian–Marxist dialogue that was taking place mostly in Europe. Tracy and I moved to London where I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of London on the anthropology of Karl Marx and the Jesuit paleontologist and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Our first child, a daughter named Sarah, was born in London. My dissertation was eventually published by Orbis Books under the title Marx and Teilhard: Two Ways to the New Humanity.

We returned to our first parish and a second child, Adam, was born in St. Louis. My parish was on a remote prairie in southern Illinois, about fifty miles east of St. Louis. I’ve included a photo of its graveyard at another place on this site. I include it because it was our view from the kitchen. It was also our children’s playground! And it was beautiful, and still is. We had moved from a city of ten million to a community of 300. Both sites were instructive for me but in very different ways. If it’s possible for a congregation to be both vibrant and set in its ways, that was my parish. I learned a lot there. Twenty-eight years after leaving, I wrote about it in Open Secrets.

From Illinois we moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia where I served as pastor of a small but growing Lutheran congregation. There I built on the foundation of pastoral ministry that my first parish had so generously provided. This was a rich time for our family.  In Virginia Beach we learned to love the ocean and, more importantly, formed memories and friendships that have endured for life.  

Although I was trained in systematic theology, I knew from eight years of parish experience that my interests and expertise were shifting toward practical concerns. Surprise: Hegel, Marx, and European philosophy are not hot topics in the parish. I found myself enjoying the rhythms of pastoral care, exegesis, and preaching every Sunday. When an opening in homiletics at Duke Divinity School was advertised in small print on one of the back pages of the Christian Century, I sent in a long-shot, what-have-I-got-to-lose application. Long-shot because my expertise in preaching had no academic base wider than the required courses in seminary and eight years of parish experience. I interviewed and preached in the divinity chapel a few days after the Jonestown tragedy in 1978. It was a heavy week. I got the job.

At Duke I conceived preaching as a theological discipline. Before the sermon is an entertaining (or boring) lecture on morality, it’s a brief, interactive set of comments about God: who God is, what God has done in Jesus, how the Holy Spirit is active in our lives, what God expects of those who claim the divine name.  A sermon must be a communal word. Like baptism, it’s not all about me. It’s about who we are as a people. During my first year at Duke I wrote A Theology of Preaching: The Dynamics of the Gospel. I think I wanted that first book to announce what was most important to me as a Christian. I wanted to get it all out in case I didn’t have another chance! And I wanted students to hear it.

Forty years later, I have recently published a collection of my sermons titled Just Tell the Truth: A Call to Faith, Hope, and Courage. I considered fancier or more poetic titles, but, given the political divisions among American Christians, fueled as they are by false claims, barefaced public lying, and “deniers” of every stripe, I chose the truth of Jesus’s mission and ministry as my starting point. This doesn’t mean you have to disprove or run down those with whom you disagree. But when it comes to proclaiming the gospel, well, just tell the truth about Jesus and let the chips fall. Jesus was not a Republican or a Democrat, but he did have a platform—and it’s been published! Just make a witness to the truth, which is precisely what the New Testament does in its account of Jesus’s compassionate ministry to the poor and the outcast and, most of all, in the redemptive power of his death and resurrection.

My office at Duke was located on the corner of Science and Research Drives. In a secular university set in the Bible Belt, I pursued this truth for thirty-seven years at Duke (and, more recently as a visiting professor at Princeton Theological Seminary). I won’t bother to list my academic credentials or activities; that information is available elsewhere. But two or three areas of engagement have stood out in my career. First and foremost are the students. I taught and learned from about 3,000 of them in many settings, including large introductory classes, intimate seminars, and in prisons. When it comes to mutual growth, there really isn’t a substitute for face-to-face encounter. “Distance learning” is exactly as advertised. What a privilege it is to preside at a student’s first-ever sermon or to participate in the give-and-take of a seminar exchange.

My engagement with students of preaching has led to several books, including A Theology of Preaching; The Company of Preachers; the Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching (with William Willimon); Reading the Parables; The Eloquence of Grace (with James M. Childs); and The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence, the last being the expanded version of my Beecher Lectures given at Yale Divinity School and the Macleod Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary.

A second area of emphasis has been my research and teaching about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. I quickly learned, again from students, that although King has been dead a long time, no engagement with race and discipleship is possible apart from a consideration of his mission to America. His message continues to address the urgent questions and conflicts in our society and our seminary community. The past is never past. The dilemmas of race are never settled. This was nowhere more evident than in a Divinity course on King I taught in the Men’s Correctional Facility in Durham, where my class actively debated the approaches of Dr. King and Malcolm X.

My third growth-area in teaching has occurred in seminars on spiritual autobiography and memoir. These initially arose from my own experience in writing memoirs. They’re now enriched by a decade of reading and research in the genre. One of the last courses in memoir I taught at Duke was offered at the Women’s Prison in Raleigh in a class made up of residents of the prison and Divinity women. It was called “The Life of Faith.” I have just completed a book on religious autobiography to be published in late 2022 by Oxford University Press, Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir. The title of one of its chapters, on Abelard and Heloise, draws on the last line of Philip Larkin’s magnificent poem, “An Arundel Tomb” in which the poet is moved by the recumbent effigies of a medieval husband and wife, hand in hand: “What will survive of us is love.” It’s a line to remember in this season of pandemic and social division.

My little autobiography is not quite finished. I’ve noticed the unfinished quality of the many autobiographies I’ve studied, from Augustine’s to Thomas Merton’s. No matter how many pages, they are never complete. None of us goes down with laptop blazing. There’s always more to say—or to be left unsaid. The Omega-paragraph of our life stories will be written by Christ, who, as it says in the book of Hebrews, is the author and finisher of our faith.