This is the third essay is a special series by the Rev. Dr. Nathan Jennings, Professor of Liturgics at Seminary of the Southwest. There will be five installments in this series presented in intervals through the winter of 2026. A “round up” with links to all five essays will be available in the spring.
Part III. Preaching the Good News: A Liturgical Theology of Grace for Preaching
In the last essay in this series developing a liturgical theology of preaching, I explained how mystagogy reveals the Christian liturgy as an enactment of the Eschaton. How is the sermon eschatological? The Word of God enacts his judgment on the last Day. As part of the Service of the Word, the Sermon gathers the people of God, and he dwells among us again. We must preach good news, we must preach the good news, if the Sermon is to connect a suffering people to the God of Scripture. In the ritual enactment, the Sermon is the bridge between the Word proclaimed and the repentance and fellowship to follow. Together, this entire service of the Word prepares us to commune with the God who dwells in our midst.
The gospel proclamation enacts Jesus’ inauguration of the kingdom of Heaven. The Sermon always proclaims the gospel, as it is the proclamation of good news that provides the occasion for the giving of thanks that makes this an act of Eucharist. As Jesus is the incarnate Word, his gospel is the enactment of Scripture. The liturgy of the Word of God, and the Sermon in particular, enacts this ritual mystery. What, then, is the good news?
What Is the Good News?
There are, of course, many ways to answer this, theologically speaking. I will offer a twofold liturgical theological answer that flows out of a single Pauline definition. From N.T. Wright, I learned to understand the simple phrase “Jesus is Lord” as the basic statement of the gospel. Something seemingly so simple and pious is quite radical in its original context. Wright has written:
The gospel is the royal announcement that the crucified and risen Jesus, who died for our sins and rose again according to the Scriptures, has been enthroned as the true Lord of the world. When this gospel is preached, God calls people to salvation, out of sheer grace, leading them to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as the risen Lord.[1]
When throughout the New Testament, and when St. Paul, especially, makes the claim that “Jesus is Lord,” a fascinating and mystical double entendre unfolds both for its original audiences and for us today. “Jesus is Lord” means both “Jesus is YHWH,” the unpronounceable proper Name of the God of Israel, and “Jesus is Kyrios,” the title given to Ceasar, the emperor of the known world. Kyrios was already used by the faithful, when reading the Scriptures in Greek, to replace the unpronounceable divine name. Calling Jesus Kyrios was also saying that the God of Israel, YHWH, is incarnate as Jesus Christ. And calling Jesus Kyrios is to claim that Jesus is the real emperor, not Caesar—or any of the emperors or tyrants of this age that is passing away. This double entendre would become for us the font of all that would become Christology in the unfolding of the meaning of revelation within the church over the centuries. It has also always been a stumbling block to the “Jews,” or Judeans, and foolishness to the Gentiles, the nations (1 Cor 1:23).
Macrocosm
Mystagogy reveals the eschatological nature of the Christian liturgy. The world is trapped in the deleterious patterns of the fallen powers and principalities of this age that is passing away. To them we proclaim: “Jesus is Lord.” This is the “macrocosmic” ramifications of God’s good news in Christ. In the liturgy, we enact Christ’s defeat over the powers and principalities of this present darkness (Eph. 6:12), openly showing how the cross of Christ has publicly shamed those who would oppress (Col. 2:15). The sermon, as an inherent part of the Word of God, is an essential part of that enactment—it is that proclamation in ritual action.
Microcosm
Liturgical theology shows us that the congregation enacts the Christian hope, and, in its intersection with ascetical theology, we come to understand that this shapes the body, the soul, the faith of each person swept up into Christ’s body corporate. So that we can hear another sense of what St. Paul means when he says, “Jesus is Lord,” when in another place he says, “[b]y grace that you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is a gift of God—not a result of works, that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8-9). All those sheep of One Shepherd, placed in our cure, are microcosms of this dark age, and trapped under the burden of each person’s vices and addictions. Thus, we find the microcosmic personal ramification of the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the lives of each person in our cure.
That Jesus is the Lord God of Israel and the Lord above all Lords has both macrocosmic and microcosmic ramifications. God speaks to powers and principalities, and speaks to the inner demons in each one of us. And these are, as in a mystery, one. To both the powers and principalities of this present darkness, and to our vices and addictions we say: “Jesus is Lord.” And their power over us is broken, as they must bow down to the only name given under heaven by which we may be saved (Acts 4:12).
In both the macrocosmic and microcosmic ramifications of the good news of Jesus Christ we find that where the Sermon falls in the Holy Eucharist is not coincidence. It is the ritual bridge that connects the Word to the prayer, repentance, forgiveness, sacrifice, and fellowship that make us Christian, and in so doing it connects the God of scripture to those who suffer.
Practical Preaching Ramifications
Where does this understanding of the gospel, the good news that “Jesus is Lord,” come into preaching in most of our parishes and congregations for the sake of each person to whom we minister? What does it mean for the concrete group of Christians and the actual person in our pastoral cures sitting in front of us? It means that God is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves. It means that God does for our nations, cities, and congregations what they cannot do for themselves. It means for each one of those of his sheep in our pastoral cures that God is doing for all of us what we cannot do for ourselves.
With regard to the cosmic, macro-level proclamation of the Eschaton, as preachers, we connect our congregation, through Scripture, to Christ’s defeat of this present darkness (Eph. 6:12). We connect our congregation with Christ’s peaceable kingdom and the ending of the dynamics of class warfare, systems of oppression, oppressive idea structures such as racism, transhumanist ideologies, and the like. The Sermon as inherent part of this ritual action throws down these powers that corrupt. Our preaching both enacts and encourages advocacy, comfort, and encouragement to the oppressed. We take great care to see the Episcopal Church’s comfortable classism, its rather open identification with what some call the “Professional Managerial Class,”[2] and its complicity in class warfare and the justification of idea structures that keep in place “invisible” systems of oppression. The sermon as ritual enactment is a place where we can preach boldly, and in ways that maintain pastoral relationship and avoid soapbox activism.
For our congregants as persons in Christ, we preach release from those aspects of ourselves that enslave us and keep us from freedom in Christ. In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, alcoholics, addicts, and their friends and relatives read good news: “we will find a new freedom and happiness”; “we will be amazed before we are halfway through”; “fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us”; “we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us”; “we will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”[3]
The good news of recovery philosophy is a restatement of the good news of the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in a particularly concrete contemporary crisis: addiction. Addiction is a hypertrophic vice. And we all have vices, whether we can be diagnosed as addicted to anything, technically speaking, or not. We preach against any notion that there is some way we can improve ourselves. We preach against “self-help.” We preach the only truth: God help. We preach that we are to “walk in all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in” (BCP p. 339). We preach that we cannot, but Christ can, through us, and that, by him, and with him, our lives, our souls and bodies, can become a holy, reasonable, and living sacrifice acceptable to the Father (BCP p. 336). As the sermon connects the lessons to prayer, forgiveness, sacrifice and communion, we boldly preach that when we put our trust in God through prayer, he will do for us what we could not do for ourselves, and surprise us with a grace that is more than we could ask for or imagine.
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[1] N.T. Wright and John Piper, “The Justification Debate: A Primer,” edited by Trevin Wax. Christianity Today, June 2009.
[2] Michael Lind. The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (New York: Portfolio, 2020).
[3] Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, pp. 83-84).
The Rev. Nathan Jennings, PhD is the J. Milton Richardson Professor of Liturgics and Anglican Studies and Director of Community Worship at Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, TX.
