The Word: Pop Preaching

The gospel is moving out of the pulpit and into the public consciousness in many unorthodox ways—through jazz and rock Masses, plays, and even electric-light shows. Three current examples of imaginative means being used to interpret the Word in the vernacular:

TELEVISION. A series called One Reach One, created by the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation, is being shown on stations in 35 U.S. cities. It goes considerably further than other worthy religious programs in examining modern moral problems with the help of frank, uninhibited dialogue and a realism that is almost painful.

One of the series’ twelve half-hour episodes, Love in a Sexy Society, focuses on a discussion of premarital sex by four coeds at Northwestern University. “Everybody’s sleeping around,” says one. “If it goes on in the adult world, what’s wrong with us doing it?” The case for chastity is made by another girl, who says of her relationship with her boy friend: “I’ve got him on a pedestal, and he’s got me on a pedestal. It’s kind of hard to jump into bed when you’re on separate pedestals.”

Another episode, played by professional actors, dramatizes matrimonial alienation. A scene shows a wife in the kitchen, husband in the living room, thinking their separate thoughts. She: “This must be the three millionth time I’ve washed this dish. John, tell me to break it. Ask me to sit next to you for a while.” He: “Jane, forget that silly dish. Come and sit with me and tell me that all my fears are untrue.” But neither utters a word. “Contact can hurt,” concludes Narrator Ralph Bellamy, “but not as much as non-contact.” ∙BOOKS. A paperback with an unlikely title, The Cotton Patch Version of Paul’s Epistles, has just been published by Association Press, a Y.M.C.A. affiliate. Written by Clarence L. Jordan, a Southern Baptist minister who helped found Koinonia Farm, an integrated colony of whites and Negroes in Georgia, the book transposes the writings of St. Paul into a modern-day setting, the U.S. South. Galatians thus becomes The Letter to the Churches of the Georgia Convention, while 1 Thessalonians is translated as The First Letter to the Selma Christians.

Jordan’s freewheeling paraphrase tries to catch the colloquial, contemporary quality of the Pauline letters. As translated in the King James version, Romans 2:9 vows “tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile.” In Jordan’s phrasing, the threat comes out: “Hellfire and brimstone upon every son of a gun who works for the wrong, whether he’s a ‘superior’ white or a Negro.” Romans 1:25 excoriates those “who changed the truth of God into a lie”; this becomes, in Jordanese, “These wise guys swapped God’s truth for an outright lie.” 1 Thessalonians 4:3 states: “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication.” Jordan puts it: “God’s will—that which makes you different—is that you hold back from catting around.”

The Dixie dialect is artificial at times, and Jordan’s version is not so consistently readable a modernization as J. B. Phillips’ classic Letters to Young Churches. But Jordan’s goal is sound: “The Scripture should be taken out of the stained-glass sanctuary and put out under God’s skies.”

∙RECORDS. An even farther-out commentary is The Incredible Shrinking God, a long-playing collection of “sermons” by Manitoba-born David Steinberg, 27, a rabbi’s son who studied Hebrew literature before becoming a comedian with Chicago’s Second City troupe. Not religious in a formal sense, Steinberg’s comic oratory is a pop version of God-is-dead theology. Steinberg explains that he picked that title for the record because “the traditional God is becoming harder to find in modern society all the time.”

Steinberg knows enough about the characters of the Bible to put them down with learned insight. Joshua, he says, was “the first real pushy prophet”; Lot was “the first Biblical voyeur”; Jezebel “was immortalized by Frankie Laine.” As for the Jonah story, “the Gentiles—as is their wont from time to time—threw the Jew overboard.” If Steinberg debunks God as well, it is not the real God but the “pompous image of him created by the clergy.” Solemnly, Steinberg intones: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. The Lord God is an Indian giver.” When suffering Job calls out for God and gets no answer, he desperately yells: ” ‘Mike’ . . . and God answered . . . How mysterious are the ways of the Lord.”

Many clergymen have applauded Steinberg’s non-homilies, on the ground that his satirizing of the wrathful, capricious God of legend is good theology as well as good fun. Steinberg keeps being invited to preach in churches and synagogues. Is he irreverent? Perhaps. But, argue his fans, who can question that God, too, has a sense of humor?