Thursday Theology: Truth, Power, and the Preacher’s Task

Co-missioners,  

When Matt Metevelis was in high school his parents transferred to the congregation I was serving in a western suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. That’s when I met Matt. I got to watch him graduate from a top-flight Jesuit academy, scoot through a demanding college in Michigan that still emphasized the classics and then proceed to Luther Seminary in St. Paul where he got to imbibe the closest thing there was at the time to Crossings-style theology in an ELCA seminary.  

On graduating Matt was called to a parttime position as associate pastor of an ELCA congregation in downtown Las Vegas. To earn a living, he also signed on as a chaplain for the leading hospice program in Las Vegas. He has been there ever since.  

Matt reads voraciously. He also writes well and started doing so for publication some years ago. His work for Crossings includes Thursday Theology essays as well as text studies. His last essay was a searing account of what he went through when the congregation he was serving was obliged to close. This was followed by the sermon he preached at the congregation’s closing service.  

The Mockingbird website has featured Matt’s writing too, most recently this past September, when he grumbled in a delightful though trenchant sort of way about insubstantial preaching.  

Today Matt is back on home turf, as I’ll dare to call it. That’s what Crossings has become for him of late. He has an especially sharp eye for the distinction between Law and Gospel. You’ll spot this at work in the essay below, which ought to be required reading for anyone who aims to function as a servant of the Gospel in the late American autumn of 2025. 

And with that, a piece of news. Matt signed on a few weeks ago as the next newsletter editor for Crossings. He’ll succeed Bruce Modahl who has served ever so well in that role for the past several years. A recent increase in family responsibilities led Bruce to resign. We’re hard-pressed to think of a more worthy successor than Matt is likely to be. Thank you, Bruce. Thank you, Matt. Thanks be to God for you both and for all who read this today. 

One last thing: The next Crossings Conference is set for January 11-14, 2026. That’s not quite two months and a week from now. I can’t encourage you enough to join us for that. You’ll have a chance to meet Matt and other emerging leaders of Crossings. Sign up now! 

Peace and Joy, 
Jerry Burce, Co-editor 

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Truth, Power, and the Preacher’s Task 

by Matt Metevelis 

Every preacher has this experience. A sermon written or planned, ready to preach. Lectionary text deeply investigated. Words given. Confidence in them fair to strong. Then a terrible thing happens in the news a day or two before Sunday. Sometimes even Saturday night. Then a hard decision to either carry on or hastily insert something. Possibly even return to the drawing board with little or no time. 

A central homiletical dilemma lives here. Do sermons shape the world or are they shaped by the world? Despite what preachers might want to think sermons are much more likely to be reactive than proactive. Our culture of instant news and simultaneously instant reaction forces some events to cry out loudly in the ears of both preachers and hearers. Preachers hound themselves with demands to be “relevant” in their preaching and address what is on everyone’s mind. But in our age of political polarization and tribal righteousness there is now a different itch in the ears of many hearers. 

“If your pastor is not talking about this you need to go find another church.” I heard this first from a young man identifying himself as a theology student marching next to Brian McLaren in a viral video shot during the Charlottesville counterdemonstration against the alt-right. That was in 2017. Then a few months ago I heard the exact same sentence said by those who were upset that their pastors did not mention the tragic murder of a right-wing activist on the Sunday after it happened. It was almost as if they took their pastors’ silence about it for complicity. 

I have to confess that this kind of thing baffles me. I’ve been a news consumer since elementary school (the grainy footage of the first Gulf War on CNN just sucked me in). There has never been a time when I could not find someone on TV, radio, the internet or a podcast who would not happily justify or magnify my opinion. Preaching to me is the opposite of punditry. The sermons I remember are the ones that took my assumptions about God and the world and just tore them apart. They either made impossible demands from me or depicted the improbable acts of a wildly loving God for me. Those sermons keep echoing in my head while the punditry and news analysis I consume while driving or putting away laundry generally leaves my head in a day or two. Punditry is elevator music. Preaching is punk rock. Nobody goes to a true punk show and tells the artists what or how to play. 

False prophets are usually the ones who tell people what they want to hear. It usually ends badly for them according to scripture. The reason for this should be theologically clear. The word of God is for us, but not from us. God does not play favorites with factions, tribes, causes or worldly opinion. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. This means nobody gets to draw a line around themselves or their sect and say “what we do and think and suffer is righteous” in such a way that it must be confirmed in the pulpit. We all have too many planks in our eyes to claim differently. 

This does not give preachers any extra power as if their words are untouchable (the thought!). Speaking a word and claiming it is a word from God is instead a terrible responsibility. My homiletics professor admonished us that conflicts in the congregation or the community do not belong in the pulpit. Nobody can get up after a preacher and respond. It’s God’s word and not ours after all. My worst regrets as a preacher were the times that I ignored this to get something off my chest or to make people who disagreed with me the butt of a joke. I still stand by my description of the opponents of Jesus in a particular text as the ones who wanted “to make Israel great again” but deeply regret the pain it caused to people I care about. Preaching is a gift, and it comes with responsibility to regard the act itself as sacred by treating all the hearers fairly.  

I worry about the kind of preachers who have imbibed a narrative about the preaching task which absolves them from this responsibility. According to this narrative, preachers have a particular “prophetic” task which is less about speaking law and grace and more about shaping the kind of world that God wants them to live in. I am not entirely unsympathetic to this argument. If taken seriously, properly applied, and especially if it is coming from places in the margins of the church and society it has and will have an incredibly profound impact. But if one assumes that the way such prophetic activity takes place is by taking one side of the culture war binary in a facile way and privileging it over the other side then it will only result in deepening that divide. Some regard the flak they get for doing so as confirmation that they have successfully “spoken truth to power.” Instead, they have only fanned flames that were already burning while kidding themselves that they’ve started a new fire.  

The idea that the job of a preacher is to “speak truth to power” can make sense in theory but is usually fraught when college educated preachers from the middle-class get up in front of their working or middle-class congregations. When you stand in a pulpit you’re the one with power. Even if you’re one of those cool relatable ones who stands in the aisle that’s you too. And the people huddled before you are the powerless. Doesn’t matter what’s in their wardrobes, their bank account, or their ballot. They are all powerless. They’ve got sins, guilts, shames, addictions, diseases, inferiority complexes, screaming kids, aching joints, unrealized ambitions, upside down mortgages. Sometimes they’re sitting right next to people they’ve profoundly failed or let down. One of them may be struggling to find work. Someone else may work for the big box store that put the first person’s former employer out of business. Another might see the world in a way you find horrific, but without your knowledge is also bringing groceries to the widow two rows behind him and helping her pay for her medications even though he is not related to her. There is so much more to the people sitting before you than any political preference researcher could ever find out. And in most cases, this would be the most boring part of who they are. But God would know the whole picture and just might be giving your fumbling mouth a word that they desperately need which they might miss if you triggered them two sentences ago. You’re the one with the power not because of your status or insight, but because a powerful God is working through you. The real power is in the one who is actually speaking the truth. 

Too many arguments about “keeping politics out of the pulpit” tend to devolve into splitting hairs and making distinctions about the two kingdoms, or worse, drawing arbitrary lines between “collective” and “personal” salvation. Politics belongs in preaching in one way or another. As sinners under the authority of the law and as citizens with claims for and from our neighbors’ politics will never be absent from our spiritual lives. Melanchthon clearly stated in the sixteenth article of the Augsburg Confession that “lawful civil ordinances are good works of God” and as such they are the business of Christians. This includes both preachers and hearers of sermons.  

Christianity is incomprehensible without its social witness. But the culture war waters it down by drawing lines between winners and losers. When a sermon becomes another talking point the force is blunted and subsumed into the binary. It doesn’t just fail at proclamation. It is a failure of politics as well by confirming the bias of one half of the divide and excluding the other. 

From Canva

By contrast, notice the politics of the church that Jesus modeled when he was dragged before Pilate. Pilate stood in the place and with the authority of the most powerful person in the world. If John had been a good scriptwriter instead of an apostle we would have gotten some fireworks. Jesus could have denounced Rome. He could have sneered at Pilate that for all his pomp and his military might he was just a cog in the big Roman machine and scared for his safety and position like the rest of them. Jesus could have offered a full-throated denunciation of the Roman empire’s corruption of his people, their abuse of the poor, their twisted worship of cruelty and naked power. There was a whole lot of truth to tell that power.  

But Jesus does something completely different. As John tells it, he evades and dissembles like a sarcastic teenager. “Who told you?” “You say so.” And then he says “I came to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Pilate just shakes his head with that famous line, “What is truth?” When it comes to truth Jesus is an all you can eat buffet. He is the truth even. And Pilate is walking away hungry with an empty plate. Jesus doesn’t bother speaking the truth to the greatest power in the world. Power will never get the truth. Jesus knows it. 

Before Pilate Jesus does not speak truth to power. He does something much worse. He hands himself over to Pilate. He becomes completely passive. Instead of speaking the truth Jesus gives his body. The truth is not placed in power’s ears. It is given into the hands of power to be crushed, abused, humiliated, mocked, beaten, hung, poked, derided, and destroyed. The power of this world cannot abide truth. It crucifies it. And this is where the church is called to be as well. Not trying to persuade it to conform with some divinely inspired image the church has created, the church is instead called to hand itself over with Christ to all who are marginalized, all who suffer, all who deal with injustice of any sort. It doesn’t try to make power be nice. It demonstrates the cruciform shape of the real power in this world. Standing in the midst of such suffering the church, and the people in it, are called not just to speak, but to suffer and die in the daily work of caring for those under the boot by making them visible and demonstrating that their suffering is not their own but Christ’s suffering too. Much of this is carried out in the vocation of the hearers. Hanging with Christ on the cross the church doesn’t just speak the truth, it is the truth. It testifies like Christ, with its entire body. This is the truth.  

Things don’t end there. The truth gets up and keeps walking. Then it starts really speaking. Not to the powerful but to the powerless. Power is not powerful at all, it says. The tomb is empty. The grave clothes are folded up like an old tablecloth. Truth keeps talking. It doesn’t have anything to say to power anymore. No more arguments to win. No more outrages to denounce. False power is dead. It got stomped on the cross. The truth is out there just letting everyone know. Preaching the gospel is the joyful addition of your voice to this victory romp no matter what happened over the last week.