A Message From
Walter J. Burghardt, S.J.

Good Friends:

This issue of The Living Pulpit highlights an amazing monosyllable: grace. Amazing what mysteries, what divine and human realities, a single syllable can embrace: A Trinity tented with our fragile flesh, enabling our love in return. God's unique Son borrowing our flesh of a Jewish mother. GodÄinÄflesh crucified for love of sinners. The Holy Spirit given us to make possible human living in the likeness of Christ. St. Paul's "body of Christ," sinful indeed, and still a graced community where no one dare say to any other, "I have no need of you." The Word of our very God in Scripture, and the word of a man or woman from a pulpit. Paul's "fruit of the Spirit" (Gal 5:22-23), with its peace and its joy, its gentleness and its generosity. Triumph over sin within baptismal waters, triumph over death in death itself.

And so much more. A faith that involves ceaseless self-giving: to a Lord who promises not Eden but Gethsemane; to sisters and brothers who experience more of Jesus' crucifixion than of his resurrection. A hope that, against all odds, puts its trust in a God who often asks the last pound of our flesh, all too often does not seem to be there. A love that mimics the love that led God's son to a crib and a cross. Indeed, Bonoeffer's "costly grace" costly because it cost the life of God's only son.

Grace everywhere: not only the glorious, gratifying experience of God's presence, but the equally "gracious" dark night of the soul. A world that, as Gerard Manley Hopkins sang, "is charged with the grandeur of God."

Still, "amazing grace" poses a problem for the preacher. How preach this central Christian reality so that its mystery does not simply mystify? How preach a grace that literally surrounds us, pervades our inmost being, is the dynamism behind every thought, word and deed that leads to salvation in Christ? How keep grace from becoming a buzz-word tossed thoughtlessly from a thousand-and-one pulpits like life and love and family values? And (dare I say it?) what, if anything, does it mean to say "All is grace"?

I presume to suggest that the articles that grace this issue will clarify and challenge, inform and inspire given, of course, God's grace!

In Christ's surpassing grace,

Walter J. Burghardt, S.J.
President