C is for Controversial, which is what both politics and preaching can be.

1. The assigned topic reads, "Preaching on Controversial Social Issues." Let us, for reasons of shorthand refer to that as "political preaching" -- but not only for reasons of shorthand.

2. All good preaching is tacitly political, just as it is tacitly many things: tacitly prose, tacitly intelligible, tacitly scriptural, and so on. However, while the preacher would add little to a sermon by announcing that today it will be in prose or intelligible or scriptural, he would add to it significantly, as I recommend, were he to explain how it is political, and is intended to be.

3. Consider one eligible definition of politics. Politics, as David Easton suggests in his Systems Analysis, is the way society allocates value authoritatively. Doesn't preaching do that also, namely, allocate value authoritatively, when to those who overvalue themselves it announces that "all are liars" or "there is no one who does good, no not one" and, to those who undervalue themselves, it announces "beloved, now are we the sons and daughters of God," or "blessed are the meek," and makes the point specific, local, situational?

4. True, the sort of value which preaching allocates seems rather "soft" by contrast with the more earthy values which an elected official might secure for us: new street lights, crop subsidies, a test-ban treaty. Still, preaching too has been known to allocate its share of tangibles: "Arise and walk"; "buried with Christ by baptism into death"; "a new community"; "my body and blood...shed for you"; "the resurrection of the body"; the collection for the saints in Jerusalem.

5. Of course, the sort of authority by which preaching backs up its allocation of value has none of the muscular clout that ordinary political authority does: a surprise reversal in the New Hampshire primaries, the enforcement power of IRS, nightly access to the media. As a preacher I may try, pathetically, to mimic that sort of secular authority: by pulling rank, by my privileged information about the deity or the cultrus, by the weight of long and revered churchly tradition, by canonical name dropping.