Preaching promise and hope: models of preaching and lived religion in Latin America

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to reflect on homiletics and Christian preaching as a voice of promise in a paradoxical context such as the Brazilian and Latin American. Initially it will reflect upon three characteristic types of relationship between preaching and promise: the eschatological and transcendentalist preaching that locates the promise in an afterlife or the end of times; the humanistic and liberating preaching that places the promise in the dimension of the socio-political struggle for transformation in the present; the individualistic and prosperity-oriented preaching that projects promise as material achievement and hedonistic satisfaction. Finally, faced with this reality, we seek ways in literature (Two Words, by Isabel Allende) and in popular culture (Central do Brasil, a movie by Walter Salles) to help us in creating a sermon that announces the promise amid the paradoxes of life in order to contribute not merely to individual, ecclesial or ideological satisfaction, but to point to human and cultural transformations.