Roland Zimany has led an interesting life. After twelve years as a management consultant, he–possibly after a Damascus-road moment, possibly not–got a pair of seminary degrees and taught philosophy and religion in college before spending five years as a Lutheran pastor. SERMONS WITH INSIGHT is presumably a collection of homilies from those pastoral years.
Right away, you can tell that Zimany is no old-school, hard-line, Sinners-in-the-Hands-of-an-Angry-God pulpit-thumper. His sermons are intellectual exercises, well-reasoned and brimming with cultural references. He presents complex concepts in simple, but not condescending, language. For instance, after pointing out that, in Jesus’ day, no one called him “Lord” because that was a Greek term, not a Jewish one, he says, “So when you see Jesus being called ‘Lord’ in the Gospels, that is a clue that that passage reflects the practices of the early Christian Church and does not come from Jesus’s own time.” Yes, preaching should be provocative, but too few pastors use their sermons also as teaching moments. Zimany gets the blend just right.
That said, a book of sermons suffers the same limitation as a play or movie script: the words are meant to be spoken, not read. Thus, there are occasional infelicities like this one: “As Járgen Moltmann, a theologian in Germany with whom I studied briefly and whom I saw again up in Chicago just before Thanksgiving (’94)–as Moltmann said, ‘No one who believes in Jesus Christ can be satisfied with the status quo.’” (In writing, you wouldn’t repeat “as Moltmann said,” but in speaking, it’s fine.) None of these should be held against Zimany. And yet, SERMONS WITH INSIGHT would benefit from more book-ness–i.e., the extra bits that a publisher adds to make the book more usable. A nice cover, for instance (as-is, the book starts with a title page). A subject index. An introduction in which Zimany explains why, of the hundreds of sermons he has delivered, he chose these for publication. The fact is, he could publish them all–he’s that good. Fans of Bart Ehrman, John Shelby Spong, and Elaine Pagels will find Roland Zimany right up their aisle.
In a still, small voice that nevertheless could calm storms, Roland Zimany delivers sermon after sermon to make readers think, feel, and love in SERMONS WITH INSIGHT.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader