The Crossover Dribble
Part Three of “The Perils of Prophetic Preaching in the Time of Trump”
Beyond the false choice between personal transformation and prophetic Christianity.
Recently, I was encouraged by a sermon and lecture by Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III at the 2025 Festival of Homiletics at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
An avid sports fan, he spoke of the usefulness of sports metaphors to understand things more sacred.
Specifically, he mentioned the cross-over dribble in basketball.
Moss declared that if you can only dribble the ball with one hand, then you can only go one way to the hoop. You are limited in your attack on the defense.
Then he said you need both hands and a good crossover (moving between hands and directions) to overcome your opponent.
Then, with a cheshire grin, he told the sanctuary filled with people we need to be able to dribble with one hand, “our more evangelical theology,” and he added names like Karl Barth to his list.
“But then, we need to be able to dribble to our left hand,” with the likes of James Cone and the social gospel folks.
“In order to defeat the enemy, we need both.”
Moss said we need to be able to think and speak with the tools of piety and conversion just as much as the prophetic, and we must be able to use both in the aim of seeking God’s heart for the world.
Moss is right.
If our sacred speech remains in the zone of personal piety, we will miss more than half of our chances to overcome the problems of the world. Likewise, if our sacred speech is “prophetic-only,” we will miss more than the other half.
If my experience is worth any measure, Moss’s wisdom is on point.
When I am with my cohort from my tradition, we often reflect on other churches that seem to be thriving in this age where so many are in decline. Who is being heard by the population, we ask? We think and analyze trends. We envy building locations and talented staff.
And the one thing that is true of all the most thriving ministries in my tradition is that their pastors may (or may not) be socially progressive, and thus they sometimes utilize the prophetic tone of social critique etc., but they are also culturally evangelical.
Culturally evangelical in this case does not mean to imply anything about their voting habits, or a tendency toward biblicism.
I am referencing the je ne sais quoi of Evangelicalism—their spiritual energy.
The unique spirit of Evangelicalism is bound up by an energy that calls people to conversion, transformation, assimilation into community, service, and personal/spiritual growth. It lays the fertile ground for growth and attracting an audience.
These churches that I am referencing do exactly all that:
1.) they do not shy away from telling their congregants about the life transformation they can experience in God.
2.) They mobilize to get folks engaged and trained in basic spirituality.
3.) And they continue to do works of mercy and justice.
There is no either/or method to their schemes.
They remember that the social justice part of our tradition grew out of its origins in revivalism and ecstatic moments of spiritual transformation. Their sacred speech maintains the agility of a “crossover dribble” as impressive as Allen Iverson’s.
Prophetic Preaching in the Time of Trump
Now we have come back to the start.
The question in my inbox, “how will the pulpit respond to the Trump of it all?”
Will the pulpit respond to the moral virtue signaling (an uncharitable interpretation to be sure) that fills many social media feeds?
There I feel pressured. Perhaps I am dropping the ball if I do not speak up on every concerning issue. Goodness, I often feel like I am playing on my heels.
Sometimes, these appeals for me to use my “platform” come in long before the facts are in, which means that judgment comes before understanding.
Must the pulpit go the way of the news media: be fast, be first...even if you get it wrong?
And given that I am thinking about this during this season of history, during this Administration (when changes happen at a dizzying pace), the opportunity to speak out about the broken issues of the world is great.
And given all that I have said about burning out, or if everyone has a platform then none do, or hot takes do not amount to prophecy, or finding a hearing, what is the best way to speak out in this cultural milieu?
Do I really only have one or two chances to take my best shot per year?
There is wisdom in discernment, no doubt. And I find wisdom in Otis Moss’s endorsement of the full message which is a both/and approach to the gospel’s application.
But in the end, perhaps the issue is not so much with speaking prophetically.
Maybe it is the tone and technique we employ.
As suggested, much of the prophetic is delivered in a rather confrontational tone. It is all too easy to deliver these messages with a sense of moral superiority, and in many cases, the delivery can be divisive, patronizing, and even harsh.
This is even more true given that, in America at least, everyone has a platform from which to make such proclamations. It is as if we are endlessly shouting at and past one another on points of great importance.
But, what if instead, we delivered the prophetic in a different tone?
As Brueggeman argued, the prophetic is about seeing and sharing an alternative vision of the world.
What if we reframe the prophetic message around the prophetic alternative vision and maybe the weirdness that comes with it, over and against the bold, confrontational approach that is falling on deaf ears in our hot take society?
This is nothing new in the prophetic tradition.
Figures like John the Baptist and Elijah did some strange things that made people look at them sideways, while Ezekial saw things no one else could see.
Speaking of vision, Martin Luther King told the listening crowds about something he saw—and he invited us to imagine it as well.
Embodying this tradition will serve us well in speaking truth to power in today’s dramatically oppositional time.
Preachers, teachers, song writers, artists, activists, and all who are called upon to speak some truth to power will do well to let the crowd in on the fact that maybe they are a little “off,” because they see a world that no one else sees—and then they invite the world to see it too.
This approach calls to mind three characters: Don Quixote, Kierkegaard, and Private Witt from Terrence Malick’s film A Thin Red Line.
In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the titular knight famously sees giants where others see mere windmills. His vision is ridiculed as madness by the world around him, yet it is precisely this “madness” that allows him to live out a nobler, more hopeful imagination.
Harold Bloom observes that Quixote’s madness functions as a kind of tragic faith, a refusal to accept a purely disenchanted world.
Søren Kierkegaard, writing centuries later in The Present Age, describes the corrosive effect of a cynical, ironic public that “levels” all distinctions and mocks genuine passion.
Against this “leveling,” Kierkegaard commends the “single individual” who dares to act on an inward vision of faith and hope—what he elsewhere names the “knight of faith.”
Quixote’s folly, then, becomes not mere delusion but a prophetic refusal of a world content with its own flat realism.
A similar dynamic is poignantly embodied by Private Witt in Terrence Malick’s A Thin Red Line (1998).
Witt confesses, “I seen another world. Sometimes I think it was just my imagination.”
Like Quixote, Witt’s vision appears naïve or even insane to those around him, yet it shapes how he lives: with compassion, detachment from fear, and a readiness for self-sacrifice.
Like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, Witt refuses the ironic detachment of the crowd and instead acts from a passionate inward commitment to a transcendent beauty glimpsed amid the horror of war.
His vision is costly, even fatal—but it is also what makes his life luminous.
In both Quixote and Witt, we see that what appears foolish or mad from a cynical perspective may in fact be a deeper fidelity to hope—a hope that dares to see, and live toward, a better world.
What if today’s would-be prophets took a cue from our three heroes: Quixote, Kierkegaard, and Private Witt?
If they took to their platforms and espoused “another world,” described evocatively and passionately and if they did so with such commitment, they may appear just a bit off or a bit strange.
But would their message break through all the noise and contempt of our very loud culture of hot takes?
Could such visions not further divide us, could they even be a balm for all the wounds of a broken people?