Sermon Prep: Preaching Dreams

My spouse rarely remembers his dreams. Unless they are about bugs or snakes, he'll wake up completely oblivious to that alternate life he's lead overnight. Sometimes, I'm envious of his dream-amnesia. I regularly wake up foggy from dreams, their wisps interfering with my morning routine, disturbing my sense of the present. My dreams are often emotionally-charged, peppered with characters who feel like real people, and it takes effort--like wiping sleep from my eyes--to move from the dream world to reality. My dreams instruct me, help me solve problems, let me know where my relationships need work, and at the least, signal where my major stressors lie.

But recently, JT had a dream that he remembered. It's such a rare event, that I was really excited to hear about it. I propped myself up on an elbow, thrilled for this view into his psyche, his ambitions, his dreams. I expected tales of flying or fighting robots or a fantastic meal that he ate in a beautiful locale with ingredients that we may be able to mimic in real life.

"Well," he started. "We were in bed in the morning, and Jo [our daughter] woke up. You brought her into bed with us, but she wouldn't go back to sleep. So, she started naming us, pointing and saying, 'Mommy. Daddy.'"

So far, this dream was unimpressive. In fact, it the exact scene we had experienced only an hour or so before, when Jo actually did wake up, come into our bed, and proceed to name us all. I continued to wait for the moment when reality would blur and Jo would sprout wings or start singing opera or something.

"So, then I said to her, 'Who are you?'" he continued. "And then--this is the weird part--she pointed to herself and said, 'Jo. I am Jo.'" He had been silent for a few minutes before I realized he had related the entirety of his dream. Yes, his dream had departed from reality: or daughter had never said her name. Much less put together a short sentence to accompany her self-introduction. But it seemed like there should be more. If he was remembering it, there must be something remarkable.

"Really?" I said. "That's what you dreamed?" "Yep," he said, rolling out of bed. And that was that.

It's make me think a lot about dreams. Me? I put a lot of stock in them and enjoy trying to stretch out that space between dreaming and awake so that I can remember the things my mind is working on when I'm not exactly there to run the show. And so often, they are impossible imaginings, wild and exciting, and I'm left dizzy trying to figure out how to translate the to life. But JT's dream was so simple, so small, so possible. And suddenly, his dream felt more like prophecy than my own.

I'm preaching this week at a classmate's church. He uses the lectionary, and he typically uses three readings: from the Hebrew Scriptures, Psalms or Epistle, and Gospels. I was intimidated by this task at first, unsure how I would handle navigating three texts during worship, and how I might craft a sermon that was harmonious. I assumed I would be simply picking one passage and lightly brushing upon (or perhaps even ignoring) the others in my message. But last week, as I read the passages again, I understood: these are about dreams. All of them are about dreams.

Check them out: Genesis 37: 1-28, Psalm 105 1-6, 16-22, 43-45, and Matthew 14: 22-33.

I'm not sure where this message is headed yet. I'm not entirely sure I can wrap it all up with a bow. But I do think that there's something here worth exploring: something about the dreams God has for us, about our own dreams and how we follow them, and how it's possible, even in reality, to live out our dreams.

Unwinding

So. It is July. Eleven Sundays have come and gone since I was a weekly preacher. About seven weeks have passed since I wrote anything about the practice of preaching. And I'm going to be honest--it feels good.

It feels good not to be under the gun right now, not be constantly checking the status of that 168 hour countdown that a weekly preacher does, not to be desperately trying to squeeze something, anything out of that lectionary passage this week. There are a few reasons for this, some complicated, some not so complicated, but I think it's fair to classify all of them under the "I Was Burned Out" category. So, I decided to become un-burned out by letting go of weekly preaching.

A few weeks ago, though, I was invited to preach at a mentor's church when she had to go out of town. It was an easy gig--all I had to do was show up with a sermon and preach it. No prayer-writing, no music-picking, no children-sermon winging, just focusing on the Scripture (which was requested to be from the lectionary...easy-peasy). And so, I worked on the text, touched base with the worship leaders, liaised with the pastor to make sure my direction would jive with her preaching and the congregation's experience. It was a smooth, leisurely experience of sermon prep. Until about 18 hours before I would be preaching when I actually sat down to write.

This has always been a problem for me: a 18-paper is due on Monday morning? I'll research it for a few weeks, then write the whole thing the Sunday evening before it's due. My 500 words on the city council meeting is due at midnight? I'll sit down to write at 11:03pm. My sermon is to be preached at 9:30am? Saturday at 5pm seems as good a time as any to be writing.

It's not that I don't prepare...I spend weeks researching, mulling over, and conversing. But when it comes time to sit down and actually write? I'm terrified. I just can't get myself to do it. Or, at least that's what I thought.

Now, when I do sermon prep, I count on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. A mundane chore becomes a sermon illustration? Spirit. I stumble upon research that delves into the exact word I have been wrestling with and it's not 35 years old? Spirit. But for some reason, I was surprised to find the Spirit show up when I was procrastinating from actually writing the sermon. But it did, in the form of a link on social media to a post by Kate Baer. "When You Are Tightly Wound," was the title, and so obviously, I clicked on it. Because, have you met me? Tightly wound is a pretty accurate description of my resting state.

I read the article, but more importantly, I actually heard it. (Thank you, Spirit.) And so, at 4pm on the Saturday before preaching, I actually took 5 minutes to unwind. At that moment, it meant closing my eyes and sitting in my own silence, imagining a bubble of calm surrounding me in the busy coffee shop I had parked myself in. I listened to myself. I released my anxiety about the message. And then, when the 5 minutes was up, I wrote the 2500 word sermon in about an hour.

I'm not saying that every experience of sermon writing is going to pop out that easily, that all the words will be waiting there like apples to be plucked off the tree. But I did realize that I often tried to wedge my writing time into spaces that didn't allow for me to unwind. And it was impossible to allow the Spirit to speak when I was still reverberating from a bedtime battle with my toddler, or the discussion in class about pneumatology. It wouldn't speak if I was counting down the minutes to the next meeing, next class, next place I needed to rush off to.

So, I'm working on the art of unwinding.  I think part of my unwinding process is not preaching every week for now, which makes it easier to swallow. But I'm also learning how to unwind in smaller ways, in simple ways, in ways that keep me lose and half-listening, ready at any moment to catch the whisper of the Spirit I know is there, that I know is waiting to be preached.

Reading up: The Idolatry of God by Peter Rollins

What's unique about The Idolatry of God: Breaking our Addition to Certainty and Satisfaction is that it's not a book for pastors, for preachers, for people who are thinking about preaching, or for church leadership (though any of them would get something out of the read). Rather, it's written in a way that the average unchurched or nominally-churched person could read it. The content is good, but what I'm interested in is how Peter Rollins puts the thing together.

Rollins is a great storyteller, and it's through storytelling that he illustrates some pretty dense theological material in a way that is understandable to people whose only experience of theology is through popular culture or the Christians who make it on the news. What I think is important about how Rollins writes is that it isn't dumbed down--he uses theological language, latin phrases, deep philosophical concepts, and theoretical ways of exploring ideas that aren't pedantic or pandering. I think this is the biggest fault of many church leaders seeking to reach a biblically illiterate generation--they speak and preach as though this illiteracy is actually infancy rather than taking the wealth of experience and theologizing the individual has likely done on her own before a religious professional even walked in the room.

Rollins incorporates stories in ways that layer upon each other, so that he's drawing you into a comfortable textual world in which you he introduces you to stories, then points out their relationship to the faith world. In discussing idolatry, he refers to "the MacGuffin," a term used in film making to discuss the item everyone's after, the magnet of the film, so to speak. In a chapter on self and identity, he uses a Miami Vice episode to explore the concept. And the conclusion is a sketch of a poor but whole woman who works miracles, raises suspicions of the authorities, and brings a renewed sense of peace to those she encounters (sound familiar?).

Though the use of popular culture is often taken as good "illustrations" for sermons, it's rare to see them used to such excellent effect as Rollins does. He's not using them to look cool (I mean, Miami Vice?). He's not using them in a way that sounds inauthentic. Rather, he's using them because they are vehicles that make his point in ways that are easily understandable and don't depend on an entirely new theological vocabulary to engage. They take the stuff of theology and make it accessible, make it so it seems like something that actually happens in real life.

The book itself is more a theology book than preaching text, but I do think that the way Rollins puts together the work is worth taking note of. First of all, he takes pop culture seriously as a story-telling medium that can convey meaningful information. He doesn't appropriate it simply to be hip and with it. Instead, he fleshes out the vehicles in ways that are legitimately helpful. (I had never seen an episode of Miami Vice and yet found his explanation quite compelling and easy to follow.) 

So...it's got me back on my line of thought about language. Rollins spends much of the text redefining, nuancing, and massaging some hefty theological terms. But he doesn't do it in biblical terms, theological terms, or in terms related to church history. Instead, he's focused on stories. And stories that people will be literate to. I think this in itself is an important notion in my developing understanding of vocabulary for preaching--that stories matter more than the language does, in many cases. Perhaps it's a Brueggemann case after all, with the contents being more important than the vessel.

Reading Up: Preaching as Testimony by Anna Carter Florence

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on Preaching as Testimony right now, as I'm mostly writing for my preparation for coursework for my summer class, and I think this text was added just to toss in a work by Anna Carter Florence before the Festival of Homiletics. It's a great text, don't get me wrong. I read it earlier this year for my introductory preaching course. But it's definitely not in the same vein as the other texts I've been engaging recently. It's a fantastic work to being working toward both a theology of preaching (or of updating one) and a sermon preparation method that takes God's immanent action in the world seriously (no surprises there, given her lecture at the Festival).

As a woman who considers herself somewhat of a church outsider, the first section which deals with the stories of three incredible women preachers was incredibly empowering. Their preaching deals directly with the stuff of their lives, their congregations were the people that God set before them, and it helped to strip away some of the pressure one feels to have it "all together" as a preacher.

I highly recommend it. Just don't have a lot of comments for the purposes I'm working toward now. Perhaps in the future, I'll come back to this text and flesh out some thoughts further.

But for now, choice quotes:

• "...you cannot rely on others to make you a preacher. You cannot preach the text if you are trying to prove that you can preach the text. You have to change the subject and testify for yourself" (112).
• "You cannot preach God's Word without putting your own work, unprotected, on the line" (115).
• "A preacher who succumbs to the constant pressure to be 'more entertaining,' or 'more relevant,' or even 'more biblical' (in the myriad of ways that phrase gets tossed around), eventually communicates that unless it is entertaining, it is not gospel; unless it meets my needs, it is not good news; unless it is in my words, it is not Word" (122).
• "We reside among the people so that the people and the Word may reside in us. And when the Word is 'in residence' in us, in ways we can see and hear, we have something to say; we have a Word to speak" (155).
• "Being honest is harder than being creative; engaging the text is harder than choosing a form. But there is a peace that comes from making it all the way to testimony, and you can see it in a preacher when she sits down after that sermon...the truth is, she does know how she did it; she just knows that she did, and on nothing but sheer grace" (157).

Reading Up: Preaching at the Crossroads by David J. Lose

Ok. I was hard on poor David Lose in my earlier post. Really hard. Like, perhaps unfairly hard. Because in Preaching at the Crossroads: How the World--and Our Preaching--Is Changing, the man does an admirable job of conveying the landscape of our current context for folks in the pews. And it made me feel like he maybe would have actually understood what it felt like to walk into a giant church full of pastors as a most-of-my-life unchurched person. Maybe he would understand my frustration, disappointment, and inability to understand how the church as it is now has been incapable of conveying the Word to so, so many of my peers. It makes me sad. It makes me angry. It makes me want to work insanely hard. And it makes me want to work with fellow clergy who want to learn a new way, too.

For me, Lose gave me many words for things that I wasn't sure how to express about the state of preaching in the post-Christian, Western society. While I've been living and breathing this context for my entire life, and then studying it intensively in my amazing progressive seminary, I realized that many working pastors may not have a real grasp on the implications of postmodernity, secularism, and pluralism in the everyday lives of their congregants (and potential congregants). Lose spends three chapters unpacking each of these terms, and then a subsequent three chapters providing practical advice for preachers who want to engage these concepts in real ways in sermon preparation, planning, and delivery.

One thing that I do want to touch on is the way he discussed the idea of biblical fluency. I noted my concerns with Willimon's work and with Barbara Brown Taylor's remarks about biblical language, and how I'm generally uncomfortable with biblical language itself being considered normative for Christians. There is something about that idea of teaching an entirely new vocabulary that has the ring of shibboleth to it. But Lose, in a parenthetical, nearly toss-off moment says that he believes Christian churches need to promote biblical fluency, or "the ability to think--without thinking--in the target language." In this way, I understand biblical fluency not to be about vocabulary, but sight. Not flashcards, but paradigm. And that's something that I don't think language is capable of doing.

Though I didn't feel like Lose was saying anything radically different than many of the folks I've been reading or that I heard at the Festival said, he did so in a way that was pastoral and clear. And in this way, it helped me to understand that in many ways, many of the clergy who I am so frustrated with are just not quite equipped yet to deal with the tasks at hand. Or, they feel like they need a prescription for success. At the end of Lose's work, like so many works on preaching right now, he acknowledges that he hasn't offered something more concrete for the preacher to put into action (though I think he does put some excellent concrete ideas out there). But he doesn't apologize for it. Rather, he seems to be excited about the adventure of rediscovering what preaching might mean here and now and in the future. And that made me excited about it. Actually, it made me excited about what I might have to contribute to the conversation myself. So, yeah. Nicely done, David Lose.

Some choice quotes:

• "If we are called to proclaim good news that is not just old news or the daily news but regularly surprises and even arrests our hearers, then perhaps preachers should not be surprised by the inherent and unending challenge of doing that" (3).
• "Does Scripture...have nothing more to say to us than what we have already heard and perceived?" (39).
• "...we preachers do not come to Scripture without a set of questions influenced by our context and experience. And we should not, as our questions are what bring us to the text in the first place. At the same time, by admitting that our context and experience powerfully shape not only our questions for Scripture but also our expectations of Scripture, we make room for others--including the voices within the Scriptures--to call into question our questions, both keeping us honest and keeping a vibrant conversation going" (41). 
• "In this way, the preacher comes not as the trained expert designated to give a guided tour of an ancient text--let alone perform a postmortem on a dead confession of faith--but rather as an experienced guide and host who makes claims, suggests lively interpretations, makes a wager about the present-day meaning and interpretation of a passage, and ultimately invites the hearer not just to take these claims and confessions seriously but also to respond to them in word and deed" (45). 
• "...we have unintentionally affirmed the secular impulse to restrict God's activity and therefore have made it increasingly difficult for our people to imagine being 'called' in their daily lives in the secular world. In particular, we have so greatly stressed the importance of Sunday activities that we have unintentionally devalued the lives we lead during the rest of the week" (69).
• "Visit your people in their vocational arenas, and describe those visits in your preaching...Perhaps it's we who feel odd or out of place in the public venues of our people's lives, at least when we come as a pastor" (73).
• "Over time, through this and other practices your congregation may grow from being a place where the word is preached more fully into a community of the word where all the members take some responsibility for sharing the good news of God's ongoing work to love, bless, and save the world" (77).
• "Increasingly, researchers suggest that in a world saturated by meaning-making stories, the mainline church has failed to offer a compelling and central narrative identity that not only informs but also guides the lives of their congregants by providing a resilient religious identity" (100).
• "Preaching from this framework, is equal measures (1) teaching of the basic worldview and how to apply it to life and (2) exhortation to do so" (103).

Reading Up: Crazy Christians: A Call to Follow Jesus by Michael B. Curry

The sermon out of which Michael B. Curry's book Crazy Christians: A Call to Follow Jesus came is the first chapter of his book, but it is also still available to be viewed online. It's a pretty tight sermon, and the book is just as tight. Curry refers to each chapter of the book as an essay in the preface, but it's also easy to read them as sermons (I'm guessing that's where they originated from), and so that's what I did.

The content of each of these messages is thoughtful, clear, connected both to the biblical text and to our current times. Curry is adept at pulling examples of Christian discipleship from historical figures and regular folks he has met on his journey. They have the rhythm and cadence of well-paced sermons, even when read silently (though in her forward, Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori encourages us to read them aloud). When I have more time, I'd like to break down the construction of these messages a bit more to get at their flow, but for now, I just want to share some brief thoughts.

One thing that stood out for me is that the essay/sermons in this book often seemed to parallel the biblical text rather than have them at its center. Oftentimes, by the end of the chapter, I had to go back to the beginning to see what passage Curry had begun with to jog my memory. Though each sermon is not centered around the biblical text at hand does not mean that the text doesn't speak. Rather, Curry is never far from the text when he is creating tableaus and scenes from contemporary or historical or even other biblical cultures to illustrate the heart of the message. For me, it was helpful to see how Curry's sermons were soaked in the biblical text while also not feeling like they were a dull exegetical foray. Curry seemed mostly to be preaching on a biblical theme that he rooted in our own context with contemporary images and characters. In many cases, the connection with the text was often one word: "Crazy" in Chapter 1--"We Need Some Crazy Christians," "Something Greater" in Chapter 2--"We Are Part of Something Greater Than Ourselves," "Feet" in Chapter 3--"Following Jesus with Our Feet," and so on. It did not come of as gimmicky at all, but rather served as the hand hold that allowed him to straddle the divide between the text and today's context.

As I was reading, I kept wanting to hear a conversation between he and Walter Brueggemann regarding prophetic imagination. Curry's sermons seem to be dealing with the world and present circumstances in ways the Brueggemann would approve of--especially his message on what the true meaning of "gospel welcome" would be (see "The Gospel Witness of Welcome will Rearrange the World"). He writes, "We never know what can happen when we feel called to follow Jesus' gospel witness of welcome. Heeding such a call can require incredible courage. Sometimes this gospel way of welcome can lead us to put our very lives on the line. But Jesus' way of welcome can inspire us to keep working to do what is right in a world where too often too much is wrong" (113). And the move he makes of imagining the Galilee where Jesus will meet his disciples as today's global context: "We are, all of us, in Galilee" (128).

This is a book I will likely revisit soon, not only to do a little deeper digging into the sermons to understand their construction, but also for inspiration for how to preach in ways that are faithful to both the biblical text and our times.

Reading Up: The Practice of Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann

Thank God. No, really. Thank. God.

Do you want to know how to begin to think about preaching to a post-modern assembly? Then read this book.

I kept putting off reading The Practice of Prophetic Imagination for a while. I don't know why. It felt intimidating. It felt overwhelming. It felt dense. And it was all of those things. But at the same time, I felt like Brueggemann (as usual) was saying things that needed to be said, setting an agenda that needed to be set, proclaiming the Word boldly. At the end of each chapter, I briefly considered giving Brueggemann a standing ovation. Then I thought my dog might think it was for her, and we don't want her getting a big head.

"Prophetic proclamation is an attempt to imagine the world as though YHWH--the creator of the world, the deliverer of Israel, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whom we Christians come to name as Father, Son, and Spirit--were a real character and an effective agent in the world" (2).

It sounds simple. It sounds obvious. But as Brueggemann takes the reader on a complete tour of the prophetic biblical canon, one sees how the obvious is over and over and over again occluded by the dominant culture. Brueggemann identifies our time as one caught up in "conventional idolatries and/or conventional atheisms," thus meaning that the preaching task is one that requires courage, imagination, and risky. Sign me up.

Brueggemann brilliantly and succinctly sums up the context of twenty-first century American context as being a strange mix of denial and despair. "In our denial, we keep imagining that it will all "work out" and that the failure of our society is not as deep or long term as we might suspect. In our despair, we have the sinking feeling that there will be no return to previous well-being, and we are left in a bad place about long-term prospects" (38). It is in this context that Brueggemann understand the preacher's task to be to name the denial, to name the despair, to allow for grief and woe and to understand God's role in it, and then, upon having sat in those dark places for a while, to begin to turn toward hope.

He traces this movement through the biblical prophetic literature, over and over teaching the contemporary preacher that prophetic preaching isn't only concerned with social justice issues or the problems at hand. Rather, it is a way of imagining the world anew with YHWH as the central character.

He outlines three major tasks of contemporary prophetic ministry:

• To empower and enable folk to relinquish a world that is passing from us (136).
• This requires dealing squarely with denial and despair.
• To enable and empower folk to receive a new world that is emerging before our very eyes that we confess to be a gift of God (138).

Thus, prophetic awareness exists in a paradoxical state between:

• God-given loss that actualizes the "woe" of being out of sync with God's purposes that require relinquishment. That relinquishment in turn produces denial. Thus:
• There is a God-given new emergent that actualizes "the days are coming" by the wise generativity of God that requires receptivity. That receptivity in turn evokes despair. (142-143)

"I believe that prophetic ministry that swirls around truth (against denial) and hope (against despair) is undertaken not because of moral passion (though that counts) but because without prophetic processing of denial and despair, our society will devour itself in alienation" (143).

Perhaps my favorite part of this book is Brueggemann's honest confession that his book falls short of a how-to guide for the local preacher. Though the totalizing forces of our society that try to deny and rule out any possibility that the great God of our creation could possibly be a present, active agent here and now, through imagination, the prophetic preacher enters into a world unseen through that consumerist, militarist lens and sees a world of possibility, of hope, of love, of sustaining grace. There is no prescription for this because it is happening in new ways all the time. Our encounter with Scripture is always new because we are always something new, and this intersection creates the opportunity for even further newness. God is good.

By the end of the book, I kept thinking of Moss' work, not only in singing the blues (in which we do own despair), but in his discussion of Post-Soul generation. As I finished chapter four, "A Lingering Place of Relinquishment," I sat down at my computer and clicked on a link a friend had posted on social media. It was a young woman loudly proclaiming that she had had enough of society's beauty expectations of her, and that she would no longer be following them. Echoes of Brueggemann's and Moss' work in my mind, I fully realized how very desperate this age is to shed the totalizing society that seeks to convince us that there's nothing else there, but how at the same time, that desperation is a flailing one, without a hand hold. Without a prophetic tradition, without a God, we are denouncing something that only grows with the denouncement. Who, then, is announcing God?

The whole book seems revelatory in the way something so common-sense seems revelatory. Which, in some ways makes me sad. But in so many other ways, makes me excited. 

There were too many underlinings and stars in this book to actually quote, but here's a final teaser before you just go out and buy this book:

We do...yearn and trust for more than what the empire can offer. We yearn for abundance and transformation and restoration. We yearn beyond the possible. That impossible is given, when it is given, on the quivering lips of the poet who refuses the thin offer of the totalizers (149).

Preaching Lessons: Angela Hancock

Having just delivered a bit of a mic drop at the end of her sermon immediately preceding this lecture, Hancock stepped up to give us a peek inside her process. Her lecture was titled, "Sermons in Quarantine: The Preacher and Imaginative Resistance." This was a pretty lengthy lecture, but I'm going to break it down here for posterity.

Angela Hancock!

Imaginative resistance occurs when we become uncertain of the narrator, and when we begin to resist or even downright refuse to engage the narrator's POV any further. Hancock emphasizes that in preaching, we offer the opportunity to glimpse something new, somewhere new within the biblical text. And, if we are able to imagine in ways that bring our congregations along with us, this imagining could even take us to a place of moving what we glimpsed there out into our lives.

But, the biblical text is full, FULL of places we have difficulty imagining. So, why do we have difficulty imagining them? First, she says that for us, even pretending to accept the "morally upside-down world" we encounter in scripture feels wrong. A world where a father is asked to sacrifice his son? Feels wrong. A world where babies are killed to protect the kingdom? Feels wrong. It's difficult for us to engage in these worlds because our culture conditions us so effectively not to engage them (more in this in my post about Walter Brueggemann's The Practice of Prophetic Imagination). But further than that, Hancock says that some part of us fears that if we let ourselves imagine this world, we'll also be more inclined to act out these moral problems in real life.

Secondly, Hancock calls out our issue of not wanting to get too close to or to identify with those we disagree with. Pretty simple, and I think jives with what Peter Rollins' lecture.

Finally, Hancock says we resist a narrator in ways that are tied up in issues of authority. While the initial question related to this is, "Do you trust the source of this information?," Hancock places us firmly in a post-modern context when she poses the next relevant question, "Is this person telling about rightness or wrongness? And if so, does she have privileged information that gives reason for this judgment." Her argument is that in today's world, an authority who simply stamps a story or event as "good" or "bad," is regarded with suspicion. And so, she encourages the pastor to trust the assembly: "Tell us the story. But when it comes to deciding what is good, we are just as capable."

Oftentimes, though, sermons wind up in quarantine--written off by listeners due to imaginative resistance. Hancock emphasized that both preachers and listeners can put the sermon in quarantine, and outlines common ways each does so.

Preachers put the sermon in quarantine when...
...we disagree with the storyteller and framework of the text. I think what she was getting at here is when a preacher knows enough biblical context to be suspicious of a text, but not enough to be able to actually trust the narrator. For example, I have this problem with interpreters of Paul. You can tell authentic Paul when there are layers upon layers of meaning in a text. Interpreters of Paul tend to come off sounding a little flat and didactic. I struggle with taking these storytellers seriously. But Hancock urges us not to put the text in quarantine ourselves, painting it ourselves as an irrelevant text.
...we cannot imagine the moral universe the text deals with. If we can't imagine the moral universe, how do we expect to ask our congregations to? This requires a dedication to the text that goes beyond mere suspension of disbelief, and requires actual faith.
...we are challenged by what the Bible tells us. When we confront something ourselves in the text that doesn't exactly line up with what we had hoped to preach on Sunday, we have a tendency to hammer the text into a space it might not be shaped to fit. Hancock said, "If the Bible doesn't inspire resistance, it's not Gospel." And so, our duty is to wrestle with our own resistance to the text.

Hearers put the sermon in quarantine when...
...imaginative resistance is the only goal. Hancock is honest about the fact that some imaginative resistance is going to happen, and is maybe even good. Those stutters in the story where we struggle to make sense tell us a lot about ourselves as people of faith. But the sermon also ought to be seeking to melt away that resistance as well. It's a balance, it seems, of pushing and leading.
...you aren't clear about the framework of a text, even if you are resisting it yourself. Basically, people can see through you when you're struggling and faking it. So don't.

Hancock then provided four strategies for handling imaginative resistance in your own sermon preparation process:

1. Strangify--Be attentive to the ways in which you move to quarantine the text early in the sermon prep process. Do you already know what you'll preach on this text even before you read it? Are you finding ways around the framework of the text to make it more palatable for your listeners? Don't. Be willing to let the text be strange.
2. Converse--Once the text is in quarantine, there may be other texts it is in conversation with. Tradition may have something to say about why this text is interpreted the way it is. Does it need to be rescued?
3. Bring it home--Let the strangeness of the text bring out the difference between the textual world and the local world. What does it say about us? Our world? God? How does it make us feel about each?
4. Listen for the deep music--At the end of the day, the biblical text--any biblical text--found its way into the big story of God's self-giving love. Look for that deeper music as it played then and as it might echo now. There may be some sweetness in the strangeness.

Reflecting on her sermon with Dr. Grundy, I noted that she did a pretty good job of opening up her agenda to us, but that she didn't really reveal this well in her sermon. He indicated that he felt she actually didn't fully allow the strangeness of the text to speak when she made the interpretation that Jesus had given his robe for us. And in reflection, I see his point. She did tidy up the ending quite a bit in order to make it something we could handle, something we could grasp: Jesus did this for you.

In the lecture, I can see room for celebration in her notion of letting the deep music burst forth. But again, I think that there needs to be some sitting in that music. Some toe-tapping, if not all-out dancing in that music.

And though she didn't address it directly, I think her acknowledgment of imaginative resistance opens up a lot of room for discussion about sermon delivery. Hers was calm, nearly saccharine-sweet, and now I can see why: she was fighting our imaginative resistance by approaching us in the most unassuming manner she could. I struggle with this, as I tend to write sermons with a slightly confrontative edge. They almost always soften in the delivery, but it's still there. Makes me wonder about how much of my messages are put in quarantine this way.

Heard the Word: Angela Hancock

Hancock preached on Matthew 22: 1-14. Now, if you're just reading this to gloss for ideas, that's great. I want you to keep reading. After you click the link for the text and read it. All of it. I'm serious. Go do it.

Yeah. Verses 13 and 14 are in there.

Hancock read the passage, then ushered up immediately into prayer, "Because after that, I think we need it."

My next post on Hancock's lecture deals with a lot of the underpinnings of this sermon, but for now, I just want to step it through, because it's construction isn't all that complex or original:

She begins with three contemporary stories of individuals who are 'invited.' Invited to church, invited to deeper faith, invited into faith-based relationships. And all three of them somehow turn down the invitation. But Hancock reminds us that there always comes another invitation. So...how do we handle this text?

She then hopped into the text, really imagining the scene with us, and acknowledges quickly that it isn't a normal story about the world as we know it. Something else is going on here, something bigger than that that we can't quite wrap our arms around.

And so, she jumps into the theological implications of the text, sorting through popular ways of interpreting it. It was like she was sorting through old photographs, looking for the one that matched the picture in her mind, and yet, there wasn't one there. She kept setting aside interpretations and digging further into the pile, eventually uncovering with us that this story is not something we can fit into a Polaroid frame. No. It's something much worse than that, she told us.

But she told us we could avoid the terrible. We could avoid the hard. We could just look at the text and avoid verses 11-14. Or 13 and 14. We could just make it a question of whether or not you will accept the invitation to the theological wedding banquet. And drop the mic there.

But Hancock pushes us to consider verse 14--verse 14 which causes us such holy confusion, which causes us to wonder what in the world is happening here, which causes us to want to fix the story. Again, we encounter the idea that this is not a normal story about a normal wedding banquet that Jesus is telling here. And so again, she moves through the traditional interpretations of this text: that the man is not righteous enough to be at the party, that the man is not faithful enough to be at the party, because he didn't care enough to take the robes offered him at the entrance to the party (literalist interpretation), because Jesus never would have said this and so he didn't.

For a moment, she steps back and looks at this interpretation, and uncovers our bias. We want so badly for the man to be kicked out because he deserves it. We want so badly for Jesus not to come off sounding like a jerk here. But then, there's verse 14 to deal with, and we find that it's true, this is not just a story about humanity's failing or a man who doesn't dress appropriately for a party. Instead, it's a story about God's way with us. And if this is how God deals with us, then what are we to make of this?

At this point, my notes dropped off. Because the interpretive turn that Hancock took was new to me. She insisted that Jesus is really the one kicked out of the banquet, that Jesus is the one who was found to be unworthy by the host and was bound, and tossed, and sent where nobody wants to go. It was Jesus who was chosen. Hancock concluded with an image of Jesus having offered his wedding robe to us, so that we could partake of the banquet. And then, she walked off stage.

So, my first instinct was to pick up my Bible and frantically locate the text and read the other stories surrounding it. Here, Jesus is talking to the chief priests and elders at the temple in Jerusalem. The two parables that Jesus tells before this refer to them (they finally realize). I could see how Hancock came to this interpretation. But I was also surprised that with as much openness as she had in the exegetical process in the content of her sermon that she didn't make this process more clear. Instead, she dropped it on us, then walked away.

This is a general critique of the Festival--it felt like most of the preachers didn't know how to end a sermon. So often, I felt like a burden had been dropped on my lap, needed still to be unpacked and given some kind of instruction in order to take it out into the world. So often with these sermons, I felt I would rather leave that package sitting on the pew when I left. Now, I'm going to err on the side of generosity and assume that these folks know they are preaching to professional preachers, and so they can toss a few harder passes at us than someone who is just picking up the sport of faith, but I couldn't help but shake this feeling that some of what they were teaching in doing this just WILL NOT translate in our congregations today.

But past this, I think this was an important sermon for me to hear because I am often so caught up in sermon delivery and structure. This sermon was not delivered or structured in any way that was surprising or even all that exciting. It was entirely the focus on the story, knowing that we would eventually get to the difficult part that I didn't understand, it was the promise that we wouldn't ignore that strangeness of it that kept me engaged. For me, it tied in nicely with Brian McLaren's session the previous morning about reshaping how we look at texts and how we might do better to engage them fully. For me, Hancock's message showed me how to deal with a difficult pericope that doesn't initially sound like it winds up in a place of grace. But through faithful interpretation and understanding, it might just do that.

Reading Up: The Pastor as Minor Poet by M. Craig Barnes

What a gentle, lovely, pastoral little book. So often, I feel jarred and unsteadied by the preaching task, but Barnes does a beautiful job in The Pastor as Minor Poet of making one feel like that pastoral role is one of gentleness and ease, of walking along a beach, conversing with people as they come. I know it's not really like that. I know he knows it's not like that. But with so many of the texts we have read and the speakers we have seen thus far with an air of desperation around then, it's nice to breath in Barnes' measured pace.

What I appreciate most about this book is that Barnes takes the preacher as a whole person--living a family life, being imperfect, having a relationship with God, and doing the daily work of the pastor. In his introductions to the chapters, he lovingly sketches the mundane in a way that you begin to see the subtext he is pointing out so readily. So much of my enjoyment of this book was about the pacing, about the lingering, and about the lingering it encourages pastors to do in order to be poets of subtext.

In some ways, I could see the connection between this work and the work in parables that ACF is doing: both require a keen sensibility to the unseen in the present moment. And perhaps Barnes' work serves as a bit more of a how-to, though it is not didactic. Rather that teaching us how to be a poet, Barnes just seems to open up the world of what it would look like to be a pastor-poet. He doesn't sugar-coat the preaching task--he acknowledges that some days are easier than others. But he does emphasize the persistence and patience required in the task...things I could really work on.

Here are a few quotes:

• "Poets see the despair and heartache as well as the beauty and miracle that lie just beneath the thin veneer of the ordinary, and they describe this in ways that are recognized not only in the mind, but more profoundly in the soul" (17).
• "What the congregation needs is not a strategist to help them form another plan for achieving a desired image of life, but a poet who looks beneath even the desperation to recover the mystery of what it means to be made in God's image" (18).
• "Poets are devote more to truth than to reality; they are not unaware of reality, but they never accept it at face value...This is why poets care about the text, what is said or done, but only in order to reveal the subtext, which reveals what it means" (19).
• "In contrast to the biblical and theological poets, the pastoral poet has the unique calling of making sense of their worlds in light of the dust and grit of daily life in a parish....the pastor poet lives with a crowded and noisy soul. Central to what it means to be ordained is to open the doors of one's soul to the complexities, pathos, longings, and even sins of those the pastor has vowed to serve" (22).
• But the creativity of the minor poet is found not in the discovery of new truth, or in speaking and writing for every other people. It's found in the fresh articulation of familiar old truths in a specific context. Clearly, that's what pastors do" (26).
• "We wrap ourselves in small talk about small things in order to hide from holiness" (30).
• "The secret to intimacy with another person is discovering the sufficiency of God's love without that person. It is the only way we are ever free to give love to another human being who can never meet the needs of our souls" (46).
• "Since their souls are a sacred meeting ground, it is critical that pastors know how to expose themselves to God. It is not enough that they have learned as minor poets how to peer into the subtexts of the Bible and the congregation. They also have to attend to the underlying holy space of their own lives" (108).

Reading Up: The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor (or BBT as I like to call her now that we're BFF) has a real knack for saying what she's saying without saying it. Or, as my short story teacher called it, showing instead of telling. Perhaps because of the title of this book, I was expecting something a bit more prescriptive, but with BBT, prescriptive is never even on the menu (see 36).

But the closest she gets is in her chapter entitled, "Preaching." The chapters before have all been leading up to the vision of the preaching life, task, and moment that she presents here, so the concept in all its fullness isn't foreign at all, but seems an obvious extension of how she understands call, church, and the world. Most succinctly, BBT understands preaching to be a cooperative task between God, herself, and the community of faith--discount any of the three, and you have something that would be classified as other than preaching in BBT's book (ha!), I think.

The accumulated effect of her conversation about life, call, church, the world, and preaching is a sketch of the pastor as careful observer of the world and lives that God loves so, so dearly. And she is also the bearer of a difficult but good news that is not so easy to deliver or to receive if you're doing it honestly. It strikes me that BBT is so effective because she is so adept in that art of indirect speech Rollins emphasized. Though, I will say more in a moment about when that speech goes silent.

When I was in college, I majored in English and sociology. When people asked me what I was going to do with that, I would laughingly tell them, "I'm going to watch people, then write about it." At the time, I hadn't encountered the Gospel--at least not in any meaningful sense of the word 'encounter.' And so, as my vocation has become a bit more clear and as my faith has deepened and begun to truly shape my life, I would probably now say that I'm going to watch the world, listen for the Word, and then write about that.

The second half of The Preaching Life appears to be a collection of sermons. And so, I'm moving through those a little slower than the first half, savoring them. But one thing I notice about them is the same thing I noticed about her sermon at the Festival of Homiletics--they don't really have endings. I mean, they end. That's true. But they don't feel finished. I told a classmate it felt like being invited over for a meal, encountering a lavishly set table, lifting the lids of still-simmering pots to smell the flavors to come, beginning to have a good conversation over a glass of win, then, at the moment when supper will finally be served, of having all the food packaged up in Tupperware and sent home with you to reheat and eat in front of the television.

I think I understand that BBT creates these scenes, sets them in front of the congregation, and begins the task of looking at them together, expecting the examination to continue after that particular moment of examination is over. This is a subtle art. And I admire subtlety a great deal. But in the preaching task, sometimes the Good News needs some additional help in being revealed. And this is where celebration makes all the difference.

In my first preaching class last semester, Dr. Grundy had us write the 3-minute ending of our sermons first, emphasizing celebration. For many of us, this was a new idea, one we had to learn from textbooks, and then from actually hearing some of our classmates who knew what they were doing do it. It felt uncomfortable, I'll admit, to be asked to add so much flesh and skin to the sermon, but it was effective. Very few of us left the assembly wondering how God might carry us forward into the next day with the message we had just received. And I think this is what's missing from BBT's endings--the understanding that God's hand is held out to us in that moment for us to grasp and walk into the new life waiting there for us. And that takes daring, dedication, and imagination all at once.

And so, here's my preaching goal: to be BBT with celebration. Not a shabby goal, I don't think.

Here are a sampling of the quotes I want to continue to bathe in:

• "God has given us good news in human form and has even given us the grace to proclaim it, but part of our terrible freedom is the freedom to lose our voices, to forget where we were going and why" (5).
• "Our job is to stand with one foot on earth and one in heaven, with the double vision that is the gift of faith, and to say out of our own experience that reality is not flat but deep, not opaque but transparent, not meaningless but shot full of grace for those with the least willingness to believe it is so" (13).
• "When God calls, people respond in a variety of ways. Some pursue ordination and others put pillows over their heads, but the vast majority seek to answer God by changing how they live their more or less ordinary lives" (27).
• "For me, to preach is first of all to immerse myself in the word of God, to look inside every sentence and underneath every phrase for the layers of meaning that have accumulated there over the centuries. It is to examine my own life and the life of the congregation with the same care, hunting the connection between the word on the page and the word at work in the world. It is to find my own words for bringing those connections to life, so that others can experience them for themselves. When that happens--when the act of preaching becomes a source of revelation for me as well as for those who listen to me--then the good news every sermon proclaims is that that God who acted is the God who acts, and that the Holy Spirit is alive and well in this world" (33).
• "Understood in this way, preaching becomes something the whole community participates in... If the preaching they hear is effective, it will not hand them sacks of wisdom and advice to take home and consume during the week, but invite them into the field to harvest those fruits for themselves, until they become preachers in their own right. Preaching is not something an ordained minister does for fifteen minutes on Sundays, but what the whole congregation does all week long; it is a way of approaching the world, and of gleaning God's presence there" (34).
• "The church's central task is an imaginative one" (41).
• "It is a matter of learning to see the world, each other, and ourselves as God sees us, and to live as if God's reality were the only one that mattered" (44).
• "The theological word for this experience is revelation, but the process, I believe, is imagination" (48).
• "My relationship with the Bible is not a romance but a marriage, and one I am willing to work on in all the usual ways: by living with the text day in and day out, by listening to it and talking back to it, by making sure I know what is behind the words it speaks to me and being certain I have heard it properly, by refusing to distance myself from the parts of it I do not like or understand, by letting my love for it show up in the everyday acts of my life. The Bible is not an object for me; it is a partner, whose presence blesses me, challenges me, and affects everything I do" (60).
• "A sermon, on the other hand, is an act of creation with real risk in it, as one foolhardy human being presumes to address both God and humankind, speaking to each on the other's behalf and praying to get out of the pulpit alive" (74).
• "When I say 'I' from the pulpit, I want them to say, 'Me too.'" (84).
• "This is one of the hardest and most rewarding aspects of the job. We do not make sermons out of air; our creations, poor or brilliant as they may be, are always variations on someone else's theme. The main melody is always a given, and even when we launch into our own bold improvisations we are limited to a scale of eight notes" (87).

Reading Up: Unlearning Church by Michael Slaughter

As I was reading Michael Slaughter's Unlearning Church, I had this strange notion that I had read it before. I went to look at my bookshelf to see if it was shelved in my collection of "United Methodist Here's How To Do Church" books. It wasn't. But gazing at that ever-expanding shelf (the connection is always being educated), I realized I'd probably read a number of things very similar to this: a pastor of a large church (always male), writing in very general terms about a very specific way in which he has grown the Church (now, whether that is church is his church or THE church is another debate for another day). And so, I'm wondering what I can learn about preaching from it.

It's not a book about preaching, as much as it is a text that is wrestling with the space in which preaching happens--namely the church. Chapter 4, entitled "Thriving in Paradox" is a pretty helpful primer to postmodern culture, if you're not living in the middle of it already, and its tips about church itself are good things for preachers to consider as well: that knowing is not as important as experiencing; that hard questions do not require easy answers, but rather spaces where they can be asked; that diversity is a reality and actually leads to greater community than homogeneity. I guess this would be the greatest strength and weakness of the book: how it does a good job of identifying what church and leadership might look like in the postmodern world, and how obvious all of this is to a young leader already. Oh wellsies.

The second half of the book is geared directly toward church leaders, and it was there that I was able to glean a few things for preaching. I want to touch on Slaughter's idea of a "trainer-coach" that he outlines in chapter 7, "Replicating the DNA." He writes:

"In the church setting, we need to help trainer-coaches break down the messages presented in each worship experience so they can formulate specific plans according to the needs of those in their cell groups. We design each weekend worship experience with supplemental curriculum for the trainer-coaches to use." 

I've had some experience in churches who have used a Sermon/Learning style, but what Slaughter outlines here seems to be different--seems to be an intentional effort to equip leaders in the church to be able to engage the message presented in worship in ways that connect with a small group's life. My knee jerk reaction is that it is preposterous to know how the message is going to connect with an individual or a group. To plan a curricula around that seems kind of presumptuous. Then again, creating space to reflect on the message isn't a bad thing. How then might this idea be a little less top-down management-style and something that is more organically available to the congregation's small groups?

I was also intrigued by his description of the Family Room in chapter 3, "Engaging the Whole Person." Evidently, it started as an experimental space for in-between the Christmas Eve services where people could gather to converse, share prayer concerns, connect with trained lay-pastors, or...whatever else. It was set up like a living room with couches, candles, and coffee tables, and was hugely popular for folks leaving the services. It has evolved into an ongoing ministry at Ginghamsburg. Certainly in a large church, the setting of the family room has something to offer. It makes me think about the early Christian home churches, with the community gathered to hear the Word, pray, learn, and sing. I know the movement toward home churches and small in-home groups is a popular one, but I wonder how many of us have actually experienced hearing a sermon in that environment. Or actually processing a sermon immediately following worship. More things to chew on.

Though Slaughter claims to have abandoned the pastor-as-CEO model for church, his book still reads like a business how-to. But here are a few quotes that I'd like to chew on to inform my preaching:

• "Some people at Ginghamsburg say, 'Mike, you don't feed me anymore.' Many of these people forget that our connection with God is never complete until we make the commitment to sacrifice our personal needs and come down from the mountains of our personal spiritual journeys to serve the needs of the oppressed and hurting all around us" (107).
• "UnLearning leaders [or preachers?] go beyond the latest leadership fads and technological innovations to the ancient practices of spiritual formation--the practice of daily disciplines that Jesus was committed to, such as prayer, solitude, meditation on the Scriptures, fasting, fellowship, service, generous giving, and commitment to simplicity of lifestyle" (109).
• "A Christian [preacher] is not someone who makes an intellectual statement of belief, or who commits to a lifestyle of little do-good-isms that have no spiritual motivation. A Christian is someone who is like Jesus" (113). What does it mean for the preacher to be like Jesus?
• "Postmodern people are looking for authenticity. They do not seek explanations about God so much as they seek authentic life-demonstration of biblical relevance. UnLearning leaders are more about a demonstration of a greater-works-than-these, authentic faith than about simplistic Jesus slogans and magic faith formulas. Their greatest persuasion point is authentic life experience, not argumentative reasoning" (115). 
• "So many times we try to tell other people the will of God in their lives, rather than that God's desire is simply to live in them, period" (119).
• "You'll keep the godfathers and godmothers of your church very happy if you continue doing church the way you've always done it--without any risk or change. But we don't have time to play the kingdom of church. We have time only to obey one voice--the voice of God. Do not settle for anything less than God's creative purpose" (127).

Preaching Lessons: John Bell Part II

When I read that Bell's lecture was on "Hidden Women in Holy Scripture," I knew I wanted to attend. Not only would I be enjoying the lovely ringing of his Scottish accent, but I would be hearing about something so often overlooked in preaching that I find myself desperate for it: taking up the female in the Bible.

Bell began his lecture by acknowledging the power of the male reading of the Bible in its shaping of how we read it now. The male gaze tends to overlook the female, to under-read her, to skip over her contributions to the story in ways that are unfaithful to the fullness of the Biblical witness. I'm kind of glossing over this point because it's one that I already understand, but if this is coming as a novel concept to you, leave a comment, and I'd be happy to chat with you about it.

Mostly, the lecture was John taking up stories of women in the Bible and reading them imaginatively and with value. For example, he read the parable of the lost coin as just as strong a witness as the parable of the prodigal son. Why hadn't he seen God there before, he wondered aloud. He read the story of the Samaritan woman at the well with such imagination: he saw her as a woman who was outgoing and vibrant, who was persuasive and outgoing, and who had these gifts redirected in her encounter with Jesus. It was a pleasure to listen to, really.

The best part of the lecture was the handout he gave with a breakdown of Biblical women, their appearance in the Testaments, and how they were treated by the text (Protester, Deliverer, Sexual Intrigue, Victim of Male Cruelty, Honored by God). It is a fantastic resource for preachers who would like to dig further into stories that don't come to light all that often, or for engaging familiar stories from a different vantage point. I'll plan to post a link to this sheet here sometime in the near future.

Here's a link to a PDF of that handout. Feel free to save and use!

After the lecture, a group of us from Eden approached John for a photo. But I also needed to ask him a question. At the beginning of his lecture, he acknowledged his male gaze, but he also spent a long time discussing how males and females read the Bible differently. I didn't want to categorically take his remarks as still being sexist despite their awareness of the male gaze, and so I approached him about it. I said, "I have a sincere question. Do you really think that men and women read the Bible differently?" He answered yes, that he thought that there were different sensibilities brought to it. I asked a further question about how he thought cultural conditioning might just be a part of this, and he acknowledged that it could. I thanked him for adding that nuance and left it at that.

When I looked around the room, I noticed that the majority of people in the session were women. Listening to a man tell us about women in the Bible. Now if Bell's assertion was right, that men and women read the Bible differently, then what exactly could he tell a group of women about women in the Bible, since we've been reading it as women the whole time? I'm being ridiculous to make a point. Bell's assumption that men and women read the Bible differently assumes a culture that conditions us differently. The reason his reading of these stories is novel to us is because we, as women, also live in a culture that has conditioned us to gloss over these stories, not to preach these stores, not to know what to do with them. Just because we are women does not mean that we have eyes to see.

By upholding the false dualism of the male and female gender, Bell not only excludes anyone who considers themselves to fall outside of those two poles, but also assumes a greater democracy in ways of knowing than is fair. More than his maleness clouding his ability to see these stories, it is his conditioning in maleness that does so. And he forgets that women are often conditioned in the exact same way. This is a long way of saying that yes, a man and a woman might read Scripture differently. But so might a woman and another woman, a man and another man, a woman and a transgender person, a man and a boy, a woman and a girl. What Bell illustrated well is that when you begin to value differences in reading, the possibilities for revelation in the Biblical text absolutely explode. But his binary understanding of that reading actually do more to reduce it than to explode it further.

Preaching Lessons: Peter Rollins Part II

This was technically a sermon, but when Rollins stood up and said, "Well, I don't really preach, so we'll see how this goes," I opted to think of it as lecture instead. More on this later in this post.

His sermon title was "Encountering Ourselves in the Other," and he used the story of Paul's conversion as one example of this general point, but the biblical text was never actually read, nor did he really do any digging into it.

Rollins' talk began with a discussion on scapegoating, our human tendency to want to project our own brokenness, our own faults, onto something outside ourselves. When we see people differently than ourselves, we generally have three responses, Rollins said: to try to co-opt them into our way of thinking and being (what you've got is clearly wrong and you need what I have), to tolerate them (you've got what you've got, I've got what I've got, let's call it good), or to learn about oneself from the other (what can you teach me about my own beliefs). "What's most terrifying about the other," Rollins points out, "is when I glimpse myself in their eyes and see that I am also other to myself."

It's precisely because of this terrifying mirror effect that Rollins believes that scapegoats are actually our salvation. Here he launched into a reading of Paul's conversion in a way that exposes how the very thing that Paul wanted to get rid of (the followers of a resurrected Christ) were where he actually found his salvation. Because the scapegoats in our lives actually expose our own brokenness. And if we are open to that, we might also just be open to getting over it and becoming whole within ourselves as opposed to trying to make the world whole around us.

"We all want to escape our brokenness, to run away. But the truth is that God is not in the escape, but rather sharing the stories of our brokenness."

After having heard Rollin's previous lecture, I felt like this talk brought his point into full relief. In actually acknowledging our issues, in engaging our scapegoats, we actually engage ourselves in ways that can lead to wholeness. In many ways, I felt like Rollins was echoing much of what we heard in Yvette Flunder's sermon--wholeness is stigma removed from our brokenness so that we can walk back into the world with head held high. Christian faith isn't a homogenizing process, but is the process of realizing that difference instructs, that healing comes in honesty not blending in, that in faking perfect believe, we are missing out on the gift that honest doubt gives us.

As my friend Jeff and I walked to the next session, we talked about the genre of Rollins' talk: was it a sermon? Was it a lecture? Was it storytelling? We acknowledged that Rollins didn't dig into the biblical text at all--actually, it was an illustration from Batman that stuck with us most (that Batman could have done a lot more good in Gotham City if he had just dealt with his anger over his parents' death; he could have then graduated from beating up criminals with the latest military-grade weaponry to giving kids schoolbooks. Not a bad point). Jeff made a point that stuck with me, though. He said that yeah, most of the time, you need to do the exegetical digging to wrestle out your message, but some weeks, he said, "You just need to get up there and say what needs to be said."

I think there's some truth to this--there are times when the truth needs to be spoken. I brought this up later to Dr. Grundy, and he nuanced it further, saying that yes, the truth can be spoken plainly, but that it also needs to come from a place of authentic wrestling with the text. He is the preaching professor, so I'm going to take that seriously.

So, then, (this sounds obvious) the preaching task assumes the preacher's relationship with the biblical text. A congregation assumes the person preaching has wrestled with it. But I'm also wondering about how the preacher makes assumptions about their relationship with the biblical text, and whether those assumptions are fair and how they come into play. Rollins' work is mostly outside of traditional church, and so his assumptions about his audiences relationship with the biblical text are different than your average preacher's (though whether they should be or not is a different story altogether). And if your congregation's relationship with the biblical text is zilch, what is the appropriate way to present yours? I have no doubt that Rollins knows his Bible. But he didn't lean on it to preach this message.

I'm toying here with some kind of line. Everything I have read on preaching, everything I have been taught about preaching, and 95% of what I'm hearing at the Festival about preaching tells me that the foundation of the sermon is the biblical text. I guess the question I am asking is how much of that foundation is it necessary to reveal? Rollins acknowledges preaching is an art of indirect speech, so it's quite possible that he utilizes layers of stories to build on a foundation that he's just not as interested in making apparent. Where is the edge of this preaching task? And how does it intersect in an age of increasing biblical illiteracy and pop-culture immersion? And what is the preaching task in between. So far, the answer for almost everyone in the Festival has been, "Stick to the text." But in Rollins, I'm hearing something different. And it intrigues me.

Preaching Lessons: Peter Rollins Part I

Peter Rollins says a lot. It's both thick and quick, and a little exhausting. A classmate said, it was like watching theological ping-pong when he plays both sides of the table. But worth it. His talk was entitled, "Fools for Christ: The Sermon as Weapon of Subversion," and he focused mostly on the approach and content of the sermon, using storytelling, psychological, and family dynamics research to explore the idea of the sermon as subversion. 

At its core, Rollins was sharing how to preaching in a way that is "disruptive and disturbing." And what is more disruptive and disturbing than telling the truth about things that nobody wants to tell the truth about? He spoke at length about systems and transgressions of the system that actually enable the systems to remain in place. It is the "allowable cheats" that keep people from questioning the larger problems that may be present in the system. So, he asks, what happens if we get honest about the things that nobody believes, but we all pretend we believe? 

Nothing short of transformation.

He did a sample reading of the parable of the prodigal son, reading it as tragedy (in the classic definition of nothing changing through the course of the drama) compared with a reading of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars subverting his father's expectations in a way that actually wound up being sacrificial for his father in the end. And so he asked, "What is the thing you can't go to....because it is the one thing that will change everything."

And so, in preaching, the radical move is in exposing what everybody already thinks, the stuff we already knew, but which we didn't want to know we knew. And this makes church the place where we come to get a clearer look at our devils and demons.

And the purpose isn’t just to talk about hard or awkward or uncomfortable things for the sake of talking about them, it is for the sake of transformation, for the sake of salvation, even.

In his sermon, Rollins gets into this more fully, so I won’t dive into it a ton here. But it was helpful for me to realize early on that he was engaging with embeddedness—not only in our theology, but our embeddedness in systems of oppression, systems that hold us back and yet somehow we hold up (consciously and unconsciously), systems that keep us from functioning as full people in the world.

For Rollins, the way to handle embeddedness isn’t to share the right answer, isn’t to continue to beat upon it like a hammer against a wall. Rather, he says that just saying the wall is there at all oftentimes begins that process of transformation in ways that allow for more creative means of taking down the wall. Makes sense to me.

But Rollins also considers preaching to be “an art of indirect speech.” And so subversion isn’t in aggression or confrontation, it’s in the layering of stories that bring to the surface the things which have been held down for so long, we’ve started living our lives around them, like a pile of magazines that started as a decluttering project and have now become a coffee table we move around in the business of our everyday lives. Which is exactly what he embodied in his lecture: the accumulation of his stories had the cumulative effect of helping us to recognize what had always been there in our preaching—the idea that we are called to tell the truth—in a way that made us wonder why we hadn’t been doing it all along.

Preaching Lessons: Brian McLaren Part II

"Light Fires, Issue Permission Slips, Invite others into Interpretive Community"

McLaren's lecture focused on what he understood the charge for preacher to be right now. Here's my outline:

Light Fires:

• Light a fire of hope, concern and courage wherever you go.
• Light your own fire first--"You can't be a purveyor of abundant life if you are so much of a workaholic that you can't enjoy it yourself."
• Light fires in others around you.

Issue Permission Slips:

• Give people permission to dance, to be happy, to move, to do something different. McLaren worked with the metaphorical and literal implications of dance for quite a while. Suffice it to say, dancing is good.
• Give permission to dance to a new tune.
• Give permission to dance with new partners (especially ecumenical partners, for McLaren).
• Give permission to innovate.

I never quite got the invite part of things. I think this is when he was talking about ecumenism. But yeah. Get others on board, I guess?

The implications for preaching and worship were mostly common-sense--dry dusty liturgy that nobody is passionate about is not worth keeping around. Write something new. Do something new. Perform something new. Dance something new. But mostly, do it with passion and excitement.

In terms of preaching formation, I really didn't get much out of what he was saying here. He seemed to think that he was saying something quite novel, especially when he discussed moving away from preaching a theology of salvation to a theology of creation, and maybe in the larger context, he is. But to me, most of what he was saying was pretty obvious. (I wanted to ask how theologies of salvation and creation differed in the first place, but thought better of it.)

McLaren was explicit in his wanting to move the church to a new place in its life, and he sees this happening through the metaphor of dance. Which is great. But at the same time, it is a little awkward to begin to try to apply his ideas to a congregational setting, especially when his ideas are being incubated outside of one. Dr. Grundy and I talked about this further--about how emergent church folks are able to offer valid critique of the church from the outside, but it fails to be able to offer much realistic advice or guidance for those working on the inside. And McLaren's advice to move beyond denominations seems to me to be a good model on a local level--why wouldn't you be working with your other brothers and sisters in faith int he local community--but he was proposing it on a much larger scale, which rang very strange to my ears. 

Preaching Lessons: Brian McLaren Part I

I attended both of Brian McLaren's sessions this morning and decided to go ahead and just write about both of them in one space. Partly because it's convenient, and partly because I don't think his sermon was really a sermon. So. On to Part I.

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" 

McLaren's sermon was more of a show-and-tell than it was preaching for me. That said, what he was showing was absolutely worth hearing.

McLaren is working on gaining a better grasp of the Bible. In his second session, he talked about how he is beginning to understand the Bible as "story space, not a story line." The space within the stories for imagination, new understanding, and new readings is what McLaren holds to be important about the text. His book due out later this year deals with this.

But in the message, he used the story of Jacob and Esau to show how important framing of stories is for preaching and sharing the Word. Especially as we will be preaching more and more to communities who aren't familiar with the Bible. McLaren reminded us, "Stories frame us as being a hostile or hospitable community." And it's true. Our stories make up who we are and how we understand ourselves. And so, the stories we present in the preaching moment matter very deeply.

What I understood him to be saying in a nutshell is that the pericope of many of the text we preach from is awkward, inappropriate to the text, doesn't take other textual connections into account, and can generally skew the whole story. In using the story of Jacob and Esau, he asked several times, "If the story stopped here, what would that tell us about God? Does it get at the fullness of God?" Most of the time, at the traditional text breaks, it didn't.

Though he didn't seem to flesh out a really good method for handling setting the pericope, he did encourage using the "fullness of the story," which for him meant "sticking with it to the point of encountering the economy of grace." In terms of the language we've been using in my preaching class, where is the celebration in the text? He asked the following questions of the text:

• Where is God revealed in the story?
• What are the marks of God in the story?
• And did you get to the economy of grace?

To me, this way of engaging the Scripture makes complete sense and actually seems to dovetail with the work the folks doing Narrative Lectionary are doing. It also connects to the continued emphasis on biblical imagination in preaching that Brueggemann, Bell, Florence, and others are all lifting up as well. 

To be honest, I feel really freed up by all of this. As an individual who really only has a few years of getting to know the biblical text under her belt, I often leaned on the Revised Common Lectionary on a week-to-week basis. But it felt like such an unnatural and jerky way of working to me. I hadn't realized how much of my engagement with Scripture was shaped by the RCL, but it has been. Through my own personal practice of lectio divina and Bible study, as well as my school work in biblical studies, some of this is alleviated, but I can still see how much my understanding of the scope of a biblical story is influenced by the RCL. 

To leave that behind, to be able to really dig into a story in a way that is imaginative and generative feels much more thrilling than feeling like I'm researching for the sake of finding some kind of "right answer." Widening the scope, looking at the Bible as space and not plot is so helpful in engaging this way. To throw in preaching terms, I feel like this is a much more helpful way of distinguishing homiletical exegesis from academic exegesis. And it only feels natural that digging for the gracious truth in any text is going to include different parts of the story than if you're just trying to get the main plot points in.

Preaching Lessons: Jesse the Former Satanist in a Minneapolis Bar after Midnight

Being out of town for the first time on my own since having my daughter, I'm taking advantage a bit of having my evenings free. And so, last evening found myself and my classmates at a great joint a college friend recommended called Donnie Dirk's Zombie Den, which was an awesome place with awesome people, and awesome house-infused liquors. Go there if you are in Minneapolis. You may have to use your phone GPS to help your cabbie get there, but it is worth it. A fun time was had by all, but when we returned to the hotel, I wasn't quite ready for bed. And so, my friend Paul and I made our way to the British pub around the corner for a pint and some more conversation.

It was here that I befriended Jesse and his friend Craig. If I'm being honest, I'll tell you that I approached Jesse to bum a cigarette. He said he'd be happy to give me one in exchange for a joke. Because it was the best joke I could think of, I told him I was a seminarian, a person studying to enter vocational ministry. He laughed, too, but then said, "Actually, we're Christians, too! We don't go to church, but we love Jesus." He then showed me his "Saved by Grace" tattoo on his forearm, and a friendship was born. Paul and I joined their table, and the next hour of conversation was some of the best, most probing theological conversation I've had in a while. (Of note: they asked how old I was, and when I told them, they seemed genuinely excited. "You just don't see many people our age going into ministry," Jesse said. "That's awesome.")

Jesse shared his story of having been a Satanist, of having worshiped Satan for years. And of coming to a point in his life when he realized grace was more powerful than any force out there...but that he would have to step into that stream. We talked about pluralism, about love, about monogamy, about salvation, about suicide and patricide, about all our homicidal tendencies, really, and we talked about God's love poured out in the person of Jesus Christ. We talked about mystery. And we talked about parenthood. We talked about the Bible, and Jesse could quote it like nobody's business. Far better than me.

His friend Craig was more reserved, more willing to let Jesse use up most of the word count, but when asked a question, he shared such insightful, thoughtful answers. He and I became Facebook friends before the night was through, and I think a more longer-term friendship may unfold from there.

But as the night wound up, Paul and I walked home. And I said, "Jesse preached. Just as well as the rest of them." We agreed, we had encountered something special, something sacred in that pub.

But I also felt like I brought my preaching self to the table, too. Though I wasn't the only one talking, I think it was more of creating this space where we could all ask questions and think out loud. And could that be preaching? Not trying to give the answers, but at sitting at the table our literal or remembered Bibles open before us, teasing things out, knowing at the end of the night you might not have THE answer, but that the conversation will have had some saving effect anyway.

I wrote in my oral examination reflection that in many ways, I don't feel like I've found my field to preach in yet. My Wesleyan roots ground me in a tradition that values preaching outside of the church an of experiencing the Word in conversation. And as we walked home that night, I had the same feeling I've had after a good day of preaching: not of certainty that what I said was heard and integrated, but of certainty that each of us was walking away with a sense of God's truth that we hadn't had previously. Pretty awesome.

Festival of Homiletics: Wednesday Impressions

This day was so full, I'm only just sitting down on Thursday afternoon to put together my thoughts. In general, I'm just a very grateful person to have been present in spaces where I could encounter God in unexpected ways--in surprisingly beautiful lunchtime sharings, in worship, in a zombie bar, on the walk home.

A few of my classmates gathered for supper in the hotel bar and decompressed on our day. We talked about our excitements from this week--the things we are hearing that make us feel hopeful, that are shaping our understanding of the preaching task, that open us up to new ways of engaging Scripture, and of approaching the sermon. And we also discussed the things that have been difficult, that we're wrestling with, and with the things that we aren't quite sure what to do with yet. And I'm noticing our conversations are affecting the conversations of others--with Eden alums who gather with us during breaks, with clergy we share meals with, with people who overhear. We are critically engaging the experience in a way that I think a lot of people here are longing to do, but either don't have the community or tools to do. Anyway...that was my Go Eden! moment of the post.

I want to give myself a bit of space to talk here about racial diversity at the Festival. As one of my classmates put it, "There is an awful lot of salt, and not much pepper." Actually, we observed that our class alone contributes to at least a 100% increase in the number of people of color in attendance. Beyond that, a significant portion of the time spent worshiping and hearing preachers is couched in a liturgical setting that is largely WASP-y. It's interesting to see how aware of this we are because of our experiences of other traditions and practices as we engage in our studies at Eden. We are noticing the null curricula because it's not a null curricula where we study. There are a couple of things I want to use this space to begin to consider:

• While most of the preachers are acknowledging issues of racism and systematic oppression, I find it interesting that much of this engagement isn't more than a tip of the cap to it. There are some amazing people of color who are preaching and lecturing, and so part of me wonders if the unspoken assumption is that the preachers who are people of color will "deal with" that in their time or if it's a discomfort with offering a perspective when it is not one's own culture. Can a white, female preacher preach about race issues? Should she? (I think the answer is yes, with great humility and care.) And actually, I'm beginning to feel like the tip of the cap is actually a way to acknowledge without really acknowledging: "I know this is a problem, but I don't know what to say about it." Actually, there are a number of issues we've been dancing around in this same way: homosexuality, gender identification, young people in the church, the reality of pluralism. Now, I know that this isn't a Festival on Social Justice, so not every message is going to deal expertly with these things. But not dealing with them at all doesn't work either.
• I'm also noticing an approach to preaching that really gives a lot of power to the congregation--that seems to be molded around an assumption of middle-class white privilege. And looking out at the congregation, I can understand that. You are preaching to a particular people. I think it was in observing Otis Moss III's lecture that I most acutely saw this--parts of his lecture were from texts or sermons of his I had encountered before. But what was interesting is that so much of the delivery was altered, packaged in a way that seemed more palatable for those gathered. This isn't a critique of Moss, but is an issue I'm having with the conference in general. So much of the messages we are hearing are calling us to prophetic preaching in one way or another, preaching that isn't saccharine-sweet, but that sticks its hands right into the rawness of the biblical text and our lives.  
• So, then...shouldn't our form follow our content? Shouldn't our delivery be raw and authentic in a way that allows for the fullness of the preacher and the preacher's message to be preached? Or should we deliver things in a package that's easily recognizable. The answer is probably both. But the two preachers who I felt simply preached the message that God had laid on their hearts exactly as they would preach it to anyone were Yvette Flunder and Peter Rollins. Both definitely have a subversive edge, but even in their fullness of their subversive messages, they were accessible because they were speaking the truth. I think that truth transcends. I think that truth is what Yvette called speaking in tongues. I think that truth is what all of us want to do and are very afraid to. Because it requires a lot of work and a lot of honest with ourselves. But I, for one, want to do that work.

Preaching Lessons: The Narrative Lectionary

The session on the Narrative Lectionary was more of  sales pitch than anything. And I had to sit outside of the room for this session, as there was a massive overflow of people present. So, I'm just going to link the website where you can get lots more information and resources: www.narrativelectionary.org. For me, narrative lectionary makes so much sense. Mostly because the Revised Common Lectionary makes no sense to me, and I like having a structure to work within when I preach.

But here were a couple of tips gleaned from the session:

• If you're going to use the Narrative Lectionary, give your congregation warning and buy-in. Don't just change over. Tell them why you are going to do it and what you hope the entire church will get out of it by doing so. Then, when you finish the program year, give them the chance to share about their experiences and learnings. 
• If you can't or don't want to start in September, a good time to pick it up is after Christmas, when you're already moving into the New Testament readings anyway. It can make for a smoother transition.

There was also a really great metaphor for preaching--Legos. Legos used to be a free-form toy, where imagination and invention were the keys and legos were just the means of getting there. Now, many Lego sets come with directions and instructions for building specific forms. In preaching, we don't want to be telling people what to build. Instead, we want to give them the tools to be able to connect the biblical text to their own lives and to announce the hope that is present in the text. From there, people make their own connections in a living, breathing faith.