Heard the Word: Anna Carter Florence

When Anna Carter Florence came to Eden for Opening Convocation in fall 2013, I sat next to her at the post-Chapel picnic as my then-nine month old daughter attempted to grasp baked beans off of my plate. She was gracious and interested in my daughter, in my experience of seminary as a mother, and of engaging the conversation around her. Since reading Preaching as Testimony for preaching class this last semester, I feel further in love, and so I was looking forward to hearing what she had to say today.

Technically, this was a lecture, but I'm still going to categorize it as sermon. Her work came out of her challenge to herself and her students to live in "A Parable Universe" (incidentally, this was the title of her lecture)--a universe in which one lives in and actually expects to collide constantly with flashes of insight that can only be glimpses of the kingdom of heaven in the here and now. ACF operates with the idea that the kingdom of God is constantly interrupts and itself into the here and now. I think I'd take the approach that the kingdom of God is always available, always there, and when we are startled by it, it's not because it's just now shown up...it's because we've just now been able to perceive it.

And so, her lecture introduced the idea that parables actually happen all the time, all around us, and as preachers, our job is to look for them and to find the words to describe them to others. I. Love. This.

Now, ACF could have left it there. She could have handed us this lovely method for sermon preparation, for living the preaching life, and then dropped the mic. But she didn't. Instead, she expertly dug into Matthew 4: 12-25, acting as professor of preaching to Jesus' first sermons. She says that Jesus' first sermon sounds a lot like his preaching mentor, John's--Repent! For the Kingdom of God is near! But, she says...he doesn't just stay there. He looks around. He lives in Capuernaum, and actually lives there. He listens. He learns. He gets to know the peoples' language, their plight, their vernacular and their lives so that when he preaches his next sermon, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people," his message is much more his own. And she goes on to illustrate how Jesus mastery of parable is what makes him so easy to understand. His preaching is made up of the stuff of gossip, of town concerns, of worry, of fretting, of beautiful moments, and of tough times. Jesus sees the opportunity for parable all around, and so he speaks them. (Context matters, it seems.)

For Jesus and for us, parables are a way of putting words to how people have been seeing the Kingdom of God all along. They know how to do it already. The preaching task, then, is to have the observational clout and the guts to point it out.

I'd be leaving out something if I didn't mention how at ease ACF's presence is. While she wasn't preaching, she still gave me the sense that there is something stripped away about her--something raw and no-nonsense, something genuinely interested in the deeper thing happening in whatever is happening. What would it mean to be so keenly aware the something deeper in the preaching moment? What would it mean to walk to the pulpit with that in the absolute front of your mind--the expectation that the moment in itself is a parable? Because for me, the Kingdom of God is like listening to a female preacher tell the story of God's Kingdom here and now.

And so, I wonder if there was a parable in our prior meeting: That the Kingdom of God looks like a community gathered for lunch after church. A lunch in which, among others, an infant and her mother and a celebrated preacher all sit together and observe what a wonderful, beautiful thing it is to watch an infant try to grasp a baked bean, chubby fists chasing it across the table in the midst of a smiling atmosphere that drinks in this realm of God.