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.