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).