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.