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: 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: 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.

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: Lillian Daniel

I hit up Lillian Daniel's sermon this morning. Her message--Noah's Ark--dealt with Genesis 6:1-9:16. I'm not going to spend much time discussing her sermon here (but I'll include a picture of my notes). For my preaching formation, there are two things I would like to emulate:

• Daniel did an excellent job of dealing with the genre of the text. She handled its mythic nature by taking it so seriously it revealed the absurdity in doing so. She reached to other creation stories to help guide us through this assertion (namely, Adam and Eve), and then fleshed out what the metaphorical implications for the story are for her in this engagement of the text. Nicely done. 
• I'm chewing on her question of whether Adam and Eve were kicked out or released from Eden and whether Noah and the Arkers (that would be an amazing band name) were free or stranded. She said, "There is no roadmap for how to be righteous. The Kingdom of God is within you. Paradise misplaced and paradise found. It's all in perception." For me, this connected to Anna Carter Florence's comments about sacramental vision. 

You guys, I talk with my hands a lot.
Here's me flapping them at Lillian Daniel.

What I really want to talk about, though, was Daniel's lecture, "Who's Asking? (Are We Answering Questions that Nobody's Asking)." It's helpful to know that Daniel is the author of the book When Spiritual but Not Religious Isn't Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church. And I am thanking God for the work she is doing. Today, she took us on a survey of preaching in America to understand just how we got to the point of church irrelevance (because to many, it is). For most of the lecture, I just sat nodding, so grateful that somebody was putting words to my experience, that someone on the inside was able to tell all the church people, in their language, exactly what was up. Here are a few things I'd like to pass on:

• The beautiful thing about pastoring a church now is that when a pastor looks out at the congregation, she sees people who actually want to be there. In his way, church shopping isn't a negative. It's a way of people making informed decisions about their faith life. And isn't that what we want?
• She lifts up the liberating effect of having people who feel that they can mark the "None" box on the religious affiliation form. We don't want people coming to church because they have to in order to vote, in order to make business connections, in order to fit in.
• She shifts the language of liberal and conserving traditions to one of open-mindedness and fundamenlism or literalism. I think this is helpful and a more accurate description of how different traditions handle Scriptural authority, encountering the Other, and a whole host of things.
• She outlined how open-minded churches have tended to market themselves in three ways, none of which matter to people who are nominally or non-religious:
• Through their activities
• Through opposition (Well, I'll tell you what we're not...)
• And through saying we are an alternative to fundamentalism/literalism. 
• She outlines non-religious people as generally falling into four main categories:
• No Ways--These people have been hurt by the church. Deeply. And actively avoid or are in conflict with the church in many ways.
• Not Latelys--These people have experience of church, but drifted away and didn't feel anything lacking after they left.
• Never Haves. These are individuals who have just never experienced church.
• Not Yets.--These are people who have never experienced church, but who are open and curious. 
• What matters to these people? Answering the question: Why does it matter to you that you follow Jesus?
• As preachers, this means actually seeking to answer this question week-in and week-out when instead we are often trying to answer questions posed by seminary professors, by our culture, or even by arguing with the pastor down the street who has different doctrinal stances than you. She urges us to stop preaching answers to questions that nobody is asking, and instead to look to Scripture to help us wrestle with the question of why following Jesus matters to us.
• And she argues that inevitably, this wrestling leads us to inclusivity, of wonder, of openness to God's movement in our lives and in the lives of people of different faiths (or no faith). So yeah. It matters.

Afterward, I went to meet Daniels and to thank her for her work. I told her that I was a "Not Yet" who has experienced a call to ministry. And then, I teared up. Being a former "Not Yet" in a church world that is still asking you to preach answers to irrelevant questions is hard. And I told her so. And I told her that I was grateful for her work because it helped those inside the church already understand how not to put the Not Yet leaders like me who have found a life-giving faith in Christianity into an irrelevant box that doesn't fit. Daniels was gracious and humble, but I hope she heard how important the work she is doing in making room for new leadership in the church. Because making room for them in the pews is one thing; letting them lead is another...and is an experience that I think will define the next era of Christianity in America...but not without a lot of growing pains. 

Preaching Lessons: Barbara Brown Taylor and MaryAnn McKibben Dana

In a dialogue and Q&A session, BBT and MAKD discussed parts of their writing work and their own engagement of the preaching task. I'm posting a picture of my full notes below, but I do want to make comments on a few points.

• Language: In so many ways, language and its revision has come up in sessions today. I also mentioned it in my discussion of some of Willimon's work. I think as a person who grew up unchurched, I understand not the simple discomfort with "churchy language," but its misappropriation and misconstrual in popular media. What I think "sin" is is likely not what your average unchurched person thinks I think it is. I think one of my areas of strength in ministry is my ability to write, speak, preach, and pray in a vernacular that is sacred and yet accessible. I'm struggling some with a tension I feel from the generation above me in changing some of this language. BBT said something really excellent, though, "Revising our language completely can be dangerous. Sure, it's accessible, but any time we open the Bible, there is the language again. We have to deal with it." I agree with her sentiment that Bible paraphrases don't deal well with the problem, I also think that with translations like the CEB becoming more common (ha!), there are ways our language might change without abandoning sacredness. But still...it's something I'm chewing on.

• MAKD on the Need To Knows for new preachers: 
• There is nothing more interesting than the biblical text. No illustration. No story. Nothing.
• Using Evernote has enabled her to organize her preaching thoughts so much better.
• Not every meal you make is a 4-course masterpiece; a modest meal can also feed those present. (So, stop being a perfectionist preacher already, Chelsey.)

• In the emergent church, the role of the pastor and the preaching task seem to be breaking open. It's an exciting time in which there seems to be a lot of opportunity to step outside of the standard 15-20 minute sermon box and to lean into the strengths of the preacher. Congregations are open to this. But BBT also shared that she thinks the preacher's role will always be as a "designated person among the community who speaks the truth of what is life-giving, meaningful, and will bear weight in a way that enables the gathered community to nod and say, 'Yes.'" Seems simplified, but I'm digging the image.

Heard the Word: Rev. David Lose Festival Of Homiletics 2014

David Lose looks quite pleased with himself.

Monday, May 19, 2014--6:30pm
"Singing Songs Old and New"
Ephesians 5: 15-20

Full disclosure: It took us like 25 minutes to walk the 3 blocks between our hotel and Central Lutheran Church because our little group of six is terrible at maps. When we walked into the church, worship had already started. We registered, then took our seats a few minutes into the sermon. So...maybe I missed some key parts. Keep that in mind as you read on.

Shortly after sliding into my seat, Lose began to talk about the phenomenon of hearing a song on the radio--a song one hadn't heard in years--and upon hearing it, being able to recall every word. At this, he launched into the chorus of "American Pie," with the 1,800 person congregation joining him. At the conclusion of the chorus, the assembly seemed genuinely amazed by the experience, and I sat stunned. These are not my people, I thought.

As Lose continued, he did talk about song having different functions--of building comradery, of helping to pass the long, difficult hours in certain dark periods of life, of uniting, of teaching the faith. He continued on in this vein for a while, fleshing out several examples, making some tidy connections. And as he concluded, he challenged those assembled to imagine a world without song. And then he asked us to imagine if the congregation would lead the world in song. And then we proceeded to BUTCHER "Amazing Grace" in a way I have never experienced...and I have sung "Amazing Grace" with a room full of people with advanced dementia.

As you can probably tell, this message bothered me. Deeply. I mean, it was all very nice. It was all very sweet. But come on! Music is so much more than nice and sweet! Maybe it's my reading of Moss informing my thoughts here, but music is so much more than what he's even touching on. And what Paul is calling the Ephesians to in this letter is so much more than nice and sweet hymn-sings. Music can be a weapon, subversion, unifying, sanctifying. I was waiting for the thunder of this message and only got a light mist, reminiscent of the drizzle falling as we walked to the church.

Even more than the surface nature of the message, I was bothered by the...well...the churchy-ness of it all. It felt like church people talking about and enjoying how great it is to be church people and how great it is to sing church songs. Which is wonderful. If you are a church person. I picked up on church music quickly because I love music and because one space I could regularly make music was in church. But your average unchurched millenial isn't going to walk in off the street knowing the verses to "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." Sorry, Luther. So, what then? In Lose's imagined congregation leading the world in song, what song are they singing? And would anyone else know the words?

I was also bothered by the smallness of the vision. It seemed in Lose's final vision that he was asking the world to join in one song, blending in harmony as they sang the words. But what hymnal would the world be using (because it was made clear it would be from a hymnal)? What version? What tempo? What language would the words be in? This is a long-winded way of saying that what I heard in this message was a vision of the world that doesn't actually take a pluralistic, multicultural, varied, beautiful, diverse world seriously. And that bothers me. Deeply.

Music? Yes. But singing the old songs because that's all you know? No. Definitely not.

Reading Up: Hip Hop Pastor as Postmodern Prophet

At first, I thought this reading was going to be insanely dated. When I pick up a book called titled The

Rev. Otis Moss III preaching it up.

Gospel Remix: Reaching the Hip Hop Generation that was written in 2007, I'm automatically skeptical. Most cultural critics I've encountered consider the "hip hop generation" to be a pretty broad term for African Americans born after the Civil Rights Movement. And with hip hop's roots in the 1980s, it's a genre that's been recognized in pop culture for over 30 years. As early as 2006, cultural critics were writing that African American youth coming of age at the turn of the millennium were better understood to be a "post hip hop generation." So, in reaching Rev. Otis Moss III's chapter, "The Hip Hop Pastor as Postmodern Prophet," I was unsure what to expect. Was it going to be dated advice already? Praise God, it's not.

Moss does a good job of contrasting "soul culture"--the culture out of which artists like Rev. Al Green, Jackie Wilson, and Aretha Franklin emerged--and "hip hop culture." For Moss, hip hop culture has prophetic roots in its cultural critique, but has since been co-opted by mainstream America as just another cultural product. Moss sketches a vision of hip hop at its best--a prophetic word against forces of oppression, domination, and injustice with a voice and sound deeply rooted in African and African American experience and tradition. In fact, Moss sketches the same vision for the church, in this way articulating that the co-opting of hip hop is no different than the co-opting of church that has happened over the course of the last few decades. Rather than functioning as cultural critics, Moss sees both hip hop and the church functioning as cultural products. He calls the church to adopt the spirit of hip hop to recover its unique voice in a world that sounds like the same old stuff.

By the end of this, I realized that Moss' critique could be applied to any counter-cultural movement in any tradition, be it punk rock, indie rock, folk, Americana, etc. His critique didn't just speak to the African American church experience, but to the American church experience. 

Some favorite quotes:

• "The strength of the church--particularly the black church--when rooted in a liberation ethic is revolutionary transformation through Christ. The church is one of the only places where the people are forced to struggle together in community and come to grips with the message of a Savior who demands not personal salvation but community trasnformation" (118).
• "African American faith has always wrapped its worship experience in the existential and eschatological. In other words, we have always worshiped with one foot in the soil of our present pain and another foot in our future hope" (124).
• "...African American children and adults are bombarded with images that perpetuate ungodly, racist, and destructive stereotypes. The church should be a place where children of color see themselves in a positive light. It is critical that the church place symbols, artifacts, and photographs that show African people as a part of the ancient biblical world. Christ should never be depicted as a European in a black church but at least Afro-Asicatic! His disciples should be viewed in a variety of dark and light hues reflective of the ancient world they occupied" (126).
• "We must be clear on this: the hip hop generation sees people with passion and conviction all the time...The church, beyond all others, has someone named Christ to be passionate about, but many of our traditional churches have lost all sense of passion. Only when passion is rekindled can celebration truly take place" (127-8).
• "Music in the church context, though it has the high calling to illuminate Christ, also is trapped by the cultural memory of the congregation. When a person says, "I don't like that song," he or she is really saying, "That song invokes no memory for me."...The clash between generations is as much about new and old memories as it is about methodology." (130).
• Music done well with the ethic of inspiration demands that we use what will undergird the Word, regardless of style (130).
• Moss' Post-Soul Tests scattered throughout the chapter are really excellent ways to frame questions about one's church culture.