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.

Preaching Lessons: John Bell Part II

When I read that Bell's lecture was on "Hidden Women in Holy Scripture," I knew I wanted to attend. Not only would I be enjoying the lovely ringing of his Scottish accent, but I would be hearing about something so often overlooked in preaching that I find myself desperate for it: taking up the female in the Bible.

Bell began his lecture by acknowledging the power of the male reading of the Bible in its shaping of how we read it now. The male gaze tends to overlook the female, to under-read her, to skip over her contributions to the story in ways that are unfaithful to the fullness of the Biblical witness. I'm kind of glossing over this point because it's one that I already understand, but if this is coming as a novel concept to you, leave a comment, and I'd be happy to chat with you about it.

Mostly, the lecture was John taking up stories of women in the Bible and reading them imaginatively and with value. For example, he read the parable of the lost coin as just as strong a witness as the parable of the prodigal son. Why hadn't he seen God there before, he wondered aloud. He read the story of the Samaritan woman at the well with such imagination: he saw her as a woman who was outgoing and vibrant, who was persuasive and outgoing, and who had these gifts redirected in her encounter with Jesus. It was a pleasure to listen to, really.

The best part of the lecture was the handout he gave with a breakdown of Biblical women, their appearance in the Testaments, and how they were treated by the text (Protester, Deliverer, Sexual Intrigue, Victim of Male Cruelty, Honored by God). It is a fantastic resource for preachers who would like to dig further into stories that don't come to light all that often, or for engaging familiar stories from a different vantage point. I'll plan to post a link to this sheet here sometime in the near future.

Here's a link to a PDF of that handout. Feel free to save and use!

After the lecture, a group of us from Eden approached John for a photo. But I also needed to ask him a question. At the beginning of his lecture, he acknowledged his male gaze, but he also spent a long time discussing how males and females read the Bible differently. I didn't want to categorically take his remarks as still being sexist despite their awareness of the male gaze, and so I approached him about it. I said, "I have a sincere question. Do you really think that men and women read the Bible differently?" He answered yes, that he thought that there were different sensibilities brought to it. I asked a further question about how he thought cultural conditioning might just be a part of this, and he acknowledged that it could. I thanked him for adding that nuance and left it at that.

When I looked around the room, I noticed that the majority of people in the session were women. Listening to a man tell us about women in the Bible. Now if Bell's assertion was right, that men and women read the Bible differently, then what exactly could he tell a group of women about women in the Bible, since we've been reading it as women the whole time? I'm being ridiculous to make a point. Bell's assumption that men and women read the Bible differently assumes a culture that conditions us differently. The reason his reading of these stories is novel to us is because we, as women, also live in a culture that has conditioned us to gloss over these stories, not to preach these stores, not to know what to do with them. Just because we are women does not mean that we have eyes to see.

By upholding the false dualism of the male and female gender, Bell not only excludes anyone who considers themselves to fall outside of those two poles, but also assumes a greater democracy in ways of knowing than is fair. More than his maleness clouding his ability to see these stories, it is his conditioning in maleness that does so. And he forgets that women are often conditioned in the exact same way. This is a long way of saying that yes, a man and a woman might read Scripture differently. But so might a woman and another woman, a man and another man, a woman and a transgender person, a man and a boy, a woman and a girl. What Bell illustrated well is that when you begin to value differences in reading, the possibilities for revelation in the Biblical text absolutely explode. But his binary understanding of that reading actually do more to reduce it than to explode it further.

Preaching Lessons: Brian McLaren Part I

I attended both of Brian McLaren's sessions this morning and decided to go ahead and just write about both of them in one space. Partly because it's convenient, and partly because I don't think his sermon was really a sermon. So. On to Part I.

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own" 

McLaren's sermon was more of a show-and-tell than it was preaching for me. That said, what he was showing was absolutely worth hearing.

McLaren is working on gaining a better grasp of the Bible. In his second session, he talked about how he is beginning to understand the Bible as "story space, not a story line." The space within the stories for imagination, new understanding, and new readings is what McLaren holds to be important about the text. His book due out later this year deals with this.

But in the message, he used the story of Jacob and Esau to show how important framing of stories is for preaching and sharing the Word. Especially as we will be preaching more and more to communities who aren't familiar with the Bible. McLaren reminded us, "Stories frame us as being a hostile or hospitable community." And it's true. Our stories make up who we are and how we understand ourselves. And so, the stories we present in the preaching moment matter very deeply.

What I understood him to be saying in a nutshell is that the pericope of many of the text we preach from is awkward, inappropriate to the text, doesn't take other textual connections into account, and can generally skew the whole story. In using the story of Jacob and Esau, he asked several times, "If the story stopped here, what would that tell us about God? Does it get at the fullness of God?" Most of the time, at the traditional text breaks, it didn't.

Though he didn't seem to flesh out a really good method for handling setting the pericope, he did encourage using the "fullness of the story," which for him meant "sticking with it to the point of encountering the economy of grace." In terms of the language we've been using in my preaching class, where is the celebration in the text? He asked the following questions of the text:

• Where is God revealed in the story?
• What are the marks of God in the story?
• And did you get to the economy of grace?

To me, this way of engaging the Scripture makes complete sense and actually seems to dovetail with the work the folks doing Narrative Lectionary are doing. It also connects to the continued emphasis on biblical imagination in preaching that Brueggemann, Bell, Florence, and others are all lifting up as well. 

To be honest, I feel really freed up by all of this. As an individual who really only has a few years of getting to know the biblical text under her belt, I often leaned on the Revised Common Lectionary on a week-to-week basis. But it felt like such an unnatural and jerky way of working to me. I hadn't realized how much of my engagement with Scripture was shaped by the RCL, but it has been. Through my own personal practice of lectio divina and Bible study, as well as my school work in biblical studies, some of this is alleviated, but I can still see how much my understanding of the scope of a biblical story is influenced by the RCL. 

To leave that behind, to be able to really dig into a story in a way that is imaginative and generative feels much more thrilling than feeling like I'm researching for the sake of finding some kind of "right answer." Widening the scope, looking at the Bible as space and not plot is so helpful in engaging this way. To throw in preaching terms, I feel like this is a much more helpful way of distinguishing homiletical exegesis from academic exegesis. And it only feels natural that digging for the gracious truth in any text is going to include different parts of the story than if you're just trying to get the main plot points in.