Unwinding

So. It is July. Eleven Sundays have come and gone since I was a weekly preacher. About seven weeks have passed since I wrote anything about the practice of preaching. And I'm going to be honest--it feels good.

It feels good not to be under the gun right now, not be constantly checking the status of that 168 hour countdown that a weekly preacher does, not to be desperately trying to squeeze something, anything out of that lectionary passage this week. There are a few reasons for this, some complicated, some not so complicated, but I think it's fair to classify all of them under the "I Was Burned Out" category. So, I decided to become un-burned out by letting go of weekly preaching.

A few weeks ago, though, I was invited to preach at a mentor's church when she had to go out of town. It was an easy gig--all I had to do was show up with a sermon and preach it. No prayer-writing, no music-picking, no children-sermon winging, just focusing on the Scripture (which was requested to be from the lectionary...easy-peasy). And so, I worked on the text, touched base with the worship leaders, liaised with the pastor to make sure my direction would jive with her preaching and the congregation's experience. It was a smooth, leisurely experience of sermon prep. Until about 18 hours before I would be preaching when I actually sat down to write.

This has always been a problem for me: a 18-paper is due on Monday morning? I'll research it for a few weeks, then write the whole thing the Sunday evening before it's due. My 500 words on the city council meeting is due at midnight? I'll sit down to write at 11:03pm. My sermon is to be preached at 9:30am? Saturday at 5pm seems as good a time as any to be writing.

It's not that I don't prepare...I spend weeks researching, mulling over, and conversing. But when it comes time to sit down and actually write? I'm terrified. I just can't get myself to do it. Or, at least that's what I thought.

Now, when I do sermon prep, I count on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. A mundane chore becomes a sermon illustration? Spirit. I stumble upon research that delves into the exact word I have been wrestling with and it's not 35 years old? Spirit. But for some reason, I was surprised to find the Spirit show up when I was procrastinating from actually writing the sermon. But it did, in the form of a link on social media to a post by Kate Baer. "When You Are Tightly Wound," was the title, and so obviously, I clicked on it. Because, have you met me? Tightly wound is a pretty accurate description of my resting state.

I read the article, but more importantly, I actually heard it. (Thank you, Spirit.) And so, at 4pm on the Saturday before preaching, I actually took 5 minutes to unwind. At that moment, it meant closing my eyes and sitting in my own silence, imagining a bubble of calm surrounding me in the busy coffee shop I had parked myself in. I listened to myself. I released my anxiety about the message. And then, when the 5 minutes was up, I wrote the 2500 word sermon in about an hour.

I'm not saying that every experience of sermon writing is going to pop out that easily, that all the words will be waiting there like apples to be plucked off the tree. But I did realize that I often tried to wedge my writing time into spaces that didn't allow for me to unwind. And it was impossible to allow the Spirit to speak when I was still reverberating from a bedtime battle with my toddler, or the discussion in class about pneumatology. It wouldn't speak if I was counting down the minutes to the next meeing, next class, next place I needed to rush off to.

So, I'm working on the art of unwinding.  I think part of my unwinding process is not preaching every week for now, which makes it easier to swallow. But I'm also learning how to unwind in smaller ways, in simple ways, in ways that keep me lose and half-listening, ready at any moment to catch the whisper of the Spirit I know is there, that I know is waiting to be preached.

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: 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).

Reading Up: The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor (or BBT as I like to call her now that we're BFF) has a real knack for saying what she's saying without saying it. Or, as my short story teacher called it, showing instead of telling. Perhaps because of the title of this book, I was expecting something a bit more prescriptive, but with BBT, prescriptive is never even on the menu (see 36).

But the closest she gets is in her chapter entitled, "Preaching." The chapters before have all been leading up to the vision of the preaching life, task, and moment that she presents here, so the concept in all its fullness isn't foreign at all, but seems an obvious extension of how she understands call, church, and the world. Most succinctly, BBT understands preaching to be a cooperative task between God, herself, and the community of faith--discount any of the three, and you have something that would be classified as other than preaching in BBT's book (ha!), I think.

The accumulated effect of her conversation about life, call, church, the world, and preaching is a sketch of the pastor as careful observer of the world and lives that God loves so, so dearly. And she is also the bearer of a difficult but good news that is not so easy to deliver or to receive if you're doing it honestly. It strikes me that BBT is so effective because she is so adept in that art of indirect speech Rollins emphasized. Though, I will say more in a moment about when that speech goes silent.

When I was in college, I majored in English and sociology. When people asked me what I was going to do with that, I would laughingly tell them, "I'm going to watch people, then write about it." At the time, I hadn't encountered the Gospel--at least not in any meaningful sense of the word 'encounter.' And so, as my vocation has become a bit more clear and as my faith has deepened and begun to truly shape my life, I would probably now say that I'm going to watch the world, listen for the Word, and then write about that.

The second half of The Preaching Life appears to be a collection of sermons. And so, I'm moving through those a little slower than the first half, savoring them. But one thing I notice about them is the same thing I noticed about her sermon at the Festival of Homiletics--they don't really have endings. I mean, they end. That's true. But they don't feel finished. I told a classmate it felt like being invited over for a meal, encountering a lavishly set table, lifting the lids of still-simmering pots to smell the flavors to come, beginning to have a good conversation over a glass of win, then, at the moment when supper will finally be served, of having all the food packaged up in Tupperware and sent home with you to reheat and eat in front of the television.

I think I understand that BBT creates these scenes, sets them in front of the congregation, and begins the task of looking at them together, expecting the examination to continue after that particular moment of examination is over. This is a subtle art. And I admire subtlety a great deal. But in the preaching task, sometimes the Good News needs some additional help in being revealed. And this is where celebration makes all the difference.

In my first preaching class last semester, Dr. Grundy had us write the 3-minute ending of our sermons first, emphasizing celebration. For many of us, this was a new idea, one we had to learn from textbooks, and then from actually hearing some of our classmates who knew what they were doing do it. It felt uncomfortable, I'll admit, to be asked to add so much flesh and skin to the sermon, but it was effective. Very few of us left the assembly wondering how God might carry us forward into the next day with the message we had just received. And I think this is what's missing from BBT's endings--the understanding that God's hand is held out to us in that moment for us to grasp and walk into the new life waiting there for us. And that takes daring, dedication, and imagination all at once.

And so, here's my preaching goal: to be BBT with celebration. Not a shabby goal, I don't think.

Here are a sampling of the quotes I want to continue to bathe in:

• "God has given us good news in human form and has even given us the grace to proclaim it, but part of our terrible freedom is the freedom to lose our voices, to forget where we were going and why" (5).
• "Our job is to stand with one foot on earth and one in heaven, with the double vision that is the gift of faith, and to say out of our own experience that reality is not flat but deep, not opaque but transparent, not meaningless but shot full of grace for those with the least willingness to believe it is so" (13).
• "When God calls, people respond in a variety of ways. Some pursue ordination and others put pillows over their heads, but the vast majority seek to answer God by changing how they live their more or less ordinary lives" (27).
• "For me, to preach is first of all to immerse myself in the word of God, to look inside every sentence and underneath every phrase for the layers of meaning that have accumulated there over the centuries. It is to examine my own life and the life of the congregation with the same care, hunting the connection between the word on the page and the word at work in the world. It is to find my own words for bringing those connections to life, so that others can experience them for themselves. When that happens--when the act of preaching becomes a source of revelation for me as well as for those who listen to me--then the good news every sermon proclaims is that that God who acted is the God who acts, and that the Holy Spirit is alive and well in this world" (33).
• "Understood in this way, preaching becomes something the whole community participates in... If the preaching they hear is effective, it will not hand them sacks of wisdom and advice to take home and consume during the week, but invite them into the field to harvest those fruits for themselves, until they become preachers in their own right. Preaching is not something an ordained minister does for fifteen minutes on Sundays, but what the whole congregation does all week long; it is a way of approaching the world, and of gleaning God's presence there" (34).
• "The church's central task is an imaginative one" (41).
• "It is a matter of learning to see the world, each other, and ourselves as God sees us, and to live as if God's reality were the only one that mattered" (44).
• "The theological word for this experience is revelation, but the process, I believe, is imagination" (48).
• "My relationship with the Bible is not a romance but a marriage, and one I am willing to work on in all the usual ways: by living with the text day in and day out, by listening to it and talking back to it, by making sure I know what is behind the words it speaks to me and being certain I have heard it properly, by refusing to distance myself from the parts of it I do not like or understand, by letting my love for it show up in the everyday acts of my life. The Bible is not an object for me; it is a partner, whose presence blesses me, challenges me, and affects everything I do" (60).
• "A sermon, on the other hand, is an act of creation with real risk in it, as one foolhardy human being presumes to address both God and humankind, speaking to each on the other's behalf and praying to get out of the pulpit alive" (74).
• "When I say 'I' from the pulpit, I want them to say, 'Me too.'" (84).
• "This is one of the hardest and most rewarding aspects of the job. We do not make sermons out of air; our creations, poor or brilliant as they may be, are always variations on someone else's theme. The main melody is always a given, and even when we launch into our own bold improvisations we are limited to a scale of eight notes" (87).

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: John Bell

Here's the short version: Imagination is awesome. Let's use it.

"Imagination is not a bogus gift of the Holy Spirit, but is a primary attribute of God and a primary gift to the church."

Bell also fleshed out an understanding of children as models for discipleship, saying that Jesus lifted them up not because they were placid, docile, innocent things, but because they were curious, trusting, energetic, and imaginative people.

I'd hoped for a little more substance, but listening to John Bell speak is lovely no matter what. So, I'm not complaining.

But I think there's another theme here--that imagination, sacramental vision, and a willingness to engage the world in a way that is truthful without being necessarily logical is the absolute stuff of faith. And if it's the stuff of faith, it's the stuff of pastoral ministry and preaching. To walk in without imagination is to walk in without our most inherent and powerful tool for doing God's loving, healing, creative work here and now.

You know things are getting good when it's all starting to blur together.

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. 

In prayer this morning...

...I heard my own voice, my deepest, most self-filled voice, speak with such resonance, with such clarity, with such assurance and certainty that it startled me. I don't even remember what it said. But I recognized it as my own, as most essentially my own, and was grateful to have heard it. Because having heard it within myself, I know that there's the possibility of it passing though my lips one day. One day.

Festival of Homiletics: Tuesday Impressions

Tonight, our class gathered to reflect on our experiences thus far at the Festival. It was a good, honest

Church selifes in the balcony while waiting for more preaching.

dialogue about what the Festival is and is not, and I'm grateful to be able to have conversations about concerns about issue of race, class, gender, orientation, inclusivity, theology, and our own personal experiences at the Festival in a way that is open, honest, receptive, and generative. Go Eden.

Actually, there is a real, "Go Eden!" spirit about us. We are all walking around wearing our Eden Theological Seminary pins, calling out and greeting Eden alums we see, joking about and examining our Eden culture. When we are in the classroom and in the middle of it, it's hard to really pin down exactly what it means to be a part of the Eden community--we are diverse in so many ways. But here at the Festival, out of our norm, we're beginning to see what characterizes us, and I think we're all excited to see that our ability to dialogue on issues that most people avoid (including many of the preachers and leaders at the Festival) is one thing that holds us together. Go Eden!

It's been interesting to see how people at the conference interact, too. So many of the people I talk to seem desperate for community, so eager to talk, so ready to pour out their tales of ministry to me and to each other. There is a loneliness that I think is very real in pastoral ministry. But I also find it interesting that cliques exist here, too. I've already found that some people are just not here to connect, which I find so strange. Full disclosure: as an extreme extrovert, I have a hard time not understanding why the whole world doesn't want to be my friend, so there's that.

But today, I got in line for a book signing by Barbara Brown Taylor. I began talking to the man next to me in line, an ELCA pastor from Ohio named Logan. He mentioned how refreshing it is to feel in community in the preaching task. He lamented how so much of it felt isolated to him week in and week out. As we chatted, the woman behind us joined in. Lea is a pastor in the MCC in Florida. We didn't know it at the time, but the line to get to BBT would take 2 hours for us to get through. And if we had known, I don't know that we would have stayed. But I think a big part of the reason we did is because we suddenly found ourselves in excellent conversations about vocational ministry, about our lives and loved ones, about the state of the church, about pews and chairs, about the truth about being clergy, and about the grace of being clergy. We joked that if we didn't make it to BBT, we'd autograph each other's books and no one would be the wiser. By the time we got our books signed, we were friends, having agreed to pray for one another for the next month, exchanging business cards and hugs as we parted ways. It was a simple thing to strike up a conversation with these people, but it was also an affirmation of the fact that the preaching task is never intended to be one undertaken in isolation. 

Preaching is never--and should never be--a solo endeavor. Not only is preaching undertaken in community with the Trinity, but it is undertaken in conversation with each other. The support, care, encouragement, and honesty of fellow preachers is what makes preaching possible. So often, we think it's easier to do it all ourselves, to just lock ourselves away in a room with our studies and our blank Word document. But preaching is relational. But preaching is communal. Preaching is community.

I'm also noticing the layering of the messages at this event and the larger picture that's emerging from it. So many of the messages have been focused on the tension between a seeming duality that the preacher calls the audience into dialogue with instead: Brueggeman's vessels and contents; Anna Carter Florence's view of the realm of Caesar and the Realm of God; Barbara Brown Taylor's light and dark; and Otis Moss III's blues and gospel. In each, the preacher drew our attention to how our culture calls us to consider these things as a strict dualism: this or that. But they also pointed to the mandate by God to faithful people to consider them in dialogue, in tension, balancing each other, not negating each other. Dr. Grundy says that this is a function of their examination of preaching in a post-modern context. I also assume it's a part of the preaching task in general--always balancing a tension between platitude and sincerity, between easy and intangible truth. The preaching task isn't clear-cut. It requires a foolishness that is nonsensical in the world. But these preachers are calling us into deeper and deeper foolishness in order to be more faithful to the Word we are given to proclaim. Perhaps its the immanent end of Christendom, perhaps its post-modernity. Whatever it is, I think it might just be grace-filled.

Also, in chatting with classmates later in the hotel bar, I acknowledged my own prejudice. As someone who grew up unchurched, I find that I always walk into a gathering that's any kind of churchy feeling like an outsider, feeling like there is something there, some experience, some knowledge, some secret handshake that I am just not a part of. And that is a really uncomfortable and ungenerous place to be. Today, I was reading out of Ephesians, and the following verse spoke to this particular thorn, "You too heard the word of truth in Christ, which is the good news of your salvation. You were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit because you believed in Christ" (1: 13). Because I have heard the Word, there is no outsider. There is no Jew or Gentile. There is no unchurched and churched. There is only faithful. And how can I be faithful to this Word if I'm constantly looking outside my own experience for validation of it. I can only seek to be faithful to the Word I am given, both to proclaim and to live out in community. This is my challenge for the next few days here--to claim my place here, to try to work myself out of my "outsider" mentality, to begin to believe that these are my people.

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: Barbara Brown Taylor

Barbara Brown Taylor and students from Eden. Boom.

You can access the full-text of BBT's sermon here courtesy of Time.com.

It started of well. A hymn about darkness (Brian Wren's "Joyful is the Dark"). A vivid reading of Exodus 20: 18-21 and Luke 9: 32-36. The beginning of a sermon titled, "Inside the Dark Cloud of God." Taylor set out her preaching task early on--that while instead of preaching in the direction everyone was looking, that she instead was wandering from the crowd, looking in the opposite direction, and finding God in the darkness.

Taylor made clear that this was not some apophatic effort on her part. Rather, through Exodus 20, she digs into the idea that God IS dark. Dark like a cloud. And that dark is so, so much harder to look at, but so very formative to who we are as people of faith. She called us into a place where we wandered into the darkness, telling us that the darkness was not a place to pass through, but is actually God's home. This home is completely off-putting--we have no sense of control, of direction, of ability to use any of the tools and equipment we rely on in the light. Instead, we only have what we came in with, and the stark faith that we realize has only really taken us where we want to go anyway. The darkness, Taylor said, inspires us to hold out the broken pieces of ourselves to God and to say, "Here. Do what you want with these." It is place of true humility, true uncertainty, and true promise.

And then the sermon ended.

I wish I were kidding. As we rose and shared the responsive prayer ("A Prayer for Darkness in an Age of Glare" by Rod Jellema), I was confused. What just happened? I turned to my preaching professor who was sitting next to me and asked him, "What just happened?" He was uncertain as well. And as others filed out the door, I continued to ask myself and my classmates, "Seriously. What just happened?"

Because I had just started to step into the darkness of that cloud with Taylor. I had just begun to see how the resourcelessness, the darkness, and the loneliness might just be something where God could do some amazing work. And I was preparing to step in more fully. I was preparing to learn how the preacher might lead into that cloud. I was hoping to also find some grace in that cloud. But my expectations were left hanging, and I was left completely disoriented. Was she leaving us in the cloud to illustrate a point? Was she just pressed for time? Why didn't she deal at all with the Luke text? What is going on?

And so, after scribbling my notes, I went to make my way out of the sanctuary. And exiting at (nearly) the same time (I had to loiter just a few moments) was Barbara Brown Taylor herself. And I had to tell her. I had to stop her and say, "You know, I am completely disoriented by your message." And her response, "Well, you should be. It's not something that is preached on often. We don't talk about it." She went on to say that Scripture, Christian tradition, and our own experience all testify to the darkness, but that we still don't talk about it. And we need to. And that's when she laid it on me. "So, that's your job. You preach it so that it's not so disorienting in the future." Whoa. That was heavy. I mean, I still managed to smile for the photo, but whoa.

I still don't know about the message itself. Part of me is cynical enough to wonder a little bit about whether it was an excellent tease for her latest book. But part of me is feeling like the sense of unease I felt (and still feel) about that message is illustrative of the deeper truth of the thing--that darkness is disarming and uncertain, and you can't preach on it without experiencing a bit of it yourself. In any case, now I have to go read Learning to Walk in the Dark. Not such a horrible task, I suppose.

Heard the Word: Anna Carter Florence

When Anna Carter Florence came to Eden for Opening Convocation in fall 2013, I sat next to her at the post-Chapel picnic as my then-nine month old daughter attempted to grasp baked beans off of my plate. She was gracious and interested in my daughter, in my experience of seminary as a mother, and of engaging the conversation around her. Since reading Preaching as Testimony for preaching class this last semester, I feel further in love, and so I was looking forward to hearing what she had to say today.

Technically, this was a lecture, but I'm still going to categorize it as sermon. Her work came out of her challenge to herself and her students to live in "A Parable Universe" (incidentally, this was the title of her lecture)--a universe in which one lives in and actually expects to collide constantly with flashes of insight that can only be glimpses of the kingdom of heaven in the here and now. ACF operates with the idea that the kingdom of God is constantly interrupts and itself into the here and now. I think I'd take the approach that the kingdom of God is always available, always there, and when we are startled by it, it's not because it's just now shown up...it's because we've just now been able to perceive it.

And so, her lecture introduced the idea that parables actually happen all the time, all around us, and as preachers, our job is to look for them and to find the words to describe them to others. I. Love. This.

Now, ACF could have left it there. She could have handed us this lovely method for sermon preparation, for living the preaching life, and then dropped the mic. But she didn't. Instead, she expertly dug into Matthew 4: 12-25, acting as professor of preaching to Jesus' first sermons. She says that Jesus' first sermon sounds a lot like his preaching mentor, John's--Repent! For the Kingdom of God is near! But, she says...he doesn't just stay there. He looks around. He lives in Capuernaum, and actually lives there. He listens. He learns. He gets to know the peoples' language, their plight, their vernacular and their lives so that when he preaches his next sermon, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people," his message is much more his own. And she goes on to illustrate how Jesus mastery of parable is what makes him so easy to understand. His preaching is made up of the stuff of gossip, of town concerns, of worry, of fretting, of beautiful moments, and of tough times. Jesus sees the opportunity for parable all around, and so he speaks them. (Context matters, it seems.)

For Jesus and for us, parables are a way of putting words to how people have been seeing the Kingdom of God all along. They know how to do it already. The preaching task, then, is to have the observational clout and the guts to point it out.

I'd be leaving out something if I didn't mention how at ease ACF's presence is. While she wasn't preaching, she still gave me the sense that there is something stripped away about her--something raw and no-nonsense, something genuinely interested in the deeper thing happening in whatever is happening. What would it mean to be so keenly aware the something deeper in the preaching moment? What would it mean to walk to the pulpit with that in the absolute front of your mind--the expectation that the moment in itself is a parable? Because for me, the Kingdom of God is like listening to a female preacher tell the story of God's Kingdom here and now.

And so, I wonder if there was a parable in our prior meeting: That the Kingdom of God looks like a community gathered for lunch after church. A lunch in which, among others, an infant and her mother and a celebrated preacher all sit together and observe what a wonderful, beautiful thing it is to watch an infant try to grasp a baked bean, chubby fists chasing it across the table in the midst of a smiling atmosphere that drinks in this realm of God.

Preach Dreams: Waitress

I'm waiting tables at a busy restaurant and come to my manager (who is also my preaching professor). I'm overwhelmed.

Him: Did you get all of them some water?
Me: *looking around* Yes.
Him: Then there's no need to panic. You've done as much as you can do right now.

Reading Up: Proclamation and Theology by William H. Willimon

The first book I picked up on my Festival of Homiletics reading list was William Willimon's Proclamation and Theology. In so, so many ways, I think that this was the exact book I needed to be reading now. The book reads like an enthusiastic, exhorting, cheering, encouraging, instructing sermon to preachers to get their theological act together about their preaching. He argues that the main issue with preaching today isn't an issue of style or accessibility, but rather is an issue of theology--AKA that it's needed in preaching.

This book was so chock full of gems that I'm going to have a tough time only sharing a few. But the biggest pieces I'm taking away have to do with the idea that in a strong theology of preaching, and preaching that takes its theological task seriously, the preacher doesn't matter all that much. God does. God, a constantly communicating Wordsmith, is taking our imperfect little selves and using us as vessels for the Word still being spoken out into the world today. For Willimon, the preaching task isn't to be taken lightly, isn't to be blown off, but is to be participating in God's continuing creative acts in this world.

What I especially love about Willimon's book is that it addresses failure. Failure by preachers, failure by the Word, failure as it realistically happens when the Word is not received. As a perfectionist, I'm struggling with this in my own preaching life, having a hard time not feeling like if I just studied harder, presented myself more generously, chose better words, that I would be able to pristinely convey this incredible message I've been given to share. Willimon says that's just not possible. And it's a relief, honestly.

My main issue with the text comes in the section in which Willimon encourages preachers to "talk like the Bible" (47). While his indication that this means presenting rich, multilayered sermons, various literary forms, and to honor the biblical world (he almost talks about it like the written Word is the New Jerusalem...hmm...) is something I can get on board with, I really struggled with his idea that we need to be teaching a new vocabulary to the congregation through preaching. I get what he's getting at--words like 'salvation,' 'sin,' 'suffering,' need to be given biblical context in order to really understand them as people of faith in the here and now. At the same time, I'm concerned about inaccessibility. To me, an important part of the preaching task is ensuring that this vocabulary isn't just adopted with definitions handed down. Rather, preaching turns that vocabulary inside-out, reaching deep into it to pull out meanings that reverberate in the present context. I think Willimon could get on board with that, but he walks a fine line in this section.

My favorite chapter was entitled "Cross and Resurrection in Preaching," and Willimon did an excellent job of fleshing out why preaching without the cross and resurrection is simple foolishness. What Willimon calls us to is Pauline foolishness--a turning upside-down of expectations to the point that the incredible things that come out of it absolutely have to be the work of God. And I'm all about some Pauline foolishness.

I love that this isn't a text that's a 7-step sermon preparation process, but instead is both the before, after, and why of a way of living life as someone who preaches. Like I said, right book at the right time.

Here are some particular gems:

• "...preaching is not about us--not about you the listener or about me the preacher. Preaching is about God and by God or it is silly" (2).
• "There is a reletntlessness about the speech of this God, an effusive loquaciousness, a dogged determination not to rest, not to fall silent, not to cease striving until every single one of us is part of the conversation. Therein is our hope. Here is a divine-human dialogue that is initiated and, at every turn in the road sustained, by a living, resourceful, long-winded God, thank God" (15). 
• "We are to love the text more than we love our congregational context" (20).
• "Much Christian worship ought to be predicated on the premise that, if we can get a group of ordinary, otherwise voiceless people to strut their stuff before the throne of God on Sunday, we will be able to do the same before the city council, or the Pentagon, or the administration on Monday" (27).
• "Preaching is that sort of public speaking that strives never to be original. Preaching is Christian only when it is biblical, when it is obviously derivative of, submissive to, and controlled by the biblical word" (33).
• "Favorite historical-critical questions--What is the earliest strata of this passage? How can this statement be credible to modern, scientific, western minds? Are these the genuine words of Jesus?--are not as relevant as Scripture's originating, homiletical question: Will you come forward, be part of a new, countercultural people of God, and follow Jesus where he leads you?" (34).
• "The pastor bears the burden of listening on behalf of the whole church" (42).
• "To be forced through our daily reading and interpretation of Scripture to see ourselves not primarily as servants of the whims of the congregation but rather as servants of the demanding Word can be true pastoral freedom" (46).
• "The Word, by its very nature not self-evident, is prone to incomprehension and misunderstanding. Failure is everywhere for the Word" (52).
• "A preacher is caught in that incarnational tension of having to speak a word for God but being utterly unable, by our humanity, to speak for God. The preacher must therefore stand up and proclaim in a  resonant, strong voice, 'Thus saith the Lord!' but at the same time confess with the young Isaiah, 'Woe is me! I am a person of unclean lips and dwell among a people of unclean lips'" (61).
• "Sometimes the best sermons do not argue the congregation into something they have not yet known but rather point to and name that which the congregation undeniably knows" (76).
• "'He is risen!' In a sense, this is as far as faithful preaching goes" (77).
• So if preaching fails and fails often, preaching also, by the grace of God, succeeds. Despite all obstacles and hindrances, people do hear" (79).
• "If there is one thing we preachers fear more than the possibility of crucifixion it is the potential of resurrection" (79).
• "The essential patience required of preachers, the freedom from homiletical anxiety over the reaction of our listeners, the confidence in the power of the preached word to accomplish what it wants, is possible only if, in fact, Jesus did rise from the tomb" (82).
• "Any pastor who is not tempted by despair has probably given in to the world too soon, has become dishonest or deceitful about his or her homiletical failures, has become too easily pleased by and accommodated to present arrangements, is expecting too little of the preached word. Weekly confrontation with the gap between what God dares us to say and what we are able to hear leads many of our best and brightest to despondency" (85). 
• "Easter keeps differentiating the church from a respectable, gradually progressive, moral improvement society" (87).

AUX SEND by Dan Smart

A poem from my good friend, Dan Smart. It, and other excellent poetry, can be found here at his website RHYTHM IS THE INSTRUMENT.

AUX SEND

Lest it should 

seem

as if he's actually singing 

you something—rest

assured, dear reader, that

he's merely returning 

back to the world 

what he's already heard—

a fraction 

or so 

of a whole lifetime later

only—darker,

more diffuse,

and a little less useful;

because a poet can't explain

even the tail-

end of things—he just covers it

quick—

with feathers. 

A more delicate tool.

I love to garden. Every part of it. From planning and learning to weeding and prepping beds, I love it all. And today, I spent some time in one of the raised beds in my backyard. It's been overgrown by daylillies--their roots were overtaking the soil, choking out even a knock-out rose bush that was in the corner, and I'd been eyeing the bed for a while, knowing something had to be done.

So, last week, without knowing exactly what I was going to do, I just began digging up all of those lilies. And if you've ever had to dig up a giant cluster of daylillies that have been growing that way for the better part of a decade, you know how difficult it can be to tear the clumps apart, to lever the tubers right out of the soil, shake off the dirt, and toss them aside. If you haven't had to do this, let me summarize by saying it is damned hard. Last week, I worked with a spade most of the time, leveraging my weight against the tension of the roots clinging to each other and the soil. I made it about an hour into the job and had cleared about three feet of space.

Today, after a week of rain, I set out again, dragging my spade and waste can behind me. I wasn't looking forward to this job. But on a whim, I grabbed a small hand rake from the rack in the garage, thinking it could come in handing in ridding the bed of any lingering gum balls from seasons past. Well, about five minutes in, inspiration struck, and I began to use the hand rake to help me loosen the soil around the root balls, to navigate around the stalks of the lilies in a way the blunt spade wouldn't have allowed. Though the task was still hard, I was amazed at how much easier it was with what I would have considered to be a delicate tool.

I wonder how often I do the same in my writing and preaching--start off with a tool that, while appropriate to the task, isn't quite refined enough to get at the heart of the task. Rather, I take broad stabs and find myself tugging and scraping through the soil of the work, laboring intensely all the while. What if there were a more delicate tool I might be using for this preaching task? What if rather than tearing and ripping the roots, I'm excavating instead? What then? What then?

What I didn't say abut my preaching life.

I have been a writer for as long as I could write. If you asked me waaaay deep down what I have always thought of myself in my innermost self, I would tell you (probably only in the wee hours of the morning, when things like this are easier to say) that I am a writer. If you took away everything else I have done and will do in life, the one thing that would remain is writing. Poetry, prose, nonfiction, silly songs, I love it all. But I also never wanted to be a writer who only wrote things that other writerly people read. I write for normal, everyday people about normal, everyday things.

I've always wanted to write in a way that was meaningful, in a way that revealed truth in ordinary life, in a way might just elevate the reader's sight from the ordinary into the extraordinary, and these early experiences in preaching have shown me that the preaching moment is what this is all about. And I was excited. It seemed I found my medium.

And, having found my medium, wouldn't I be able to just slide into preaching with ease? I mean, hadn't I been practicing this my whole life? I'm a writer, after all. Wouldn't it just be a matter of sitting down and writing?

Turns out, not so much.

So, I did what I do, and I read books. Books by preachers. About preaching. And I found that a lot of what these preachers were saying about preaching is what a lot of authors say about writing--that it's not an act to be undertaken in the moment of composition or proclamation...rather, it's a lifestyle.

And so, far from the preaching task being well on its way, I am realizing that it's just beginning. I have figured out that I'm  preacher; now I have to figure out how to be one.