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).

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.

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.

Heard the Word: MaryAnn McKibben Dana

MaryAnn McKibben Dana

MaryAnn McKibben Dana is a pastor and writer (check out her blog The Blue Room) and mom and spouse and denominational leader and spiritual speaker and OH MY WORD WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING WITH MY LIFE??? Seriously. She's one of those people who, when you read their bio, you think, "How. How? How!" But then, when you hear her preach, she's so nice and wonderful and focused and passionate, you think, "Oh!"

So, she's a regular congregational preacher like most of the Festival attendees, and her message "Lips, Stomach, Heart" based on Matthew 15: 10-28 was a really fine example of a preacher who has wrestled with her text, come up a with a bloody lip, and is sharing her honest learnings with the assembly. Her movement from an image of "Jesus caught with his compassion down" to a God of ever-increasing grace was thoughtful, aware of the listener, couched in our current context, and really accessible. I can see why she's a great congregational speaker.

One piece of her message that struck me was her commentary on our current culture of saying more and more about less and less and her commentary on our snark-obsessed virtual world. She reads the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman through this lens. And if Jesus' words are less than kind, our cultured response would be to expect, even demand, snarkiness back. Instead, Dana called us to something greater, to one-liners that elevate. She said, "The Canaanite woman does this: She polishes the defiled words [Jesus spoke to her] off, and hands them back and says, 'There. That's more like it.' That's our job as preachers, too, in an age of snarkiness."

So often, I get caught up in a culture of quick retort and snark. It's funny, fun, and oftentimes immediately gratifying. A deft smart response often gets a greater reaction (and support, really) than does a thoughtful one. How often, then, as a preacher, am I able to just as quickly respond with words that elevate? With words that take the conversation to a more balanced, peace-filled space, where ideas can be handed back with a little sheen of grace on them. Actually, I think that this is the pastoral care aspect of what Anna Carter Florence was talking about in her discussion of living in a parable universe--when we see sacramentally, we can preach sacramentally, but then we must also live sacramentally in our everyday conversations. One liners that elevate. Gonna let that one marinate.

Dana appeared to be a confident preacher, who brought her own style to the preaching moment. One classmate pointed out that she was herself, even down to her patterned pants, not trying to dress down or up or around or any other way that looked uncomfortable for her. She moved. She gestured. And she seemed like herself.

Her preaching inspired a conversation between a classmate and myself about how women use their voices. We talked about the breathiness that so many women adopt when addressing a large group (Dana did not do this, but 4 of the 5 women who asked questions afterward did.). Where does it come from? I said that I thought it was a way of sounding humble and unassuming. To speak with breathiness is to defer in some way, but my friend said that she found it to be sickeningly sweet. Both of us agreed that it can be one way that women choose to make their voices smaller in society. I began thinking about how clearly Anna Carter Florence and Barbara Brown Taylor spoke today, how I was captivated not only by their words, but by the strong, clear tone of their voices. It's something I need to pay better attention to in myself. How often am I minimizing myself through my voice or actions (or humor, as is often my case)? How might this be diminishing the message I have been tasked with giving?

Reading Up: Knowing your message and preaching to the margins.

Reading Yvette Flunder's chapter in Birthing the Sermon, I was struck by two things: 1) She has such a clear understanding of the underlying gospel message she is charged with preaching. She writes, "That struggle [for equality, parity, and justice] is the long, strong, deep, resonant bass line of all I preach, sing, and pray about" (68). 2) She also has a deep sense of who her audience is when she preaches--those who are marginalized or feel marginalized by the church.

What is the bass line for my preaching? The line everything else hangs on?

And who is my audience? I already have a hint at this--I feel called to preach to those who don't realize that the church could be for them, that the gospel message could be for them, that God could be for them. Marginalized? Yes.

Favorite Quotes:

• "Mine is a voice that passionately preaches justice and freedom with responsibility; however, not to the exclusion of Jesus" (68).
• "People who have for generations been abused by the preaching of the Bible need to hear the Bible preached in ways that affirm and validate them" (68).
• "The gospel is from the community as well as to it" (69).
• "It is not enough for me to simply be profound; I must seek to be a profound blessing, by hearing from God and paying close attention to the 'voice' of the listening congregation" (69).
• "We all keep secrets, so what would they[the biblical writers] rather we did not know?" (71).
• Preaching to people who are on the edge of society and the mainline church must have good content and good form. Preaching to marginalized people mus be believable, powerful, and passionate" (73).

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.