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.

Preaching Lessons: Jesse the Former Satanist in a Minneapolis Bar after Midnight

Being out of town for the first time on my own since having my daughter, I'm taking advantage a bit of having my evenings free. And so, last evening found myself and my classmates at a great joint a college friend recommended called Donnie Dirk's Zombie Den, which was an awesome place with awesome people, and awesome house-infused liquors. Go there if you are in Minneapolis. You may have to use your phone GPS to help your cabbie get there, but it is worth it. A fun time was had by all, but when we returned to the hotel, I wasn't quite ready for bed. And so, my friend Paul and I made our way to the British pub around the corner for a pint and some more conversation.

It was here that I befriended Jesse and his friend Craig. If I'm being honest, I'll tell you that I approached Jesse to bum a cigarette. He said he'd be happy to give me one in exchange for a joke. Because it was the best joke I could think of, I told him I was a seminarian, a person studying to enter vocational ministry. He laughed, too, but then said, "Actually, we're Christians, too! We don't go to church, but we love Jesus." He then showed me his "Saved by Grace" tattoo on his forearm, and a friendship was born. Paul and I joined their table, and the next hour of conversation was some of the best, most probing theological conversation I've had in a while. (Of note: they asked how old I was, and when I told them, they seemed genuinely excited. "You just don't see many people our age going into ministry," Jesse said. "That's awesome.")

Jesse shared his story of having been a Satanist, of having worshiped Satan for years. And of coming to a point in his life when he realized grace was more powerful than any force out there...but that he would have to step into that stream. We talked about pluralism, about love, about monogamy, about salvation, about suicide and patricide, about all our homicidal tendencies, really, and we talked about God's love poured out in the person of Jesus Christ. We talked about mystery. And we talked about parenthood. We talked about the Bible, and Jesse could quote it like nobody's business. Far better than me.

His friend Craig was more reserved, more willing to let Jesse use up most of the word count, but when asked a question, he shared such insightful, thoughtful answers. He and I became Facebook friends before the night was through, and I think a more longer-term friendship may unfold from there.

But as the night wound up, Paul and I walked home. And I said, "Jesse preached. Just as well as the rest of them." We agreed, we had encountered something special, something sacred in that pub.

But I also felt like I brought my preaching self to the table, too. Though I wasn't the only one talking, I think it was more of creating this space where we could all ask questions and think out loud. And could that be preaching? Not trying to give the answers, but at sitting at the table our literal or remembered Bibles open before us, teasing things out, knowing at the end of the night you might not have THE answer, but that the conversation will have had some saving effect anyway.

I wrote in my oral examination reflection that in many ways, I don't feel like I've found my field to preach in yet. My Wesleyan roots ground me in a tradition that values preaching outside of the church an of experiencing the Word in conversation. And as we walked home that night, I had the same feeling I've had after a good day of preaching: not of certainty that what I said was heard and integrated, but of certainty that each of us was walking away with a sense of God's truth that we hadn't had previously. Pretty awesome.

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.