Heard the Word: Yvette Flunder

All. Right. I think all of us from Eden were ready for Flunders' message. We were ready for some church. We were ready for some celebration. And she did not disappoint. Her message title, "God is a Mighty Good Healer" was based on a phrase her grandmother would use while working in the kitchen. Flunder remembered how out of nowhere, her family would hear her grandmother exclaim, "Hey! Hallelujah!" from the kitchen while she cooked. A remembrance of God's incredible work in the world would strike her, and she wouldn't wait to celebrate. She would do it right then and there.

Flunder preached on John 9: 1-11, what she calls the "second spitting incident" in Jesus healing ministry to the blind (see Mark 8: 23-26 for the other). Early on, I could see how Moss' lecture about preaching the blues was at play in Flunder's message, so I honed in on that as she preached.

Right up front, Flunder laid on us the biblical blues, exploring the very real problem of blindness in biblical times--20 out of every 100 people was blind in some way, whether it was near- or far-sightedness, cataracts, or another sight impairment, there were no options for correction then. She used this information as a springboard into discussing the problem of blindness in places in the world today where good medical care, nutrition, access to clean water, and eye care are not accessible. She sang the eschatological blues, helping us to see the issue in the here and now.

And for most of the sermon, she riffed between the two of these, building the tension between the biblical blues and our present circumstances. She nuanced it all as she moved through the text, teasing out its meaning, walking it through in these terms. Her celebration was introduced here--that Jesus' healing isn't about just getting better...it's about "removing stigma so that we could return to productivity." And Flunder does celebrate this for a while, sitting with the idea that if we are changed, we can change the world. If we are free, we can free anyone who we come into contact with.

And as she builds this tension, she worked up to the theological blues--that many of us are unwilling to be healed. That many of us resist God's healing power because of what will be expected of us next. When the man's eyes were healed, he had a charge--to go to the "pool of sent" and to return to productivity. How many of us resist God's healing because we don't actually want to be productive?

But she continued to celebrate--to celebrate the times when we do heal. To celebrate the imagined space in which we all walked out into the world whole, bearing stigma for our difficulties no more, and preaching the gospel by sharing our experience.

But probably the coolest moment of the sermon for me was when she was able to connect her vision of wholeness with that preaching moment. She told us that she was, "Preaching in tongues." She said that her mere presence at this festival, and the fact that she was preaching out of her culture and that we (a significant majority WASPs) could understand her was the work of the Holy Spirit at work in the world and in the church that she wanted to celebrate. I want to come back to this and write more about cultures represented here, but that moment really was of note for me.

Flunder's sermon was excellent. But I'm also excited that I was able to apply Moss' lecture to it. I really believe that having a capacity to speak about and for tragedy is an important part of preaching, and Flunder gave me an excellent model for how to do that faithfully.

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: 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?