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).

Reading Up: Unlearning Church by Michael Slaughter

As I was reading Michael Slaughter's Unlearning Church, I had this strange notion that I had read it before. I went to look at my bookshelf to see if it was shelved in my collection of "United Methodist Here's How To Do Church" books. It wasn't. But gazing at that ever-expanding shelf (the connection is always being educated), I realized I'd probably read a number of things very similar to this: a pastor of a large church (always male), writing in very general terms about a very specific way in which he has grown the Church (now, whether that is church is his church or THE church is another debate for another day). And so, I'm wondering what I can learn about preaching from it.

It's not a book about preaching, as much as it is a text that is wrestling with the space in which preaching happens--namely the church. Chapter 4, entitled "Thriving in Paradox" is a pretty helpful primer to postmodern culture, if you're not living in the middle of it already, and its tips about church itself are good things for preachers to consider as well: that knowing is not as important as experiencing; that hard questions do not require easy answers, but rather spaces where they can be asked; that diversity is a reality and actually leads to greater community than homogeneity. I guess this would be the greatest strength and weakness of the book: how it does a good job of identifying what church and leadership might look like in the postmodern world, and how obvious all of this is to a young leader already. Oh wellsies.

The second half of the book is geared directly toward church leaders, and it was there that I was able to glean a few things for preaching. I want to touch on Slaughter's idea of a "trainer-coach" that he outlines in chapter 7, "Replicating the DNA." He writes:

"In the church setting, we need to help trainer-coaches break down the messages presented in each worship experience so they can formulate specific plans according to the needs of those in their cell groups. We design each weekend worship experience with supplemental curriculum for the trainer-coaches to use." 

I've had some experience in churches who have used a Sermon/Learning style, but what Slaughter outlines here seems to be different--seems to be an intentional effort to equip leaders in the church to be able to engage the message presented in worship in ways that connect with a small group's life. My knee jerk reaction is that it is preposterous to know how the message is going to connect with an individual or a group. To plan a curricula around that seems kind of presumptuous. Then again, creating space to reflect on the message isn't a bad thing. How then might this idea be a little less top-down management-style and something that is more organically available to the congregation's small groups?

I was also intrigued by his description of the Family Room in chapter 3, "Engaging the Whole Person." Evidently, it started as an experimental space for in-between the Christmas Eve services where people could gather to converse, share prayer concerns, connect with trained lay-pastors, or...whatever else. It was set up like a living room with couches, candles, and coffee tables, and was hugely popular for folks leaving the services. It has evolved into an ongoing ministry at Ginghamsburg. Certainly in a large church, the setting of the family room has something to offer. It makes me think about the early Christian home churches, with the community gathered to hear the Word, pray, learn, and sing. I know the movement toward home churches and small in-home groups is a popular one, but I wonder how many of us have actually experienced hearing a sermon in that environment. Or actually processing a sermon immediately following worship. More things to chew on.

Though Slaughter claims to have abandoned the pastor-as-CEO model for church, his book still reads like a business how-to. But here are a few quotes that I'd like to chew on to inform my preaching:

• "Some people at Ginghamsburg say, 'Mike, you don't feed me anymore.' Many of these people forget that our connection with God is never complete until we make the commitment to sacrifice our personal needs and come down from the mountains of our personal spiritual journeys to serve the needs of the oppressed and hurting all around us" (107).
• "UnLearning leaders [or preachers?] go beyond the latest leadership fads and technological innovations to the ancient practices of spiritual formation--the practice of daily disciplines that Jesus was committed to, such as prayer, solitude, meditation on the Scriptures, fasting, fellowship, service, generous giving, and commitment to simplicity of lifestyle" (109).
• "A Christian [preacher] is not someone who makes an intellectual statement of belief, or who commits to a lifestyle of little do-good-isms that have no spiritual motivation. A Christian is someone who is like Jesus" (113). What does it mean for the preacher to be like Jesus?
• "Postmodern people are looking for authenticity. They do not seek explanations about God so much as they seek authentic life-demonstration of biblical relevance. UnLearning leaders are more about a demonstration of a greater-works-than-these, authentic faith than about simplistic Jesus slogans and magic faith formulas. Their greatest persuasion point is authentic life experience, not argumentative reasoning" (115). 
• "So many times we try to tell other people the will of God in their lives, rather than that God's desire is simply to live in them, period" (119).
• "You'll keep the godfathers and godmothers of your church very happy if you continue doing church the way you've always done it--without any risk or change. But we don't have time to play the kingdom of church. We have time only to obey one voice--the voice of God. Do not settle for anything less than God's creative purpose" (127).

Preaching Lessons: John Bell Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preaching Lessons: Peter Rollins Part II

This was technically a sermon, but when Rollins stood up and said, "Well, I don't really preach, so we'll see how this goes," I opted to think of it as lecture instead. More on this later in this post.

His sermon title was "Encountering Ourselves in the Other," and he used the story of Paul's conversion as one example of this general point, but the biblical text was never actually read, nor did he really do any digging into it.

Rollins' talk began with a discussion on scapegoating, our human tendency to want to project our own brokenness, our own faults, onto something outside ourselves. When we see people differently than ourselves, we generally have three responses, Rollins said: to try to co-opt them into our way of thinking and being (what you've got is clearly wrong and you need what I have), to tolerate them (you've got what you've got, I've got what I've got, let's call it good), or to learn about oneself from the other (what can you teach me about my own beliefs). "What's most terrifying about the other," Rollins points out, "is when I glimpse myself in their eyes and see that I am also other to myself."

It's precisely because of this terrifying mirror effect that Rollins believes that scapegoats are actually our salvation. Here he launched into a reading of Paul's conversion in a way that exposes how the very thing that Paul wanted to get rid of (the followers of a resurrected Christ) were where he actually found his salvation. Because the scapegoats in our lives actually expose our own brokenness. And if we are open to that, we might also just be open to getting over it and becoming whole within ourselves as opposed to trying to make the world whole around us.

"We all want to escape our brokenness, to run away. But the truth is that God is not in the escape, but rather sharing the stories of our brokenness."

After having heard Rollin's previous lecture, I felt like this talk brought his point into full relief. In actually acknowledging our issues, in engaging our scapegoats, we actually engage ourselves in ways that can lead to wholeness. In many ways, I felt like Rollins was echoing much of what we heard in Yvette Flunder's sermon--wholeness is stigma removed from our brokenness so that we can walk back into the world with head held high. Christian faith isn't a homogenizing process, but is the process of realizing that difference instructs, that healing comes in honesty not blending in, that in faking perfect believe, we are missing out on the gift that honest doubt gives us.

As my friend Jeff and I walked to the next session, we talked about the genre of Rollins' talk: was it a sermon? Was it a lecture? Was it storytelling? We acknowledged that Rollins didn't dig into the biblical text at all--actually, it was an illustration from Batman that stuck with us most (that Batman could have done a lot more good in Gotham City if he had just dealt with his anger over his parents' death; he could have then graduated from beating up criminals with the latest military-grade weaponry to giving kids schoolbooks. Not a bad point). Jeff made a point that stuck with me, though. He said that yeah, most of the time, you need to do the exegetical digging to wrestle out your message, but some weeks, he said, "You just need to get up there and say what needs to be said."

I think there's some truth to this--there are times when the truth needs to be spoken. I brought this up later to Dr. Grundy, and he nuanced it further, saying that yes, the truth can be spoken plainly, but that it also needs to come from a place of authentic wrestling with the text. He is the preaching professor, so I'm going to take that seriously.

So, then, (this sounds obvious) the preaching task assumes the preacher's relationship with the biblical text. A congregation assumes the person preaching has wrestled with it. But I'm also wondering about how the preacher makes assumptions about their relationship with the biblical text, and whether those assumptions are fair and how they come into play. Rollins' work is mostly outside of traditional church, and so his assumptions about his audiences relationship with the biblical text are different than your average preacher's (though whether they should be or not is a different story altogether). And if your congregation's relationship with the biblical text is zilch, what is the appropriate way to present yours? I have no doubt that Rollins knows his Bible. But he didn't lean on it to preach this message.

I'm toying here with some kind of line. Everything I have read on preaching, everything I have been taught about preaching, and 95% of what I'm hearing at the Festival about preaching tells me that the foundation of the sermon is the biblical text. I guess the question I am asking is how much of that foundation is it necessary to reveal? Rollins acknowledges preaching is an art of indirect speech, so it's quite possible that he utilizes layers of stories to build on a foundation that he's just not as interested in making apparent. Where is the edge of this preaching task? And how does it intersect in an age of increasing biblical illiteracy and pop-culture immersion? And what is the preaching task in between. So far, the answer for almost everyone in the Festival has been, "Stick to the text." But in Rollins, I'm hearing something different. And it intrigues me.

Preaching Lessons: Peter Rollins Part I

Peter Rollins says a lot. It's both thick and quick, and a little exhausting. A classmate said, it was like watching theological ping-pong when he plays both sides of the table. But worth it. His talk was entitled, "Fools for Christ: The Sermon as Weapon of Subversion," and he focused mostly on the approach and content of the sermon, using storytelling, psychological, and family dynamics research to explore the idea of the sermon as subversion. 

At its core, Rollins was sharing how to preaching in a way that is "disruptive and disturbing." And what is more disruptive and disturbing than telling the truth about things that nobody wants to tell the truth about? He spoke at length about systems and transgressions of the system that actually enable the systems to remain in place. It is the "allowable cheats" that keep people from questioning the larger problems that may be present in the system. So, he asks, what happens if we get honest about the things that nobody believes, but we all pretend we believe? 

Nothing short of transformation.

He did a sample reading of the parable of the prodigal son, reading it as tragedy (in the classic definition of nothing changing through the course of the drama) compared with a reading of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars subverting his father's expectations in a way that actually wound up being sacrificial for his father in the end. And so he asked, "What is the thing you can't go to....because it is the one thing that will change everything."

And so, in preaching, the radical move is in exposing what everybody already thinks, the stuff we already knew, but which we didn't want to know we knew. And this makes church the place where we come to get a clearer look at our devils and demons.

And the purpose isn’t just to talk about hard or awkward or uncomfortable things for the sake of talking about them, it is for the sake of transformation, for the sake of salvation, even.

In his sermon, Rollins gets into this more fully, so I won’t dive into it a ton here. But it was helpful for me to realize early on that he was engaging with embeddedness—not only in our theology, but our embeddedness in systems of oppression, systems that hold us back and yet somehow we hold up (consciously and unconsciously), systems that keep us from functioning as full people in the world.

For Rollins, the way to handle embeddedness isn’t to share the right answer, isn’t to continue to beat upon it like a hammer against a wall. Rather, he says that just saying the wall is there at all oftentimes begins that process of transformation in ways that allow for more creative means of taking down the wall. Makes sense to me.

But Rollins also considers preaching to be “an art of indirect speech.” And so subversion isn’t in aggression or confrontation, it’s in the layering of stories that bring to the surface the things which have been held down for so long, we’ve started living our lives around them, like a pile of magazines that started as a decluttering project and have now become a coffee table we move around in the business of our everyday lives. Which is exactly what he embodied in his lecture: the accumulation of his stories had the cumulative effect of helping us to recognize what had always been there in our preaching—the idea that we are called to tell the truth—in a way that made us wonder why we hadn’t been doing it all along.

Preaching Lessons: Brian McLaren Part II

"Light Fires, Issue Permission Slips, Invite others into Interpretive Community"

McLaren's lecture focused on what he understood the charge for preacher to be right now. Here's my outline:

Light Fires:

• Light a fire of hope, concern and courage wherever you go.
• Light your own fire first--"You can't be a purveyor of abundant life if you are so much of a workaholic that you can't enjoy it yourself."
• Light fires in others around you.

Issue Permission Slips:

• Give people permission to dance, to be happy, to move, to do something different. McLaren worked with the metaphorical and literal implications of dance for quite a while. Suffice it to say, dancing is good.
• Give permission to dance to a new tune.
• Give permission to dance with new partners (especially ecumenical partners, for McLaren).
• Give permission to innovate.

I never quite got the invite part of things. I think this is when he was talking about ecumenism. But yeah. Get others on board, I guess?

The implications for preaching and worship were mostly common-sense--dry dusty liturgy that nobody is passionate about is not worth keeping around. Write something new. Do something new. Perform something new. Dance something new. But mostly, do it with passion and excitement.

In terms of preaching formation, I really didn't get much out of what he was saying here. He seemed to think that he was saying something quite novel, especially when he discussed moving away from preaching a theology of salvation to a theology of creation, and maybe in the larger context, he is. But to me, most of what he was saying was pretty obvious. (I wanted to ask how theologies of salvation and creation differed in the first place, but thought better of it.)

McLaren was explicit in his wanting to move the church to a new place in its life, and he sees this happening through the metaphor of dance. Which is great. But at the same time, it is a little awkward to begin to try to apply his ideas to a congregational setting, especially when his ideas are being incubated outside of one. Dr. Grundy and I talked about this further--about how emergent church folks are able to offer valid critique of the church from the outside, but it fails to be able to offer much realistic advice or guidance for those working on the inside. And McLaren's advice to move beyond denominations seems to me to be a good model on a local level--why wouldn't you be working with your other brothers and sisters in faith int he local community--but he was proposing it on a much larger scale, which rang very strange to my ears. 

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.