Arrived at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference

At 6:00am today, I had been up for about two and a half hours already. I had showered, dressed, hopped in my car in the dark, and headed for the airport. At 6:00am today, my flight took off on time, lifting wheels off the tarmac and flying up and over St. Louis. Up and over my brothers and sisters who gathered in South City at the very same time to honor and recognize the six months that have passed since Michael Brown was shot and killed in the streets of Ferguson. Six months since his body was left in the streets for four and a half hours. Six months since I watched St. Louis turn itself inside out in grief. Six months since there were tanks in the streets of my city. Six months.

The night Michael Brown died, I sat in my daughter's dark room, holding and rocking her before bed. We said prayers, and as I prayed aloud for Michael Brown, for his family, and for grace to be found in the tensions we could already feel, I began to cry. As I felt her body in my arms, as I imagined Michael's body in the street, I did not know what else to do but pray and cry.

I'll admit that what I watched unfold in St. Louis immediately thereafter robbed me of my words. I did not know how to speak to what was happening. I could see the police response to protests escalating. I could see the expressions of grief in the protesters being met with violence and suppression. I could see that suppressed grief bursting forth. I could see it moving all around me. But I did not have words. For this, I repent.

So, I listened to a lot of words from people who were witnessing to the experience. I listened to voices who were speaking out against police brutality. I listened to voices who outlined a history of racial tensions in St. Louis. I listened to those who spoke about segregation, about the stunningly uneven distribution of wealth in St. Louis, and about how it all neatly fell along carefully drawn lines of small municipalities, which were then being carefully guarded by more police forces than I could count. I listened as people explained white privilege, oppression, systematic injustice, racism. I listened to stories from friends about how they have to explain that police are not always there to help. I listened to stories of friends being trailed by shop owners who profile them. I have listened to stories of friends being pulled over for driving while black. I have listened.

And from all that listening, I began to examine myself: my whiteness and my privilege, my call to ministry in the Christian faith. I began to examine how Christianity itself has been a vehicle of oppression and white supremacy, a means of holding Euro-centric societal norms in check for longer than we Christians would care to admit. I am examining the history of lynching and race riots and of churches that stay silent about them on Sunday mornings. I examined my own tradition, and I examined my spirit, and I began to find words.

They are words that I am still learning how to pronounce correctly: justice, reconciliation, repentance,  privilege, prophetic, liberation, ally, protest, holy anger, creative response, grace. I'm learning how to say, "Black lives matter," and then I'm learning how to say more than just that. I'm learning.

Today, I arrived at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference and am learning about the activist, minister, and educator who the conference honors. I am learning about what he called, "The Scratch Line," and I am learning about his work. I am learning about the social justice work that is carried out in his name. And I am learning how to speak up and act out a witness of justice in this world.

Six months ago, the world wasn't all that different than it was the day before or the decade before or the century before. I'm learning that. But six months ago was the first time I was able to catch a glimpse at it. It was the first time I couldn't turn away. I know that it was privilege and downright ignorance that kept me from seeing before. But this time, there's no turning back. No turning back.

Sermon Prep: Preaching Dreams

My spouse rarely remembers his dreams. Unless they are about bugs or snakes, he'll wake up completely oblivious to that alternate life he's lead overnight. Sometimes, I'm envious of his dream-amnesia. I regularly wake up foggy from dreams, their wisps interfering with my morning routine, disturbing my sense of the present. My dreams are often emotionally-charged, peppered with characters who feel like real people, and it takes effort--like wiping sleep from my eyes--to move from the dream world to reality. My dreams instruct me, help me solve problems, let me know where my relationships need work, and at the least, signal where my major stressors lie.

But recently, JT had a dream that he remembered. It's such a rare event, that I was really excited to hear about it. I propped myself up on an elbow, thrilled for this view into his psyche, his ambitions, his dreams. I expected tales of flying or fighting robots or a fantastic meal that he ate in a beautiful locale with ingredients that we may be able to mimic in real life.

"Well," he started. "We were in bed in the morning, and Jo [our daughter] woke up. You brought her into bed with us, but she wouldn't go back to sleep. So, she started naming us, pointing and saying, 'Mommy. Daddy.'"

So far, this dream was unimpressive. In fact, it the exact scene we had experienced only an hour or so before, when Jo actually did wake up, come into our bed, and proceed to name us all. I continued to wait for the moment when reality would blur and Jo would sprout wings or start singing opera or something.

"So, then I said to her, 'Who are you?'" he continued. "And then--this is the weird part--she pointed to herself and said, 'Jo. I am Jo.'" He had been silent for a few minutes before I realized he had related the entirety of his dream. Yes, his dream had departed from reality: or daughter had never said her name. Much less put together a short sentence to accompany her self-introduction. But it seemed like there should be more. If he was remembering it, there must be something remarkable.

"Really?" I said. "That's what you dreamed?" "Yep," he said, rolling out of bed. And that was that.

It's make me think a lot about dreams. Me? I put a lot of stock in them and enjoy trying to stretch out that space between dreaming and awake so that I can remember the things my mind is working on when I'm not exactly there to run the show. And so often, they are impossible imaginings, wild and exciting, and I'm left dizzy trying to figure out how to translate the to life. But JT's dream was so simple, so small, so possible. And suddenly, his dream felt more like prophecy than my own.

I'm preaching this week at a classmate's church. He uses the lectionary, and he typically uses three readings: from the Hebrew Scriptures, Psalms or Epistle, and Gospels. I was intimidated by this task at first, unsure how I would handle navigating three texts during worship, and how I might craft a sermon that was harmonious. I assumed I would be simply picking one passage and lightly brushing upon (or perhaps even ignoring) the others in my message. But last week, as I read the passages again, I understood: these are about dreams. All of them are about dreams.

Check them out: Genesis 37: 1-28, Psalm 105 1-6, 16-22, 43-45, and Matthew 14: 22-33.

I'm not sure where this message is headed yet. I'm not entirely sure I can wrap it all up with a bow. But I do think that there's something here worth exploring: something about the dreams God has for us, about our own dreams and how we follow them, and how it's possible, even in reality, to live out our dreams.

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: The Idolatry of God by Peter Rollins

What's unique about The Idolatry of God: Breaking our Addition to Certainty and Satisfaction is that it's not a book for pastors, for preachers, for people who are thinking about preaching, or for church leadership (though any of them would get something out of the read). Rather, it's written in a way that the average unchurched or nominally-churched person could read it. The content is good, but what I'm interested in is how Peter Rollins puts the thing together.

Rollins is a great storyteller, and it's through storytelling that he illustrates some pretty dense theological material in a way that is understandable to people whose only experience of theology is through popular culture or the Christians who make it on the news. What I think is important about how Rollins writes is that it isn't dumbed down--he uses theological language, latin phrases, deep philosophical concepts, and theoretical ways of exploring ideas that aren't pedantic or pandering. I think this is the biggest fault of many church leaders seeking to reach a biblically illiterate generation--they speak and preach as though this illiteracy is actually infancy rather than taking the wealth of experience and theologizing the individual has likely done on her own before a religious professional even walked in the room.

Rollins incorporates stories in ways that layer upon each other, so that he's drawing you into a comfortable textual world in which you he introduces you to stories, then points out their relationship to the faith world. In discussing idolatry, he refers to "the MacGuffin," a term used in film making to discuss the item everyone's after, the magnet of the film, so to speak. In a chapter on self and identity, he uses a Miami Vice episode to explore the concept. And the conclusion is a sketch of a poor but whole woman who works miracles, raises suspicions of the authorities, and brings a renewed sense of peace to those she encounters (sound familiar?).

Though the use of popular culture is often taken as good "illustrations" for sermons, it's rare to see them used to such excellent effect as Rollins does. He's not using them to look cool (I mean, Miami Vice?). He's not using them in a way that sounds inauthentic. Rather, he's using them because they are vehicles that make his point in ways that are easily understandable and don't depend on an entirely new theological vocabulary to engage. They take the stuff of theology and make it accessible, make it so it seems like something that actually happens in real life.

The book itself is more a theology book than preaching text, but I do think that the way Rollins puts together the work is worth taking note of. First of all, he takes pop culture seriously as a story-telling medium that can convey meaningful information. He doesn't appropriate it simply to be hip and with it. Instead, he fleshes out the vehicles in ways that are legitimately helpful. (I had never seen an episode of Miami Vice and yet found his explanation quite compelling and easy to follow.) 

So...it's got me back on my line of thought about language. Rollins spends much of the text redefining, nuancing, and massaging some hefty theological terms. But he doesn't do it in biblical terms, theological terms, or in terms related to church history. Instead, he's focused on stories. And stories that people will be literate to. I think this in itself is an important notion in my developing understanding of vocabulary for preaching--that stories matter more than the language does, in many cases. Perhaps it's a Brueggemann case after all, with the contents being more important than the vessel.

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: Preaching at the Crossroads by David J. Lose

Ok. I was hard on poor David Lose in my earlier post. Really hard. Like, perhaps unfairly hard. Because in Preaching at the Crossroads: How the World--and Our Preaching--Is Changing, the man does an admirable job of conveying the landscape of our current context for folks in the pews. And it made me feel like he maybe would have actually understood what it felt like to walk into a giant church full of pastors as a most-of-my-life unchurched person. Maybe he would understand my frustration, disappointment, and inability to understand how the church as it is now has been incapable of conveying the Word to so, so many of my peers. It makes me sad. It makes me angry. It makes me want to work insanely hard. And it makes me want to work with fellow clergy who want to learn a new way, too.

For me, Lose gave me many words for things that I wasn't sure how to express about the state of preaching in the post-Christian, Western society. While I've been living and breathing this context for my entire life, and then studying it intensively in my amazing progressive seminary, I realized that many working pastors may not have a real grasp on the implications of postmodernity, secularism, and pluralism in the everyday lives of their congregants (and potential congregants). Lose spends three chapters unpacking each of these terms, and then a subsequent three chapters providing practical advice for preachers who want to engage these concepts in real ways in sermon preparation, planning, and delivery.

One thing that I do want to touch on is the way he discussed the idea of biblical fluency. I noted my concerns with Willimon's work and with Barbara Brown Taylor's remarks about biblical language, and how I'm generally uncomfortable with biblical language itself being considered normative for Christians. There is something about that idea of teaching an entirely new vocabulary that has the ring of shibboleth to it. But Lose, in a parenthetical, nearly toss-off moment says that he believes Christian churches need to promote biblical fluency, or "the ability to think--without thinking--in the target language." In this way, I understand biblical fluency not to be about vocabulary, but sight. Not flashcards, but paradigm. And that's something that I don't think language is capable of doing.

Though I didn't feel like Lose was saying anything radically different than many of the folks I've been reading or that I heard at the Festival said, he did so in a way that was pastoral and clear. And in this way, it helped me to understand that in many ways, many of the clergy who I am so frustrated with are just not quite equipped yet to deal with the tasks at hand. Or, they feel like they need a prescription for success. At the end of Lose's work, like so many works on preaching right now, he acknowledges that he hasn't offered something more concrete for the preacher to put into action (though I think he does put some excellent concrete ideas out there). But he doesn't apologize for it. Rather, he seems to be excited about the adventure of rediscovering what preaching might mean here and now and in the future. And that made me excited about it. Actually, it made me excited about what I might have to contribute to the conversation myself. So, yeah. Nicely done, David Lose.

Some choice quotes:

• "If we are called to proclaim good news that is not just old news or the daily news but regularly surprises and even arrests our hearers, then perhaps preachers should not be surprised by the inherent and unending challenge of doing that" (3).
• "Does Scripture...have nothing more to say to us than what we have already heard and perceived?" (39).
• "...we preachers do not come to Scripture without a set of questions influenced by our context and experience. And we should not, as our questions are what bring us to the text in the first place. At the same time, by admitting that our context and experience powerfully shape not only our questions for Scripture but also our expectations of Scripture, we make room for others--including the voices within the Scriptures--to call into question our questions, both keeping us honest and keeping a vibrant conversation going" (41). 
• "In this way, the preacher comes not as the trained expert designated to give a guided tour of an ancient text--let alone perform a postmortem on a dead confession of faith--but rather as an experienced guide and host who makes claims, suggests lively interpretations, makes a wager about the present-day meaning and interpretation of a passage, and ultimately invites the hearer not just to take these claims and confessions seriously but also to respond to them in word and deed" (45). 
• "...we have unintentionally affirmed the secular impulse to restrict God's activity and therefore have made it increasingly difficult for our people to imagine being 'called' in their daily lives in the secular world. In particular, we have so greatly stressed the importance of Sunday activities that we have unintentionally devalued the lives we lead during the rest of the week" (69).
• "Visit your people in their vocational arenas, and describe those visits in your preaching...Perhaps it's we who feel odd or out of place in the public venues of our people's lives, at least when we come as a pastor" (73).
• "Over time, through this and other practices your congregation may grow from being a place where the word is preached more fully into a community of the word where all the members take some responsibility for sharing the good news of God's ongoing work to love, bless, and save the world" (77).
• "Increasingly, researchers suggest that in a world saturated by meaning-making stories, the mainline church has failed to offer a compelling and central narrative identity that not only informs but also guides the lives of their congregants by providing a resilient religious identity" (100).
• "Preaching from this framework, is equal measures (1) teaching of the basic worldview and how to apply it to life and (2) exhortation to do so" (103).

Reading Up: Crazy Christians: A Call to Follow Jesus by Michael B. Curry

The sermon out of which Michael B. Curry's book Crazy Christians: A Call to Follow Jesus came is the first chapter of his book, but it is also still available to be viewed online. It's a pretty tight sermon, and the book is just as tight. Curry refers to each chapter of the book as an essay in the preface, but it's also easy to read them as sermons (I'm guessing that's where they originated from), and so that's what I did.

The content of each of these messages is thoughtful, clear, connected both to the biblical text and to our current times. Curry is adept at pulling examples of Christian discipleship from historical figures and regular folks he has met on his journey. They have the rhythm and cadence of well-paced sermons, even when read silently (though in her forward, Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori encourages us to read them aloud). When I have more time, I'd like to break down the construction of these messages a bit more to get at their flow, but for now, I just want to share some brief thoughts.

One thing that stood out for me is that the essay/sermons in this book often seemed to parallel the biblical text rather than have them at its center. Oftentimes, by the end of the chapter, I had to go back to the beginning to see what passage Curry had begun with to jog my memory. Though each sermon is not centered around the biblical text at hand does not mean that the text doesn't speak. Rather, Curry is never far from the text when he is creating tableaus and scenes from contemporary or historical or even other biblical cultures to illustrate the heart of the message. For me, it was helpful to see how Curry's sermons were soaked in the biblical text while also not feeling like they were a dull exegetical foray. Curry seemed mostly to be preaching on a biblical theme that he rooted in our own context with contemporary images and characters. In many cases, the connection with the text was often one word: "Crazy" in Chapter 1--"We Need Some Crazy Christians," "Something Greater" in Chapter 2--"We Are Part of Something Greater Than Ourselves," "Feet" in Chapter 3--"Following Jesus with Our Feet," and so on. It did not come of as gimmicky at all, but rather served as the hand hold that allowed him to straddle the divide between the text and today's context.

As I was reading, I kept wanting to hear a conversation between he and Walter Brueggemann regarding prophetic imagination. Curry's sermons seem to be dealing with the world and present circumstances in ways the Brueggemann would approve of--especially his message on what the true meaning of "gospel welcome" would be (see "The Gospel Witness of Welcome will Rearrange the World"). He writes, "We never know what can happen when we feel called to follow Jesus' gospel witness of welcome. Heeding such a call can require incredible courage. Sometimes this gospel way of welcome can lead us to put our very lives on the line. But Jesus' way of welcome can inspire us to keep working to do what is right in a world where too often too much is wrong" (113). And the move he makes of imagining the Galilee where Jesus will meet his disciples as today's global context: "We are, all of us, in Galilee" (128).

This is a book I will likely revisit soon, not only to do a little deeper digging into the sermons to understand their construction, but also for inspiration for how to preach in ways that are faithful to both the biblical text and our times.