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.