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.