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.
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