Festival Reflections
Day Two
I made my way back to the church for the morning worship. I must confess it is disconcerting to not have a bulletin, but it was an ecological decision. We were told 4 trees were saved by not printing the multiple thousands of bulletins throughout the week that the Festival required. Instead they were projected on a screen or you could download them from the Festival app. Makes sense, but still ... I found my seat and settled in.
Cell phones in worship, boon or bane to seizing the experience? Discuss. OK, I understand it’s a unique setting and famous preachers and such, but come on. Can we put them away and just worship together? Ahem. Moving on....
I felt a presence as the music began, again I was transported, lifted into an attitude of worship that is hard to find when leading. The string was back. I took hold of it this morning. But it didn’t feel quite the same. Instead of the gentle lifting of the kite in flight in the wind, this one felt taut. It was grounded and vibrated like I had plucked the low E string on a upright bass, the thrum filled my head. I looked up and saw the preacher and then understood. Walter Brueggemann, the irascible Old Testament scholar who manages to look like a prophet even as he preached from them. “Advantage McEnroe” was the sermon title. It wasn’t really about tennis, but about advantage. Who has it and who doesn’t, who are the advantaged, the privileged and who are the disadvantaged, the marginalized. And how does call, does chosenness lead to advantage even when we don’t want it to. In fact, Brueggemann went so far as to suggest that it is the loss of advantage that leads to anger ... in the OT and today. And that one way to hear “Make America great again” is restore the advantage that is being lost. Has been lost. Do you realize, he pointed out, that soon there will be no majority race in this country, we will be a collection of minorities. As Leonard Pitts pointed out last night, if you’re used to being Gladys Knight, it can be disconcerting to discover you’re now a Pip. Your best choice in that scenario is to choose to harmonize. But will we?
Preaching from Isaiah 45 and Acts 10, Brueggemann points to Acts 10:34 “Peter began to speak to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality.’” It wasn’t easy for Peter, it won’t be easy for us, for any of us. Even with the best will in the world. Now I knew what the string morphed into today. Amos’s plumb line. Today was a harder day, as our presuppositions were challenged. Presuppositions as a white male, as a preacher, as one who was called - chosen. Did I measure up as a follower of Christ. Can I stand with Peter and believe God shows no partiality? Even as our General Conference is meeting in Oregon with much conversation about who is in and who is out. It was a sobering act of worship to say the least. Brueggemann came back to his title at the end and said “You remember how every time McEnroe lost his advantage he threw a tantrum. It did not serve him well.
This theme continued in Brueggemann’s lecture at 11am titled “Choosing against our Chosenness.” Chosenness, he argues leads to entitlement, which leads to exclusion (who is in, who is allowed in, who we can legitimately hate), which leads to extraction of wealth (accept those who are useful for us even as we put them down with our economic oppression), which leads to violence (bomb them until the desert glows, go after their wives and children).
Then Brueggemann dropped the biggest bomb of the morning. “The Church continues to be a wounding institution, of which the perpetrators don’t even realize.” But those we wound certainly do, those we exclude certainly do. The string dangled near as he spoke.
The problem, he argued, is that the bible often supports our chosenness. But that is not the only message. There is the Acts 10 passion mentioned earlier, but other words, even in the prophets, Old and New Testaments that point to a different reality. An inclusive reality. His conclusions were two: Absolute chosenness is at an end, and the pastoral task of the church is to guide people through the process of the end of exceptionalism. Our tools? Lament, the psalms are full of them, and the certainty of God’s grace. That last did my Wesleyan heart good.
But the string dangled near. After lunch with a colleague from Indiana, I listened to Antony Bailey preach from Revelation, which he called (with tongue firmly in cheek) the favorite book of the mainline church. His title was “But This I Have Against You” based on the Letter to the Laodicean Church, the only one of the seven letters in the first part of Revelation that has nothing good to say, only warning, only condemnation. Their fault? They relied on themselves to the exclusion even of God. They were lukewarm and Christ wanted to spit them out of his mouth. Ouch. Christ is against this idea of self-sufficiency. Against those who rely on their wealth to solve their problems. Against us.
But Bailey, who comes from Barbados and serves in Ottawa, Canada, told us that maybe we can listen deeper to this word. The letter to the Laodicean Church is the one that includes the warning “Behold I stand at the door and knock!” Warning? Or invitation. Maybe he wants to come in and eat with us, to sit next to us, right up against us. Against us. Maybe, Bailey argued, Christ wants to dance.
Dance we did this evening, as Peachtree Road United Methodist Church was taken over by the choir and musicians and preacher from Ebeneeer Baptist Church. The gospel was sung and preached with passion and power. And the plumb line. Yeah, it was still there. Dr Raphael Warnock from Ebeneezer preached on “When Prophets Collide with Profits.” The text was again from Acts, this time chapter 16, the slave girl with a spirit of divination who was healed by Paul. But her owners didn’t see this as good news as their money-maker was now broken.
Warnock told us to preach to power, to challenge the status quo and to recognize that the interests of the empire often conflict with the interests of the kingdom of God and that empire won’t take that lying down. But that story ends with an earthquake. Paul and Silas are in jail singing hymns at midnight and the earthquake shakes them loose. God does the best work in the darkness, Warnock argued. And that our job is to sing, God will do the shaking. Our job is to proclaim, God will do the shaking. The Holy Spirit comes to set us free to clash, to collide even despite the risk. The plumb line measures, and one end is the weight of judgement, but the other end is still the Spirit of grace, the kite aloft in the wind.
Interspersed between these hard words were two other presentations that lifted my Spirits more than they weighed me down. Maybe the design of the day? In between Brueggemann’s sermon and lecture, Anna Carter Florence came back with a lecture titled “Five Things Poetry Can Do for Prophetic Preaching.” Because you’re getting weary of all these words (Maddie’s frequent complaint - “Too many words, Daddy, too many words), I’ll give you the over all thing. Poetry can help us look at the world differently. To describe, even the difficult, can be healing. To give new perspectives, to engender intimacy, new interpretations of reality. Preaching should be about finding ways to name the Christ among us, even hidden in the mundane busyness of the world around us. To use the text as a lens through which we see our today, not just the bible’s yesterday. My favorite parts were the conversation of the power of metaphor to enlighten and trouble at the same time, and the story of the Russian poet who defied a censure and lived among her community and gave them hope by helping them see reality. I came away feeling lighter and wondering which poets I might turn to when I get home.
The other different moment came from Pastor Bruce Reyes-Chow, a Filipino-Chinese pastor from California who planted a church built around the concept of conversation. His lecture was titled “The Desire, Discipline, and Disruption of Conversational Preaching.” A very organized approach that presented the possibilities, the pitfalls and the practices of this unique approach to preaching. I took copious notes and look forward to taking them back home and working to take Genesis to the next level. We created Genesis with the idea of interaction, but Reyes-Chow showed me new ways to envision this happening.
But here’s the thing, he also gave me ideas for Heartbeat. Not to turn it into something it isn’t and shouldn’t be, but to bring a new spirit and new joy into worship. That’s the power of this event. Yes, I am here for me. For me to be inspired and lifted up, reconnected to the Spirit that is always with me. For me to be challenged with a theological kick in the pants that hopefully get me back motivated to fulfill my calling as a preacher. But it is also for Aldersgate. Sometimes with good ideas I might be able to utilize, and sometimes just to bring a new enthusiasm for the task of the whole community of faith.
A community with some unique realities, some almost indefinable qualities. Reyes-Chow described the process of rethinking preaching as one of expanding our ecclesiology, our understanding of church. He was the one who came up with my favorite metaphor of the day, the one I used in the title. By including the congregation in the act of preaching, we are acknowledging who they are in a new way. They become, he says, a Sanctioned Island of Misfit Toys.
The best description of the church I’ve heard in a long time.
Shalom,
Derek
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