Day four of the Festival is the last full day. Friday morning we’ll hear from the Rev Dr. Amy Butler, the Senior Pastor of Riverside Church in New York City and then we’ll go back home and attempt to put into practice some of the things we learned, attempt to share some of the inspiration in our preaching in our own congregations, attempt to hold on to the grace we have tasted in this place.
But that’s tomorrow. Today we spent some time with some familiar characters and learned we hardly knew them at all. The morning began at Westminster again, as we heard Dr. Matt Skinner present a sermon titled “Don’t Give Me That Old Time Civil Religion.” We revisited Philippi with Paul and Silas. And all seemed well until the slave girl with the spirit of prophecy outed them as emissaries of the God of salvation. Paul healed her because she annoyed him and ended up in jail because he messed with a source of income. And that was just the problem with the story, even the girl was just a commodity. And that maybe our call is to move beyond the winners and losers mentality that allows us to keep score. Especially in our polarized culture we devolve into shouting matches and muscle flexing that accomplishes nothing except widens the gaps. Maybe we need a different approach.
Maybe we need to climb trees. At least that is the advice of Dr. Anna Carter Florence, Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta. Her sermon was based on the familiar story of Zaccheus. Aware of all the usual interpretations, Florence Carter instead invited us to step into the head of Zaccheus for just a moment. Imagine, she asked us, wanting to see Jesus so much that you would risk the humiliation, the risk to life and limb, you would think creatively enough to actually think of climbing a tree just to catch a glimpse. Maybe our problem is we think Jesus is so available, we’ve forgotten to desire a glimpse, forgotten to live our lives trying to catch sight of Him. Maybe we’ve forgotten we’re looking, or maybe we’ve stopped looking. Maybe it’s time to climb a tree.
The next hour Dr. Carter Florence introduced us to a work in progress. Her next book will be a dictionary of sorts. As a teacher of preaching, she decided to write a book that presented characters and places and words from the Bible while she looked for the preacher in the story. Or the Word that spoke. So, she presented various letters, like C, which was Caleb and told the story of the one spy who believed in the promised land. Or L which was Lukewarm, like Laodicea the town that couldn’t get a good water supply; the cold wasn’t cold and the hot wasn’t hot and both were calcified in the pipes. So when John the Evangelist put the word Lukewarm in the mouth of the Lamb of God, it made all of them sick to their stomach. Q which was Quirinius, governor of Syria when Jesus was born, and U is for Ur the town were Abraham was from, but never really lived in. We all need a place to be from, she argued. It is and will be a reminder of the power of that Book, the more you listen and the deeper you go.
The Rev. Lillian Daniel had the hardest job all week. She was a last minute addition to the program to take the place of Rachel Held Evans, the progressive blogger and writer whose writings challenged the complacency and patriarch of the church. Rachel, or RHE as she was known by those who learned from her and loved her, was taken to the hospital a few weeks ago with an infection that moved to her brain. The next thing you knew, the brain seizures were so severe she was placed in a medically induced coma while they sought the medications that would cure her. Except they couldn’t. And at 37 years old this mother of two, died to the shock and horror of many.
Lillian Daniel agreed to speak in her time slot because she was a friend of Rachel, and she said, “we have a hope that is not seen.” With all that in background, Daniel spoke of the need for and the danger of the personal in preaching. The very act of preaching is self-revelation of the deepest sort. But it is also possible that the vulnerability of the preacher can block the presence of the gospel. So, it is a line we walk each and every time we climb up into the pulpit. Something I’ve been trying to talk with my students about for years.
We then ended this last full day with a poetry reading by Natasha Trethewey, the US Poet Laureate from 2012-2014. Trethewey writes powerfully and passionately about the vulnerabilities of life, her life and through her the life of our nation. She is of mixed race, born in the sixties in Mississippi when we were still trying to find our identity as a nation with civil rights. After her white father divorced her black mother, her mother remarried, to a black man who had anger issues and after divorcing him he came back and murdered Natasha’s mother. The grief and the guilt and the anger are work together to create breath-taking art. Each poem is a heart wrenching exercise in the search for hope in the midst of despair. In other words, preachers aren’t the only ones who struggle with the place of the personal in their presentation.
A beautifully heavy end to the week, though we still await a word from Dr. Amy Butler. But soon we’ll all return home. And I for one will be looking for a tree to climb to claim a new perspective on my life and the gospel and the life of the church and the world. I am grateful to those who fed me, challenged me, encouraged me and troubled me this week at the Festival of Homiletics. And I am also grateful for those who come to listen as we go out on a limb to catch a glimpse of our savior. Come and climb with me. You can see for miles.
Shalom,
Derek C. Weber
#Homiletics2019
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