PREACH

This one’s for my Jesus nerds!

WELL. This week I stumbled into a free invitation to attend the Festival of Homiletics, a preaching conference for extreme theology geeks, which was partially hosted at our church. It was a last-minute surprise and extraordinarily rich: back-to-back lectures and sermons by some of the raddest preachers and theologians.

After a string of packed work weeks, this one was mercifully flexible, so each morning I set myself up in a Sunday school room, pound out emails, run downstairs to the sanctuary and take notes until my hand froze, then rush back upstairs for a Zoom meeting, and repeat. Glorious, actually! IN ADDITION TO THIS, I also (1) went to an Amy Grant show, where you know I spent every moment either grinning or sobbing, AND (2) got to meet AND HANG OUT WITH AND BECOME FRIENDS (name/claim) WITH one of my favorite writers, who has now joined us as a subscriber on this very blog (!!!HI ERIC!!!).

So, guys, I have to share with you some of what I heard from these preachers preaching to preachers, because it…was good preaching. Consider this another Michelle Augustine Writes an Elementary-School-Style Report, and skip if theology is not your jam.

[Hamilton voice] HIGHLIGHTS!

Poet & theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama talked about power, control, and story

• Pádraig kept quoting Terrence Tilley, the author of Story Theology: “The author of a story cannot control the story’s power to reveal.” We tell stories because we tell stories, he said: we can’t know in advance what they’ll mean.
• He described part of the story of Job as “Satan appears in a velvet smoking jacket and teases God into a demonstration of fuckery,” which is both delightful and accurate.

Psychologist, minister, and artist Thema Bryant spoke about pathways to healing and wholeness for trauma survivors. WHEW. She retold the story of Abraham and Isaac from Isaac’s perspective, which was VERY AWFUL and demonstrated how churches relegate the victim to the margins when the perpetrator is a faith hero (who reports that God told him to abuse the victim).

• “In the text God interrupts the violence that Abraham reports God told him to do...I’m here today to speak to those of you who’ve been hurt by those others admired, those who say God told them to do it.”
• Isaac is the only patriarch whose name didn’t change: he retained laughter and joy as his name.
• “Let God throw God’s weight around.”

Sojourners president Adam Taylor and Director of Racial Justice Moya Harris talked about their new Faiths United to Save Democracy campaign, which trains clergy to help protect the electoral process and educate their people about the right to vote—especially in swing states (including PA, OH, and MI). You know I’ll be keeping an eye on this for us.

Columbia Seminary professor Anna Carter Florence’s sermon was called “Tamar, Rahab, Ruth & Bathsheba: She Wasn’t On the Roof.”

• “A lot of interpretive damage has been done to these women,” who “had to think fast and strike a deal in order for righteousness to happen—knowing that they’d be blamed for whatever went wrong.” YES THIS.
• She recommends regularly blocking and acting out biblical texts—“finding a way to bring the text over your body”—as a new (albeit awkward) way into their meaning.
• Doing so, one realizes, for example, that Bathsheba wasn’t on the roof; David was. Bathsheba’s not some “roof-bathing vixen or exhibitionist.” David is “looking down into the urban dwellings of his citizens” and then, you know, the rest. EW. (I will not use the EW DAVID gif bc the man after God’s own heart, I’m afraid, doesn’t deserve it.)

Author and deconstruction godfather Brian McLaren reminded the audience of four “permissions” we have in faith-life:

• Permission to face reality—around you, within you—as it is, not as you think it should be
• Permission to declare an emergency when there’s an emergency (instead of normalizing and adapting to the bad stuff)
• Permission to fall back on love, which Jesus and Paul say fulfills all obligations, even when faith and hope fail. “Faith is just the opening act for love.”
• Permission to take the long view and detach from outcomes.

Theological superstar Willie James Jennings talked about communion and Mary, so, you know. That was fine.

• Communion: “the deepest sense of the God-drenched life—not with people in general, but the people in one’s concrete place of living” and plants, animals, the built environment—“a communion of and in place, down to the bone and the dirt.”
• “God asked Mary to be God’s mother”—requiring “the vulnerability of God and the grace of Mary.”
• “Jesus is the intensification of the listening of God”—listening, as a creature, to the land and to other creatures.

Author, pastor, and hermeneutical gadfly Jacqui Lewis (whom I accosted for a brief handshake, on behalf of our Sunday school class) demonstrated “stepping back from the traumatizing passages” and understanding their context—esp how many of them were “written by traumatized people in traumatized times.” I had to leave partway through her talk and need to finish listening at some point.

• Traditional readings of Genesis 3 “set us up to believe that some people are holy enough and others aren’t. We are not worms who need a dead Jesus to be OK.”
• The biblical theme of chosenness has been repurposed by colonizers throughout history. “When the traditions lead to dead people, maybe the traditions need to die.”

Author and pastor Otis Moss III did what I have learned (not snarkily; sincerely) to call THEATER in an exposition of Exodus 5 x Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.

• “When you know you’re loved by God, and when you love yourself—when you know you have great worth and power before God—it changes the way you function: you can laugh in the face of someone who claims power over you.”
• We need collective liberation: “a theology that’s not just looking for a solo,” where you “sing in the choir and know your part.”

O. KAY! Any of this land for you? I thought about you constantly during all of this.

Back next week with more authoritarianism yay xoxo