Preaching class
This semester, I'll take my first preaching class. I hadn't planned on taking *any* preaching classes, so it's an interesting turn of events. It sounds like the class will be a blend of rhetoric, creative writing, and theological research, which isn't too far out of my usual wheelhouse. But the idea of actually preaching a sermon in front of a congregation feels a universe away.
When I think about teaching Bible stuff, I think of my favorite Bible rhetoricians of all time: C. S. Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. I love Lewis because of his tendency to face the difficult realities of life and then connect them with the wonder of existence, resulting in a reality that is, at its core, a situation of necessary tension. But he didn’t stop there. He grappled with it to see what he could find, and what he tended to find was a God that is grace, empathy, wonder, and wisdom.
I love King because of his insistence on justice and peace not being at odds—another necessary tension. He was so deeply skilled in rhetoric that you hardly notice it. The rhetorical tools come across as ease of communication; the weaving of social issues and recognizable popular references and common values come across like the creation of a master storyteller; and he was so passionate that sometimes he was almost singing his message. I don’t believe it was just that preacher way of singing and repeating a phrase either. I think it was because the reality of the message brought out emotion so that a regular vocal presentation simply would not do. It had to be sung.
There’s nothing in my words that will reach the level of magnitude that theirs reached, and I don’t care about that. But those two men are for me, rhetorically and spiritually, voices that send the darkness into the far corners of the room. Sounding like them is not my goal. But sending the dark into the far corners is something we can all aspire to, and I hope to learn to do some of that.
There are a couple of other people that I'm particularly inspired by when it comes to preaching. They are the first female preachers I’ve had the privilege to know, learn from, and be lucky enough to call friends. They’ve been preaching at our church over the past year or so as part of a rotation of speakers while a new full-time pastor search takes place. To them, maybe the fact that they are women in the pulpit is not special. But it is to me.
In the tradition I grew up in, a woman never led a Sunday service, but they secretly did the heavy-lifting of biblical teaching by telling the kids Bible stories in Sunday School and at VBS. Pulpit sermons were for salvation and alter calls back then. But Sunday School was the meat and potatoes. And the women did most of that. They also held things together by being the community planners of the institution. They watched the babies so the young families could come, made the children’s Christmas plays happen, collected money for missionaries in big ol’ glass jars, cooked the covered dishes and planned the church picnics, started the meal trains, packed the shoeboxes at Christmas, cleaned the bathrooms, counted the offering, sung in the choir, made dinners for Meals on Wheels, took care of house and home, and did a million other things, not to mention modeling extreme humility whether they should have had to or not. They were the storytellers. They were the community keepers. Their jobs were…well important seems like a silly word, so I’ll use the word cement instead. Yes, I mean the kind that holds things together. This isn't about diminishing the work of servant-hearted men who were present. It's just that right this second, I'm talking about the women.
So those ladies that are friends of mine standing behind the pulpit unapologetically telling those Bible stories to the whole darn congregation, not just the kids in the Sunday School rooms of the old days, well when they do that, it’s a little bit like a healing happens. It starts when they stand up to walk to the stage, at which point, in my mind, every overlooked lady in every ministry in every town and state in this country for decades upon decades speaks through them. They walk right up there as an army of witnesses. They talk about what’s happening in our world. They talk about what Jesus had to say about it, and they talk in light of the wisdom that God has especially given them in particular, a wisdom that used to be stuck in the rooms with the green felt boards and little paper men. They weave life lessons into the stories of Eve and Mary and Ruth and Esther and Noah and Jonah and Moses and David and Abraham. They used to tell us kids we could talk directly to Jesus, and they'd tell us how. And now they're up there telling it to everybody. They’re all smart as a whip, and they let God work the hard things of life out through their messages--tough messages, hard to hear messages, wise messages, inspired messages, required messages. They preach. They teach. God speaks, I believe. And people listen. It does me good--not just spiritually, but as a human body in a human world where I grew up as a girl. So for Lizzy and Ewan, seeing a woman preach will be normal, which is something I'll be meditating on for a long time in different ways for each of them.
Maybe preaching isn't so far off for me either. While I’ve never done it on stage at a church, I’ve sort of been preaching through my writing for quite a while, and in the classroom (about communication, but still) for almost 15 years. Just ask my kids and they'll tell you I’ve been preaching for 6 & 8 years—to Ewan about what to do when you’re born with a sensitive heart or how to let the emotion pass and then look for solutions, and to Lizzy about how to feel when you don’t fit the mold people think you should and about what being tough really means. During the coming term, I'll shift some of those efforts to preaching formally and learn what makes it different from teaching, what my wrong assumptions are, what kind of preparation goes into it compared to a regular classroom setting or a creative writing piece, how people's approaches vary, etc.
So those ladies that are friends of mine standing behind the pulpit unapologetically telling those Bible stories to the whole darn congregation, not just the kids in the Sunday School rooms of the old days, well when they do that, it’s a little bit like a healing happens. It starts when they stand up to walk to the stage, at which point, in my mind, every overlooked lady in every ministry in every town and state in this country for decades upon decades speaks through them. They walk right up there as an army of witnesses. They talk about what’s happening in our world. They talk about what Jesus had to say about it, and they talk in light of the wisdom that God has especially given them in particular, a wisdom that used to be stuck in the rooms with the green felt boards and little paper men. They weave life lessons into the stories of Eve and Mary and Ruth and Esther and Noah and Jonah and Moses and David and Abraham. They used to tell us kids we could talk directly to Jesus, and they'd tell us how. And now they're up there telling it to everybody. They’re all smart as a whip, and they let God work the hard things of life out through their messages--tough messages, hard to hear messages, wise messages, inspired messages, required messages. They preach. They teach. God speaks, I believe. And people listen. It does me good--not just spiritually, but as a human body in a human world where I grew up as a girl. So for Lizzy and Ewan, seeing a woman preach will be normal, which is something I'll be meditating on for a long time in different ways for each of them.
Maybe preaching isn't so far off for me either. While I’ve never done it on stage at a church, I’ve sort of been preaching through my writing for quite a while, and in the classroom (about communication, but still) for almost 15 years. Just ask my kids and they'll tell you I’ve been preaching for 6 & 8 years—to Ewan about what to do when you’re born with a sensitive heart or how to let the emotion pass and then look for solutions, and to Lizzy about how to feel when you don’t fit the mold people think you should and about what being tough really means. During the coming term, I'll shift some of those efforts to preaching formally and learn what makes it different from teaching, what my wrong assumptions are, what kind of preparation goes into it compared to a regular classroom setting or a creative writing piece, how people's approaches vary, etc.
Like my past teaching, anything I attempt will be the broken work of a regular human person. There is certainly a ton of room for improvement. In spite of those shortcomings, something compels me to speak through the written word, and then to take that word and teach it. Think about what compels you. What is it? You know that feeling? The have-to feeling? Well that’s the one I’ve got when I sit down here on my couch to write something out like this. Like if I don’t write it down, I’ll bust. I am forced by something inside of me to process the information of life and spit it back out in a new form. I have been for years and years.
So preaching class, here I come. In a few months when the term is over and Christmas bells are ringing, maybe I'll know if my future path is bound up some stairs, behind a pulpit, microphone on with all eyes looking, folks waiting to see if I've got anything to say that's worth hearing. If that's where things lead, I pray for the gumption to do it, for the strength and humility of the women of my past, for the inspiration of the women of my present, for a measure of the light-in-the-darkness word power of Lewis and King, and for the ability to hold the tensions that form the backbone of that still good news.
So preaching class, here I come. In a few months when the term is over and Christmas bells are ringing, maybe I'll know if my future path is bound up some stairs, behind a pulpit, microphone on with all eyes looking, folks waiting to see if I've got anything to say that's worth hearing. If that's where things lead, I pray for the gumption to do it, for the strength and humility of the women of my past, for the inspiration of the women of my present, for a measure of the light-in-the-darkness word power of Lewis and King, and for the ability to hold the tensions that form the backbone of that still good news.
