Festival of Homiletics

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We Have Not Lost Each Other: Closing Worship with Amy Butler

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Amy Butler
Amy Butler

Drawn into worship with yearning for God’s continued presence in hearts and lives, Brad Froslee called Festival participants into their last service together at #Homiletics2019 with centering prayer and song repeating the refrain; Oh God, we call, from deep inside we yearn for you. Moving into a prayer of Remembrance for Rachel Held Evans, beloved author and Christian voice who recently passed, participants were invited into a time of silent reflection.

We wrapped up our week of powerful sermons with “Sink or Swim,” a message shared by Amy Butler, Senior Pastor at the Riverside Church of New York based on excerpts from Genesis 6-9. In the sermon, Butler dug into a text many preachers like to avoid, the story of Noah and the Flood. The story of Noah does not appear in full in the lectionary. Maybe because as Butler put it, “The story of Noah and the arc is pretty much a terrible story…The plotline centers around a natural disaster that destroys the whole world…and God is a terrible character in this story.”

Neither God nor humanity come out ahead in this story. The anger of God leaves preachers and parishioners alike wondering, Does God really get angry? Regret decisions? Change God’s mind? Play favorites? Butler boldly declared, “The one thing we can be sure of in this text, is that God is male…I mean look at how emotional he gets.” Much of the crowd responded with laughter and applause. Beyond that one thing, Butler argued that we can only watch in wonder as God evolves and humanity wades through waves of trauma and survivors guilt. As Butler put it, “The story you learned in Sunday school is not true. It didn’t end as beautifully as we all imagine. Noah and his family had lost so much.”

Since Noah’s time, humanity has continued to live through story after story of sin and loss. “A lot of us have survivors guilt, and trauma and fear and so many questions just like Noah and his family,” Butler pointed out. “But we are still here. We’re still trying to do this work. We still believe.” Ending her discussion of a difficult text, Butler urged Festival participants not to give up because there is solidarity in the work of muddling through in faith. “We may have lost the benefit of the  doubt, but we have not lost God and we have not lost each other.”  

Offering from the service benefits Downtown Congregations to End Homelessness (DCEH) , a shared project to provide Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA). Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) is a program to provide personal support and funds to stop folks from being evicted and cast into experiencing homelessness. The participants are connected with congregations, return volunteer hours and are supported in their journey.  To date, the program is 85% successful in helping people remain in stable housing. Last year over $250,000 was provided for this program by the inter-faith, downtown congregations. See their website: http://www.dceh.org/ 

Our final worship service was sponsored by Working Preacher, a trusted source of inspiration, interpretation and imagination for preachers across the globe.

Many thanks for a great week! We look forward to seeing your next year at the 28th Festival of Homiletics: “Preaching a New Earth” in Atlanta, Georgia May 18-22, 2020. Registration opens Nov 1st 2019.

Anna Carter Florence, Ready to Climb

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Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence
Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence

On Thursday, surrounded by eager listeners in the Westminster sanctuary, Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence returned to her roots. This was the church where she was first ordained, where she preached in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, where she navigated despair from presiding over yet another lonely funeral of man who died in the AIDS Crisis. She remembers being there, by the pulpit, years ago while pregnant, feeling the first stirrings of her soon-to-be firstborn when he leapt in the womb at the sound of the organ.

Sometimes we recognize the work of God echoing loudly in our lives, and Florence can also speak to the times when it’s felt “Jesus was AWOL and God radio-silent.” How do we find the image of God after the evening news, and the budget meeting, and the 6th microaggression of the day? This is where, like Zaccheus, we have to be open to a little improvising, “yes, and…,” climbing some trees, and putting ourselves out there to get a better glimpse of Jesus. “Inspire me not to give up, but to improvise, not to despair that the way is blocked… but to huff and puff my way up there despite scraped knees and egos.”

Encouraging people to seek God at the risk of seeming a little foolish — Florence noted that this is a strong point to highlight in the story, enough to clean it up and send it to bed. “But this is Festival of Homiletics week, and sermons get to stay up late!”

Zaccheus is characterized as an Empire-aligned (needless to say, corrupt) tax collector of short stature, and from these details Florence explored how we the audience are metaphorically stunted and equally corrupt, holding back ourselves and our communities with racism, sexism, ableism, and a nationalism that would readily entrench obstructions in the push for a wall.

Unbound by walls or language, “Jesus is always on the move, passing through Jericho, the towns where we live, the texts in the lectionary — moving between the lines.” So, Florence recommends we get a better angle and mitigate what obstacles we can. And we shouldn’t be surprised when Jesus calls us out, inspiring repentance and offering an extended dinner invitation to our own home. Sometimes we think we just want a glimpse Jesus, and instead we get Jesus hanging out late in the kitchen, appearing around street corners, and strolling through the gardens of our minds.

We are so much like Zaccheus, whose “perch on the parade route was the springboard for the moral imagination that would change his life,” and Anna Carter Florence is ready to keep climbing.

Will Willimon Points Out Some Pitfalls

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Rev. Will Willimon
Rev. Will Willimon

In Rev. Will Willimon’s estimation, self-righteousness is a major pitfall to preachers’ efforts to be prophetic. When religious leaders internalize expectations of saintly perfection, we can be too afraid of saying the wrong thing to risk saying anything meaningful at all. When the idea of “prophets” gets confused with “fortune-tellers,” we feel pressured to speak from a place of all-knowing certainty.

We cannot know everything; but we can try to understand God, and speak truth from that humble place of trying. Willimon encouraged us to dust utilitarian anxieties from our compasses, and to navigate by questions that point to God: “Who is God anyway? What is God up to? And how can we hitch onto that?”

Reaching for the answers can be collaborative with other people, and from the sound of laughter in the audience, it resonated when Willimon joked about how it feels when the Holy Spirit swoops in during the eleventh hour for another crack at the preacher’s notes.

There are times for public discernment, reckoning, and repentance — and what God has to say isn’t necessarily the gentle comfort we’d prefer. Some of the harshest words recorded in scripture were delivered by the ancient prophets to Israel during her moments of greatest suffering. Suffering persists today in old and new ways, and while there is a balm in Gilead, we can stray off-base in our search for a cure-all.

Willimon explained how “Most of my congregations, I confess, are limited to white, powerful, privileged people… and those kinds of people — like me — love to be told that ‘you’ are the solution to what’s wrong with you…” So we caution against individualistic delusions of control and knowing better, and remain vigilant against abuses of power even from ourselves. While personal accountability and peace of mind are important forces, Willimon reminded us that church is “not a place for anxious upper-class people to gather and be soothed.” We are an expansive body of Christ, with material needs and issues — from healthcare, to homelessness, to opening our senses to God’s movements.

In addition to critiquing different interpretations of what it means to be prophetic, Willimon challenged the idea that the sermon is meant to pull all the weight. Much of the work we associate with preaching is actually spread throughout the liturgy. Willimon acknowledged that speaking harsher truths to a congregation feels more approachable in services featuring Communion, when reconciliatory liturgy and invitation to the table can make any pill easier to swallow. 

But if the pill is the truth, and the truth has a name in Jesus — we can trust that our neighbors can handle it. During sermon prep, Bible study, while wondering what “moral imagination” sounds like to our community, and even navigating confrontation with a fellow member, we can let go of our need to know or control everything. Willimon stirred peals of laughter in the audience as he portrayed a caricature of the grin-and-bear-it strategy, but the idea holds true in all seriousness, when we dodge the pitfalls to continue accompanying our Christian neighbor: I’m going to love you enough to try to believe God knew what God was doing when God called you to be a disciple.