PeaceBang

I Was Dang Happy To Be There

May 29, 2007 on 7:06 am | In Shout-Outs, Theological Reflection |

The Festival of Homiletics was absolutely wonderful. I was beyond thrilled to get to hear William Willimon, Barbara Brown Taylor, Fred Craddock and James Forbes in person after intensely admiring them from a distance for so many years. Craddock and Taylor in particular totally inspired me. You know how you love someone’s writing so much, and you form a vision and an inner voice in your imagination that you associate with them? And it’s pretty idealized? Then when you see them in person you find that they’re a little less charismatic or a little less articulate or a little less completely inspiring and impressive than you had imagined?

Well, that didn’t happen at all at this conference. Barbara Brown Taylor is graciousness on toast — she embodies her own message in an entirely authentic, grounded, beautiful way, plus she’s freaking brilliant — and Fred Craddock was even better than anything I could have made up in my own head. It’s hard for me to believe that someone could be that much of a cornpone character without having it be a contrived, homey kind of act, but Fred Craddock is the real deal. He just happens to be Elmer Fudd meets Martin Luther King. It’s just who he is. He’s the kind of preacher that you hear is a national treasure and you think, “Oh yea, I bet… I bet he has an ego a mile wide under all that charm and talent and Christian wisdom.” And then you hear Craddock and you sit there all laughed out and also feeling like you just ate the most delicious spiritual meal, and also a little heartbroken — because he does all those things — and you think, “You know what? This man is a national treasure.” I’ve been listening to a recording his sermon about the hyperbolic nature of God (and of preaching) for days now. Again and again. I still laugh and cry.

James Forbes did this thing where he kind of acted like a charming, slightly befuddled old man and just as you were relaxed and in the palm of his hand and feeling all comfortable there, WHOMP, he got sharp as a tack, direct, organized, challenging, convicting. It was breathtaking. Like fun he’s a befuddled old man. We should all be so old and befuddled.

Willimon… well, I just have a big crush on William Willimon. I’ve loved his books for a long time, which read as though the author is a very cranky, very stern old guy. But it turns out that in person Willimon is a total wiseacre and also, in my opinion, a dreamboat. Don’t you think I’d be a good Southern bishop’s wife? Can someone arrange this?

If anyone can finally make a Trinitarian out of me, it is Willimon. “The Trinity moves !” He talked about how God changes people through preaching, and he had me at “The title of this lecture is a joke. I don’t know how God changes people through preaching.” He was, for me, the most quotable of the speakers. I’ll be cracking his jokes and telling his stories for years.
Here he is, Bishop Dreamboat:

The only disappointment of the conference — and it was a big one — was Brian McLaren’s worship and lecture. There were so many things wrong with it for me, I hardly know where to start, but let me just say that if that’s the big star of the Emergent Church movement, I’m a lot less interested in the Emergent Church movement than I was two weeks ago.

I hope that the Emergent Church movement has many tendrils, and that Brian McLaren and the group vivid are just one branch on the tree. Still, his presentation and worship felt to me slick, manipulative, intellectually insulting and just badly planned. For one thing, it’s painful when a major proponent of “plugged in” worship stands there with a clicker in his hand trying to get the lyrics to the next hymn on the screen and failing. THUMP. Talk about killing the momentum of a service. Also, I don’t want to see the preacher’s sermon outline on a movie screen while he’s preaching. Especially not when it’s full of typos. It’s distracting and for some strange reason, depressing.

I also don’t know what I’m supposed to get from a kid running the Mac standing up there in big sunglasses and a friar’s robe. I am guessing that it’s supposed to look hip and ancient at the same time, but to me it just looked like a Halloween costume. Like a mockery.

Music that is the aural equivalent of Thomas Kincaid, Painter of Light, is not my thing. I can think of no other way to describe some of the music we heard at the conference — some of it sounded to me like a teenaged girl’s journal set to random piano chords, and not in a good way. If we love Jesus, I don’t know why we have to whine about it and use breathy babydoll tones, that’s all I’m saying. I think this is a trend in Christian worship that I hope, dear Lord, will be a short one.

Also, I don’t feel that droning repetition of the same musical phrases necessarily brings us all to to a deep, meditative place. It just brings some of us to a deeply irritated place, especially when the vocals are nasally and flat. I love Taize and chanting, but this just felt like nerve-wracking, insistent repetition. Maybe some of the musical folk out there can explain why this sometimes feels so transcendent and sometimes feels like a punishment (”We are going to repeat this phrase SO MANY TIMES, you are GOING to have a spiritual experience! Whether you like it or NOT!”).

Okay, ’nuff said on music. It’s just that music is so important to me, and when it’s not done well I find that so very, very disappointing. McLaren told some good stories. But he also contradicted himself in a fairly significant way, and I went away feeling that there was a lot of style but not a lot of substance.

Way on the other end of the substance spectrum, Walter Bruegemann gave a dense, genius talk on prophetic ministry and frankly, I’m going to have to listen to it again before I can say anything about it beyond, “Man, that was powerful.” I’m still working through my notes and looking up all the Scripture passages that he cited, digging into his thesis and trying to understand it better. I got the tape so I can listen to it again.

Bishop Vashti McKenzie did a beautiful sermon on the last day, using a lot of call and response techniques and other classic A.M.E. methods, and to tell the truth I couldn’t so much enter into the ministry of what she was doing as sit back and admire how she was doing it. It wasn’t until later, when I had some distance from her mammoth energy and volume, that the emotional impact of her message hit me, which was like getting a good thing twice. “What are you willing to believe God FOR?”

Rev. Grace Imathiu gave us a fantastic closing sermon with one of those great African stories only someone who speaks the language can tell, but which you wish you could share with your own congregation, and we did a really cool Litany of Thanksgiving and Acclamation where we sang “Amen” in between phrases. I loved it. And we also sang the Lord’s Prayer, which I also loved.

And when we took Communion together, I have never before felt so much part of a community of disciples. Usually, I look around and wonder how everyone is doing in their individual relationship with God and Christ. This time I looked around and thought to myself, “Lord, what a mess we all are, just as pathetic as the original disciples. I am so damned happy to be here.”

I went away not exactly thinking I was the worst preacher that ever lived, but certainly convinced that I’ve been doing it all wrong every Sunday for the past decade. Which I think is probably a totally fine reaction to have after you’ve attended your first Festival of Homiletics.