Festival of Homiletics (a.k.a., a week of good preaching!)

Last week I earned 25 contact hours of continuing ed, from 7:00 p.m. Monday to noon on Friday, by attending the Festival of Homiletics in Atlanta.  (For more info, see www.goodpreacher.com)  In a word, it was awesome.  It was also renewing, refreshing, and just plain great.

A friend and colleague invited me to go with her.  Before going, I didn’t know quite what to expect.  I had heard of some of the speakers: Walter Brueggemann, Michael Curry, Lillian Daniel, Adam Hamilton, James Howell, Thomas Long, and Will Willimon.  But I didn’t know what to expect.  Was I going to have to defend being a woman pastor, like I occasionally do in North Carolina?  Was I going to find myself amidst a sea of extreme conservative or extreme liberal theology?  Was I going to be bored or wish I hadn’t come, after spending my whole year’s allotment of continuing ed money on this one event?  Gracias a Dios, the answer to all those was no.  All but two of the denominations present (Catholic and Baptist) ordain women.  The speakers were engaging.  The theology was neither overly conservative nor liberal, but in the middle, indeed “mainline,” as most speakers and attendees belonged to mainline Protestantism.   I felt affirmed in where I stand rather than having to be defensive about it or quiet about it (so as to not get drawn in to arguments with people who will not concede any ground). 

On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday the Festival ran two simultaneous venues and you had to choose which speaker you wanted to hear.  For the second session on Tuesday, my friend and I chose the secondary and smaller venue because of the topic, “Who Am I to Preach to You? Authority and Preaching to Postmoderns.”  We were so glad we did, and spent most of the next two days also at the alternative site.  What we discovered from other friends was that we heard more hope from these speakers than from the speakers at the main site, many of whom apparently talked about the decline of the Church. 

During the talk on preaching to postmoderns, I decided to embrace my postmodernity and post on Facebook during the session from my phone.  This was radical for me, but this speaker said something I thought was worth sharing.  There’s a lot of junk on Facebook (which I’m guilty of posting, too), but I felt like this was something worth sharing beyond “at Ebenezer Baptist Church – so much history!” or “really enjoying this awesome music.”  These were also new ideas or ones I’d not heard quite so eloquently phrased before.    

The first one I was just amused by: “If you'd become better sinners, you'd have better sermon illustrations.” Nadia Bolz-Weber was the speaker on preaching to postmoderns.  My husband’s response?  He’s been telling me that for years. 

Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Church preached on Mary Magdalene: “We need some crazy Christians. The sane ones are killing us.”  Mary Magdalene went while it was still dark to go look at the tomb, she didn’t wait for daylight.  Bishop Curry did specify that we’re talking culturally crazy, not clinically.  A connection that I made was a shift from “well-behaved women rarely make history,” a saying that’s always bothered  me, to Bishop Curry’s statement that “only the crazy ones do something of significance in this world.”  Only crazy men and women do something of significance, and that is more than simply “make history.” 

This next one is a paraphrase of a couple paragraphs of a lecture: Worship space is a foreign land and we are all immigrants without green cards, only here because God invited us. None of us have ownership of it.  The preacher is also a foreigner.  Claudio Carvalhaes was the only Latino speaker.  He led the worship before his session and led us in a Pentecostal prayer, which I would term Latino-style, where we all prayed out loud our own prayers at the same time, just like so often happens at Hispanic churches.  I can’t wait to try to this with a small group at Orange because I’ve often wondered how to make it happen among non-Latinos. 

“Worship isn't directed to you. The only person we want to get something out of it is God.” Lillian Daniel preached.  The point isn’t for you to get something out of it.

Another paraphrase from a lecture: It's hard to end a sermon because we serve a living God and nobody can exhaust the Gospel, there is always something else to be said.  It amused me that this came from Bishop Will Willimon, because it has been said about him that he’s never had an unpublished thought.  However, he ended both his lecture and his sermon early. 

Finally, the closing song at the very end of the conference was “As a Fire is Meant for Burning,” words by Ruth Duck.  This is not a new idea, but the poetry is beautiful:

“Preaching Christ and not our customs,

let us build a bridge of care,

joining hands across the nations,

finding neighbours everywhere.”