Stress the Halls!

Why are the holidays so stressful? Let me hazard a few guesses.

1. Fantasizing: I think an amazing amount of people fantasize about what the holidays are going to be like. We paint the rosiest and most amazing portraits of what it will be like on Christmas Day and the days leading up to it. Many families gather together from around the country and the fantasy of what it will be like often does not meet the reality of people who are struggling with life, failing at finances, or stressed out from work or school.
   
2. Schedules: We don't think about schedules and how they affect us until they go awry. Holidays are all about scheduling. When will we arrive? Where will we stay? How long will we be there? When will everyone else arrive so we can get started? Who made up this schedule, anyway? Let's face it, we all married people different than who we are and then we had children who grew up and married someone different than they are who have children who are . . . well, you get the picture. All these folks in a close space with differing traditions, personalities, schedules, and interests. It has the potential for great stress.
3. Unfamiliar Territory: Most holiday celebrations occur on unfamiliar territory. Either we go to someone else's home turf or we have people in that change the dynamic of our home and household. Either way, we end up in unfamiliar territory. What do we do? Well, we either bite our lip and go with the flow (at which point when we finally get alone or on our way home, we swear we will never do that again) or we have the blowup - like the Colonel (Al Pacino) does in "Scent of a Woman" where he blows in and blows up the Thanksgiving Dinner.
   

Well, with all that, how do you cope? How do you make the holidays less stressful? I hazard a few hard fought suggestions:

1. Lower the Expectations: Don't go in thinking this is going to be the best Christmas ever. It's hard to top the first one for drama and impossible to exceed the one you think of from your past that was the best Christmas you ever had. Let it be what it is. A gathering. Enjoy the moment. If it exceeds your expectations, all the better. If it doesn't then at least it wasn't so far below your hopes and dreams that you find yourself fighting a deep depression or resentment.
2. Spread Out the Attention: Let others have their time in the sun. Like worship, Christmas is not about you, is it? If you don't have to be catered to, it will be amazing how much less stress their is around the season. If others have a desire for something to take place, fine. If that makes them happy, let it make you happy, too. If you aren't at the center of your plans, you might have a better time.
   
3. Get to Know One Another: One of the problems families often have around the season is that they gather for one of the few times during the year. In reality, you live separate lives. Cell phones have sure helped us to stay in touch but it is nothing like conversation face to face. The problem is, we don't know what to talk about when we get together. So, since we have different experiences that aren't the same and don't relate, conversation becomes tough to maintain. Here are few ideas:
• Be OK with periods of silence when together. After all, when you were all living together there were many periods of silence. They weren't awkward then, don't let them be now.
• Ask questions instead of telling about yourself. If you really want to know what is going on with someone else, let them do the talking. Tray a few of these:
• What was the best thing about this year for you? For your family?
• What was your best Christmas growing up?
• What one tradition did you and your family have around the holidays (good one to ask the in-laws)?
• Who is the most interesting person you have met in the last few months? Why were they so interesting?
• What is the best thing about your church? What's the most challenging thing? What would you like to see changed about your church? How do you plan to change it?
• If you could have seen one thing during Jesus' life with your own eyes, what would it have been?

Well, I hope these help. Everyone could use some help at Christmas. After all, even Mary and Joesph had to go through the stress of traveling (while pregnant), getting stiffed on their hotel reservations, early delivery, and strangers coming to visit at the most inopportune time. Merry Christmas!

Analyzing Narrative Preaching

My sermon today was a narrative version of the story of the Angel appearing to the Shepherds. One of the things I am attempting to understand is exactly how I do these kinds of sermons from a technical side of things. If I am going to teach others how to do this, I have to know some of the things that seem to come naturally to me (but may not to others). So, here is what I learned today in telling a narrative sermon:

1. My mentor tells his homiletics classes that repetition is extremely necessary in sermonic presentation. I agree. One of the major keys of narrative storytelling is the ability to have a repetitive line or concept that holds the story together. For instance, my opening line of the sermon today was, "It was a night like any other night." I not only repeated the line numerous times during the story but developed it further with two other variations. After moving from the job of the shepherds to the appearance of the Angel, I used the line, "But when the Angel appeared, it suddenly became a night unlike any other night the Shepherds had ever experienced." My final transition was to talk about the appearance of the host of angels and I used the line, "When the angel hosts appeared, that night became unlike any other night in the history of the world." The key here is to use both the mnemonic device for memory and the development of the idea as a way of building tension and plot. Eugene Lowry, in his landmark book, "The Homiletical Plot" talks about the stages of narrative as follows:
• Upsetting the equilibrium
• Analyzing the discrepancy
• Disclosing the clue to resolution
• Experiencing the gospel
• Anticipating the consequences
• He describes these as:
• Oops
• Ugh
• Aha
• Whee
• Yeah
• When I look at Lowry's process, my developmental repetitive phrasing helps move the plot along from the Oops phase to the Ugh phase. In other words, it was how I upset the equilibrium of the story (that at first it was a night like any other night) to analyzing the discrepancy (that is was a night unlike any other night). This moved to the issue that disclosed the clue to resolution (the birth of Christ). Whatever may be the case, you must find some device that allows you to build the story dramatically and create a tension between what seems obvious (it was a normal night for the shepherds) and what is hidden (the Angel's appearance broke the fabric of the space-time continuum between eternity and the now).
  
2. Another principle that I noted today was how narrative constantly gives opportunity to talk about quality issues of theology. Telling the story of the angels and the shepherds gave opportunity to talk about Temple sacrifice of lambs; the meaning of light and sound as the revelation of God to human beings; the reality of Jesus and the Angels as eternal beings that moved from an eternal place to a finite earth in order to accomplish a divine mission; the theological depth of the birth of Christ.
   
• The reason I bring this up is that it seems that many think that narrative does not allow preachers to preach either expository-like sermons with doctrinal or theological issues nor does narrative allow for theologically sophisticated messages. Nothing could (or should) be further from the truth. Preaching the word with 3 point sermons or telling the biblical story narratively allows you to share the deeper things of Christ if you are looking to do it. It must be intentional, but that's how it should be.
• Fred Craddock in his book, "As One Without Authority" criticizes expository sermons as doing harm to the text. We remove the text from its context in order to make some kind of alliterative, stylistic meaning out of it (The Pattern of the Shepherds; The Purpose of the Shepherds; The Perception of the Shepherds - or something like that). The real dynamic is that narrative, story based sermons allow you to stay in the story while making the points about doctrine and theology rather than leaving the story to wander through some made up idea about the meaning of the text that is really no more than your idea of how this concept should be viewed. Narrative allows you to stay with the scripture, even in the scripture, while you apply the power of God's thought (theology) to the words of the text (homiletics).
  

More To Come Later!!!

What They Dont' Tell You In Seminary

I told someone today, "This is one of those things they don't teach you in seminary!" Let me tell you why.

The little church that I am the interim pastor for (Foothills Church of God) had quite a traumatic day today. We have a Preschool at the Church. This morning, at around 6:20am one of the teachers arrived to open the Preschool. After pulling up into the parking lot, she was accosted by 4 men. They carjacked her SUV and drove to a bank ATM machine where they forced her to remove funds from her bank account. Meanwhile, some of the parents a few of the other teachers started arriving around 7am. Finding the church still locked (highly unusual), they got out and looked around the parking lot. They found a purse and some of the contents of it strewn around the parking lot. One of the teachers called the home of the lady who was supposed to have opened earlier in the morning. Quickly the situation escalated into a very nervous and worrisome event. The mother of the woman who was missing came flying down to the church. She was nearly hysterical. Children and staff were arriving. A call was placed to 911 and another call came to me. All I got out of the call was, "We need you pastor, come quick."
By the time I arrived, the police were there and the staff was crying and peeking out from doors and windows. The parents and staff that had discovered the purse and things were being interviewed by the initial officer. What do you do?
Well, all I know is that they don't teach you this stuff in seminary! I took several steps to try and deal with the immediate situation. I got the Preschool director to go in and get her staff to calm down and concentrate on the children. Nothing was going to be accomplished by having the children in a panic. I immediately went over to the husband and father of the victim to console them. I then talked with the officer to see if we needed to close the Preschool. He suggested we wait for the arrival of a detective who would be in charge of the case. He arrived momentarily and we discussed our options. We closed the Preschool and some parents and the director began calling parents to tell them that we would be closed for the day and reopen Monday. Meanwhile, the officers began to arrive in droves. We closed the parking lot and the police put up crime scene tape. For the next hour I walked up and down the street and talked to parents who were arriving to bring their children to daycare. I assured them that things were going to be OK and that the incident had occurred before any of the children had arrived.
After an hour of anxious waiting, a phone call came and all kinds of activity started up. A few minutes later, one of the officers told me that they had found the woman in a remote part of a place called Chino Hills and that her abductors had kicked her out of the car (unharmed) and left her in such a wooded area that the police were having to send a helicopter up on the mountain to retrieve her. The good news was that she was all right.
We told the staff and everyone was relieved. By then, some of the parents began arriving to pick up their kids. I continued to go up and down the street assuring everyone that everything was indeed OK. Later, I gathered the staff together and told them what a good job they had done that day. By then, the Administrator had arrived (she was taking care of her grandkids quite a distance away and then got caught in traffic trying to get to the church) and we talked with the staff about how to handle things on Monday. Some of the staff were still arriving and were shocked by the news. I spent the next hour in pastoral care, assuring everyone that this was a crime of opportunity and unlikely to be repeated by either the criminals or others. By the time noon had arrived, the police CSI had come and gone and all the children were picked up. The staff left and I headed out for lunch, grateful for all that I have learned in seminary and over the 3+ decades of pastoring - none of which prepared me for today ... and yet, with the presence of the Holy Spirit, everything I had learned in seminary and in pastoring helped me get through the morning. I ate lunch, came back to the apartment, and took a nap. Not a bad day. Thank God.

The Fun Part

The Fall Quarter has come to an end. As of last Thursday, I am officially on Christmas Break. When you're a Ph.D student, this is when the fun begins. At Fuller, your seminar is broken up into two phases. The first phase is the seminar itself. In my case, I spent the Quarter reading and studying with my mentor, Dr. Clay Schmit, on the Theology of Preaching. It consisted of reading a series of books on preaching. Almost all of them were revelatory. The first two books have influenced my thinking in such profound ways that I think it may have helped to clarify what I will do with my dissertation. Another of the books has made me ask questions about basic areas of preaching that are extremely important to me - questions about performance theory and the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the preaching event; questions about the role of the listener in the formation of the sermon and the whether the key theological issue in preaching is the Cross or the Resurrection. As I indicated, the books where revelatory.
But now, the second phase of the seminar begins. After all the classwork and reading is done, the final requirement is to write a research paper. The paper is usually between 30 and 40 pages and centers on an area of interest to the student that arises out of the seminar. During this period, you probably read more than you do during the Quarter. I currently have about 35 books surrounding me that I am using for my research paper. Unlike a term paper, I am not trying to show the teacher that I know something about the subject. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I know more about the subject I am writing on than Clay does (that's not a slam at him, either). This kind of research is designed to be concentrated detective work. You are looking for new connections or understandings that others may not have seen or made. For instance, in this paper I am looking to understand a historical character by the name of Erasmus. He was a philologist (a grammarian) who helped put together a quality Greek manuscript of the New Testament and helped to correct the Latin version of the Bible (called the Latin Vulgate). By the time I am finished with the paper, I hope to know more about Erasmus and about the implications of his translation of one word from the Gospel of John (how he translated the Greek word logos in John 1:1 - "in the beginning was the word (logos)". In the Vulgate he changed the translation from the Latin word verbum to the word sermo. The implications of that simple change of one Latin word for another changed the life and work of Erasmus. It may also help to change the way in which preachers and homiletics professors understand preaching.
And for me, this is where the fun part begins. I enjoy both the reading/research part and the organizing/writing part. I have already written 10 pages in the last two days. I have barely scratched the surface. By the time I'm finished with this, I may know more about Erasmus, sermo and verbum than 99.9% of the people in the world. I guess this is what it means to be a scholar. Sounds like fun to me!

Preparation

After a too long absence from writing here, I return to the keyboard afresh. I am in Minneapolis writing this after having attended the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Homiletics Meeting. This gathering of professors of preaching from around the world (I know of at least 7 different countries represented) is a time of both scholarly pursuit and networking. During the Meeting, professors and Ph.D. students present scholarly papers that are open to any Academy members to read, critique, and question. Next year, I will be presenting a paper (hopefully) dealing with some of the issues that I will be dealing with in my Doctoral Dissertation. It will be a chance for well qualified and published scholars to ask questions of and critique my thinking. I will be required to give a defense of my positions and arguments. Sounds both challenging and exciting to me!
This year, I spent time making connections and networking with members of the Academy. This is crucial since, after all, these will be the men and women who will be on or chair search committees looking for professors of Homiletics for their various seminaries and graduate schools. Knowing them gives me a foot in the door when submitting my resume. Some of these men and women are the leaders, movers, and shakers in the world of preaching. I spent time with Richard Lischer from Duke Divinity School, maybe the leading homiletical theologian in America; O.C. Edwards, retired from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, who has written the definitive History of Preaching for this generation; Eugene Lowry, now retired from St. Paul School of Theology in Missouri, and the leading voice in the area of Narrative Preaching. To one seeking a career in Homiletics, this is like a baseball player meeting Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Willie Mays. Maybe more importantly (and amazingly) they now know who I am. Let me explain.
I don't know that I am now or will be in the future a scholar of the rank of these gentlemen I have listed. I think I am smart and continue to have a thirst and capacity to learn. However, I do have confidence in my performative abilities. After all, that's what I have been doing now for more than 30 years. This year at the Academy, the Performative Studies Group (one of many small scholarly groups that meet to hear papers dealing with the area of Performance Theory as it relates to preaching) received permission to take an hour at the Academy meeting to share some of their performative arts. One of the members, Todd Farley, is both a professor of communication at Calvin College and a professional Mime (he studied with the great Marcel Marceau). He performed a magnificent Mime piece about the meaning of God's call. Another professor of preaching, Dr. Jana Childers, did an oral interpretation of Daniel 5. Dr. Charles Bartow, professor of homiletics at Princeton Seminary, shared a series of poems he had written (even if you don't like poetry that much, his performance of them is riveting). My mentor, Dr. Clay Schmit from Fuller, performed several musical pieces - he is an excellent baritone. And there, on the same stage, was this unknown Ph.D. student sharing a "midrash" (a story based on a text of scripture). It was only 6 minutes long (about the prophet Elijah and his home town of Tishbe) but it was a hit. Over the next several hours members of the Academy sought me out to ask me about what I had done and how to teach others to do the same. One professor wants me to put some of these stories on DVD and send it to her to use in class as a teaching tool. Others bought my book. One who sought me out was Dr. Eugene Lowry. Not only was he complimentary of my performance, but he offered to help me in my dissertation. We will be communicating over the next couple of months and I may get the chance to study with him for my Dissertation (that would be a huge "coup" and make my Dissertation far more important and respected.
All in all, for someone attempting to make a place for himself in a crowded and competitive field, it was quite a week. Maybe God really does have something for me to do in this pursuit of Homiletics. I don't think I'll set the world on fire or win a Pulitzer Prize, but I might help a few young preachers catch fire and change their world. That would be enough of a prize for me. Thank, God, for an opportunity and a vision. They feel pretty good on the inside.