Thursday, November 08, 2012

Preach This?

Ecclesiastes 3 promises that there are seasons for everything. A season for mourning and a season for laughing. A season for peace and a season for war. A season for casting away stones and a season for gathering stones together, whatever that means. There are also, apparently, season for blogging and seasons for forgetting to blog. After a very long season of forgetting to blog, I'm back. I hope this will be a season for blogging. 

I will say, though, that my season of not blogging was not a season of not writing. In fact, I've been doing some of the most challenging writing I've done in a long time. Just not in this medium. 

It all began in the spring, when our church staff got together for a planning day. As we discussed plans for fall classes and themes for the upcoming school year, our minister of youth and young adults came up with a brilliant suggestion. "Why don't we have an emphasis on the Hebrew Bible throughout the fall? We could focus all of our classes on the Hebrew Scriptures and preach on the Old Testament lectionary texts in worship. We could tell the stories people aren't familiar with and look at the texts we usually skip over in favor of the gospels and epistles." The light of excitement went around the staff room. Yes! We could tell the stories from the Hebrew Bible, build Biblical literacy, deepen the Scriptural knowledge of the congregation! I threw myself into planning a Bible Study based on the idea of a road trip through Genesis. We dove into Hebrew Bible preparations with great enthusiasm. 

Then the other shoe dropped: I decided to plan worship for the fall. I purchased the lectionary worship planner for the year (September-to-September... why isn't it structured for either the secular calendar or the church calendar?) and took a look at the assigned texts for the coming months. And there they were, those passages that preachers fear to face. I had expected the stories from children's Sunday School: Adam & Eve, Noah, Abraham & Sarah & Hagar, Moses, Joshua, Deborah. I had expected readings from the prophets, the dense imagery of Ezekiel or perhaps the dense imagery of Isaiah. But what I found in that worship planner wasn't any of those things. What I found was wisdom literature. I discovered that in September I'd be preaching on the Song of Solomon, the Proverbs 31 woman, and Esther. In October I'd have to tackle Job. And in November, the story of Ruth. I had to preach on all of them. I didn't get the classic stories, no. The Hebrew Scriptures in this lectionary cycle had enough sex to put thirteen-year-old boys in fits of giggles for months, enough philosophical thought to satisfy a classics major at a liberal arts college, and enough gender trouble to make the feminist in me scream with rage. 

Somewhere in my panic, I'm fairly certain I heard the Almighty chuckle. 

So I put on my newly-bestowed stole and my big-girl-pastor-heels and got to work. I prayed for wisdom. I dug into passages I hadn't wrestled with since my seminary classes with Dr. Petersen. I exegeted. I pored over commentaries. I prayed some more. I wrote sermons, then called my Catholic, Brethren, and Baptist advisers (thanks, family!) and ran ideas past them. I prayed for courage. And I preached. 

With the help of the Holy Spirit, I talked about sex from the pulpit without blushing. I remembered God's wisdom imparted through the words of my seminary classmates and clergy colleagues as I tried to cut away the pink-covered expectation baggage from the Proverbs 31-woman. I taught my congregation about the traditions of Purim and we all booed at Haman. I poked a stick at the pinata of Biblical literalism that was hanging over Job. And I endeavored to preach prose interpreting the poetry of the Psalms. They were not all great sermons. But they were genuine attempts to delve into the challenging parts of our sacred book. I figured that if I, with some serious theological training, had difficulty with these passages, my congregation might, too. And I felt the Spirit challenging us to gird our congregational loins and wrestle with the passages God placed before us.

By the time I got to planning November, I was looking for trouble. After preaching some of the most terrifying passages in the Bible, my attitude had shifted from, "Oh, no! Another hard passage!" to "Troubling text? BRING IT ON!" That's when I decided to put a cherry on the top of this Old-Testament-Worship-Sundae. After praying about it for a while, I decided to do a pre-Advent series focused on some more hard texts. Inspired by the challenging stories we'd been looking at throughout the fall, I decided to plan a sermon series on the "black sheep" in Jesus' genealogy. So for four weeks, I'm taking on the stories of: 1) Tamar and Judah, 2) Rahab and Salmon, 3&4) Naomi, Ruth, & Boaz. That's right. We're getting ready for Advent by talking about sex, prostitution, fidelity, family, and tradition. Some days I shake my head and wonder what I was thinking in choosing this path. But other days I feel blessed. I feel blessed by the challenge of God's Word and passages that I cannot address comfortably. I feel blessed that God is disturbing my assumptions and pushing me to go deeper. And I feel abundantly blessed that I have friends, colleagues, family members, and a congregation who are willing to engage the questions and go deeper with me. 

Talking with my sister this afternoon, I expressed relief that once Advent begins I'll return to the New Testament Scriptures. She said, "So, away from the challenges of the Old Testament." I replied, "Yes, back to something fluffy, like the gospels." Laughing, she replied, "I don't think you can describe the gospels as fluffy. Is any part of the Bible fluffy?" We both pondered this for a moment, then concluded that, apart from the occasional Psalm, none of the Bible is fluffy. None of it is easy. It isn't meant to be. 

The Bible is dense and challenging, meant to be pondered and chewed on, wrestled with and rested in, doubted and trusted. If we're getting only reassurance from it and never struggling with it, we're probably not reading it right. 

So, on to a new season. A season of New Testament texts. A season of Advent and Christmas and Epiphany. But I hope all of them will be seasons of wrestling as this one has been. Maybe when I approach the Christmas texts, perhaps the most familiar, comforting texts of all, I'll read them with the same sense of challenge and prophetic discomfort that I've come to cherish in this season of learning. 

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