Shortly before moving to Pasadena, my family and I rented a cabin in Canoe Creek State Park in Pennsylvania. We spent an entire week with my parents, brothers and their spouses swinging on the porch swing, playing games, eating good food and enjoying the created world around us. But mostly (and this will tell you something about my family) we went fishing.
One day, while the rest of the clan took a nap, I slipped down to the spillway below Canoe Creek Lake. The lake is stocked with trout, my species of preference, and I figured I might be able to coax a few to take my spinner. I began catching a few small trout in the pool directly below the dam where the oxygenated water helped the trout thrive. But as I worked my way down the stream, the trout population began to wane and I not only failed to catch more trout but also was not even seeing any. I had nearly concluded that I should return to the pool below the dam when, quite by accident, I discovered a place just teeming with trout. Off to the side, a small feeder stream with limestone spring water was pouring life into the main branch of water. I wandered up that stream and caught dozens of trout, then returned to the cabin to share my secret with my family.
We spent many hours the rest of the week fishing that feeder stream, catching its beautiful trout. We never did meander farther downstream on the main branch, and yet, now as I think about it more, that is probably where the largest fish would be found. The main branch, with its breadth, depth and abundant food supply, was a perfect place for trout except the water was too warm for them to survive. The feeder branch, with its cold water and its tiny holes and riffles could hold trout but only about a foot long. But where the two streams come together, the benefits of each stream merge into one flow and the drawbacks of each stream become minimized. How I wish I could go fish that section of stream right now!
I am a preacher at heart and I love to help people see the biblical text come alive in new ways, especially by exegeting the biblical culture. Understanding Paul’s world, the temple or the life of a first century fisher can illumine the biblical text and infuse new life and a deeper understanding of it in the disciples who listen to it, wrestle with it and live the text. And yet, taking the class, Living the Text in a Postmodern Context has revealed to me that there might be deeper waters to negotiate where a whole new group of people might be able to enter into the text and hear it, taste it, touch it and live it.
As a DJing preacher, I must faithfully exegete the Bible and culture alike, bringing them together into a new mix infused with the life-giving message of the gospel and the practicality of everyday applicability for ordinary people. The three primary ways Steve suggested this might happen – juxtaposition, subversion and amplification – have helped me think about ways in which I can create sermons that are meaningful and that catalyze people to live the text.
Yet the text is not just for me to study, live and learn but for every person in the faith community and beyond. I think one of the main lessons God is teaching me right now in regards to the text is to be filled with humility: humility that says I am not the keeper of the text but God has entrusted it to all of His people; humility to realize that a welder untrained in biblical exegesis may have an insight into the text that I would never come across because of the blinders I wear; humility to allow others to speak and breath and live the text because God is working in all of us, not just those who can parse a Greek verb. Yet, if I look for an even more fundamental principle that ties Bible and culture together, I am led to the challenge of becoming a good listener, for it is in listening well to both the text and to culture (more specifically people) that a new creation emerges.
How surprising it is that the biblical writers were DJs themselves. From Genesis to Revelation, the biblical authors, inspired by God, mixed gospel and culture: the Genesis creation stories juxtaposed against the Babylonian creation story; the Gospel evangelists DJing the Jesus tradition; Paul’s use of ‘Lord’ in association with Jesus as subversive teaching in the shadow of the Caesars. The text itself is a mix of gospel and culture.
As a preacher in a predominately ‘boomer’ congregation, I will need to work slowly and cautiously in allowing the congregation to move from preacher-centered preaching to congregational living of the text. The following are ways I anticipate this taking place:
*I will form a group of people made up of diverse backgrounds (young/old, married/single/divorced, men/women, abused, non-Christian/Christian, etc.) and have them read a common biblical text. Then I will hold a roundtable discussion on the text, utilizing, with permission, the insights of the group in an upcoming sermon. As the congregation grows, I will allow these contributors to preach parts of the sermon, eventually, even an entire sermon. Patience is the key here.
*I will broaden ways in which people can live the text by engaging all of their senses (acting the text out, telling stories and creating art or some other form of expression, etc).
*I will spend less time in my office reading and spend more time over lunch listening to the stories of the people around me.
*I will continue to do good biblical exegesis (because the anything-goes mentality is “lazy postmodernity”).
And now, I’ve got to run because there’s a new stretch of stream I need to go fishing in!
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4 comments:
Daryl, I really enjoyed your blog post. As I thought about your post, I remembered some of my good friends from Tuolumne, California. Together with my brother-in-law and most of the men in our home-Church, I was constantly surrounded by fishermen. I am not much of a fisherman myself, but I know firsthand the enthusiasm that these men have for their sport. Reflecting on the reading materials for the class, I thought about the section in the book ‘Sensual Orthodoxy’ (Blue 2004) titled “A Potentially Gruesome Metaphor”, and how sometimes there may be an element of mystery and danger to our fishing. Sometimes we may find it “[A] slithering morass up from the depths, and Jesus (God incarnate) sits there on it (Blue 2004).”
Nathan Rutan
Blue, D. (2004). Sensual Orthodoxy. Saint Paul, Cathedral Hill Press.
Daryl, I felt like I was right next to you in trout country, fishing rod in hand. Great post. (Keep writing that fly fishing book!) What struck me about your reflection was your discussion about the importance of humility when we address the text, something that I, too, am confronting. It seems that the more we study about God, the more humble we become as we realize how little we understand about him. As you write, that affects our preaching. That's the point I think Lucy Atkinson Rose makes in her book, "Sharing the Word" when she writes about how she has rethought the content of her preaching because "humans must learn to live with the uncertainty of limited knowledge and fragmented truth" (p. 99). Your fishing analogy gets at that by telling us a story that can't be argued with, while at the same time relating a truth about faith. Bravo.
Lucy Atkinson Rose, "Sharing the Word: Preaching in the Roundtable Church", (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997).
Daryl – As a preacher I’m wondering how you reflected on Rose’s book? I found it to be quite helpful on several levels. I appreciated her grasp of the dominant views of the last hundred-plus years and how she built her proposal of conversational preaching’s goal of gathering the community of faith around the Word with the preacher and the congregation become colleagues exploring together the mysteries of the Word – with an aim of applying it to their own lives, their community of faith, the larger Church, and the surrounding world (pg. 4). I thought she really got rolling on pages 92-93ff. She regularly called into question the gap that seems to separate the congregation and the preacher. She stated that the primary purpose of preaching is to gather worshippers regularly around the Word, to set texts and interpretations loose in the midst of the community, so that essential conversations are nurtured (pg. 98). This feels a bit scary to me, yet I also resonate with the idea that in this context, all members of the community “from the center to the margins” have the opportunity to participate in the interpretation of the community’s mission and in decision-making (pg. 98).
Your fishing story told me alot about your love for the outdoors and God's creation. A good fisherman reads the water and the conditions - temperature, flow, time of day, season, insect activity, etc. The same way we are challenged by this class to read culture in order to discover where the people are and what they are hungry for. Bringing change to an established congregation will be challenging. Your idea of adding a roundtable group to solicit different insights into the text is a good way to "add-on" to existing traditions to bring about change with traditional/oral people(Sample,55). On the other hand, Sample warns against disrupting communal relations which are a complex web of relationships and hierarchies. Your idea of spending more time with the people and listening to their stories will help you understand the best way to move towards a conversational approach to living the text(Sample,57).
Tex Sample, Ministry in an Oral Culture. Living With Will Rogers, Uncle Remus, and Minnie Pearl (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 1994).
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