Our Only Comfort?

A pair of NY Times pieces in the past two weeks raise vital issues.   A week ago in an "On Religion" column, Samuel G. Freedman wondered where the humanists--those who now claim "None" as their religious preference--were in the wake of the Newtown tragedy in December.   Freedman noted their absence over against Jewish, B'hai, Muslim, Christian, and other religious leaders, all of whom stepped forward to comfort those in Newtown.  In the course of the article a humanist chaplain from Harvard noted that the main failure of humanists and "Nones" is that they have not yet figured out how to form a community to come around people who are suffering.   If one day they can figure out how to do that, this chaplain said, then the humanists will provide an eminently meaningful alternative to those communities that talk about God, resurrection, or hope beyond death.

This past Sunday Susan Jacoby reflected on "The Blessings of Atheism" and likewise noted that whereas religious people manage to find things to say to people who have lost loved ones to death, "Nones" and atheists generally sometimes struggle.  But since she has just written a book about him, Jacoby commended the 19th century atheist Robert Green Ingersoll who was known to tell people at the graves of loved ones to take heart because the dead, Ingersoll said, are perfectly at rest because they can no longer suffer.  Jacoby concluded her essay by claiming that President Obama could have better served the larger country if in his remarks at the Newtown memorial service on December 16 he had told us some version of the Ingersoll sentiment.   This would have helped the gathered mourners that night because "Somewhere in that audience, and in the larger national audience, there were mourners who would have been comforted by the acknowledgment that their lives have meaning even if they do not regard death as the door to another life, but 'only perfect rest.'”

These ideas properly give people of faith pause.   One cannot deny, for instance, the vital role that community plays in times of loss, grief, and outright tragedy.  Nor can one deny another point made by Jacoby in her essay: when faced with the need to say something in the face of great loss--when faced, in short, with the classic conundrum of theodicy--not a few religious people say egregiously awful things.  Too true.  I've heard them in many'a funeral home.  Like Job's miserable friends, some Christian folks need to learn the value of silence.   Of course, it's not as though the "She's in a better place" and the "God needed another angel in heaven" sentiments are all that people of faith have ever managed to say.   Better, more sensitive, more thoughtful ideas have been spoken in history by people who are not ever and only trying to--in Jacoby's phrase--"get God off the hook" for the bad things that happen in this world.

But in the relative short compass of this blog I want to engage just two of the thoughts raised by these articles.   First, is it really true that all atheists need to do is figure out how to become a community in order to "compete" with--or at least be a viable alternative to--a Christian congregation or the members of a Jewish temple?   Frankly, I doubt that would be enough.  Community is important.  Having a way to come together and to come around mourners is vital.   It's also a convenient way to coordinate the bringing of casseroles and the writing of letters and the visiting of those in grief.   But a community without a core message may still seem empty to at least some--and perhaps to many--who are in crisis.   After something like a 9/11 takes place, it's startling to see how well otherwise disconnected people can form communities of solidarity.  Neighbors, co-workers, even total strangers find a common bond with each other--we even become to some extent an extended national community gathered around TV screens as we together experience the same things in real time.

But people in grief need more.  They need a message.  They seek hope, comfort, even the future prospect perhaps to feel joy again.

So maybe that's where Ms. Jacoby's piece comes in to provide the message that a humanist community of "Nones" would provide by telling the grieving parents in Newtown that they at least can know that their 1st Graders are now "at rest" and that they cannot suffer anymore.   If an entire community of such like-minded Nones could surround those parents and say this, would that be what the grieving are seeking?    Perhaps.   But I think there is something finally hollow in the Ingersoll phrasing about which Ms. Jacoby makes so much in her essay.   The truth is that "rest" and a lack of "suffering" are meaningful only vis-a-vis beings that in some sense still exist.   The raw truth of what an atheist needs to speak is that the dead 1st Grader isn't really "resting" in any meaningful sense because that child and all her distinctiveness and everything that already at the age of 7 made her the joy of her parents' lives is inextricably gone.   The child is not at rest: she is annhiliated, extinguished, extinct.   The gunman took it all: past, present, and future.  No one beyond the handful of people on earth who knew her remembers her now.  Thus, once the last person on earth who knew that 7-year-old is also dead, the cosmos will never bear a single trace of that dear child's having existed.  

Good news?   Comforting words?  Some may find it so.  Me?  I wonder how many parents would be glad to know that their child winked out of existence in so irretrievable a way.   And it might not much matter if those same parents were surrounded by an entire "community" whose bottom line message was essentially that.

Most people have the need for more, sometimes even have intimations of more.   On the same day that the Times published the Freedman article, the New York Times Magazine published its annual "The Lives They Lived" series with obit-like reflections on the lives of some very well-known figures but on also lesser-known folks who died in the past year.   Most revealed the stunning uniqueness--the irreplacable and irrepressible features--to these people that made them worth remembering and recounting.   But one such figure, Maurice Sendak, conveyed a deeply felt conviction that a lot of people--even atheists like Sendak--have when Sendak said (from a radio interview some years before) "I don't believe in an afterlife but I fully expect to see my brother again."

Why is that?   The answers would fill many more blogs.   But the Ingersoll graveside sentiments--even if shared by a large community--would perforce chalk that up to an impossible dream.

What comfort or solace do the humanist Nones have to offer in the face of grief, loss, and intimations of something more?   I think I know the answer: None.

Home: A Sermon

Note: I realize this post is far, far longer than the average blog here on The Twelve.  But my turn for blogging here falls on Christmas Day and since I doubt folks want typical blog fare on Christmas--if folks visit blogs at all on Christmas Day!--I thought I'd post a sermon from my days as pastor at Calvin CRC in Grand Rapids.   If you read it, I pray it will be a blessing.   ~Scott Hoezee

Text: John 1:1-18

"Are you going home for Christmas?" What question has been more commonplace in recent weeks? A little over a week ago while I was at Meijers, I was already pondering this sermon, including that opening line, "Are you going home for Christmas?" Startlingly, as I walked through the store, I heard some version of that very question over and over. A cashier glanced over to a bagger, "So, you going home for Christmas next week?" Two older couples met up in the dairy section: "Hey, Charlie and Doreen! Are your kids coming home for Christmas?" I was quickly passing by two women who were chatting by the Pop-Tart display and although I had no idea exactly what they were talking about, the two words I did catch as I zipped by were "Christmas" and "home."

Are you going home for Christmas? It seems like the question to ask, as well as the theme to play on. One major retailer has as its advertising jingle on TV, "There's no place like home for the holidays." The U.S. Postal Service has run an ad showing people in far-flung places opening mail to convey the idea that there's more than one way to be home for Christmas--send the right card, and maybe your daughter in the Army won't feel like Kuwait is so far from Kansas after all. Speaking of soldiers, most of us know the well-known World War II song, "I'll be home for Christmas, you can count on me. I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams."

Are you going home for Christmas? Frederick Buechner has written that in mid-December 1953 he was in church one Sunday, listening to a sermon by his mentor, Rev. George Buttrick. Buttrick, too, related overhearing some people in the church narthex the week prior talking about Christmas and home. And when in his sermon that Sunday morning in New York City Buttrick asked, "Are you going home for Christmas," Buechner says the question was asked with such a sense of longing that tears leapt to his eyes.

Home. What is it really that we mean by that word? What do retailers and the postal service want to conjure by the word "home"? Is it a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting, all soft colors, crackling fires on the hearth, wide-eyed children whose eyes sparkle in the light of the Christmas tree? Is that home? Is it the sense of "Home sweet home" counted-cross stitched and framed over the mantle, or Dorothy clicking her heels together three times and saying, " There's no place like home"? Is that home?

Is it finally actually a place? Or is home more a longing? Or maybe I can put it this way, how many of us over the age of 20 feel like we are really "home" right now? Isn't it true that "home" for us summons up, as often as not, a whole battery of things that are past and that cannot, as a matter of fact, be retrieved? Maybe "home" is the house you grew up in but that now belongs to some other family. But it's not really that house, either, is it? Yes, that place, that locale, those four walls, are all important. If we concentrate, most of us can still take a kind of "virtual tour" of our childhood homes. In our mind's eye we can still navigate those corridors, staircases, and rooms; we can still smell the mustiness of the cellar, the mothballs in the front-hall closet. Through an act of imagination, we can still open the door to mom and dad's room and when we do, we know where every bottle of mom's perfume will be on the bureau, where we'll find dad's plaid work shirts in the closet, his favorite hat on the edge of the dresser.

That's home, but it's still not just that. A skilled Hollywood set decorator could probably re-create our childhood homes based on photos and our descriptions. But even if someone could re-make that physical place, few of us would believe that just going there would be like going home again. Truth is, "home" is as often as not a whole set of longings, it's a set of special people, an array of feelings that combine to make you feel safe and loved. It's like that untranslatable German word, "Gemütlichkeit." If something is "Gemütlich," it's cozy and fitting and warm and right and, well, I don't know but if you find a "Gemütlich" place, you'll know. You just will. You'll feel it in your heart.

Home is like that. That's why "home" could be experienced most anywhere so long as the right people were around. "Home" could happen in a hotel room where your family gathers because the heat is broken at the house. Many of us know full well that stabbings of home can hit you while talking on the phone with your sister just as surely as they can bubble up were you actually to journey to some piece of real estate back in Iowa.

Are you going home for Christmas? You could say that this is just another piece of sentimental doggerel, the very type of Hallmark hoo-ha that lards over Christmas and obscures its deeper meaning. "Home for the holidays" may have as little to do with the gospel as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. A theological Scrooge could say, and with some biblical justification I might add, that whatever the gospels tell us about what we now call "Christmas," it has precious little if anything to do with being "home for Christmas."

It's partly right to say that: in terms of the gospel, "Christmas" and "home" don't have much to do with one another. But seen from the right angle, those two things may have a lot to do with each other after all, and this morning I'd like to wonder aloud with you about that connection. Maybe even the soaring opening chapter to John's gospel has something to do with this. And so I'll ask again, "Are you going home for Christmas?"

We'd maybe all like it if we could, but mostly we cannot. We can't go home because it doesn't exist anymore. Not just the physical place but the sense of the place, the ambiance, the people above all. We can't go home because mom and dad are dead now. Or one of our parents is gone and nothing has been the same for any of us since. Or we can't go home because maybe we don't want to. For a few of us perhaps, "home" was never that fine a place to begin with. Home was the place where mom and dad argued all the time until finally they split up, and then for the rest of our lives all we ever heard from other people was how sad it is that we come from "a broken home." Or "home" is the place where we wished mom would have walked out on dad but she never did, and meanwhile he beat the living daylights out of her and us a couple times every week.

Are you going home for Christmas? Maybe in some real sense we still can do this, and maybe today we are doing it. And maybe for some of us it's wonderful, but if so, then it is likely also true that for others of us it's strained. We'll all be home today all right but after we leave later on, mom will cry buckets of silent tears because she knows, as only a mother can, how much is wrong in our various relationships with each other. And whether she's right or wrong about it (because who, after all, can finally know such a thing?), mom will wish to high heaven that her kids and grandkids were more like Verna's family because they all seem just golden and why can't our family Christmas parties be like Verna's?

We long for what was but is now lost. We long for what never was but should have been. We rue what was as well as what is. And so in a thousand ways we find now and then, here and there, an unsettled part of our hearts and whatever else we make of that ache, that longing, that sense of sadness, we think we maybe should cover it over because it doesn't have anything to do with Christmas. It ruins Christmas, spoils our fun, curdles our eggnog. Today is not a day to feel bad about things related to home. Let's try to be happy instead. We even prayed that we would be. At least for today. For the kids. For mom. For ourselves. We should at least pretend all is well on the home front, past and present.

Or maybe not. Listen: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God." With God. The Word, the Son of God, the one we now hail as Christ and know as Jesus: he was with God. That's just as well because, as John's opening verse goes on to say, that Word just was God, too. In the beginning. Way back when, even back when technically there was no "when." Once upon a time and before time; once upon eternity the Word was with God. The Word was, well, home. When God was all that there was and all that there had ever been--and even after God made a universe such that there was something other than just sheer divinity around--even still for the Word of God, to be with God was to be home. In the beginning the Word was home. With God. Home.

But by the time you get to verse 10 of John's prologue you read, "He was in the world." In the world. That's different than "with God," isn't it? If you tell me that when you were little, you grew up with your parents in Sheldon, Iowa, then I'll know where home is for you. But if you later tell me about that time when you were "in Vietnam," I'll know that during that time of your life, you weren't home. Not by a long shot.

So here: in the beginning, "with God"; then, "in the world." That's not home. The Word had crafted that world, true, but it still wasn't home. The proof was in the fact that no one recognized him. If people had seen the Word of God when he was at home, when he was dwelling in light inaccessible, crowned with glory and radiant with luminescence, well, they would not have failed to recognize him then. Not when he was home. But when he was "in the world," he wasn't home, and so he blended in as a face in the crowd. They didn't recognize him. They didn't receive him.

Small wonder, because John has more to say about the Word's journey from home. Verse 14 famously tells us that this very Word who in the beginning had been at home "with God," this Word became flesh. Actually, what it says is that the Word was made meat. The ethereal, eternal, divine Word of God became as meaty as a t-bone steak, as fleshly as you or I or any other person, cow, horse, or dog on the planet. The Word was made meat, flesh, skin and bones, and once that happened, he pitched his tent among us.

Literally in verse 14 John says he "tented" among us. He went camping. Camping is, after all, what you do when you're not home. You pitch a tent and camp. When you go camping (and now I mean real camping and not the thing you do when you drive a WonderLodge with indoor plumbing and a satellite dish), but when you are really camping, you know it. None of the conveniences of home is there and that's why this can rightly be called "roughing it." If it rains, you're damp in the tent. If it's hot or cold, so are you. When you camp, you're not anywhere near "at home" in the usual sense and that's why people either love camping or they hate it.

In the beginning the Word was with God. He was home. Then he wasn't. He was in the world. No one recognized him because he was one of us now, living on a kind of extended camping trip, and not a day went by when Jesus didn't sense this. After all, if you are deep-down the eternal Son of God, then even the most plush mattress from Sealy Posture-Pedic must feel hard as a rock compared to living on clouds of glory with the Father and the Spirit. The Word was made meat, and he went camping.

Maybe that's why, even many, many years later, when someone said to Jesus, "I'll follow you anywhere," Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no home, nowhere to lay his head." Maybe that's why when mother Mary came to fetch Jesus and pleaded with him, "Son, come on home now to your family," he said, "I don't have a home or a family, except for these disciples who travel with me now." In the beginning the Word was with God. So long as he was in the world, he could never be duped into thinking he was home.

Are you going home for Christmas? An odd question when you realize that the One we tout as "the reason for the season" created Christmas precisely by not being home. Christmas is about the homelessness of the Word. Christmas is about the One who knows as keenly as anyone ever has what it means to have a longing for home, to have reason to feel displaced. "He was in the world. He made every person in the world, but they didn't give him the time of day." That's what Christmas is all about.

Are you going home for Christmas? He didn't. The Word of God did not go home for Christmas but created Christmas by letting himself get exiled from home. Theologians sometimes make a big deal about saying that although Jesus was a human being who was always in just one place at a time the same as the rest of us, the divine side of Jesus was still able to be everywhere at once. But that's not what John says. The Word was made meat and he pitched his tent, he made his dwelling here, among us. Jesus was not nursing at Mary's breast in a cattle shed and at the same time sitting on a cloud chatting amiably with the Holy Spirit. He was there, all there, because that's what it meant for the Word of God to come down here. He wasn't home. That's what it was all about.

And that's why there is hope on this Christmas Day for every one of us who knows he or she isn't home yet, either. To varying degrees each one of us can or cannot get back home today, or ever. Sooner or later we all lose our homes on this earth. Parents die or are exiled to the nursing ward. Children fly the coop, leave the nest, strike out on their own. In short, they leave home, and they take a little bit of home with them when they do. They wave goodbye, go off to establish their own homes, and parents may take joy at that, but at the same time are stabbed with the realization that because little Joey is now married with a home of his own, mom and dad's own home is the less for it. Or, as I said earlier, maybe you never had a good home to begin with and so although in one sense you've got nothing to be nostalgic about, at the same time you sense you were robbed of something all along. Somebody somewhere owes you a good home, and that sense of something lacking in your life makes you either angry or despairing, or maybe both.

Are you going home for Christmas? It doesn't matter how you answer that question, it still evokes some longing in your heart. But if you can't go home or won't go home; if you can go home only to regret how much it's changed or if you're still basically at home but you know it won't last forever--whoever you are and whatever your circumstance, the news of Christmas Day is that the One we call Jesus understands. If he didn't, we would not have a Christmas to celebrate to begin with. But we do.

Because the One who left home for our sakes came down here. He was meaty and fleshy and undeniably human. He lived his life like an extended camping trip, replete with all the inconvenience, dirt, and mess of it all; replete even with death. And yet he lives. He's alive. And so we, John says, have seen his glory. We've seen that the homeless one of Nazareth was full of grace and truth. And what is the result of that grace, what is the core of that truth? That for those of us who believe, he has given us the right to be called "children of God." Children. Of God. He has given us a Father, and children belong with their Father. If you are the Father's child and he loves you the same as you love him, then the day will come when the Jesus we know as "Immanuel," "God with us," will reverse the formula to allow "us with God." With God. The same as for the Word in the beginning. With God.

Are you going home for Christmas? Because Jesus did not go home for Christmas, one day we all will. With God. Home. As it was in the beginning, so forevermore. Home. Amen.

Careless

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

My son just finished reading The Great Gatsby for his high school English class and so that probably accounts for why this quote occurred to me when I heard the news last Friday about the nurse in England who appeared to have committed suicide on account of getting caught up in a witless prank.   A couple of radio DJs in Australia wanted to get a scoop on the pregnancy of Prince William's wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, and so prank called the hospital, pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles.   The nurse who took the call, Jacintha Saldahna, was probably busy at her job as most nurses are and so answered the phone in the absence of a receptionist and then quickly forwarded the call to the part of the hospital where the Duchess was being treated for acute morning sickness.  And it created a sensation that proved, it appears, to have been finally overwhelming to this woman who ended up in the middle of it all.

It's hard to say how much blame should accrue to these DJs, who claimed they never dreamed of being taken seriously for two seconds.  Yet they did the research needed to find out where to call, they placed the call, they imitated the voices, and they got through to someone close to the story.   Maybe there really is a level of innocence to all this.   But there is also a grave level of carelessness here.  In a world where Prince William's mother is dead in no small part because a few photogs "just" wanted to snap pictures of the woman, you'd think folks would realize that when you're dealing with real people with real feelings, things can turn serious very quickly.  Even deadly serious.   So here: the DJs were just going for a laugh so why not give it a whirl--it could be really funny.

But no one's laughing anymore. 

In Matthew 12:36 Jesus said that people would be held to account one day "for every careless word spoken" in their lives.   The Bible just generally often warns about swearing too-quick of oaths or engaging in foolish talk.  In fact, it's interesting to see how often the New Testament warns against speaking too rashly--it's a point on which both Paul and James most surely agree but Peter and John in their epistles say similar things about guarding one's tongue.   Carelessness can kill, and God knows this and so warns people about it often and with urgency.  

There isn't a person reading this--nor a person writing this--who gets through too many days without ever uttering the careless thought or sentiment or snap judgment.   I know that I am often just not careful enough.   Maybe if I tried harder, if I knew it could mean life or death, I would put forward more effort.  It reminds me of a scene near the end of the film The Godfather in which Marlon Brando's aging Don Corleone is advising his son Michael how to survive as the family's head once the old Don was dead.   His most basic piece of advice was not to be careless.  "I've spent my whole life trying not to be careless.   Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men."   His sexism aside, what the old mobster was telling his son is that one careless word or action in their dangerous world could mean the end of everything.

Mostly the stakes aren't so high for us but then, sometimes the stakes are higher than we know.  When we carelessly insult someone, pull a prank on someone, or engage in some other careless act that affects another person, what we many times do not know is what else is going on in that person's life.  Without our knowing it, we may push an already vulnerable person over the edge.   In her memoir A Widow's Story, Joyce Carol Oates tells of the night she left the hospital where her husband was suddenly desperately ill.  She was shaken, frightened, disoriented.   Upon returning to her car--which in her distraction earlier that day she had parked a bit crooked on the street--she found a note on the windshield: "LEARN TO PARK STUPPID BITCH."   A careless insult left on the windshield of a woman whose life was falling apart in ways the note-writer could not know about.  But in his carelesslness neither did he ponder what effect his nasty note could have.  

In England a woman is dead in no small part because a couple of people came up with a prank hardly worthy of a giddy group of middle schoolers who can't think of anything being funnier than making someone else look like an idiot.  But then, this kind of thing is encouraged by any number of puerile films that come out of Hollywood, sitcoms on TV, or YouTube videos in which folks will do anything to go viral.   Getting attention and making other people roar with laughter is the main thing for altogether too many people these days.   They'll do and say almost anything to pull it off.

And that's just careless.

Grading Grace (or Grace Grading)

I envy math teachers.  I mean, when they have to grade a test or a quiz, they know at a glance whether it's right or wrong.  Shoot, they can sometimes feed quizzes into a machine that scores the thing for them.   Of course, no doubt the art of such tests and quizzes lies in the designing of them, and that is no easy task I am sure.  And, of course, grading such things takes time.  A while back I traveled with a colleague who teaches Astronomy and Physics and she had a goodly stack of tests with her that she scored in the airport and on the plane--it was clearly a lot of work.  Still, once she looked at the bottom line, she knew at a glance whether the student got it right or whether the student had carried the wrong number or multiplied by the wrong percentage and so got it wrong.

Last week as I labored my way through 35 student sermons, I thought of that.   Often.   My task was to read the sermons, figure out what worked and what didn't (and determine also how or why it worked or didn't work), make meaningful comments so the student could understand my thought process, and then--last and most agonizingly of all--put down a letter grade.   And the thing is, you know full well that a different teacher or evaluator might well come to a different conclusion--maybe only slightly but possibly also more substantially.

English teachers and anyone who evaluates essays in blue books know what I am talking about.   With sermons, however, there seems to be an extra pressure because it's probable that the student has more of his or her heart and soul in the sermon than may be true in other forms of writing.  It's also true that students pay attention to their sermon grades with some intensity because they know that preaching is the single most public act they will perform in ministry--every week they have to be "up there" and "out there" in front of people such that their relative success or failure will be in plain view every time.   That's scary and it raises the stakes.

But precisely because I believe in preaching and want it to be as good as it can be in as many congregations as possible, I try really hard to steer students to preaching practices that I hope will resonate with as many people in the future as possible.   For people reading this blog, you may or may not care for two seconds what I think goes into a good or decent sermon, but since I just spent an entire holiday week doing little else than thinking about all this, I'll make a few notes here to see if it sparks thoughtfulness about preaching in also all those who never have to grade sermons but who do listen to them every week.

To put it succinctly: I look for sermons that are true to the Bible text above all.  If that text is not proclaimed aright, the sermon is off the rails from the get-go.   Most students get that much right, however.   I seldom if ever read heresy.   So next up the sermon needs to be clear.   Preachers need to connect the dots for listeners and never assume that just because the connection between A and B is clear in the preacher's head, that everyone else will see it easily as well.  (I often tell students that I have never confused myself when I preach.   I have, however, been known to confuse others . . .)   

Sermons also need to be lively and energetic with real-life vignettes, images, and stories that connect what is being said in the pulpit on Sunday with things that people will experience in the office on Thursday afternoon or at school on Tuesday morning.   This is why I often scribble in the phrase "Show, Don't Tell" in the margins of sermon manuscripts.   You can TELL us over and over that Jesus gives people hope but for that truth to wing its way into people's hearts, the preacher must SHOW what this infusion of hope actually looks like in real, day-to-day life.   That way when people see this happening in their life or in another person's life, they will know it when they see it and have cause to rejoice and be encouraged.

Above all, though, sermons need to provide hope, joy, and a reminder that in our Father's kingdom, it is all Grace, Grace, Grace.   Too many preachers these days have morphed into Dr. Phil mode, providing Good Advice instead of proclaiming Good News.   But too many people come to church on Sundays weighed down by the burdens of life, by the pressures they face at work, by the disappointments that come to so many families these days.   The last thing they need is to pick up the message from a sermon that the solution to all that is trying harder, doing more, becoming a more self-actualized human being.   Lots of sermons end with such "To Do" lists and not a few people who listen to sermons think it's not really preaching until they are given marching orders to stay good and moral people in the week ahead.

Not me.   I'll take all the Jesus and all the Grace and all the Hope and Joy the Gospel can give.  All of that has myriad implications for how I behave in life.  I know that.   But what I need to know at the end of the worship service is that it's all God, all Jesus, all the Spirit all the time.   In that Good News I can rest, and when in a sermon I spy that Gospel in action, I sigh with joy (and probably write down a good grade, too!).

Too Moving?

My last post two weeks ago generated more comments than anything I've done on The Twelve.   So today I will shift away from all things political and think about preaching, thus returning things to normal where no one will comment (!).

A week ago I attended a conference put on by Fuller Seminary (with partnership help from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and my Center for Excellence in Preaching) titled "Preaching in a Visual Age."   As organizer Mark Labberton said, it made a lot of sense to hold this particular conference at Ecclesia Church, located as it is right on Hollywood Boulevard's "Walk of Fame" in the old Warner Pacific Theater.  Conference speakers featured a mix of pastors, theologians, and film industry people, the latter group including Oscar-winning director Pete Docter (Up, Monsters Inc.), producer Ralph Winter, and screenwriting expert Bobette Buster.   The former group included David Taylor, Ralph Watkins, Barry Taylor, and Shane Hipps.

The conference was well done but it raised some questions I had not thought a lot about before, only one of which I want to raise here.  One of the best presentations across the three days came from Bobette Buster, whose insights on what makes for a good story were deep and rich.    I've long contended that good preachers are people who can tell good stories.    I have also long thought there is something akin to a 1:1 correlation between people who can never even tell a joke right (much less a story) and those who in the pulpit somehow manage almost never to catch fire in the preaching moment.   Thus, learning from Ms. Buster the ingredients in gripping narrative is properly right up every preacher's alley.

But it was a larger point she made that gave me pause.  She pointed out that movies function best in the area of what she termed "orchestration of emotion."  Screenwriters and directors know full well that what has to happen across the arc of a movie's narrative is the manipulation and orchestration of the viewer's every emotion.  

By way of example, Buster mentioned what in the industry is referred to as "The Rule of 3's" in which a key thematic element gets visited in 3 different moments of a movie, each one deeper and more gripping than the last until the final one succeeds in bringing the viewer to exactly the emotional space intended all along.  By way of example she points to the theme (mainly visual) of the power of industrialization in Schindler's List.   Move One showed the efficiency of Schindler's pots-and-pans manufacturing facility--with just a few simple steps aided by wondrous machines, you make a pot to sell.   Move Two showed this same industrial-like assembly line efficiency in a far more grisly way as viewers watch the systematic sorting of all the goods looted from the Jews by the Nazis.   Shoes are on one pile, gold and silver candlesticks are shelved and catalogued, watches and wedding rings are worked on methodically by jewelers who remove the precious stones.  And then comes the final moment of Move Two when those same jewelers are asked to remove the gold from . . . piles and piles of human teeth poured out before them.   Finally at the end of the film Move Three comes as the Jews saved by Oskar Schindler methodically manufacture for him a golden ring by which the Jews wish to thank their savior and by which he will remember them.   And yes, by this point in even Ms. Buster's presentation summary of all this, most of us at the conference were wiping our eyes.

That's how it works in movies, and many preacher colleagues believe firmly that not only can we preachers learn much from all this but that because they work so well in precisely these ways, the more film clips we can weave into worship and preaching the better.  And to all that I say at this point: Perhaps.   And then again, perhaps not (or at least let me offer a "Not so fast").

My caution stems from the fact that there is a longstanding tradition in spoken rhetoric (going back to Aristotle but appropriated by also many in the church) that warns against the excesses of emotional manipulation.   There is a definite "ethics" to communication--what my friend Quentin Schultze in more recent times has framed as a kind of "servant ethic" for public speakers--and a hallmark of that ethic is that the speaker--and most certainly the preacher in making a Gospel appeal--must be careful in how he or she handles the raw emotions of those listening.    Maybe even the Apostle Paul had something like this in mind in 2 Corinthians when he contrasted his way of Gospel preaching with the clever bells and whistles of the super-apostles.

I raise this not because I have answers yet.  I don't.  I need more time to think.  And I raise it not because I fail to realize there is an utterly necessary emotional element in all preaching.  Of course!    The last thing preaching should do is aim at only the head and never the heart!   But how do we get to people's hearts?   What is it that (pace Wesley) strangely warms those hearts?   Is it the sheer beauty of grace that always comes through when the Gospel is proclaimed or can we take a short-cut to that and orchestrate emotions the way Spielberg does? 

And while I am raising questions that will require more blogs in the future to sort out: if we should determine that there is something about movies that inherently makes them use this orchestration of emotion, could that be yet another signal to preachers to use caution in the over-use of film clips in worship and especially as part of a sermon?  Will the "orchestration of emotion" tail of the movies wag the whole sermonic dog eventually?

The PVA conference in Hollywood raised many vital questions.    Thankfully, we have more time to continue the conversation as a smaller, condensed version of this very event will be held in January at our next Symposium on Worship at Calvin College and Seminary.  Also, the folks at CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts) will hold a capper event on these very topics in Chicago in June.   So let's keep talking and thinking.    The "Visual Age" part of this conference's title is undeniable and it is here to stay.   Thankfully, so is the "Preaching" part.