Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Can Sunday’s sermon inspire those in the pews to be agents of redemptive interruption in their own Monday-to-Saturday lives?
The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Dayle Rounds:
Can Sunday's sermon inspire listeners to practice Christian witness in their day-to-day life? In this episode, you will hear from Sally Brown, an ordained Presbyterian pastor and professor of preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. She spoke with us about her new book, *Sunday's Sermon for Monday's World: Preaching to Shape Daring Witness*. Sally talks with us about how preaching can help people be agents of redemptive interruption and inspire others to exhibit the inclusive love, radical mercy, and restorative justice of God. Listen in to learn about embodied Christian witness, imagination theory, and sermons that have the capacity to influence action.
You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Alright, Sally, thank you for sitting down today to talk with me about teaching preaching and about, particularly, your new book that has come out. I want to start our conversation, just to simply ask you what drew you to study homiletics in the beginning, and then to commit yourself to nurturing and teaching preaching all these years?
Sally Brown:
Thank you. That's always interesting for me to reflect on, finding myself now having taught preaching for 22, almost 23 years. I was in the ministry for 18 years -- non-parish for five and parish ministry for 13. It was early in the second call that I really started thinking more about my own preaching and felt that I really didn't know what I was doing. I had had exactly one course. I took the course at a time when actually I didn't believe that women were called to preach. So, you can imagine I didn't take it terribly seriously. But then, you know, one thing -- you change, and your mind is changed, and the Spirit changes your mind. And I realized I was called into the ministry, called to preach, called to the pulpit. And I found myself in a call where I was preaching regularly, not every week, but on a regular basis every month in three services. And by the end of the morning, whatever I'd done, I'd done in the hearing of about 1100 people. And I was very self-conscious about how little I really understood what I was up there doing. So I took a seminar that was on preaching parables. And by about the end of the -- and this was at Princeton, continuing education, Tom Long was doing a seminar on preaching parables. And by the end of day one, I knew that whatever this was we were doing, which was really more homiletical theory and rethinking how we read a text, how we move from text to sermon, whatever this I wanted to be doing it. So one thing led to another, I did some tutorials, not only with Tom Long, but also Christine Smith. Just one-day tutorials. They gave me reading lists. I did the reading. We would have a conversation. We would listen to my own sermons and critique them. And, eventually I decided I wanted to at least, attempt to get into a PhD program and that happened. And, I, I guess the rest of this story is, is clear enough. My first call was to Lancaster Seminary, where I taught for three years. And I'm happy to say that the current homiletician there is a graduate of our program, Catherine Williams, and I worked with her on her dissertation, and then I moved to Princeton in 2001.
Dayle Rounds:
That's great. Thank you, Sally. The next thing I want to ask you is, so that's what drew you in, how you began to teach preaching. And then so through your career, when you've studied, you've written, you've, you've been teaching pastors -- what prompted the writing of this particular book *Sunday's Sermon for Monday's World?* What brought you and why did you write this?
Sally Brown:
I've always taught preaching, as I say to my students, with one foot in the congregation. You know, I think if you've spent enough years just immersed in congregational ministry, you always feel the interconnection between the sermon and the rest of life, the rest of parish life, you know, the rest of congregational life. But also, you get more conscious of what is it like for these people in the pews to step out the door. You know, by the time they get in their cars, do they even remember what the sermon was about? You know, and what can help people? What I'm hoping happens in the pulpit is that we hand people a lens on the basis of the texts we're preaching and the way we open it up for them. I hope that when I'm opening up is a lens into the world and the Monday-to-Saturday world, not just talking in sort of an echo chamber of Christian Sunday morning or Saturday night worship. I want their world to look different because of what happened in the sermon. So that's always been a preoccupation of mine. And then it seemed to me that sermons had to get to be something more than memorable. They had to somehow become portable in the sense that, that you could grab that lens and look through it and see your world differently and recognize how God is working in that space. And you can be a participant in whatever God is doing to work redemptively in that moment in time that may be at work or school or in the cafeteria, or, you know, at the, you know, with the other soccer moms at the soccer field. And I got interested in what makes the sermon portable into the world of Monday-to-Saturday. So I began reading on the subject of how -- what inspires any human action. And I got interested in imagination theory because as Paul Ricoeur says, imagination is essential to all human action. We mentally rehearse in a nanosecond, our choices in a situation, and then we choose. But there's this dynamic of imaginative rehearsal. And I wondered how could the sermon itself become part of the imaginative rehearsal for human action in the everyday world? I also then got interested in what is Christian witness because one of the dominant models over the last 15 years or so -- more than that, probably 20 years, 25 -- has been a missional approach that really emphasizes the witness of the whole congregation as a body that lives out and embodies forth Christian convictions in the world. But even insiders to the missional movement have said, what's happened to the witness of the individual? And the reason I think that's so important is that public worship really isn't so public anymore. A lot of people regard worship services, religious gatherings, as private, not public. And so where are people likely to encounter a believable embodiment of Christian faith? Well, in individual lives, in the individual lives with the Christians they happen to rub shoulders with an ordinary space, any day of the week. So that became my interest. What's the connection between a sermon that develops this capacity for faith-shaped, imaginative rehearsal that influences the action that one might take on an ordinary day and an ordinary space, in a situation that maybe has some ethical edge to it, or calls for a way of exhibiting the -- what I call in the book, "the inclusive love, the radical mercy and the restorative justice of God."
Dayle Rounds:
The other thing you lift up in the book and use as a lens, and that I have actually heard you talk about in your teaching and in the conversations we've had over the years, is you talk about "promise-grounded hope," and that's a key part of this book. But you came to that idea before you even wrote this book. So can you tell our listeners a little bit about what you mean about "promise-grounded hope"? What is it? And why is it so important?
Sally Brown:
Yeah, I do think that's a critical question and a critical point of departure in the work I do. I think, especially in this pandemic, we've really been conscious of how -- what is hope and where does it come from? And then we've been living through really a double viral pandemic, as the COVID pandemic exposed so many inequities that are traceable to systemic racism in American society, inequities in healthcare and access, and even vulnerability to the disease and to dying of it, all of that, connects to race and a long history here. So, where does hope come from? I've been very much influenced by what's sometimes called apocalyptic theology. And some of my other colleagues here represent that too. And the accent there is that hope comes from the God who promises again and again and again -- it happens in both the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament. It happens as well in the New Testament -- promises the renewal of all things, that God is bringing about a new creation, God promises to make all things new. And there are visions of what that new creation will look like. For example, you find it in Isaiah 65 and in other places in the Old Testament. You find it in Revelation, of course -- "And behold I saw a new heaven and a new earth." And then, Paul the apostle talks about "we are a new creation," or actually he simply says (it doesn't even use 'is'), he just says "behold, new creation." When he went, speaking of the risen Christ and our participation in the life of the risen Christ. So, what that does, if we can affirm in preaching, that God has promised and is bringing about a new creation, then what we're doing in preaching is to invite people, to see and participate in that reality. In other words, we don't come up with the hope. Human optimism and endurance are powerful things. There's no question about that. And I don't mean to diminish the meaningfulness of human optimism and endurance, particularly during this pandemic. The endurance of people of color, through decades and now, hundreds of years of oppressive, systemic bias against them. And I don't mean to diminish that, but genuinely Christian hope anchors itself in the future that is already established in the risen Jesus Christ who's called the firstborn of the new creation. That God has already begun this transformed future. It is reaching out to meet us from the future. And I believe that the Spirit is at work all around us in the church and outside of the church, creating this ferment of transformation toward this renewal of all things -- all created things, not just humans, but the whole, the ecology in which we live, the environment, all creatures, all living things and, and even the inanimate. So my understanding of preaching is that we preach anchored in the future. Every sermon is anchored in the future, in a sense, in the promise of God to bring about that renewal of all things. And then that enlists, maybe, our optimism and our endurance, but the hope doesn't, isn't something we have to generate. And we don't go into the pulpit to say, you know, we got to get it right, or the reign of God can't come. In other words, that makes us always pushing from behind and scolding people for their failures and telling them, do this, do this, do that. You know, we lengthened their to-do list, which was long enough when they came into church. I don't think that's what Christian preaching needs to do. First and foremost, it needs to announce that despite all, whatever may have happened to you this week, God is still at work and God's promises are good. And the new creation has begun, and we have the opportunity to participate. So that a sermon says, because God promises (and then fill in the blank, depends very much on your text) we can. Rather than saying, we must, we ought, we should all the time. What do we now have the opportunity to be, to become, to do, to say, to create, because God's new creation is laying claim to the present and to us? So that's what I mean by promise-grounded hope. And the third chapter of *Sunday's Sermon Monday's World* is devoted to that.
Dayle Rounds:
You talk about wanting to anchor the sermon in that future reality, in that promise-grounded hope. And the book is about how we might preach that way. But the real purpose is -- I think -- is not just about the preacher's witness, but it's the sermon that then ignites, enlists, encourages the witness of the community of each individual that makes up that community, and how they can bear witness in their everyday lives, you know, Monday to Saturday. So you touched on it a little bit talking about Christian witness, but I wonder if you can spend a little more time about what does faithful Christian witness look like for you, for the average everyday person who's coming up and sitting in the pews on Sunday morning? What's a story or a description of that in your mind? Like, what are you -- what image are you using as you're writing this book for Christian witness?
Sally Brown:
What I have in mind is a person who is going about her everyday week, the roles she plays, as parent, maybe as a worker, as a volunteer, as a voter, maybe she's a board member for a nonprofit, whatever that person is doing. And just even in the most mundane kind of interactions, for instance, at a social event of some sort, and say that, she finds herself in the middle of a discussion, which involves some kind of belittling language say toward women, toward women's leadership or something. I would imagine her as a person who speaks up about that, and says, you know, I have trouble with the kind of language that diminishes women's capacity to lead, or to lead with authority. Their authority may look different. It may look more like achieving consensus to move forward, but I have trouble with diminishing women in this way. So that just in an ordinary conversation, you would bear witness to go back to that, try to the inclusive, love the radical mercy, the restorative justice of God, maybe that's a restorative justice kind of comment? In, that you, you want to help us see differently aligned with a new creation in which women, as well as men are called into leadership and fullness of the use of their gifts. So, it can be just as mundane as that I do begin the book with some examples, which actually only one of the examples that I used is someone who consciously identified with the church, and that was Rosa Parks. I mentioned Rosa Parks and what she did. And actually there was a lot of activism on her part that led up to the day that she did not give up her seat. But in the moment because of the person she had become, and because of the person of faith that she was, she had courage to seize a moment that would make a difference that would change, shift the situation and challenge the status quo. And then I speak of, for instance, the individual only known as the tank man, the young man who stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in China. And then I mentioned a couple of others. What these have in common is that this person is actually acting as a couple of my colleagues put it in a book as agents of redemptive interruption. Well, actually the redemptive is my contribution, they talk about witness as acting as an agent of interruption of the status quo to bear witness to a transformed reality. The future that God is bringing about. And, so I talk about people -- and I want to see the people in the pew think of themselves as agents of redemptive interruption, potentially in an ordinary situation to shift things toward rightness, toward justice, and toward inclusivity, and toward mercy. But that takes imagination. So then you roll it back to the Sunday, to the Sunday morning pulpit. And even behind that to the work and the study on the sermon and the sermon needs to be about how can we help people become imaginative, anchored in their faith tradition, anchored in understanding God's inclusive, love and radical mercy and restorative justice by, you know, being steeped in the stories and the metaphors of scripture and in the practices of faith and the church and individually. So you have all these resources and then like a jazz player, you draw on this deep tradition and you play out something new, something imaginative and something apt to the moment and the situation. That for me is embodied Christian witness in an everyday world that imaginative improvisational drawing out of a deep tradition. And my job is to help people inhabit that tradition as I draw them inside a story. You know, we're not supposed to really -- I think we're not supposed to so much explain the stories of scripture as explore them and help other people to explore their dynamics. And I do think that an awful lot of emphasis has been on information. If we tell people -- if we give people enough information about what they ought to do, then they will act. Well, what if they need us to help them develop their imagination, rather than just stuff their head full of information? Because unless you are able to look imaginatively into the world and discern what I call the public presence of God, the presence of the Spirit, the possibilities of the Spirit in that setting, you don't need to flip through a manual, you know, sort of (this is a metaphor) flip through a manual and try to find the right injunction for that moment. You need to be able to relate to it imaginatively, coming out of the stories of scripture that have shaped you. But I think often the missing move at the end of a sermon is, wow, what could this look like? An imaginative move on the part of the preacher. So too many sermons analyze a problem, apply, in some sense, the scripture and give the list of shoulds and oughts on the basis of the scripture. And then just say, "and may we go into the world as true disciples of Jesus"? Yeah. But show me what that looks like. What does that look like on Main Street? So I, I really encourage my preachers to spend at least one-fourth of the sermon toward its end saying, what might this look like in our community? What -- how could this change the way that we interact with neighbors of other cultures than our own? It might look like this. What if that? There are some preachers who do that exceptionally well. And one well-known one is Barbara Brown Taylor. She's just one of many who are doing this, have been doing this for a long time.
Dayle Rounds:
In the book, too, when you unpack Christian witness, and you talk about it in terms of participation and imagination, you draw on the work of Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile. Can you say a little bit more about that? Go a little deeper into their work and how that has informed your understanding of what it means to be a Christian person bearing witness in the public square?
Sally Brown:
Yeah, it's partly Van Gelder and Zscheile, also Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass redefined Christian witness as participation. I think the imagination move comes particularly from Van Gelder and Zscheile. The participation move comes especially from Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass. And, so, so this is the idea that God has proceeded us into every situation. I sometimes say in sermons, no matter where we find ourselves, God got there first. And so then our job is to be alert to the possibilities that the Spirit of God is opening up in a situation for us to participate in the flow of God's redemptive, transforming grace expressed in the situation, or maybe just name it or bring it to bear, call it forth in a particular situation. So it's not that we bring God to a godless world. We go to meet God where God is already working in the world and in ordinary space. That's what I mean by participation, we participate in something that is already underway in the power of the spirit.
Dayle Rounds:
The thing that kept coming to mind to me was remembering... I had a class years ago on the gospel of Mark with Don Juel at Princeton Seminary. And in the crucifixion, when the temple curtain is torn, the phrase Don used was that God is on the loose, you know, so God has gone before us and, right, it's not us to bring God around, but to point out and to discover where God is already at work in the world. Another move you make toward the end of the book -- you do have an interesting chapter toward the end that I wanted to get to a little bit on metaphor. Because as you acknowledge in the book too, some people become squeamish about metaphor, but you really point to it as one particular preacher move or whatever -- that might allow us to bring it home to the witnesses who are in our pews as a way to maybe do that move. So, so what? You know, what does this mean? What does this look like? Can you say a little bit more about metaphor, maybe address the issue that why some people are uncomfortable with it and why you think it actually can be used well for preaching?
Sally Brown:
I think historically the theological mistrust of metaphor is that metaphor is a poetic device. Generally, it's something like, well... Let's take one that's been common in our conversation over this past year of the pandemic. People -- I guess you'd only say this in Christian circles, but -- people are saying these days, I've been living in exile so long. I'm really ready to get back to normal. Well, what are they alluding to there? They're alluding to a sense of displacement from whatever feels like home or normal. But they use the term 'exile.' Are they literally in exile? To be exiled is to be banned, you know, from one place to a foreign place. It's a major trope in scripture. There are literal -- there's a literal exile of the inhabitants of Jerusalem to Babylon and there's a return. Although home doesn't turn out to be, you know... Even home is, is kind of a metaphor. And we use metaphors all the time in common speech. For example, we might say, in a discussion and it's ranging all over the place... You might say if you're trying to bring people back, "Let's get back to home base and deal with, you know, the problem at hand." Are you really asking everybody to go outside, find a baseball field and find home base? No, you're not. You're using a metaphor, but the metaphor evokes the whole kind of, you know, the game and we get it. We know that we need to get back to the place from which we start. So that's one. And I already used a metaphor actually in this conversation. I talked about, is preaching meant to hand us a rule book, sort of a pocket rule book for how to handle every conceivable situation is a crucial element of information. Do we really, are we really expecting people to compose or are we composing a literal physical rule book? No, but you know what I'm talking about. And I say that I don't think that's what preaching is meant to do. So we use metaphors all the time. It's a very common way of communicating in shorthand with each other. And then there are some that, you know, are used so much that they're called dead metaphors because they're not really very interesting anymore because we've been using them for so long. Like, you know, I don't know, my father used to say, boy, it's hot as blazes today. You know, which was sort of a euphemism for hell. But, that that's obviously a metaphor, you know, is it, is it literal hell out, out on the sidewalk? No. So it's non-literal and theology has treated metaphor as therefore untrustworthy obfuscation you could say the same thing perfectly clearly. Like the philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, who I mentioned earlier in relation to imaginative rehearsal for action, also wrote a bit about, quite a bit about metaphor. And he says that a metaphor allows us to evoke a depth of understanding that literal language could not achieve. For example, I talk in the book about a sermon that's well-known already to at least some of the readers of the book, preached by Dr. Anna Carter Florence, way back before she was, when she was just a brand new, young pastor, she preached at General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. And the sermon was called "At the River's Edge." She uses the story of Pharaoh's daughter, encountering the -- hearing this infant cry coming from a basket that's floating toward her on the river. The river's edge is the metaphor -- is one of the dominant metaphors of that sermon. And by the end of the sermon, we are... She places us all on the river's edge. And the river's edge is wherever we find ourselves in our ordinary lives. And the river that is life flows by and brings to us human identities and situations that we can't ignore, that we can't pretend not to hear, not to see. The river's edge is a place of being confronted with what is out there and making a decision about how we will act. So... and what's so powerful about it is that it's portable. After hearing that sermon, you recognize that you're on the edge of the river when something confronts you that you've got to deal with, you have to make an ethical decision about how to respond. So that's just one example of a metaphor and many, excellent preachers use metaphor.
Dayle Rounds:
That's great, Sally. What I want to ask you last is what do you hope the preacher, or just the person who picks up this book and reads it -- what do you hope they will receive by reading this and maybe have the courage to do?
Sally Brown:
I hope that preachers will have the courage to invite people into an imaginative engagement with stories in scripture, and also help people to reimagine their everyday world as the arena of God's constant transformative redemptive activity. And that preachers would help the people in the pews to see themselves as those potential agents of redemptive interruption in ordinary places. And it doesn't have to be as dramatic as being that the guy who stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen square. I think often it simply is looking for that opportunity in the ordinary situation to exercise mercy, inclusive love, and justice. To challenge the status quo in some way, with courage and with some imagination, and to be willing to get it wrong. I mean, improvisation is not an exact science. I guess if you ask any jazz player, for example, and I don't think improvisation is an exact science and some days it goes better than other days. But, I do think that we're called upon to be creative and inventive participants in what God is doing in the world. And I hope that preachers would be excited about that life-forming, vision-forming task and begin to use more imagination, more of the 'what if' and 'what might it look like here' kind of move. [percussive music in background] And that people in the pews would feel that transfer of energy that, you know, this sermon is finally handed to them, in the form of a new lens or a new metaphor or an animating story that helps them experience everyday life differently. So that would be my hope. I did teach out of the book this last semester, I heard some wonderful sermons from my students who really caught on to this idea of imaginative rehearsal and encouraging those in the pews to be agents of redemptive interruption in the world.
Dayle Rounds:
That's great. Thank you, Sally.
Sally Brown:
Thank you. I appreciated the conversation.
Dayle Rounds:
You've been listening to The Distillery. Interviews are conducted by me, Dayle Rounds.
Sushama Austin-Conner:
And me, Sushama Austin-Connor.
Shari Oosting:
And I'm Shari Oosting.
Amar Peterman:
I'm Amar Peterman, and I am in charge of production.
Dayle Rounds:
Like what you're hearing? Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast app. The Distillery is a production of Princeton Theological Seminary's Office of Continuing Education. You can find out more at thedistillery.ptsem.edu. Thanks for listening.