The first time I attended the Festival, I remember being overwhelmed - like drinking from a firehose. There are 3 venues with speakers and preachers running concurrently, and attendees have to choose between preachers like Nadia and Michael Curry or David Lose and Brian McLaren or Will Willimon and Craig Barnes. No matter who you choose, you're going to miss out on something great. But you'll also be hearing something great, and I have learned to trust that wherever I choose to go, I will hear what I need to hear.
When I first began discerning my call to ordained ministry, I didn't think I could ever preach a sermon. I had no confidence in my ability to say anything worth hearing. I remember one session with my pastoral counselor (who was a Methodist minister,) in which I rattled on at great length about my anxiety around preaching. She looked at me and said, "Okay, let's work on this. If you were going to preach, what is the first thing you would do?"
"Well, since I'm in a lectionary based denomination, I would read the passage first."
"Great," she said, "And what would you do next?"
"Well, I think I'm supposed to look up a bunch of Greek words and figure out what they mean and then start reading commentaries and..."
"Stop right there," she said. "They can teach you all that in seminary. Go get a Bible off the shelf and let's look at a passage."
She then took me through a passage of scripture in which we read it out loud and she asked me questions about who I related to in the story, what would it have been like if I had been there, what were the questions I had, what images stuck out. She asked me how it related to me. And as I answered, she told me I had the beginning of a sermon.
It wasn't so hard after all. In consultation with a mentoring priest, I chose a passage from the daily office about Jesus finding the lost sheep, and I wrote my first sermon while sitting in the backyard of my house in Norfolk. It was actually fun! I never preached that sermon, but it gave me the confidence to preach at my internship church when I was in the ordination exploration process. As much as I angsted and worried and practiced that sermon, I found when I was done that I loved preaching. And then I slept for 4 hours! Ever since then I have felt a call to preach.
Attending something like the Festival of Homiletics is very humbling though. I have received many compliments for my preaching over the years, the best of which are when people tell me they really thought about something in the sermon or that something changed for them. I'm always grateful then that God has spoken to them through me. But my ego also loves the praise, and I get to thinking of myself as an especially gifted preacher. It never hurts to get a reality check.
The preachers at the Festival are phenomenal. The first time I went I wanted to give up. I felt that I didn't even belong in the same category with these people. I was so intimidated that even though I had been inspired by all I had heard, I found writing my next sermon extremely hard because I had all these expectations. You see, I think I have an African American preacher deep in my soul just waiting to be heard, only I'm a white girl manuscript preacher. Whenever I have a chance to speak without notes, the Holy Spirit gives me silence, not words of wisdom. And so I long to give passionate, inspiring, extemporaneous sermons, but it's just not who I am. Maybe one day, that will be my gift, but for now, the Holy Spirit and I meet in the writing process.
And so, as I come back down from the mountain, literally and figuratively, I am preparing
to write a sermon for that most holy of days, Pentecost. I pray, as I always do, that I will get out of God's way, and that God will help God's people hear what they need to hear, regardless of what it is that I say. I give thanks for the opportunity to go up on that mountain, to hear the brilliant preachers, to learn new ways, to hear God say to me what I needed to hear, and to be renewed and restored. I will blog more about what I learned, but today what I feel is gratitude for each preacher out there who dares to take the risk to step into the pulpit or onto the chancel step or out into the aisle and proclaim the good news, to be a herald of good tidings, to speak the words of truth in love. Thanks, God, for taking us up on the mountain, and then for bringing us back down again to share our experience with others.
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