Birthing the Sermon

Description

Where do preachers get their ideas for sermons, and how do they turn those ideas into great sermons week after week? Sharing their experiences, these dynamic women preachers take us through their process from conception, through development, to the actual delivery of the sermon and beyond. Each chapter includes a sermon that illustrates the results of that preacher's labor of love. Contributors include: Barbara Shires Blaisdell, Teresa L. Fry Brown, Jana Childers, Linda L. Clader, Yvette Flunder, Mary G. Graves, Linda Carolyn Loving, Barbara K. Lundblad, Karen Stokes, Barbara Brown Taylor, Mary Donovan Turner, Margaret Moers Wenig.

Sujets

• Sermons
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Chalice Press
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780827202429
• Langue: English

Extrait

© Copyright 2001 by Chalice Press.
All rights reserved. For permission to reuse content, please contact Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], www.copyright.com .
Bible quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Biblical quotations marked (JPS) are taken from The TANAKH, the new JPS translation according to the taditional Hebrew text, copyright © 1985 by the Jewish Publication Society. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
The photographs on pages 147 and 149 are the work of Dusty Stokes and were taken at Montclair Presbyterian Church.
The following materials in this book are used by permission:
Linda Clader, “Homily for the Feast of the Visitation.” From Preaching through the Year of Luke: Sermons That Work IX, ed. by Roger Alling and David J. Schlafer, Morehouse Publishing.
Mary Oliver, “For poems are not words, after all.” From A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, Harcourt Brace and Co., Publishers.
Marge Piercy, “To be of use.” From Circles on the Water by Marge Piercy, copyright © 1982 by Marge Piercy. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Barbara Brown Taylor, “Bothering God.” Copyright 1999, Barbara Brown Taylor. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Home By Another Way by Barbara Brown Taylor; published by Cowley Publications, 28 Temple Place, Boston, MA 02111. www.cowley.org (1-800-225-1534).
Cover photograph: © D. Jeanene Tiner Cover and interior design: Elizabeth Wright Art direction: Elizabeth Wright
Visit Chalice Press on the World Wide Web at www.chalicepress.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data
Birthing the sermon : women preachers on creative process / edited by Jana Childers.       p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-10: 0-827202-30-X ISBN-13: 978-0-827202-30-6 1. Preaching 2. Women clergy. I. Childers, Jana. II. Title. BV4211.3     .B57     2001 251′ .0082—dc21               00–011839
Printed in the United States of America
In Memory Of Lucy Atkinson Rose
CONTENTS
Introduction
Contributors
Barbara Shires Blaisdell
Mother to Mother: Centered in a Circle of Need
Teresa L. Fry Brown
A Love Letter Written in Blood
Jana Childers
A Shameless Path
Linda L. Clader
Homily for the Feast of the Visitation
Yvette Flunder
Managing the Thorn
Mary G. Graves
Jesus Christ Superstar
Linda Carolyn Loving
Bird’s Nest or Hornet’s Nest?
Barbara K. Lundblad
After Emmaus
Karen Stokes
Inbreeding
Barbara Brown Taylor
Bothering God
Mary Donovan Turner
Not Silent
Margaret Moers Wenig
“Their Lives a Page Plucked from a Holy Book”
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Preaching is a mother who conceives and gives birth to faith. It’s a surprising metaphor. Preaching and mothers were not exactly love-and-marriage, horse-and-carriage words in the sixteenth century, nor in most of the centuries before and since. Even now when half the students going to mainline seminaries are women, there are those who wonder about the pairing. “What do mothers know about preaching?” “Do women have anything new to say about preaching?” “Is God really calling women to preach?” This book is an attempt to answer some of those questions.
As surprising as it may be, this is hardly a new metaphor. Even John Calvin, in a sermon on 1 Timothy 4:6–7, compared preachers with wet nurses. The dissolute nurse wastes her energies and has no milk to give the child, he wrote. But “she who will work readily, and will take food and sustenance along with her normal rest, she will be able also to feed her baby. So it is with those who have to preach the word of God.” 1
The twelve women whose work makes up this volume have something to say about conception and gestation, labor and delivery, nursing and feeding. Not all of us have been pregnant. Not all of us have raised children. Not all of us use the term mother to describe ourselves. But all of us know what all preachers, male and female, know. We know what it is like to conceive, nourish, and give birth to a sermon. Many of us also know what it is like to wonder about other people’s processes. In the early days of our preaching ministries we remember worrying over whether we were doing it right. Was what we were doing in our studies on Tuesday mornings like what other women preachers were doing, like what the men who taught us were doing, or like some odd amalgam of the two? This book is an attempt to answer some of those questions too.
The contributors to this volume represent a wide spectrum of homiletical styles, theological traditions, and racial-ethnic communities. All of us are women who preach—but it is hard to find a single other thing the twelve of us have in common. Half of us are in parish ministry, half in teaching. We represent seven denominations and two major faith traditions. Some of us were born into the denominations in which we now minister; some of us have traveled across the theological spectrum to get to where we are. We are from the South, North, East, and West. Some of us agonize over the preparation process, and some of us find it to be pure joy. In terms of personality (at least according to the Myers-Briggs test), some of us are J’s and some are P’s. Some start preparing Sunday evening and work two and three-quarter hours each day; others write feverishly through Saturday night into the wee small hours of Sunday morning. Black and white, lesbian and straight, married and single, mother and not—we represent many, although not nearly all, of the demographic categories from which God is calling preachers.
The fact that we are women—people who have a certain experience with wombs, blood, cycles, menstrual pain, bloating, fatigue, anxiety, and the societal expectations that surround them—may not turn out to be the most important or interesting thing about this book. After all, some of the greatest creators (and creativity theorists) are men. On the other hand, where better to start a conversation about preachers’ creative process than with the segment of the population who live in bodies that remind them constantly of creativity’s rhythms? Who can comment more appropriately about changes in contemporary preaching than the newcomers who are causing (some of) them? What better encouragement is there for young preachers than the testimonies of those who have had to struggle to claim their place?
If John Calvin were alive today, I like to think he would take an interest in the question of preaching’s “mothers.” We know he liked the metaphor. Perhaps he would be willing to extend it. If preaching gives birth to faith, who gives birth to preaching, and how? How can a preacher find herself with enough milk to feed her baby? More than anything else, this book is an attempt to answer those questions.
    Jana Childers     San Anselmo, California     Summer, 2000
CONTRIBUTORS
Barbara Shires Blaisdell is pastor of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Concord, California.
Teresa L. Fry Brown is assistant professor of homiletics at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, and a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Jana Childers is professor of homiletics and speech-communication at San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, California, and a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Linda L. Clader is professor of homiletics at Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California, and a priest in the Episcopal Church.
Yvette Flunder is pastor of City of Refuge in San Francisco, California, a congregation of the United Church of Christ.
Mary G. Graves is pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in San Carlos, California.
Linda Carolyn Loving is pastor of the House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Barbara K. Lundblad is associate professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, New York, and a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
Karen Stokes is pastor of Montclair Presbyterian Church in Oakland, California.
Barbara Brown Taylor is the Harry R. Butman professor of Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, and a priest in the Episcopal Church.
Mary Donovan Turner is Carl Patton Associate Professor of Preaching at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, and a minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
Margaret Moers Wenig is rabbi of Beth Am, The People’s Temple, in New York City, New York, and instructor in liturgy and homiletics at Hebrew Union College, New York, New York.
CHAPTER 1
Barbara Shires            Blaisdell
I never intended to preach. I entered seminary not to pursue professional ministry but in search of something. Exactly what I was searching for was not at all clear to me. I was on my way to law school, to a profession that I hoped would help me make a real difference in a suffering world. The Christian faith of my childhood had lost credibility, given the suffering I had seen. The church of my childhood fell far short of its calling—that seemed all too clear to me. That my observations and my doubts about my faith and my church were not at all original did not occur to me. I entered seminary with questions, with outrage over the world’s evil. I entered seminary with very few role models of women preachers and with ecclesial authorities relieved that I was “just” on a spiritual search and not on a career path toward ordination. I entered seminary to challenge the good people there and found instead that they shared my questions, my doubt, my righteous indignation at suffering and counted that as faith. They taught me to notice the way in which my questions, doubt, and indign