Preaching Camp
I'm at preaching camp! Did you even know they had such things? Preaching camp, or the Preaching Excellence Program, closely resembles boot camp with sermons. We bring a prepared sermon to preach to a small group and get feedback, then write another sermon while we're here. It's a really good program, and I feel like I am learning a great deal. From the things that people are actually attempting to teach me. Also? The preaching at GTS? Utterly wonderful, and I have a new-found appreciation for it. We rock anew!
So I'm spending my days sitting in small groups and giving feedback, and laughing inappropriately at the hideous (HIDEOUS) Vatican II art in Villanova's chapel, where the conference is being held. My God. I appreciate the theology of that period in the RCC's history, but man oh man. Did you put all your energy into reform and neglect asthetics?! There is a giant white limestone crucifix hanging at one end of the room, on a Gold. Shiny. Mosaic. Backdrop.
I am talking HUGE. I have named him Shiny Happy Jesus, and he has adventures, mainly with Shiny Happy Mary to his right and Shiny Happy Joseph (to the Left, to the Left). Together, they are.....Shiny Happy Holy Family!!!! TV show coming soon.
Also, I preached this sermon. This was my 'prepared' sermon, which I wrote one afternoon at Starbucks. We were supposed to write something on reconciliation (with no lectionary texts given?!? Who does that?!?!) And I went Colossians 1:11-20, because I wanted to talk about knitting. The sermon actually went really well, despite my huge misgivings about the large spectrum I was crossing in one 10 minute span. See what you think.
Prepared Sermon #1:
Recently in seminary, I’ve gotten back into an old hobby of mine. I taught myself to knit in college, for reasons I can’t remember any more, though I’m sure they were extremely important. And now I’m back into it.
It’s a good seminary hobby: it doesn’t take much abstract thought, I don’t have to exert pastoral authority over the yarn, the yarn doesn’t ask deep probing questions of the nature of God or the universe of me, and doesn’t ask that I remember what occurred at the Council of Nicea or Constantinople. All that is required is that I sit there and play with the pretty pretty yarn and the two sticks. And make loops. Lots and lots of little loops. Loops and loops and loops and loops. And at the end, I have a nice, concrete end product that I can prove exists. This is no small feat.
There is a catch though.
The magic of knitting is also its downside. The magic is that You get to turn one solitary piece of string into a three-dimensional object, and feel like the smartest magician-like person in the world. However, should you make a mistake at the beginning, all the way at the bottom of your lovely sweater, your perfect scarf, should you drop a stitch and make a hole in the toe of your sock…..
You’re completely screwed.
You have to unravel everything, all the way back to the problem and fix it. All the way back. All those rows. All that work. Because the problem with knitting is that you’re working with one piece of string to make all those loops. All those loops are connected, in ways you can’t see until you mess up. That one piece of yarn is a tight rope. It’s either a great performance or a disaster. Everything is connected. What you do in one place will affect the entire piece. So it really is a lot more complicated than you’d think.
In our church recently, we talk a lot about reconciliation. But as with many things, reconciliation is possibly one of those words we use without explaining what we mean. It looks great on a bumper sticker, but try to go past that, and we get confused.
For my part, I’d say reconciliation is much like fixing a dropped stitch. Reconciliation is getting back to that common thread that held you together in the first place. It’s remembering that something, in fact, did! hold you together in the first place. Some common experience maybe, some link, some common heritage. Or maybe just common humanity.
We forget that link exists. We pretend that it’s us versus them. That there are ‘other people’, and that God is divvying us all up on some huge gameboard somewhere. In the letter to the Colossians, the author pulls us back from that: Christ “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him al things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together…for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” (Col. 1:15-20) In Christ all things hold together, are knit together. –if you want to play around with the Greek a bit-- All creation holds together in Christ, and we come together in him. When we break apart, when we cause division and separation, when we throw up walls, we deny this. We act like it’s not true.
Reconciliation is a remembering of what we truly are. It’s a remembering of who we are, where we are. It’s coming home.
It’s not like it’s easy. It’s not like it’s painless. Lord only knows the problems in the church, in the world, are real, and they aren’t over small matters. They are emotional and heart-felt, and people are hurting for real. They aren’t going to go away any time soon. (Though, to be fair, it’s not like going home is always easy in reality either…)
Reconciliation, though, isn’t about shoving things under the carpet, or hugging it out, or singing Kumbaya in a happy circle til the endorphins flow. I’m not even sure it’s about fixing the problem. Reconciliation looks across the chasm and sees another child of God as an equal. Sees another creature beloved of God, just as you are. It’s just a change of perspective.
But, at the same time, that’s massive. It’s a huge change, to recognize someone you thought was the enemy, the Other, as someone who could be you, had circumstances been different. They are human, all of a sudden. They are like you. They are reconciled.
Three years ago this week, I went to live in East Jerusalem for a few months. Towards the end of my stay there, I decided to take a day trip back into Bethlehem with two friends, fellow American women. We took the normal route into the nearby city, via two taxis and an Israeli military checkpoint: less thorough for us because we were Americans. On the way into the city, I saw three Palestinian boys selling gum. We stopped, and I bought gum from them, and learned that they were from D’heisha Refugee camp: the eldest was 9, the youngest was 7. We kept going, and I didn’t think anything else about it—everyone’s poor, lots of people sold stuff, and we were busy. The day passed, and we saw the sights: the Nativity church, the Milk Grotto, the Olive wood carving shops, and everything, and then it was time to leave. On our way back to the checkpoint, there were the boys again.
The youngest wanted me to buy gum again. I did, and kept walking. We had to meet our taxi on the other side. He kept following, demanding that I pay him more. Now I had run out of money, and we were approaching the checkpoint. The soldiers started yelling.
The problem with being a refugee, or raised by refugee parents, or in a camp is that you don’t have identification papers. You can’t pass a checkpoint. The children couldn’t pass the checkpoint, and now they were too close.
The soldiers yelled for us to get in the metal chute to the side of the road, and one young soldier ran in front of us, ran to the center , dropped down behind a pile of sand-bag pile and aimed his machine gun back down the road where we had just come. I kept my eyes on him, because I kept thinking that I couldn’t imagine what happens to a person when they watch a child shot. I didn’t know I could deal with that. It was happening too quickly and all I could think of was those three boys, selling their gum, and getting too close to a metal shack on a dirt road.
The soldier released the safety and that’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.
Then something else,
The soldier suddenly got up, ran back to the side of the road, and ran back with his helmet.
He yelled something in Arabic, back down the road, and I suddenly thought of his mother, sending her son off to a horrible, dangerous job. I thought of her telling him to remember to wear his helmet, because it was the least she could do, this nameless woman sitting somewhere worrying about her teenaged son, barely done being a kid himself.
The soldiers gave us the all-clear, and waved us through. Apparently it was over.
But not really. It was the kind of experience that takes the snow globe of your life and shakes it firmly. You don’t know which way is up anymore, and start to strongly suspect that maybe no way is permanently up.
There are those little kids, with no way out of Bethlehem, and at the wrong end of a machine gun. All because they sold me Arabic Chiclets. And there’s that young soldier, who looked the same age as my younger brother. Who ran back in the middle of a stand-off to get his helmet, like he was remembering someone’s advice to stay safe. And he did the best he knew how. I don’t think there was any enemy that day; it was boys shooting boys. The only thing that placed one on one side of the gun was an accident of birth. A twist of circumstance.
In the end, we ended up in the same place. All of us standing on a dusty road in Bethlehem, the four boys, the three women. All beloved by God. All bound together in Christ. All equal. Everything else fades into the background.
That’s what reconciliation is—it’s that chaos of the dusty road. It’s that flipping around of everything you thought you knew. All those neat assumptions I thought I had about right and wrong and in-between that day got tossed out the window. Reconciliation reminds us that, in the end, we’re all there. We’re all human, vulnerable, and standing on the same road. Holding onto the same rope. Bound up in the same God. And once we get up enough courage to look around and see everyone else here with us, everything else will follow.
So I'm spending my days sitting in small groups and giving feedback, and laughing inappropriately at the hideous (HIDEOUS) Vatican II art in Villanova's chapel, where the conference is being held. My God. I appreciate the theology of that period in the RCC's history, but man oh man. Did you put all your energy into reform and neglect asthetics?! There is a giant white limestone crucifix hanging at one end of the room, on a Gold. Shiny. Mosaic. Backdrop.
I am talking HUGE. I have named him Shiny Happy Jesus, and he has adventures, mainly with Shiny Happy Mary to his right and Shiny Happy Joseph (to the Left, to the Left). Together, they are.....Shiny Happy Holy Family!!!! TV show coming soon.
Also, I preached this sermon. This was my 'prepared' sermon, which I wrote one afternoon at Starbucks. We were supposed to write something on reconciliation (with no lectionary texts given?!? Who does that?!?!) And I went Colossians 1:11-20, because I wanted to talk about knitting. The sermon actually went really well, despite my huge misgivings about the large spectrum I was crossing in one 10 minute span. See what you think.
Prepared Sermon #1:
Recently in seminary, I’ve gotten back into an old hobby of mine. I taught myself to knit in college, for reasons I can’t remember any more, though I’m sure they were extremely important. And now I’m back into it.
It’s a good seminary hobby: it doesn’t take much abstract thought, I don’t have to exert pastoral authority over the yarn, the yarn doesn’t ask deep probing questions of the nature of God or the universe of me, and doesn’t ask that I remember what occurred at the Council of Nicea or Constantinople. All that is required is that I sit there and play with the pretty pretty yarn and the two sticks. And make loops. Lots and lots of little loops. Loops and loops and loops and loops. And at the end, I have a nice, concrete end product that I can prove exists. This is no small feat.
There is a catch though.
The magic of knitting is also its downside. The magic is that You get to turn one solitary piece of string into a three-dimensional object, and feel like the smartest magician-like person in the world. However, should you make a mistake at the beginning, all the way at the bottom of your lovely sweater, your perfect scarf, should you drop a stitch and make a hole in the toe of your sock…..
You’re completely screwed.
You have to unravel everything, all the way back to the problem and fix it. All the way back. All those rows. All that work. Because the problem with knitting is that you’re working with one piece of string to make all those loops. All those loops are connected, in ways you can’t see until you mess up. That one piece of yarn is a tight rope. It’s either a great performance or a disaster. Everything is connected. What you do in one place will affect the entire piece. So it really is a lot more complicated than you’d think.
In our church recently, we talk a lot about reconciliation. But as with many things, reconciliation is possibly one of those words we use without explaining what we mean. It looks great on a bumper sticker, but try to go past that, and we get confused.
For my part, I’d say reconciliation is much like fixing a dropped stitch. Reconciliation is getting back to that common thread that held you together in the first place. It’s remembering that something, in fact, did! hold you together in the first place. Some common experience maybe, some link, some common heritage. Or maybe just common humanity.
We forget that link exists. We pretend that it’s us versus them. That there are ‘other people’, and that God is divvying us all up on some huge gameboard somewhere. In the letter to the Colossians, the author pulls us back from that: Christ “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him al things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and in him all things hold together…for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” (Col. 1:15-20) In Christ all things hold together, are knit together. –if you want to play around with the Greek a bit-- All creation holds together in Christ, and we come together in him. When we break apart, when we cause division and separation, when we throw up walls, we deny this. We act like it’s not true.
Reconciliation is a remembering of what we truly are. It’s a remembering of who we are, where we are. It’s coming home.
It’s not like it’s easy. It’s not like it’s painless. Lord only knows the problems in the church, in the world, are real, and they aren’t over small matters. They are emotional and heart-felt, and people are hurting for real. They aren’t going to go away any time soon. (Though, to be fair, it’s not like going home is always easy in reality either…)
Reconciliation, though, isn’t about shoving things under the carpet, or hugging it out, or singing Kumbaya in a happy circle til the endorphins flow. I’m not even sure it’s about fixing the problem. Reconciliation looks across the chasm and sees another child of God as an equal. Sees another creature beloved of God, just as you are. It’s just a change of perspective.
But, at the same time, that’s massive. It’s a huge change, to recognize someone you thought was the enemy, the Other, as someone who could be you, had circumstances been different. They are human, all of a sudden. They are like you. They are reconciled.
Three years ago this week, I went to live in East Jerusalem for a few months. Towards the end of my stay there, I decided to take a day trip back into Bethlehem with two friends, fellow American women. We took the normal route into the nearby city, via two taxis and an Israeli military checkpoint: less thorough for us because we were Americans. On the way into the city, I saw three Palestinian boys selling gum. We stopped, and I bought gum from them, and learned that they were from D’heisha Refugee camp: the eldest was 9, the youngest was 7. We kept going, and I didn’t think anything else about it—everyone’s poor, lots of people sold stuff, and we were busy. The day passed, and we saw the sights: the Nativity church, the Milk Grotto, the Olive wood carving shops, and everything, and then it was time to leave. On our way back to the checkpoint, there were the boys again.
The youngest wanted me to buy gum again. I did, and kept walking. We had to meet our taxi on the other side. He kept following, demanding that I pay him more. Now I had run out of money, and we were approaching the checkpoint. The soldiers started yelling.
The problem with being a refugee, or raised by refugee parents, or in a camp is that you don’t have identification papers. You can’t pass a checkpoint. The children couldn’t pass the checkpoint, and now they were too close.
The soldiers yelled for us to get in the metal chute to the side of the road, and one young soldier ran in front of us, ran to the center , dropped down behind a pile of sand-bag pile and aimed his machine gun back down the road where we had just come. I kept my eyes on him, because I kept thinking that I couldn’t imagine what happens to a person when they watch a child shot. I didn’t know I could deal with that. It was happening too quickly and all I could think of was those three boys, selling their gum, and getting too close to a metal shack on a dirt road.
The soldier released the safety and that’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard.
Then something else,
The soldier suddenly got up, ran back to the side of the road, and ran back with his helmet.
He yelled something in Arabic, back down the road, and I suddenly thought of his mother, sending her son off to a horrible, dangerous job. I thought of her telling him to remember to wear his helmet, because it was the least she could do, this nameless woman sitting somewhere worrying about her teenaged son, barely done being a kid himself.
The soldiers gave us the all-clear, and waved us through. Apparently it was over.
But not really. It was the kind of experience that takes the snow globe of your life and shakes it firmly. You don’t know which way is up anymore, and start to strongly suspect that maybe no way is permanently up.
There are those little kids, with no way out of Bethlehem, and at the wrong end of a machine gun. All because they sold me Arabic Chiclets. And there’s that young soldier, who looked the same age as my younger brother. Who ran back in the middle of a stand-off to get his helmet, like he was remembering someone’s advice to stay safe. And he did the best he knew how. I don’t think there was any enemy that day; it was boys shooting boys. The only thing that placed one on one side of the gun was an accident of birth. A twist of circumstance.
In the end, we ended up in the same place. All of us standing on a dusty road in Bethlehem, the four boys, the three women. All beloved by God. All bound together in Christ. All equal. Everything else fades into the background.
That’s what reconciliation is—it’s that chaos of the dusty road. It’s that flipping around of everything you thought you knew. All those neat assumptions I thought I had about right and wrong and in-between that day got tossed out the window. Reconciliation reminds us that, in the end, we’re all there. We’re all human, vulnerable, and standing on the same road. Holding onto the same rope. Bound up in the same God. And once we get up enough courage to look around and see everyone else here with us, everything else will follow.
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