“Daring to Dream,” “Preachin’ that drives folk crazy,”
“Fools for Christ: The Sermon as Weapons
of Subversion,” “Jesus of Nazareth will Rock Your World,” and “The Strange
Silence of Biblical Women” are the topics that held my attention today at the
Festival of Homiletics.
I was brought up believing that dreams keep people
alive. Today, Luke Powry confirmed
it. He said in his sermon that “to dream
is to live; NOT dreaming leads to death.”
His text came from the story of Joseph, the dreamer who translated
dreams. Powry referenced Martin Luther
King Jr. who we all know “had a dream.”
MLK showed us that “Dreamers know that some dreams will be unfulfilled.”
And that dreaming can be dangerous.
Why? Because through dreams, “God
flips life on its head.” As leaders, we
need to start with our dreams…not our goals or plans. Powry asked, “Are you dreaming about God’s
plan?” He said that we all need to
“Dream on…God isn't finished with you yet!”
Bishop Michael Curry, of North Carolina was astounding! He gave a talk (Preachin’…) and later
preached (Jesus…). Who likes
change? Change engenders resistance—it takes
growth to change—often the instruments of change are considered crazy—non-conformity
to the status quo always looks like insanity.
With all of this talk of change, Curry said, “We need some crazy
Christians;” our “ecclesial sanity is killing us!” To be Holy is to dare to be different. When we change our attitude from living in
the world’s nightmares to living the dreams of God we open ourselves to
understanding Incarnation and Transformation:
Through incarnation God came into the world as Jesus to change
(transform) the world into the dream God intended.
Talk about change, Peter Rollins, from Belfast, really
pointed out human nature. We have
ideological systems that tell us what is acceptable or unacceptable. In those ideologies we know the right way of
being wrong. He used the character “Jester,”
that person who is able to transgress, to make fun of the royalty, mocking but
still supporting the royals. The
character, “Trickster,” is one who transgresses against the system. This is the one who tells us what we know we
don’t want to know. Like in AA, the
first step is admitting the problem.
Admitting the problem, bringing up what is repressed, becomes the agent
of change. Another way of explaining it
is that we tend to fear people who will tell us what we already know, but don’t
want to see, or to be exposed to ourselves.
He said “only real change can begin to happen when we admit the
repressed parts of ourselves.” He
challenged us to find ways to “open ourselves to our own suffering and then
find a space of exorcism.” Rollins ended
his talk asking us, “Where can we find a place where the pastor invites radical honesty?” I wonder how we can be transformed when we
admit our truths.
In his sermon, Curry was back at the tomb where, in Matthew
28:1-10, the women are there to roll the stone away and the earth quakes. The writer of Matthew used the image of the
earthquake a number of times to express the changing world—the upending of what
people knew. Through the resurrection,
the world is shaken, broken open and changed.
There were women at the tomb, right?
Curry talked about the disciples.
Can you name all of them? Can you
give any information about each of them?
How about the women who were around Jesus; can you name them? Can you tell the stories about them? I bet your list of women is more complete
than the men. Women were important! They were so important, said Curry, that “if
we didn't have women disciples we may not have ever known that the brother was
raised from the dead!” Think about that.
Then John Bell, of Scotland, talked about Biblical
Women. He admitted that it took him most
of his life to understand that women and men read texts differently. Thinking about this, when we look at the
stories women in the Bible, Bell realized that “God does not want women to be
compliant handmaids.” He went through a
list of many of the women of the Bible and explained or described the strength
each woman brings to the stories.
Turning the focus toward the women and what really do rather than what
they are known as makes the stories bigger and even more profound. Go back to the question above. How many female followers of Jesus can you
describe? Is it more than the men? What is it about those women’s stories that
impact the way you understand your faith?
I don’t know that I could have planned the sequence of the
day better. The whole day was about
change. We often fear it, even though it
is the constant in the world. We dream,
but with the fulfillment of dreams come change and in change we can be transformed
when we look at ourselves, our churches, our communities, honestly. Sometimes all it takes is looking at
something in a new way. It’s people like
these four men who can articulate God’s dreams for us, that we need to inspire
us to accept the possibilities!