Subpoenas and Sermons

The netrage is out there, about everything, about anything, and one rage-meme that's been popping a whole bunch in my feeds lately has to do with the subpoenas issued to five Texas area pastors for copies of their sermons.

The reason has to do with a fight over a Houston ordinance protecting the rights of transgendered persons.  A coalition of conservative megachurch pastors actively opposed it, using the same odd tactic that's been attempted in my region.  They also used their large congregations as their political base in their attempt to overturn the law.  After a petition attempt to put the issue on the next ballot as a referendum failed, the coalition filed a lawsuit to stop the ordinance.

So the lawyers for the city, acting in defense of the municipality against the lawsuit filed by the churches, chose to subpoena the sermons of five representative communities.

This has created the netrage, as the pastors now stand firmly on the principle of the separation of church and state.  It has nothing to do with the LGBT community!  This is about the Constitution!  This is about religious liberty!

Of course, this is also coming from pastors who are using their pulpits and their congregations how?   To engage in political endeavor.  Complaining about the separation of church and state when you've actively used your congregation to mobilize politically is...well...mildly ironic.

Two particular things seem problematic about this carefully cultivated outrage.

Thing number one: why would you ever need to subpoena a sermon?  If a congregation and/or their pastor is doing their job, a sermon is not a secret.  This isn't a closed business meeting.  It's something you share, not just with the true believing Pureblood Christians, but with anyone and everyone.  It's not "inside the silo" speech.  It's a message to the whole world.  Anyone can hear it.  You should never, ever, need a subpoena to shake loose a sermon, any more than you'd need to subpoena the front page of the Washington Post or the Houston Chronicle.

Sermons are public speech, and speech you should be willing to have out there in the world in front of everyone.

I post the full text of every single sermon I preach online.  Thanks to the good work of folks at my church, the audio is also available...on iTunes, streamable, and downloadable.  Every single one of those sermons is there, my weekly efforts to interpret these ancient sacred texts with as much accuracy and grace as I can. Why?

Because what I preach is intended to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That's the whole point of preaching, isn't it?  Not to affirm what my congregation already believes as we whisper to each other in secret, but to challenge anyone who hears me to be more loving, more merciful, more compassionate, and more gracious.  If I'm doing my job right, it's a message of grace to anyone...the stranger, the visitor, anyone.

If one so chose, you could keyword search through my sermons, looking for anything and everything.  Go ahead.  I stand by those words.  They represent my best effort to articulate the grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ into the world.

So if anyone ever says to me, I demand a copy of your sermons?  Sure.  Here's the link.  Go to town, buckaroo.

Which gets me to thing number two:  It's an effort to shame us, the pastors argue, and to tar us as anti-LGBT bigots.  We're being bullied by those mean government folks, just because we've used our pulpits in an effort to overturn a law that prevents discrimination against a tiny minority of Americans.  We will never turn over our sermons, they cry.  They're just trying to shame us with our own words!  We'd rather go to jail than turn over our preaching to these shamey bullies!  Because...liberty!  Because...Constitution!

From a libertarian/anarchist perspective, I can sort of see that.  We don't like being told what to do, not by anyone, for any reason.  It's an affront to my sovereign individuality to force me to do anything.

But from a Gospel perspective, a servant-of-Jesus-Christ perspective, this is completely insane.  If those messages contain the Gospel, then they're nothing to be ashamed of.  I want you to hear them.  I want you to read them, whoever you are, wherever you are.

If what they are would appear hateful in the sight of a neutral, objective third party, then they're not the Gospel.

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the church at Rome, laid that out pretty clearly.  What we do and say, if we are acting and speaking as Christians, must be noble in the sight of all.  Following Jesus is self-evidently loving, self-evidently merciful, self-evidently just.

As preaching should be, if it is really and truly the preaching of the Gospel.

In Defense of Sermons

I've seen this thread surface in a variety of places, all stemming from the below post in Patheos:

The sermon?  She is dead.

The idea behind this is rather simple.  We no longer process information in lecture format.  Someone gets up?  Talks for a while?

YAAAWN.

We need snickity snackity multimedia interactivity!  None of this blah blah talkiness!  No one thinks this way, or processes information this way, we say.   This is teh age of teh inter webs, we say!  Time for us to reconsider the sermon!

I'll freely admit there are other forms of worship, ones that are more relational and conversational.  We should explore these, and celebrate them.  Praise?  Bring it.  Contemplative worship?  Absolutely.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.

But into that mix we need to consider how badly the oldline often fails to grasp the place of the sermon in the first place.  Oh, we do them.  But do we really know how to do them?

Because honey child, in the Big Parking Lot Churches where most folks now go to get their church on, the sermon is alive and well.  AmeriChrist, Inc. isn't doing away with it any time soon.  Those big shiny Jesus Nordstroms?  They're as culturally relevant as it gets, and still, there it is.  The sermon.  Oh, sure, they repackage it as a "message."  But a rose by any other name still smells as sweet.

The issue here may not be that we no longer need the "sermon."  It may be that we've forgotten the importance of the spoken word.  I say this not as the world's greatest preacher.  Just give our podcasts a listen.  I mean, I'm OK.  Perhaps above average, in that Prairie Home Companion sort of way.

But my ability to deliver an effective sermon wasn't even considered as I worked my way through the ordination process.  It wasn't even a factor.  Oh, I had to submit an exegesis, and a homiletic treatment of said exegesis, which were then assessed as if they were a graduate-level written assignment.

I never once had to get up there and preach it.   Not once.   My capacity to convey the goodness of the Gospel through the spoken Word wasn't even a factor as folks considered my ability to be a pastor.

This struck me as a nontrivial oversight at the time.

The focus of the Patheos article approaches proclamation using a similar frame, that of academe.  That oldliners - Presbyterians particularly - use an academic lens to understand preaching is a significant part of our failing on that front.  A sermon should bear no resemblance to a lecture.  It is not a lecture.  It is not a carefully constructed academic discourse, in which information is conveyed and everyone takes notes so they'll be ready for the test later.  This is how we learn in college, or was.

Sermons exist to delight, enlighten, persuade, and inspire.  Data transfer is subordinate.  That, we can do through blogging, or books, or classes.  Those forms work better for conveying information relationally.

Preaching, brothers and sisters, preaching should not feel like a droning lecture.  Think of it like a TED talk.  Or Jon Stewart's opening monologue.  Or it should feel like spiritual standup.  Or it should feel like sacred beat poetry.  It is more akin to music, or to storytelling.  There should be laughing.  With, and not at, preferably.

I'm just not quite ready to give that up.

Sermon Dreams

Dreams are a peculiar part of our existence.  

They are the odd sputterings of our subconscious.  As our cerebral cortex sorts and shuffles through the memories and insights it has gathered, it spins and weaves those bits of data into peculiar narratives.  Our nightly defrag may be there to keep us sane and our psyches healthy, but it creates some fascinatingly fractal reflections on the various concepts we've encountered or experienced.  Interpreting and exploring them can be both entertaining and revealing.

Like, for example, the dream I was trying to process on Saturday.  That Friday evening visit from Morpheus involved me, sitting in a room, reading a strange book while wearing a veil. 

Given the stuff I'd been prepping for the sermon on Sunday, this was not surprising.  The images and themes were derivative from the texts and commentaries I was reading.  The veil imagery was clearly influenced by the "veil" (masweh) worn by Moses in Exodus 34:29-35, the passage I was emphasizing in my sermon.

When you've spent all week reflecting on and reading commentaries on a passage that includes a "veil," or whatever the obscure term masweh referred to, it is no surprise that a veil would surface in a dream.    Interpreting the underlying symbolic referent of that dream was straightforward, particularly in context.

Or it would have been, if it had been my dream.  

But it was my wife's dream.  She said, on Saturday morning, "I had the strangest dreams last night."  My wife, with whom I'd not shared/talked about/presented/discussed any of the things I'd worked on over the last week.  I generally don't for my sermons, her being Jewish and all.  And she hadn't seen the sermon, she couldn't have.  On Friday night, I hadn't written that part yet, though I'd thought about it.  

Why would her dream about me make total sense to me and be meaningless to her?

Well, that's a bit harder for me to figure out.