Wholeness, humility ought to mark Anglican/Episcopal preaching, Troeger says

Thomas Troeger, the J. Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz professor of Christian Communication at Yale Divinity School, told the group of just-graduated Episcopal seminarians and rising seniors that the world is filled with religious violence and spiritual hunger. Preachers must help mend the break between religion and spirituality, he said. To do so, Troeger said, preachers cannot have only methods for preaching or a theology of preaching; they must have both.

He outlined an Anglican/Episcopal understanding of scripture and the role of the preacher to help mend the break, using two poems from The Temple, written by George Herbert who became an Anglican priest at age 40 in 1630 and spent the remaining three years of his life as rector of a parish.

In "The Holy Scriptures", Troeger found the first quality of what he called an "Anglican homiletic." Troeger noted that the poem's placement in the collection suggests that "Anglican homiletics doesn't start with the preacher; its starts with the word of God."

The poem begins "O that I knew how all thy lights combine, And the configuration of their glory." Anglican preaching thus starts, Troeger suggested, with a sense of humility before Scripture and prayerful approach that looks for God to reveal Scripture's wholeness -- its configuration and "all the constellations of the story," as Herbert writes in the poem.

Then using the poem "The Windows," The Temple's last poem, Troeger noted Herbert's sense of the preacher's humility. The poem's first line asks "Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?"

"If you are not baffled by preaching, you shouldn't do it," Troeger warned the conference participants.

Likening the preacher to a stained-glass window, Herbert wrote that the preacher can become infused with the light as God's story shines through "making thy life shine within [t]he holy Preacher's…" Troeger suggested that this infusion of God's story through the preacher allows the congregation to experience connection with God and thus wholeness.

The ideas of humility before Scripture and the desire for wholeness on the part of the preacher and the community call for preachers to engage the entire human being and the entire community in their preaching, Troeger said. He suggested that preachers learn about the idea of Multiple Intelligences, a set of eight ways of processing information, one of which is often dominant in any given person.

The intelligences include linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalist. The theory suggests that not all people learn in the same way and thus connecting with a person's dominant intelligence can begin the other forms of intelligence into a wholeness that promotes greater learning and understanding.

The end -- the goal of preaching in general and the summation of any one sermon -- is prayer, Troeger said. Such prayer is not only private prayer but prayer as a community relating to God.

"Too many sermons I hear try to solve something," Troeger said. "Take people to God and then sit down because you can't top that."

Finding sustenance at one's well
At the conference's opening Evening Prayer service June 3, Troeger encouraged his listeners to draw new possibilities from the "the well has run dry" metaphor that preachers frequently use to describe how they feel about their preaching lives. If God is the living water flowing through our lives then, Troeger suggested, perhaps one's preaching well is not dry but merely clogged.

"If you are only clogged, it means there's hope," he said.

To clear out the entrances to their wells, Troeger said, preachers need to keep in touch with God even more than they need new tools and methods. He urged preachers to approach their task of wrestling with Scripture and their preaching assignments by trusting in the promise in the Letter of Paul to the Philippians. Paul urges his listeners to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure."

Other speakers join in conversation with preachers
New Brunswick Theological Seminary dean Virginia Wiles, invoking Virginia Wolfe and others, suggested that preachers ought to be playful and imaginative in their approach to Scripture. Too often, she said, preachers do their preparatory work on their sermons by studying the Scripture as if its writers were scholars when most were not.

Preachers might try reading Scripture as one reads creative non-fiction, "for beauty, pleasure [and] for the transformation of self and culture," Wiles said.

Preachers learn how to do biblical criticism and how to preach, but they rarely find ways to integrate the two sets of skills, she observed.

Wiles hearkened to the practice of lectio divina, recalling how a host of medieval scholars and mystical writers who used the spiritual discipline came to see the Bible "as a friend and not a taskmaster." They uncovered the Scriptures' multiplicity of meanings in a way that evokes the Jewish practice of midrash, which is also used to derive deeper meanings from Scripture, she said.

In this sense, she said, "Playing Around with Scripture," the title of her presentation, considers playing as a way of thinking which over time can give preachers a greater awareness of the whole of Scripture's meanings.

"Please trust your homiletical imagination," John Dally, a professor of homiletics at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, told the conference. He told the preachers to avoid getting analytical about what that imagination brings to them as they studying the texts in preparation for preaching. Instead, Dally said, find ways to welcome your congregation into your experience of the Biblical texts by connecting your experience to a more universal level in ways that will take you all deeper into Scripture.

He urged preachers to remember that their listeners "may have to swim through a lot of deep water to get to the service and to hear your sermon." Dally said that preachers must be able to acknowledge to themselves their own "deep water" and be able to put those pre-occupations aside as they enter the pulpit. He worked with the participants in considering how they begin their sermons, suggesting that they be deliberate about their choice of beginning from a cognitive, emotive or intuitive stance.

Julia Slayton, executive director of the Bethany House of Prayer in Arlington, Massachusetts, was the conference's spiritual director. She told the participants that preachers need to find ways to enter into the mystery of God and draw others into the mystery as well. Sometimes, she said, that entry begins with "noticing the obvious" and simply remembering that the Spirit prays within each of us.

The Rev. Brent Norris, rector of St. Mary's Episcopal Church and vicar of Iglesia Nuestro Salvador in Asheville, North Carolina, organized the conference's liturgies and music. Speaking of the intersection of liturgy, preaching and music, Norris urged the preachers to try to make a liturgy's music have some coherence with their sermon, and even to let music continue to preach their sermon after they have sat down.

Because the hymn texts can, conversely, work against the sermon's tone and message, Norris said, "My advice to you, preacher to preacher, is to know the hymn text."

He also suggested that rectors search for hymns beyond The Hymnal 1982 so as to uncover more meaning in the Scriptures appointed for the liturgy, to have a variety of music and to have more resources for pairing preaching and music. Norris suggested exploring Lutheran, Methodist and Moravian hymnody especially.

The internet can be a source of hymns and music, Norris said, citing in particular the Cyber Hymnal, which is an audio and textual collection of about 6,300 Christian hymns and Gospel songs.

New hymn texts now frequently appear on the internet shortly after major news events, such as "We Understand Tectonic Plates," which was composed by Andrew Pratt and published by the United Methodist Church shortly after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. When Pratt's hymn text, set to the tune of Morning Song (hymns 9 and 583 in The Hymnal 1982), was published on the internet, it came with permission for churches to reproduce it for congregational use. Norris urged the preachers never to reprint a hymn without first getting the necessary permission from the copyright holder or licensing agency.

"There's a commandment against stealing," he said, adding that most writers and composers support their families with their work and "you are stealing bread from their table."

He suggested that congregations explore using OneLicense, which charges an annual fee based on a congregation's size for reproduction permission for thousands of hymns.

Twentieth year of PEP conferences
The PEP conference brings together rising Episcopal senior seminarians and just-graduated seminarians together for six days of intensive preaching and study. The 2007 group of 61 spent June 3-8 at Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania, working with their peers, preaching professors and parish priests. They preached and received feedback from all of them about their own preaching, and listened to others preach and discuss the art of preaching.

A. Gary Shilling, founder of the investment advisory firm bearing his name, began the Episcopal Preaching Foundation in 1987 because he was convinced that excellent preaching is a key to engaging all of the church's members, but especially those who were relatively uninvolved. Working together with the Rev. Roger Alling, his aim was to improve preaching in the Episcopal Church by offering seminarians an immersion experience in the art and practice of preaching. Alling left the foundation in 2006 and the Rev. Timothy Mulder is now its executive director.

The foundation has sponsored the annual tuition-free program since 1988. Approximately 10 percent of the clergy active in the Episcopal Church today have participated in the program. Participants are nominated by their seminaries.

Three years after the first conference, the foundation developed "Sermons That Work," a collection of outstanding sermons preached by Episcopal clergy all over the church. The series, published by Morehouse Publishing, is now in its 15th year.