On the morning of my 33rd birthday - which begins, as one of my agnostic students so jovially intoned, my "Jesus year" - I sat on my parents back porch and looked upon the backyard of my childhood. On this particular morning, late in Spring, the field was full of flowers. Sunkissed in the morning dew and beaming yellow from the petals strewn across the green carpet, I drank in their beauty.

Why do we treat dandelions as any other weed, a nuisance to rid from our lives and our lawns? They're some of the most resilient of all flowers, thriving across climates and environments. The rapid transformation to seed shows not only a powerful purpose for furthering life, but an entirely different beauty to behold beyond the golden petals that first spring from the stem. 

I blame Scotts. Roundup too. Golf courses don't help either. Really, we've bought into the narrative that grass belongs everywhere and deserves to dominate the landscape. That kind of thinking allows grass to suffocate the existence of dandelions, clover, bellflower, buttercup, and a host of other beautiful pieces of God's creation. Not only that, though, the relentless push to force grass everywhere puts grass at an unnatural disadvantage, whether among inhospitable climates or competing with better-acquainted neighbors for precious nutrients. It's not good for the grass or the dandelion. Sometimes, the best thing for grass to do is coexist alongside all the other plants, drawing on the same nutrients from the same soil to reflect  their unique expressions of life. In other words, these beauties aren't weeds at all. They're just not what we expect because we've been told to want something else. 

On Saturday, the day before my birthday, I led the Interfaith Baccalaureate Service as a part of Capital University's 168th Commencement. We interwove different aspects of various religious traditions, including Hebrew and Catholic scriptures, Buddhist meditation, Sufi (Muslim) prayer, Christian song, Hindu, Jewish, and Navajo blessings. We lifted up the diversity of spiritual expressions that make up who we are as Capital University (we call ourselves #CapFam because, well, we're just that close).
 
Capital is a historically Lutheran university that still commits to operating with "contemporary Lutheran values." Indeed, that's why they still hire a Lutheran pastor (read: me) to care for the spiritual health of our entire campus. I'm charged with caring for a Lutheran campus ministry and an ecumenically Christian weekly worship service, but I'm also called to care for the spiritual wellness of each student, faculty member, and staff person at Capital. It's admittedly a delicate balance to strike, being a committed member of a particular Christian tradition and yet supporting the spirituality of people with vastly different backgrounds and goals. Yet, that's also the joyful wonder of my role. I get to live out my discipleship as a Christian and see the wonderful ways the divine works through parters of all sorts of faiths and spiritual walks.

There are some who might see the kind of baccalaureate experience I mentioned as a grassy field full of weeds, which ignores the beauty of the individual plants and the vibrant life each organism has to offer. What I wish they could see, though, is not just the forty-five minutes or so that we spent in worship together on Saturday morning. It's the interfaith panel we hosted together with Residential and Commuter Life. It's the activity in interfaith prayer space that's just a few doors down from my office. It's the positive relationships developed between Muslims and Christians, Jews and Jains, agnostics and Hindus, practically all of which help to strengthen the faith identities of the people in question. That's why others, like me, find those interfaith experiences like a bouquet scattered across a meadow. It's in these moments when we finally refuse the ridiculous narrative that only grass deserves to exist in our pastures and instead look to all the ways that God brings life and meaning into the world. 

When you see something that you don't expect, or something that you consider out of place, refrain from judgment at first. Then, ask yourself: Can you see the beauty even if it's unfamiliar? Can you see the goodness even if it's unexpected? 

If nothing else, anytime you see something that blooms, change your language. See the flower, not a weed. Do the same for practitioners of other faiths. Relish the petals. Inhale the scent. Then imagine, even if just for a moment, how indescribably beautiful the world is where we all grow together in the field. Where we all belong together, even as we express our divergent beauties, because it's in our particularities that the mystery of the of the divine shines through. 

“Sixty five? Sixty five!”

I rarely find occasion to pray more fervently than I do when I’m at the BMV. Between my own social anxiety and the palpable frustration of the others waiting on a clerk to call their number - “Sixty six? No Sixty six? Sixty seven, then!” - I know I need God here. As I began to pray, I said something that I've rarely said in my life, but something I intend to say much more in the years of ministry and personal piety to come: ​Mother God...

Recently, I heard Dr. Christena Cleveland speak to the importance of how we imagine God and the metaphors that we use when we pray, especially for those of us who believe God placed the divine image in humanity and that the divine chose to become human in Jesus. The average human person is a woman of color in the Global south. Even so, our prayer language remains dominated by male names (Father) and pronouns (him/his). We need Mother God.

“Sixty eight!” The tension of people being called like cattle, like sheep led to the slaughter, only adds to the density of this Saturday morning.

Now, before you lose your collective gourds about referring to God with feminine language, remember a few things about scripture. The first depiction of divinity in the Hebrew Bible is of God giving birth to all creation. Through waters. That’s a graphically obvious reference to motherhood. All throughout the Bible, we find images of a divine mother, gathering Her chicks and comforting Her children. Of course, from within an ancient patriarchal culture, many more metaphors in scripture use masculine imagery. Yet, even in that matrix, God’s motherhood remains a core metaphor. God's maternal nature is essential to God's identity.

“Sixty nine? Seventy?” People have started to leave because they’re fed up with waiting, all without comfort. We need Mother God in these places because, well, from where else would our help come from? More than that, though, in the Christian tradition we've been inundated with almost exclusively male images for God. We've seen Jesus's exclusive use of paternal language in a paternalistic culture to become determinative for our conceptions of God. We've ignored the profoundly feminine activity of God depicted in scripture and in our larger tradition. "Seventy one!" We need Mother God to honor the fullness of God's identity through her interactions with all creation. 

"Seventy two!" By now, I've noticed with intention that it's two women who are shouting these names, to a room full of mostly women. Mothers and daughters, caught in the dehumanizing assembly line of getting the proper titles for our vehicles. It's one of the nicer BMVs in which I've ever sat, but the marble countertops and chandelier lighting don't create warmth, not the way that a mother's touch does.

Mother God also honors the image of God present within women and femmes across all time and space. The exploitation of women is made easier when the feminine is seen as further from God than the masculine. God's neither male or female, or better both male and female, or more accurately, the fullness of the gender spectrum is within God's identity. That's something that's theologically embraced across most traditions throughout history, but not practiced in most churches, past or present. We need Mother God to see the intimate connections between God and all those who identify as feminine. Which, of course, includes God, and all the women and femmes who've been marginalized through our masculinization of God. 

"Seventy three!" I'm next and so my prayer turns toward an end. Then, I committed to myself and to God, the same commitment that I'm now making publicly. From now on, into the fullness of 2018, I'll be using feminine names, pronouns, and metaphors for God in my prayer life and my writing. We need Mother God and God begins to meet that need through our language, our willingness to admit the feminine qualities at God's core. That looks like many things, but likely begins with: Our Mother in heaven, holy is your name.

"Seventy four!" I approach the woman at the counter, and in a way that I haven't before, I see the image of God in her. That's God's work. Mother God's work. 

Training Day premiered during my sophomore year at Orrville High School. Mashing up Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke in a police drama struck the right chord with this budding pubescent demographic. Action, purpose, the kid from White Fang and everyone's favorite actor from Pulp Fiction coalesced in ways that enticed our teenage sensibilities. Of course, the content - the violence, the language, the drugs, the concepts of grey areas in justice - were all beyond us as an audience, but like Hawke's character, we became apprentices to a caricatured version of LA. 

Preaching is Training Day every Sunday for the church. Instead of an overemphasized version of Orange County's flaws, however, we're trained in the otherworldly language of the church. Two of my church history professors, Warren Smith and Sujin Pak, spoke of the importance of learning the language of our faith. For Dr. Smith, the language of the early Christian fathers and mothers held great importance because those words, found especially in creeds, revealed the agreed upon theological foundations of the faith. For Dr. Pak, the language of the Reformation showed us how Christians wrestled withe tradition while meeting the unforeseen realities of a brave new world. In both instances, the language they used, which still forms the ways we think about God, faith, church, mission, discipleship, and creation, still matters. In one sense, preaching should train us with the language of our forebears. 

In quite another, though, preaching trains us in the language of scripture, and especially the scriptures that don't fit nicely on bumper stickers and memes. Sermons properly arise from a preacher's personal wrestling with the Bible, and that struggle ought to compel the congregation into their own engagement with God in God's written word. Some might here argue that we should use a single translation of the Bible so we can have a singular memory of certain verses. After all, do we walk through the valley of the shadow of death or the darkest valley in Psalm 23? However, that's not at all what I believe is important about learning biblical language. Rather, learning the content of the Bible gives us the language to make sense of the world in which we live. However you translate Psalm 23, we hear a promise of a God who walks with us through times of anxiety, fear, and tragedy. We hear of a God who feeds and feasts us even in the face of enemies. That language, in whatever variations, now give us powerful words to speak to church communities facing tragedies like our recent natural disasters of hurricanes, wildfires, and earthquakes in the Northern and Western Hemisphere. 

While the movie sensationalized the violence of city life, preaching should train congregations in honesty. Honesty about the challenges we face and the triumphs we experience. Honesty about the sins that plague us and the forgiveness that saves us. Honesty about the difficulty of living God's justice in our world and the resolute commitment that God has for justice anyway. This is honesty about God, about us, about creation, about all things. 

Even as preaching trains us in holy language, it should not train us in sterile language. We should remember that words like "shit" appear in the Bible (Phillipians 3:8). Rather, preaching should train us in honest language. Words of lament and righteous anger should appear in the pulpit alongside words of thanksgiving and hope. Preaching is ultimately the comingling of the language of God's Kingdom with today's vernacular speech. Too much Kingdom language and all we'll hear is a foreign tongue. Too much familiar language and there's nothing that sets a sermon apart. 

Perhaps most importantly, like Denzel in Training Day, preachers are complicated characters. While we're proclaiming the Gospel of grace and exhorting God's people to saintly life, we stand before these people as sinners. We're held to a higher standard and yet know our own faults too deeply, too intimately. We're enacting God's grace before the eyes of God's people: sinners made saints leading congregations full of sinners made saints. Any preaching that doesn't acknowledge the fallibility of the preacher isn't Christian preaching. Any preaching that elevates the preacher to a pedestal breaks the second commandment (idolatry) and obscures the ultimate content of the sermon: God's very self. We're not to point to ourselves. We're to point through ourselves to the God about whom we speak, in whom we live and move and have our being, for whom we preach. 

If you're coming to church, then, don't just look for a "good message." Look to be trained. Give the sermon your close attention and listen for how God is calling you to shape your life as a disciple of Jesus. 

In a culture that's driven more by images and icons, the importance of preaching is understandably called into question. Many of my friends communicate in memes and GIFs more than even text messages. We've gone from verbal shorthand (instead of typing "are you serious," people will type type "r u srs") to culling even more langauge from our vocabulary. With every image-based communication, it seems we're all just, well, this:

If our peers so commonly communicate without words, then why should we continue to preach? What's the point of speaking words about God to God's people?

Preaching matters, not because we've always done it that way, but because with our words we connect to God's Word in a unique way. This doesn't mean that preaching always does the job better than images; in fact, the church developed icons and symbols. This doesn't mean that preaching does the job better than music; indeed, we have scores of songs of all sorts built for the life of the church. It doesn't mean preacher does the job better than service; certainly an embodied Gospel lived in our every day lives makes all the difference in our work places, our homes, our schools, our parks, our politics, and throughout our social existence.

All these things do something that preaching can't do. And the converse is also true. Preaching (and other purely primarily verbal forms of faith like prayer) does something that these different expressions of faith can't do, not on their own. Preaching, at its best, helps us to examine our faith, to critically engage the entirety of our religious experience, from ancient text to present experience to future hope. Preaching matters because it's the locus of the church's communal continuing education. We reflect on God's actions on our behalf, as well as on our actions in response to God, and then are sent to encounter God and the world in all sorts of forms beyond preaching. Preaching is not the whole experience of divine communication, but it is certainly a part.

With that in mind, the next few post will be a loosely organized series around preaching matters. Why I believe preaching still deserves a regular place in Christian worship. Features on certain preachers and what makes their preaching meaningful. Suggestions on how to engage preaching, even if it's not the best sermon you've ever heard.

One way to illustrate the importance of preaching is to imagine a relationship. Imagine you're in love with someone. They bring you flowers. They rub their shoulders. They write letters. They introduce you to their friends. They play you songs. They can speak but they don't speak. They never say, "I love you."* We're left wanting for those words, those declarations and explanations of the relationship we have. We're left hoping for exhortations and inspirations based in that love. We're left wanting for a voice, whether a whisper or a shout, to connect us with the heart of our beloved. That's why preaching is important. Preaching, at its best, communicates the love of God to the church and the world, making that love blossom and grow all the more. 

Do you think preaching matters? I'd love to hear from you in the comments or via email. 

*Of course, there are some people in our lives who don't have language ability. These people aren't less loving because they can't communicate. In fact, they're often better than people who can speak at showing their love with actions and behaviors! The point here is that, when we have a certain means at our disposal and don't use those means, then we're left without the fullness of possible experience. One of the people I work with at our church is nonverbal, and while she doesn't speak her love in language, she shouts it with the voice that she has. I'm thankful for that, and it's no less valid than those who use words.