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Welcome everybody. It's 10:00 on Tuesday morning and we are here for the second day of Midwinter's and for the jones lecture this morning from Matt given to about whom I'll say something in a minute. But first

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just a few reminders. Um we're glad you're with us and we encourage you while you're present of their on hop in to use the chat feature to visit the expo booths and the fellowship rooms, all kinds

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of ways to interact and feel connected to what's going on here. The schedule today this morning, beginning this morning includes uh Matt's lecture followed by Anthony pens like that will be followed by a 30 minute break

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and then we'll hear the second western belt lecture from Evelyn parker and then a moderated panel discussion with all three of our lectures and our midwinter midwinter's preacher. We'll get to as many of your questions as possible

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during that panel so be ready to type them into the chat box and we will get them into that conversation as quickly as we can for this morning's first jones lecture. We are thrilled and pleased to welcome

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the reverend Matthew given to to this lecture when I'm not on duty here. I sit on the tenor section back row at University Presbyterian Church here and Austin were mad as the pastor. So it's a joy

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week after week to hear him and to know him there prior to coming to the University of Presbyterian here in Austin. Matt was the pastor to Amherst Presbyterian church in Amherst Virginia and chaplain at sweet briar college

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, you may know him as a preacher or as a writer. His work is featured in working preacher and in the christian century and you may have heard his podcast that he co hosts on film and bible

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and theology. The podcast is called Sunday Morning Matinee . If you don't know it or I've heard it highly recommended. Uh Matt also serves on the board of directors for the covenant Network of Presbyterians and on

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the advisory boards of day one and the church lab . He holds degrees from Georgetown University, the University of Iowa and Princeton Theological Seminary and he was the 2012 recipient of the David H. C. Read

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preacher scholar award from Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. He lives in Austin with his wife Sarah, who is our Dean of Students here at the seminary and their son charlie and the most recent addition um a fun

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dog named Otto as I was thinking about coming into this lecture, I was thinking that one of the things that's true of a good story or a good poem or a good joke is both inevitable surprise and

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surprising inevitability. The story line of a joke may seem familiar in the punchline, intuitive, but it's still a punchline, surprising and unexpected. The poem may bring us along so that we sense what the

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riding phrase will be. We may predict what the rhyming phrase will be, but there's always some wonder , some surprise something broken open that we didn't foresee the joke the poem and the story invite us in

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. Not so much as flashcards that reveal the next unknown thing more like the chalk sidewalk drawings and mary Poppins. We look at them but were immediately invited to be part of them and walk around in them

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even as we're led through them. That to me is a quality that's present in all really good preaching that we are part of the sermon from its beginning . It's not that the preacher thought it all up

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and then unveils it word by word more that the preacher has noticed something and invites us along to share in it. This is always the feeling I have whenever matt preaches ah sitting there in the choir loft

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or on zoom and the sermon is going along and I find that I'm thinking, oh yeah, this or I think I sense where we're headed or this is totally ringing true. But yet there's some culminating

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wonder or revelation or surprise or word of wisdom that inevitably shows up and though we organists will have nothing more sometimes than to launch into the post sermon, him get things moving again. I always find that

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after matt sermons, I just want to sit there quietly because even though the preaching is over the sermon isn't and I want to just remain in the story or the humor or the poem or the sidewalk drawings

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or whatever has happened and just let the revelation simmer for a moment. So as we come to these lectures, we'll look for all kinds of things december among us like you. I'm looking forward to it

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and to see where we're invited to go so matt , Good morning friends and thank you eric for the kind introduction. Thank you to Austin's seminary and President Wardlaw for the invitation to come and be with you

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all today. I'm humbled to share billing with doctors , pen and dr parker and reverend sweetened berg and also just glad to spend some more time here in a seminary community that I know and love. I'm

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also slightly baffled by my own presence here. I'm what they charitably call a working preacher, which is not an academic theologian nor a scholar of home politics . And so my approach to any of this is

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necessarily self reflective. Born largely from the archive of my own experience in the pulpit, I'm also aware of the danger of inviting a preacher to give a lecture. There's a fine line between lecturing about preaching

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and lecturing four preachers and just straight up preaching and I suspect I've got a little of each of them for us over the next couple of days and I'll invite you to find where the line is between them

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On August three of 2012, comedian Tig Notaro was scheduled to perform a set at a Los Angeles comedy club called called Largo Notaro was by this point a solidly built list name on the comedy circuit known for

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her profoundly deadpan style. She's got deadpan observational comedy . She's got a bit about being stuck on highway 405 and traffic and watching a B fly past you , that sort of thing. She released a debut

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album but she wasn't headlining even that night at Largo and then the summer of 2012 had not been kind to her personally and Taro has been dealing with her mother's death. And then just four days before her

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scheduled set, she finds out that X rays have showed cancerous masses in both of her breasts, which even for a comedian isn't funny. She decides to go on with the set anyway, But she decides

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not to lead with the B on the 405 instead the crowd that night got something totally different and totally unexpected and we're going to listen to it here and as you can hear it, there's no video of

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this set. We just can hear the opening beats . The crowd has nothing to do with it. So let's go ahead and listen to that. Hello , I good evening. Hello, I have cancer

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. How are you? Hi, how are you ? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer? How are you? Ah it's a good time diagnosed with cancer. It feels good. Just

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diagnosed with cancer. Oh God. Oh my God , it's weird because with humor, the equation is tragedy plus time equals comedy. I in just at tragedy right now, that's just where I am in

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the equation. Oh, it's fine. I well , here's what happened. I went I'm going to get, it's very personal. Found a lump. Guys, relax, everything's fine. I have cancer

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. Found a lump. Got a mammogram. You know, they're doing the ultrasound. They're like, oh we found a lump. I was like, oh no, that's my boob. Yeah, they're

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like, no, no, no, we we found a lump on the other side too. I was like, yeah, I got one over there too. Those are my boobs. Um I ended

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up getting biopsies, which is painful, feels like being stabbed. I felt like I'd been rear ended all day and then just dropped off back at my house, I couldn't move or anything. Um and

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it was just it was so intrusive and horrible and I was just like, God, after all of these like ice pick stabbing feelings, I better have cancer. Somebody over here just keeps going, oh

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, oh, I think she might really have cancer . Who who's taking this really bad? Oh, it's okay, It's okay. It's gonna be okay . It might not be okay, but I'm just

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saying it's okay, you're gonna be okay. I don't know what's going on with me. There's a lot to unpack in this little clip at first. I think nobody knows exactly what to believe. Hello

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I have cancer is not a traditional opening to a comedy act and nobody is entirely sure whether she's telling the truth or doing some kind of avant garde performance art, but even as the reality of it sinks

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in, the next question becomes, is it funny the crowd paid for funny? Some of them are laughing, albeit nervously. Some of them are crying , some of them have no idea what to do

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. You can hear the room come to a dead quiet as the reality reality of it sinks in. And then, over the course of the next 30 minutes, which is the entirety of her set,

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Notaro finds herself in a role that I can only describe as pastoral. She becomes the bearer of the crowd's emotions, the wounded priest carrying their wounds, it's gonna be okay. You heard her say it's

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gonna be okay. Well it might not be okay , you're gonna be okay. I don't I don't know what's going on with me And in my world , if someone has a microphone for more than 10

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minutes while providing pastoral care, then something like preaching is happening. This is the central conviction that I bring to the lectures today and tomorrow, that if something home elliptical is happening in a nontraditional space for

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homily like, for example, a stand up routine , then as a preacher, it merits my attention . Something here is worth examination and I'm aware that the very subject matter of these lectures runs the risk

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of feeling like the second semester senior year elective, like the stand up comedy class sounds like a fun blow off, and I certainly hope that we can have fun, but I'm not here to be funny

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. My interest is not in helping creatures put more jokes in their sermons, or even to presume that I could tell you how instead I want us to pay attention to the ways in which modern stand up

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occasionally finds itself doing pastoral and harm political work. And I think in paying attention to that overlap, we can ask some really fundamental questions about the very nature and purpose of contemporary breaching. I want to

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do this discussion in two parts today and tomorrow. The first today will be to talk about this relationship between comedy and preaching as it pertains to vulnerability and subjectivity as it does. The once borderline, unthinkable

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work of putting the person and body of the preacher in the foreground of the home political moment. I should say that I don't mean any of this prescriptively , I'm not here to convince you to do your

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own tag Notaro and put your raw autobiography in the center of your sermon. What I'm interested in today is a descriptive comparison in the hunch that the subjectivity of stand up and the subjectivity of preaching in 2022

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can can define each other and so that we can best understand what we do when we stand at the home political desk Tomorrow, I'll follow this with some thoughts about how comedy of anger and outrage and catharsis

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can help us. Likewise described not just the nature , but also the purpose of preaching in 2022. So if I can be allowed one dad joke today , I'm going to remind us that there is in

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fact an eye in preaching. And tomorrow we will look for the y a few disclaimers as a breed stand up comics like to be provocative. I'm going to play some clips today and tomorrow and while I

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have done my best to make relatively palatable and family friendly selections, there's a little bit of mild language tomorrow and some difficult subject matter including cancer, depression , death, institutional racism, patriarchy, unless we

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forget partisan politics, it's a laugh a minute folks . I'm also entirely aware that in some ways I'm talking about trends and comedy or slivers of comedy that don't necessarily represent the practice or the field as a

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whole I'm picking and choosing so I can figure out what preaching means. With great deference to the folks who do actual sociology of comedy and I'll try to keep the armchair sociology to a bare minimum. So

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let's begin. Tig Notaro is set at The Largo was literally an overnight sensation by the time she woke up the next morning her twitter feed was exploding and her inbox full of book offers it would be impossible

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to trace the precise vector of how the word got out. But one thing that we know is that now disgraced comic louis C. K, who is not a hero of this or any story, but

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was there in the audience that night at a time when few few voices spoke as loudly about the scene of comedy as his and he tweeted afterwards that it was one of the most remarkable and best comedy sets

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he'd seen in his entire life and his tweet helped set the world. The comedy world on fire, which simply means that something unusual happened that night. Getting on stage and talking about cancer at a comedy

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club is not the norm, it is not what the genre expects, Which is of course, normally the be going down the 405, the observational comic , I think first of jerry Seinfeld standing outside the

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world, so as to pry apart its absurdities. Seinfeld was in fact so well known for this kind of style that when he hosted an episode of Saturday night live in 1992, they ran a skit called

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stand up and win, in which the categories were things like what's the deal with airline food and what's the deal with count Chocula. It's hard not to say those in an impersonation voice, but that observational

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style also pretty well, this reflects the style of preaching that has been deeply familiar if not too deeply familiar to generations of preachers in his book on the spirituality of the pastoral life. Gordon? Lathrop recounts

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being asked how he prepares to preach and his answer sums up what I think is the fundamental impulse of the observational preacher, quote, I try to pay attention. I attend to the texts that are going

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to be read to the people who are going to gather and the purpose of their gathering and to the world in which they gather. I will be responsible once again to how we might see the world and

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to be candid. This is a pretty accurate description of how I and I think most preachers approach their work. It is our job to see and observe , to see the text and the congregation and the

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world around us and to try week in and week out to tie these things together. We are not the story, it's not about you. I have been told more times than I can count. We

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are not the story we tell the story. By contrast, one of the trends and comedy that Notaro set illuminates is a move towards making the comedian in fact, the center of the story, often in

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raw and vulnerable and borderline unfunny ways. There's so many examples I'd love to share. There's a lot of really good comedy on the cutting room floor of these lectures. Little Ray, how're is brilliant.

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Live in Crenshaw from 2019 centers on the 20 minute story of him going home to Chicago for his uncle's funeral, which is complete with all of the twisty nous of families navigating their own emotional baggage at the

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time of death And he tells it so hilariously and so painfully. But I could not find 30 families from the seconds to show you that same year you may know an Australian comic named Hannah Gadsby released her

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stand up special called Nanette in which she conveys her own story of the profession in such a way as to intentionally question the patriarchy embedded in it. We're going to come back to her tomorrow. What I

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can show you instead now is a minute of Gary Goldman's remarkable. HBO special chronicling his own battles with clinical depression. Let's let's watch a bit of that . I have taken antidepressants on and on for 30

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years. And because of the nature of antidepressants, sometimes they don't work and you have to try something else. Sometimes they work and then they stop working and you have to try something else. Sometimes they

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work but they're not good enough. You need to augment them with something. So over the years I have tried Pamela, your nor triple in Wellbutrin, Zoloft Paxil Abilify Adderall at even Klonopin. Dill oxytocin

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marta's Alpine sertraline affects a CeleXA Zyprexa At one point my doctor said let's just try drugs that rhyme. Thank you. Dr Seuss mm hmm. Mhm. Okay. What makes this work? It's it's almost

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observational comedy. It could be done observation. Only Seinfeld could do this bit. What's the deal with pharmaceutical naming conventions. But also almonds in it. He's part of it. We know that we're just

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not talking about some abstract ridiculousness in the world. We're talking about his specific diagnosis and in his diagnosis , we hear our diagnosis statistically a fair number of the folks in the crowd that night would be somewhere

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in their own journey through a catalog of antidepressants. And when he recites the names, they may hear themselves named, Oh, Klonopin, that was me . I was there. I'm there. I'm seen

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. I'm in the hands of somebody who can tell me something true because they have been where I have been. And now the most remarkable thing has happened , which is that by doing the one thing you're

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not supposed to do by centering himself in the story . Goldman has grabbed the whole political gold ring. The audience isn't now worried that the story is too much about him now. They're worried it's too much

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about them. Of course, this isn't an exact recipe for preaching. I'm not here to tell my colleagues every week that we should claim a new personal tragedy that we can mind for the purpose of creating

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solidarity. This wouldn't be sustainable practice for anybody, neither for the pastor who let's hope only has so much personal tragedy to work with, nor for a congregation who presumably only has limited capacity to hear and

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receive this kind of ha Miletic sunday after sunday. I'm not even here to convince the preachers among you that you should center yourselves in the hard political moment . I'm here observation. Aly, I'm here to

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observe that no understanding of the whole political moment is complete without an incorporation of the preacher herself who is a person in her own right. And that part of what I preach weekend week out inescapably and inevitably

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is me, whether I like it or not, and I think what comedy is figuring out therefore is the inherent subjectivity in the form. Before I came to Austin, I was the solo pastor of a

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small church in rural Virginia. And one week late in the sermon preparation process, I came across a metaphor in my head that I really liked, which was about the cast iron cornbread pan that I had

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inherited from my grandmother. I didn't love the sermon and it was too late in the week to rewrite the sermon around the metaphor to make it better, but I love the metaphor. So I left it

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in if only so that I could like my own sermon for a couple of paragraphs. And then when I came to Austin for my first week in the pulpit, I decided to go back and write this

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sermon that I thought the metaphor deserved in my imagination . The church is the pan handed down generation to generation. It accumulates grime and oil and all the mess that goes along with its use and sometimes the

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water has to come along to strip it bare so that it can begin again. I wrote that sermon alongside Isaiah's everyone who thirsts come to the waters convinced that I had crafted something lovely about a church reformed

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and always reforming and here I was as their new pastor to value their traditions and find out together also where the spirit is moving and I was pretty happy with it. I thought I was doing some good

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theological and ecclesial logical work and while I was preaching it I could see it landing. I could see folks connecting with it. Yes I thought these folks are ready to be this kind of church. I'm

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so excited that we have this shared ecclesial logical vision but of course that's not what they were thinking. They were thinking this is a guy who likes to cook, this is a guy who likes to eat

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and I know this because to this day, almost five years later there is rarely a month that passes in my ministry at U. P. C. When someone does not bring up the cast iron pan

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sermon to me when someone does not make a joke to me about cast iron. I have been given numerous cast iron pans. I have been sent multiple D. I. Y. Instructions for cast iron

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pan maintenance. And nobody in all of that time . And any of those conversations has ever said to me, you know our churches like that pan. Huh? I was trying to preach about church.

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I promise I was instead I ended up preaching about me because of course, of the most obvious thing in the world, which is that the people were not there to hear about church. They weren't even

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there first and foremost to hear about God. As scandalous as that may sound in the moment. They were there to find connection with their new pastor. Which meant that my humanity had to be there so

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that the people could find their way in this prospect can be a little humbling for a preacher. The very last thing I want to foreground on a sunday morning is my humanity. I've got a lot more

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trust in jesus than I do in me. In her brilliant book on preaching. Through the lens of mary Jerusha Neil talks about her own conversations with preachers in ways that very much echo my own experience.

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She reports that among them among us is a quote recurring fear that preaching God's word will expose them as a fraud or erase them as a human of a feeling of inadequacy. And speaking for the divine.

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An experience of loss when one stops experiencing hope, because one feels responsible to make that hope a living reality for others. Whether one is trying to stand in the shoes of one's congregation or meet those congregational

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needs by standing in the shoes of christ. There is a sense that preaching requires a kind of pretense a kind of standing in for a body other than one's own, but as neal argues and I would

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join her, this is an impossible burden and not just for the emotional lives of pastors, but for the pastoral needs of listeners and indeed for the theological integrity of the gospel. There's a cost to not

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letting ourselves be part of a home elliptical equation. When the preacher disappears, Neil writes the uneasy borders of christ's presence and absence collapse, christ becomes so fully present in the body of the preacher that any

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conception of christ as absent other is unnecessary. There is no need for him and his resurrected embodied form . After all, the preacher is filling his shoes . The display of humanity on the part of the

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preacher is therefore not simply incidental to effective preaching. It's imperative because it creates room and the imagination of the hearers. For the risen living christ to be at work elsewhere. And always, I've been told

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more times than I can count that the danger of having an eye and preaching is that you run the risk of making yourself the center of the story. But what if the truth is precisely the opposite?

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That only by putting the broken humanity of the preacher fully on display, Can we proclaim with any integrity the fundamental gospel of any sermon, which is of course, that God is God, We are not

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in this case the right proclamation of the gospel is precisely not about. Erasing the one who proclaims it . Instead Neil rights, proclamation requires the exposure of being seen. It requires the opposite of fading away

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. The opposite of pretending the opposite of embodying somebody else's ideal of expectation. It requires instead the foolish revealing of one's imperfect ordinary flesh as the decided the inconclusive evidence of a loving god. And in my

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experience, congregations will find their way to this whole Miletic. Regardless of the preachers intent, they wanted to know about my cornbread pan, not instead of knowing about God, or instead of learning about jesus

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and certainly not because they were conflating the cornbread pan for God or jesus, they wanted to know about my pan because they wanted to know about me because they wanted somebody else who was just as awestruck and

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confused and mystified by the whole thing as they are . Of course, there's an i in preaching, there has to be. But also, while we're here, I think we should acknowledge that the very

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notion that a preacher could preach separate from their identity is in and of itself a fiction that has only ever been available to people who look like me, no women preachers that I know, or black preachers

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that I know, nor any queer or trans or disabled or otherwise non white, non male nonsense preachers that I know have ever been able to stand in the pulpit and feel as if their identity was somehow

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removed from the act of preaching. Because congregations remind them constantly because the pulpit itself is an accessible via wheelchair or because the sound system isn't tuned for a troubled voice or because all the comments and the reception

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line after worshiped are about how good your english is , the illusion that a preacher can preach and be heard without their subjectivity fully on display is in and of itself a legacy of privilege. As if being

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a middle class, straight white male, straight, straight white cis male was not already an identity fundamental to the hermeneutic and hemolytic of anyone who identifies with it, none of which to say is to say

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that a good preacher needs to constantly preach about themselves . Not every sermon I give needs to have a story about my cornbread pan, nor even a paragraph that begins with as a middle class straight white cis

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male. But if my body and my identity and my story are a fundamental part of the force and function of my preaching, then for sure, I had better at least be aware of them when I'm

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sitting down to do the craft of it. Once again, I think comedy can be instructive periodically on the late show with Seth Meyers, one of the sea of late night talk show hosts, talk shows

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hosted by people who look like me periodically. They will broadcast a segment called jokes. Seth can't tell in which Myers is joined by several of the writers on his staff amber Ruffin who was black and jenny

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Hagel who was gay and the three of them take turns offering jokes related to their identities that would clearly sound wildly inappropriate coming from miners himself. Let's watch just an excerpt of one of those segments now here

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at late night, every night I deliver a monologue comprised of jokes written by a diverse team of writers . As a result, a lot of jokes come across my desk that due to mind being a straight

00:31:49.710 - 00:32:02.760

white male would be difficult for me to deliver but we don't think that should stop you from enjoying them . So we'd like to share them with you now in a segment called jokes Seth can't tell everybody these

00:32:02.760 - 00:32:15.020

are two of our writers, Amber and jenny. I'm black and I'm gay and we're both winning and I'm not. So here's how this works. I will read the setups for these jokes and then Amber

00:32:15.020 - 00:32:28.130

and jenny will read the punchlines. Here we go . A Virginia woman was arrested for public intoxication last week after she was spotted carrying a suitcase with three cats inside Said Lesbians. three. Where are the

00:32:28.130 - 00:32:45.010

rest of our cats? Mm hmm esquire magazine recently featured a profile on the hardships of growing up white middle class and male said black people who fiction. Mm hmm. Okay. According according to new data

00:32:45.020 - 00:33:00.990

. American women are now more educated than ever. And if they get just a little smarter, they'll stop dating men President trump said this weekend that he thinks african americans like him a lot. No word

00:33:00.990 - 00:33:10.950

yet on. Who told him that it was Kanye and Amber real quick. Are you are you a Kanye of him? I was until he died. Oh he's not dead. You're dead To me.

00:33:13.140 - 00:33:31.660

A court in michigan ruled yesterday that giving the middle finger to a police officer is an act of free speech. Said black people you first. Mm hmm . Oh no, I couldn't. I just,

00:33:31.670 - 00:33:43.080

I feel like I'll get in trouble if I do one. Come on, do it. Okay. I will because I trust you both. The head of Nasa claimed in an interview last week that the

00:33:43.080 - 00:33:54.750

first person on mars is likely to be a woman and then if it's safe they'll send the men, how dare you, you told me it would be okay to be ashamed of. You wrote that for

00:33:54.750 - 00:34:17.180

me today and handed it to me at my desk , lesbians and black women are liars. I want to be careful with this example. The point is not to suggest a specific operational approach to preaching as

00:34:17.180 - 00:34:30.790

if we would then decide that only black preachers could preach about race or only gay preachers that brought sexuality a situation which would unfortunately mirror the reality in a lot of our churches as too many pastors who look

00:34:30.790 - 00:34:44.450

like me outsource the work of preaching about justice and equity. Two guest preachers who end up being tokenized and used. I also want to note that there is a potential cost in asking subaltern voices to perform

00:34:44.450 - 00:34:58.110

self deprecation and Hannah Gadsby will talk about that a bit tomorrow. What I do want to take from jokes Seth can't tell is the power of being addressed by speakers and storytellers who display a minimum capacity of

00:34:58.110 - 00:35:10.900

self awareness. When Meyers and Ruffin and Hagel put their own identities and stories front and center, we are assured that they are also in on the joke . With that reassurance comes a quantity of the most

00:35:10.910 - 00:35:27.860

elusive currency in modern communication, which is trust. We begin to know that the comedians are joking, we begin to know that they know they're joking and in that realization we can start to trust them.

00:35:29.140 - 00:35:43.450

And at the end of all of this trust is what we're talking about. Listen to philosopher Daniel Abraham's talk about comedy and trust and see how well it describes preaching comedy. He writes depends on building a

00:35:43.450 - 00:35:55.400

relationship between comedian and audience and the best comedians are the best at building this relationship. They demonstrate not only their competence and joke crafting, but in getting the audience to trust that they have the right sort

00:35:55.400 - 00:36:08.670

of intentions and that they are capable of having the right sort of intentions. What comedy demands then is the presentation not just of jokes, but but of a joke teller, a human being to which the

00:36:08.670 - 00:36:22.670

audience can relate and with whom they can participate. I'm not here arguing for stand up as an interpretive lens for preaching because I think preachers should be funny . Nor even because they both get a mic for

00:36:22.670 - 00:36:37.200

10 minutes straight on a regular basis. I'm here because what comedy and preaching share in 2022 and what I think gives them this shared capacity to do real pastoral work and have these profoundly vulnerable conversations is that

00:36:37.200 - 00:36:51.860

they both rely on an economy of trust and a cultural landscape that is otherwise totally devoid of it in a time of institutional collapse and fake news and winning confidence and expertise in every field. My apologies to

00:36:51.860 - 00:37:06.550

dr Fauci on behalf of the coal country comedians and preachers still operate on and depend on trust. This of course, is why Tig notaro can do comedy with material that isn't funny. This is why Gary

00:37:06.550 - 00:37:19.460

Goldman can do comedy with material. That isn't funny because part of the allure of comedy in 2022 and maybe the important most important allure of it, maybe even more important than the promise that she might get

00:37:19.460 - 00:37:37.930

to laugh is the promise that something true will happen , that somebody trustworthy will speak, that some body trustworthy will speak and to the preacher's listening. That's that's also us. We have to be that some

00:37:37.930 - 00:37:52.900

body we have to be there. We are there . The joke doesn't work without a joke teller. The truth doesn't work without a truth teller. The gospel doesn't work without a gospel teller. I once

00:37:52.900 - 00:38:05.010

heard tom long say that preachers need to worry a little bit less about originality and a little bit more about authenticity and in a moment in which people see hypocrisy all around them and especially in the church,

00:38:05.080 - 00:38:17.940

I couldn't agree more. So there's good news and there's bad news and now I'm talking almost exclusively to the preachers out there, listening. The good news as Neil has already articulated it, is that God

00:38:17.940 - 00:38:31.140

calls us to preach in the fullness of who we are, that we're not meant to disappear behind the pulpit, but rather be seen as fellow pilgrims joining their congregations in the dark for her words better than

00:38:31.140 - 00:38:46.630

mine. The foolish revealing of one's imperfect ordinary flesh as the decided the inconclusive evidence of a loving God . The bad news is that authenticity itself can be a kind of a trap as whether or not your

00:38:46.630 - 00:39:00.070

identity feels true to a listener is as much a matter of their expectations as it is your lived reality . And how many times has the church implicitly asked black preachers to be the kind of black. They

00:39:00.070 - 00:39:15.170

expect or queer preachers to be the kind of queer . They expect telling creatures simply to go be themselves is a lot more complicated than it sounds. And we always end up performing something for somebody. So

00:39:15.170 - 00:39:29.310

I don't have a prescription. What I have is a conviction born of this kinship between the preachers who worked the comedy clubs and the comedians who stand in the pulpit this conviction that we who dwell in either

00:39:29.310 - 00:39:45.880

world or traffic in both live and breathe in an atmosphere almost entirely subsistence on trust more so than elegance , eloquence or ecological flair more than prophetic gut, more than the size of the pulpit, or the

00:39:45.880 - 00:39:58.150

size of the budget or the reach of the microphone or the quality of the anthem or any of it . The currency, the most important currency, the most elusive currency of any preacher here in the year

00:39:58.150 - 00:40:13.250

of our Lord 2022 is trust. And not just trust in jesus. You can put trust in jesus in your sermon, but it might not matter unless they trust you to, it won't matter unless they

00:40:13.250 - 00:40:27.290

know you and it won't matter if you're not there . But when they do trust you, just see what happens tomorrow. I'll talk a little bit about what comedy can tell us, not about, just

00:40:27.290 - 00:40:37.220

not just about the nature of preaching, but also its purpose. Which is another way of asking what is all this trust for and where do we go ? But I thought I would close this morning by

00:40:37.220 - 00:40:51.270

circling back to Notaro set at the Largo, we're going to skip to the end through a lot of processing of her diagnosis and her mother's death. It's raw all the way through. It's not always funny

00:40:51.280 - 00:41:01.490

though. The crowd regularly laughs, but at the end it turns and as you listen to it, I want you to think about why, why is the end funny? You'll know it when we get

00:41:01.490 - 00:41:15.880

there. Is it funny because the joke is funny or is it funny, is it funny because they've been in this holy and true and vulnerable and authentic moment together and when you gather together as holy and

00:41:15.880 - 00:41:30.450

true and vulnerable and authentic people underneath the foolishness of the cross, everything else starts to look a little ridiculous. Let's listen in. I was gonna, I just wanted to come out here and just,

00:41:30.460 - 00:41:45.520

I wrote something, you know what I've been talking about over the past like week and a half and uh and I just wanted to share it and I really didn't feel like I could just tell normal jokes

00:41:45.910 - 00:42:07.430

. Um and I really appreciate you guys barreling through it and I hope that you're going to do okay , are you doing better? I'm I'm doing everything I can to do better. I appreciate it.

00:42:07.800 - 00:42:27.850

I am going to new york, I have a job there who um ah I'm going to be working on Amy Schumer's new show and she's a great comedian and friend and so I'll be in new york working

00:42:27.850 - 00:42:45.160

on Amy's show and I'm also gonna get treatment while I'm in new york at Sloan Kettering Hospital, which is the number two hospital in the country and uh and so my job is there waiting for me and

00:42:45.160 - 00:43:00.900

they said I can come in or don't come in or do whatever you have to do. So I'm very well taken care of and and I'm going to check on you while I'm in the hospital because I'm

00:43:00.900 - 00:43:16.800

going to be worried about you and how you're dealing with all of this and you sir, I'm not worried about you at all. That guy is all set. But maybe just before I leave, if

00:43:16.800 - 00:44:00.570

there's a if there's a topic that you'd like to hear a silly joke about, tell the bee joke . Okay. Yeah, I was driving here and um there's a lot of traffic. Mhm. My

00:44:00.570 - 00:44:34.950

car hadn't moved in several minutes. I was just sitting there. My window was down and a B . Flew past me. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is when a bee passes you In

00:44:34.950 - 00:45:08.180

5:00 traffic And P. S. What was the be doing taking the 405 in the first place anyway , Thanks so much for coming. Thanks matt friends . We're going to take about a 15 minute break

00:45:08.190 - 00:45:15.490

and then Anthony pen will be back with the second cray lecture. So this was wonderful gift this morning