It has felt good to flip the page on the calendar. I am ready to wipe the slate of my life clean and start fresh. And it's even o.k. that my slate has some grooves and markings on it that won't wipe off completely. Those markings add character! It's a new year, I have a new job and another chance to be the me I want to be. Of course, we are presented with this sort of "new" opportunity every morning--how cool that we wake up every day with another chance to begin life anew?! Though I must admit that I've needed something bigger--more of a jolt--to get that refreshed feeling. I've needed to begin a new Year and not just wake up to a new morning. One of my first tasks in this new year is to preach. It has been awhile since I have delivered a sermon and I feel a bit rusty. Searching for inspiration, I opened up one of the most important books I read in seminary. Anna Carter Florence's book Preaching as Testimony (Westminster John Knox Press, 2007) is brimming with wise counsel and insight--especially for the woman preacher. I was struck by a paragraph I had highlighted a couple of years ago. It speaks about an attitude of "freedom" which I wish to embody in this upcoming year (and the next 50 or so years for that matter). So a guidepost for 2010 and beyond:
"Proclamation, then, is a testimony of freedom...Yet the freedom women have seen and confessed is never for the sake of the present order, 'keeping things as they are.' If it were, our preaching would only be interested in trying to maintain the status quo. We would simply try to spread power around. We would try to help women become like men, blacks like whites, the poor like the rich--as if extending privileges through a heaping portion of patriarchal power were the answer to all our problems. But preaching, as Jesus taught us, is never for keeping the status quo. Instead, it is for the reordering of relations: for jubilee. It is for canceling debt and making all things new. It is for freedom." (p.97)
May the proclamation and expression I engage in this year be in service to this "reordering of relations", this freedom, this moving beyond the status quo.
