 I invite you to stand. I haven't properly warmed up this morning, so you to warm up with me. And thereby, we will experience our bodies in a different way. And what I'm trying to encourage in students in general is that we get our bodies ready. We're kind of close together, and some of this may work in some interesting movements. I'm going to shirt as well, because we're going to get really interesting places in your body and breathe. Just relax your body and force it. Breathe, settle down there. Breathe it out. The top of our torso, and they move down. But you can breathing way down in your abdomen, because everything is putting pressure down there. Breathe in. Feel it go all into your tummy, and then back up again. Places. Meeting, or whether we're in a class, and we've just gotten over of a heavy thing, and we're going to move to something else, you breathe. Remarkable what that reptile, just reptiles, just flee out of the room. They just scream, right? OK, so what I'd like you to do now is you might have to take your glasses off. I don't know. Play with your jaw, your face on the side, open your mouth, and notice an indent there, or your lower jaw skull. There's a hinge there. We don't have a lot of hinges in it. Just rub that about. There you go. Now, let's say a few sounds. We'll do a few sounds. Make some sounds. Try this. Some of us, this is quite difficult, because we have a tense. For others of us, we've just grab your teeth with on the top. All right, keep your still. Need a tense jaw to speak. In fact, what we want is a relaxed jaw to speak. What you have to do now is you want, because your jaw is so relaxed. I'd like you to just turn to the people next to you. Do you have a loose jaw? Loose, loose jaw, loose jaw. David, how about a loose? Yeah, yeah. Hey, I'm Alan. Nice, nice. Excellent. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Thank you very much. Wow, this is a very lively and fun group. So we're going to do more than I thought we'd do. I don't know if this will work. Yeah, we'll just do this for shoulder size. Rachel talked about this, about tension and we go up like this when we're. So try this. Just go up this. And then just move down. And then just let your shoulders feel like they just have a lot of weight. So up and then down. And just let them settle. I don't know if this will turn to the side of this, but this is done in all kinds of different volleyball. I don't know. But with your legs, shoulder legs apart, your knees slightly as far as you can. And keeping, folks, keep breathing. Remember your breath. There we go. There you go. And down, down, breathe, bottom. And then slow. One, two, three, four. OK? Let's try that again. Head, be just this heavy weight. Your hands feel like they have a lot of weight, too. So it's just dragging you down. Keep breathing. Breathe at the bottom. And then stay there for a while. Feel the air. Breathe down there. Feel the air going to the smother back. And then back up again to the count of. And the last thing that should come up, your shoulder need to come up. Just keep them where they are as the top. And then let your head come up. Some people who are coming in now are wondering what we are doing. But that's so. The next thing that we will do, oh yeah, we'll just mind ourselves of our body. So do this. Just slap yourself all at one side, down the up. And then start again on the other leg. Here's another one that may or may not I think you have to cooperate with the person besides so that you're not the other two a little bit. You can feel the air going there, OK? There you go. And I'll try it on you. Lovely, there you go. Lovely, there you go. OK, you can come back to center. The reason why we are doing these exercises is because the extent to which your body is relaxed and ready is the extent to which you can communicate. If you are tense, we can hear it. If you are tense in any part of your body, and we can't all be sort of fully relaxed and ready. But the extent to which we have tension, even in our jaw or in our legs, means that we're not communicating as well as we could. The voice is not just here. The voice is the whole body. I have this friend in Toronto who's been teaching voice to actors and preachers for 40 or 50 years now. And if you come visit him, he can tell if you have a sore leg just by hearing you. He can tell if you've done a funeral that week. When we do a funeral, we're caring for people. And our jaws are just a little bit further out because we're caring. He can tell that, right? So we're going to do an exercise now, again, that helps us relax our body. And this one is very odd. And it's a little intimate. I want you to put your hand on your abdomen, lower abdomen, right in there, right? So it could be below the belt a little bit for some of us. And I want you to let your tummy go, right? Don't push it out necessarily. It may come out, but just, no, it's OK. Yeah, it's OK. Let it go. We spend, and just wiggle it a bit, OK? Just jiggle, let it go. Let it go, all right? In North American society, this isn't true of all societies. In our society, we spend an inordinate amount of bodily energy keeping our guts in. So that's energy that we could be using to communicate, but we're not. Because we're holding, especially if we're in front of people, we think, oh, I've got to look svelte or something like that, right? Watch some good actors sometimes, or even watch those who are ballet dancers or people doing musicals. Look at their guts. They don't need their guts to move. You've got all kinds of inner muscles there that are working for your diaphragm and working for you to move, but you can move around quite nicely with your gut just hanging out. Let it go, OK? Let it go. You feel that? Jiggle it a bit. Now what I'd like you to do, and remember to keep breathing. It's still all right. I invite you to say hello to the next person beside you. Hello, my name is Alan, and I have a loose gut. All right, I've just heard the word from Jewel here, and she's speaking out for herself or for others, but she's praying for the desire to have a loose gut. Lovely. OK, so you have a loose jaw, and you have loose shoulders. Just hanging, a loose tummy. Now let your head. Your head is a helium balloon. Just let it rise a little bit. Let it rise. Where you are right now, it feels a little bit strange, a little bit different from where you're used to standing. But somewhere in there, and not in the way you usually stand, is where you should be standing if you want to communicate. It's a little bit different. What we're trying to do is free up this whole passage so that we can breathe properly and speak when we need to speak and speak in the way we want to speak when we need to speak that way. Well, there are just a few more exercises. We have lips, so a smile. Nice. And then pout. You can do the whole thing. There you go. We have lips, so this is something you've probably done in a choir too, just ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma. Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma. We have a tongue, which helps us make sounds like, eh. Stick your tongue out. It's OK. When you're preaching, we can see your tongue once in a while. So we can't use it. We have something called the soft palate here, which really helps us with resonance. It's back here. And we can exercise that by doing the NG sound. So swimming. Try that. Swimming. You can really feel it if you go swimming, swimming, and when you're doing that swimming, try to put the sound forward. One of the problems with especially us bases, or especially with men, is that we go swimming, and we push it back. Try swimming, and even move your face before. Swimming, ah, ah, nice. And one more thing that we'll do, and that is just a resonance test. If you put your hand on your upper chest, and just go, ah, do it low, ah, ah, can you feel that? Ah, ah. And then a more medium note. And put your fingers right here. Ah, ah, can you feel that? Ah, ah. Try to move it to the front. Move this. You can do this. Move the sound to this bone right here. Ah, ah. Nice. I got good resonance going on. And then one more last one, and that is the top of your head. This one's a little harder to feel, but you can do it with really high pitch. Somebody give me a really high pitch. I probably can't go as high. If you make that sound a bit more nasally, you can actually help your sinus as a bit. Ah, ah. Thank you very much. You don't often see the preacher tuck his shirt in like this. So point number one, there are three things I want to talk about this morning. I have three. I don't preach in threes. I don't think we should preach in threes. I think that's too much. We should preach in ones. There should be one central thing that we're doing in our sermon. But you're writing notes, and this is a bit longer, so we can do three. Body, that's the first one. Body. You have a body. You are a body. Where are my glasses? Just a second on the table. My body doesn't work as well without my glasses. You don't just have a body. You are a body. You're more than a body. You singular, I mean. I know in Mennonite circles and in Christian circles, we say you are a body, and we often mean that in the plural. No. No, you singular are a body. You are more than a body, but you are a body. When you are preaching, the congregation is looking at your body, your bodily self. And you are looking at theirs, right? God willed that we should have bodies. We have hands, ears, voice. We communicate with sound waves and with friction. We interact in embodied ways. In some ways, we transcend our bodies, but in most ways, we don't. Even if we were talking about this the other day with a few people at our table. Even if I am emailing you, there's still body involved in that. And you, especially if you know me, are thinking of my voice. And you are receiving that information with your eyes. We are bodies. Preaching is a performance. Performance has everything to do with your body. Now, I know that some of us are skeptical of the word perform or performance when we're talking about preaching, because it's often used as a derogatory term, right? Oh, he's just performing, right? Or we was preaching the same way, though. Don't preach to me, right? Or don't give me your sermon again, right? In common speech, these are derogatory terms. I don't see performance as a bad word. It's a word that recognizes how we are moving deliberately or not deliberately in every situation that we're in. For instance, right now, I am performing. I am still me. I am being genuine to myself. But if I were performing this in a smaller group, my actions would be a bit smaller, and my voice would probably be a bit smaller. If I were in a much bigger group, I may be just naturally doing this. We are performing all the time. You are performing right now. We have a script for how the lecture or presentation goes. And your role, if you choose to accept it, is to sit and listen. Or you could stand and listen. We will have Q&A later. We are performing together right now by speaking about our bodies and doing these exercises and naming preaching as a performance. I am not talking about the preacher being dramatic, necessarily. I'm getting at how we are genuine with our voice and our body, how we communicate, the congruity between me and my voice and the spirit, my body. What are the connections that are there? What are the connections that aren't there? One of the things that we know from taking preaching classes and preaching, and if we look at ourself preaching, we start to notice how our gestures are working or not working. I noticed some time ago when I was looking at myself preaching on a video, that I was speaking of God's love and doing this. Oh, wow. Shame on you. God loves you. Shame on you. Wow, what's that? We're looking for congruity. And performance studies helps us discover that. When our bodies are relaxed and ready, we have a better opportunity to speak. And we will be heard better. Can I guarantee this? No, I'll just dare you. To try to exercise during the week a little bit with some of these exercises and others and do them on Sunday morning before you preach, you will feel different. You will be heard in a different way. Even try to humor yourself. Speak with your gut hanging out. Let it go. And speak at the same time. Actually, you'll find with that exercise, if you just try to do that on your own, on a Tuesday morning, wherever you're doing, what you're doing, you will start to feel nauseous if you do it for too long, because your body is so used to keeping it in, right? But you don't need it. You don't need to keep your gut in. You don't need to hold your jaw. Let it go. And you'll have so much more energy for other things. Still with the body. As a teacher of preaching, I hear many of the people from your churches tell me how I should teach preaching. Well, maybe not your specific church, maybe. But the comment I hear most is, I can't hear the preacher. And this isn't some big theological thing, like, oh, I can't hear his or her theology or his or her way of reading the Bible. No, I can't physically hear the preacher. And sometimes that's an issue of the architecture, of the way the sound moves in a space. Sometimes it's an issue of electronics and how we're using our systems. But most of the time, it's about how we use our voices. And it's not just that we want more volume and to push it out right from here. It's the whole body that makes sound. It's everything that makes sound. So to work on this as preachers is important. We have this class here called Performing the Faith. And of all the things, we look at performance theory in connection with theology and Bible and the church. And we talk about a lot of great philosophy and a lot of hard to pronounce words of the theater and of performance. The word that we talked about, I think the most, the word that came to the fore as we thought about the church was rehearsal. Why is it that the choir rehearses, that soloists rehearse, but the preacher doesn't always rehearse and the worship leader doesn't always rehearse? We would do well. If these words are important to us, if we are truly interested in what's happening in preaching the gospel, we would rehearse. Exercises like this morning odd as they are and odd as you will look when you do them in the morning at your house or in your office will improve your preaching. You have a body. You are a body. Use it to the glory of God. So that's number one, body. Number two, just getting some water here. Number two, this is a hermeneutic pause and let Christ do you some good. Pause and let Christ do you some good. Do you remember random acts of kindness? They still go on, of course, but it was sort of all the thing about 10 years ago, where you could be on a toll road. You could be in a lineup at Tim Hortons in Canada or wherever you are or Starbucks. Or you could be in a restaurant and you were ready to pay or something like that. And you heard from the person, the cashier, the person at the tail, the person who was supposed to take your money. You don't have to pay for this. The person who was here before you paid for it. So you don't have to pay anything. This happened to friends of mine. Some years ago, Sandy was out with her two boys for lunch. And they went to go pay the bill and it had already been paid. And she said, well, who paid it? And they said, well, he left already. And I can't, for confidentiality reasons, I can't tell you who that was. There were studies done on random acts of kindness and the reactions to them. And one of the responses that people had to random acts of kindness were, ah, wow, that's awesome. And they would just be stunned and walking out of the restaurant or whatever. Other people were stunned. Oh, well, OK, so that anonymous person paid for me, I'll pay for somebody else. So kind of an accounting thing, in a way. We are uncomfortable with gifts, so we sometimes want to account if somebody paid $30 for us, we want to pay $30 for them. And then there were other people who were just really mad. There are no free lunches. I demand to know who paid for this, so I can pay them back. We are not good at receiving gifts. Pause and let Christ do you some good. Can you receive the gift that Christ has for you in a bigger sense of your salvation, but also this week, as you look to the text that you're preaching on Sunday, can you receive a gift and just stay there for a while? So I submit to you a way of reading the text, another hermeneutic that you can add to the other ways that you look at the text. And this hermeneutic introduces us to God's grace, God's gift to us. I'm going to read a paragraph slowly from Martin Luther. When you open the book containing the gospels and read or hear how Christ comes here or there or how someone is brought to him, you should therein perceive the sermon or the gospel through which he is coming to you or you are being brought to him. The preaching of the gospel is nothing else than Christ coming to us or we being brought to him. When you see how he works, however, and how he helps everyone to whom he comes or who is brought to him, then rest assured that faith is accomplishing this in you. And he is offering to you the same sort of help he is offering to the person in the story. If you pause here and let him do you some good, that is, if you believe that Christ benefits and helps you, then you have it. Then Christ is yours, presented as a gift. That's from Martin Luther. It's from 1521. It's called a brief instruction on what to look for and expect in the gospels. You can find it online. It's a short article. When you open the book containing the gospels and read or hear how Christ comes here or there or how someone is brought to him, you should therein perceive the sermon or the gospel through which he is coming to you and you are being brought to him. Pause and let Christ do you some good. Luther is asking the faithful to view Christ as a gift first and foremost, and stay there for a while. We often want to move on to what this particular story means, what it meant then, what it means now. Those are all good and we need to do that. We also look at these texts and wonder what the ethical implications are for us. What is Jesus? Jesus is doing something. How do we model or follow that? That's all great. What Luther is saying is stay for a while with the gift. I want to visit this morning the good Samaritan story and see how this might work. This is a tough test case for this one. One of the classic images of the good Samaritan, or no, one of the classic images of the Christian faith is the good Samaritan stooping down to bend the, excuse me, the good Samaritan stooping down to tend to the wounds of the man who is lying in the ditch. We actually love this image as Christians. And we suppose that we are the one helping the other in need. When the curious or skeptical in Christian history have asked, what is central to Christian life or discipleship, we have developed a long line of answers that sound something like this. We have this simple analogy. The Samaritan represents the Christian, the in control agent who is called to help the hurt man. And the hurt man represents all others. Capital O, if you'd like. The story of the good Samaritan told in this way is good public relations for Christians. Absolutely. Christianity is about loving and helping the neighbor, even in the case of enemies. Right on. The Samaritan stooping down to the man in the ditch, the coins pass to the innkeeper. These are simple and straightforward images. And we can communicate the faith very clearly with this. When we hold up this canvas, it shows our faith as a practical faith and ethical faith, one that joins with all others in the common good. In the court of public opinion, Christians are justified by such a practical story. When we are asked by those who do not believe, tell me about Christianity. We sometimes point to this story, this picture. We help. Jesus wants us to help and showed us how to do that. However, Martin Luther and my daughter, when she was five, do not read this story in this way at all. Here's another image. When Abby and I were reading stories, or I was reading stories to her when she was five, she would sometimes ask me, can I hear the story of the hurt man? And I'd say, oh, you mean the good Samaritan. She'd say, no, the hurt man. I'd say, good Samaritan. She'd say, hurt man. She saw the Samaritan certainly as a hero of the story, but she identified not with the good Samaritan, but with the hurt man. What she wanted from this story is she was listening to it. I want him to be helped. I want him because she would like to be helped if she was in a ditch. It's that simple. And she's just thanking God and happy that the man is no longer in the ditch and being carried away. There's no moral takeaway for her in that way of reading the story, not immediately. She stays there as a child for years. She can later develop a sense of looking at this ethically. But for now, she will pause and let Christ do her some good. This picture is a little bit different than the others. In most depictions of the good Samaritan story, it's the person who is the in control person is higher than the other one helping them. This one is the opposite. And I wonder if something else is being communicated here. The person who was in the ditch is now on top of the other person. Talk about bodies, oh my goodness. We miss the bodiness of this story. How do you hold a guy who's half dead on a donkey? How do you put him on the donkey? So there are times when we interpret this and we see ourselves as the person who's helping the other. But what Luther is asking us to do and what our children are often seeing is that they are the one being carried. For Luther, both the donkey and the good Samaritan represent Christ as our helper. Contrary to what some Mennonites believe, Luther did have a strong sense of ethics. Luther will get to discipleship, but first he wants the reader, the listener to get the gift. Just as Jesus heals a woman, so Jesus comes to heal us. Just as Jesus placed mud on the man's eyes, so he does that to me. Pause in this moment. This is the beginning of discipleship. Can you receive this gift in your study next Tuesday? Can you stay there for a while? Maybe you have to change your posture. Maybe you have to get on your knees. I don't know. Maybe you have to be the low person in the room. Maybe you have to get your custodian or your copaster to carry you around the church for a while. Get bodily with this, right? If we don't feel the gift, if we don't get the gift ourselves, we won't preach it either, right? Rachel said yesterday we cannot offer what we do not have. If we have not seen Christ, how can we help others see Christ or bring Christ into the room, if you will? If we cannot see how Christ is carrying us, how can we say to others that Christ is carrying them? There was a study done several years ago on preaching in North America, and in North America, and mostly Protestant churches. They also looked at Mennonite churches. And you know what? Sermon listeners are onto us. When we are not fully interested and invested, when we have not experienced the Christ that we pretend to portray, the listeners get it. They get it. They know when we have not received the good news, but are still talking about it. There are other things that are very interesting that these just by the way here. Sermon listeners are also onto our analogies that we use. If they're not genuine to our lives, you can just hear that, right? There was one sermon I did many years ago where I talked about gardening. I'm not a gardener. I mean, and it didn't work. Marilyn pointed that out to me after the sermon as well. But it doesn't work. It has to be so much more personal than that. The other thing that they're onto us with is they know when the sermon is over long before we do. And it's not simply about them not wanting to hear us, but they have heard the gospel. And we're still up there explaining it, rationalizing it, saying more and more instances where this happens. Ah. And in some traditions, and some of you are in those traditions, where there's call and response is a word for that, right? I mean, the preacher is supposed to stand up and preach and then sit down. And there's a line. When the preacher keeps going on too long, what's the line? Anybody? Bring it down, brother. Bring it down, sister. The primary image for Luther on the whole issue of discipleship, and we will hear this story later, the story of the bent woman, right? This is in a bodily way how Luther viewed salvation and viewed ethics as well. We are bent over people. We are naval gazers, literally. When we are bent over, we can only see ourselves. We are narcissistic. Our hands are even pulled in. We do not see our neighbor or our brother. So how can we help them? But when Christ, we don't do this on our own, of course. This is Luther, right? When Christ saves us, we are open. Jesus says to the man who can't speak and who can't hear, be open, right? Be open. Now, my whole life is entirely different. I can see the world. I can see God's beautiful creation. Luther has an actually very strong view of creation. I can see my neighbor who needs help. I can help them. This is it, that's salvation, and that's discipleship. So the body, and pause and let Christ do you some good. And the last one, do the gospel in your sermon. Do it. Don't just tell us about Jesus. I know I say that like a Canadian still. Don't just tell us about Jesus. Show us Jesus. Bring Jesus here. Bring God here. This is partly about verbs and partly about confidence and all kinds of other things. The question that we often get on Wednesday or Thursday, right? So what's your sermon about this week? Is it about, we should know what our sermons are about. We should be able to do that in one line. My sermon is about Sarah and how she laughs and how we should laugh. That's great. We should know what our sermon is about. But what, a better question is what is your sermon doing? What is your sermon doing? This is what we get into the world of verbs now. And the text, what is the text doing? What's happening in the story? What is God doing here? What's the spirit doing? Is this particular sermon, am I calling? One verb per sermon. If you have too many verbs, it'll get lost. One verb. Is this sermon, am I calling people with this sermon? Am I encouraging? This is verbs and participles, right? Am I healing with this sermon? Exhorting? Judging? Comforting? What's the verb? Words do. Words do. They do not just contain information. We know this from some of the things we say. I can say to a friend or to Marilyn, I love you. That's not just content, folks. Love is happening when you say the words, right? Love is taken and received in the moment the words are spoken. It's a speech act. Words do. We say it when we baptize somebody. I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. I baptize you in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sustainer. This is not just information. The person is being baptized in that moment. And the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Creator, the Redeemer, the Sustainer, are there in that moment. Words do. Jesus announces, proclaims, names, heals, pardons, exercises, prophesies, blesses, curses, warns, all of these things with words, words that are actions at the same time they are words. There are many ways to make the sermon a happening, an event, an experience. One way to do this is to speak for Jesus, to speak for God, to speak for the Holy Spirit. We're often afraid to do this. The lines are all there. Do not be afraid. I am with you. I am always with you, even to the end of the age. I call you my friend. Follow me. First person to second person statements. We don't need to do this often. Maybe we don't do this in every sermon. And certainly, our sermons cannot be a string of God speaking to us. Julia did this in her sermon two days ago. She dared to speak for Jesus in I statements. She did not say, she could have said, our God is a God who makes all things new. That's actually quite good. Our God is a God who makes all things new. It's a statement, refers to God. She could have done it in the past, which wouldn't be quite as meaningful, I think, because it's past. She said, our God has made all things new, or our God was making all things new. That's actually in the past, and it's not here. She dared to do this. See, I am making all things new. See, I am making you new. See, I am making the church new. See, I am making the world new. And then there was a pause. And then she said, you don't see it. That's all right. She spoke the words of God to us directly, first person to second person. God is not some distant past deity. God is here and now. There are these direct promises of God. And again, we need to use these sparingly. And as Julia did, it came in the climax of her sermon. She built up to that place. I come to church, and I think most of us come to church to, we want to learn about God, but mostly we want a relationship with God, right? I come to worship, and I want to learn about, say, vocation. But mostly, I want to be called. Not simply hear about something. So this is what I have. If your body is ready together with your spirit, if you have paused to let Christ do you some good, then you're probably in a position where you can speak for Jesus from the pulpit. So preach it, brother. Preach it, sister. As is our custom, our script, if you will. I invite you to stand and have a conversation for a few minutes, and then we'll come back for some questions and answer. I invite your questions, comments. We have some microphones. There's one here. There's two in the middle. We have our first comment or question. You did not mention this at all in your presentation. But what are your thoughts on the use of technology and preaching? Oh, the use? Well, I did some. It wasn't a sermon, but a lecture. Well, yeah, technology and preaching. I have not thought a lot about this. I don't typically, when I'm preaching, I usually do not have images up, although I have done that to some extent. I think the whole issue of technology and preaching needs to include right off the bat that we have electronic amplification, which changes a lot of things from where they were 100 years ago or 80 years ago, depending on when your church got its microphone. So that's a kind of technology that we're already using. Sometimes the question comes to me with regard to visuals. Will we use, and that's maybe what you meant by that. I'm not sure. How do we use visuals in preaching? And one of my responses to that is that you are the first visual. You, the preacher, are the visual, the primary one. So get used to that and get comfortable with your body. Because you are the prime visual. The second thing is that there are lots of visuals in your church already. So there may be stained glass. There may be something on the front. There's all kinds of other images there. And actually, one of the interesting things that we're doing in at least some Men and I churches is we're actually using more visuals in different ways. And even to use visuals on the screen up above, are we, in a way, going back to our Catholic roots 500 years ago where there were more images? I mean, one can see it as a modern thing. And there's a lot of modern technology there. But if we are looking for images in worship, some of that may actually come from reading back to the Reformation and before that and so on. Or icons, the use of icons would be another one. One of the things that's important when we're using visual technology is that we need to be able to deal with it when it doesn't work. I'm sorry. In the best situations with those amazing guys back there, they cannot do everything. They cannot figure out everything in the moment it needs to be figured out. The internet connection didn't work the other day. Well, we survived that quite nicely. That wasn't a big deal. But if you're going to show a clip of a movie that you love and you're going to show three or four minutes of it and for some reason it doesn't work that morning, you better be able to, you're either going to have to abandon the whole thing and maybe leave the pulpit, I don't know. Or that's probably not the best idea. But you will have to know that story so well that you can tell it in the same kind of compelling way that the movie did. So you need to be working on telling that story as well. That story, you need to be rehearsing that story so that you can tell it if the technology breaks down. So those are my comments. I mean, some people use technology so much better than I ever could. And the issue is that it's smooth. I think the issue is that it has to work in conjunction with what's already happening. Pick up on your point. Chuck Newfield? Chuck Newfield? Could you sing a song? I forget what it's called now. Yeah, the slides weren't there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I wanted to talk or just comment on your use of or your point about rehearsal. And I've experienced rehearsal in various ways. I believe very strongly, a huge amen to the need for rehearsal. Rehearsal can be understood, it seems to me. I've seen it as memorization and getting all the moves just right the way we had them. And then worship is controlled by our rehearsal. And I wonder if you could comment about how can rehearsal allow us to digest and ingest it so it becomes so much a part of it that the worship is freed rather than controlled. Yeah, no, I think you made the point quite nicely. So thank you for that, Chuck. Yeah, and I think a lot of that is, I mean, we can learn a lot from theater people about that very thing. If you go to a play, a dramatic production on a Thursday night, it's different than Friday night. If you go on the next Saturday, it'll be different. You watch for how it's different. It's different because the audience is different. It's different because the actors are different. They have their lines memorized, and they kind of know where they're going and so on. But it's the interaction of the actors on stage. Good actors are always reacting against each other in the moment. And part of that has to do with the confidence they have in their bodies, right? I mean, it's an old cliche, but they are living in the moment. So I think a lot of that is we have to be able to work with our bodies and trust our bodies and our minds to know that it needs to do what it needs to do in the moment, right? I think we do this as preachers. I mean, we can rehearse our sermon and so on, but it's very different with a group of people in the room then. If you rehearse it Sunday morning early, twice in an empty church, it's very different when you start seeing people. I'm always looking when I'm preaching for the person. I mean, this is different in some churches where there's verbal feedback. But in churches that I've been in, I'm always looking for some of you are poker faced. Like, you don't react. And I'm not looking at you, right? I mean, I'm trying to get through to you, but I'm looking at the people. And I can see you right here, the people who are like, and perplexed. Sometimes I can see perplexing. And then if I see a few perplexed people, I may backtrack a little bit and say that thing again or connect it with something else. Dan King, the first question about technology is a great segue into a couple of comments. I also use technology rather sparingly in my church. Numbers of persons have said that it's a distraction to them. And the screen in our church comes down in front of a big cross directly in the center. Somebody needs to write something about that. The screen coming down over the, anyways. But what I may use if I can get the information from the, I'd like to see if possible the first screen of the Good Samaritan and the last. I think there were three. But what struck me in my sermon I'm preparing for Sunday from Matthew 25, entitled, it was entitled Action for the Least of These. And somewhere at the beginning of this week or last week it struck me. I'm gonna put a slash and have two prepositions, not just action for the least, but action with the least of these. And there's a big difference there in how we perceive ourselves as helpers or how we actually help. So I was struck by the Good Samaritans getup. They're costuming there. And as you described, our typical stance as being the Good Samaritans helping everyone, especially menos. Take a look at the third one. And see how different the Good Samaritan, the only difference there is a little bit of a loincloth around his middle, pretty much. I mean, as far as your first impression and not in addition to being below as opposed to above. And so maybe I can get from you and maybe I'll have the screen come down. One problem is the screen is, it's a big nice screen and the technology is good, but it's slow and it's knee. But I might just tolerate that knee to show those first and last because it was very striking to me this morning. There are, I saw also, I got this online. This is a late 1800s French painter. I am forgetting his name right now. But one of the pictures that's sort of highlighted or blown up is just the feet. The feet of the donkey and the two feet. So it's just this big caption of just the feet. It's remarkable, a remarkable picture. David Miller. Alan, rather than a question of comment, that something happened as you were speaking this morning, you were obviously were teaching, you weren't preaching. But it became a sermon. It became proclamation, it became living word. And what, for me, the text of your message was after the walk on the road to Emmaus, and they reflect back on the encounter with Jesus on the road and say, you know, we're at our hearts burning within us. There was a burning within as you were speaking today. And in that encounter, there's all this information at the beginning that you didn't say any words we didn't know. And yet, what you invited us to was from words to living word. And that movement that happened. So thank you for that. And blessings. Your first comment was about how we are embodied as we are preaching. And when you said that, the first thing that came to my mind was the role of gender and the differences between women preachers and men preachers. And I'm just wondering if in your thinking about that, you've done much thought about that. I know for myself, the time when I was preaching and I was most aware of my body was when I was eight months pregnant. And I'm just wondering if you've thought about how that should be different or might be different or I don't know. Yeah. There are three women in this congregation here right now who could deal with that better than I can, especially because I'm not a woman, right? But I'm a man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly. Yeah, I mean, I know from my wife, Marilyn, who is a preacher and from Rachel and from Rebecca, who I've taught worship and preaching with, and many women and men preachers, there are different issues with the different genders, you're absolutely right. I get away with, men get away with clothing that we don't have to think that much about. In my experience with speaking with Marilyn, she has to be much more careful about what she's wearing when she's preaching. There was a, in pastors week, was it five, six years ago? There was actually a workshop on clothing. Oh, and was it specifically for women? Yeah, maybe we should have one for men as well. Yeah, we are gendered people. Absolutely, this comes into it. And I think we hear it consciously or unconsciously whether this person is man or woman. And obviously we've had men preaching for so many years. So we've been receiving that perspective and women preaching now has really shifted that. A really good person to read on this would be Anna-Carter Florence or Anna-Carter Florence. Yeah, she's done some really good work on women and preaching. And one of the things she says is that there have been a lot of women who've been preaching over time. We've just subverted the history, we've forgotten it. We've defined preaching in a certain way that just didn't include women. So the devotions that women were having in the church basement on Tuesday where one person was leading out, one woman was leading out with scripture and with her interpretation of it, that wasn't a sermon. Cause it was in the basement on a Tuesday morning. So that's getting away from your comment. Is anybody else? Voice, do you wanna, does anybody, yeah? Voice. Again, this would be something for Rebecca or Rachel. Do you wanna, yeah, so, okay, okay. So I taught a class this fall called Voice and Identity. It used to be taught by Rebecca. She called it soul and voice and for whatever reason I called it voice and identity. Our voices are tied to our identity. Our identity is tied to our voice, right? One of the things we have to work out here when we're critiquing preaching is that it's harder to receive a critique on my voice what I say than to what I write. Writing is sort of out here somewhere and I can put red marks all over it and give you a B or something. But when I give a B for speaking, this is a problem, right? One of the things that's really telling about the voice and identity class and it's telling about worship generally and preaching, there were six women with me in the preaching in voice and identity, right? What's that about, right? When we have Lent Planner or Advent Planner, which is primarily worship, it's mostly women who come. When I do a storytelling course, it was seven women last year, right? Does this mean that men aren't conscious that they have a voice and an identity and that it's related to each other and women are more interested in discovering that? I think one of the issues that could be there and I think Rebecca could speak to this more powerfully than I could, but one of the rituals that Rebecca has done and I know others have done with women, they stand right here, you get to be here. You can use your voice here, right? And tears, whoa, I can look at you. We often end up or sometimes end up in voice class with tears, right? Because discovering our voice, discovering that I can speak here is powerful and especially for women who have not been given this space, right? So I think Joni did this when she was, Joni Sankin, when she was teaching here, I think she, and she does this where she's teaching at EMS too. She sometimes just has to say to somebody in the name of Jesus, you can be here. Why don't you come? The other thing that I learned a lot when I was teaching the soul and voice class is how much trauma gets suppressed and then cannot come out. So certainly others in our culture who have been oppressed in some ways know what how important that journey is. I think it's often surprising to us who may have been more privileged in the culture to realize how much we also swallow our voices because we are afraid. In that course when I taught it, it'd be interesting we haven't compared notes, often about the halfway point in the course, people were falling apart because their voices now as they were using them were touching and reaching into things that they had not, they were exploring territory now that they had not felt free to explore and to be supported and to have a space whether it's this space or other space to be able to quite literally just practice speaking it changed them and for several brought fairly deep healing. This was not a psychology course, this was a course in which we did these exercises that Alan did, it was you practice speaking, you practiced singing and when in fact you got all this body stuff working together all of a sudden there was healing and possibility there that you couldn't think your way toward. So it's that kind of embodiment, this work that Alan has been doing and I hope will continue to do, it reunites us as whole beings and not as segmented beings and it's often astonishing to me when we really are in touch with our bodies then there really is freedom to speak for women to speak, for men to speak, for those who are young or old who have been oppressed, who have been oppressors it's when we are in touch with our body and know that grounding and know that that grounding is also in God there is huge freedom and there is power. Just one other comment about that would be that for men and women one of the easy things that you can help yourself and other folks in the church with is we so often when we're reading scripture for instance just read it far too fast and there's a number of reasons for that but one of them is to just look at the person who's rehearsing this, because they're rehearsing it is to say you know what, you have the right to be here. We sometimes think we have to read fast because I mean sometimes we think we need to read the scripture fast because we just want to get onto the preacher or something like that but taking your time, you have the right to be here you've been working on this text we want to hear you tell the story. Take your time. Sarah, I just want, Sarah's been standing there for such a long time now. Todd Gussler, one of the things that struck me about your presentation is and I don't know if this was an intention or not but how incarnational the approach that you're presenting is you know whether the exercises that you had us do or thinking about the role of the spirit identifying with it, could you say a bit more about how you see speaking, presenting, performing as being an incarnational act? Yeah, I haven't really thought through that intellectually as much as just practically. In Ontario, where I lived in Kitchener Waterloo I was associated with a theater troupe for a long time and all the people in this theater troupe were Christian. They weren't necessarily doing nice Christian plays. It was a Christian community doing theater for the community and we have a lot of that and this is very interesting on the whole missional level. We have a lot of Christian actors in Christian communities all over North America and Europe and they're not necessarily doing Samuel Beckett. They're doing all kinds of really interesting plays pushing things out and they would talk very openly about the word becoming flesh and how does that work? How do we dare to do this? Well, we do it with our bodies. We do it with emotion. We do it in relationship with others on the stage and I mean, one of the reasons I got into this was because I was so anxious about standing up on Sunday mornings and I realized that actors have ways of getting their bodies ready so they're not as nervous and then I got into other parts of that. Does that help? I probably need to do more reading on the incarnational aspect of this but I've assumed it practically. I'm Sarah Dick and just a follow up comment. I grew up with, I'm 42, but I grew up with women in the pulpit from as far back as I can remember which stood in very faithful contrast to me with culture. I still had culture telling me I shouldn't have a voice but church in that way was a prophetic voice, a prophetic place of empowerment. My question though, I wrote down your comment, live in the moment, have confidence in your body and I wrote have confidence in body and I also heard that as the body of Christ and I wonder how that, how you connect body with body and the confidence that as preachers we must have in the body I don't know, if you have more to say on that I would be eager to hear it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, use the term body singularly and in a plural sense. I think, again, I haven't done a lot of serious thinking about this but again, practically, this is one body up here and there's a body out there. I'm part of that body but also distinct from that body. In this moment, by looking at this with performance studies, there's a person up here, there's a body up here speaking and bodies are listening and also reacting but I'm also seeing you, this isn't simply, I don't know that this is simply a monologue because and actors will tell you that they, especially in a smaller theater but also in very large theaters, that Friday night is different than Saturday night because you're tired as an audience and the body doesn't work as well. The bodies are tired, the body is tired and whatever they're doing on stage, they have to do double the amount to get people to laugh or cry or emote in any way because it's Friday night. Saturday night and Thursday night are different. People are more relaxed, especially Saturday night, performances can be quite different. So that's just one way where this body meets the whole body, all the bodies out there. I had one more thing to say about this but now I forget what it was. Yeah, my body forgot. And I think more and more I'm using the term body rather than voice because voice or at least to qualify that voice is, we think voice is up here, it's not. It's the whole body, it's how we're standing, it's how we're breathing, it's where our gut is, right? One more and then I think we'll have to, yeah? Maybe two, go ahead. Laurie Redpath again, sorry he always looked like to talk but I've worried about something you said in the beginning of your sermon was that something about we shouldn't be dramatic and yet all I've heard you say is that we are acting and performing and something about last night's choir and going to Promise Keepers where that black preacher just gets into it with his body and yet not with his words. Right, yeah. He doesn't say anything that makes me go whoa, he makes me go yes brother, preach it, like come on, finish what you came here to do. And I wonder how many times we get thinking and then our bodies don't have a chance to help us out. And to me that's what I heard you say was just, I think drama is the best as long as it's authentic. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. So how do we develop that if we don't exercise, if we don't know our bodies? That's my question. You answered it. I mean, you know, we're trying to find the voice that we have, not somebody else's voice and we're also trying to match that voice and that body with the culture of the church that we're in, right? Those matches, we should actually ask that question on the MLI, how, tell me about your body and how your body works with other bodies. Like, I mean, one of the things that, one of the things to look at is the body culture of your church. What do your bodies do in church? Like literally just do this, right? Like, okay, you sit and then you sit sometimes with the book and then you stand up and sometimes you stand up with the book and sometimes you sit down and you pass the offering thing this way. Once in a while you move forward. So what are the movements? That's some of the moves. And other people, the somatic culture or the body culture will be more this, right? Or this, or we're talking to each other during the service, right? Or we were at the Orthodox Church last year and most people stand during the service and they also walk in and out. It's not the kind of service where you need to be there all the time. You come in for a while, you appreciate it and then you walk out and have a conversation with somebody in the back and then you come back in again. That's a body, a body culture. So I'm not sure if I'm really getting at your question but I think the issue is that we all have different bodies and they all will express them. Don't try to do something that somebody else is doing for the sake of doing that. Do what comes naturally to you but remember that the natural thing is still developing, right? We may have bodies or voices that are stuck doing one thing, doing one or many things that it shouldn't be doing. We can actually free the voice. You can actually have a different voice and a different body than you have now. It's something that has to be developed over time but I think about the acting of, I mean Anthony Hopkins could stand there and move almost no muscles except for his lips and he can communicate much better than somebody who is, have you ever seen Walter Wangren? I love some of his stuff. He is exhausting to watch, right? He is walking all over the stage and doing all kinds of things. For me it's exhausting but that's his style. That's how he does it, right? Was there one more? Yeah, go ahead. I appreciated very much, Ron Gingrich and I appreciated very much what you said about pausing and then about rehearsing but I was wondering how do, what do you think as a pastor that we help the congregation know how to pause? In what they're doing and I had to think in the song we sang open my eyes that I may see. There was an obvious place in there where we could pause but we just went ripping through it. And so how would we, that might be one place but how do you teach a congregation to participate in the pauses to bring ourselves or bring others to Jesus? Well I think we can introduce pauses in places where we may have not had them before. I mean what about the song leader saying we will pause for a moment of silence after this? Or I think another way to pause is to simply make, it is simply, is to make our sermons more simple. I think saying one thing and not three is very important. Taking more time with scripture and it doesn't mean necessarily going slower but somehow taking more time with smaller bits. Something like that may help. And I think again, the extent to which the leaders of the church are ready to pause. The extent to which I as a leader am non-anxious, I don't have reptilian things crawling all over me. The extent to which my body is relaxed and ready is contagious, right? If I'm nervous, the congregation will be nervous. This is part of leadership. So if leadership is willing to pause in some places that I can't even imagine right now, then the congregation can learn that. This is the time.