WELCOME TO 'LATERALLY LUKE' 

  TO THE PREACHER:

If you’ve visited either 'matthewinthemargins' or 'marginallymark', you may have read this Introduction already. I use it again here for those who haven't visited either site & wonder about its aim. 

Gathered in 'church', most congregations look surprisingly like pages of Scripture. All set in lines, row upon row. Here a stop. there a comma, an exclamation! a question or two?? But a congregation's life is lived mainly outside these rows of pews & aisles. As Scripture itself arises more from that outside life than from what goes on inside synagogue or church. It's heart stuff, Spirit stuff, before it's head stuff, in-house stuff!

LLK is an attempt to help preacher, congregation, & the text of LK as read week by week, to better ‘connect’ during 'Year C' of the Revised Common Lectionary. It aims to encourage us to find new 'entry points', to break out from blind spots & strait-jackets we’ve fallen into in our preaching. Maybe to give us an idea to start with, when we could not, for the life of us, see how to 'break into' the passage, break it open.

Good preaching operates out there in the margins of life where scripture still happens. Rabbi Lionel Blue once described Jewish Midrash imaginatively as 'scribbling & doodling in the margins'. Preaching needs to scribble & doodle too, enlivening the relationship between text & readers. In his 'Day Trips To Eternity' [DLT, '87] & other writings, Rabbi Blue gives some stimulating & insightful examples of such goings on. On another wavelength, but in kitchen imagery this time, Beth Yahp [Weekend Australian 30.8.97, p.12] writes: ‘I am always looking inside & under pots, pans, cupboards, anecdotes, stories; listening for what lies beneath their skins. I am always hungry.’

LLK encourages us to look hungrily inside & under the skin of the Gospel as we engage with it in the Eucharist. So we can move in & out of the text creatively & relate to it out there in our laterals, in life’s margins. Out from presuppositions that bind us, & on to new, more imaginative trains of thought; to 'fly a kite' with, develop, or even ‘cook’ with for the hungry! So we & LK &, best of all, YHWH God can come alive to each other.

LLK assumes the serious preacher will do the hard-yards of theological homework. Dare I suggest we oughtn't know what our sermon thrust will be till we've done a lot of poking around in the margins of text & life. Scripture is intuitive before it's logical. Matthew Fox says somewhere, 'faith is the creative use of the imagination', so, go for it. And, as we all ‘go for it’ let’s all pray God's Spirit will stimulate & foster all our faith imaginings to create a newly unfolding chapter of the Old, Old Story.

P.S. I tend to work from The Complete Gospels [ed. Robert J.Miller, Polebridge, '94] compared with NRSV, NJB, & other versions & commentaries to hand. But in the end, we all have to become our own version & our own commentary!

Brian McGowan,  ‘Retired’ Anglican Priest, Falcon, Western Australia  Revised 2018 

Email: tirnanog1@iinet.net.au)