Elisabeth R. Jones argues for an approach to preaching that facilitates holy inspiration, transformational discipleship, and faithful public witness. What she demonstrates in this book is a tested method of midrashic biblical imagination that enables preachers and their communities of faith to explore the polyvalence of the biblical text. In Midrashic Imagination, Jones draws on ancient and contemporary interpretive practices that privilege curiosity, open-ended questioning, and faithful imagination. Jones's midrashic biblical imagination enables the preacher and congregation, or people in other communal settings, to unlock the various interpretive possibilities of any biblical text or genre. Midrashic Imagination provides an approach to Scripture that delays judgment, works across confessional and theological differences, and invites inquiry and curiosity centered on the biblical text. Midrashic Imagination is designed for working preachers who are called to preach biblically while searching for a solid, adaptable method to take the Bible imaginatively too. This book is a good fit for preachers focused on the sacred connection between the lively word of God in Scripture and today's cultural landscape, spiritual longings, hopes, and fears.
Elisabeth R. Jones is an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada who has taught at the Vancouver School of Theology and at the United Theological College/Le Seminaire Uni, where she was director of pastoral studies. Jones has served as lead minister at Cedar Park United Church, Quebec, since 2011. She also continues to teach preaching and lead preaching workshops for seminarians, lay worship leaders, and congregations.
Introduction: Recovering a Biblical ImaginationThe introduction provides a historical and theological overview of midrashic approaches to the Biblical text, exploring the rabbinic trajectories of midrash as process and product. It also makes the case for the Christian recovery of this ancient, faithful engagement with Scripture in community as particularly adept for navigating preaching and discipleship in the increasingly contentious and fractious landscape of Christian life in North America. The chapter demonstrates how this midrashic biblical hermeneutic can be coherent with diverse Christian theologies, worldview, and praxis. Chapter 1: Midrashic Method overviewThis chapter lays out a helpful synopsis of the midrashic method that will be laid out in detail in the subsequent chapters of the book. This serves as a helpful tool the preacher can share with lay people who are interested in engaging in this community-based exploration of preaching texts. The chapter also locates this midrashic interpretative method within current wisdom and advocacy for collaborative preaching ministry shared between pastor-theologians and their communities of faith. Chapter 2: Hearing and Marking the TextThe chapter outlines the rationale for this primary move in the midrashic method: an encounter with the Bible not merely as a written, but as an uttered Word, spoken and heard. Understanding the oral nature of Scripture is key to one's first encounter with the biblical text for preaching. Marking the text invites physical engagement with the text--a helpful, even necessary precursor to spiritual, intellectual, and imaginative encounter with it. Chapter 3: Minding the GapsThe chapter argues works from the premise that Scripture is inherently polyvalent. This second move in the midrashic method privileges questions, noticing the gaps in, around, behind, and in front of the text, and creates an environment for questioning that is hospitable and generative. This is where community involvement is crucial. The method encourages the preacher and community to hold multiple possibilities of the text in creative tension with various homiletic possibilities. It encourages awareness of contemporary context and circumstance to be invited into conversation with the biblical text. Chapter 4: Texturing the TextThis chapter helps the preacher to introduce their communities to the layered nature of biblical texts--their oral and written prehistory, redactions, translations, and interpretive histories--in ways that enlarge the faithful imagination concerning the text and its preaching possibilities. This step provides preachers with the opportunity to share biblical exegetical scholarship in accessible ways. It also invites knowledge of other disciplines such as literature, music, science, and history to come into conversation with the text in ways deeply reminiscent of historic methods of rabbinic exegesis. The chapter also introduces non-traditional hermeneutic approaches to exploring textual meaning and possibility by studying the ways that art, music, poetry, drama, embodiment, and aesthetics have interpreted biblical narratives, themes, and characters. Chapter 5: Following the RabbitLike Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, when we follow the biblical rabbit, we enter a world both familiar and strange. For the preacher, this is the moment where decisions are made: Which of the foci might is the preacher to address in their preaching? What journeys and encounters might this particular rabbit direct the preacher and community to discover? When this move happens in the context of a community of interpretation, the sermon is more likely to both take of from and land in the pew in ways that engender transformation in discipleship and witness. Chapter 6: (Re-)Telling the TaleRabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso calls this last move of midrashic interpretation the profound moment when we dare to insert ourselves with faithful imagination into the biblical narrative. In the process, participants in this midrashic engagement can hear God's echo in their own lives. Practically speaking, this last move of biblical midrashic imagination is where possibilities and decisions about homiletic form can creatively occur. To give an example, if art becomes an icon into the biblical world of the text, how then might art become an element of the preaching event? Chapter 7: Ways and MeansThis chapter outlines possibilities for preachers to incorporate midrashic approaches into their homiletic process as well as offer some best practices, honed over a decade of developing this method, for using this approach in Bible studies sharing moments of biblical exploration with children and families, and in preaching peer-coaching groups. This concluding chapter also offers a concise argument for recovering this form of midrashic biblical engagement as a potent tool for dialogue and mutual respect between diverse expressions of Christian faith and witness within a perilously fractured global context. AppendicesThe section offers samples of midrashic exploration that have applicability to preachers who use either the Narrative Lectionary or the Revised Common Lectionary, (or other model of planned preaching), offering a model for a liturgical or thematic season of Midweek Midrash that can be adopted or adapted. It also offers examples of how to host midrashic conversations with preaching colleagues or with a mixed group of preachers and parishioners.
