“Fractured Ground” with Kimberly Wagner

Show Notes:

Traumatic events happen to us as individuals, but we also experience trauma as a community. How do we--individually and collectively--deal with trauma? How do we frame it within the narrative of our own stories and of our communities’ stories? How do we rebuild from traumatic fractures without leaning into the temptation to return to a false memory of a golden age that never existed in the first place?

This conversation on The Weight is built around a heavy topic, but Dr. Kimberly Wagner brings brightness, empathy, and hope to a discussion that is, well, weighty. Even though her most recent book is a resource for preaching, there’s something for everyone in this episode.

Kimberly is assistant professor of preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of Fractured Ground: Preaching in the Wake of Mass Trauma. Her doctoral dissertation centered around preaching and trauma, and she has seen first hand how disorienting mass trauma to a community and to individuals. 

Resources: 

Learn more on Kim’s website, preachingandtrauma.com.

Buy Fractured Ground.

Transcript:

Chris McAlilly 00:00 I'm Chris McAlilly.

Eddie Rester 00:01
And I'm Eddie Rester. Welcome to The Weight.

Chris McAlilly 00:03
Today we're here with Dr. Kimberly Wagner. She teaches preaching at Princeton Seminary, and she's written a book called "Fractured Ground: Preaching in the Wake of Mass Trauma."

Eddie Rester 00:15

This is a resource primarily for preachers or people who lead in local churches. But the conversation today dives deep into the meaning of trauma. Not just traumatic experiences, but what we have all experienced as trauma and what it means, how we react, and how we can begin to build forward. Chris, for you what was meaningful in today's conversation?

Chris McAlilly 00:40

I think this is helpful. Trauma is a word that gets used. A fair amount, and sometimes overused, and so we define what separates trauma from traumatic events. We talk about how that affects our stories and our sense of the past, the present, and the future. And then we have some just great conversation about how to navigate our way through difficult stories, both individually and as communities. What about you?

Eddie Rester 00:44

Over used. I think for me, just the freedom to say, just live in it. Let the trauma... You don't have to move past it real quick, I guess. You can own the moment. But there's a way you can live in the moment where you live in that tension between what was and what can be. And the ability, the art of living in that moment is important, because you can't go back to what was. You're not where you're going to be yet. So narrating that story of the moment, I think is critical.

Chris McAlilly 01:39

I think this conversation will be a resource for someone living in a faith community. But also, for anyone that's experienced something difficult. I think you're gonna get a lot from Kim. And she's also funny. And so we talk a little bit about humor and trauma at the end of that conversation. So thank you for being with us today on The Weight. If you like, the episode, share it. Leave us a review, subscribe, and continue in the conversation with us on The Weight. [INTRO] The truth is, the world is growing more angry, more bitter, and more cynical. People don't trust one another, and we feel disconnected.

Eddie Rester 02:17

The way forward is not more tribalism. It's more curiosity that challenges what we believe, how we live, and how we treat one another. It's more conversation that inspires wisdom, healing, and hope.

Chris McAlilly 02:29

So we launched The Weight podcast as a space to cultivate sacred conversations with a wide range of voices at the intersection of culture and theology, art and technology, science and mental health. And we want you to be a part of it.

Eddie Rester 02:44
Join us each week for the next conversation on The Weight. [END INTRO]

Chris McAlilly 02:52
We're here today with Dr. Kim Wagner. Kim, thanks for taking the time to be with us today.

Kimberly Wagner 02:57 Absolutely, thanks for having me.

Chris McAlilly 03:00

You've written an incredible book that we want to get into. But for folks who don't know your work, maybe just tell us a little bit about your position and kind of your point of reference, where are you are these days.

Kimberly Wagner 03:15

Absolutely. No, thank you so much. So I am currently serving as Assistant Professor of Preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. And as part of that work, I get the chance to work with students from all denominations as they prepare for ministry, and have the opportunity to do some mentoring, as well as teaching preaching. So I teach classes like intro to preaching. I teach a course called Women Preaching, Preaching Women. I teach a course called Preaching Death and Eschatology with the Earth at a farm, which is very fun.

Eddie Rester 03:29 Oh, wow.

Kimberly Wagner 03:52

But my probably most popular class that they're not required to take--they're required to take Intro, right? But my most popular class is my Preaching and Trauma class, which is the heart of the research that I've been doing over the last, you know, five to six years. So that, and that's what this book is about. And so I do a Preaching and Trauma class at least once a year, sometimes twice if the waitlist gets too long.

Eddie Rester 04:19

So the book you're referencing, "Fractured Ground." Tell us a little bit about how that rose up, just in your soul or in the need that you saw for teaching this and helping preachers, but also, I think, helping congregations deal with trauma. Where did that come from? Where did the sense that this was needed arise?

Kimberly Wagner 04:38

Yeah, well, so looking back, I realized that much of my life and career I spent with communities experiencing trauma. So my first life, my undergraduate degree is actually in Secondary Life Science Education, with a specialty in botany and genetics. I can tell you about plants. I can't keep them alive. But I was a...

Eddie Rester 05:00 Good distinction.

Kimberly Wagner 05:02

Yeah, it is a good distinction. I just want to be really clear about that. Because I don't want people to start thinking like, I'm... I like to say I'm a hospice worker for plants. I help them transition to Jesus.

Chris McAlilly 05:15 [LAUGHTER] That's awesome.

Kimberly Wagner 05:17
So I don't want anyone to be fooled by my degree with botany.

Eddie Rester 05:20
So, you don't want email? No emails about how to keep plants alive. So

Kimberly Wagner 05:24

No, please keep that... I know plenty of wonderful people who can do that. It's not me. So. But I ended up teaching 10th grade biology and then eighth grade earth and space science at a inner city school in Cincinnati, Ohio. And a lot of my students there were experiencing, or actively being recruited for gangs, and gang violence, as well as a lot of food insecurity, a lot of homelessness and students experiencing a lot of that. So I found myself navigating what it meant to teach in the midst of that situation where we had young people being arrested. We had young people with weapons. We had young people who had food insecurity or housing insecurity. From there, I went to seminary, and while I was in seminary served for two and a half years as a student chaplain at a maximum security women's prison in Atlanta. So I did my required stuff there and then kept going, and so found myself among this population of people experiencing trauma. When I went to my church, I served a church in Portsmouth, Virginia. And when I went to my church, I thought, "Oh, good. Finally, a trauma free place," right, which we all know is fanciful and not true. And what I discovered was that was a congregation who had experienced a lot of traumatic events, a lot of which just had not been talked about or dealt with, and so would pop up in surprising and unexpected ways. One example of that is the Sandy Hook shootings in Newtown happened while I was pastoring that congregation and I noticed a handful of folks in the congregation really responded as if it was like happening in our backyard. And I was like, do we know people there? We're in, like, southeast Virginia, not anywhere close to Newtown, Connecticut. Come to find out a bunch of our parishioners, my parishioners, had been impacted pretty directly by the Virginia Tech shootings. And they never dealt with it. And they never talked about it. And so when the Newtown shootings happened, it brought up all that stuff. So fast forward. So this is a long-winded answer to a really short question. But fast forward to my PhD work. And I'm going back and doing my PhD in homiletics, in preaching, nd I decided that I wanted to address this question of what do we say after a mass shooting, because that was something in my ministry that continued to confound me. And so I thought I'd solve it with a 30 page seminar paper.

Eddie Rester 08:03 Right.

Kimberly Wagner 08:05

But when I went to do the research for it, there was nothing out there. So I did what every good PhD student does and I complained to anyone who would listen, including my advisors and my professors, and they all said, "Well, maybe you should write it." And what I kind of thought was, well, that's a terrible idea. Let's not do that. But the more I did it, the more I realized my previous experiences had positioned me well, to be able to dig into this literature in a way that I had a kind of pastoral empathy for what was going on, and some experience of what it means to lead communities, whether that is a classroom community, or church community, or prison Bible study community, who is experiencing trauma. And so really, this work became as much a call as it did an assignment. And so I ended up digging in and writing. My dissertation was on preaching in the wake of mass shooting specifically. And then when it was time to write the book, I expanded it and thought more about mass trauma, writ large. And then in preaching and trauma, we, of course, talk about other things. But this has truly become a calling for me that has come out of my experiences and my questions.

Eddie Rester 09:20

So let's define some things. So how do you define trauma? We experience traumatic things, but trauma is something, I think, a little different than just the experience of the thing. So help us understand what you're talking about when you talk about trauma.

Kimberly Wagner 09:35

Yeah, absolutely. And I love the way you already pulled apart the experience, the event and the trauma. To me holding those apart is really important because I think events can be traumatizing, but trauma is actually the thing that lingers after those events have even ended or are subsiding, right. And in fact, folks can't even begin to conceive of their depth or breadth of trauma, often until there's a sense of safety for them to start to assess their trauma. So I understand and define trauma as a kind of blow or wounding of the whole self. And I always say, of the mind, body, and spirit self. And here I'm thinking of that beautiful Hebrew word "nephesh," right, the whole self. And that trauma is a fully embodied blow that happens when an experience or an event or a reality, that we can't make sense of it. It lives outside our capacity and our resources to fit it in or assimilate it into the stories that we've told about God or ourselves or the world, or the ways we've understood things to work. And so what ends up happening is we have all these... Trauma is the experience of having these realities, these experiences, that don't fit in to our understandings and our stories of ourselves and the world, and even of God. And so that is... To me, what differentiates trauma from suffering or from grief, those are very real things, and we need to attend to them. And certainly there is traumatic suffering and traumatic grief. But it is that disorientation that happens with trauma, as well as the way that trauma never really fits into... We're never able to get our arms and our hearts and our bodies around it. Right? It eludes our capacity to make sense of it.

Chris McAlilly 11:27

Right. And one of the things that you talk about is the impact, and you've already kind of drawn us in this direction. One of the ways in which you think about both preaching, and I guess the way in which humans deal with trauma is through stories. And so one of the things you say in your book is that "Stories, both those we wordlessly live out every day, and those that we tell, have the ability to structure our conception of time." And there, you reference Paul Ricoeur, phenomenologist, and his exploration around time and narrative. For those that may not, for whom that may be kind of a new set of ideas, maybe just unpack that a little bit and talk about the way in which you view stories structuring our sense of time?

Kimberly Wagner 12:18

Absolutely. That's such a good question. So I think generally, the way that we interpret the world is that we have the all these stories that we tell about who we are, about how the world works, about who God is, about how our communities act, right. And the ways that we make sense of new experiences is we fit them into this kind of chain of narrative. And so time makes sense to us, because we can place these events through time, right? That all of a sudden, our narratives have a sense of this happened first, and this happened second. The other thing that happens in the way that we tell stories, and the way stories can structure our understanding of the world is that they're coherent. Right? Is that they hang together. The story I told, at the start of our conversation about how I got into this work. I don't know... I wouldn't have told you when I was teaching middle school in Cincinnati, that I would have that that would influence my PhD work and ultimately my scholarship, right. But looking back, I have drawn a thread that brings purpose and meaning to these different events and brings them together both through time and coherently, right, that my life kind of makes sense. How this book came to be makes sense because of my previous experiences. Does that make sense?

Chris McAlilly 13:41

It does. Yeah, no, that makes good sense. And, you know, one of the things I hear is that stories... I mean, one of the difficulties there, retrospectively, you can kind of see the thread. It's hard to look forward. And so then, perhaps maybe you could talk a little bit about what is it that trauma... If trauma is a blow or trauma is, like, you know, an explosion within a story or within time, what is it that trauma does to our stories?

Kimberly Wagner 14:10
Yeah, so I argue that trauma does two things. It creates two crises: a crisis of time and a crisis of coherence. The crisis of time happens because the trauma, because it can't fit into the stories that we tell, it becomes a sort of eternal present, right? Because we can't locate it in time, because it won't fit into the stories that help us make sense of time.

Eddie Rester 14:34
So it's always, always present.

Kimberly Wagner 14:35 I'm sorry.

Eddie Rester 14:36
No, I was just gonna say so it's always present with us. It's always here. Is that what you mean?

Kimberly Wagner 14:41

Yeah, and when we can't fit it in, it kind of exists as a kind of free agent, outside our capacity to integrate it. And so it keeps showing up trying to fit in. This is how we get things like flashbacks or when we talk about being triggered. A lot of times what happens is that trauma, because that traumatic reality, because it doesn't really fit into our stories, it lives as a sort of eternal present. And so it ends up disrupting the relationship between past, present, and future. Another way to put it is the past that we lived, and the stories we told about the past did not lead to the present that we expected. And therefore, it's really hard to imagine a future. There's a scholar, his name is Robert Stolorow And he writes about it, about this disruption of time and the eternal present using an image from Harry Potter, which I'm a fan, so happy to talk to about Harry Potter.

Chris McAlilly 15:43 So is Eddie.

Eddie Rester 15:44
You're about to make it really easy for me. Thank you. Thank you

Kimberly Wagner 15:47

Perfect! So he talks about the eternal present of the trauma being like an enchanted portkey. So in Harry Potter, a portkey is an object that has been enchanted, so that when you touch it, it transports you to any location you've preset. As someone who spends a lot of time on

Eddie Rester 16:10
One hundred percent. One hundred percent.

Kimberly Wagner 16:13

Right? How helpful would that be? But he talks about that, because trauma is an eternal present, whenever it gets triggered. It is as if he says you were touching a portkey and transported. And he talks a lot in this in his book about the tragic loss of his wife. And he said, one of these moments was he was at a conference, and a colleague came up and said, "Oh, my goodness, Robert, I haven't seen you, since your wife's funeral. And I just have this vivid memory of you and your daughter and your daughter laying her head on your shoulder. And I'm so sorry." And he said, "It was as if this colleague handed me a portkey. And I was transported back to that moment to that funeral." And he says, "That became more present to me than the present I was actually living."

Eddie Rester 17:11

That's a perfect description, I think, whether someone has lost... I'm just thinking about sometimes people who go through a very traumatic divorce experience or lose a child, it's... Free agent, I think, is the right way to talk about it. Because it suddenly appears again, and becomes a thing that continues to be. You live in the present with it.

Chris McAlilly 17:35
Yeah, the thing that I'm thinking about here... I want to move forward a moment and talk about this image, this category that you use of fracture.

Kimberly Wagner 17:35 Yeah, I'm headed there. Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 17:39

But I want to pause for a moment, because I think we're talking about this as if this is something that happens to a single individual. You know, I think one of the things that you write about is the nature of a mass trauma and the way in which this could happen to a whole group of people or even a society. I wonder if you could just spend a moment and talk about the complexity of mass trauma, as opposed to just trauma that an individual experiences?

Kimberly Wagner 18:19

Absolutely. So one of the unique things about a mass trauma is that it impacts individuals and communities. And so we actually encounter a situation of individual and collective trauma interacting. And I want to be really clear, collective trauma is different from and really more than simply the assemblage of individual traumas. So you have individual traumas, one-two, one-two, one-one-one-one, and then you have the collective trauma of the community. And this is where the narratives of the community get disrupted. Right? There's a crisis of time, and a crisis of coherence that happens in the community, the stories the community is told, the ways they function together, the ways that they understand their identity. All of these kinds of crises that can happen at the individual level happen simultaneously at the collective level. And of course, the two feed each other--that the individual traumas feed the collective, the collective feed the individuals--but one of the things I think we need to be really attentive to, especially in the wake of mass trauma, is that it isn't just individuals that are experiencing trauma. The collective, the community is experiencing trauma. And when a community experiences trauma, it does two things. It pulls together. It's a uniting force, so it can bring together... Well, we all know after an event, communities seem to come together magically, right?

Eddie Rester 19:50
Boston Strong or those kinds...

Kimberly Wagner 19:53

You got it. Or money for Ukraine or water for water for Mississippi, right for the hurricane. So we do that. The problem is, I mean, you guys know, it doesn't last, but between usually two weeks and three months. And that's because that kind of uniting is driven by urgency. So unless you can keep the urgency alive, which is not tolerable, and you can't, that binding together can't happen. What happens more often, in communities experiencing trauma are two things. The first thing that happens is a coming together of sub communities of the equally wounded, those groups of people who experienced the same kind of depth, intensity, kind, level of trauma. So maybe those who lost loved ones in the shooting, those whose houses were destroyed in the storm, right? They bond together. And at first, that's a really healthy thing, right? Because it's good to be with people who understand what you're going through. This is why grief groups are so powerful, right? You don't have to explain to people how you're feeling.

Eddie Rester 20:01 For Jackson.

Kimberly Wagner 21:02

But ultimately, what can happen is, those groups can become really insular. Because let's be honest, the bar of entry is super high into those sub communities. And so what ends up happening is they end up feeling... The larger community feels like they can't reach those folks. Those folks feel rejected from the larger community, and you start getting these sub communities splintering off.

Chris McAlilly 21:24 ... Yes.

Kimberly Wagner 21:28
You want the other one? The other thing that happens is the exacerbation of conflicts already occurring in the community.

Chris McAlilly 21:35

Yeah, Lord have mercy. Yeah. And that's where you end up, you know, some of the things that I observe both within families and within neighborhoods and within local communities, as some of it... Because you ended up like offering your feelings, your emotions, your anger, your bitterness towards the people that are most proximate to you.

Kimberly Wagner 21:59 Absolutely.

Chris McAlilly 22:00
Even if what you're experiencing are things that are coming your way from a regional or national kind of story.

Eddie Rester 22:06
I think one of the ways...

Chris McAlilly 22:09
Things are getting harder here, Kim.

Kimberly Wagner 22:11 I'm sorry.

Chris McAlilly 22:13
You've gotten... You're moving us in a more difficult direction. Keep going, Eddie.

Eddie Rester 22:16

I was gonna say that one of the ways I think what y'all were just talking about is that it, that comes against who's close by, was that a lot of leaders, church community leaders, during COVID took the brunt of people's fracturing, that moment of trauma. So it was easier to come after your local town mayor, or your pastor, or someone who was there, who was an easier target than not. So I think about the magnifying glass on the fractures, when trauma happens. And you see it a lot in families after a death, when suddenly after that first moment, then the next layer of the story is everybody's fighting with each other.

Chris McAlilly 23:01

So I want to come back to the category of fracture, because it's a really important category for you. And I wonder, you know, how did you land on that? You know, where does that come from in your research?

Kimberly Wagner 23:17

Yeah. So narrative fracture is actually an original phrase from me. And it for me, I define it, I understand it as what happens when a crisis of time and a crisis of coherence come together. And I'm really clear about this term, because--and I wrestled with it a lot. Because I think that often times, especially historically, we've treated people in communities experiencing trauma as decimated. So we've noticed it's not narrative wreckage. It's not narrative decimation. It's fracture. Things are not holding together. Part of why I want to talk about fracture is because I want to honor the resiliency of people. And the fact that all those raw materials still exist to be rebuilt. The image I often give students is when I think about individuals and communities experiencing trauma, I imagine them with baskets, of pieces of their stories that have been broken apart, because then they don't hold together in time. They don't really cohere anymore, because the trauma has disrupted all of it. And yet, they're coming to us and saying, "I want to rebuild." And part of that rebuild, is sorting, is picking up a piece and saying, is this still valuable? Can I still use this? And what new pieces do I need? And so trauma recovery, I think... So my big argument in the book is trauma recovery requires us to take narrative fracture and to take the fractured reality seriously in our ministry and in our preaching, because we need to honor and bless those baskets of broken pieces before we even try to start putting them back together again.

Eddie Rester 24:55
And I love that you're using the word "rebuild," not "return."

Kimberly Wagner 24:59 Oh, yeah.

Eddie Rester 25:00

I think sometimes when we hit the, speaking personally,when we hit those moments of trauma, you want to find a way back to how life was, what it looked like, what it felt like. Communities do that as well. But your term of rebuilding, taking the fracture, as you say, you've got all the pieces there. It's trying to figure out how they fit together now. I think that's an important distinction that you've brought out.

Kimberly Wagner 25:28

Yeah, and I think one of the hard things about trauma, and particularly collective trauma, is that not only do folks want to return, we often want--and I don't say folks like others. We all do this--we want to return to a golden age that never was. I think a lot about the story of Exodus 16, where the Israelites are in the wilderness. And they go up to Moses and Aaron, and of course, they whine and complain and say, "Oh, we're so hungry." And then the line that I love is, "if only we had remained in Egypt and laid by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread."

Chris McAlilly 26:07 Flesh pots.

Kimberly Wagner 26:08

And I want every time to shake the Bible and say, "That's not what happened." Like, your time in slavery was not an all you can eat cruise buffet, right? Like, that never happened. That's a false memory. And so I think one of the things about collective trauma is it often supplies us with false memories of golden ages that never were. And so return is not just return to what was, but the idealized version of what was. Right?

Eddie Rester 26:36

Yeah. So what this thing was in our mind that at least it's better and holds together, instead of what we have, this fracturing that we have now. So as we think about the trauma and trauma that communities experience, how can we, as a church, begin to do that work of helping people and helping communities rebuild, to regain some coherence to the story?

Kimberly Wagner 27:05

Yeah, I think the very first thing, and I kind of nodded to it earlier, but I want to name it even more explicitly is that I think, resisting the urge to rush to wholeness again, right, to rush to a quick rebuild, honoring the fractured pieces. And one of the ways I think we can do that is preaching and ministering in kind of a rich theological tension, between brokenness and death and loss on one side, and hope and resurrection and redemption on the other. I think our temptation is often, especially in the wake of trauma, to collapse that tension one way or another. To either collapse towards the brokenness, death, loss, and we're like, oh, all we can do is cry out to God and lament, and there's no hope, and things are terrible. Or we collapse toward the resurrection side, and we just say, God's got this. It'll be okay in the sweet by and by, right. And I think both are dangerous. To collapse towards brokenness is to give up any thread of even the promise of hope, right? And to collapse toward resurrection, while people will do that with beautiful intentions, saying I want to preach a counter narrative to all the brokenness. At best, it will come off as inauthentic to the listeners and to the congregation's experience. At worst, it will come off as saying that until you're at that point where everything's fixed, you are not welcome here, and your story, your brokenness somehow may lead you beyond not just the love of this community, but the love and grace of God. And so my invitation is often to think about what does it mean to hold in tension, and to navigate back and forth that tension, between brokenness and hope? And that there'll be times and seasons where we preach pretty darn close to that brokenness, loss, death side, where all we can do is pull a thread of the promise of hope that is coming toward us, but we are not yet experiencing. And then I hope that even on the most beautiful, sunny, pre-pandemic Easter Sunday, we would preach over--still in the tension--but over toward the resurrection side where we could say... Because let's be honest, resurrection doesn't matter if there's not brokenness in the world. We don't need redemption if nothing is broken, and so constantly navigating that. And one of the things I really encourage pastors and preachers and community leaders that is, practice that work in the in between times. Practice. Practice that vocabulary, so that it isn't held in trust for your congregation and your communities for when they need it. So that they can navigate that tension, that their theology has capacity for brokenness, which will then fuel resiliency, will fuel that capacity to then start rebuilding. And then know that it is a process, not just of putting all the pieces back together, but also sorting through the pieces. There's going to be some pieces that they pull out and say, "Yes, this is important." And there's going to be some pieces they pull out of that basket and say, "This is no longer holds. This is no longer true." And they're going to need new pieces along the way, right. And so I think, holding that tension between brokenness and hope, and death and resurrection, and living in that tension, is really, really helpful.

Eddie Rester 30:33
And that's the story. I mean, that's the story that Scripture gives us over and over and over. It's the story of Isaiah speaking to the folks in exile, you know.

Kimberly Wagner 30:44 Absolutely.

Eddie Rester 30:45
Live where you are. That's where you are.

Kimberly Wagner 30:48 Yeah.

Eddie Rester 30:50

And God's gonna create a way in the wilderness. It's the story of what we call Holy Week, which is, you know, Jesus dies. It's a real death. Resurrection doesn't happen two hours later, or three hours later. It's on the third day. You wait in this tension. I think that's the gift, repeatedly, of the story of scripture for us.

Kimberly Wagner 31:13 Absolutely.

Chris McAlilly 31:13
Yeah. So you kind of have this dominant story of creation, fall or brokenness, damage, into new creation. That's kind of the mass narrative.

Kimberly Wagner 31:22 That's the whole story. Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 31:23

And then you have these kind of sub stories of the Exodus that we talked about from slavery, deliverance, wandering, promised land, and then that kind of unravels. And then you have this New Testament story of the life, death, resurrection of Jesus. But you mentioned a couple additional story forms that are useful for navigating trauma. And you mentioned a snap, and this becomes more of kind of the turn towards preaching. You talk about a snapshot form, and then also a frayed edges form. I wonder if you--I just think both of those are great--maybe just start with snapshot. And you mentioned, particularly Lamentations 3, and you may want to go with that or something else. But just tell us what is a snapshot form?

Kimberly Wagner 32:14

Yeah, so in the book, I think a lot--and in my work--I think a lot not just about what we say but how we say it. Because if our sermon form, or the way we put together our conversations, counters, the very thing that... So if we've preached a sermon that questions are great, and then end the sermon with a statement that answers all the questions we set up in the sermon, the form itself has now fought the sermon message, right? And so I wanted to think about what would it mean to preach sermon forms, or speaking proclamation forms, that would honor and hold space for the tension, that kind of eschatological tension. So I came up with two forms inspired by Scripture. And actually also I saw it reflected in memoirs of trauma, and seeing people employ it in their memoirs and holding... So the Scripture models it beautifully and then the memoirs kind of said, yeah, this, this can be a thing. Snapshot form. The idea of snapshot form is that we, it's... The reason I call it that is imagine somebody taking a bunch of pictures. This is back when we printed out pictures. I don't know, I know Polaroids are coming back.

Eddie Rester 33:25
Every now and then I'll find a box of pictures from the early 2000s. Every now and then.

Kimberly Wagner 33:29

Exactly. It's any church office. Go to your local church office and ask for the snapshots, right. But the idea of taking them and throwing them on the table, not in any particular order, not in any date. So kind of giving up both time and coherence in the sermon form itself. So thinking about what it means to go, and I look at Lamentations 3 as a brilliant model of this. Because Lamentations is obviously a trauma soaked text. And if you look at just Lamentations 3, the author goes from crying out to God in lament to praising God and there is no interlude. It's not like, Okay, so now things are better. So I'm gonna praise God for a second. Right? No. There's no interlude to praising God, it then moves to a call for corporate confession. It then moves to a cry to God for justice, and then it moves back to a lament. And then the very last thing is kind of trust in God's providence, and there is no interlude between them. And what would it mean to preach a sermon or just offer a proclamation that is willing to name these things very clearly, but isn't trying to make sense of them? Right? Isn't saying and so one doesn't crush the other. The lament doesn't crush the praise, but doesn't crush the call the confession but doesn't crush the the for justice. All of these pieces can live side by side and actually be generative in the tension between them.

Chris McAlilly 35:00

Two things come to mind. One is the biblical scholarship of Brent Strawn. Brent Strawn has done a lot of work. There's this big move in the second half of the 20th century, and then in the first quarter of the 21st century, to think about, to use narrative as a dominant category for reading scripture. And Brent challenges that and says that it's not just the story of God. That's not right, because you've got all these books, and it doesn't read... You know, the Bible does not read like Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a coherent narrative. The Bible is, it's more fractured. You've got more voices, and some of them are narrative, but some of them are also epic poetry. And some of them are law. And some of them are prophetic texts. And some of them are letters, and all of that stuff is kind of in a cannon. And so he uses the category of poetry. And I found that to be very interesting. It's thinking about the Bible, not just as one coherent narrative, but it speak to us in the way that poetry does. So that's the first thing that this reminds me of. And then the second thing is just a vivid image that came to my mind. My best friend from high school, lost his mother unexpectedly. She got, she took a turn, and she passed away within a very short period of time. And I had the privilege of speaking at the funeral. And then after the funeral, we went back over to the house, and they were having food. And they were telling stories. But the way that they were doing it was unique in that... But I think people do this. It's a regular practice. But around the dining room table, the family had pulled out all the photos from her life, I mean, going all the way back to college, and they had them all out on the table, and we just sat around. We literally walked in circles. And then stories were told. And that was a way of kind of processing what we had all experienced in short form. So anyway, both, I mean, this snapshot form is very generative. It's just a powerful idea.

Kimberly Wagner 37:19

That's beautiful. Yeah. No, and I think that it's hard to do well in preaching. Because it does require you to make the sections distinct and be willing to live in that tension. Right. One of the hard things about preaching in the tension is you have to be able to tolerate the tension yourself a little bit, you know. The other form I suggest is the frayed edges form. And here I look to my favorite resurrection story, which is from the shortest ending of the gospel of Mark, right, where the women come to the tomb. The stone has rolled away. They look in and the messenger says, "You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He is not here. He has gone ahead of you to Galilee. He has resurrected. He has gone ahead of you to Galilee, just as he said." And then that text ends with, "and the women left the tomb, amazed and terrified. And they said nothing to no one."

Eddie Rester 38:17 Yeah.

Kimberly Wagner 38:17 Right.

Eddie Rester 38:18
We don't preach that on Easter, typically.

Chris McAlilly 38:20 I'm preaching it this year.

Eddie Rester 38:21
You're gonna preach it this year.

Kimberly Wagner 38:22 I love it. Yes!

Chris McAlilly 38:23 I'm fear and in trembling.

Eddie Rester 38:24
So if you'll help him with this...

Chris McAlilly 38:26
Yeah, can you help me with my sermon?

Kimberly Wagner 38:27

I got you. I got you. Here's what... Well, I mean, it's an uncomfortable ending. It's so uncomfortable, first century Christians added two additional endings onto Mark. Right? It felt so incomplete to them.

Eddie Rester 38:39
And if I'm not mistaken, the Greek word actually, kind of... The short ending, doesn't it just end in the middle of a sentence? Isn't it gar?

Kimberly Wagner 38:45

It ends on a preposition. It ends on gar, which is "indeed," or can also be translated "because." So it says, "They said nothing to no one." It's a double negative in the Greek. "They said nothing to no one because," or "They said nothing to no one, indeed." It's like Mark got called for coffee and never sat down and finished the sentence. Right?

Eddie Rester 39:11 Yeah.

Kimberly Wagner 39:12

It's as if there's a hanging preposition, which is unusual in Greek texts, especially at the end of a paragraph or a book. So even like the literary construction of it is unfinished. And I think that's what I really like about this as a model, both ominously of content and form, in Mark is that mark, take seriously the trauma, both of the community to whom he is writing, but also of these women. And this idea of a turn on a dime, "Jesus has risen, be happy," doesn't happen in Mark. There is this time and space given for these women to process the information and to respond to it, right. And notice where Jesus is. Jesus does not appear to these women in this one. "He is ahead of you in Galilee." He is already coming toward you. He's not right here. And so for me, part of what's so beautiful about this text is it gives time and space to honor the brokenness and live into the hope.

Chris McAlilly 40:21
Can I go ahead and can I just extend to you an invitation to come preach this text on Easter Sunday? You just come and preach it.

Kimberly Wagner 40:31 Perfect!

Chris McAlilly 40:31

Or I'll just play the podcast. I'll just say, "Alright, guys, I know you're all here to hear a sermon. My friend Kim told me about this. I'm just gonna let you hear her. And it's really awesome." That's what I'm gonna do.

Eddie Rester 40:43
I'm thinking back. I have preached that. That's why I knew it was "gar." Because you're not tying it up. And you're allowing the story to happen forward.

Chris McAlilly 40:57 Woo.

Kimberly Wagner 40:58 Yeah.

Chris McAlilly 40:59 Let's do it

Eddie Rester 40:59
Without defining what that forward is.

Chris McAlilly 41:04

I think what you said, you don't... "Jesus is resurrected. Be happy." I just think about like the smiling Protestants. You know, it's just like, just that, that picture. I mean, Joel Osteen is the the poster child of this. And there are a lot of people that get a lot out of Joel Osteen. And it's not, you know, maybe it's for you, it's not my cup of tea, I think in part because it gets the hope. It gets the the joy, but it doesn't fully, you know, hold on to the trauma or the pain and give voice to that and give space to that. And so I like what you're talking about in terms of holding these things together. I did have one more question. And it's really to both of you, because one of the things that I appreciate about both of you, is humor, as it relates. I was waiting for in your book where humor or laughter shows up as a way of kind of navigating trauma. And, you know, it's I think beyond the work that you did in this particular piece of writing, but I do think it's a part of the way that you navigate the world, Kim is, and this is over the course of the time that I've known you. I've recognized this about you. Humor is a part of who you are, and the way that you approach stories. And Eddie, you're the same way. In your preaching, it's one of the things that I really appreciate and respect about you, as a preacher, is your capacity to use humor as a way of getting people into the text. And, you know, so I just wonder, for both of you, how does... You know, we've got story. We have fractured narratives. We have trauma in the conversation. How does, where does humor fit in, as we kind of navigate the fractured nature of our stories?

Eddie Rester 43:00 Kim?

Kimberly Wagner 43:00
Eddie, do you want to get that one first?

Eddie Rester 43:02

I'll take that so you can fill in the gaps with wisdom. As I think about it, I think there are two emotions that draw humans together. One is grief, tears. That draws humans together. The other emotion is joy, which laughter is a part of that, that ties humans together. And so I think if you only lean towards the hard and the difficult and the grief, you'll get part of a human heart into the story. But you also have to... There's a lightness to life that I think laughter reminds us that it's not all heavy. And that even in the midst of deep grief and pain, there's a joy that can be found and expressed and is necessary to lighten the load of the moment, of the trauma, of the issue, of the grief.

Kimberly Wagner 44:00

Yeah, no, I love that. I think that's right. I think humor, too, I want to say yes-and. I think humor does two other things. The first thing that it does is it brings down some walls. Humor opens people to... When we laugh together, we actually create communal bonds. This is why the people who go to stand up comedy shows immediately feel like a unit in the crowd. Right? And that's why they do, I think one of the reasons, they do a warm up act before like the Late Show with Stephen Colbert is so that the--I almost said congregation--the audience is laughing together already and there's a bond that happens. And so it lowers our bars of relational bonding. And so I think that, especially amid trauma and collective trauma, which seeks to pull us apart, it can be really powerful. The other thing I think laughter does is it is a symptom of the resurrection. I think laughter can remind us, like Eddie was saying, that not all of it is hard and heavy. It doesn't erase the hard and heavy, right. But what it does is it reminds us that there is hope and there is joy and there is laughter. I shared with you all, just before we got on and started recording, that my mom passed away about three months ago, after a very intense and hard illness, she spent seven weeks in the ICU. And we made sure that there was a family member by her bedside at all times, and sometimes more than one. And the stories... But she was not conscious for most of it. The stories we told around that bedside, alternated humor and tears. Not because we couldn't tolerate the tears. We could totally tolerate the tears. The humor was the promise of of hope that we were holding on to that promise of resurrection hope, no matter how it turned out, no matter whether she survived or didn't. And it reminds us, even just a small laugh, reminds us that joy is not crushed. And so for me, humor is so important. I teach with a lot of humor. Whether or not my students find me funny is a different story.

Chris McAlilly 46:27
Well, nobody thinks Eddie is funny.

Eddie Rester 46:28
Nobody thinks I'm funny. So it's... Yeah, I got you. It gets worse as you get older as well.

Kimberly Wagner 46:34

I'm glad we're in a boat together here, Eddie. So, you know, when I try to teach with a lot of humor, and not because I think... because I actually think it's a valuable resurrection tool. You know, like I said, a symptom, a sign of the resurrection, a hint of the resurrection.

Chris McAlilly 46:51

This this book,"Fractured Ground: Preaching in the Wake of Mass Trauma," it doesn't have a lot of humor in it, but it does have a lot of wisdom. It is an incredibly powerful frame, I think, that will be a huge encouragement and a resource for preachers, but I also think for folks who are experiencing trauma and are trying to make sense of it narratively. You know, I think there are resources here for you as well. We're just so grateful, Kim, that you would take the time.

Eddie Rester 47:24 What a gift.

Chris McAlilly 47:25
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I also can't wait to read your book on laughter and preaching. And if you want to let Eddie offer a nugget or two, that's fine.

Kimberly Wagner 47:38 Or ten.

Chris McAlilly 47:39 Or ten!

Kimberly Wagner 47:41

It's a great idea. It's one of those things. This book, every time I was like, "well, I could do this." And actually, it was funny. When I was working with the editors, they were like, "Can you add this? Can you add this?" And I was like, "This has to be one book, y'all."

Chris McAlilly 47:53 Yeah, that's right.

Eddie Rester 47:54 That's right.

Kimberly Wagner 47:54
And so, the hope is more books are hopefully coming. But also maybe another edition of this. We'll have more about humor. But I'd love to write something on humor and trauma.

Chris McAlilly 48:06
I think you would be great at that. I really do. It would be awesome.

Eddie Rester 48:10

Just again, to echo what Chris said, this gift. This book is a gift and our time today has been a gift. I just want to thank you for making some time to be with us and our listeners today.

Kimberly Wagner 48:19

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. It's been such a joy to be with you and to reconnect and to have the chance to think together about this stuff. It's always a blessing to me as well. So thank you.

Eddie Rester 48:31
[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.

Chris McAlilly 48:40

If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]