I learned to Make Great Espresso!
I learned to make espresso. At three dinner parties in our home this summer, where the guests were colleagues in homiletics, I was able to prepare and serve espresso graciously, welcomingly, and hospitably. My espresso is really good! I have excellent equipment. I am very selective in what coffee beans I use. I would much rather make my own espresso than go out for coffee. My wife includes my espresso as an ingredient in her baking and cooking. My colleagues at the dinner parties both enjoyed the espresso and conversed about the connections between making espresso and teaching preaching.
Except for when I was traveling, I practiced the art of the barista—a person who serves at a coffee bar—and made espresso every morning during the year that I was privileged to participate the Wabash Center’s 2010-11 Teaching and Learning Colloquy for Mid-Career Theological School Faculty, and indeed every day since. Making espresso is such a habitual part of my life that writing this final report occasioned my recalling that this is a practice I intentionally undertook a year ago. Reading about techniques for making espresso and steaming milk and researching espresso machines and other equipment feels very long ago. Thus, I accomplished one of my primary goals and undertook an art form that I succeeded at, which has become part of my life—a hobby—and not simply another project.
I accomplished my second primary goal in that, in time, making espresso became an experience of triumph or accomplishment that broadened my life and revitalized my spirit and vocation. I learned to make espresso and, in time, to steam milk. I am particularly grateful to Chris Nachtrieb of Chris’s Coffee Service for explaining a method of steaming milk that relies on listening to the sound of the milk rather than watching a thermometer. I was never able to master “latte art”— an art form created by pouring steamed milk into a shot of espresso and resulting in a pattern or design on the surface of the resulting latte—in large part because my espresso was so good that I did not want to dilute it with milk!
More than an accomplishment, making espresso has become for me a “sacramental” experience in which I encounter God and a “Sabbath” experience that distracts and so renews me. When I travel, I miss the morning routine of standing at my “altar” and thinking and praying while I grind, tamp, pull, and clean. As I listened to the reflections of the quilters, novelists, musicians, and photographers who were my companions in the colloquy, I discovered that my experience mirrors theirs, making espresso art. While some may need convincing that a shot of espresso is akin to a photograph, I have come to appreciate espresso as art. Made well, which I learned to do, It is a beautiful, multisensory experience—extraordinary sweet taste, inviting aroma that fills the house, and a beautiful dark reddish-brown crema, smooth, yet thick, that is delightful to look at.
Becoming a Student Again
Like preaching, espresso preparation is an art that demands the precision and dedication of science. Whereas the preacher must understand and balance variables including the personalities of the preacher and the listeners, Scripture and the context, the occasion and delivery, and the presence (or absence) of the Spirit, and the teacher of preaching must teach students to understand and balance these variables, the barista must understand and balance the blend, roast, and grind of the beans the distribution and tamp of the coffee in the portafiller, the quality, temperature and pressure of the water, the timeliness of the extraction and the temperature of the cup. Factor in milk for cappuccinos and lattes, and things get even more complicated.
Making espresso helped me rediscover the complexity, uncertainty, and need for trial-and-error that my students experience as they learn to balance the variables in preaching. One of my three leading questions is: How does a “method” of preparing espresso inform a “method” of sermon preparation, and vice versa? I was helped greatly by the formula known as the “golden rule” of espresso, which states that a double shot of espresso should equal 2 to 2.5 fluid ounces and take approximately 20 to 25 seconds to extract from the moment you start the pump until you reach the appointed liquid volume. I recall the weeks I spent watching the timer on my iPhone as I adjusted tamp, grind, and temperature. N response to this experience, I am exploring what formulas or “golden rules” I might provide students as they learn to balance the variables in preaching.
I also relearned the importance of routine, practice, and spending time every day. I could not “cram” and learn to make espresso, as surely as students cannot “cram” and learn to preach. I felt affirmed in my insistence that students follow a method in sermon preparation and that I follow a (labor intensive) step-by-step process to teach students to preach. Yet, I wonder about the course’s place in our curriculum. Students can take preaching in the second semester of their first year or the first semester of their middler or second year and not preach again until the third year on internship. With the three or four sermons they preach in class, they are discovering a process and not developing a routine. How might I better help students develop the routine? How might they preach every week or, at the very least, preach regularly in the interim between finishing preaching class and starting internship?
I learned a great deal by hanging out in coffee shops and both watching and talking to baristas and roasters. I wonder how I might facilitate students learning by hanging out with preachers. I know this happens during the summer residency of the ACTS Doctor of Ministry in Preaching Program, between students themselves and students and teachers. I am toying with ideas for inviting preachers into my M.Div, classes to preach and discuss a sermon and reflect on their process of sermon preparation.
A Fitting Metaphor
I made many metaphorical connections between preaching and making espresso. For example, coffee is like the Bible and the grind is exegesis—the process of analyzing and interpreting the biblical text. Relying too much on biblical commentaries is like using ground coffee. Much of the work is done for you but, like the coffee, the exegesis is dated. The best sermons, like the best espresso, require
freshness. Among preaching students—and preachers, I suspect—we can find two types of exegete. Those that enjoy exegesis produce a very fine grind. The message of the gospel gets clogged up in the exegesis. The preaching of those who are not exegetical fans is watery. Of course, the proper amount of exegesis depends on the discipline of the preacher and the expectations of the congregation. The question for me as a teacher of preaching is whether I need to do more to teach this balance? I have trusted my colleagues in Bible classes to teach exegesis for preaching. Do I need to do something more or different in preaching classes?
I made fewer metaphorical connections between making espresso and teaching preaching. I suspect that they are there but will take time to reveal themselves, since I am still thinking about making espresso and preaching, as opposed to making espresso and teaching preaching. Yet, the language and perspective of being a student of art nevertheless found its way into my teaching. I increasingly find introductory preaching students love to use “creativity” and “self-expression” as license to do whatever it is they want to do—along with reference to their particular “calling.” I now tell them that jazz and improvisation are only possible when one knows the scales; otherwise the result is noise. A student who fancies herself a painter wanted to produce a watercolor painting while she preached. I said I learned sometimes painters make lots of attempts before they get it “right,” and wondered how she could be certain her painting would turn out spontaneously “right” as she painted while she preached. She answered that she trusts the Holy Spirit. Other students in the class, including an artist and a musician, countered that the Spirit works through a method. The class had a great conversation about art, preaching, the Holy Spirit, method, and practice. We decided that, even under the brooding of the Holy Spirit, “spontaneity” and “masterpiece” rarely go hand in hand, whether in art or in preaching.
A Helpful Evaluative Tool
Early on in this project, it occurred to me that, as espresso comes down to taste, so preaching at its best leaves people “tasting” the gospel. Preaching so that people “taste” the gospel is different from describing the taste or telling people what they should taste or how they should respond to the taste. If people don’t “taste” the gospel, the rest really doesn’t matter. Just as you cannot satisfy someone by describing a good cup of coffee, convince someone that they had a good cup of coffee, or get people to respond to a good cup of coffee when they have not been served one, so preachers cannot describe, persuade, or convince listeners that they have experienced the gospel in preaching when they have not. I now ask students whether they “tasted” the gospel in the sermons they preach and hear their colleagues preach in class. Students respond to this evaluative question and can name other tastes—guilt, shame, obligation, earning God’s favor—the sermons they hear metaphorically leave in their mouths. I also look for consistency when evaluating students.
I also learned a goal of making espresso is consistency. I had to learn to pull a double shot of espresso of 2 to 2.5 fluid ounces in approximately 20 to 25 seconds as a matter of course. A barista cannot tell someone, “Sorry your coffee isn’t good. The shot I pulled last week was excellent.” So, too, a goal of preaching is consistently—as in every sermon—giving people a taste of the gospel. I now expect students to demonstrate consistency. Preaching the gospel in one of four sermons is no longer enough.
A Catalyst to Other Artistic Expression
I am delighted that this project—and the colloquy itself—served as a catalyst for additional artistic experimentation and expression. I learned to set up a blog; I was less successful in maintaining it, because I wrote a book and twenty articles during the colloquy year, as well as sermons. I learned that writing is an artistic expression for me and I am claiming that more and more. I also learned to take pictures and video, and find myself writing poetry and song lyrics
Contribution to Scholarship
In terms of this project’s contribution to my scholarship, I published “The Preacher and Teacher of Preaching as Barista” in Currents in Theology and Mission, Vol. 27 No. 6 (December 2010). I included the notion that proclaiming the gospel is like serving someone a cup of coffee in my newest book, Preaching and Stewardship: Proclaiming God’s Invitation to Grow (Alban, 2011). I have engaged in lively conversation with colleagues in the Academy of Homiletics. I continue to be intrigued by the “call for papers” put out by Teaching Theology and Religion, soliciting essays on the question, “What metaphor describes you as a teacher?” I undertook writing such an essay as the form of final evaluation for the project; however, I am not ready in time for this report’s deadline. Tom Pearson was very helpful in advising me to clearly distinguish “preaching” from “teaching preaching,” and to explore and identify the limits of the metaphor.
Thank You!
I am very grateful to the Wabash Center for including me in this colloquy, for the leadership team, the fine teachers who taught us, and the colleagues with whom I shared the journey. The various artistic mediums we experienced provided a disarming and inviting entrée into deep questions about identity, vocation, faithfulness, and meaning. I do hope that Wabash will replicate an artistic approach to mid-career so others will benefit from a remarkably rich experience. Thank you!
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Routine
I ran out of beans last week so couldn’t make espresso for a day or two. I missed the morning routine of standing at my “altar” and thinking and praying while I grind, tamp, pull, and clean. I suspect that, if someone wandered into our dining room when I am alone at the coffee bar, they might be reminded of something liturgical theologian, Dom Gregory Dix, wrote. I certainly am:
Yet it is an uncanny fact that there is still scarcely any subject on which the imagination of those outside the faith is more apt to surrender to the unrestrained nonsense of panic than that of what happens at the catholic eucharist. As a trivial instance, I remember that my own grandmother, a devout Wesleyan, believed to her dying day that at the Roman Catholic mass the priest let a crab loose upon the altar, which it was his mysterious duty to prevent from crawling sideways into the view of the congregation. (Hence the gestures of the celebrant.) How she became possessed of this notion, or what she supposed eventually happened to the crustacean I never discovered. But she affirmed with the utmost sincerity that she had once with her own eyes actually watched this horrible rite in progress; and there could be no doubt of the deplorable effect that solitary visit to a Roman Catholic church had had on her estimate of Roman Catholics in general, though she was the soul of charity in all things else. To all suggestions that the mass might be intended as some sort of holy communion service she replied only with the wise and gentle pity of the fully-informed for the ignorant (Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p. 45).
I share this quote mindful of Lutheran presiders that I know who clutter up their altars with stuff—we finally were able to move the stack of individual glasses to the credence—and their celebration with medieval ceremonial. “But,” as Ambrose would say, “I digress.” My point is that this is how I imagine I would look at my coffee bar and that, without coffee beans, I missed looking this way.
I also know that I get out of whack if I don’t preach often enough. I miss the routine. When I was recently away for a few weeks, my pastoral colleague talked about the grace of the weekly routine of preaching. We agreed that it is easier to preach every week than once a month. Just as there is grace in beginning each day at the coffee bar, there is grace in the discipline of weekly preaching. Taking a few days off from making coffee, I fell out of practice, had to familiarize myself with what I need to do, and learn to trust myself again. Making coffee every day and preaching every week, I learn to trust the “method.”
So what does it mean that students can take preaching in the first semester of their middler year and not preach again until they begin internship a year later? With the three or four sermons they preach in class, they are discovering a process and not developing a routine. How might I help students develop the routine? How might they preach every week or, at the very least, preach in the interim between finishing preaching class and starting internship?
Yet it is an uncanny fact that there is still scarcely any subject on which the imagination of those outside the faith is more apt to surrender to the unrestrained nonsense of panic than that of what happens at the catholic eucharist. As a trivial instance, I remember that my own grandmother, a devout Wesleyan, believed to her dying day that at the Roman Catholic mass the priest let a crab loose upon the altar, which it was his mysterious duty to prevent from crawling sideways into the view of the congregation. (Hence the gestures of the celebrant.) How she became possessed of this notion, or what she supposed eventually happened to the crustacean I never discovered. But she affirmed with the utmost sincerity that she had once with her own eyes actually watched this horrible rite in progress; and there could be no doubt of the deplorable effect that solitary visit to a Roman Catholic church had had on her estimate of Roman Catholics in general, though she was the soul of charity in all things else. To all suggestions that the mass might be intended as some sort of holy communion service she replied only with the wise and gentle pity of the fully-informed for the ignorant (Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, p. 45).
I share this quote mindful of Lutheran presiders that I know who clutter up their altars with stuff—we finally were able to move the stack of individual glasses to the credence—and their celebration with medieval ceremonial. “But,” as Ambrose would say, “I digress.” My point is that this is how I imagine I would look at my coffee bar and that, without coffee beans, I missed looking this way.
I also know that I get out of whack if I don’t preach often enough. I miss the routine. When I was recently away for a few weeks, my pastoral colleague talked about the grace of the weekly routine of preaching. We agreed that it is easier to preach every week than once a month. Just as there is grace in beginning each day at the coffee bar, there is grace in the discipline of weekly preaching. Taking a few days off from making coffee, I fell out of practice, had to familiarize myself with what I need to do, and learn to trust myself again. Making coffee every day and preaching every week, I learn to trust the “method.”
So what does it mean that students can take preaching in the first semester of their middler year and not preach again until they begin internship a year later? With the three or four sermons they preach in class, they are discovering a process and not developing a routine. How might I help students develop the routine? How might they preach every week or, at the very least, preach in the interim between finishing preaching class and starting internship?
Learning By Hanging Out
We went to the Z & H MarketCafe (http://www.zhmarketcafe.com/) on 57th Street today. The espresso bar is especially neat because a “garage door” opens to the street and you sit “outside.” The cappuccino I had was quite tasty, but not any tastier than the ones I am making at home. I am learning and accomplishing!!!
I struck up a conversation with the barista about steaming milk and then pouring it, which is my next challenge. She was making a latte so explained as she steamed and poured. I learned a thing or two, which was really fun. I explained my project and asked if I could come back and watch her work. I suspect I will. Learning by hanging out is a good avenue.
How do we do this in teaching and learning preaching? I suspect this is one way internship is invaluable. During that year in the parish, seminarians can (ideally) hang with a preacher and ask questions, observe, and converse. I know this happens during the summer residency of the ACTS Doctor of Ministry in Preaching Program, between students themselves and students and teachers.
When I came to LSTC a decade ago, I attempted to set up a “preacher’s table” in the refectory one day a week over lunch, where I would discuss preaching, sermons, etc. with students in a “hanging out” kind of way. Students would bring/set the agenda. No one showed up so I abandoned the attempt. I wonder if I should try again.
I struck up a conversation with the barista about steaming milk and then pouring it, which is my next challenge. She was making a latte so explained as she steamed and poured. I learned a thing or two, which was really fun. I explained my project and asked if I could come back and watch her work. I suspect I will. Learning by hanging out is a good avenue.
How do we do this in teaching and learning preaching? I suspect this is one way internship is invaluable. During that year in the parish, seminarians can (ideally) hang with a preacher and ask questions, observe, and converse. I know this happens during the summer residency of the ACTS Doctor of Ministry in Preaching Program, between students themselves and students and teachers.
When I came to LSTC a decade ago, I attempted to set up a “preacher’s table” in the refectory one day a week over lunch, where I would discuss preaching, sermons, etc. with students in a “hanging out” kind of way. Students would bring/set the agenda. No one showed up so I abandoned the attempt. I wonder if I should try again.
Friday, October 22, 2010
So Here's A Double Shot!!!
Today I learned to take and edit a video and upload it to You Tube and here. The aim of the Wabash workshop and grant is to help mid career professors incorporate art into their work. I never imagined that I would be fussing with a video recorder and enjoying it. I part of me wishes I saw as well with my eyes as I do through the high definition camera.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Cups
I knew I was getting good at pulling shots today when a double shot fit perfectly into the wonderful Mickey Mouse cup that my daughter brought me from Euro Disney. I was so pleased with myself that I took pictures -- something that seemed really ridiculous for me to attempt, but it worked.
For awhile, I was using the wrong cup. It was more a latte cup than an espresso cup, which led me to pull larger, weaker shots. Then I used a cup that measured out ounces -- an espresso measuring cup -- to learn how much a double shot should be. I stood at the espresso machine with stop watch in one hand
and stared at the measuring cup, determined to get 2-2.5 ounces in 25-30 seconds. When i got it down, the Mickey cup worked perfectly.The cup, it seems, is the forms of the sermon. In my introductory preaching class, I provide some examples of forms of sermons that, as Craddock says, have demonstrated that they can carry the burden of truth with clarity, thoughtfulness, and interest. These include Inductive Reasoning, Deductive Reasoning, Definition, Moving from problem to solution, and Biblical “flashback.” What I need to add is some direction on how to choose the right cup. For example, a sermon should "do" what the reading does. Sermons on parables ought to be parabolic. Second, as my latte cup taught me, the form effects how one experiences the gospel. Trying to get the message to fit the form may weaken it. Finally, just as the cup should not command more attention than the espresso, the form should not loom larger than the gospel. So, if all people walk away from the sermon talking about is that the preacher used sock puppets, we cannot say that the form worked.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Espresso Beans I've Tried
Black Cat Classic Espresso, Intelligentsia Coffee, Chicago, IL
Mighty Good Coffee, Ann Arbor, MI
Dalai Jave, Canandaigua, NY
Finger Lakes Roaster, Victor, NY
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Exegetical "Grind"
It occurs to me that coffee is like the Bible and the grind is exegesis –- the process of analyzing and interpreting the biblical text. Relying too much on biblical commentaries is like using ground coffee. Much of the work is done for you but, like the coffee, the exegesis is dated. The best sermons, like the best espresso, require freshness.
Among preaching students—and preachers, I suspect—we can find two types of exegete. Those that enjoy exegesis produce a very fine grind. The message of the gospel gets clogged up in the exegesis. The preaching of those who are not exegetical fans is watery. Of course, the proper amount of exegesis depends on the discipline of the preacher and the expectations of the congregation.
So, the teaching question for me as a teacher of preaching is do I need to do more to teach this balance? I have trusted my colleagues in Bible classes to teach exegesis for preaching. Do I need to do something more or different in preaching classes? Any suggestions?
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