A Semester Ends

By Tripp Hudgins, grateful teaching fellow

So, here we are at the end of another semester and I want to get the feelings of gratitude down in words before I am, as usual, overcome with the post-happiness blues. In a week or so, I will have convinced myself that I have done everything wrong and I should be selling donuts to lemurs in Anchorage.

I teach preaching at the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley, CA, Church Divinity School of the Pacific. I am the Bogard Teaching Fellow. It’s a lovely opportunity.

My family and I have been in the Bay Area since 2011 in order for me to get a PhD in Liturgy and Ethnomusicology. During this time I have been a TA and have co-taught some online courses at other GTU schools. I made a home at American Baptist Seminary of the West for a couple of years and also worked with scholars at Pacific School of Religion and the Jesuit School of Theology. They have all been enjoyable and I have learned an incredible amount each time.

Graduate Theological Union is a good place to be.

HM-2100, Introduction to Homiletics, was the first time, however, I have taught an in-person class all on my lonesome. Yes, I’ve had mentors. Yes, I inherited someone else’s well-wrought syllabus. But the week-to-week classroom management has been all mine.

What an incredible gift. Truly.

The students have worked hard. There have been moments of frustration and even heartbreak, but overall there has been grace. I am so proud of their work and their camaraderie.

I never expected to teach preaching.

I never expected to enjoy it as much as I have.

I will be teaching an intensive homiletics course this summer and will be teaching Introduction to Preaching in the fall here at CDSP. I’ve been working on the syllabi. Incrementally, I am making the class my own. The spring course will be significantly different from this semester’s class.

We’ll be looking at different models of preaching and practicing them. We’ll be reading scholarly work by people of color and women as core texts rather than appendixes. We’ll be analyzing sermons we hear on Sunday mornings and not just the sermons we hear in class.

It’s not more work, but it will be different work.

These assignments reflect more of how I understand the craft of preaching rather than how my honored predecessors have. And that feels right to me.

None of this would be possible without the help I have received along the way as a TA for other astute scholars. It would not be possible without the help of those students. And there is much more I need to learn. Still…

In our time, it seems like gigs in the academy are few and far between. That is no doubt true. Nevertheless, I find myself grateful in the midst of this uncertainty. And though one day I hope to be able to talk teach about Jesus and banjos, I am a grateful teaching fellow teaching homiletics to those who are the present and future of the church.

Now…let’s finish grading everything.

Right.

That.