Skip to main content

Sermon panic

Two days ago I shared that I've been having a bit of trouble with my sermon this week.  This is generally my approach: I choose the text and read it a few times; I put in a bit of work reading commentaries; I pray and ask God what he wants me to say about the text; and then I wait.  Some people describe this as letting it all 'percolate'; as an enthusiastic coffee drinker I heartily concur.

Sometimes the waiting goes on far longer than I'm comfortable with, however.

This morning (having still not written the sermon, which is for this Sunday morning), I had a highly entertaining breakfast with some of the other local Baptist ministers, during which we covered a range of topics, which I will not reveal otherwise they won't let me come any more.  Or at least they won't talk about interesting things in front of me.  Just before we all realised we really had to get back and do some proper work, we got on the subject of the journey of faith.  We talked about the tension between the personal conscious faith we have in Christ and the work of God who saves us despite ourselves.  Fascinating stuff.  Personally, I have become more and more convinced in the last few years that it's almost all about God and very little about me and what I bring to the table.  He speaks to me when I'm not even listening; he loves me when I forget about him; he waits patiently for me to realise I'm not all-powerful, so he can be.

A couple of hours later, I was walking somewhere I think, and decided to pray as I walked.  I find concentrating on prayer difficult - it's easier for me to pray when I'm also doing something else.  As I prayed, he finally gave me my sermon idea.  Phew.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties.  This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks.  The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids).  I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday.  The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children.  I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too.  I decided to carve a simple f...
6 comments
Read more

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral.  The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness.  During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead.  I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home.  Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that.  But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness?  My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent.  I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity.  I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have hea...
4 comments
Read more

Turn or burn: OCD and evangelism

Recently I came to realise that my psychological makeup, specifically my OCD, had probably influenced my theology and indeed my vocation quite profoundly. I'm an evangelist, which is a word which means different things to different people, so I'll tell you what it means to me.  Being an evangelist means that my principal concern as a Christian minister is for people who don't follow Jesus, and that communicating the gospel or 'good news' to people who haven't heard it a thousand times already is the most important thing I do.  My faith has been nurtured in evangelical churches, and it's probably fair to say that evangelicals place a greater emphasis on evangelism than other Christian traditions.  That's partly because we emphasise conversion and making a personal decision to follow Christ.  In Baptist churches we practise believer's baptism, which means that we only baptise people who have made that personal decision for themselves (which is why ...
Post a Comment
Read more