I have completed writing a sermon that I will deliver this Sunday at my internship. It took a period of two and half days to finish the message. I spent all day revising. My preaching colleague and classmate provided an extra set of eyes of revision and critique since she won’t be able to hear me deliver it on Sunday.
I find the sermon writing process a bit stressful at times. Over two weeks ago I was struggling to find a text to preach. I simply had no idea what to preach. I prayed. And prayed. Waited, then prayed some more. I pulled out the Revised Common Lectionary to see if it had any ideas. The Old Testament reading was Genesis 22, The Binding of Isaac. I thought, “Oh no, I’m not preaching that!” So I prayed. And prayed some more. Then I waited. Dry for several days.
Then one day last week, I had a impression of two texts on which I preached last year for my trial sermon. I pulled that sermon up. But I wasn’t going to preach this sermon in this context. I needed something fresh of the press! First I read the texts again. Then I felt like God was giving me a new message to preach from these texts. So I wrote down some impressions on slips of paper. I’d but the Book down and walk away. When talking with folk, I received “downloads” then pull out a notepad and jot things down. The insights from the analysis yielded similar results to last years’. Then I found some new gems in the text. Cool! Then off to do exegesis. Plowed to my handy one-volume commentary, my bible dictionary, compared translations and what not. Turned on my computer, pulled up a blank document, and was totally blank. “Lord, how and the world am I going to started this thing?”
The process of sermon writing is a daunting, thrilling, and humbling experience. It’s daunting because preachers serve the Word, and dare speak the Word of God! Preachers do not presume to speak for God, but are commanded to speak for God. We are authorized to declare the Good News. It takes patience and obedience. The Word is near us, yet it cannot be controlled. Karl Barth wrote that when preachers engage the Bible, we enter into a “strange new world.” A world which does not have to justify itself before magistrates of modernity or the potentates of post-modernism. We look and we see in its pages the witness to God’s good future. We also see the witness of our deepest human failures. The Word discerns us, reads us better than we can ever read the Book. Preachers proclaim the Book proclaim the One whom the Book attests, the Word made flesh.
It’s a thrilling! You have to have a sense of imagination. The Scriptures engage all of our senses. I’m riding the Spirit through the Great Forest of Scripture. I see the trees of Genesis down through the Revelation of John. We stand before the great tree of Jeremiah. The Spirit takes me up in her wings and we fly up to see all the mighty branches. Of them is the dreadful branch of Chapter 23. On it is where we perched so that I may analyze the text for the message.
It’s a humbling experience. I find that this branch is powerful, strong enough to hold me. I see leaves of judgment and restoration. More judgment than restoration I might say. I don’t know were to start. Then the Spirit points her beak to a particular bundle of leaves. There I turn my face and walk in that direction. I don’t know what I should do. I turn to the Spirit and ask, “God, what should I say?” Then the Spirit opens her beak and a twig from the great Tree of John’s Gospel. It was from Chapter 10. So I put the two branches together and I understood the message.
Now I have a new message to deliver. It’s entitled “A Shepherd We Can Count On.” It draws from Jer. 23:1-8 and Jn 10:7-15. I covet your prayers so that I may be found worthy to preach the Gospel!
