Watch out for those deacons...oops...I mean demons

Sunday I accidentally confused my deacons with a couple of demons. It got a good laugh and actually helped a difficult sermon be received a little better. I'd love to hear some of your preaching stumbles. I know you have some good ones, as well.

Oops! from Southland Baptist Church on Vimeo.

Question of the Week: What are you reading?

With all the gift giving now behind us, I am sure you have at least one or two new books in your hands. What are you reading these days that you might recommend to other preachers?

I'm almost all the way through Annie Dillard's, The Writing Life. It's a delightful, meandering piece about what it takes to write a book. Much of it resonates with the task of writing a sermon.

Take for instance, this advice on writing as if you were dying.

"Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality" - Annie Dillard.

So, what are you reading?

The story behind "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day"

Thought this video was very well done. Could be used as a sermon illustration in whole or in part.

Behind the Music- Christmas Bells from First Christian Church on Vimeo.

Gain enough!

"For preachers, preaching is a no-win situation. We can never greet opposition as sure evidence of sin without first examining our own thoroughly mixed motivations, our lack of love, and our strident self-aggrandizements; and we can never bask in praise as if we are anything more than mediators, the servants of grace. Though we can take no credit and, indeed, must accept our share of blame, there are compensations. Because we are preachers, we are afforded the gladness of exploring the gospel week after week and thus coming to know the Mystery of God through Jesus Christ. Gain enough!"

David Buttrick, Homiletic: Moves and Structures (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 456.

When God Rocks Your World - Will Willimon

"The gospel in just two sentences. The good news of Jesus Christ: 1) God is going to get the world that God wants. 2) No matter how much God has got to rock your world to get it." - Will Willimon

So concludes Will Willimon's sermon from Mark 13 preached two weeks ago at Duke Chapel. That text has parallels to this week's gospel reading in Luke 21. Powerful stuff. Sermon starts at the 33:35 mark and runs for nineteen minutes.

Four Advent Sermons by Jim Somerville

Jim Somerville, Senior Pastor of Richmond's First Baptist Church, presents four sermons for Advent, 2012, based on the lectionary readings for Year C. The embed feature has been disabled for these videos so you'll have to make the jump.

These sermons are sponsored by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Babara Brown Taylor Sermon

In my opinion, there is no better wordsmith in the pulpit than Barbara Brown Taylor. Here, she preaches from James 3 on the power of our words. The sermon starts at the 35:40 mark and finishes near the 53.00 mark. Well worth the listen.

Overcoming writer's block with the help of others

Every pastor has struggled with it - the blank page. No words are more difficult to write sometimes than the first words. I was looking over some notes from a conference I went to a while back and came across these notes taken from a lecture by Anna Carter Florence:

Writers block is rarely about being blocked, usually it has to do with being empty. If your spouse locks you out of your house, the problem isn't the door.

At first glance, I get a little defensive when I read these words. Nobody likes  to be told the problem is with them. We'd rather think that there is simply a problem with method or technique. Change our technique and we'll be well on our way. I'd rather not admit that I have times of emptiness.

Over time, though, I've come to realize that this is more true than I'd like to admit. I've come to realize, there will be times of emptiness for every preacher. If you prepare a Sunday sermon and at least one Bible study a week with just a few weeks of vacation each year, you are creating nearly 100 sermons a year. That's a high demand on one's creativity. For some of us, it's just more than we can generate. Trying to tackle that volume all on our own will lead to seasons of emptiness.

Dr. Florence's advice, fortunately, was not to put more pressure on the preacher by telling them to just dig a little deeper. That advice feeds into the myth that one person is capable of being the one voice a church needs to hear from all year long. I just don't believe that anymore. Churches should hear from multiple voices. Some churches are picking up on this and moving towards a team approach to preaching.

For those of us in churches that still follow a more traditional pattern of hearing from one voice most of the time, Dr. Florence suggests that the preacher learn to draw from more sources than one's own brain during the sermon preparation process. I don't mean simply copying another's words or thoughts. I mean something more akin to group work. At the conference, we did exegetical and homiletical work with small groups of other ministers. It's amazing how this encouraged the creativity in all of us.

I've occasional borrowed this method of overcoming emptiness by reading an upcoming text in staff meeting and allowing the other staff to speak of what they see in the text or even how they might preach the text. I also have a pastor's group I meet with regularly and we've occasionally done something similar. In each instance, I have left the group setting with more ideas on how to preach a certain text than I ever would have had on my own. I've also felt sermon preparation has moved towards being a church activity and not simply something the pastor does all by himself.

What do you think? Do you agree with Dr. Florence that writer's block is a result of emptiness? Also, do you ever attempt to prepare sermons with someone else? How has that worked for you?

Will Willimon's sermon, "Together..."

Together ... from St. Luke's UMC on Vimeo.

This sermon was preached at St. Luke's UMC Gethsemane Campus (Houston, TX) on January 8, 2012. Find more from St. Luke's at their vimeo site here.

Are you well acquainted with the subject?

I was looking over some notes from last year's Preaching Practicum at Wilshire Baptist Church and came across this gem of a quote from Dr. George Mason.

"When people come to church to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, they have the right to hear it from someone well acquainted with the subject."

Be Alive! Pay Attention! Follow Jesus!

Chuck Campbell talks about the presence of good preaching and the importance of living a life apart from one's preaching. Thanks to the folks at www.workingpreacher.org for another good video clip.

Quote of the Week: Conducting a Text

"The sermon is not an act of reporting on an old text, but it is an act of making a new text visible and available. This new text in part is the old text, and in part is the imaginative construction of the preacher, which did not exist until the moment of utterance by the preacher. Like a conductor 'rendering' Beethoven so that that particular music exists only in that occasion, so the preacher renders a text so that it only exists in that particular form in that particular occasion of speaking."

- Walter Brueggemann, The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word (Fortress, 2007), p. 85.

Blessed Voices (even among the voiceless)

Doctoral work has kept me pretty silent on the blogosphere lately. No matter. Other excellent voices have been hard at work. Some of my favorites....

All of us who practice the awkward act of dunking a new believer beneath the waters in baptism (and then trying to figure out how to get them back up) will be blessed by Lee Hull Moses's post "Newness of Life Or: How I Gave up the Waders and Learned to Love the Water."

All of us who've preached till we are hoarse can learn from Charlie Johnson's post over at Ethicsdaily.com, "What a Preacher Learned When He Stopped Preaching."

Would love to hear what you've been reading in the comments section.

How wandering through the library can make you a better preacher.

I escape to the public library to write many of my sermons so I was struck by Tom Long's advice on connecting the library's vast resources to your sermon preparation. As always, thanks to www.workingpreacher.org for these great videos.

 

How to keep from being enslaved by the opinions of others (as well as your own!)

Julie Pennington-Russell, my former pastor and current pastor of FBC Decatur, GA was the keynote speaker for the Women in Ministry Conference at Truett Seminary back in March. I was saddened not to be able to attend, but Truett has posted her sermons. Her first session, "Who and Whose are You?," is a must listen for all who struggle through the highs and lows of ministry.  You can listen after the jump below. You can find her other two sessions here and here. The videos are slow to load on the Baylor site, but worth the wait.