This Preaching Thing

[I will be posting my Holy Week sermons over the next day or two. Here is the first one.] (A sermon based on Luke 19:28-40 for Palm Sunday 2013) That first Holy Week occurred almost 2000 years ago. Yet here we are, as we are year after year after year, recalling it, celebrating it, and standing in awe of it. It’s one thing, of course, to have an historical observance, to mark an event as having happened, and to think nothing else of it. But we don’t do that with truly significant events. Take American Independence Day, for example. Yes, we remember and celebrate that initial throwing off of the colonial yoke by our forebears, but that is not all that we do. We also celebrate the continuing working out of what our independence means. Independence Day matters mainly because of its continuing influence. Along that same line I pose the question this week, “When does Holy Week linger in our lives?” When does it continue to have the influence that it was meant to have? Today...

[A sermon based on Psalm 27 for the Second Sunday in Lent] The early 17th century scientist Galileo held, contrary to the scientific and religious beliefs of his day, that the earth orbited the sun rather than the other way around. He was forced by the Roman Catholic powers to recant his belief. According to a long-held legend, at some point following that recanting the great scientist muttered, “But it does move,” meaning that regardless of what anyone said, the Earth did in fact orbit the sun. Galileo was right, of course, because facts are facts. Facts are facts no matter what opinions are; facts are facts no matter what appearances are. Anybody can see that the sun comes up in the morning and sets in the evening—only it doesn’t. Anybody with any sense would believe that the Earth is the center of the solar system—only it isn’t. Psalm 27 opens with some of the surest of all sure facts: “The LORD is my light and my salvation” and “The LORD is the stronghold of my life” ...

One does not preach for forty years without undergoing some changes in the ways one preaches. At least one shouldn’t. I have recently noticed a change in the way that I end sermons. I put it that way because I don’t think I planned it. For thirty-nine or so of my forty preaching years I ended all of my sermons with a period, an exclamation point, or a question mark. I ended with a period if the sermon closed with a declarative statement. So a Lent sermon ended like this: “On our way to the Cross, let’s remember that it is the Lord Jesus—and not the institution of the church—that we worship, because it is his crucifixion and resurrection that have made all the difference.” I ended with an exclamation point if the sermon closed with a thought that seemed to call for a little extra emphasis. So a Christmas season sermon ended like this: “Jesus, then, took on our life with all its suffering and pain and struggle—and he did that throughout his life, not just at the end. He di...

In March of 1973, just two months after his first album Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. was released, the first major article on Bruce Springsteen was published in Crawdaddy! magazine. Here is an excerpt from the article in which Springsteen is talking about his songwriting. He had stopped picking, and he looked up and smiled. "It's exciting to me! It's very weird, you know. I'm happy and the music is exciting to me." He looked for an explanation, his eyes glazing over for a moment. "It's like I'll write a song and I'll think back on some of the lines, and they get me off!" He was so pleased a grin almost shone. "As an observor, you know. "'Cause in my mind, my mind was thinking, 'Hmmm, need something to rhyme with night, need something to rhyme with...all night.' And it works like that; it focuses it in. 'Well, you got the universe to think about but you need something that rhymes with nig...

(A sermon based on Luke 9:28-36 & 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 for Transfiguration Sunday) Anne Lamott has written a book about prayer that we all should read; it’s called Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers . In a blog post , Lamott noted with appreciation that her book was #9 on last Sunday’s New York Times Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous Best-Sellers List. She further observed that numbers 1-8 were diet books, number 10 was a recipe book, and numbers 11-15 were also diet books. That’s right—thirteen of the top fifteen books were diet books! Lamott went on to say that she should retitle her book Hips Thighs Waist: Three Essential Diet Tips for Emaciation and Wealth . It says something about our culture’s obsession with personal transformation, doesn’t it? If we could only change something about ourselves—our weight or our shape, for examples—then we would at least feel better about ourselves and—who knows?—we might even become a better version of ourselves. T...

(A sermon based on Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 & Luke 4:14-21 for the 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany) Can you go home again? And if you do will they listen to you? On May 7 I will be preaching at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Georgia’s Senior Adult Celebration at the First Baptist Church in Forsyth, Georgia, which is about fifteen miles from the house in Barnesville in which I was raised. This will be the first time, except for a couple of funerals, that I have preached that close to home in many years. Many of my remaining family members and friends in the area are chronologically qualified to attend the meeting and I hope they will. If they do, though, I will be a little intimidated. Some of them will be very curious about me. They’ll be asking themselves questions like, “Is he a know-it-all?” “Is he full of himself?” “Where did his hair go?” “Didn’t he used to be skinny?” I don’t know what I will say to them but I hope it will be a lot like what I want...

(A sermon based on John 2:1-11 for the Second Sunday after Epiphany) In the Harry Potter book and movie series, there are creatures called Dementors; they have the ability to suck the soul out of a wizard. In the stories, those who experience the work of the Dementors report that they felt like there was no more happiness in the world. According to one of the adult wizards, a man named Lupin, dementors drain “peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them” ( The Prisoner of Azkaban , p. 10). There are events that can seem to drain the life from us. There are events that can drain the life from us. Not all events to which we give that kind of weight deserve it, though. It is good and necessary that we learn the difference between a crisis and an inconvenience. The world if full of both; our lives contain both. What the family at the wedding feast at Cana was confronted with was not a crisis; it was an inconvenience—a very embarrassing one, but an inconvenience no...