those twenty or so minutes toward the end

So, the sermon.  As a pastor it is my most important part of church, the time where I try to hack through the time gap between the present and the past and bring freshness to words that are at least 1900 years old.  It is a time that I both treasure and dread, because it is where I find out if the work I did in the week in between mattered.  It's where I see if I am connecting on any level with the 30 or so people who show up to my church every week.  It is the time where I see if this is the week that I will totally fail, looking like a complete idiot and people will still tell me that it was a great message.

Take this morning's sermon for instance, I will freely admit that it wasn't one of my greatest, which means that more than anything else it is a learning experience.  But I tried to preach on faith and/or works, and I started by talking about Martin Luther's 95 theses, let me tell you, as my wife said after the sermon, Martin Luther is a hard thing to preach.  I was floundering badly, I read the quote from Martin Luther and it just sounded like a bunch of gobbledygook, then I moved into my main scripture (Titus 3:3-8) and talked about how there needs to be a movement in our lives from being bad humans to being humans that are meant to do good.  I talked about how faith alone doesn't really accomplish anything except getting ourselves into heaven, and that is not our job.  Our job is to get everyone into heaven, as I was preparing for the sermon this week I came across a saying that says, "If when we die we go to the pearly gates alone, Saint Peter will ask, where are the others?" [come to think about it, I should have used that in my sermon]

And let me tell you, it sound a lot better in that previous paragraph than it did when I was up there speaking it. I moved on to James 2 and talked about Saint Francis' quote "Preach the gospel at all times, when necessary use words." [which incidentally there is no concrete evidence to prove he ever actually said that] and then I was done, with no place to go and no way to end, luckily while I was sitting listening to one of my people sing a song I realized that I should talk about another member who is our greeter and wasn't there this morning because of a family reunion.  I talked about how he welcomes us all to church because he is genuinely glad that each person is there, about how if he didn't do that he could still get to heaven, but that our experiences would be the worse for not having him.

Until I started talking about James I would say that my sermon totally and utterly sucked, luckily James saved me, even when he wasn't there.  Which just goes to show that sometimes the point of a sermon is to help the congregation be better people, but sometimes, just sometimes, the people make the sermon better by being the people that God meant them to be.

It's been a little over a month since I started preaching by outline as opposed to by manuscript, I would say that by and large it has been a positive experience for me, and hopefully for my congregation as well.  But it does mean that I am having to rely on faith a little more, both in God and in myself.  My sermons are sometimes good, occasionally great, and sometimes less than, I am not Billy Graham or Rob Bell, which is fine, I'm just trying to remember to be me, and that will be enough if God has called me to be where I am when I am and how I am.

Peace and Love,
Pastor K