Having four sermons in various stages of preparation at the same time is:
But still, I am exhausted and it’s only 2pm on a Friday.
This week, I’m working on my sermon for Blue Christmas. It’s a special service that we hold each year for those who are struggling during this season. I’ll be preaching on John 19:16-30 with a special focus on the detail about Jesus, his mother, and John the Evangelist. John Calvin comments beautifully:
I say nothing about the severe tortures of his body; I say nothing about the reproaches which he suffered; but, though horrible blasphemies against God filled his mind with inconceivable grief, and though he sustained a dreadful contest with eternal death and with the devil, still, none of these things prevent him from being anxious about his mother.
Featured image is The Crucifixion by Jacopo di Cione. I sourced it from The National Gallery and it is used here according to a Creative Commons non-commercial license.
Sermon writing day, which means spending a few hours inside Obsidian thinking about Pentecost.
I can honestly say that writing a short sermon is so much harder than writing a longer one, but it is forcing me to be deliberate and precise in my language. I can also say that writing a short sermon for an evangelistic event only magnifies the difficulty because I don’t have time to get everyone on the same foundation before making the point. This is one of those sermons where I have to really believe that God can use the reading of and very brief explaining of his word to change hard hearts.
They’re varying degrees of exhausting depending on how much time I’ve managed to get in the week to study or how opaque the passage seems to be.
One of the things I’ve found tricky with getting my head around 1 Peter is how different his style is to Paul. In Paul’s letters, you get clues to the meaning of the whole thing in the top and tail of the letter. The whole of 1 Peter is boxed in by an inclusio (his prayers for grace and peace). And then to refer to the readers as elect exiles immediately opens the door to a sprawling rabbit trail with links all over the place in the Old Testament.
It is safe to say that compiling my outline in order to write my script has required me to be ruthless in keeping my main point at the centre of everything so that I don’t have a revolt from the congregation for preaching 3 hours on 5 verses!