My First Sermon

The universe has been having some fun at my expense this week.

This morning I was scheduled to deliver my first sermon. The opportunity to do so arose because our local minister utilised the long weekend to take a more than well-earned break. Fortunately, my local Uniting Church congregation is blessed with any number of people who can lead a service and preach a sermon; but given my Dearly Beloved and I are presently applying to candidate to the ordained ministry of the Uniting Church, our minister offered us this chance to preach in his absence.

My Dearly Beloved has had some opportunity to preach as a consequence of her work as a school teacher; and so she graciously allowed me to take up the offer to preach this sermon. Moreover, our minister has generously offered to mentor my Dearly Beloved and I and take us through some of the issues, methods, and skills of preaching; and so I thought this would be an unprecedented opportunity to get some preaching experience under my belt.

I won't bore you with all the details of how I went about constructing the sermon; afterall, everyone approaches this task differently, and everyone has their own method that works for them. But I will say how gratified (and surprised) I was to discover that many of my initial impressions gelled closely with observations made by the various biblical commentaries I consulted; and, more importantly, how such commentaries enabled me to expand upon my first reading, enabled me to access a more complete insight that was a combination of personal reflection and the wisdom of those much more learned than myself.

I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying I was delighted to realise I didn't get it completely wrong!

Additionally, having the benefit of my Dearly Beloved's experience as an English teacher, and our minister's experience as a, well, minister, really made the difference in shaping my sermon from a rambling mish-mash into an at least vaguely coherent commentary. So I was reasonably confident that I'd be able to deliver something worth making people get up on a Sunday morning to listen to.

All I had to do was deliver the sermon. And that's where the cosmos stepped in.

For the past week, I have been battling a cold that started as a mild irritation in my throat on Monday, and by Friday had become a full-blown malaise characterised by a running nose, a throbbing head, burning eyes, and a 48-hour absence of sleep. And all this in a week in which I was meant to be studying for my Greek and Biblical Text exams scheduled for next Tuesday. To make matters worse, given this was to be my preaching debut, my parents decided they would attend the service to watch their little boy in action. Needless to say, I wasn't in any fit state to be doing any studying; and it was looking like I wasn't going to able to deliver any sermon, either! My preaching "arrival" looked over before it had even commenced!

The universe was pissing itself, no doubt. Personally, I had no trepidations about my capacity to deliver the projected sermon - a decade addressing meetings of angry union members as an organiser had more than prepared me for facing a church congregation. The issue was whether or not I'd be physically capable!

Fortunately, my condition improved over Saturday, due in large measure to hefty doses of medication, aided and abetted by 8 blissful hours of uninterrupted sleep on Saturday night. By Sunday morning I was feeling as washed out as a load of winter washing, but my nose had stopped dripping, my throat was no longer burning, and my eyes had returned to their normal focal acuity (admittedly not great). My voice still sounded like a kazoo with a severely strangled hernia, but as I explained to the congregation, having suffered for the sake of this sermon, it was now their turn to do likewise.*

Anyhoo, the upshot is that everything went swimmingly. Not because I was particularly good, but because the congregation responded with the grace and generosity which I have now come to expect from them. They laughed at all my gags, didn't yawn or fidget, somehow managed to preserve interested expressions on their faces, and after the service offered much undeserved praise and compliments. And because they are such good and generous people, I was able to walk away from the service with a nice inner glow! (Mum and Dad also thought I did good, too!)

So, all in all, a wonderfully affirming and rewarding experience. Now all I have to do is cram a week's worth of study into the next 24 hours!

Talk to you soon,

BB

Quote for the Day: Sermons are like pie-crusts: the shorter the better. (Austin O'Malley)

*Yes, I know this is an old gag, but under the circumstances, highly appropriate!