Looking for Hope

Sunday's sermon is up.  The text is here.  

Over the past year my process for writing a sermon has been changing.  When I first started, I wrote my sermons way in advance and practiced them over and over to get them perfectly polished for the day.  Once I was ordained and in full time ministry, that ceased to be practical, but I always went to bed on Saturday night with a sermon written.  I couldn't sleep otherwise.  However late, I would finish it.  I might tweak a line or two on Sunday morning or during delivery, but basically what I had on Saturday night was what was what it was going to be.  

My process has been evolving into a more stressful process that involves less sleep.  Now on Saturday night, I frequently have something written, but it's not quite right.  And then on Sunday morning at 5:30 am, usually in the shower, I get the inspiration for fixing it.  Then I scramble to edit it in time for church.

This past Saturday I went to bed without a sermon.  Not because I hadn't been working on it for most of the day or thinking about it for most of the week.  It just wouldn't come.  I had too much to say.  I'd seen the movie, Just Mercy, that afternoon and wanted to include it along with so many things going on in the world.  Trying to figure out how the scriptures were connected and could provide guidance, comfort, challenge, or insight into these events.  Tossing around big abstract words like hope, justice, mercy, and peace, and struggling to make them concrete without being partisan or suggesting there's one right way to achieve them.  I hear my brother and sister preachers suggesting we have to address things going on in the world specifically and directly, but I have to be careful that I'm not just preaching the Gospel according to Lauren.  And I want people to be able to hear the Good News, whether they agree with me on certain issues or not.  It's a real wrestling match.

So on Saturday night at 11pm, I realized I was getting nowhere.  What I had was boring.  I didn't know what my point was, and I knew I wasn't going to get it finished.  I needed sleep.  I went to bed, set my alarm even earlier, and actually slept.  When I woke up I said, "Okay, God, we've gotta get something written."  And, as usual, in the shower, it started to become clear.  I rushed downstairs to start writing.  But there wasn't enough time, and I really needed to be dressed to go to church.  I hit print, and took what I had, but there wasn't an ending, and I hadn't had time to read over it.  I had a selection of different paragraphs at the end, not sure where they would go.

When I preached at 7:30am, it felt like a mess to me.  The order was all wrong.  I did my best to tie it all together, but then I hurried to my office before the next service to fix it.  Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time, so I was running down the sidewalk at 9:14 to get to the 9:15 service.  Somehow God must have played a little with time, because I was walking in the door at 9:14 and by 9:16 I had put the sermon in the pulpit, gone to the sacristy and vested, come out to thank the rector for waiting for me, and was standing in the back ready to process.  "This is too stressful, God," I prayed several times over the course of the process.  

But this is what I've learned.  Even though sometimes I worry that I'm just satisfying my ego with all this last minute polishing, trying to make the "perfect" sermon, the truth is that the rewritten versions are SO MUCH BETTER than what I have before I go to sleep.  Sadly, it sometimes takes me the whole morning to get to a coherent message with a solid point.  And no, preaching extemporaneously is not the solution.  I'm not a straightforward thinker, and though I can kind of wing it on mid-week services, I ramble and repeat myself over and over and over when I try to preach without a manuscript.

My point this week is about hope and placing it in God.  Apparently, from the feedback I've received, it was a message people needed to hear.  If I hadn't been willing to keep working on it, I wouldn't have gotten there.  I'm grateful that I'm learning to hear the Holy Spirit on Sunday morning, even though I sure wish she would show up a little earlier in the week.  But I'll take it and give thanks for the opportunity to let God speak through me.