This post started as my standard Roblog entry of my latest sermon, but much like the sermon itself, it has become something else.
I was talking with our pastor, Micah, and elder, Matthew on Sunday, September 26th, about our upcoming plans. It came to my attention that in two weeks Micah was planning to have the week off, and there was no plan for the sermon that week. Since I was in the middle of vacation, I offered to fill that gap. My last sermon was in March, and I felt overdue to go through the labor of creating a sermon. Whether that labor is more of a production job or the act of giving birth, I am still not sure.
I was not sure at that time what I would be preaching on. Micah was working through 2 Thessalonians, and wasn't sure whether he would finish that week or the week before. I had been talking with Rick about his preaching, which was working through some significant points in the Old Testament. He had mentioned the possibility of preaching on the Jubilee, from Leviticus, and that sparked something in me. I have been fascinated with the idea of the Jubilee for a long time, and this felt like the time to tackle it. I pitched it to Pastor Micah that Tuesday, and he told me to go for it. That left me with 12 days to assemble my sermon, much less time than my usual 3 or 4 weeks. I started re-reading chapters 25 and 26 of Leviticus, and a sermon in a book of sermons by Walter Brueggemann that I borrowed from Rick far too long ago and which he has not bothered me at all about returning. The sermon was about how dangerous this idea of Jubilee is to a world that worships at the altar of capitalism.
And I was on fire for this sermon! I was looking forward to dragging our congregation into the Torah and showing them where you could find the tools to take apart society and rebuild it into God's Kingdom! I spent Friday that week, nine days before the sermon was due, at Rick's office, researching the Jubilee.
I found that to really grasp the idea of Jubilee, it would help to have an understanding of the seven-year-Sabbath: a year in which the land was to rest, and the people were to have faith that God would not let them starve. And that only really made sense in the light of the weekly Sabbath, which Jewish people still celebrate every week and we do ourselves a disservice by not more closely observing. And the Sabbath really comes into focus when you realize that it is just one of the times that God appointed in Leviticus for Israel to stop and focus on their relationship with God. And those appointed times make much more sense when you realize that they are part of a larger structure of social interactions and laws that govern how God's people get along with each other. These rules clearly stem from the boundaries of holiness that are clearly defined in Leviticus, from how priests should behave in their daily life and their job, to how all of the various kinds of sacrifices should be made, and how the priests were to approach God.
I decided that I could cover all that in a couple of minutes.
Spoiler alert: I couldn't.
I spent the next week assembling an outline. On the Friday two days before the sermon I started fleshing out my outline, connecting the pieces to help me figure out what was missing. In that process, I came up with "an idea to bracket Leviticus," to set that portion of the sermon apart from the parts about Jubilee. It was beautifully symmetrical, and painted a clear picture of Leviticus that I had never before held in my mind. The problem was that this two minute introduction had grown to more than ten minutes of a sermon which I had intended to last 20 minutes (knowing full well that it would likely be 25, but not at all likely to pass 30).
In addition, my end bracket for Leviticus felt like the end of the sermon. Except that I had my Jubilee ending as well, so I was stuck with a sermon that effectively had two tails. I thought and prayed about it, and came to the conclusion that I had two sermons on my hands. I asked Micah and Matthew what to do, and they agreed that I should run with the more complete sermon of the two, so I started hacking.
I had to remove some of my favorite parts, because this was no longer a sermon about the Jubilee. I left hints and allusions to them, and a couple of their themes as they fit into the larger structure, but withheld the smackdown that Jubilee brings to the world at large. This was not really painful, because I had already made up my mind that Jubilee still needed, and would get, its own sermon. It's in the works, and will likely show up sometime around November. (It ended up being September 27th.)
So I spent the Friday before it was to be delivered doing surgery on my sermon. I have had to do a lot of writing on sermons later than that, but it was late enough that it should have felt panicky. It didn't, though. It felt like the right move, and it felt blessed. I went to bed late Friday night fairly happy with it. Saturday I went through it a couple of times, reworded a few parts, tweaked here and there, but no major changes. Horyon had it early in the day to translate, but she had a busy day, so she finished after I had gone to bed Saturday night.
I had been working on a theme involving circles, which I illustrated by carrying a kind of shofar with me. Mine is made from the horn of (I believe) a longhorn steer. The shofar was also used to announce the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, which is mentioned in the sermon. I held it through the sermon, and gestured towards it a few times. Even mentioned how one like this would be blown for Yom Kippur. But I did not actually blow it until the end, and in fact used it to end the sermon. I believe to good effect.
I have a Korean friend who is the pastor of a little home church. He gives a couple of sermons on Sunday, and another for Wednesday services (which are standard for Korean churches). He preaches through three different books at a time. Doesn't leave much room for procrastination. He recently told me that preparing a sermon can be painful, like giving birth.* I find that most creative efforts are like this. If a deadline is not imposed on me, I will often delay, just to avoid that pain.
*I realize that comparing the birthing of an idea to the birthing of a child is problematic, in that I have only witnessed the latter, and am missing some key anatomical features involved. But I struggle to come up with a better metaphor, and just can't. So please bear with me if you have actually borne a child.
This Roblog post is an example. The writing itself was no more difficult than usual, but the self-examination in these past few paragraphs gave me an excuse to stall. So I did. And I didn't feel like I could post the sermon until I had this ready to go, so that didn't happen either.
And waiting for these two posts is the latest sermon, this one actually on the Jubilee. The sermon itself was last week, but I couldn't post it without getting this one done, so...
There is also part 2 of my faith journey. It is also suffering birthing pains. It is almost fully formed, but refuses to come into the light.
Enough. This is going up, and the sermon it's about will go up shortly thereafter.
