Psalm 42
Galatians 3:23-29
Sometimes, maybe even often, the problem with writing sermons is not having enough to say, but having too much to say.
It’s very tempting as a preacher to look at the texts and think, “ooh, I want to say this and this and this and this!” and to go galloping off in all directions until the congregation thinks, “where is she going with all this? What do all these things have in common?”
To use a gardening metaphor, since it’s that time of year, sermons grow like weeds, or better, like the dozens of little tree shoots that pop up in our garden each year.
Each spring, from some common root structure that we have yet to dig out, the beginnings of many little trees pop up in the cultivated parts of our garden surrounding and choking roses and irises alike. (I suspect that, if I were a really serious gardener, this would be an embarrassing confession to make. Good thing I’m not a serious gardener)
For sermons, the scripture texts form the basic root structure which, as the preacher lives with them and reflects on them in the time leading to the preaching of the sermon send shoots and runners in many different directions, it’s the preacher’s job to prune them back, to cut them off until she finds the one that is right for this congregations on this Sunday.
The first shoot that I had to cut short for this week was the hardest, because it was the simplest, most obvious sermon to preach from the Galatians text, especially with this being Pride weekend.
I know that preachers across the country today are preaching about Paul’s proclamation of the end of human distinctions, “There is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female.” It’s the end of ethnic distinctions, class distinctions and gender distinctions.
Those preachers are exhorting their congregations to open their arms, their hearts and their churches to the other, to the stranger, to the foreigner. And in many cases, they are encouraging their listeners to welcome the lesbian, the gay, the bisexual and the transgendered.
Those are great and powerful sermons that I hope will open new welcoming vistas in the hearts of those who hear them.
But I had to nip that sermon off in the bud. Not because I didn’t want to write and proclaim that message, and not because I don’t think that it’s a vitally important message for the world today.
I had to cut that sermon off because I am not preaching to the whole world, or to some random church this morning.
I’m preaching here, to you, to Family of Christ Presbyterian Church; and the truth is, I don’t think FOC needs to hear that sermon. If the number of people who are down at the pride parade this morning doesn’t prove that, then the amount of work we’ve done with Al Frente for the victims of the ICE raids certainly does.
That’s one reason, then, for cutting off a perfectly good sermon shoot, it’s just not what the congregation needs to hear.
As the great preacher and preaching professor Fred Craddock says, “you can’t preach from long distance.”
