Sermon Prep

This Sunday is Transfiguration Sunday. This Sunday, the one before the beginning of Lent, is set aside to read from the Gospel story of Jesus on the mountain top appearing with Moses and Elijah and appearing to the disciples in translucent white.

I, however, have sold out to popular culture and am preaching about love for Valentine’s Day. I realize that I risk alienating my congregants who eagerly look forward to the annual reflection on Transfiguration, but I am willing to take that risk.

This is partly due to a tradition we have had for a number of years to supply Mylar balloons for Valentine’s Day as a fund-raiser for the North Platte Rape and Domestic Violence prevention program. It is not that often that Valentine’s Day lands on a Sunday so it seemed that it would be a good convergence.

But what I am thinking about this morning is what we religious professionals call “Sermon Preparation”. I seem to remember back in seminary we were told that a good preacher will spend 35 hours a week in prep, or three hours for every minute preached, or something like that. Now this makes sense when you have just graduated from seminary and feel compelled to include everything you ever learned into your first sermon. I have re-read some of my sermons from the early days and they are heavy enough to hold down a tarp on a windy day.

And preparation is still important, especially when dealing with complicated areas either biblically or worldly. I am not disrespecting prep as such.

But this week I have a new approach to sermon prep. I am not doing any. None. Nothing. Why so daring? Because my topic is the Love of God. 1 John to be specific, with a little John 21 thrown in for good measure. And, frankly, if, after nearly 20 years in ministry, I cannot talk to someone about the Love of God for ten minutes without writing something down I might as well open a used bookstore in Vermont and grow a really long beard.

And when I say none, of course I mean a little. But the point is that we preachers can risk being so intent on looking up what everyone else thinks about a text that we fail to truly discover what we think of it. Truthfully the best sermon prep, from the perspective of 20 years of preaching, is simply to be fully alive to both the world around and the world within and bring that aliveness to the scripture. Over the years the preacher learns to trust that the questions, doubts, fears, and affirmations of his/her own journey are the richest vein to mine. Hopefully all of that study over the years should pay off at some point.

The temptation to divert the responsibility of authentic scriptural encounter is shared equally by preacher and listener. The preacher may lean too heavily upon the commentaries but the listener leans too heavily on the preacher. There are those who express their frustration that I do not “tell them what to believe”. But they do not really mean this. What they are really saying is “please validate my existing world view so I do not have to go through the difficult process of integrating ambiguity and mystery into my engagement with the world”. Perhaps more people would come to worship if I did rain down upon them the appropriate mix of judgment and confirmation, making it easy for them to sit there and passively receive. But that is not my calling.

So this Sunday no carefully poured over manuscript. Still, just to be safe, I think I will write one or two talking points on my hand.