The Dog Ate My Sermon

season 1, episode 2

I once heard a story of a friend of mine sitting in the ANTS library, reading a commentary, and preparing for a sermon. As he was deep in a scholar’s explanation of a text someone else came up to him and said, “don’t prepare, just let the Holy Spirit move you.” Sad to say, the person was serious.

There are those people who feel that sermon preparation forces God and does not free the Holy Spirit. These people will argue that if you have nothing to say on Sunday it is because God will not give you anything to say. Weak.

Granted, we always need to be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in our preparation and our preaching. There may be times when mid-sermon you go a different direction or change things altogether because of a “feeling.” Yet this is different from going to preach with nothing at all.

To do no preparation at all shows little respect for your congregation and almost no respect for the act of preaching and proclaiming the Word. If you want to have a good product, give God something good to work with, spend time in prayer and preparation, and show up with something.

Lets be honest, winging it is not so much trusting the Holy Spirit as it is being lazy, procrastinating, and spending to much time playing Farmville.

Ouch.

In the corresponding episode we mentioned a number of resources. For commentaries we mentioned the Interpretation series, the Anchor Bible series, and the New Interpreters Bible. There are other good commentaries, but these are some good ones to start with.

We mentioned the Oxford Annotated Bible and the Harper Collins Study Bible as editions of the NRSV that we like to work with.

Here is a link to the Christian Book Distributers site where I attended a warehouse sale and was almost trampled by Christians.

Finally, there are a million plus sites about the lectionary – look it up.

After thought - I neglected to link the other two books mentioned on the podcast:

The Homiletical Plot by Eugene Lowry

Homiletic by David Buttrick