Morning thoughts

I am preaching tomorrow, and I have words down on paper, but no sermon yet. There is always the intention to work on Fridays to take the various notes and first attempts at a sermon and bring it into a cogent whole, that would be at least a first draft. Often though Fridays have other things in mind. Yesterday was one of those days. This is usualy not a problem, I can usualy spend some part of Saturday working on the Sermon and since Reconicler meets on Sunday evnings, Sunday morning is often final tweeking of the sermon. But there is a half day church retreat today and then a church bbq this evening.
Needless to say that my further comments on Frank Scheaffer will wait.
I have also concluded that writing the concluding sermon of a series of sermons when you haven't preached the whole of the series is difficult. It is complicated by the fact that we didn't plan the series since we follow the Lectionary and the Revised Common Lectionary for year B has had us going through John 6 for the past few weeks. In a sense it is good, since it makes us see this passage from various angles. We didn't though notice in time that in effect we had a sermon series, and we have had guest preachers in the mix. And all this is simply the technical aspect of how much does one draw on what has been said before, and doesn't touch on the difficulties of the passage itself.
Oh, and I do like preaching, but it is the area of pastoring where what you were trained for and what actually is has this great gulf(there is never enough time to prepare and polish a sermon like they teach in preaching classes). All I can say is that it is a good thing Spirit is involved in this because there have been times when I got to the pulpit without much of a sermon and suddenly there it was. That is not this week, its just finding the time to organize what is already there. the other crazy thing is having a sermon and realizing as you enter the pulpit that you are to preach something else.
So I wait and listen and then preach it is on the whole a wonderful experience, though as today, often frustrating in the midst of preparation.