The link to the sermon is now fixed, it should now take you to the sermon. LEK 4/29/2008
It seems that I am back to writing manuscripts of my sermons. After posting on my struggle with the sermon for this past Sunday I ended up writing a okay manuscript. I had a wedding celebration to go to Sunday afternoon so I had to finish my sermon Saturday night, which I know is the norm for most pastors but I do take advantage of Reconciler having a 5PM service. But as I got up and prepared for a Sunday with both a wedding reception and preaching, I ended up deciding that I needed to use David J's song No Faith from his Urban Urbane album. So, I changed the introduction which essentially meant I changed the entire sermon. I had the manuscript I wrote but did not read it or follow it exactly. The Sermon posted then is a facsimile of what I said last night. Though more an editing of the original manuscript to hopefully reflect something of what was actually preached, though I know that I said things that I have not remembered well enough to put in a manuscript.
I am finding that of late I think my sermons have been around the theme of the faith and the church being something that needs to be in conversation with the surounding culture and context but charting its own course according to its own logic, the logic of the Gospel
The difference is that I don't ever try to post a representation of the sermon that I preached. Rather, I post the manuscript that I take up with me. But I rarely look at manuscripts any more, often walking away from them completely and so what I post when I post my sermons is not what someone hears on Sunday morning.
ReplyDeleteYa, the last manuscript I posted was like that, but I felt my delivery was close enough to what I actually preached so as to have been a close facsimile of what was said. This Time, because I entirely reworked the introduction adding the David J lyrics to No Faith, I felt the spirit and tenor of my manuscript was entirely different, and communicated less well. So, I wasn't going to post the original manuscript but wanted to post the sermon. So, I reconstructed the sermon from my memory and the original manuscript.
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm just not willing to put the extra work in to trying to represent what I said. I figure that the people reading my sermons online (which is by far the most visited of my online places) aren't the same people hearing it on Sunday morning and it might even be interesting for someone to compare and contrast.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I've had Sundays where my manuscript was so different than my sermon that I've avoided posting the manuscript because I felt it didn't do justice to what I had said. Instead of putting the work into getting it ready, I've just left it off the website.
Perhaps my reluctance to re-visit the sermons is that when I'm done preaching one, I'm done with it and moving on to the next one, so I don't want to go back.
Oh I meant to say that I am there as well, even though I have more time between sermons than most pastors. Its why when I only have notes I never attempt to reconstruct a manuscript to post.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I felt that this sermon was important enough to rework based on how I preached. So, this is one of the only times I have reworked a sermon manuscript after I preached it.