That reminds me...

Anne over at Get Out of Jail Free posted an entry the other day that triggered two thoughts.

Firstly, it seems that the planned trip to Peru might be the start of the deep involvement that I was advocating in a recent post.

The second (more trivial) thought was about a recent conversation with some longstanding friends who go to our church.  Many years ago, I preached a sermon where I was encouraging the congregation to think about the areas that we were willing to get involved in.  (There's a bit of a recurring theme here.)  I concluded my talk with the question, 'When did you last have breakfast with a prostitute?'

Surprisingly, the sermon had stuck in the mind of their son, who was probably about 10 years old at the time.  Over lunch, he asked, 'Mum, you're a prostitute aren't you?'

When she had recovered her composure and her thought processes, the penny dropped with Mum, who replied to her son: 'I think you might mean PROTESTANT!'

stop and think

Two quotations from the same sermon made me stop and think. The preacher was called Jim Roberts, speaking at St Michael le Belfrey in York (podcasts available through iTunes).

"We are all the best Christian somebody knows... because we are the only Christian somebody knows!"

"We get persecuted for the message of Christianity, not for being stupid! There is a world of difference, although some Christians don't realise that."

Now put them together... Hmmm!?!

Do you want mustard with that?

A great many people think that they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
William James

Today I was looking back at a sermon that I delivered in 2000, because I am preparing a Bible study for our youth Nurture Group on the same passage. The sermon doesn’t seem too bad to me. Nowadays I might have been a bit more challenging about our cosy attitudes and tendency towards ‘nimby-ism’ (in thought and deed).

What did bother me was the frighteningly dull order of service that I had prepared for that Sunday morning. The only radical departure from our bog standard service was to have two readings from the Bible – one before the kids left for Sunday School, my act of rebellion! Trouble is, 7 years on our services are the same. Aye, I know that we project the words of the songs rather than using books. And I have to acknowledge that our pastor has started to use Powerpoint during his sermons in the past few weeks (honestly – we are at the cutting edge now!). This blog isn’t the place to slag - I mean comment – on the quality of preaching, but can this stultifying “hymn sandwich” approach really be the way forward?

To adapt Timothy Leary, it’s a bit like: Turn up, switch off, drop off

And yet, through this gloom, there are signs that God cannot or will not be limited by our ineptitude.

"One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

So what about the mustard reference? "Hymn sandwich"of course! ;-)