A friend recently suggested that I start posting an occasional sermon online. The next post is an experiment in that direction. I don’t have plans to do so regularly, but perhaps this is as good a place to start as any.

A few caveats: My sermons are written with the intention that they are to be read aloud, so I intentionally construct them phrase by phrase. It’s not poetry, but may look like it on the page.

Any sermon is a contextual event, constructed for a community that hears it and is engaged by it. This is true if it is proclaimed multiple times one morning in the same church, or if it is read in different places at different times online. Each engagement is different. The written text is only one component of a sermon, which also requires hearers/readers and the movement of the Spirit between them.

Even as this art is shifting and adapting, and becoming increasingly dialogical, nonlinear, with multiple access points woven throughout the reflection, I hope that it may be of enough interest that people may find their time not wasted after reading them. Your mileage may vary.

Also, because sermons are not really meant to be a final word on the matter, but to provoke internal thought for the individual and for the community, I don’t intend to engage in debate about them (to defend rightness or orthodoxy or any such thing contained therein), and all comments still are handled as I described way back when.

Thanks. Happy reading.

[Pic: sermon coverpage for the Rev. Jeremiah Burroughs, who, according to Wikipedia, worked in a study with the following motto on his door: “Opinionum varietas et opinantium unitas non sunt ασυστατα” (“Difference of belief and unity of believers are not inconsistent”). From Google Images]