I’m preaching Friday at the All Saints service here at Seabury. I have actually gotten pretty far along in preparation before I remembered that some people like to read about how I get from notion to sermon — so here’s where things stand.
I oinly found out which lessons we’ll be using yesterday, but since a service for All Saints will be heavily thematic anyway, I’d been mulling over how to address a Seabury congregation (which might even include a handful of trustees, who will however probably be kept too busy to worship) about one of the theological premises of All Saints: namely, that in all our servanthood and leadership, in our discipleship and spiritual growth, we are not alone, but we constitute integral elements of a greater whole that comprises all the saints, all the faithful of every generation. If I had more than five minutes, the designated maximum for sermons by people who aren’t the Dean, I’d probably throw in an excursus about Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, complete with sales pitch; but David will have to settle for a quick allusion this time.
Anyway, I looked around the chapel and made a connection with one of my favorite poems, “The Widener Burying-Ground” by John Hollander (sorry about the bleak page layout for the poem; there’s no excuse for treating a lovely poem so brutally). I’ll begin by quoting the opening couplet, and expound the burden of the remainder for a paragraph or so (this part’s giving me headaches just now, since the job of summarizing a poem falls so far short of just reading it — but I don’t think I have the luxury of assuming that the congregation would catch it well enough in a once-through oral presentation). I’ll then turn to the climax (“we are the dead / resounding voices in our stead,” in italics in Hollander’s original presentation).
At that point, I’ll wrest the stream of the homily toward the theological point that the voices we hear, the voices to which we in turn give new voice, are not dead, but alive. I’ll name some of the saints memorialized in the chapel, and make connections between their testimonies and our work as a seminary.
But I don’have a conclusion yet, and that’s the killer. I’ll have about a sermon-and-a-half’s worth of exposition, which I’ll have to trim back, and I’ll have to work with the material to see what coalesces for the wrap-up. I’ll report when anything comes clearer, but this is where things now stand.
Posted by AKMA at October 29, 2003 01:11 PM | TrackBackpowerful sermon akma,
let us read it!
These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Martha at January 13, 2004 09:33 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Everard at January 13, 2004 09:33 AMEarlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.
Posted by: Ursula at January 13, 2004 09:34 AM