I’m preaching both Sunday and Monday, as I noted before — though I haven’t the foggiest notion when I’ll have time to prepare. I have a committee meeting this morning, class this afternoon, a dinner and presentation this evening (not that I’m giving the presentation, but a colleague), Meaning and Ministry tomorrow morning (for which I owe Lynette and Laura comments), a student flying in from Oklahoma to meet with me tomorrow afternoon. . . . And those are just the obligations I remember, leaving out things like course prep time and eating and sleeping.
Did I mention, by the way, that I hate exercising, especially when I neither gain strength and endurance nor lose any weight?
The readings for Sunday are Jeremiah 14:(1-6), 7-10, 19-22; Psalm 84:1-6; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18; and Luke 18:9-14. To save you the trouble of looking them up, that’s Jeremiah’s plea for the drought to end, Paul’s plaintive acknowledgment that he’s at the end of his career, and the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. Ordinarily, I’m drawn to texts that seem to trigger anti-Judaic prejudice (such as Sunday’s parable, which permits pious Gentiles to congratulate themselves for not being hypocrites like those Pharisees), but I’m not sure I can modulate my philo-Judaic interpretation of the text into a proper sermon. moreover, the Jeremiah passage includes the words “We look for peace, but find no good; for a time of healing, but there is terror instead,” a refrain that seems a propos for this particular juncture.
And then there’s dear old Paul, getting ready to hang up his — whatever it was that he used, that he might either hang up or leave in a heap on the floor, for the dog to lie on, so that his parents would say, “The floor is not a coatrack; go hand that up like a civilized person.”
Monday’s service includes a blessing of the Seabury grounds, in which there’ll be lots of miscellaneous verses, and the main Gospel reading is Luke 11: 1-13, which includes Luke’s (short) version of the Lord’s Prayer, the parable of the friend at midnight, and the query about giving children stones instead of eggs, a scorpion instead of fish. Heaven only knows what I can do with that; maybe I’ll look into those miscellaneous verses for a resource.
Maybe I’ll be able to sneak some sermon-writing time in during the committee meeting and presentation.
[Later: Through the helpful intercession of Josiah, I have opened an antique file that records what was actually a pretty decent sermon. I won’t be able to preach it just as it stands — time has passed, the setting is different, few people will remember the transitory outrage that the Savings and Loan scandal-giveaway engendered — but there’s a good homiletical idea in there, so I won’t necessarily have to start from scratch.]
DRMA: Kid Fears by the Indigo Girls; Velvet Underground by Jonathan Richman; Miracles by the Jefferson Starship; The Man I Love by Ella Fitzgerald; Blessed To Be A Witness by Ben Harper; Down On Me by Eddie Head and his Family; The Revolution by David Byrne.
Posted by AKMA at October 21, 2004 08:25 AM | TrackBackCloak. It was a cloak. Remember when he asks Timothy to bring to him in prison his winter cloak? (And if you love Paul at all, that's sort of a heartbreaking request.)
Posted by: kate at October 21, 2004 10:57 AMI was grasping for something like “his pen,” as that was the implement I identified with Paul — but “pen” doesn’t work, and “his cloak” works exactly right. Well done!
Posted by: AKMA at October 22, 2004 11:25 PM