Web Drawbacks

I usually write here about how great the web is, and why I’m positively-disposed toward the Web for pastoral, theological, social, and academic reasons. Today I’ll show that I’m not entirely sanguine about online communication.

I have posted a couple of wedding sermons here, sermons that went over pretty well — and I’m very sure that no one who attended either wedding will be at Joey and Wendy’s wedding in September. But now that I’ve posted these two exemplars, I have to come up with something fresh for Joey and Wendy. (I actually prefer to preach fresh sermons under most circumstances; my belly-aching here is merely for effect.)

I suppose that I wouldn’t be able to recycle a past favorite anyway. The interfaith, interethnic ceremony has already been carefully planned, and there won’t be a reading from the Bible during the service proper, so I just wrote to offer them their choice of any Bible passage whatsoever. I don’t assume they’ll choose one of the readings on which I already have a sermon in the files.

They could play it conventional and choose a passage about love and marriage, or they call my bluff and choose one of the passages about sex and body parts, or chopping people into bits, or seas of fire and horses like scorpions. My hunch is that they’ll go for a safer selection, if only to prevent my taking longer than the allotted time for my exposition. “You may wonder why we just heard a lengthy reading about the dimensions and decoration of the Tabernacle. . . .” Or “Joey did not have to present Wendy’s parents with a hundred foreskins, but. . . .”

5 thoughts on “Web Drawbacks

  1. I completely empathize! I’ve put a handful of the wedding ceremonies I’ve done online at my site, because I like sharing such things and I think it’s useful for couples who might seek me out to see the kinds of things I’ve done before. The drawback, of course, is that I expose the limits of my creativity (or at least the creativity I’m able to use within the form at hand). And there’s always fear of repeating myself from one homily to the next.

    Of course, this time I’m off the hook in that regard… *g*

  2. Joey didn’t even have to present my parents with *one* foreskin. They took my word for it.

    Just kidding. Really.

  3. It’s a pity there are no accordions in the Bible. Personally, I hope they go for the “horses like scorpions” text, because it rhymes (sort of).

  4. Oh I do sympathise, besides, if you did use one of those sermons from what we hear down here someone in the audience would be sure to have heard it at a wedding last week, and believe you just stole it off the Internet, anyway 😉

    BTW I’ve landed myself with preaching about the church from Song of Songs for college chapel, any clues how I can do it, or even get the Scripture read without the congregation collapsing in laughter?

  5. You need a SermonWiki where we can all chip in and write one together.

    You could try seeding it with “For Esau was an hairy man,” which I believe Peter Cook took as the topic of a sermon once upon a time…

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