Preaching – Page 12 – Rev. Scott Wells

July 12, 2011

Fifth Sunday after Pentecost 2011 Preparation

July 17, 2011 is the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost. Iâ€™ll be meditating on these.

Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

Collect:

O God, the Protector of all that trust in thee,Â without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal: grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake our Lord. Amen.

Epistle: Rom. viii, 18-23
Gospel: Luke vi, 36-42

A book of prayer for the church and the home (Universalist, 1866)

Collect:

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, withoutÂ whom nothing is strong, nothing holy; increase and multiply upon us thy mercy;Â that, though being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through thingsÂ temporal,Â that we finally lose not those things whichÂ are eternal.Â Amen.

St. Luke vi. 36.
Rom. viii. 31

July 10, 2011

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost 2011 Notes

OK — far from a sermon, but as I said: I have to get back on the preaching horse. Here are the notes I drew up when I wasn’t swooning over Google+. I’ll try for more next week.

The text from St. Peter’s letter describes the humility and respectful regard Christians ought to give their (spiritual and literal) elders. A few words about humility are in order because of common and inherited misunderstanding and abuse. Humility takes cultivation and may be identified with the question, “are my needs consistent and able to accommodate the needs of others” including food, water and goods, but also a fair place in the social world, esteem, justice and care. Using the common phrase, a humble outlook means the world “is not all about you.”

But this can be taken too far. For those who are chronically without the means of living — material, social and spiritual — the call to humility can be read as (or imposed as) a means of control. If humility is way to govern the desire to outstep others, then it must also be enjoyed as a way to uplift and encourage those who have been left behind. See the celebration of the woman who found the lost coin. [Reference to the other text for the day.]

That’s about how far I got.

July 7, 2011

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost 2011 preparation

July 10, 2011 is the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost. I’ll be meditating on these.

Free Church Book of Common Prayer (1929)

Collect:

O Lord, we beseech the mercifully to hear us; and grant that we, to whom thou hast given an hearty desire to pray, may by thy mighty aid be defended and comforted in all dangers and adversities; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

or

We beseech the, O Lord, to renew thy people inwardly and outwardly, that as thou wouldest not have them to be hindered by bodily pleasures, thou mayest make them vigorous with spiritual purpose, and refresh them in such sort by things transitory that thou mayest grant them rather to cleave to things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Epistle: 1 Pet. v: 5-11
Gospel: Luke xv: 1-10

A book of prayer for the church and the home (Universalist, 1866)

Collect:

O Lord God, who hast made glorious the name of thy Son Jesus Christ; mercifully grant us, we beseech thee, such a participation of his spirit, that we may even here possess rich measures of heavenly strength and comfort; and that hereafter we may be admitted to the full joy of his blessed presence forever and ever. Amen.

Same lessons.

July 7, 2011

Getting back on the horse

A bit of light lunchtime blogging.

Well, whatever the future of preaching, it’s been so long since I’ve had to preach in any way that I’m long overdue to resume a preacher-like discipline. So, I’ll try to get out something each Sunday that puts me back on that path. I’m sure it won’t be a sermon, but thoughts, notes or at least a little research.

Keyed not to the newer Revised Common Lectionary, but to the older one-year western lectionary that set-liturgy Universalists generations past would have more likely known, and which I think makes more sense in a culture with so little biblical fluency and where someone might miss more than the occasional worship service.

July 5, 2011

New church: small sermon, long sermon

The new church is still in the conceptualization phase, and so I’m taking the time to consider what unquestioned habits in everyday church life were developed when communication, city life and transportation were very much different than they are today. Habits which, however loved, make less sense in a church getting started.

The conspicuous and central Protestant sermon is one of these. It made sense in a education- and resource-poor (and frankly, entertainment-poor) age, but if I held forth for twenty minutes or more every Sunday, I expect to be regularly challenged (perhaps mentally, and in an unspoken way) by people who would Google for facts during my oratory. Another option is to take the high-flown or superstar route, but that so often leads to a lack of substance. For those who can manage extraordinary weekly preaching with integrity, at what opportunity cost? (It’s worth remembering that colonial preachers exchanged far more than ministers today, and I’m sure time management for preparing sermons was a part of the calculus.)

At the same time I thought about that fossil: the pastor’s printed book of sermons. I can hardly think of a printed genre that goes staler, and I hope its age is past. But it did make me think of the future. It might make sense for a minister to preach briefly — tightly, eloquently, perhaps around a single point — to the “live congregation” and have it spelled out later in another way. Not print necessarily, but perhaps a podcast or video, or forgoing these perhaps a live event more in common with an interview or discussion than fighting with hymns and prayers for attention.

June 13, 2011

If your church relies on visiting speakers . . . .

If your church relies on visiting speakers, don’t make them hunt for the details essential for a successful visit.

Back in Ye Olde Days, the Unitarian Universalist Association (and predecessor groups) had information about what the main service was — as well as where — and at one point what the hymnals in use were.

Of course, with individual congregational websites, such a responsibility can be laid aside. But that means the congregation should step up.

Over the weekend, I ran into a page on a site of a church in one of my favorite-named denominations: the Countess of Huntington’s Connexion. It’s the organizational heir to George Whitefield’s Calvinist Methodism, and I have run across it again in preparing the Life of Murray for republication.

Consider this page at Mortimer West End Chapel‘s site. It gives what a visiting speaker needs, and a careful and interested visitor can intuit much about the service by what is included, down to AV details. (And what is not: there’s plenty of parking but no reference to publicÂ transportation. And the nearest rail station is four miles away.) An effort worthy of emulation.

May 14, 2010

A church year with the Church of South India

One of my favorite liturgies — dignified, flexible, not stuffy — is the old Church of South India liturgy. The CSI is a union church, consolidating Anglican, Methodist and Reformed denominations; it has 3.8 million members today and there are churches worldwide.

The old liturgy has the fingerprints of a newly post-colonial church; heck, it’s in English and was printed by Oxford University Press! So it seems very Western. (There’s a new liturgy; I don’t like it as much.)

But what really makes the work sing are its direction on how to modify the service to accommodate the then-unmelded denominational traditions and its church calendar.

The CSI used a one-year calendar that was both lectionary-based and thematically-driven. That should be interesting to Free Churchfolk with a taste for historic liturgy, even if only as an index or a “checklist” for possible preaching topics.

While the old and new liturgies have appeared online (at the website for a parish in Michigan) the lectionary never has. And while I’m guessing it’s in copyright, I think its use as a research tool — especially since it’s out of print and hard to find — might maybe justify my publishing a version here.

This is a spreadsheet, with my own way to describe the liturgical year. The ODS version — which you may open with OpenOffice or Google Docs — it the original. The Excel version is generated and its dates for Easter may not work.

May 16, 2009

Wolfram Alpha — not yet ready for church work

I knew this was going to be a stretch, but if I was going to take the new so-called “Google challenger” Wolfram Alpha seriously, it would have to get past its comfort zone of mathematical and financial data. And so far, the new “computational knowledge engine” — a term that’s a bit steampunk to not have depictions of gears or giant squid — doesn’t seem it can. (Neither for church workers or government transparency folk.)

Yes, like other geeks I was entranced by the webcast demo. I was there at 8pm last night, watching the service get born, with all the bumps and jolts that entails. And Gina Trapani — who is a reliable writer in such matters — has some fun examples of searches.

But here are the ones I tried that failed:

unitarian universalists usa
church buildings in maine
harry emerson fosdick quotations
flight boston salt lake city
fidelity mutual fund
protestants in romania
35 increasing 15% per year [I was thinking of the “compound interest” of a rapidly growing family-sized church]

Some searches, related to dates, were more helpful:

3/25/1825 returned facts about the day; it was 67,257 days ago.
9/15/2009 is 17 weeks, 3 days hence, is Software Freedom Day, Britain’s Prince Harry’s 25th birthday and Ramadan 25, 1430 in the Islamic calendar.
BOS IAD correctly identified the airports, and measured the distance between them, but said nothing about flights.
distance boston salt lake city, likewise, measured the distance.

The only really useful test search — file under self-care — was for “hamburger and fries”, which gave me a generic calorie count with a one-click option for two fast food restaurants’ offerings. The search for great rhombicosidodecahedron is pretty amazing and perhaps useful if your church building is a later-generation geodesic dome. But Google has little to worry about — yet.

(For the political watchers, there’s nothing for bills and “pelosi” gave the House Speaker’s barest biographical information. OpenCongress.org has nothing to worry about either.)

December 15, 2008

"The Duties of Hard Times"

As a way of testing my PDF scanning workflow, I wanted to publish a document that was plainly in the public domain and potentially interesting to my readership.

I had on hand a sermon by the Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham, the minister of the (Unitarian) First Church of Boston, preached there April 23, 1837, entitled “The Duties of Hard Times”. The United States was in first spasms of a major financial crisis, so it seemed timely and appropriate.

On the whole, it is rather telling of its merchant-to-Brahmin readership — do read it aloud to yourself, as printed sermons ought to be read — in its praise of commercial forces and uncritical handling of the mysteries of economics. And classic Unitarianism in its appeals to the strength of character and the implicit priority given to moral over material joy.

A telling line:

In the instance now before us, the question is to how we shall make the times any better; — that were a hopeless undertaking; — but how we shall make ourselves better by the reasons of the times. (pp. 8-9)

In short: keep a cool head; our situation could be a lot worse (to which I tend to agree) and America is a prosperous and peaceful land. Of interest to my readers from Spain, Frothingham cites as recent example of how bad things could be in the siege of Bilbao, during the First Carlist War.

Colophon: I created this PDF in the same way as the Esperanto hymnal, except that I set format to line art and the threshold to 40. Tried to generated a text using OCR — and while the tesseract modules did a much better job than the GOCR ones — I didn’t find an easy way to automate distinguishing between the two pages per scan. I’ll try OCR again when I have modern typed pages to work on.

Download “The Duties of Hard Times” (2.1 Mb)