Preaching
Forth Worth on Monday morning
Jeanene and I are still in Fort Worth. We fly home at 1:45 pm.
It was a fascinating thing for me to preach in the Broadway pulpit. Broadway Baptist Church is probably the closest thing to a cathedral you'll find among Texas Baptists. I'm used to preaching behind a battered black music stand that a local high school band teacher gave me. The nearest person is about 10 feet away. It's a more casual setting. Suddenly I was on this big stage behind a
I'm Preaching in Austin on Sunday
I probably wouldn't mention this, but the very nice folks at University Baptist Church of Austin asked if I would. I'll be preaching at UBC this Sunday, the final preacher in their Centennial Festival of Preaching. This is a church I am humbled to join for worship. This is why. If you are in town and want to stop by and say hello after church, that would be cool too.
rlp
Where Do Sermons Go?
I preached a sermon this morning — one in a long line of sermons stretching back to 1992. I've preached so many sermons by now that I find it almost impossible to remember any particular one. Right now, on a Sunday night, I don't want to remember any of them. The discipline of Sunday night is forgetting.
It's strange, but while I can't remember my sermons, I do remember preaching them. And if I close my eyes, I can see myself laboring away at the work of it...
Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.
Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson
rlp
Tethered To Christianity
I saw my father preach the other day. His hair is now white, and the skin on his face has loosened with age, but this is the same man whose face I saw above the pulpit throughout my childhood. He stood like a captain in the bow of the ship that he loves, confident that the vessel would rise and fall with his voice and break the waves of human need as it sailed to the promised land.
Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.
Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson
rlp
Sorrow and Joy
Being a rambling account of nausea, preaching, mother's day, evil, and a few other subjects. It's too long, covers too many subjects, would be rejected if I submitted it to any decent publication, and is probably very self-indulgent, blah blah blah.
I was strangely ill last week. I say strangely because any illness seems strange to me. I'm one of those people who rarely get sick. I will admit I've been pretty smug about that over the years, though I don't know why. It's not like I have anything to do with being sick or not being sick. I just sit here in my skin and take whatever comes to me. I guess we all do that.
So anyway Tuesday, out of the blue, I got severely nauseous. I don't have a lot of experience with nausea. I haven't thrown up since I was a small child. They tell me I threw up on my teddy bear when I was three. Apparently, it was so disgusting that teddy had to be thrown away. I'm sure it was traumatic as hell, though I don't remember anything about it. Maybe after that I just decided to opt out of the whole throwing up thing. However it happened, I don't throw up. I can't. I don't even know how to get started with it. It looks to me like some sort of heaving of the chest precedes the event itself, but I couldn't tell you for sure. I will tell you this - by Tuesday afternoon, I wanted to throw up badly. I wanted to, but I never did. Instead I just rolled around in bed for about 7 hours, trying to find a comfortable position.
Did you know that there is no position that is comfortable when you are nauseous? None. I tried them all.
This is What Preaching Should Be
On Monday she selects the scripture for Sunday's sermon. She reads it. She prays. She thinks. She reads what others have said about the text. She doodles. She frets. She puts the bible aside and goes about her business, but the passage is always on her mind. She becomes a watcher and a student of life. She is on the trail of new connections and new ways of seeing.
Tuesday is the day of pain and joy. She is sometimes broken by the passage and sometimes carried away to places unspoken. What is suggested by the text is beyond belief, like a madman's story. She is out of her mind with hope. She is a dreamer and a wisher and a punch-drunk pilgrim.
She would never claim to have an absolute handle on scripture, but on Wednesday she thinks she has heard the story.
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