Sermon 24 - "Ordinary" vs "big global problem" sermon topics

Sermon 24 - "Ordinary" vs "big global problem" sermon topics

Job 5:10

God sends showers on earth and waters the fields.

Deuteronomy 10:18

He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.

When Gloria and I started hanging out together I called up one Saturday and asked if I could come over.  She said that she wasn't going to be doing anything special, she just had boring jobs to do.  So I said that that was fine.  I was keen on doing boring jobs with her.  I believe that day we went out and got her kettle's cord replaced.

We seem to think that we need to do something special.  And, in particular, with regard to sermons.  You can't have a sermon about "ordinary" things.  You have to have big ideas and big concepts to be worthy of being put into a sermon.  The thing is, that what you do put into a sermon can be triggered by anything.

I sat through a sermon, this weekend, from somebody who was talking about "Christian Hope."  That we, as Christians, hope for salvation, we hope for God's power and presence, and that that is justified.  Well, that's a big topic.  It's an important topic.  There is no question that it's an important topic.  But, having said that, why do you have to talk about that for half an hour?  Or, rather, if you're going to talk about that for half an hour, you'd better make sure that you have something to say.  Something interesting.  Something important.  Something supportive.  Something that builds up the people who are listening to you, and listening to your sermon.  This guy didn't.  It was a pretty terrible sermon.  It was a slurry of scripture texts and Christian cliches without much structure, and really without much point at all.

As a matter of fact, I'm not alone in thinking that it wasn't a very good sermon.  The minister, himself, couldn't have thought that it was a very good sermon.  He forgot what he was saying.  Towards the end of the sermon he knew that it was the end of the sermon because it was about the time that sermons should end.  But he had no idea where he was, because he wasn't anywhere.  There was no structure to his sermon.  There was no point.  There was no argument.  There was no building on basic ideas and extending them.  I know that he lost track of what he was saying, because he *said* so.  He said, out loud, to all of us, that he didn't know how many more slides he had.  He didn't know how much further he was going to be going with this.  And, in fact, when he clicked for the next slide, what came up was the closing hymn.  He was, in fact, at the end of his sermon.  But his sermon was such a mess that he didn't actually realise that.

Anyways, that's the one hand.  If you pick a big important topic, you probably have to put some time into working on it, and making sure that your sermon is, in fact, worthy of the topic.

But there's the other side.

I've written sermons about blackberries.  I have written sermons about broad beans.  I've probably got two months worth of sermons about gardening.  I've written lots of sermons about very ordinary things.  Because very ordinary things can present you with the opportunity to make an important point.

Swinging back to the other end of the spectrum, I had a conversation with one of the ministers in town who was having trouble with his sermon.  He was talking about all the troubles of the world.  Literally.  The state of the world as it is, and as we know it to be.  The political trouble.  The wars.  The famines and lack of food security for people who are in war zones.  The attempts, by large groups of populations, to try and get away from war zones, only to be turned back by people and countries that they flee to.  All of this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad stuff.

Well, the thing is that it's a huge problem.  It's disastrous, there is no question.  It's really, really bad.  But what do you say about that?  The world is really really bad.  We don't see much help, much support.  Well, that's unfortunate.  What can we do about it?

I have a saying in situations like this, where you don't think you can do much about a huge disaster.  Never let what you *can't* do, prevent you from doing what you *can* do.  If you don't like mine, take Mother Theresa's: "Don't do nothing because you can't do everything."  Or, there's a line from the chorus of Josh Wilson's "Dream Small": "Don't buy the lie you've got to do it all."

Maybe we can't end world hunger today.  But you can, today, take someone to lunch.  And maybe it's not even because they need the food, that they need the meal.  Maybe it's because they need to be fed a little bit of fellowship.

You can do that.  That's not a hard thing.  It doesn't even have to be an expensive thing.  It's just a little bit of your time.  Now, I know we don't have unlimited time.  You can always get more money, but you can never get more time. And sometimes time is a very precious gift to give.  But everybody has it to give.  So, do that.  Maybe you can't end world hunger.  Maybe you can't end all the suffering in the world.  But you can do a little bit to reduce the total suffering of the world by helping someone right in front of you.  You don't have to end the war in the Middle East.  After all, they've been fighting in the Middle East for at least thirty-five hundred years.  But you can go to someone that you have upset and ask them to forgive you.  You can always do that. 

You can go out and help at Shelter Farm on Tuesday morning.  You can join any one of a hundred different organizations here in Port Alberni that are looking for volunteers to help out.  You can go out for Community Policing and help to keep people alive.  (Because you guys are the worst drivers in the entire world, and you don't need to speed, too.)  You can go out for emergency support services, and be trained and ready when and disaster happens, so that you are part of the solution, rather than being part of the problem of people running around screaming that we're all going to die.

You can help out with the hospice society, which doesn't just mean sitting with the dying.  If you don't like being around people who are dying, there's plenty of opportunities for people who can cook breakfasts and lunches and dinners.  For people who can do fundraising and can plan fun events.  For people who can do fundraising and go around to businesses and ask if they will donate something to help the cause.  You can do administration of all of this stuff.  You can do something as simple as collecting Quality Foods receipts and sorting them into bundles of certain total amounts of money so that some funding can flow to the organisation.  There's all kinds of things you can do.  Just because you can't do something, don't let it stop you from doing what you can do.

I was talking to somebody today about writing all these sermons.  I'm not sitting in front of a desk writing this.  I'm walking down the street.  At the moment I was dictating this, I was walking down Tenth Avenue and going through the dip.  (Or, The Mound, for you real old timers.)  I'm dictating this onto my phone, which has an app that does a very, *very* bad job of transcribing what I am saying.  But at least it writes it down in some form or other, and later on I can sit at my desk and I can actually edit it and turn it into something of a sermon that's worth preaching.

And that's another thing.  As I am dictating this sermon, I have approximately thirty-five or forty sermons that I have, in fact, written.  I haven't preached a single one of them.  Now, I have *posted* some of them, and some other ministers may have taken my sermons and preached them.  I don't know.  Maybe this sermon will never be preached.  I do keep thinking about the line out of the song, "Sounds of Silence," about people writing songs that voices never share.  I am writing sermons that people never hear.  But, maybe, some day, somebody *will* hear.  Maybe somebody will hear this sermon, and it will help them.  Maybe it will get them to get off their back, and maybe that will help somebody else.

I don't know.  You know that God is in control of these things, and I'm not.  God can use what we do, even if what we do isn't perfect.  But I can do this, so I'm doing it.  I can't preach.  I have not been called to the ministry of any church.  Nor has anybody taken me up on my offer of pulpit relief.  At least not yet.  But I can write the sermons.  So I do.  And this is ordinary.  This is not sitting in an office full of theological tomes surrounded by the great thoughts of Christian thinkers of past centuries.  No, this is me, walking down 10th Avenue, on my way to the hospice society office, to sort Quality Foods receipts. 

But I can think while I'm doing it.  And God has given me a phone that will take down this dictation.  So I'm doing it.  I'm writing a sermon, or, at least, the draft of a sermon.  I can't preach it because nobody has given me the opportunity to preach.  But I can *write* it. So I will.  On a very ordinary day.  On a very ordinary street, just making my way from one appointment to another.  I can do this.  So I am doing this.

From the ordinary may come the extraordinary.  I don't know.  I don't know how God is going to use this.  I don't know *if* God is going to use this.

Gloria was a singer.  (No, I'm not changing topics.)  She had an amazing voice.  Maybe not the most amazing voice that there ever was, musically speaking, but she had an amazing voice and an amazing gift which I have never heard from any other singer.  She could sing with full emotion, but still enunciating everything so clearly that every single word that she sang could be heard and understood.  That was extraordinary.  It wasn't ordinary at all.  But here's the ordinary part.  Gloria was asked to sing a lot of different places.  As a matter of fact, when people asked what church we went to, Gloria would frequently say that when you are a soloist, the church that you're a member of is the church you *don't* go to, because you are asked to sing so many other places.

Gloria told me that she can considered God to be her booking agent.  She knew, at the age of twelve, that her voice was special, and that it was a gift from God, and that it was to be used *for* God, and in his service.  Gloria didn't do light opera or amateur musicals.  Gloria sang in church.  Gloria sang for services.  Gloria sang for weddings and funerals.  Gloria sang for God, and, as she said, God was her booking agent.  When she was asked to sing, she said it wasn't her job to decide whether or not this venue or this service was important enough for her to sing at, or whether the audience was big enough.  Whether the need was enough.  That wasn't her job.  It was God's job to bring her the offers.  Gloria said her job was just to say yes.  Which, if she didn't have a conflict, she did.  She said yes.  And I would drive her to wherever she was asked to sing and she would sing.

Gloria *also* said that every time she sang she knew; she could feel; that someone within the sound of her voice needed to hear that song.  She didn't know who.  And she didn't know why.  She didn't necessarily know what part of the song that they needed to hear.  That wasn't her job.  Her job was to say yes.  God was her booking agent, and she knew that someone needed to hear that song.  And she could sing it.  So she did.

Maybe it was an ordinary song.  Maybe what you can do is ordinary.  Maybe my sermon topics are ordinary.  You do what you can do.  Let God take care of what you can't.

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html