Saint Matthew's

… because I finished my Wednesday night homily and posted it to the Sermon section.

Usually I finish 20 minutes before we start. For some reason, today I am done 7 hours before.

After Morning Prayer, I settled on down in my church office ready to write up (or outline) this weekend’s sermon and prayers. There was only one problem:

My brain is zapped.

I tried everything, but nothing could be squeezed from the mush in my head. The sermon I started to outline was quite pathetic. I know, I know, the Holy Spirit helps guide my thoughts and then uses the words to build faith in the hearts of the hearers. But it is like the Holy Spirit took the morning off. Nothing that I wrote made any sense. Each word I wrote was unpreachable (I know, that isn’t a word).

After two hours, I stepped away and came home.

I need to step back for a little while. A change of scenery today, for at least a while, could be helpful.

Read Luke 10:16. Preaching is the living voice of the Gospel as it conforms to Holy Scripture in proclaiming the forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake. When we hear such preaching, who are we hearing?

That is a question we’ll be tackling tonight in our Bible class following our Wednesday Night worship service. It is taken from “The Lutheran Spirituality Series: Word, God Speaks to Us,” a bible study published by Concordia Publishing House. It was written by a former seminary professor of mine, Rev. John T. Pless, a man who helped shaped my appreciation for an unending study of Lutheran doctrine. Professor Pless has a sheer love of God and the Lutheran Confessions and his teaching was infectious.

But the question is interesting in that most people truly don’t grasp that when a pastor preaches rightly, he’s preaching God. The pastor stands in the pulpit and preaches not what he wants, but what He wants – and that is the forgiveness of sins won for us by Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Luke 10:16 says it all:

(Jesus said) “The one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects him who sent me.” (ESV)

You are hearing God.

This weekend, our Gospel reading is from Luke 5 where Jesus tells Simon (Peter), after Simon and his fishing mates pull in a huge catch of fish after Jesus tells them to drop their nets, that they were to become fishers of men.

One of the important aspects of sermon preparation is that sometimes English translations of the Holy Bible don’t truly explain fully the meaning of a particular word. We usually use the words "fishers" or "catchers of men" when we translate Jesus’ statement to Simon. The reason is simple: both words can be tied into the fishing aspect of the situation.

But there is more than just translating the Greek word as "catchers" or "fishers." A deeper understanding shows that the word we usually translate as those mentioned actually is a compound word – two words combined into one. Individually taken, the words can be defined as follows:

"Living"
"Catch or take"

So when we are talking about Simon Peter and the disciples becoming "fishers of men," it really means that the disciples were to become those who would catch or take the living. Looking at this word in this way, it opens the door to a deeper understanding of the power of God’s Word, in this context, and in this story from Luke. The disciples were to go out to the people of God and cast the net of the Word and catch those living in darkness and shining the light of the Gospel on them. They weren’t just fishing, as we learn in Sunday School. They were doing more.

And we do the same in our day. We, too, are catchers of the people of God, using the Word of God. It isn’t because we do such wonderful evangelism that people come to God’s house, but simply due to God’s Word that ties up those living in darkness and opens to them the light of the salvation offered through Jesus Christ.

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Our task is to be where that seed is planted. Our task is to study the Scriptures—the readable Word; to hear the preaching—the audible Word; to use the sacraments—the visible Word. When God sows His seed, He plants His power in human hearts.

Author: Paul J. Schulze/Feb. 16, 1963
A Year in The Word (c) 1999, Concordia Publishing House

The above comes from the daily devotion on the LC-MS website. Tells a lot about the need for church in the lives of God’s children. The seed of faith is planted by God through His Word. We receive the nourishment through God’s Word – read, preached, and visible – that helps water and grow that seed in the hearts of God’s children.

Without God and His Word, we can only trust the world. And the world that rejects God tells us that as long as "God is in your heart," that’s all that counts. Why go to church when you already have God, the world contends.

But without hearing the Word read and preached and received in bread and wine, God is slowly being eased out of your heart. Trust is being placed in the world instead of God. In God’s house, you receive the love and forgiveness of God through His Word, a Word that builds us up to believe in Him in a true sense.

See you on Sunday morning for some watering.

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On the first Friday of each month, I hold a worship service at Woodcrest Center on River Road in New Milford. Usually 20-30 residents come downstairs into their large room, which also serves as their dining room. I enjoy this service for a number of reasons, one of which is the ability to bring the Gospel to those who are in most need of it: those who are sick and suffering under the frailties of body.

I got there a little early this morning (OK, 15 minutes) and had the opportunity to speak with a couple of the residents, one of whom seemed very sad. Our chief topic was the state of the facility, which has been undergoing a massive rehabilitation during the past year or more. One of the women turned and looked at me and said that it didn’t really matter if the lights in the hallways were nice since everyone there was just there to die. She then complained about her family dumping her there and rarely visiting her.

My heart was breaking as she spoke.

I tried in my sermon to speak to her directly about the confidence we have in the promises of God. He is the one who promises to comfort the suffering – and He does! Using our Gospel reading from Mark 7 this week, I focused on the importance of understanding who are are in God: a redeemed child of the Almighty, rescued from death, Satan and the devil by the price of Jesus Christ. For all our troubles, we have a God who is willing to hear our concerns and answer them. Specifically on the Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that a person is not defiled by what they eat, but by what comes out of them. Rolling this in, I preached on the strength of our lives because of Christ, the one who leads and guides and loves. We should try in our day, when we are feeling angry and hurt, to remember that God who loves us beyond all understanding.

I looked at her at the end of our service and she smiled a bit.

For all my complaining recently over the lack of quality in my sermons and my delivery, I ran across this quotation from Martin Luther today while going through my private devotions. This quote is taken from the Minister’s Prayer Book, edited by John Doberstein:

“A good preacher should have these qualities and virtues. First, he should be able to teach in a right and orderly way. Second, he should have a good head. Third, he should be able to speak well. Fourth, he should have a good voice. Fifth, a good memory. Sixth, he should know when to stop. Seventh, he should be sure of his material and be diligent. Eighth, he should stake body and life, good and honor on it. Ninth, he must suffer himself to be vexed and flayed by everybody.”

For some reason, Luther always seems to have the right words at the right time.

I have updated the sermon portion of the site with this week’s edition … If you are coming to church, you can pick one up at the door.

And if you want to read a really good sermon (used different readings for today), then check this one out by Pastor Dietrich in Central Illinois.

I have been faced with a little difficulty regarding sermon posting over the past couple of weeks. Don’t know why, but I couldn’t post. It wouldn’t let me upload the sermon. I am not a computer expert, but I couldn’t figure it out.

But now get this: Tonight I posted my sermon for tomorrow without any error message.

One day I’ll get it.

Sermon preparation is always a hit-and-miss sort of thing with me. Usually, I get all the studying done by the end of Tuesday, usually in the evenings. But this week, after spending four hours with it this morning, following the several hours yesterday, sermon studying is done. And guess what?

I have no clue as to what I want to preach about on Sunday yet.

Yes, it is only Tuesday, but I like to have a clue as to what theme I will be working with for the rest of the week. Each sermon I write is centered on one specific theme or thought. I try not to expand too far away from that thought as to lose the impact of that specific theme.

But this morning, I am sitting here in the study in the parsonage with a baffled look on my face. There is just so much in this weekend’s readings that can make a good sermon. But I can’t narrow my thoughts down yet.

This is a rarity for me. Usually I come to some idea and work with the idea throughout the week until Friday morning when I memorialize my thoughts into an actual sermon. Right now, I have too many thoughts and I can’t narrow them down. I will have to step away and let it be for a while.

Too many thoughts in a sermon make for a wandering message. I need a little time to direct all those thoughts down to one.

As I opened by sermon this past Sunday, members of Saint Matthew’s should come a watch me try and write a sermon during a given week. It will give a new appreciation for the art of preaching.