Sermon Week Wrap Up

This has been the most stressful week by far. I had been thinking about this sermon for about a month now and was drawing a blank. I knew that I didn't want to preach from the lectionary so when Lois offered me the chance to continue the sermon series on John I jumped at the chance. I looked through the passages that they were thinking about for the rest of the series, reading through them all in an effort to find a connection to homelessness. Nothing really jumped out at me so I decided that John 9 would be a good text, don't ask me why.
In the next several weeks it was always in the back of my mind, lurking, waiting for an idea to come along and be pounced on. It didn't happen until I heard Lois preach about the woman who committed adultery two weeks ago. I don't know what it was but I had some really good ideas while listening to Lois, the problem was that I didn't write them down. I read through her sermon a couple of times but they didn't come back to me so I was back at square one.
Now the last sermon I preached Tom helped me to prepare the rest of the service 10+ days in advance so the only thing I actually had to do was write the sermon. This time around, no such luck. I left everything up until this week, and it nearly killed me. Monday I read through commentaries the entire day, Tuesday I wrote my first draft and began to plan the service, Wednesday, I freaked out. You see, the thing about preaching from the lectionary is that there are all these resources with litanies and prayers and all that good stuff. There are other scripture passages that tie in well with whatever you choose as your central text. When you stray from the lectionary, you are on your own, and on my own I was. I found myself flipping through the back of the Hymnal aimlessly, trying to find prayers that I liked and made sense, and don't get me started on hymns. Another big stressor was that our sister church from Dallas will have representatives in the area for the Western District Conference annual meeting and they will be in church on Sunday so I had to try to figure out what would be a good song that they might know to allow them to feel welcomed. Very hard!
Now why didn't I just ask Tom and Lois for help? Because they left me again, this time to go to family camp at Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp for 10 days. I somehow managed to make it through to today without having a major breakdown, but I was close.
Now Tom and Lois are back, we talked through the service and worked everything out, I'm working on my sermon with suggestions from Sarah and Jamie, and things are looking a bit up. I'm currently using the following analogy to describe my stress levels, the waters are calmer, not smooth and glassy, but calmer. For those of you who read my first sermon, I didn't take my own advice very well.
Here's hoping that this one goes as well as the first. Prayers are appreciated.
Peace,
Daniel