Link to my sermon

they let me preach again. Click to listen or watch.

At least this will lead you to a fuller appreciation of the high-quality preaching in your church.

All kidding aside, I just watched the video for the first time, and through the haze of crippling self-conciousness (Maybe I'll look less fat if I squint. Um, okay, NO. Hmmm.) I can say I feel decent about this outing. I meant all that stuff.

Here is how I have come to preach, twice, at Cedar Ridge:

every summer we have The All Ages Show, aka family services, or Sunday School Teachers Get August Off. As staff liturgist and tech director (I bet I'm the only one of those in the country!) I'm heavily involved in the collaborative planning of these services. (I'm heavily involved in the planning of practically every service, but most of those discussions are small - me and the speaker - and efficient, not free-wheeling brainstorming that August entails.)

At some point during the brain storming, I am unable to control myself and go off on some long, ill-considered rant about 'what we should really say' about this topic. (Because I'm, you know, the tech director. So I am perfectly positioned to shoot my mouth off about matters of spiritual formation.)

I go until I run out of steam, and the other people (you know, the pastors) look at each other in silence for a moment. Someone starts some sentence fragment, like:
"well, that's, uh..."
and someone else says "yeah, that's really, um, it."
and I say "I guess I could, you know, just..."
and someone else says "Yeah, why don't you?
and I say "Really? Would that really be okay?"
and someone says "I think so." and someone else says "Yeah, totally."

And then I'm preaching.

I'm preaching again this fall, and it did not come about in that way. For my next sermon, I was actually asked, and put on the schedule back in spring. I will be preaching to the grownups in November.

Good Lord.