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Writing the Story of Your Life |
Advent as a Novel |
Since I have never been a Lectionary preacher, never grew up with the Lectionary in my parsonage home, I have instead developed a habit of preaching sermons "in sets," in a series. I enjoy developing series of sermons. Every year of my ministry I have set up a series of Advent sermons, sometimes built around a set of common, or related, texts, sometimes built around a theme. One of the Advent series that I most enjoyed was the one I built around literary metaphors. It was "Advent as --" and then the literary trope. I had, as I recall, Advent as Comedy, Advent as Tragedy, Advent as Fairy Tale, Advent as a Play, and so on. This is one of those sermons. It is one of my three or four favorite sermons, as, indeed, that series was. This one is Advent as a Story, or Advent as a Novel. The sermon topics, as I recall even now listening to it again, provided a kind of informality in speaking that, to my mind, was what I wanted to achieve in every sermon, though I did not always succeed. |