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Lead Us Not Into What? |
The Lord's Prayer |
This is a sermon from a summer series on the Lord's Prayer, with a single sermon devoted to each phrase the prayer. At first I thought that would be a fairly simple set of things to prepare, but was I surprised! Each item in the prayer is a virtual iceberg, pretty and easy to recite on the surface, but a dangerous monster underneath. And the idea of the sermon was to get underneath each one. So it was a sermon on "Our Father," with all of the implications and pitfalls of that phrase--though, I have to say, it turned out to be more than worth doing, for me and for the folks who shared the sermons with me. Then a sermon on "who art in the heavens," heavens, of course, being plural, raising a whole other set of questions. This is the "lead us not into temptation" phrase, one that sounds harmless enough, but isn't. Who leads us into temptation, and who are we asking, profoundly, please do not do that? These kinds of sermons, in my view, have to be real thinking sermons, visibly so, coming straight from the mind and hard work of the preacher. I sure hope that you preachers who read this actually study, think through, and prepare your own sermons and do not get them from someplace and just tinker to make them a bit your own. If you do not do that, you sure are missing one of the really exciting, even fun, things about the ministry. |