There are a few moments each day, just after my alarm goes off, when I lie in bed and think about the day that lies ahead. The transition from sleep requires that I remember what day of the week it is and what activities are planned for the day. My days are rich and varied. Although I do have routines, there are days that require different modes of dress and preparation.

You might think that Sundays would have their own routine, since I go to church at the same time; worship is at the same time and lasts approximately the same amount of time; there may be a meeting after worship, but the mornings are fairly consistent in terms of what events occur. However, Sunday is the morning of the week when I need to sort out the most ideas and concepts as I make that transition from sleeping to being awake. Part of the process is that what seems to work best for me is to do the preparation for worship in advance and then to take Saturday off. It isn’t that I don’t work on Saturday. I often have church-related activities on Saturdays. However, I rarely spend time working on the worship service per-se. It might be in the back of my mind as I focus on other activities, but I rarely am sitting at the computer or at a desk surrounded by books on a Saturday. It is just my style. I have colleagues who like to spend much of Saturday afternoon on sermon preparation. For me, if I don’t have things in place earlier in the week, I fall into a kind of panic.

Of course there are plenty of events that can occur in a church that force a change in a well-planned worship service. I remember early in my career planning for the worship service that would follow the championship game in the state basketball tournament. Our town’s team wound its way through the preliminary rounds victories, but we didn’t know until Friday evening whether or not they would be playing in the championship round. And the championship game was Saturday night. I listened to the game on the radio so that I would have that information for the next morning. I sort of had two different sermons: one for victory, another for loss. What I hadn’t figured on was that most of the town had traveled to the game and worship attendance the next day was pretty light. I might have had a good sermon had the room been full, but it is always a challenge to preach a cogent message to a handful of people. As it was, the sermon has not become memorable for me and I doubt that it was for the people in the church.

Of course worship is much more than a sermon. The goal of good preaching is not to have people going away from the church thinking, “Wow! that was a good sermon!” The goal is to have people leave with a deeper understanding of the connection of scripture and how it informs their daily living. Given the choice, I’d always choose to have people remember the scripture, not the sermon.

One of the dynamics in a complex congregation like ours, is that different people come to worship with different expectations. Members of our bell choir will rise today thinking about the bell anthems that are a part of worship. The choir director will be thinking of the choral anthem and responses. I rose thinking, “Three anthems! I really have to be concise and brief with my words.” Most preachers will tell you that finding the right words to have a short sermon is harder work that being allowed more time. One of those quotes whose source has been lost that I often use goes like this: “I didn’t have time to make it short!”

It must have been different fro Pastor Zach Zehnder from Florida who recently broke the Guiness world record for the Longest Speech by preaching a sermon that lasted 53 hours and 18 minutes. The stunt was a successful fund-raising effort for a nonprofit that provides free drug and alcohol addiction counseling. It was a noble cause, but something that wouldn’t interest me. It’s one thing to bore the congregation. It is a different matter entirely to preach yourself into boredom. And Zehnder didn’t create much fresh material for the marathon. He went into the pulpit with 50 previously-prepared sermons. In the end I guess there were a few that he skipped. That’s about a year’s worth of sermons in one sitting.

Of course, I’m not as long-winded as Zehnder every Sunday. A year’s worth of my sermons wouldn’t amount to half of the previous world record.

I commend Zehnder for his dedication and ability to raise funds for an important cause. He probably feels that it was worth the effort. But that is one record that I’m perfectly willing to let stand. In my mind, preaching shouldn’t be an endurance test for me or for the congregation. After all, worship is about a total experience, not about what I have to say. In our congregation, there are people who bring life experiences into the room that far exceed anything that has occurred to me. We bring together people of all different ages and experiences and my job is to make connections. I like to think about the people. Preaching is a relationship for me. Part of my Sunday morning routine is a half hour or so in the sanctuary when no one else is present. Sometimes I run through my sermon and write a few notes to myself. Sometimes I just sit quietly. My preferred activity is to sit for a couple of minutes in several different places in the sanctuary and think about the people who usually sit in that part of the room. Most of our people sit in the same general area week after week. And I know a lot of their stories.

Their lives are different every week. And it makes sense that the entire community is shaped by the events in the lives of our members.

The schedule may be similar. The day is never routine. And that is a blessing.

I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.