Post-Game Analysis

(this was supposed to get published yesterday.  My apologies)

So ... Sunday was a little bit crazy at the DC CRC, huh?  I realized on Friday that God was not going to give me a "normal" sermon.  It was a full week.  I wouldn't have minded "normal."

But instead: outline and props and audience participation, oh my!

So I've been reflecting on the nature of preaching (as I do) and realizing a couple of things:

1) Generally, I am a narrative preacher.  I gravitate toward the narrative texts in the Bible (OT, Gospel, Acts.)

2) When preaching narrative texts, the story is the central image, metaphor, illustration.  The job of the preacher, then, it seems to me, is to re-tell the story, inserting textual insights along the way.  The raw materials are evocative and the preacher crafts a scaffolding of teaching and nuance around it (hopefully in a way that never obscures the original materials.)

3) Colossians is not a narrative text.  It is an epistle, written by the Apostle Paul, chock full of insights, teaching, nuance and concrete concepts.

4) Preaching epistles is proving to be an exercise in building scaffolding out of central images, metaphors, illustrations, etc.  I am required to re-insert the story (because Colossians is not a text written outside a context, which means that there is a story there somewhere.) And Paul, God love him (& God does), is full of passion but you have to pull a little harder on the threads of the text for the evocative language/metaphor to start unraveling.

5) Explanations & apologies in advance, then, for stranger than normal sermons.  Thanks & a request for patience as you have given me the opportunity to stretch and grow and learn with you.