More Sermons Than Anyone Could Possibly Want

For many, a single sermon is one sermon too many. For me, two thousand sermons were two thousand too many.

I figure that, roughly, I preached approximately two thousand sermons in my ministerial career. I almost always preached from a manuscript—typed or word-processed—and I kept a copy of each one of those sermons. Too lazy to count them all, I used gross arithmetic calculations to come up with two thousand of them.

They were stored in a dozen or so cardboard file (“banker’s”) boxes in our attic in Orange Village. Sweltering in summer’s heat and frozen by winter’s cold, through our family’s happy times and sad, above our heads and looming over us were scores of my sermon manuscripts. They began in my college days when I thought I was up to the task of preaching, and ended well into my retirement days when I was no longer sure I had ever been up to it. Preaching the word of GOD! is awesome business, as awesome as God.

I had kept them all, (1) because I thought I might preach some of them a second or third or more times; and (2) because I thought I’d re-read them one day to see how I’d grown (or not) in my preaching skills; and (3) because I thought my daughters might want them and be deeply disappointed if dear old dad denied them their gift.

But I over the years realized that that, (1) I always found it more difficult and less satisfying to rework old sermons than to create new ones; and (2) that I never found time to review my preaching career; and (3) that my heirs were doing much more productive things with their lives than reading Dad’s sermons.

As we were beginning to downsize for our move to Breckenridge, I came up with a scheme to cut down the number of sermons—a scheme that would result in a random selection of four from each year, one from each quarter of each year. I wanted to include samples from all seasons of the church year, without regard to any particular sermon’s merits or lack thereof. This numerical scheme saved me from having to read them, which I now knew I would never do. I ended up with two boxes of sermon manuscripts, and threw the rest away.

Honesty compels this caveat: all of my sermons from 1998 on are stored in “the cloud.” But they are not as real to me as their printouts stored in cardboard.

Those two boxes now sit in a closet in our garage, patiently awaiting my return to them. They are surrounded by several more boxes of things I’ve hardly touched in six years, but which, when we moved, I was sure I’d get to, some day.

The question for all who are winding up their lives is why do we keep all that stuff? Once we are gone, why will it all be to anyone else other than something they have to make a decision about—a decision we should have, and could have, made ourselves?

But the thing about my sermons that makes them so hard for me to give up entirely is that they are from me, of me, and in some ways, me! They represent a calling that I gave the best of myself to for some five decades. They are about how I celebrated that calling and how I struggled with it and how I invited those who heard me to consider it the calling to follow Jesus themselves.

Sermons, of course, are not be be about the sermonizer, but about God and Jesus and love and trust and ethics…about things that are bigger than and in fact beyond the ability of the preacher to fully comprehend or live up to. But they are also about the preacher because they come from the mix of those big things and the time and space-bound orator who dares, Sunday after Sunday, to stand behind a pulpit and open their mouth.

No wonder I have held on to at least a few of them; they are my Icarus-like attempt to fly on melting wings.