Sermon Prep for Sunday

I'm a big believer that your surroundings affect your work! This morning I'm sitting on a hotel balcony on the west beach of Galveston Island (Texas) thinking about the sermon I need to preach on Sunday. What a blessing it is to have a few minutes to be by myself and listen to the waves and think about God. (On a side note, I am suprised by how much my work on worship every week has become such a big part of my devotional life!)

We (my family and I) are celebrating Thanksigiving this week in Galveston. I'm a little bit sad that we've got to leave in a few hours to get back to the world, it was nice while it lasted!

So the text for that I have been assigend to preach on this week is John 1:1-18. The more I read the text, pray, study the commentaries, and read the text some more, I am struck by just how very correct I think most of the commentaries (and my own anaylsis, frankly) are. In essence, in the prolouge, there are two different voices speaking in this beautiful, in not strangely edited, hymn/poem.

For this week's sermon, I think I'm going to briefly explain the two voices and go with the following three points...(which is funny, as I haven't written any three point sermons in a long while!)
1. John is telling us in no uncertain terms that Jesus Christ is the Lord of all Creation and that God wants to be in relationship with us so much that God would come to earth in human form to seek us out, to show us what God is like, and to teach us how to live for the Reign of God.
2. John is also instructing us (via the community that he lived in) that John the Baptist is not, infact Jesus. I think we need a reminder similar to that in the progressive church that there are a lot of things out there that are good, but that are not the main thing. (i.e. The ONE Campaign, which I think is a good and worthy thing, is good, but it is not the Jesus, it is not the best that God has for God's people, it's not God!)
3. THe light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never overtaken it! (And expand on this from there.)

Is it three sermons? Most likely! Will I need to do some crazy cutting, most definitley. I look forward to getting in to this in the study and seeing what happens!


Voice 2 continues to tell us