feedback

I preached this morning. It was my sixth and final preaching gig for the semester, though I still have to write two more sermons for class. The sermon that I preached this morning was actually written for a class last fall too. I preached on Jesus' entry into Jerusalem from Luke 19, a story with lots of tears and no palm branches or hosannas--contrary to what one might expect on Palm Sunday.

What's always interesting to me is what people say after the sermon. I admit I don't always know what to say when I shake the preacher's hand when walking out of the sanctuary. I usually just say, "Thank you," and walk on, and that's what many people did this morning too. However, I also received a few bits of feedback that I'm going to share here.

"You know, I never thought about this story as..." A woman who's probably in her 60s told me this, and I was delighted. She's probably heard 50 Palm Sunday sermons in her life--a dozen from each of the gospels. And so the challenge for the preacher with passages that are so familiar is to help them hear the story in a fresh way and to encounter Jesus in the story. The point is not to be creative just for the sake of creativity; efforts at being unique often lead to heresy (thankfully, since I wrote this sermon for class, I wasn't really worried about it being unorthodox; my professor has already judged it to be "exegetically intelligent"). The goal is not to be unique but instead to shake off the shackles of familiarity and expectation and let the story speak afresh.

"Awesome, awesome, awesome. That's all I have to say." My Mexican friend told me this. My sermon touched on the fact that sometimes people say the right things but have the wrong idea of the kingship of Jesus, and I used the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa as an example. They adhere to the Heidelberg Catechism, Canons of Dort, and Belgic Confession (these are the three confessions that unite my denomination as well), and yet the Dutch Reformed Church was the one who pushed for apartheid in South Africa. In fact, the prime minister in South Africa who instituted apartheid was a Dutch Reformed pastor. My sermon also touched on racial reconciliation issues that happen in my denomination and community too, and this obviously resonated with my friend.

"What should I do with this?" One of the freshmen in our youth group said this to me as he showed me a paper with two columns on it entitled "Good stuff" and "Bad stuff." Prior to the service, I had handed out a few sermon evaluation forms to a some attendees so I could get some feedback on the sermon. I had given one to another guy in our youth group, and but this guy wanted to evaluate the sermon too. Therefore, he made his "good stuff" and "bad stuff" categories and filled it out while I was preaching. I read it when I got home, and I was humbled. His evaluation was rhetorically quite brilliant and accurate, and he had even picked up on an internal connection in my sermon that I wasn't even aware of as I wrote it (and he chided me for not emphasizing it). And that is the way the Spirit sometimes works.