How do you prepare

This Sunday I was preaching in two different churches. The first was an international church, where I was preaching in English; the second was a Latvian church that meets next door.

I decided to preach the same sermon. There would have been too much cognitive overload to switch topics so quickly. I try to inhabit the sermon, or as some people put it, “Get into the zone!”

I say that I preached the same sermon, and that is partly true.

The sermons did cover the same ground, but they did come out differently. I used a funny story to begin the sermon in the English-speaking service. It worked there but I felt that too much would be lost in translation in the Latvian service, so I ditched it and started the sermon differently. There were points in both sermons where the practical application was a bit different in both locations. Standing in front of a real congregation involves the preacher making a live connection with real people. The rapport and response of the congregation have an impact on how the sermon flows.

I think that the sermon landed well in both settings but in slightly different ways.

I was interested that two people spoke to me specifically about the sermons afterwards.

Both were Latvian and both were women. After the first service a young woman made her way to me from the other side of the room to say why the sermon had been helpful to her. In the second service another young woman asked me how I go about preparing a sermon.

I have been asked this questions many times and it is a difficult one to answer.

I spoke about how it takes twenty years to prepare a sermon because it takes twenty years to prepare a preacher. I explained that a sermon arises out of a process of prayer, reading, meditation and study. What I try to do is allow the shape and movement of the biblical text to become the shape and movement of the sermon.

The text I was preaching on was Mark 10:35–52. It comes at the end of the third major section in Mark (8:22–10:52), which is a sandwich between two miracles of restored sight.

The theme of ‘seeing’ clearly seems to be its unifying theme.

In the text we see James and John approaching Jesus who has just announced for the third time that he is going to experience a violent death. They demand that Jesus give them whatever they want.

Jesus asks them, “What do you want me to do for you?” They ask to have the top jobs in his kingdom. They are not seeing the humble suffering servant king clearly.

This same question is asked again by Jesus at the end of the passage. He has been approached by a blind man who ‘sees’ clearly who Jesus is and recognises that he has no entitlement to anything from Jesus.

Bartimaeus cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” When Jesus asks Bartimaeus the same question, “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus replies, “I want to see.”

The first thing that Bartimaeus sees is the face of Jesus.

We really do see when our vision is full of Jesus rather than full of ourselves.