One comment I hear from preachers is that they wait on the Holy Spirit for inspiration before writing their sermons.
Unfortunately, though, the Spirit doesn’t inspire them until 11PM on Saturday night!
This leads to stressful, sleepless Saturday nights preparing their sermons, followed by tired Sunday mornings, a collapse onto the couch for the Sunday afternoon nap, and then repeating the whole process the next week.
And the next.
And the next…until sermon preparation is all anxiety and overwhelm, with the preacher waiting impatiently on the Spirit to appear, who is as unpredictable as the wind.
Let’s unpack this common conundrum.
Who’s Waiting on Whom?
We probably agree that no sermon that is of God, that hopes to offer a genuine word of God’s Good News, comes from human efforts.
The Holy Spirit serves as our muse, inspiring our message and the way we offer it to our listeners.
We probably also agree that we don’t control the Spirit, as John 3.8 tells us: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
All well and good.
Where we might disagree, however, is to believe we are simply at the mercy of when the Spirit decides to show up!
Because even though we don’t know where the wind comes from or where it’s going—that doesn’t mean currents of air aren’t always circulating.
The breath of God, the Spirit, sustains our every waking moment, our rising and our setting, our creativity and perseverance.
We can put ourselves in the path of the Spirit because: The Spirit. Never. Stops. Moving.
The Spirit is moving!
One way we do this at Backstory Preaching is by beginning our sermon prep early in the week.
It’s amazing how much inspiration we receive when we slowly and prayerfully engage Sunday’s text the Monday prior!
It’s also amazing how much inspiration we receive when we engage the text with parishioners or other preachers!
In fact, you can join us any Monday at 12:00 CT on Backstory Preaching’s Facebook page to pray the coming Sunday’s RCL gospel.
The Spirit always shows up, providing us a cornucopia of sermon ideas!
Another way we can be inspired anytime of the week, is by slowing down and feasting on the inspiration the Spirit provides through other preachers, writers, and poets, those muses who are always present on page and computer screen!
There’s never a need for us to wait, patiently or impatiently, for the Spirit to show up late Saturday night, because the Spirit is just waiting on us, every day, all week long—and I trust, patiently!
To inspire you through the season of Advent, I put together a collection of Advent quotations from people like Hildegard of Bingen, Howard Thurman, Miles Davis, Alice Parker, Carlos G. Vallés, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Click here to receive your free copy.
We don’t have to wait until Saturday night for the Spirit to deign to arrive.
The Spirit is always available, eager to share the Good News with us, for us, and through us for our listeners.
We can make ourselves available early in the week.
We can slow down enough to actually hear the Word the Spirit offers.
We can join with other preachers and listen for the Word the Spirit offers us through them.
And we can let our hearts rest in the wise, beautiful, challenging—inspirational—words of the muses like those in this Advent collection.
The Spirit is just waiting for us to deign to show up.