A Sermon in the Face of Tragedy

Last Wednesday, on the eve of his ordination, my friend Jody’s wife passed away. Carolyn was young and this was completely unexpected. Jody anticipated going to presbytery on Thursday, then being installed at Grace Presbyterian Church in Conway, SC on Sunday. That changed radically. Jody and Grace Church are both in shock and would covet your prayers for their healing.

In the face of this, Grace asked if I would preach to them the Sunday Jody was to be ordained. This was far and away the most difficult sermon I have ever preached. You can download the sermon by clicking here or listen using the widget below. If you do listen, please pray for Jody, his 4 children, and Grace Church.

iPads in the Pulpit!?!

As many of you know, I received an iPad as a gift for my ordination a few months ago.  Since then, I have loved a number of things about it.  I use Pocket Informant HD to keep my calendars and to-do list.  I use Dropbox and QuickOffice to edit documents on the fly and make a step towards using less paper.

I also started to use the ESV Bible application.  I love its simplicity and I love using to notes function to create sermons or youth talks.  At the same time, I am weary of using it too much, especially in church settings.  Tim Challies wrote a great series of post, that you can access by clicking here, about e-books and how the medium shapes the message.

So with great trepidation, I preached my Grandfather’s funeral from my iPad.  Afterwords, I was discussing my discomfort about preaching from an iPad with my dad.  He, in his keenly sarcastic way, said, “Yeah, I remember when the Gutenberg Press was invented and these slacker pastors started carrying their bibles into the pulpit instead of memorizing the whole thing”.  In short, get over it.  And in short, I think he was right.

So when it was my turn to preach last week, I decided to dive headlong into 21st century sermon prep.  I had my secretary scan all my commentaries and studies into PDF’s.  I loaded those into the iPad and trotted on over to Starbucks to do my prep.  It was wonderful.  The only thing that I would change is the fact that I couldn’t multi-task (which is coming in November).

So here it is in all of its technological stumbling:  The Table Guests: Luke 14:1-24