Merry Day After Christmas. We’d like to hear about your churchgoing experience this past weekend. Or your church viewing experience, if you were among those who had a chance to watch the Christmas Eve broadcast from General Seminary during with Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached. Did you hear a good sermon? Did you give a good sermon? How was the music? Feel free to share links to text, podcast or videos.
To get the ball rolling, I want to say how impressed I was by Bishop Mariann Budde’s decision to begin her Christmas Eve sermons (6 pm and 10 pm) by singing a song–unaccompanied. The song was Christmas in the Trenches, which tells the story of the famous Christmas truce that broke out spontaneously along the front lines early in World War I. Her voice was pleasant, but not powerful, and the pulpit microphone, while ideal for preaching, didn’t provide perfect amplification, so one had to listen hard. This created an air of vulnerability (and therefore risk) which made the performance that much more compelling.
If one is going to preach on amazement, amazing your audience is probably a good way to start.