Be careful what you talk about

In my sermon at All Saints’ earlier this month, I made a comment along the lines that my students think that one doesn’t have time to do an exegesis when you’re asked to preach the night before a service, and that I disagree.  Little did I know that I’d have the opportunity to prove that point...

I knew that I was on the chaplaincy schedule to preach at Community Worship on Tuesday, 2 December.  I began thinking about the topic and text assigned while I was in the States, and then began preparing in earnest on Monday this week.  Praise God that I did, because at 5:30 Monday evening, I got a call that since the scheduled preacher was out of town, the chaplaincy wanted me to preach the next day. 

This is quite a normal thing in Africa, to be ambushed either the night before, or even as you enter a church, with “oh, since you’ve come, you must bring the Word to us!”  I beg my students to be the generation that ends this practice; when you ambush someone, they’ve not had time to prepare anything.  Yes, the Holy Spirit can, and does, bail us out, but the point I make to my students is that the pastor’s responsibility is to feed the sheep, and when you ambush a preacher like this, you are likely sending your sheep away starving.

I don’t quite consider myself to have been ambushed, and thankfully, the Lord bailed me out (yet again!) and my sermon was well-received.  And no, I didn’t do a full-on exegesis of the text.  But I did enough.