Yawns and Preaching

In a few hours I will be preaching again.  It has been a long time since I have stood in the pulpit to preach a sermon.  The church that gave me the invitation should know there is some risk.  It could possibly be a long sermon since I have not preached a sermon in several years.  I may have forgotten how to stop when I am finished.  Sometimes the two moments are far apart.  And, it could also be that my preaching will suffer from a lot of rust.  When preaching is not practiced Sunday after Sunday, the preacher can be rusty and inappropriately as loud as a old door hinge squeaking as it opens and closes.    

Regardless of all these concerns, I am ready.  Unless the folks get wind of the risk, I will be preaching in a few hours.  When the invitation came, I thought about my sermon barrel.  While no preacher actually has a sermon barrel, it is the mythological place where old sermons are stored.  I dug down though its musty smells and decided there was nothing there fresh enough to preach.  So, I did the unthinkable.  I wrote a new sermon.  It may not be any good since it has been so long since I have written one, but it will at least be fresh bread instead of something so stale it reeks of being stale and out of date.    

The problem with preaching old sermons is that they can often end up being very unexciting.  It is hard for the preacher to get excited about preaching old stuff and if the preacher is short in the excitement department, it is a certain thing that the congregation will find nothing exciting in the sermon being preached.  I still have memories of a sermon preached one Sunday night some fifty years ago.  In the middle of the sermon, I yawned.  I also remember that I recognized the yawn as a sign that it was time to quit which is a requirement for any good sermon.  Here is hoping that neither the preacher, nor the congregation suffers from yawns that are too obvious tomorrow.