It's Beginning to Look a lot Like...

Like the song says, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. If you still have school-age children at home, they will soon be dismissed to their Christmas vacation. This, during one of the most intense times of ministry for preachers. Even if you no longer have children at home, you are feeling the pinch of the extras of the season. Extra gatherings, parties, dinners, caroling, and worship services. Along with wanting to put our best foot forward during a time where we might engage more visitors, we are trying to complete the work of one year whilst putting the finishing touches on our plans for the next. The time of Advent and Christmas is truly exhilarating and exhausting. 

    It is not a time to let your focus on preaching slip. It is not a time to lose concentration. It is not a time to phone it in. This is particularly tempting because the passages which routinely surface during the Christmas season are familiar. You have likely preached them before. People are filled with the joy and enthusiasm of the season and probably do not remember what you said last Christmas Eve when you preached from Luke 2. So, this year use that text on the Sunday morning before Christmas, tweak the introduction and conclusion, throw in different illustrations, and voila! Sermon complete, time saved, you’re the hero. Till next year when you will have to make some of the same choices. Or 10 years hence when you’re still wrestling with “new things” to say at Christmas. 

    It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Again. It comes every year at pretty much the same time. Some years will be busier than others. Your Christmas preaching needs to be fully embedded in your preaching plan. This is one of the reasons I constantly harp on the need for fully planning a year in advance. After years of ministry, some of the easiest things begin to become more and more difficult. Christmas and Easter come every year. They arrive with certain expectations of what will be preached, and those sermons generally come from a restricted number of texts. If you approach this significant season as detached from what you are preaching through the whole year you will likely end up in one of two places. The rut of repetition or innovation escalation. Let’s examine these two pitfalls of the looming Christmas preaching season.

The Rut of Repetition

    I alluded to this pitfall above. It is tempting to say the same things about the Nativity every year. And while it is true that some Biblical truths need constant reinforcement, that process should be creative and engaging. After years of studying the processes of preaching, I am convinced that the best way to avoid redundancy is by incorporating Christmas, and other seasonal preaching into a year-long thematically organized preaching calendar. 

    And tell people! There is no reason for this process to be a secret. Explain to people that you have invested a lot of time and thought into preparing a 52-week plan for preaching and teaching scripture. Give them a preview of the year and include a glimpse of how the important seasons of Christmas and Easter are embedded in that larger plan.

    As is often the case I can hear many of you ask, “Why?” Longevity and freshness.  After years into the annual cycle of preparing to preach, you must beware of the twin problems of a bored preacher and a bored congregation. There is nothing like sitting down to prepare a Christmas sermon from an unfamiliar text, or a familiar text being applied in a new fashion. It keeps you fresh and involved. It will provoke new questions from those old texts and perhaps even evoke some new intertextual conversations. You may discover that when this Christmas Eve or Christmas Sunday sermon is finished that you have a list of new sermon arcs that will be useful for many years to come.

Innovation Escalation

    The second pitfall to be avoided is innovation for innovation’s sake; innovation escalation Once this process begins the preacher engages in a difficult cycle of trying to find new ways to convey old messages that are not firmly anchored to the text, or that rely on novelty. 

    Much of the material provided online is topical at best. Some of it is so driven by popular trends that it is just a passage of scripture away from being nothing more than culturally driven holiday encouragement. Often these messages provided turnkey from independent vendors, practically require all of the secondary and tertiary materials provided to engineer the fully conceived effect. Videos, handouts, cards, programming materials, dramatic readings and plays, children’s programming, and so on. It is possible to prepare these kinds of materials in-house, but there is clearly an arms race and even when not buying it is often easier for a harried and unfocused preacher to just copy or buy the work from others. Then the real trouble begins. After a big hit this year, after something memorable and moving, the pressure will escalate next year to do something even more innovative. And the next year. And the next. This sort of non-biblical process is just as exhausting as trotting out the same old thing every year, except it costs more and relinquishes more and more control of your pulpit to the worship industrial complex.  

Conclusions

    You, the preacher, are in charge of what goes on in the pulpit. You can either do your work with excellence or you can farm it out to the expectations or products of others. Why would you want to do that? If you have been called to preach that means you are called to prepare. You are called to use your gifts to the best of your ability. You are called to envision not only weekly sermons but a program of preaching. You are called to see the work not only tactically (week by week) but strategically (year by year by year). 

    You are called to preach. By the time Christmas is coming, you should be itching to preach those Christmas sermons which have been percolating in your planning process. You should be excited to tell old, old story in a new and engaging way, as a part of a long-term sustainable process. When you get done with this Christmas Eve sermon, with this year’s Christmas season you should already be planting the seeds of next year in your sermon garden. 

    God called you. I trust you and I will do everything in my power to encourage you and equip you to be the best preacher you can be.