Monday, September 3, 2012

Recycled sermons?

I've recently read of an alleged problem within Christianity pertaining to the lack of unique sermons.  The citation warned about 'recycled sermons,' but this sounds like as a strange chord being played in striving for unique sermons as if we need to search for brave new interpretation to suit the growing complexity of the audience receiving the application.  Recycling two hundred year old illustrations will certainly leave an audience baffled, just as much as a message contextualized for the problems of a foreign culture will most likely be misunderstand in our culture, but the main points in exposition will not drastically change.    

The very idea of too many recycled sermons seems to be kind of a misnomer because of the limited amount of qualifying sermons in the New Testament, so it is a tragedy to think you need a new sermon, or even a different sermon.  Truth is not recycled; the truth claim made in the N.T. is the truth we stand by, and it will always be the truth.  The problem is not too many recycled Piper, MacArthur, Spurgreon, or Westley sermons, all embedded with lots of truth value, but at the same time they have a practical variant which is a tad distant from saying they have the same homelitical truth claim in the Acts sermons or the 1 Corinthians 15 proclamation of the gospel which followed the exhortation of living in a still fallen world.  The problem arises when we are not preaching the N.T. sermon of living in Christ our Lord crucified, resurrected, ascended, and reigning.

Do we suffer from a lack of creativity?  Yes.  Is it wrong for the same thing to be said over and over again?  No.  We have a limited amount of source material, so it may get old to hear the same things over and over again, but should we stray away from N.T. homelitics patterned in the oral gospel and the liturgical epistle.  I'm all for retelling the gospel in today's language, but I don't think we need a unique retelling every time around.

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