Well, it was the final preach for me in the Ecclesiastes series, and although I found it the hardest one to prepare, it went fine. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed preparing the series and preaching the sessions that I did. Ecclesiastes is a fantastic book but one that still maintains a certain amount of enigma to it! I opened with a poem I’ve written, which I may well share with you later this week.
What a chunk to deal with! I’ve never preached on such a large portion of scripture before, but I did enjoy doing so yesterday. It went well and in order to read enough to get the gist of what was going on in that chunk I introduced the first reading just as a poem—not telling the congregation until afterwards that it was part of the passage. I read Eccl. 7:1-14 in the New Century Version.
Having arrived back from holidays, yesterday was the first preach I did in Malpas Road’s summer series on Ecclesiastes, life? Meirion Thomas preached the first two, which I was unhelpfully away on holiday for.
I’ve been asked to organise a series on Ecclesiastes to run over the summer. The best known bit of Ecclesiastes, made famous by The Byrds and their ‘to everything turn, turn, turn’ and by funerals, is the bit where it talks about a time to be born and a time to die, a time to cast away stones and to gather them together (Eccl. 3:1-8).
Sunday just gone, I was preaching both in the morning and the evening, in different places. The morning one was a bit short notice, and I haven’t got bags of time at the moment, so I did the same sermon in both venues. It was a sermon I’ve preached twice before as well, once without any notes, so I was quite confident with it.
(Synopses of previous chapters can be accessed by clicking here)
One of the problems is that there is little apostolic preaching in the New Testament, at least not the regular Sunday style preaching. This means we haven’t got so many examples to mimic. The redemptive-historical Christ-centred hermeneutic is abundant in their writing, however.
(Synopses of previous chapters can be accessed by clicking here)
The preacher is torn between the desire to preach Christ in all the scriptures, as he is the only means of salvation and sanctification, but also of being faithful to the text itself, where a Christocentric emphasis may feel artificial. “We want to preach Christ, but we also want to preach each text with integrity” (p.128).
(Synopses of previous chapters can be accessed by clicking here)
The aim here is not to sample the whole 200 year history of preaching but to sample a few hermeneutical controversies along the way. These have often centred around church authority in interpretation as well as context (historical and literary) and genre.
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