Years ago, however, when I thought this would not be my pen-ultimate but my ultimate (my last) sermon, I started a file called “Last Sermon.” Anything I thought would apply to a last sermon I carefully stashed away in the file. Well, dear hearts, even if this isn’t the last, it is going to have a lot of those perfectly pithy perusings about this and that and the other. If I used all of them, we would be here till next Sunday. As it is, we will likely be finished by 6:00 PM or so.

The liturgical season of Advent is always the four Sundays prior to Christmas. Because I was ordained as a minister fifty years ago on Friday, and because I have been concentrating for two Sundays on my thoughts regarding a half-century of preaching, I have not had truly Advent themes this Advent until today. But even now we shall not be looking at the birth of Jesus per se, but rather at his life and public ministry, and especially at his death and resurrection.

No preacher in the history of homiletics has been more greatly blessed by the quality of the minds in the congregations he has served than I. Purely by the grace of God, I have been associated with congregants, the majority of whom were eager and able thinkers. Through the past fifty years the most common comment about my preaching has been something on this order: “I didn’t necessarily agree with what you said, but you made me think.” Only people who can and do think would ever say, “You made me think.” Those who don’t think wouldn’t say that, because it would never occur to them to think to say it.

Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Normally during Advent preachers talk about various aspects of the coming of Jesus Christ into the world as Lord and Savior. The word Advent literally means Coming, so that centuries-old pattern is very understandable. However, for us this Advent will be mainly a Non-Advent Advent. I shall be preaching three sermons during Advent itself, but only one of them will have a traditional Advent theme. The other two sermons, and the sermon on the Sunday after Christmas, will be a brief summary of my thoughts regarding preaching as a major factor in worship, as well as a primary vocational responsibility of parish ministers.

The account of Jesus walking on water is problematic for the kind of people who are skeptical of anything that runs counter to ordinary experience, or which seems to contradict the laws of nature. A human being walking on the surface of the Sea of Galilee is a good example.

From the time I preached my first sermon as a high school student in Christ Presbyterian Church of Madison, Wisconsin (my home congregation growing up), I have written out every word of every sermon I ever preached. I might alter what I wrote a little bit during the delivery of some of those sermons on the spur of the moment, but not much. So the real issue I am addressing here is this: In that fifty-year span of sermons, to whom was I preaching: to the parishioners, or to me? To myself, or to you?

There would be no Church of Jesus Christ had there been no Jesus Christ. That is obvious, but it’s the first thing to say. The second thing is to say that there would be no Church of Jesus Christ had there been no Apostle Paul. That is less obvious to most people. The third thing to say, and one which almost no one, other than those who attended seminary, would observe, is that there would be no Church of Jesus Christ had there been no council of the New Testament church leaders as it was recorded in Acts 15.

There are many issues we may deliberately prevent ourselves from seeing: malaria or ebola in tropical countries, rapidly advancing desertification in the American West and sub-Saharan Africa, physical abuse of women and children, a steadily if also slowly rising sea level. What we don’t like to think about we can conveniently erase from our vision and our minds.

Every branch of Christianity and every denomination originated because an individual or a group of individuals believed that they had discovered the best way, or perhaps they thought the only way, to be a proper Christian. The New Testament was completed about the year 120 in the Christian calendar. It is obvious, especially from reading the Book of the Acts of the Apostles and the letters of the apostle Paul, that the New Testament Church was not a solidly unified institutional entity. It was, in fact, already splintered, as the New Testament itself asserts.

A couple of weeks ago, I announced in the sermon that today I would preach the last of a 10+-year series of sermons on the Book of Psalms. I realize that may have little or no significance to you folks, because every Sunday you are stuck with listening to whatever sermon I preach from whatever text in whatever book of the Bible, and therefore you need give the matter no thought whatever ahead of time. I, on the other hand, obsessively ponder these issues, and since The Chapel Without Walls started nearly eleven years ago, I set a goal for myself to preach from nearly all of the 150 Psalms. Today is my last hurrah to the Psalms as your full-time-part-time parson.

Words have immense power. They also can pose grave dangers. I suppose that even as a teenager I realized both of those truths. For that reason, throughout my ministry I have always written out every word of what I intended to say in a sermon. On occasion I will insert something that pops into my addled brain when I am delivering a sermon, but it doesn’t happen often. I am amazed at the increasing number of preachers, especially younger ones, who preach without a complete manuscript, or indeed in many instances without even any notes. I would go into cardiac arrest were I to attempt to preach like that. Kudos to those who preach extemporaneously excellently, but as for me, give me a complete text, or the lack of same will give me death.

The first eighteen verses of the 139th Psalm are the clearest and most compelling passage of scripture in the entire Bible for describing what theologians have long called “the omnipresence of God.” You don’t need a doctorate in linguistics to know that the word “omnipresence” suggests that God is everywhere, that He is in all (“omni”) places.

Labor Day is one of several annual national holidays. It always signals the beginning of the school year, or at least it did in the school districts in which many of us lived for much of our lives. Back in the day, there were Labor Day parades and public gatherings in which labor union leaders and others, including the clergy, spoke out in recognition of the importance of work. Now, labor unions are hard pressed to find jobs for their members or members for those jobs, especially in a state like South Carolina, which is not thrilled with unions and which, during one very memorable period, was not thrilled with The Union, either.

Psalm 136 is like no other Psalm in the entire book of 150 Psalms. It has 26 verses, and every one of those verses contains this proclamation about God: “For his steadfast love endures forever.” Twenty-six verses, and twenty-six times the phrase is repeated about God, “For his steadfast love endures forever.”

Sometimes dictionaries are helpful in defining words, and sometimes they aren’t. My Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, which I have had since college and which thus isn’t very new anymore, defines the word “Christendom” with two definitions. The first is that Christendom is Christianity. The two words, this implies, are synonymous. No church historian or sociologist of religion would ever accept that as a proper definition, and I also firmly reject it. The second definition comes closer to being satisfactory, although even it does not describe what most academics would think is a valid explanation of Christendom. It says that Christendom is “the portion of the world in which Christianity prevails.”

Defining orthodoxy or heresy is a tricky business, and it depends in large measure on the views of whoever is doing the defining. For much of our lives, some of us have been branded as heretics by people who considered themselves the epitome of orthodoxy, and others of us who are more orthodox have fitted in very nicely with those who agree with us on nearly everything.

For many reasons, life gets messy. We mess it up ourselves, others mess it up for us, or it just gets messed up through no particular fault of anyone. Someone you love is engulfed by a situation over which neither of you has any control, or he or she is afflicted with a serious illness, or she or he is the victim of a stolen identity, or someone from the past has surfaced to vex him or her, and now both of you are victims of the vexing. Someone close to you spends money like water, and it results in a constant financial crisis. It’s a mess, a colossal mess. How are you going to resolve it? Is it resolvable?

It seems so counter-intuitive. WE don’t believe in everyone. We don’t love everyone. Who could believe in or love people who murder teenagers in Israel, whether the murderers are Palestinians or Israelis? Who could believe in or love a man who allegedly left his young child in a hot car to die? Who can believe in or love priests who sexually abuse children, or drug dealers who deliberately hook innocent victims on crack cocaine or pain killers or heroin, or religious zealots, who kill in the name of religion? It is not so hard to imagine that God believes in us, in you and me, because we believe ourselves to be relatively upright and righteous people, but how could God believe in some of the people we know or read about or see on television?

First, we need a very brief explanation of terms. The word “libertarian” has been around for a long time, while the word “communitarian” is of fairly recent origin. Libertarian philosophy has evolved into promoting as little government as possible and as much personal freedom and personal rights as possible. Communitarian philosophy, on the other hand, readily accepts the necessity of government, although it doesn’t necessarily see government as a panacea. It promotes the good of the whole populace as compared to the good of the individual and individual freedoms and rights. In a single but admittedly exaggerated statement, libertarianism focuses on me and communitarianism focuses on us.

Death comes to everyone and everything. All animals die, all plants die, all trees die, all people die. Even mountains die, in that over millions or billions of years they eventually erode into dust. The molecules of all dead things are reconstituted into other animate or inanimate things, and the process of life and death goes on forever. Thus everything and everyone, including you and me, shall die. It is written into the very nature of nature. Nevertheless, what is to be gained by Christians affirming death? What is to be gained by acknowledging the inevitability and even the benefit of our death?