I have a great deal of empathy with Sidney Carter when he pleads, in the lyrics of one of his most famous songs ‘Present Tense’, to hear the Good News in the present tense.
When we prepare a sermon, we shouldn’t only have our assembled congregation in mind, we should have the people in the check-out queue at Sainsbury’s in mind too.
They’re the ones who need to hear the Good News in the context of our contemporary world. Sidney Carter goes on to sing about the living truth and that’s what we preachers should be offering – the living truth, the Good News now. Jesus in your high street and mine.
So as we prepare to preach, I hear all those right and necessary points about thinking around a text, praying over it and so on, but we also need decent news sources, in print or on screen, as we prepare.
Most of us need resources as we create our sermons – and I know that at our side we also need a contemporary Bible with inclusive language. And of course we need our commentary and concordance and perhaps a Bible dictionary, but we mustn’t start to write unless we have our sources of news – our news cuttings file – physical or electronic – to hand.
So when I’m listening to a sermon that’s always my litmus test: What is this saying to the listeners in the ‘present tense’? How is this sermon relevant to the person in the next seat to me on the bus? How are my pals at the squash club going to react to these words? How would this go down with friends in my local Italian eatery?
