I’ve been trying to apply the mantra Keep It Simple Stupid to my sermons since returning to the pulpit.  I don’t know if it has improved my preaching but I plan on continuing to focus on simplicity.

You see, the big temptation I have is to try to be creative or put a new spin on a text, or look at it from a fresh perspective.  This is understandable, given that sermons (especially following the lectionary) can get as repetitive, boring and stale to preach as they can be to listen to.  So I find myself tempted to makes something more interesting by developing a more complicated sermon structure or approaching a text from a less obvious way, looking at inferences or subplots rather than the main point.  The problem is that complexity makes a sermon more difficult to follow and the less obvious bits I seem to pick up on can tend to also be less important; there’s a reason the main point of the text is the main point.

So I’ve committed myself of a year of preaching the most basic, simple and obvious message of each Sunday’s text in order to serve the meat and potatoes instead of intellectual delicacies and creative, theological tidbits.  As I do so I find myself pushed to make things more interesting by focusing more on presentation, illustration and clarity.

This seems like an obvious thing to do, but when you come to a story for the 10th year in a row the first question seems to be, ‘How can I deal with this that isn’t just like what I’ve done the past three times’ rather than ‘What does this say to us, here and now?’