Sermon Revisions, Poem Revisions

It's been a good week-end, with our attention shifting from home repairs to church work.  I usually have a rough draft of my sermon written by Friday, but not last week.  So my main writing task on Saturday was sermon writing.  Happily, by the time I sat down to write, I had already plotted it out in my head.

You can read my sermon in yesterday's blog post at my theology blog.

It's always interesting to see how the sermon changes from rough draft to preaching manuscript to actual delivery.  For example, I will occasionally reference the youth sermon, but since I don't write it in advance, it won't be in the written versions.

We're a small church, and occasionally in the summer, when families are on vacation, we have no youth, so there's no youth sermon.  When I announced that there would be no youth sermon, I asked the congregation to think about what had brought them joy in their own youth.  I referenced a popsicle in the park event that one of the members had made the subject of a Facebook post.  The recording of the sermon referenced that popsicle event; the manuscript does not.

You can view yesterday's sermon here, on my YouTube channel.

I've been trying to read my sermon less, which in some ways is good, primarily in the more lively energy.  But I don't like that I get tongue-tied, and I worry about my sermons getting longer.  I try to limit my discursive comments so that they don't become a wandering tangent where I can't easily get back.  I want a sermon to be 9-12 minutes, so if I'm going to continue this experiment in not looking at the manuscript as much, maybe the manuscript needs to be shorter.  

Now it's time to shift my attention back to poetry writing.  My various writing projects do feed each other, while at the same time demanding time, which requires constant balancing.  Last week, I returned to a May rough draft of a poem, "A Song Both Familiar and Strange."  In the poem, I connect my visit to my friend who had a catastrophic stroke which means she now lives in the skilled nursing unit to Julian of Norwich.  I did some serious revising, moving stanzas, taking out material.  I think it's done, but before I started last week's revisions, I thought it was done.  

Last week's earlier draft ended with this stanza, which I worried ended the poem on too melancholy a note:

By your bedside, as you sip
tea through a straw, I think
of Julian of Norwich
who insisted that all manner
of things shall be well.
I wish that I could share
the convictions of Julian,
but in the presence
of your shrinking
body and mangled speech,
my doubts blossom
into an orchard of hazelnut trees.

Now that stanza is in the middle of the poem.  Here's the last stanza:

Like a medieval priest
chanting words in a strange
language, I read scraps
of Julian’s work, her odd
metaphors for the Divine
filling the space between us.
You listen and sing
a song both familiar and strange.

Last week I even made some poetry submissions.  In some ways, it's easier in the summer when many journals aren't taking submissions.  In September, when most journals are "open," and most for a very short time, I find it overwhelming.