Easter 4.AVI

So I had a bit of a saga with this sermon. It began on Tuesday when I read the scriptures assigned for the the fourth Sunday of Easter of the Revised Common Lectionary. I was excited to see John 10:10 as the last verse of the gospel passage. It is one of Dad's favorite verses from all of scripture, and I remembered him preaching on it often as a kid. I was excited to use an acronym for the word L.I.F.E. that he used because I like to honor my father as my true homiletics teacher, and his material was always rick solid. I knew the sermon would land using his outline. So, I spent the next few days thinking about what I wanted to say using his acronym as the backbone of the sermon. On Wednesday I flushed out his outline a little bit using my mind mapping software (this detail will be important later). When I got to Friday, which is my writing day, the sermon went down on "paper" pretty easily. That is to say I typed into OpenOffice in a couple of hours.

So,I had my first draft complete and was fairly happy with it. I decided to close out the program and let the sermon sit for a bit before I went back to fix typos and such. Well, as it would have it, when I closed out the program I hit "discard" instead of "save". Unlike every other sermon I have written in the last 10 years, I had not saved frequently as I went. Needless to say, I freaked out and almost chucked my computer through the stained glass windows of my office. Luckily, I didn't it, because folks are pretty fond of those stained glass windows. Anyway, after leaving the building, getting some lunch, and clearing my head a bit, I got a hold of one of vestry members who is a computer expert and he helped find and undelete the file. At this point, I am thinking that I now have a sermon illustration for the Resurrection to use at a latter date, which would be a really cool bonus to the drama of losing the sermon. Alas, this was not to be, because though we found the file, it was so corrupted that the text was illegible. In the words of my vestry member, "Yeah, you're screwed." So, I went back to the outline in the mind mapping software, amplified it a little bit, and preached from that. Some of my colleagues thought that maybe the holy spirit was involved in the whole drama, but I have my doubts. You can watch it here let me know if you think the spirit was involved.