Lift Up Your Hearts

I am off to preach in Chapel tomorrow. My first Sunday since finishing in the parish after sixteen years as Vicar. It is strange to think that I no longer have a church - though I shall be all over everywhere in my new role.

Sermons these days are expected, by and large, to be ten to twelve minute homilies. The expansive evening  address hangs on in some places, and of course there are many parishes where sermon is more the focus than Sacrament. The pulpit in S Paul's cathedral has a clock set into the coving, close to the lecturn where one pplaces ones notes. It has a fourth hand - which is red - which the preacher sets to point to the time at which he aims to finish. I was told when I preached there once for evensong that I had better not over run my time or the choir would have to be paid for an extra hour. I think they meant it!

Brevity can aid clarity and no one wants to snooze throiugh waffle; but there is a problem about how to develop longer trains of thought and argument, and what is short is sometimes inadequate.

As an undergraduate I struggled once with an essay. My supervisor clarified things for me, and I exclaimed "it's simple really!" 'Yes,' she said, 'simple but not simplistic.' To write - and speak - simply but without falling into being simplistic. Now there is the art of the true preacher. Read again the sermon on the Mount in S Matthew or the sermon on the Plain in S Luke. Look at the parables. The Incarnate Word spoke so simply: but never simplistically.