Sermon Illustrations on going through the motions



Background

The Music Must Always Play

As Europe plunged ever deeper into a second world war, the British poet W.H. Auden composed a poem (“September 1, 1939”) that peels back our human tendency to cover up all fear and uncertainty with sentimentality. But, as Fleming Rutledge notes, “the poet knows better:”

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play.

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort* assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

*emphasis mine

Ultimately, a flourishing life can only be lived when we face our fears head on, to allow our “fort”-like defenses down. The season of Advent calls us to peel back these layers, to see the situation, that is, our utter need of a savior, for the truth of what it is.

Source Material from “W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939,” in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), 57.” and Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, Eermdans, 2018.

Stories

Jonathan Swift’s Exhortation for Two

While primarily known today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift also served as an Anglican priest in his home country of Ireland. While his writing gained significant traction throughout Britain, his ministry was not quite so successful.

While serving a small parish in Laracor, Ireland in 1709, the author and clergyman regularly drew less than a dozen souls to Sunday worship. His prayer meetings were even less well received, where he could only depend on a “congregation of one,” his clerk and bell-ringer Roger Cox. Apparently, it was recorded at the beginning of one of these meetings, “Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places …’

Stuart Strachan Jr., Source Material from Hesketh Pearson, Lives of the Wits, 1962

Recording Your Prayers?

When prayer consists of the same spoken sentences on every occasion, naturally we wonder at the value of the practice. If our prayers bore us, do they also bore God? Does God really need to hear me say these things again? We can begin to feel like a little girl I heard about. Her parents had taught her the classic bedtime prayer for children that begins, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

One night she thought, “Why does God need to hear me say this again?” So she decided to record herself saying the prayer, and then she played the recording each night when she went to bed. Perhaps you smile at her story, but you have prayer recordings in your head; they’re just a little longer or more sophisticated. Recorded in your memory are prayers—your own or the prayers of others—you can repeat mindlessly.

Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible, Crossway, 2015.

The Usher’s Prayer

I pastored a church in the Chicago area for almost fifteen years. During the worship service one Sunday morning the ushers came forward to receive the offering, and one of the ushers was asked to pray. As the man was praying, I could hear someone else talking. I thought, Surely this person will stop in a moment. Then I realized it was a child, and I said to myself, Some adult will quiet this child any second now. But as the talking continued, I opened my eyes and saw in the second row the five-year-old son of the usher who was praying.

Soon it became obvious that the little boy was praying the same words as his dad; not repeating after him but in unison with him. It was like when entire congregations pray the Lord’s Prayer in unison; instead this was a father and son praying “Dad’s prayer.” How could such a little boy do that? It was because every time his dad prayed, whether at the Lord’s Supper table at the church or the supper table at home, his dad prayed the same prayer. The boy had been in the world only sixty months, and he had already memorized everything his dad said when he prayed. He could say the words of the prayer, but most of what came out of his mouth was just a repetition of what were, to his five-year-old mind, empty phrases.

Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible, Crossway, 2015.

Analogies

Recording Your Prayers?

When prayer consists of the same spoken sentences on every occasion, naturally we wonder at the value of the practice. If our prayers bore us, do they also bore God? Does God really need to hear me say these things again? We can begin to feel like a little girl I heard about. Her parents had taught her the classic bedtime prayer for children that begins, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

One night she thought, “Why does God need to hear me say this again?” So she decided to record herself saying the prayer, and then she played the recording each night when she went to bed. Perhaps you smile at her story, but you have prayer recordings in your head; they’re just a little longer or more sophisticated. Recorded in your memory are prayers—your own or the prayers of others—you can repeat mindlessly.

Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible, Crossway, 2015.

The Usher’s Prayer

I pastored a church in the Chicago area for almost fifteen years. During the worship service one Sunday morning the ushers came forward to receive the offering, and one of the ushers was asked to pray. As the man was praying, I could hear someone else talking. I thought, Surely this person will stop in a moment. Then I realized it was a child, and I said to myself, Some adult will quiet this child any second now. But as the talking continued, I opened my eyes and saw in the second row the five-year-old son of the usher who was praying.

Soon it became obvious that the little boy was praying the same words as his dad; not repeating after him but in unison with him. It was like when entire congregations pray the Lord’s Prayer in unison; instead this was a father and son praying “Dad’s prayer.” How could such a little boy do that? It was because every time his dad prayed, whether at the Lord’s Supper table at the church or the supper table at home, his dad prayed the same prayer. The boy had been in the world only sixty months, and he had already memorized everything his dad said when he prayed. He could say the words of the prayer, but most of what came out of his mouth was just a repetition of what were, to his five-year-old mind, empty phrases.

Donald S. Whitney, Praying the Bible, Crossway, 2015.

Humor

Jonathan Swift’s Exhortation for Two

While primarily known today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift also served as an Anglican priest in his home country of Ireland. While his writing gained significant traction throughout Britain, his ministry was not quite so successful.

While serving a small parish in Laracor, Ireland in 1709, the author and clergyman regularly drew less than a dozen souls to Sunday worship. His prayer meetings were even less well received, where he could only depend on a “congregation of one,” his clerk and bell-ringer Roger Cox. Apparently, it was recorded at the beginning of one of these meetings, “Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places …’

Stuart Strachan Jr., Source Material from Hesketh Pearson, Lives of the Wits, 1962