Sermon Obsession?

Ok, I just need to put my frustration with myself into words on a page. Nobody else is really going to get this. In fact, some of you REALLY won’t get this. Oh well. I am writing a note to myself and you can read it if you dare.

I’m a pastor. Every week I write a sermon. I write out virtually every word that I will be speaking, because that is just the way I do it and anything else seems lazy and half-cooked to me. My sermons usually wind up about 11 pages of single spaced material with half inch margins. As I shared in a sermon recently, preaching is not some unimportant little thing in the church. The early church was “devoted” to the public preaching of the Word of God (Acts 2) and it was a big part of what made the church, the church. It is no small thing to preach the Word of God to a room full of His people. I won’t make the case for the importance of preaching again right now, because this is a note to my self, and I already know how important preaching is. That’s part of the problem. After ten years of preaching virtually every Sunday, I’m afraid it has become an obsession. If an obsession is something you can’t stop thinking about then I’m guilty.

I try to take Mondays off, though I never fully succeed. Tuesdays I work on my sermon in a preliminary way... a little research... some reading... maybe a few thoughts jotted down on a page. Wednesday, if I’m lucky, I get an outline down and sometimes maybe even almost a rough draft. Thursdays are almost always the big day when I really pound out the body of the sermon, spending literally 8-10 hours straight, sometimes not even thinking to eat. Fridays I start editing down the monster, usually trying to cut several pages of material. I also start rehearsing the sermon on Fridays, because it is one thing to have something down that reads well and another thing to have something that preaches well. I actually read over my sermons out loud to see how they come out, usually several times each week (yeah, I’m weird). This verbal reading leads to many more changes. Saturday is more of the same, usually reading through it silently several more times and out loud at least one more time, pausing to do this here and there throughout the day. Sunday mornings I always give the old girl one more of each kind of read through just for good measure. I make additional changes every single time I read through it. Did I mention something about an obsession? I’ve been doing this for 10 years.

By now most readers think I’m crazy or that I’m making way too big of a deal out of something that winds up being a 40 minute little slice of everyone else’s life. That’s because you are not pastors. And that’s because nobody understands what really goes into anybody else’s job... especially if that job is performance based. We have no idea what goes into Albert Pujols being Albert Pujols. We think he’s a natural... that he just shows up and hits home runs, but that is not the case. We would be blown away by his daily and weekly regimen, I’m sure. I’m no Pujols in the pulpit, and that just means I have to work that much harder.

But this is not really what I wanted to write about. The problem is that as I’m emailing and phone calling and texting and relationship-ing and doing all of the other stuff that it means to be a pastor and leader of a church.... and even as I’m riding my bike or mowing my yard or making dinner... in the back of my mind, at virtually all times, every single week, until my sermon is, at least, roughly on paper, a thought is running incessantly through my brain. What is that thought? “You don’t have your sermon written.” Yes, that very thought, even those exact words, runs in the background of my mind, every week, usually until some time late Thursday afternoon, at which point there is usually some relief from the voice. 

Worse are those weeks when I procrastinate and/or other things crowd out sermon writing until more like Friday. On these weeks, the voice in my head is SCREAMING and I mean screaming: “YOU DON’T HAVE YOUR SERMON WRITTEN!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!” I wish I was overstating the problem. You think I need counseling? Overrated. 

Someone will suggest, no doubt, that I should write my sermon earlier in the week, and this would seem wise, because the truth is that once my sermon is written, I am like a different person. I breathe better. The voice stops screaming and I am fairly relaxed again until about Tuesday morning when the mantra starts back up again, ever so softly at first, “You really should get started on your sermon.. Something else may come up later in the week and then what will you do? You know that the best sermons are the ones you work on all week... you really need to get started right away. You’ll feel better once it’s done. You don’t have your sermon written.” 

So why don’t I just write it on Tuesday and be done with it? The problem with trying to write my sermons earlier in the week is about twofold: 1) I simply can’t bring myself to write that soon after I have given birth (which happens on Sundays), and 2) If I did that, I would write and re-write the thing incessantly all week long because I can’t leave well enough alone. As I mentioned before, once it is written I don’t leave it alone until about 8:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, when I finish my last practice run. [Incidentally, last Sunday I still didn’t feel like I knew it well enough and wished I had gone through it a couple more times. I was annoyed with myself the whole time. Perfectionist? Only on some things.]

What am I to do? Yoga maybe. I need to get control of my mind. I need to be able to shut out the voice... that annoying little voice that only has one thing to say. I need to remember that my sermon always gets done, and it will get done, and everything will be alright. Yeah, so shut up you stupid little voice. In ten years I’ve never had to get up and wing it so just shut up. Besides, I could wing it if I had to... I just know I could... Maybe I’ll even show you this coming Sunday so shut up you silly little, chirpy little, squeaky little, annoying little voice.

Right now some readers are thinking, “Man this guy takes himself way too seriously.” Well, duh. If that weren’t the case would I blog? Hello? Others are more compassionate and they know me and they care about me. They are thinking, “Mark you always do great and you just need to not worry about it and relax.” Well thanks, but if and when I do great, it isn’t because I just relaxed. It’s because I worked my tail off. I know God is the key and I can’t do this without Him and He’s the One who really makes it meaningful or “good” or whatever you want to call it, but please spare me the whole “just let go and let God” platitude. 

Ok, maybe there’s some truth to that, actually. Sigh. I know God wants me to work hard and not be lazy and not just expect Him to work through me without me working through Him (Hey that’s pretty good. I should use that in my sermon on Sunday, which I haven’t started yet...), but on the other hand, maybe this IS a trust issue for me. Maybe I need to trust that God will help me get it done instead of fretting that somehow a week is going to come along eventually where I just won’t have the gumption to do it. Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of isn’t it? I’m basically relying on me aren’t I? Bad Pastor Mark. I need to rely on God. Yes, that really could help me beat this. Trust. Why does it always have to come down to that?

Ok, here I am trying to bring this whole thing to some kind of personal solution and that wasn’t the purpose of this writing. I just needed to vent. I just needed to tell all 4 people who will actually read this just how crazy I am. That way they won’t be surprised when it comes out in public. Seriously, I think I needed to identify the fact that this is kind of a problem for me and I need to work on it somehow, because this can’t be healthy. I’ll pray about it. 

God, could you please shut that silly little voice up (because I absolutely know it isn't You) and just let me do my work without stressing out? That would be really cool. In Jesus’ name, Amen.