A Big Fish of a Time: A Second Helping
Some things got switched around fairly last minute this week and so Kate was tasked with preaching a sermon in the middle of a series that she did not set. This poses a challenge for Kate to preach a passage that, while near to her heart, she did not initially intend on preaching. It also poses an opportunity for me to reflect on a sermon that approaches the same passage for which I was preparing a sermon. First, a little background on preaching style. Haddon Robinson was a professor of preaching and an author of many preaching books. He developed what is known as the Robinson method of preaching and this method centers on the Big Idea. The big idea of the Big Idea is that it is impossible to retain and remember an entire twenty minutes of someone’s sermon, so it is the task of the preacher to craft a main takeaway point for the listener to be able to remember long after they have heard the sermon. This takeaway is the Big Idea. There are guidelines for Robinson’s Big Idea, and there are liberties that preachers can take to stay true to their own styles of preaching while drawing on the Robinson method. Kate and I both draw on the Robinson method in our preaching, but our approach and style tend to be quite different. This week, the Big Ideas for both our sermons (the one Kate preached on Sunday and the one I’ll save for a rainy day) were practically the same. God gives us second chances. Regardless of your views on the historicity of Jonah, there are obvious creative elements that craft an argument. Kate did a great job of outlining these creativities and parallels in Jonah 2 and 3 that point to a redemptive God. We see the second chances of both Jonah and Nineveh. The oddity is how quickly Nineveh repents. Jonah goes into this large city and speaks just five words in Hebrew, and immediately the Ninevites turn to God. This wicked city showed more remorse and penitence than the prophet! The story reaffirms that Jonah is not the focus here, God is. And like the VeggieTales Gospel Choir says, “our God is a God of second chances.” Kate made the excellent point on Sunday that we are given chance after chance, never losing favor with God even in view of our mistakes. This grace and mercy is bigger and more powerful than we could ever mess up. This frees us to give full effort towards living rightly without fear of losing our relationship with God. We know that God’s love redeems us and empowers us for success when our efforts and our hearts are working towards God’s will for us and for our world. No whale required!
Click here to watch this week’s sermon.