You know those bars on the back end of a semi trailer that come down from the trailer body? In 1967 the famously buxom actress Jayne Mansfield was a passenger in a car that rear ended a semi, the car went underneath it, and she was killed. That led to the installation of those bars, now referred to as "Mansfield bars."
Huge upset at the French Open! Serena Williams was seeded #1 but lost to an unknown French woman in the first round. Serena had never lost in the first round of a major, all the way back to her rookie experience. Someone named Sharapova is smiling.
I've looked deep within myself and can't find an ounce of interest in the NBA playoffs.
"The mind can absorb no more than the seat can endure."
How long should a sermon be? There's no simple or universal answer because of the variables involved. Some preachers load their messages with solid content delivered vividly, have good pacing, and connect well with their listeners. They can get away with a longer sermon than the monotoned guy who repeatedly circles the same obvious truth without ever landing on its relevance to real life situations.
Years ago I was the guest preacher in what was then the largest Black church in Grand Rapids. I had asked the pastor, Reverend Donelle Smith, how long I should preach. "Until you're done." I was so constrained by my whiteness that I preached my standard 35 +/- minute sermon only to learn later that the people felt cheated. In many (most?) African American churches the sermon can go for an hour or more and nobody blinks.
A guest preacher in any church can get away with a longer sermon than the guy who's up there every week. Just the fact his voice sounds different holds their attention better and longer. If he's got a British accent he's good for an additional 10 minutes on top of that. (Note: if a guest preacher's accent makes understanding him difficult, listener fatigue will make his effective time shorter than the resident preacher.)
Those variables (and others) aside, a decent preacher in a typical White church has 30-35 minutes, nothing more. I have an internal clock in my head and can usually "feel" where I am on that timeline, one of the benefits of decades at this job. Go much beyond 35 minutes and effectiveness, when plotted as a curve on an xy graph, falls off at a rapidly increasing angle.
But another old preacher's adage plays here:
"Start with a bang, hit the truth squarely, and quit all over."
That is, have an intro that grabs their attention, that pulls even the reluctant listener in. Then say what you've got to say (i.e., deliver the truth from Scripture) with clarity, authority, and relevance. Then quit.
Too many sermons go five minutes longer than they should have and torpedo the effectiveness of what preceded. When you're done, quit. If that's 20 minutes after you started, better to quit smartly than put them into a stupor by spinning your wheels to satisfy the clock.
Note: I screw all of this stuff up all the time and realize it as soon as I'm done preaching. Which is why this perfectionist is a pain to live with Sunday afternoons. Pam learned early on to let me stew and await my return to civility sometime Monday afternoon.
With the above as an explanation, I have a problem. We're working through the Book of Romans at Pathway and this Sunday brings us to chapter 11. It's monolithic in the sense that the whole chapter addresses the same issue, doing so from three angles. To break it up into separate sermons does an injustice to the flow of the text, but to give it adequate treatment seems - at least as I look at it on a Tuesday - impossible to accomplish in 35 minutes or less. What's a preacher to do??
Dr. Rigsby, one of my wise seminary profs who also pastored a church, said in a course on the OT poetic literature that the only way to preach the Book of Job was to do the whole thing in a single sermon. There just isn't a way to break that book up into separate homiletic segments. In order to preach it as a unit he restructured the entire service. Sing one song, take the offering, and start preaching. Use the rest of the service to preach the content and significance of the book, sing a closing song and send 'em home.
I suspect he's right on principle but pulling it off, especially in an age of 40 character tweets, is probably impossible. Besides, at Pathway we have between 25 and 30 little kids off in Children's Church classes while I preach. Anything much beyond 35 minutes and their teachers get hazard pay.
So what's this preacher to do? At this point I'm looking at visuals. If a picture is worth a thousand words I should be able to save significant time by using images to illustrate some of Paul's content, especially since the center section of Romans 11 is an illustration taken from agriculture and the art of grafting trees. Lends itself to visualization.
Besides, there are some powerful and timely take-aways from this passage that shouldn't be shortchanged because the preacher tried to pack 10 pounds of potatoes into a five pound sack.
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