Two
Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday August 3, 2025
Scripture: Acts 20:7-12
When I took the Licensed Lay Worship Leader course, many years ago, and we
started learning how to write sermons, one of the first things our instructors
taught us was don’t try to preach more than one sermon per sermon. Which sounds silly, but it’s true. We were beginner preachers, and when you
start diving into the richness of the bible, with most readings there are many,
many directions that you can go with the reading. As beginner preachers, the temptation was
there to try and say all the things. But
this leads to a sermon that doesn’t have any focus, or too many foci. “I want to say this about the story, but I
also want to say that, and what if I go down this rabbit hole here, and that
detail is interesting too.”
Only preach one sermon per sermon, they taught us. You’ll always have next week to say the thing
that you didn’t get to say this week; and don’t forget that if you are
following the lectionary, the same reading is going to come around 3 years from
now, and you can say that other thing about the story then.
On the opposite side to this advice, I can also tell you about the time that I
sat through a 3-hour sermon. Not a
3-hour church service, but a 3-hour sermon.
The preacher that day was all over the bible. He would be following one train of thought
which would make him think of a bible reading – he would call out a chapter and
verse and then point at someone in the congregation, and they were expected to
find the verse and read them out loud for everyone, and the preacher would then
follow that train of thought for a while.
It was an overwhelming experience for me, as someone not used to this style of
preaching. It was like thoughts and
stories and teachings were washing over me.
At the end of 3 hours, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what the
sermon was about, but 16 years later I still remember the feeling of being
there in worship that day, and at least one of the points that the preacher was
trying to make.
One other important point that I should make about this 3-hour sermon is the
context. I was in a Pentecostal house
church in Tanzania. They didn’t have a
church building, and the pastor would travel around offering worship services
wherever he found himself. He showed up
at the house where I was staying, as my hosts were members of his flock. They then sent word to all of the neighbours
who might be interested in attending, and once everyone had assembled, the
worship service began in the living room.
(And for those of you who can’t imagine sitting there through a 3-hour
sermon, don’t worry. Because it was a
house church, it was very relaxed – people were free to wander out and come
back in again, and because we were all sitting on the floor, it was easy to
shift and stretch and get more comfortable.)
So this was a case where the preacher was trying to say it all in one sermon,
because who knows how long it would be before his next visit to this segment of
his church. He wanted to convey as much
teaching, as much encouragement to them as he could – almost like filling them
up in faith to keep them going until next time.
And when the sermon was done, when the prayers and the singing were over, our
hosts brought out a meal and we broke bread together.
Which brings us to the Apostle Paul, and the bible story that _____ read for us
this morning. If you remember Paul’s
story, he started out as a persecutor of the very early church, before he
encountered the Risen Christ on the Road to Damascus and had a very dramatic
conversion experience. This led to his
transformation from the primary persecutor of the church to the primary apostle
of the church. He undertook a series of
missionary journeys all around the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and his visit
to Troas that we read about today was on his third and final journey.
Here, he is on the coast of what would be modern-day Türkiye, and he is only
able to stay for a week in Troas. He has
never been to this city before, never met the fledgling church that has sprung
up there, and history tells us that Paul never had a chance to visit them again. So he only has a single week to spend with
them, and he wants to maximize the time he has with them.
On the last night, Paul starts preaching.
And he keeps on preaching. I
could be funny and suggest that maybe Paul’s persecution of the church hadn’t
ended with his conversion if he was going to preach such long sermons!
And then somewhere around midnight – three, four, five hours into the sermon, a
young man who had been perched on the window sill to listen to the sermon dozes
off. And when he falls asleep, he loses
his balance and falls out of the window, landing on the street three storeys
below.
At least Paul pauses his preaching at this point, and he and the others rush
down. The young man died as a result of
his fall, but Paul, following in the footsteps of Jesus, raises the young man
back to life. We’re told that the people
were much comforted by this, but I suspect that there was also a fair amount of
celebration as a result.
As for Paul, he and the rest of his congregation went back upstairs, had a bite
to eat, and then Paul continued to preach for the rest of the night, right up
until daybreak.
It’s a quirky little story. When I was
planning out worship for the summer, I was tempted to put this story next week
when our Session members are going to be leading worship so that they could
complain about long-winded preachers and make jokes at our expense, but I
decided to tackle this story myself and poke fun at myself.
I would put Paul’s visit to Troas, and his marathon 8-hour sermon, into the
Tanzanian House Church category of sermons, rather than the LLWL “Only preach
one sermon per sermon” category. This is
the only time that he is going to be able to spend with them, and he wants to
convey as much as he possibly can to them.
If he had only preached for 10-15 minutes, the church in Troas probably
would have felt cheated out of time that they had with him, like they were
missing out on the wisdom that Paul had to impart on them.
But in this short story, we get to see so much of how church can be. Church is people who want to spend time
together. Church is learning about our
faith from each other. Church is
breaking bread together. Church is
healing one another. Church is serving
each other.
The church of the era of this story was very different than what we think of
church today. There were no church
buildings – churches would have met in the house of whoever had the most space
to welcome everyone. There were no
seminaries, no professional clergy. Even
what we think of as the bible didn’t exist yet – they would have known the
Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, as most of the early
Christian communities arose out of the synagogues, but the very earliest parts
of the New Testament, the letters that Paul himself was writing to the church
in different places he visited, these were only just being written at the time
of this story.
And yet church still happened anyways.
The people gathered and they would have told the stories that they knew
about Jesus – “Do you remember the story about the time when Jesus walked on
water? It went this way, there was a
storm on the Sea of Galilee and the disciples were in a boat when they saw
someone walking across the water towards them.”
At each gathering, they would have shared bread and wine in a communion
meal. As new people joined the faith,
baptisms would have been offered by the community. And so when someone like Paul came to visit,
someone with authority and expertise in the faith, it was an opportunity for
the members of the community to go deeper.
In some ways, I wonder of the 21st Century Church is moving back
towards this model of church. For 1700
years in between, Christianity was the norm in society. Christianity governed the nations. Christianity set the laws. And yet in the past 50 years or so, we have
been moving into a post-Christendom world where church-going is not a societal
requirement, and those of us who are here are here because we want to be here.
And so I think that a story like the one that we read today can offer us some
comfort. We don’t need to be in the centre of society to be faithful followers
of Jesus. All that a church needs is
people who want to learn and grow in faith, people who want to share the bread
and the cup and offer the water of baptism, people who want to embody Christ in
the world, serving and healing the world.
It’s as simple as that. (Though I
rather suspect that we can leave the 8-hour sermons back with Paul.)
No matter what the church of the future might hold, the one thing that has been
consistent in the church across the eras is the presence of the Holy
Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who calls
us, the Holy Spirit who equips us, the Holy Spirit who sends us into the world
and accompanies us along the way. The
same Holy Spirit who inspired Paul’s words almost 2000 years ago is dancing in
our midst today. For we are the
church. We are God’s church. And God will never leave us nor forsake us,
no matter what shape or form the church might take. Thanks be to God!
The conclusion of
my Not-8-Hours-Long Sermon
(And not even 3-hours-Long)
But if I didn’t have next Sunday, and the Sunday after that,
and the Sunday after that, who knows how long
this sermon would have been…
