much too early

Sunday morning much too early, it's 3:14 AM and I've been up an hour looking over this sermon, my homiletic endeavor for our eight o'clock and ten-thirty church services today. 

It wasn't my intention: Father Nature roused me and I knew that if I went back to bed and asleep I'd oversleep and put my morning in a jerk. For my mornings in the pulpit, which was long years of happiness, my decades' habit as a parish priest was to get up at three o'clock and work over my sermon notes until I was confident of it and pretty sure I had it down. Those mornings, we'd then have breakfast at five o'clock, after which I'd go back to bed for an hour's nap, then rise at six o'clock and get ready to leave the house by a little after seven and be set for the morning's work. 

A few Times I did oversleep, and it added unneeded stress to my morning. A few mornings, as today, I've got up way too early. It then means that the ninety minutes between the early service and the late service are a Time when I have to struggle to stay alert. How do I manage that, especially at this advanced old age? Well, with hot black coffee and dark chocolate. 

And then at noon I collapse in the car as Linda drives us home!

Episcopal priests usually preach on one or more of the lessons being read, which we call "the Propers" for the Sunday. The church is on a three-year Lectionary cycle, Year A, Year B, Year C, therefore the same set of Propers comes up every three years. You get a Collect (short, gathering prayer), a First Lesson (generally Old Testament, today from Genesis), a responsive Psalm), the Second Lesson (most often from one of Psul's epistles, but today from Hebrews), and a gospel reading (today from Mark). Today's gospel can be seen as difficult, a "hard saying," and sometimes in the past I've avoided it and preached on something else. 

Not this Time. 

We'll see how it goes, eh? 

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When we are first ordained, the bishop usually assigns us to a parish where we work for a year or more as a trainee under a senior priest, the rector. In my case, the rector had long been in the practice of printing his sermon manuscripts and putting a few copies in "the sermon rack" in the entryway of the church building. And he required that I do the same, to get into that mode. So, basically, with a lapse or two, I've been printing my sermons afterward. I still do that, but these days of the internet, instead of printing paper copies and putting them out, I publish them online - - on my Blog, called +Time, and with a link to it on my Facebook page.

http://plusmoretime.blogspot.com 

I'll do that today, probably as soon as we get home from church about noon. For years I just left the link on Facebook, but recently I started leaving the link up a couple of days, then moving it to "archive." The +Time blogpost is still up though, and it's public, for anyone who might want to go there.

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The Time is 3:45, so coming up on four o'clock now. I need to get back to work on these sermon notes.

RSF&PTL

T89&c