Sunday Comes Every Week: Daily Habits for the Busy Preacher

By Frank G. Honeycutt and Thomas G. Long

Seasoned advice for pastors facing the weekly challenge of preparing sermons

For pastors, a new sermon comes every week. Conventional wisdom says that pastors need to sequester themselves to prepare their weekly sermon without distraction. But veteran preacher Frank Honeycutt suggests just the opposite: prepare your sermons as part of a daily, lived experience in the community.

Using the days of the week as a framework, Honeycutt describes practical and essential tasks leading up to the writing and delivery of the Sunday sermon—habits that will provide lasting spiritual nourishment for pastors who plan for a long career in parish ministry. With humor and candid acknowledgment of his own mistakes and doubts, Honeycutt reflects on the joys and hazards of ministry and explains how a faithful process of preaching shapes pastors for a lifetime of healthy ministry.

1. Monday: Listening
2. Tuesday: Hearing
3. Wednesday: Exegeting
4. Thursday: Naming
5. Reflecting: A Pastor Looks Back
6. Friday: Writing
7. Saturday: Rehearsing
8. Sunday: Offering

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781467456692

Frank G. Honeycutt

Frank Honeycutt is a Lutheran (ELCA) pastor who has authored numerous books and articles. His writing interests include short fiction, homiletics, and catechesis . An avid hiker and cyclist, Frank has backpacked the length of the Appalachian Trail and bicycled across the country from the Puget Sound to the Maine coast.

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Introduction

I’ve always liked riding with Howard. Not because he drives the lead car and that’s where someone like me is supposed to ride, but because he always has a story to share in the twenty-minute crawl at 15 mph between the church building and the old cemetery over on Elmwood Avenue. We are one of the few cities in the South that still allows funeral processions. I don’t know how it works in other locales. Maybe everyone just jumps in their vehicles and gets to the graveyard as quickly as possible.

But here in South Carolina, we process. So, I tear off my sweaty robe after the last verse of A Mighty Fortress, grab the Occasional Service book (the mini-version) my Aunt Flossie gave me after I graduated from seminary, and join Howard in the front seat. Tell me something interesting in your line of work these days. He smiles, expecting the invitation, having heard me pose this opening a dozen times.

Howard’s been at this for thirty years now. He’s a solid man, speaks thoughtfully and slowly with the measured deliberation of poured pancake syrup. The funeral home positions him at the front door on visitation night like the welcoming lion in front of the New York City Public Library—solid, comforting, consistent. He’s seen it all. Clumps of mourners file by his sentry post to view the body and pay final respects. Howard knows just about everyone in town.

A couple years back, our mortuary, keeping up with the times, expanded their services to include pet funerals. I got a call from a church member once—Darlene. Pastor, you gotta come now. Willy didn’t make it. Sister was coming down them stairs about an hour ago in her favorite bathrobe, tripped about three steps from the bottom, and landed right on top of him. She’s okay, nothing is broken, but you gotta come right now. She squashed the life right out of poor Willy, and there’s no consoling her. She’s wailing by the fire and asking for you. Can you come right now?

My first cat funeral; Howard’s third.

He ushers the weeping family into the black limousine directly behind our lead car with door closures so soft the clicks of noise could have been a quilt tucking the bereaved in for an afternoon nap. Howard pulls out into the main road next to our church building and slowly angles toward the first light and a waiting policeman, ready to stop all traffic for the procession.

A teenager in one of those godlessly-loud pickup trucks, mechanically adjusted for higher volume, roars through a yellow light. The officer shakes his head. I ask Howard why on God’s green earth does a truck need to sound that loud? He laughs. I told my wife recently that it’s like pissing on your neighbor’s geraniums. Or maybe saying I’m alive, suckers to unfortunates heading to a sad hole in the ground.

We’re moving again. You might be interested in a funeral we had last week, Howard says behind sunglasses. Our first time releasing birds.

I hate releasing birds. I once presided over a wedding for a young couple whose family spent a ton of money on an elaborate outdoor wedding. They said their vows, we offered a blessing, and listened to a taped Dan Fogelberg song while staring at our feet. After a passionate kiss (which included a fairly long connective string of saliva that only I could see), avian foolishness followed. The birds were released three times and never got above the tree line, floating back to earth each time with leaden wings—an omen for a marriage that dissolved six months later. The last release included a futile upward push from one of the ushers.

Cars in the opposite lane slow down and even pull off the road, an old courtesy in the South. Well, they got Linda’s ashes in the ground okay at the Turner family plot, Howard tells me. "You know, that family goes way back in the county. The pastor read something poetic from Khalil Gibran and then Linda’s husband released a dove from a shoe box equipped with a couple of air holes. My colleague, Sally (you’d like her), read about the symbolism of doves in the Bible—peace, security, the afterlife, all that. It was a beautiful day, and the dove made a long, slow loop around the cemetery. We all followed it, eyes skyward. Well, on the second loop a hawk suddenly shoots out from the trees, grabs the squawking bird in its claws, and flies into the woods at the far end of the lot for an early lunch. Audible gasp. Sally turns to me and whispers, ‘Well, we’re never doing that again.’ "

We arrive at the cemetery. All goes well. A grandchild chokes out a poem she’s written. The graveside liturgy includes Saint Paul’s famous in-your-face declaration, O death, where is thy sting? I’ve often wondered how mourners truly feel about this startling question, surrounded by hundreds of gravestones that must have stung mightily for many. I make a mental note to ask Howard what he thinks about this question. Maybe we’ll talk about it in the car on the way back to the church.

***

A pastor in North Carolina, a young woman of my acquaintance two years out of seminary, phoned me one recent Tuesday morning and left a message. Can we talk sometime? I’m free this afternoon at three. Can you possibly call me then?

I’d been Susan’s¹ pastor at one time and had taken a role in her formation as a young Christian, participating in her eventual decision to enter seminary. She’s one of the most solid and promising pastoral candidates I have ever assisted in the process leading to ordination—with all the gifts that might suggest a long and effective ministerial career.

We talked that afternoon at three and caught up, initially, on respective family details. The conversation then turned to challenges I’d heard described by many young pastors in the last few years: unrealistic expectations from church leadership; unresolved conflict centering on a previous pastor or staff person; inconsistent weekly offerings that quickly created serious budget deficits, including the inability to pay church employees; few friendships outside a grueling work week; a perceived lack of support from an overworked ecclesiastical oversight staff who live several hours away; and the worry of paying back large student loans.²

I asked about all the obvious: her prayer life; time reserved for regular exercise; the health of her marriage. Susan was doing all the right things and experiencing some of the fruits such disciplines bring a person over time. Her main worry: that no matter how much she did as a pastor for the people of her parish, nothing much was going to change.

We reached a point in the conversation that was filled with a good bit of silence. And then she asked, Did you ever think about quitting?

***

I arrived at seminary in 1981 for summer Greek, a month after our wedding, filled with excitement, but also with so many questions about my faith (and so many doubts) that I was certain the faculty would kick me out before the end of the first semester. Perhaps my greatest breakthrough with regard to belief, writes Kathleen Norris, came when I learned to be as consciously skeptical and questioning of my disbelief and doubts as I was of my burgeoning faith.³ I love this quote, but in 1981—especially after watching a couple of classmates arrive confidently on campus with a full set of multicolored ordination stoles—I was far from embracing my catalog of doubt as healthy (or even helpful) for the pastoral life ahead.

In 1987, two years after graduating from seminary, I suffered a full-blown bout of clinical depression that was somewhat fueled (I later discovered) by a long genetic history on my mother’s side of the family. Managed with the help of an excellent counselor, medication, and a supportive wife, my depression was definitely triggered by unrealistic pastoral expectations and inconsistent spiritual disciplines that created a pretty perfect storm. And yes, I told Susan, I had thought very seriously about quitting.

Quitting became a real option for me in the wake of (and recovery from) the almost year-long depression. The soul-crunching challenges that often face seminary graduates are somewhat different today, but many remain the same, especially the large mistake of neglecting to cultivate an inner spirit (shaped by the classic disciplines) that can stand up to the authorities and powers of this present darkness (Eph. 6:12) that infiltrate congregational life with no less frequency than any other earthly arena. Jesus’s first encounter with evil in his public ministry was not in an obviously dark location, after all, but rather in a religious setting (Mark 1:21–28).

This is not to say that the spiritual development of a new pastor is without its own set of murky pitfalls. Advises the diabolical Uncle Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood, a novice in the deceptive arts,

Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the states of his own mind—or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. . . . You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.⁴

With that warning caveat, I can say I have never met a pastor effectively immersed in this odd vocation for the long haul who is not attentive to centuries-old spiritual disciplines. At the end of the day, they have no saving value, but they do give the Spirit room to get at followers of Jesus and change us over time.

Sometime after my brush with depression (and with the assistance of helpful homiletic guides⁵ along the way), it suddenly became clear to me that the process of writing and delivering a weekly sermon brought together a variety of spiritual disciplines in surprising synthesis. Perhaps this is an obvious no-brainer to most seminary graduates. For me, it was a light-bulb revelation that I either missed in school or that no one bothered to mention.

I cannot recall the author of this quote: Ministry is not something you go and do. It is something you do as you go. Everything packed into that statement, a healthy description of Christian identity, can also find intersection with a pastor’s developing identity as a preacher.

The development of an inner life, post-seminary, slowly began to lead to a resumption of joyful external encounters with parishioners like Howard, my friend who drives the lead funeral car. All conversations and moments—including uncooperative doves, squashed feline unfortunates, annoyingly loud pickup trucks, and old questions from First Corinthians silently posed at a gravesite—are packed with preaching potential for a pastor who learns to pay attention and attempt to faithfully record the intrusions of the Spirit into a broken world, all of it indeed the Lord’s (Ps. 24:1). These interruptions sometimes come to us loudly, and other times arrive whispered and obliquely, even accompanying the very doubt that once troubled me.

***

This book is written for pastors like Susan, recently out of seminary, who sometimes feel like giving up. My thesis is that the weekly act of preaching can be a remarkable gift that shapes the ongoing spiritual formation of both preachers and the congregations—often beset with what seem like insurmountable challenges—to which first-year pastors are often called.⁶ (My first congregation included a misguided and vengeful woman whose palpable hold on my imagination caused me to turn around in transit to her house one night because I was convinced she meant to do me physical harm.)

The delivery of a weekly sermon requires intestinal fortitude. Regular preaching requires courage (a spiritual gift if you are born timid like me) as the pastor stands and says things offered in tandem with the Spirit’s prodding. Jesus discovered this early in his ministry with folk who initially seemed to want him there (Luke 4:14–22), but after hearing a single sermon became miffed enough to try to interrupt his preaching ministry permanently (Luke 4:23–30). Before accepting a call, therefore, I have carefully checked the topography surrounding various churches I have served for nearby cliffs. (Kidding! Well, mostly.) It is a risky (and sometimes dangerous) conviction to actually believe the spirit of the Lord is upon me (Luke 4:18).

But the previous paragraph’s lead sentence also applies to sermons that aren’t necessarily prophetic and risky, but also inevitably comforting, or quizzical, or mutually agonizing in addressing shared suffering. A sermon’s Sunday morning range is strategically limited by biblical theme and prescribed time, but the possibilities of finding