No Sermon

You will note that I have not posted my sermon from Sunday; this is because there is no sermon from Sunday.  Nor will there be a sermon for the rest of the Epiphany season.

Every so often (maybe three to four years or so) I present an instructed Eucharist to the congregation.  This can be done in several ways.  One of my friends did an instructed Eucharist using an amplified bulletin.  He had the bulletin printed on legal size paper (instead of the usual 8-1/2 x 11) and put a running commentary in the margins.  That's a nice way to do it because you can save the bulletins and hand them out to people who missed that particular Sunday.

I choose to do mine by breaking down the service into five parts and covering those parts in depth during the normal sermon time.  Normally the five Sundays in Lent before Palm Sunday and Holy Week are when I do this.  I figure that's as good a time as any to dig into the Eucharist and give people a deeper understanding of it before Easter.

But this year I will be out of town for the first two weeks in Lent, and I will miss the first three Sundays.  I got to looking at the calendar and, as luck would have it, there were five Sundays left during the Epiphany season following last week's annual meeting.  So I decided to do it here.

The schedule looks like this:

Week 1:  Opening hymn to the Gospel
Week 2:  Sermon to Absolution
Week 3:  Peace to Offertory
Week 4:  The Great Thanksgiving
Week 5:  The Lord's Prayer to the Dismissal

It's also sort of a way to entice people -- you need to be here to get the whole thing.  I'm not sure that last part actually works, but I can pretend.