Just a minute

Sermons don't come much shorter than this.

I would be a rich man if I had been given a donation every time someone made a comment about long sermons in my hearing or reading with the implication that a shorter sermon would obviously be better (see previous blog regarding a disappearing newspaper's editorial, for example). 

As I did not attend the service I cannot confirm directly the success of this attractive advertisement for brevity but I was outside not long before the service was due to commence and there was no queue!  I did some further investigation on the Church's website however.  Websites, for all their techno wonder, are often more out of date than a good old fashioned notice and thus I read an earlier version of the service there:

1.10 pm Holy Communion (said) (lasts twenty-five minutes), with two minute sermon.

Aha!  I have, then, discovered that if I get my sermons down to two minutes I will find that is way too much to bring them in - exactly 100% too much in fact.  Thoughts race round my head - what if the new one minute version is also unsuccessful?  Half a minute - would that work?

The good news is that, given restraining circumstances, a preacher can make a decent fist of it in about five seconds, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved" (Acts 16:31).

Except that we are told that the apostles then spent time telling the family the Word of the Lord.

And if Jesus had not taught all afternoon long there would never have been the feeding of the five thousand who had listened and learned hour after hour.  Indeed, they would have never been fed at all - which is rather the point.