When is a sermon past its use by date?

Friday afternoon I spent a while sifting through an impressive pile of my previous sermons stretching back at least 20 years. Fascinating how what I preached then doesn't seem to cut it now; and the contemporary engagement with political, historical and ecclesial events now dates them, in the negative sense of out of date, but also in the positive sense that when they were preached, they were taking the life and events of the world seriously.

Sermons referring to Piper Alpha (when I was in Aberdeen), the invasion of Kuwait, Nelson Mandela's release and the overturning of apartheid laws, the Berlin Wall, numerous Balkan conflicts (appearing in several remembrance Sunday sermons), the crushing of student protests in Tianneman Square by the Chinese military, the Omagh bombing when on the Saturday afternoon I went into the study and did an entirely different sermon;

numerous harvest sermons asking increasingly serious questions about ecological concerns, globalisation and non-accountable economics; the Ethiopian famines, the Lockerbie bombing, the Dunblane and Hungerford massacres;

various attempts to think Christianly about consumerism, the lottery, genetic science developments; affirmations and questionings about changing views of church, mission, faith and work;

regular explorations of the meaning of the Lord's Supper, the blessings, the challenge, the frustrations and the guilt trips associated with praying or not praying; the nature of the church as community, agonising about inter-faith dialogue and the uniqueness of Christ.....and so on....and on....and on.

A quick scan of the texts preached caused no surprise - the Gospels are well ahead of Paul, some of the OT narratives are well represented including Moses, Jacob, Joseph, Elijah and Samuel and David. Ruth and Jonah I've preached through twice! But the thick pile of sermon notes in one bundle shows Isaiah has been a key text in my ministry and in my life ever since as a 19 year old I sat in a car, beside the River Tay in Perth, and prayed really hard that I'd manage not to make a fool of myself when I preached for the first time in a 'real' Baptist church. I opened my Bible at Isaiah 43 and the first words I read were 'Fear not I have redeemed you; I have called you by name....' I've never doubted that random anxious flicking through Scripture was whatever the divine equivalent is to a reassuring arm round my shoulder. I still have the handwritten sermon, in a brown paper covered notebook - it was on Philippians and the AV text "I press on towards the mark of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus". I'll never chuck that one out - it's one of those holy relics that remind me of grace that takes our ordinariness and makes it sing. If forced to have only one book in the Bible other than the Gospels it would be Isaiah then, a book I've learned to call the fifth gospel.

Anyway and anyhow, I've been preaching for over thirty years so there's a lot of this stuff despite previous clear outs. James Denney claimed to have burned all his sermons when he left Broughty Ferry in 1897, but fortunately there's still a few hundred of them so he must only have burned the ones he thought unpreachable elsewhere. Whatever, it's time to engage in some discriminating sifting to see how many might be worth keeping. Having made a start I've got one carrier bag full of sermons now well past their use by date.

Question 1. What criteria should be used to decide if a sermon preached in the past is worth keeping now?

Question 2. Should an old sermon ever be re-cycled?

Comments

[andy goodliff]

Jim

I would try and keep them all. they are a testimony to your ministry and to God. I think an old sermon can be recycled, but perhaps never completely from scratch. I would buy a book of Jim Gordon's sermons

[Margaret]

Making them into a book gets my vote.

[brodie]

Jim - there is clearly a difference between using an old sermon as a starting point for a new preach, reading a collection of sermons in a book and simply using an old sermon again without any editing.
As my uncle who was a pastor used to say "when you re-heat beans they always stick to the pot and burn". This is the danger if we just reused a sermon without any thought about what has changed since we last used it.

[Thomas]

I agree with Margaret - make them into a book. Then you can flip through them and see if God moves you to use them as a starting point for a new message.