Words do not grow old
Occasionally, when times are busy and days seem short, I am tempted to recycle an old sermon. I am tempted to pop an old ring binder open, pull out those forgotten notes, and preach them again. Every time, though, a little voice inside me says that I am cheating. It tells me that I am a lazy man and I am selling people short. It tells me that I should pull my finger out and write something new, for heaven’s sake. Whose is the voice though, I wonder? Charles Haddon Spurgeon used to say that if a sermon could not be preached ten times it ‘should not be preached once’. I wonder…
Yesterday’s second inaugural address from Barack Obama came out of the blocks with the American Declaration of Independence, and went on to ooze with references to the words of Martin Luther King. Look at the two excerpts below side by side. The words on the left are from a speech made in 1963 by Dr Luther King, and the ones on the right from yesterday’s address by Obama. They are not so much derivative as verbal homage.
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The echoes, of course, are deliberate. From the choice of veteran civil rights campaigner Myrlie Evers-Williams to give the opening invocation to the words reproduced above, the mantle of Dr Luther King rested squarely on the shoulders of the 44th President yesterday.
Maybe I should learn to ignore the little voice? Powerful words may be powerful if spoken again…and again in the right context. The Sermon on the Mount is littered with the phrase ‘it is written’ as Jesus revisits old theology with new application again and again.
What do my fellow preachers think?
