pat loughery

Frequently I have no idea what to preach* about. Usually I have a Biblical text, or an understanding of what our need for spiritual formation is, but every so often I have no idea how a sermon can flow out of it. So in that circumstance usually I give up, bring the text to the group, and we discuss it together.

Last Sunday we did that. We did something of a cross between a group lectio divina with a guiding question.

We looked at Hebrews 10:19-12:3. I introduced it by saying that we wanted to practice, for the first weekend of Lent, the spiritual discipline of Listening. I asked people to practice listening to the text, to the voice of God for you in the text, and the voice of God for us in the text.

We read it three times. Each time was by a different person, and that person read the whole passage (and that’s a LONG passage).

The first time through I asked people to simply listen for a word or phrase that caught their attention. We read the passage, then sat in quiet for a minute or two, then shared what we heard.

The second time through I asked people to listen to what the Word might be saying to you individually, asking you either to do or to be. Again we read the passage, then sat in quiet for a minute or two, then shared what we heard.

The third time through I asked people to listen to what the Word might be saying to us as a church, asking us either to do or to be. Again we read the passage, then sat in quiet for a minute or two, then shared what we heard.

It was incredibly powerful. There were tears. There was also joy as one of our members who has a difficult struggle in his faith chose to read 3rd, and he did a wonderful job. There was encouragement, both for individuals and especially for us as a replanting church. I’m incredibly happy that I didn’t just hammer out a speech to give, but that we just went into this time asking to listen together.

There are really good lectio resources here including a good passage on group lectio. Note that usually, lectio divina considers a much smaller passage of Scripture, but for this weekend we were aiming for a different thing.

* I do the one-way “preaching”, the speech/lecture thing so infrequently it’s silly, but hopefully you get the drift