Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The Gospel According to Debby Boone

My lastest Huffington Post offering -- wherein a procrastinating preacher hits homiletic pay dirt on Facebook. Seriously.

For parish clergy, Holy Week is full employment time. Here at All Saints Church in Pasadena we have 24 services between 7:30 a.m. Palm Sunday and 1:00 p.m. Easter Day -- and even with a boatload of brilliant colleagues it is a week-long plate very full of liturgy, pastoral care and preaching. It is pedal to the church metal time and there is no time to waste.

So of course, faced with the looming writing deadline for my Good Friday sermon, I was on Facebook -- scrolling through pictures of kittens and puppies, updates from clergy friends about how busy they were and past dozens of "must-see" videos.

But since I didn't have time to watch a video, I kept scrolling past the one entitled "You light up her life: Debby Boone on LGBT acceptance." It had a great picture of Debby Boone (who is married to my good friend and Los Angeles clergy colleague Gabri Ferrer) and lots of comments like "must see" and "brava." But I didn't have time to watch a video -- even one that was only a minute sixteen seconds long. I had a sermon to write and it wasn't going write itself!

Read the rest here.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Wonderful, Susan,

I left a comment over at HuffPost. What I want to say is that I have struggled my entire life with Good Friday. I have been stuck with a vocabulary of substituionary atonement, even though I find that explanation of the Cross to be wrongheaded and terrible. I have worked to find new language to talk about the meaning that I feel in the story of Jesus' suffering and death.

I will be thinking this week about truth doing its work, and "the gospel according to Debby Boone."

Thanks again!

Lou Poulain
lay member of TEC
in the heart of Silicon Valley