The Rev. Canon Dr. Kendall Harmon (yes Anglicans love their titles ;-)) has posted a video on his site which he calls “Archbishop Rowan Williams’s video message to mark the beginning of Lent 2010”. When I clicked to watch it I straight away recalled I had seen it before. It is in fact last year’s video. It’s a good reminder that many people regularly make too much of sermons. I don’t want to deny their value, but let’s keep them in perspective – if you don’t believe me, survey your community a month from now what the sermon was about on, say, Sunday Feb 7 and see what proportion remember. Meanwhile, if you want to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury on Lent again, here it is:
This is very bad advice, Bosco, to use last year’s sermons. I have it on good authority that once upon a time an unwise colleague tried this and found that he started receiving last year’s payslips 🙂
Perhaps your observations say more about the dire state of modern Anglican sermons than about the importance of the sermon within the liturgy?