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Mt. Lebanon United Methodist Church | November 21, 2021
I normally follow the Revised Common Lectionary when lay speaking. But I got this assignment at the last minute — Saturday night — and the church where I was to preach doesn’t strictly follow the Lectionary readings. I looked through my files for a sermon I’d preached on this Sunday of the Lectionary, something I could update and use without starting from scratch, but I could not find any. This is actually updated from a sermon I preached some years back about this same week of November on one of the other two years of the three-year Lectionary cycle. So it’s appropriate to the liturgical season, even if it’s not officially the lectionary passage.
Five years ago this month, I was on a mission trip in Sierra Leone, which is in West Africa. My teammate and I spent a week in Sierra Leone, conducting a leadership workshop for pastors and teaching workshops on health and cottage industry topics.
When you fly from the U.S. to Sierra Leone, you change planes in Paris, and so on our way back it really didn’t cost that much more to spend a couple of nights there, which was something that both I and my traveling companion, Debra Snellen, had always wanted to do. Paris is an amazing city, and now I want to go back some day when I have the time to do it justice.
