A sermon interrupted

Some “through the bible” thoughts from Mark 2.

A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such large numbers that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on. (Mark 2:2-4)

This unusual sermon interruption brought back memories of some of my interrupted sermons.

• My sermons usually began about twenty minutes into the worship service. When someone walked in after I started preaching, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Really? Twenty-five minutes late?”

• Some sermons were interrupted by the arrival of EMTs to care for a worshiper who passed out during the sermon. In those cases, I would stop and lead the congregation in prayer, resuming my sermon once they had left for the emergency room.

• A malfunctioning fire alarm panel would punctuate my preaching with a series of beeps. It was both annoying and amusing to see folks scrambling around trying to silence the alert.

• Except for a few Covid-19 Sundays when I was alone in the sanctuary preaching to a video camera, I could count on hearing sneezing, coughing, nose blowing, and candy being unwrapped.

• My favorite interruption was one I engineered. When my wife was in Haiti providing medical care after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, I had her call me during the sermon so she could report on her experience. That was the only time my phone rang during a sermon.

• Before online giving, some folks wrote out their offering checks during the sermon. They tried to be quiet, but I could hear them slowly and carefully tearing the check out of the checkbook.

• On a stormy day, I often had to compete with rumbling thunder and the sound of a downpour on the sanctuary’s metal roof.

• Babies liked to make their presence known. I love babies and I love babies in worship. Bring it, little one. I’ve got a lot of volume in reserve.

The sound of people tearing a hole in the roof interrupted Jesus’s preaching. The paralyzed man from above encountered the son of God who came from above. Jesus forgives the man and heals his condition, as powerful a message as his preaching that day.

According to my WordPress statistics, this is my 2,000th blog post! I published my first post October 23, 2008.