Here’s Monday afternoon, if you’re me.

Sit on the couch in your office with a pad of paper, and various translations of the Bible. Take a deep breath. Center and focus. Remember it’s not about you.

Read one of the texts assigned for Sunday. Mutter to yourself, You’ve got to be kidding me. There is nothing here to work with.
Go to the other lectionary texts for that day. Nothin’, nothin’, nothin’. Wow.
The Bible is a book of treasures, how did I manage to get an entire set of duds?
Sigh. It’s going to be a long week.

Consider going off-lectionary. It’s not heretical or anything. No, you hate picking texts. Glance at the calendar. Briefly, briefly consider choosing a text that acknowledges what Sunday it is—that holy grail of holidays (holy days?), that apex of the secular/liturgical year, Mother’s Day.

Snap out of it.

Fret.

Attempt to come to terms with the fact that your preaching career is over. Your liturgical imagination is tapped dry. Oh! Your poor, unsuspecting congregation. At least you’re only on once a month. But all that theological education, wasted. They’ll never ask you to write for the preaching journal again, or worse, they will, and you'll be publicly de-pantsed. It’s all dull, droning sermons from here on out; limp, lifeless three-pointers with canned illustrations for the rest of your life.

Well, this is getting you nowhere. Time to bring in the experts. What do the commentaries say? The NIB, Interpretation, Barclay even?
NO!
Not until you’ve got some thoughts of your own,
you cheap hack!

Get up off the couch.

Putter.

Visit the restroom—nature calls. Grab some candy from the office manager’s desk. Try to look normal; resist temptation to actually walk around with head in hands.

Sit back down. Remember that a sermon is an event—this event is going to occur on Sunday, regardless of what you do in the meantime, so you might as well look at the stupid text again, examine the different translations, look at the Greek, although really, why bother, there’s nothing there, what’s the point anyw—

Wait. What’s that?

That wasn’t there before.

Hmm. That’s interesting. A little exegetical rabbit-trail to follow, perhaps, but really, it seems so obscure and arcane, how could that possibly preach? Write it down, you idiot. Worry about that later.

Repeat the previous paragraph several times.

Allow yourself to feel a little excited and hopeful. Just a smidge. A tiny amount. Itsy-bitsy. Like the spider. Yeah, that’s it. Realize you’re on a much bigger web than you dreamed possible, and there’s lots of tasty morsels buzzing around out there, and they’re going to blunder their way onto that web over the next several days.


And that’s Monday.