Students who are doing their first B.Th or M.Div have to deliver a graduation sermon in their final year. In the past, they had to do it twice. From this semester on, they only have to do it once.
We had our first graduation sermon today.
I hadn't been in a Chinese congregation for more than a year. The sermon today reminded me that kind of sermons I usually listened to when I was still active in a local congregation.
For one thing, it's long! Of course, it didn't last 90 minutes, which wasn't unusual in a Chinese church. The rule was you only got 20 minutes for everything. By everything, I mean the sermon, hymns, everything from start to finish. That sermon was long, and unnecessarily so. If size didn't matter, then surely the length of a sermon did, and the longer the better!
And I learned something about the speaker's daughter(s). I had absolutely no interest in how his daughters were doing and I wasn't sure they wanted to be part of the sermon. Anyway, I was reminded how many personal details I had learned in the past both from the pulpit and from the one who's leading the singing or the service.
The sermon was also about what we should do. A bit moralizing, though not as much as I feared.
I had thought about not attending the morning prayer today. Maybe I am becoming intolerant.
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