Yesterday I had a very productive day, completing a draft of my sermon, the bulletin, and the weekly newsletter all in one day. That simply never has happened before.

The text is the Ascension story told in the first chapter of Acts. I am now around to preaching a second time through the lectionary at CoH, so it is a text I've preached on before. I didn't even look at the old sermon, because I knew I was going to do something different with it.

A week or so ago I had read a congregational development book, In Dying We Are Born, which talked about how congregations needed to be prepared to die (or undergo change) in order to experience resurrection. The themes of this book were in mind as I did my sermon prep.

I read Lectionary Homiletics and other lectionary aides, discovering a passage in Sojourners that I really liked, which became the introduction.

In the congregational development book, there had been a quote from a poem entitled They Have Threatened Us with Resurrection by Julia Esquivel. I looked that poem up and really liked it. It became a reading in the service and themes from that (and one commentary on it I found) helped shape the themes of the sermon.

I was also looking for a good story to use, so I did what I often do, and stood before my bookcases looking for something to pop out. I was looking for a story that would convey the power of the resurrection to transform our lives. Three novels jumped out at me -- Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle. I ended up using a quote from Hurston on the bulletin cover and decided to use Graham Greene's story in the sermon.

I tied it all together with a Harry Wooten-ism. And there you have another example of how I find my sermon illustrations. You'll have to wait till after Sunday to see the sermon itself.