Christmas Easter Pentecost All Saints Christ The King Confirmation Palm/Passion Reformation Stewardship Books of the Bible Lenten Series Christmas Dramas Videos Series A - Matthew Series B - Mark Series C - Luke Series D - Other To contact Edward F. Markquart info@sfs.com

Videos  Astonished and Astounded Easter Sermon Division, Diversity and Oneness : A Conflict Drama   Series C, Epiphany 3 Katie and Martin (coming) Reformation Drama Growing to Enormous Proportions (coming) Confirmation You are the Light of the World Dialogue Sermon Christmas Dramas: Videos Annual Meeting of the Archangels  (coming) Christ Was Born for This (coming) Off Limit Shepherds (coming) The Humble Hotel (coming) The Visit of St. Nicholas  (coming) Waiting for the Christmas Guest When Joseph Doubted (coming) Lenten Dramas: Videos (one video from each series) The Voice of God  (coming) The Seven Deadly Sins (coming) The Living Gifts (coming) The People VS Jesus of Nazareth (coming) Conversations by the Cross (coming) Silent Witnesses (coming) A Video Overview A professor once said: “The orange is living inside the peel and the peel wraps itself around the orange. Similarly, the sermon is living inside the pastor and the pastor wraps himself/herself around the sermon that lives within.” How profoundly true that professor was! That concept has become vital to me and is illustrated in the videos. These videos are important because they demonstrate the potential power of preaching without notes, minimal notes or without a manuscript. As a pastor writes the sermon, it is essential to construct the sermon so that it can be easily learned. It is important for oral preaching to construct the flow of the sermon so that the pastor can easily learn it and so the hearers can easily follow it. If a pastor cannot memorize the flow of the sermon, it is too complex for both the pastor and the hearers. In all of the sermons on this website, after I had written them, I spent about two hours memorizing the flow of logic, the flow of the points, the flow of stories, the flow of certain words, so that the sermon began to live inside of me… I never memorized a manuscript word for word, but only its flow, so the sermon lives within.  One time, while listening to an audio-tape of a sermon of mine from years ago, my voice on the tape said to me: “Get the sermon off the page and into your soul. That’s what is important.” For a sermon to live on Sunday morning, it doesn’t live on the paper but in the soul. This is a fundamental value for me: for the sermon to live within my bones, my psyche, my soul.  Words are vehicles of communication but so is the human body, the millions of inflections of the voice, the millions of lines in the face. When giving a sermon, the lines in your face are just as important as the lines on the paper. That is why God sent not only a book and words on a page, but sent his Son, so the words in the book would be alive, would be incarnated, in the flesh of the human body. A book was not enough for God. Religious ideas and ideals were not enough for God. God wanted to communicate even more clearly and so God sent his Son in the living flesh of a human being. Preaching is God’s Word in the flesh. When you read the sermon, ASTOUNDED AND ASTONISHED, the sermon makes sense but when you see it and hear it on the video, it becomes much more alive. You again realize that the vast part of communication is non-verbal, and body-expressions can communicate as much as words do. The focus is not creatively reading the words on the page but releasing the words living inside of you to the congregation.  The videos are not professional: you hear squawking kids, whining airplanes, and coughing adults. There are also videos of several dramas that help a pastor see the play in action and imagine it as a sermon. Back to Top