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St. James the Least-of-All
Happily, the Church of England still retains some singular parish clergy. Take the parish of St James-the-Least in the county of C- for example. Here the elderly Anglo-Catholic vicar, Eustace, continues his correspondence to Darren, his nephew, a low-church curate recently ordained...
Letter from St James the Least of All on how long a sermon should last
The Rectory St. James the Least of All
My dear Nephew Darren
I am afraid we will never agree about the appropriate length of sermons. Your 50 minute expositions on the theology of St. Paul concerning women wearing hats in church are, I am sure, of particular interest to you. I suspect to most of your congregation, their primary concern will be, since you are preaching, that they should have put the oven timer to come on a little later.
Whenever I even hint that a matter of theological moment may be about to appear in one of my sermons, an expression of benign incomprehension comes over my congregation that you normally only see in the faces of golden Labradors as they try to work out what you are trying to communicate.
There are certain sure signs that should tell you when you have preached for long enough. One is when you see members of the congregation reaching for their prayer books to try to work for the umpteenth time how the date for Easter is calculated. The organist turning on the blower when you say “and finally” is another.
Most members of the congregation will count the number of dead flies on the windowsills during your sermon, but when you can see members of the congregation counting the numbers in the congregation counting the numbers of dead flies, that is absolute proof that you have overstayed your welcome.
There has only been one occasion when I preached for longer than my standard 8 minutes. Our former organist was in the habit of taking his dog for a walk during the sermon. I knew I had to carry on preaching until I heard the latch on the vestry door for the second time, marking his return, ready to play the last hymn. Unfortunately one Sunday, his dog ran away.
While he searched for it over every field in the parish, I spent the intervening two hours reading the greater part of Leviticus, giving lengthy reports of the previous six church council meetings, and was even reduced to giving out the batting averages from the choirboys' cricket team, before I heard the vestry door re-open.
After the Service, the congregation left looking as though they had just been rescued from a major shipwreck. At the next church council meeting, we unanimously voted to buy our organist a stronger lead.
Your loving uncle, Eustace
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