Christmas, and the uniqueness of Christ
Two posts from the turn of 2012 into 2013: a Christmas sermon titled God's Refusal to Quit on You and I, and a March 2013 post on the uniqueness of Christ.
Pinned by The Notice Board · Entry checked on · 3 min
On 18 December 2012, the week before Christmas, the parish posted a sermon with a title that reads like a sentence someone stayed after service to repeat: "Christmas: God's Refusal to Quit on You and I". It is the most quoted-shaped title in the archive, less a label than a line, and it tells you the sermon was written to be remembered.
A title built to be repeated
The archive's sermon titles usually quote the text. This one makes an argument instead. The Christmas claim it carries, that the incarnation is God's refusal to quit on humanity, is the kind of phrasing a preacher lands on after years of Christmas sermons, when the familiar texts need a sentence that still lands. Filed a week before the feast, it functioned on the website the way a sermon title on a notice board functions at the church gate: an invitation.
Uniqueness, three months later
On 19 March 2013 the record keeps "Uniqueness of Christ". The title is doctrinal rather than homely, and the post sits in a different register from the Christmas piece: not an invitation but a claim. Between them the two posts span the archive's whole range of address, from the festival sermon built to be remembered to the spring post that states a position plainly.
The last dated season
The Christmas post of December 2012 and the uniqueness post of March 2013 belong to the archive's last full season. Dated sermon posts thin out after 2013; the site kept publishing, but the rhythm of a sermon a week faded, and the standing pages, the magazine and the notices did more of the work. These two slips are near the edge of the dated record, which makes them worth pinning where the dates can be seen.
The season the archive ends on
There is something fitting in the fact that the dated sermon record thins out just after these two posts. The Christmas sermon is the year's most listened-to address, and the uniqueness post is a statement of position; between them they are nearly a summary of what a parish's published word was for, invitation and declaration. After them the weekly pins go quiet, and the board carries the standing pages instead. The archive does not announce its own ending. It simply stops being weekly, the way a notice board stops being refreshed when the person who pinned it moves on to other work.
The two posts also show the archive's calendar doing its quiet work. Christmas and March are the poles of the preaching year, the festival and the fast that follows it, and the parish posted at both poles. A board that keeps those two dates has kept the whole year's shape, even where the weeks between them have gone thin in the record.
And the pair share one more trait worth pinning: neither apologises for what it claims. A festival sermon that declares and a spring post that states are both written for readers who can disagree, which is the tone of a parish confident enough to publish its preaching rather than only its programme.
How the board files it
Two slips, pinned at the end of the sermon rail: the title that argues, and the title that states. The dates stay on them, 18 December 2012 and 19 March 2013, because at this end of the archive the dates are the story: the last season the parish posted its preached word week by week.
