Once a year at my church, I usually give one sermon. I was asked to tie the theme to a young adult retreat we had taken to the Sunshine Coast.
My first experience giving a sermon was many years ago at my old home church in El Monte, California. It was a Vietnamese-American church, but kind of oddly located in retrospect, as everybody commuted to the church from pretty far away, and at the time there really weren’t too many Vietnamese people in El Monte. The church service used to be primarily in Vietnamese, but all the second-gen kids (including me) never picked up Vietnamese very well, so they split it into an English and a Vietnamese service.
I forget which book I read, but my pastor back then did give me some books to read about preaching, which was helpful. In the book, it said that a sermon should have a spiritual anchor based on a Bible verse that is the key backbone of the message.
Since I do this so infrequently, I kind of let my mind explore for ideas since I have time. I borrowed some books about the Sunshine Coast from the library to see if there would be any inspiration, and there were some interesting bits about the First Nations there, but nothing really came to mind.
1. History
I started off more broadly by learning the history of the place, but nothing quite came to mind from the books. One of the things I wanted to do first was to experience the trip and then use that as inspiration to finish writing it, but that would require writing the sermon more at the last minute.
In retrospect, if I had taken that approach, I would have been inspired by this tiny museum we visited in Egmont, which is near Skookumchuck, where this 2–3-metre tidal rapid forms during certain tides, where kayakers can try it out. Think of a permanent surf wave that just stays there for 45 minutes.
At the museum, I had arranged a tour, and the lady at the museum walked us through artifacts local to the Sunshine Coast’s history. We saw some local fossilized sea life like starfish, shells, and even a whale’s ear. History-wise, she told us that many of the first settlers in Egmont came from the Azores islands of Portugal, hence a lot of the Portuguese names around town, like Madeira Park.
Another room had some old tractors and relics from the logging days, and an assortment of glass spheres that had drifted from Japan, which people collected.
There was also a temporary exhibit about the Japanese internment in Canada, with a focus on the families ripped apart from Egmont. Similar to the United States, Canada interned thousands of Japanese people in camps. It is a bit crazy timeline-wise; this was not that long ago.
Now that history was out of the picture, one of the concerns I had was that I didn’t want it to be a trip recap experience, as I wanted the message to be inclusive.
2. Spiritual anchor selection / ideation
Subsequent prompts were about ideation on different Bible verses and stories. ChatGPT suggested about 10 of them, but the one that stuck out to me was the story of Nehemiah and how he started on one of the most complicated wall-building projects, dealing with logistics, security, and speed. Later, there is a mention of heading out into nature then coming back (Sukkot).
At that time, the theme I emerged with was more along the lines of what happens spiritually when people leave normal life for a while. At that point, I began doing more exegetical research by reading the entire context of the passage, cross-referencing Leviticus and John, and watching some Bible Project videos. I stayed in this research phase for about a week.
ChatGPT’s idea was “Go on retreat → notice God → come home,” which I really wasn’t happy with, and I felt it was kind of flat.
3. Narrative construction
I eventually landed on a four-era narrative of:
Leviticus → Nehemiah → Sunshine Coast Testimonial → Jesus (New Testament)
The new theme was to think about the building of the wall as a reflection of our goals, aspirations, and safety, but the wall is not God.
4. Research Take Two
After the formation of the theme, I went back into exegetical research on:
- Nehemiah’s Persian context;
- ancient fortifications;
- enemies around Jerusalem;
- the mechanics and strain of wall construction;
- what happens after completion;
- the reading of the Torah;
- what is Scripture versus external historical material;
- why the people weep;
- mo’ed;
- Sukkot’s Temple imagery;
- water, lights, music, and John 7.
What I did was take some of my draft themes and ideas and put them into Google’s NotebookLM to create some audio podcasts. The first prompt I had was “Analyze my sermon and give me feedback,” and the second one was “Pretend you are sitting in the audience listening to my sermon. What kind of feedback would you give?”
5. Final edits
At this point, I actually had too much to work with, so I did quite a bit of trimming. My style is to write out everything for the sermon, so I passed it through a final grammar check with AI. Here is the final result (with some AI-generated images):