What if preaching were like hospitality – what would your guests experience?
Arriving at the door, slightly tentative about what may follow, they are rushed in and quickly seated. No time for friendly interaction, there’s a meal to be eaten! Before them the table is empty, but is continually filled as numerous covered serving dishes, pots and plates continually emerge from the kitchen. In your zeal to feed them (and to show them everything you’ve done in preparation), you quickly uncover the first dish and serve a spoonful of carefully prepared french beans (the best result of your culinary efforts). Then as they take their first taste of this fine cuisine you clear their plate, uncover another dish and serve some burned peas, swipe them off the plate and dish out an undercooked steak. This continues with vegetables in various states of readiness, and an assortment of meats from a variety of animals (some familiar, some more exotic). To break the intensity you also serve a big scoop of ice cream, before moving back to the main course again. Your guests look bewildered at the experience, barely managing a bite before receiving more food and the odd sniff of a dessert. Finally after forty minutes you pull away their plate and extend your hand for a firm handshake. They smile cautiously and thank you for all your hard work before filing out of the front door.
I hope this wouldn’t be the case! How much better to be welcomed and made comfortable? How much more satisfying to enjoy the finest meal you could prepare and nothing more? How much more comfortable to not have to experience every culinary idea you had and every cuisine cul-de-sac you entered in the last week as you planned and prepared the meal? How much better to savour the meat chosen, rather than having a whistle-stop tour of all your favourite meats in your meat guide (concordance)? How enjoyable to enjoy the side dishes and vegetables chosen to compliment the main meat of the meal? How much better to partake of dessert when it is appropriate, rather than as a forced interlude in a manic meal? How nice to have time to chew on the good food received? How much better to receive a carefully prepared meal than an overwhelming force-fed food dump? How nice to not have to come up with something polite to say at the door!
It can be a real blessing to be a guest for dinner. It can be even better to be fed from the pulpit!
(Feel free to interpret this post in the comments, perhaps someone else missed what you observed!)
Biblical Preaching 
An interesting, but flawed, analogy. This Anglican, at least, regards the content of the service up to the point of the sermon as doing much of the preparation that you envisage. I’ll grant you that presently un-digested material in sermons isn’t good, but you do need to take the context in which preaching takes place into serious consideration.
Thanks for the robust comment, Steve. Good to hear from you! I fully agree that the rest of the service is very important and the sermon cannot truly be considered alone (in any denominational setting). Perhaps the analogy does need to be developed between arriving at the door and sitting down, although the analogy is intended to focus on a sermon, not a whole service. However, even after the welcome and preparation of the rest of the service, the preacher should still think carefully about the introduction of the message. Diving straight in to the content without some sort of connection with the listener, or surfacing of need for what is to follow, is less than ideal if the sermon section of the service is to be effective.
I like this post! Made me smile. Humourous and exaggerated, but with a sadly serious point.
As a real carnivore, all I really want is a beautifully cooked, juicy steak…