Preaching II (and a clarification)

I was looking through my posts so far, and noticed one very unclear little sentence.

I said:
When I still lived in Australia I had a bit of a beef with the preaching

This implies one. But preachers are many. I wasn't having a go at preaching at my home church per se, but with the state of preaching everywhere that I had access to: Uni, my home church, churches in my town, churches I have visited, and sermons I download.

I'd say Tim Keller is my favourite preacher pastor who I don't know personally (Don Carson is my favourite speaker and writer but he's no longer a pastor). I don't agree with all his theology, but he has a lot to teach me. Nevertheless, I find his weekly sermons get pretty old pretty fast.

So what's going on? I am still happy to admit that my sinfulness is a problem here. But maybe it's not just sinfulness. Maybe there's a problem with my expectations... What is it that I should expect from a sermon? If the preacher gets something out of the passage that I couldn't get for myself then there's something worrying about my ability to read or his ability to read (know what I mean). Isn't there?

So I know that what I would love is to have my eyes opened (about something) every time I hear a sermon. But that's unrealistic, and frankly a bit unfair on the poor old preachers. So then what is the point of the weekly sermon? Here's a rough list off the top of my head:

1. It's good to spend an extended time reflecting on one chunk of the Bible. It aids rumination
2. A preacher can spend the week figuring out the wider biblical context of the passage, which is something that takes time and it's nice having someone do it for me at times and teach me to do it through his example.
3. A preacher can draw the threads through our Christology - another thing that can be hard and learnt from example.
4. We easily forget and need constant reminding (a very Islamic concept - but I suppose Islam got it from the Israelites too?)

There must be more, and significant ones I've missed. But when I think about it all these things are done in a good sermon by Tim Keller or back home. But these things can be a bit mundane. The breadth of Christian theology is in some ways vast and in some ways quite narrow. Drawing everything through our Christology is so extremely important that if it's not done it's not a good sermon, but then again, doing that same thing every single time can get a bit old. The wider biblical context is also not really that wide. The Bible is 1000 pages. There are only about 7 major epochs (or whatever you call them). Genesis 1-3 seems to explain most of the whole world and the Biblical trajectory of most things pretty well.

So I think the problems are: I'm sinful and tend to gripe, my expectations are unrealistic, biblical Christianity can be quite narrow which is both a wonderful thing and (see point 1: I'm sinful) at times a bit dull.