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At 4:00 PM on a recent Saturday afternoon, my cell phone rang. It was my pastor, telling me (our congregation's music director) that he had the flu and wouldn't be able to lead the next day's worship service. I thought he said his temperature was 105, so he had extra empathy from me. (I found out later that he had said "100-point-5.")

As Episcopalians, not having an ordained priest available meant we could not celebrate the Eucharist. So I offered to rearrange the hymns we had chosen for the service so they would fit into that old reliable Anglican standby, the service of Morning Prayer.

"Thank you. That would be nice," my pastor said, "but that leaves the matter of the homily."

Despite having spent 11 years as a pastor and having taught homiletics for a short while, I was not eager to begin a fresh sermon preparation so late on a Saturday afternoon.

"Would you like me to find a classic treatment of one of tomorrow's Scripture lessons?" I asked. "I could read the congregation a classic meditation on the passage."

He said he would be grateful for that.

And so I set to work looking for an old and authoritative commentary on Jesus' teaching on the Vine and the branches. I began looking where I knew I would find a rich trove of historic Christian material, the website known as the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Ach du lieber Augustine
CCEL (pronounced "Cecil" or "SEE-sell" by many users) contains about 700 classic writings, 500 of them coded with a special mark-up language called ThML (for Theological Markup Language). At CCEL I perused Calvin's comments on John 15 (good comments, but not in preachable form), and sermons by the fourth-century preachers Hilary of Poitiers and John Chrysostom, before I settled on what I would share with our congregation: Augustine's sermons on John 15:1-3 and 4-7. (Click here and search for Tractates LXXX and LXXXI.)

I spent the next few hours doing for Augustine of Hippo what editors do for most writers: I broke up long sentences into shorter ones. I simplified vocabulary (for example, encomium became tribute). I rearranged material thematically.

I also inserted historical context to help the congregation make sense of what they were hearing. Augustine was born only 29 years after the council of Nicaea, I told the congregation, and the Nicene teaching on Jesus' divinity was still not fully accepted during much of Augustine's lifetime. That, I told the congregation, was why his comments on Jesus' being the Vine focused so heavily on his full divinity. (Indeed, just two years before he died, Augustine had to publicly defend orthodox Christology as his beloved city of Hippo was being besieged by an army of Arian Goths.)

Similarly, when in these sermons Augustine rails against those who think they can bear good fruit apart from the Vine, his conflict with the followers of Pelagius comes to the surface. And when he tells those Pelagians to "vapor away at [their] windy talk" it is helpful to remember that Augustine was a trained rhetorician.

The next morning I delivered to our congregation the words of Augustine, updated, simplified, rearranged, and condensed. Remarkably, these old, old words held the listeners' attention.

A Kempis in an E-book
Grateful for the way CCEL makes such resources available, I wanted to learn more about the site and its creator, Calvin College computer science professor Harry Plantinga.

In a 1997 essay, Plantinga recalled his personal struggle that gave birth to CCEL. One day, the Plantingas' three-year-old son, Peter, was standing outside of a glass door and his mother inside. Remarkably, Peter understood what his mother said, even though the door was closed. Then it dawned on the Plantingas: Peter was lip-reading. They took him to an audiologist who confirmed that, at least by most people's definition, Peter was deaf. Soon they discovered that their 14-month-old daughter Anna was also profoundly hard of hearing.

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May (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49