A Sermon Game

In 2013 I began a project. I resolved I would watch a movie for every year from 1913 to the present day: 100 films from a hundred years. I kept a blog about them - The Penciltonian - not reviewing or critiquing, but talking about what made each of them interesting. I deliberately pushed myself into watching new genres, new styles and films from a pretty wide range of countries. I realised fairly late on that there was a mathematical flaw in my concept: if I was watching one from every year, 1913-2013, that’s not a hundred films, it’s a hundred and one, because I was including both of those -13 years.

Similarly, today is the 40th day since Lent began, and the 41st track of Ben-Them, but the 40 days of Lent aren’t over yet — though today and tomorrow are days when some people end Lent and Passiontide, but we talked about that last Sunday.

Tomorrow is also the start of Holy Week, which I’ve always seen as the Lent of Lent. However much you’ve given up or put aside treats and joys, and reverted to sobriety and fasting, Holy Week is that squared. If you intended to be sombre in Lent, tomorrow you can be morose. As the last Sunday in Lent, some would see this as the last time to have some fun.

The other thing I slipped into my Penciltonian film-watching project, as well as years, was the alphabet. I made sure there was a film beginning with every letter of the alphabet. You know, Amelie, The Big Lebowski, Cats 2019 and so forth - though none of those were on my list. If you have an idle moment, see if you can find a movie title, or book title or what have you, for each. It’s a satisfying challenge.

The book-stall at my old church in Durham had a book called ‘A Basic Church Dictionary’, which always seemed an excellent title, beginning, as it does, ABCD - though I never looked inside. The other place to look for the alphabet in church is in sermons. This is a game invented and recommended by my friend Rob Reed, who was an occasional preacher at my church in Wakefield.

The game works like this: if you find your attention wandering during sermons, try to find the alphabet in what the preacher says. Find the letter ‘a’ in today, the letter ‘b’ ‘c’, ‘d’ and ‘e’ in quick succession in ‘Nebuchadrezzar’ and keep on like that until, if you’re lucky, the whole alphabet is done. Some letters are trickier than others. I once struggled to find the letter ‘J’ in a sermon about Jesus going from Jerusalem to the Jordan, because despite its topic, those three words were only mentioned in the first few minutes. Sometimes you will ache for a Q or find an inexplicable drought of something common like ‘t’. If you’re very lucky, the preacher, will find an excuse to use ‘X Y Z’ as a phrase at just the right moment.

It might sound like a distraction, but I actually find this game focuses my mind on the words, rather than on unrelated thoughts. I come through it following the sermon and remembering what was said. It’s akin to watching the TV with subtitles on, rather than watching TV in the background while distracted by phone.

Incidentally, if you played the same game while listening to Ben-Them, you'd find the Day One contains everything up to 'p', and day two polishes it off all the way to 'z', with the tricky final trio coming in 'Saxony' and 'Hezekiah'.

So there you have it, alphabetical focus fun, on the last Sunday in Lent. Tomorrow holy week begins in earnest, we can put aside these games for a few days.