So today, I'm getting ahead start on sermon prep for Sunday coming.  I have some ideas, and a rough trajectory in mind, but now it's time to read commentaries and start the mulling.

Walter Brueggemann on the psalms - one of my favourites with his threefold schema of orientation, disorientation and reorientation.  Among the books I have is a pocket-sized one called 'Spirituality of the Psalms' and it's just wonderful.  I am tempted to quote a large chunk of it in Sunday's sermon because it says so eloquently more than I oculd ever say.  If I don't go with quoting, I'll almost certainly put it on a handout, it's just so good.

The Word Biblical Commentary Volume 21 and a focus on the psalm that will form the centre of my sermon.  Not shrinking from the cursing with which the psalm closes, the writer, Leslie C Allen, quotes a novel by P D James (and as I read the citation, I recalled using this in a sermon a couple of years or so ago).  I've been looking for something new to read for a while, so have ordered, not the book mentioned, but the first in the series of which it is part.

And then is the annoying ear-worm that goes with this psalm and having been a child/adolesecent in the 1970s... Boney M have a lot to answer for!!

So now, into mull mode proper.  An extended quotation to scan or transcribe.  And, with God's help, a sermon will come out at the other end.