I don't preach that often, and don't see myself as making it a regular part of my routine anytime in the foreseeable future, but I've had the impulse from time to time (going back to my days teaching at Radford--try turning Sartre's Being and Nothingness into a sermon for 50 bored undergrads!), and so today I preached for the third time.
I like the parables perhaps most of all in the New Testament. The Napkin Artist gave me quite a complement--perhaps more than he meant--when he said my sermon made him see the parable in a new light. That's quite a trick, and I wonder if part of that comes precisely from being "unchurched": my familiarity with the Gospels is limited (I could never imagine myself preaching out of Hebrews, for instance), but I also don't have the same ossified understandings of the most familiar texts.
In any case, my subversion of the process was to include a "highly degraded image" in the order of worship. It's a black and white image--probably copyrighted, otherwise I'd include a scan--that doesn't really look like anything at first, but at some point resolves into a bearded man who looks like the typical Jesus envisioned in various works of art. I woke up in the middle of the night last and stumbled to my bookshelf: this is the picture I need to use! The subversion is that this image came from a book called, Engine of Reason, Seat of the Soul, by Paul Churchland. Even for a theologically liberal school, I suspect that this is the first time a text by an eliminative materialist (see here as well) made it's way to the front of the chapel!
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