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Sermon Illustrations: Assumptions

A man decided to wallpaper his bedroom, but had no idea how many rolls he'd need. The Irishman next door had recently done the same job with a room of identical size, so he went and asked, "Murphy, how many rolls of paper did you buy for your bedroom?" "Ten," said Murphy, happy to be of assistance. So the man bought his ten rolls of paper and did the job. The walls looked fine, but he had two rolls left over. "Murphy," he said. "I bought ten rolls like you said for the bedroom, but now I've got two left over." "Dat's funny," said Murphy. "So did I!"

Karl Barth, the famous theologian, was on a streetcar one day in Basel, Switzerland, where he lectured. One day, a tourist to the city got in and sat down next to Barth. They started chatting with each other. "Are you new to the city?" Barth inquired. "Yes," said the tourist. "Is there anything you would particularly like to see in this city," asked Barth. "Yes," he said. "I'd love to meet the famous theologian Karl Barth. Do you know him?" Barth replied, "Well as a matter of fact I do. I give him a shave every morning." The tourist got off the streetcar very pleased with himself. He went back to his hotel thinking, "Today, I met Karl Barth's barber."

After a week of skiing with his mates, George, my husband, wanted a group photo in the lodge. He held out his camera to a man sitting quietly nearby and asked, "Excuse me, would you mind?" The man seemed wary, but George kept after him. "It's easy," he said. "Just look through this here and push that button." Then George showed him how to frame the picture. After the guy took the shot, the lodge manager came over. "Don't you think that was a little insulting?" he asked. "Not at all," George insisted. "He didn't seem to know much about taking pictures." "Oh, really?" said the manager. "That was Steven Spielberg."¹

Late one Saturday morning I was walking down a shopping street when I saw a flower seller holding out a large bunch of carnations for which he was only charging two shillings (ten new pence). It seemed a good bargain and I assumed that it was the end of the morning and he was getting rid of his leftover flowers. I paid him, whereupon he detached a small bunch of about four carnations from the large bunch and handed them to me. The little bunch was a genuine bunch wrapped with a little bit of wire. It was only my greed that had assumed that the bunch offered had referred to the whole bunch he held in his hand.²

Have you ever wondered why, when you're walking through a shopping centre, people don't walk into each other all the time? You get it occasionally, but not often. I wondered this, and I noticed that it all comes down to body language. When people are walking towards each other, they unconsciously point their heads or look in the direction they're going to walk. And the other person picks up that signal and assumes they know where you're headed. Here's a fun activity next time you go shopping: Walk towards someone, look to your right, but walk to your left. I've done this. It's a whole lot of fun.

A preacher visited an old lady from his congregation. As he sat on the sofa he noticed a big bowl of peanuts on the coffee table. "Okay if I have a few?" he asked. "No not at all," said the old lady. They chatted for an hour and when the preacher stood to leave he noticed that instead of eating a few peanuts, he'd emptied most of the bowl. "I'm really sorry for eating all your peanuts, I meant to eat just a few." "Oh, that's okay. Ever since I lost my teeth, all I can do is suck the chocolate from them anyway."

1 Erin Bowser in Readers Digest January 2006 p91
2 De Bono, Edward Lateral Thinking p 84