THE EMERGENCY SERMON [Sun, 8-1-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

It’s Sunday morning, so, as always, I am thinking about my emergency sermon. Not actually preparing it, since I don’t know what the Bible text or the title are for the sermon listed in the bulletin, but simply getting ready, just in case. I have done this every Sunday morning when I was scheduled to sit in the pew rather than stand in the pulpit for… I’d say fifty years.

It started in Rutland, Vermont, on a family vacation, when our daughters were quite small. It was Sunday morning, so we had sought out the nearest Methodist church. The worship service starting time came and went, with all the worshippers waiting in the pews while the organist played the longest prelude ever heard in The Green Mountain State. The ushers formed a scrum and whispered urgently to one another. I figured out the problem. I went to the ushers and told them I was a Methodist preacher and willing to preach, since it was clear the expected preacher had not shown.

They were relieved. The regular pastor was on vacation, and a guy from another town was supposed to fill in, but he had not shown, and hadn’t answered his phone. [No cell phones then.] They took me to the pastor’s study and got me outfitted in a pulpit robe and stole, which I felt was unnecessary, but that was a time when men, especially preachers and ushers, wore suits to church, and I was in vacation clothes.

I didn’t have any particular idea about what to preach, but I was always working on a sermon in my mind. I figured I’d just start with the Bible reading listed in the bulletin and go from there.

That’s when the fill-in preacher finally showed. He hadn’t answered his phone at home because he was on his way. He thought he was early. He had forgotten that the Rutland church had gone to a summer schedule, an hour advanced. Another good reason why churches should never change worship times. It was the only time I was defrocked.

I was disappointed. I wanted to see what the spirit would come up with for me to preach. As I listened, I was pretty sure that what that late preacher came up with after a week’s preparation was no better than I would have come up with then and there.

I’m older now, not nearly as sure of the quality of my preaching as I was when younger. Then I was sort of like the young preacher who said to his wife on the way home after church, “I wonder how many really great preachers there are.” “One less than you think,” she said.

Still, every Sunday of pew sitting, I have considered what to do if the pulpit were suddenly vacant, if the preacher got sudden-onset laryngitis. That happened only once, the last year before I retired--at a rather large, formal Saturday wedding--when the wife of the pastor in the next town called me in a panic and said, “They’re in the church and Mike suddenly lost his voice. How quickly can you get here?”

That wasn’t really a challenge. Just read the service from the Book of Worship, which I knew from heart from doing it so many times. Weddings don’t usually have a sermon [homily] anyway.

So, they seemed quite surprised when the preacher they’d never even seen before launched into one. Everybody there said it was really good for spur of the moment. Spur of the moment? Ha! I’d been preparing that sermon for fifty years. The one about love.

John Robert McFarland

“There is no marriage in heaven, but there is love.” Sarah Brown in Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters.