NOTHING IS HIDDEN… [W, 8-3-22]

 

Preaching is like the internet. I’ll explain… 

July 31, when I preached my final sermon, again, I recounted how my father told me, when I was 66 years old, that I was not really his child. It was an entirely new sermon. I had never talked about that publicly, only privately. The bottom line of the sermon was that it makes no diff who your earthly father is, for we all have the same eternal father. [And mother] The point of the Adam and Eve story is that none of us can claim better lineage than anyone else.  We all have roots in “the ground of being.”

I had not spoken publicly of my father, and the problems he caused us as he aged, because I was afraid I might sound disrespectful. But he has been dead for 18 years, and he lived his final years not in Oakland City, his [and my] home town, but in Spencer, 20 miles from Bloomington, where my brother had moved him and Mother when she could no longer drive. No one in Bloomington would know…

Well, of course, on the St. Mark's first-time visitors list on Monday morning was the name Dan Grossman. Now, the Grossman name might sound familiar to football fans, for his son, Rex, once quarterbacked the Chicago Bears. But I knew Dan as my father’s eye doctor!

It’s quite possible that Dr. Grossman was sitting there thinking, “This fill-in preacher is named John McFarland, and he’s talking about his father, who was nearly blind. I used to have a patient by that name who was almost blind. This jerk is dissing his father!”

Of course, considering that Dr. Grossman has had thousands of patients, and my father was a patient a long time ago, he probably thought nothing of the sort.

Still, let me suggest that preaching is like the internet. Anything you say will be out there for everybody to see, regardless of how private you think you are being, so it’s good always to preach stuff that is true.

Jesus of Nazareth said long before the internet, “For nothing is hidden that will not be revealed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light.” [Luke 8:17]

John Robert McFarland