THE FINAL SERMON, MAYBE [F, 2-4-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter--THE FINAL SERMON, MAYBE [F, 2-4-23]

 

Each time I preach, I say that it is the last time. Because I’m old. I’m forgetful. I would hate to be in the middle of a sermon and be like Charlie…

I was walking down the hall in a hospital, going to see one of my church members--avoiding looking into rooms, since folks in the hospital have enough problems without people in clothes seeing them in those backless gowns--when some intuition caused me to alter my gaze and look into a particular room. There was Charlie. He was not one of my members, but I knew him. He looked desperate. So I stopped and went in.

He peered up at me and said, “I’m trying to pray, and I can’t remember what comes after Our Father…” and he began to cry.

A classic case of anesthesia hangover, both the forgetfulness and the depression, but when you’re in one of those periods, it’s very real. So I said that I could remember what came after in that prayer, so I would pray it with him. Together we got all the way through “…and the glory, forever. Amen.”

When I mentioned the experience to him later, he didn’t remember me being there, or our praying together. Of course not. That’s the way anesthesia works.

But there are other reasons for forgetting when you’re old, and I don’t want to be in the middle of a sermon and pronounce “Then Jesus said…” and not be able to remember what Jesus said.

I’ve always been disnomic anyway—unable to remember nouns. When George Loveland and I led worship services together in Charleston, IL he would sometimes shout nouns across the chancel to me when I took too long remembering what to call the altar or the offering plates. I miss George.

Sometimes I try to blame my disnomia on old age, but Helen always says, “I’ve known you since you were 20 and you’ve always been this way.” I guess that’s good news.

My mother’s youngest brother, Johnny, was my best friend from age ten until I went to college. He was a bachelor in a small town, and lonely. So he would come to our house to play baseball and basketball with me. He had a hardware store and took me on buying trips and had me help with inventory. Sometimes we went to movies together.

One of those was about a famous singer whose husband died. In despair, she cried out, “I’m forgetting. Even what he looked like. I want to remember.”

I used that as an illustration in the first sermon I preached when I was nineteen and sent by a desperate District Superintendent to be the preacher on the Chrisney, IN circuit—three churches each Sunday morning, Chrisney and Crossroads and Bloomfield. [Not the one that is the Greene County seat].

So, that being my first sermon story, I think it would be neat to use it in my last sermon…unless I have already preached my last one.

I thought it would be neat to preach my last sermon at age 90. That would be impressive. But I have decided on age 89 for my final sermon, because that would be 70 years since that first sermon, and I could use that first illustration again. If I could just remember the name of that famous singer…

John Robert McFarland

Uncle Johnny didn’t marry until he was 35, shortly before I married at 22. He was best man at our wedding.