This morning at St. Mark’s
Above the Starbucks, on the Highway 46 bypass, Mary Beth Morgan, one of our
pastors, and the wife of our other pastor, Jimmy Moore, is using Helen and me
as props for the children’s time in worship. She and Jimmy sit on the floor
with the kids, but she has promised chairs for us.
[You’d think that a
denomination that is willing to ordain a Roman Catholic from Chicago and a
Baptist from Mississippi would be willing to ordain anyone, but apparently not
so with The Ununited Methodist Church.]
Our job this morning, as
the first couple married at St. Mark’s, sixty years ago, is to tell the
children what the church was like back then.
Bloomington’s mayor might
be there. I hope so. He comes sometimes. In fact, he was there that Sunday
morning at St. Mark’s, sixty years ago, in worship, although he did not come to
our wedding at 2:30, since he was only one month old.
I’m going to tell the
children how the preacher back then, the mayor’s father, tried to give a
children’s sermon, and a little girl got under his robe and wouldn’t come out.
So the Rev. Richard E. Hamilton, perhaps the best example of a preacher/pastor
anyone will ever know, just switched from his prepared sermon and preached on
“Let the little children come.”
That’s what St. Mark’s
Above Bucetto’s Smiling Teeth Restaurant has always been about, inclusion for
everyone others might prefer to leave out. We are glad, after sixty years, to
be back home, where they take you in even when they don’t have to. [1]
John Robert McFarland
1] “Home is the place
where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Robert Frost, “The Death
of the Hired Man.”
No comments:
Post a Comment