THE IMPORTANCE OF FINISHING ON TIME  [Sat, 2-15-20]

When I preached my final sermon, almost a year ago now, I left out one part I planned to preach, because time ran short. It was an important point, about how to be a Christian when you are too old or decrepit to “do” Christianity. But there just wasn’t time.

I started preaching in little country churches in southern Indiana. You never knew what might happen. Someone might jump up to “give a testimony.” Someone else might call for another favorite hymn. An announcement about the quarterly “settlement day” might spark a discussion about the organization of the denomination. Once a woman ran to the altar rail and started confessing her sins right in the middle of the service. Occasionally Wayne and Mae would start dancing in the aisle together during a lively hymn and just keep going when the hymn was over. Wanda would have to “doodle” on the organ until they finished up.

As the preacher, it was important to be prepared, to know what I was going to say, but also important to be prepared to be flexible, to cut the sermon, sometimes drastically, to get the service over “on time.” The preacher himself had to get out on time, too, because with three congregations, I couldn’t run overtime. The schedule was tight. The churches were not very close geographically, and the roads between were curvy and hilly and usually not even on the map. The folks at the next church on the circuit were waiting, sometimes impatiently, already on the second hymn when I arrived.

When it was the last church that morning, the cooks were waiting, the women who had stayed home from church that day, against my expressed wishes, to cook huge amounts of food because they were hosting the preacher for “lunch.” They had the food hot and ready. Eating on time was much more important than getting the last point of the sermon in.

When Helen and I married, she looked forward to those big meals. They were like her mother made, and also a meal she didn’t have to cook. [There was no thought that a husband would do any cooking in those days.] She had ridden the circuit with me a few times before we married and so knew what those meals were like. And we really needed a free meal.

But after we married, no one ever signed up on the sheet on the bulletin board, the one to host the preacher for lunch. The women had learned that Helen was a Home Ec major, and they were afraid to cook for her.

But she was a Home Ec major who had never cooked a meal when we married. The IU Home Ec Dept was a research institution. Helen could tell you which foods eaten together would poison you, but she had no experience actually cooking those foods. She knew well the family relations and child development and fashion design and clothing construction and home management and architecture areas of Home Ec, but the folks in that department just didn’t cook. She became a consummate cook on her own, but the church ladies didn’t understand, so we ate a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches after our last worship service on the early Sundays of our marriage.

Oops, I’ve run over. Our “agreement” is that these meditations won’t run over 500 words, and 500 is in the rear view mirror. I’ll tell you the story I left out of my final sermon next time.

John Robert McFarland