Best Easter sermon ever.

 Best Easter sermon ever. 

As we have been these last few weeks, Uncle Albert and I went to Easter service in a different state according to a different polity.

     Roz said she would be happy - “I really mean it,” she said, “happy” - to fix Easter dinner instead of watching with us though I had volunteered to make spaghetti.

     “What will you be cooking then?” Uncle Albert asked, pretending not to be pleased. He says he likes my spaghetti, but he always adds “okay.” “I like your spaghetti okay,” he says.

     “I don’t know,” Roz said. “I’ll have to look around. We’ll see.”

     “It’ll be something with chicken,” I said. I hadn’t thought about Easter dinner when I went shopping, but I knew we had chicken.

     “We’ll see,” Roz said. And she disappeared.

“There was a mad preacher from Ai . . .”
Not Edward Lear
For genuine Lear, click here.

And Uncle Albert and I went to church on Facebook Watch. We had to wait a while for it to load. Then, it finished, and we watched. Because the church is in another state in a town we’ve never been to, we watched a bunch of people we didn’t know participate from home, reading Scripture, leading prayers; children sang from different living rooms in different keys. We also sang - hymns we didn’t know because the church was in a different denomination.

     The sermon wandered a bit - and a bit more - but it always came back to what Easter sermons almost always come back to: “Christ is risen!” so rejoice!!

‘almost always’ because

     When we were done and had turned it off, Roz came in and said, sounding like the mom: “Wash your hand, boys. Time to eat.”

     And at the table Uncle Albert said he remembered, he thought, every word of the best Easter sermon he’d ever heard.

     “Yeah?” I said. I didn’t believe it.

     “It was less than a minute long,” he said, “maybe even less than half a minute.”

The preacher had read the lesson from Mark. It told how early on the first day of the week the women come to the tomb, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome, with spices to anoint the body. They are wondering who is going to roll the stone away for them. But it is rolled away. And the tomb is empty. Or except for a young man in white who tells them Jesus isn’t there because he’s risen. They may see him in Galilee if they went there. And they run out astonished. They don’t know what to say, so they don’t say anything. At all.

     “And the preacher said,” Uncle Albert said: “‘Every Easter we talk, talk, talk. We talk the resurrection to death because we think we have to say something about it. But, the truth? - what can we say that makes sense out of what doesn’t make sense? Look at it through Mary, Mary, and Salome’s eyes. Don’t think. Look. The tomb is empty. Or there’s a strange man inside who says, “Go to Galilee.” Go where? What? Gob-stopped, that’s the word. The women are choked with amazement; they have nothing to say. But, what can anyone say really?’ And he, the preacher, shook his head and sat down.

     “And he sat then for the length of a regular sermon. There was one whisper after about two or three minutes. And he said, ‘Shhhhh,’ so everyone could hear it.

     “That was it,” Uncle Albert said.

     “Who was he?” I asked.

     “Nobody,” Uncle Albert said. “Nobody you’d know.” And I thought later, “Right. Nobody at all,” because can you imagine any preacher you’d know shutting up after a minute anytime, much less on Easter?

We had African peanut stew.**

04.13.20

_______________

 * 16:1-8. See here.

 **The recipe, from the cookbook, Savory Stews (1969, by Mary Savage), is here.