With only a few sermons under his belt, he really didn’t know how to preach. When he stood to speak that morning, pages of notes lay on the podium, along with his red-letter edition Bible.
The small church building was still pretty but the long-time members were battered by years thad had made them old and sad. They were sitting to hear a 20-year-old boy tell them things they had already heard many times from other speakers who had delivered them better.
The boy picked a favorite passage. John 11. The raising of Lazarus. He struggled to explain it to the people but how did it help them to hear that a long time ago, someone they didn’t know had died but was raised and given back to his family, when the people in this audience would not be given the same thing?
There was so much in the passage that he didn’t understand, but at least he knew that he didn’t understand. The night before, he read it repeatedly, struggling to tease out the meaning of the story. But at his young age, he was too limited by his youth, as well as the literal minded dogma of his upbringing, to see the rich drama and pathos of the ancient writing.
He knew that Lazarus coming out of the tomb was the big moment but it was the phrase “Jesus wept” that led him to say the thing these people needed to hear:
“Jesus cares that we are sad.”
It wasn’t a new thought. Every week they sang and spoke of the love of Jesus. But at this particular moment, those people needed to hear that Jesus cared for them. And the boy-preacher saw how much they needed it.
Amidst all of the prepared verbiage, it was the only thing that had meaning that day.
He looked up from his notes to see the old women scattered in the audience who were still in shock that their husbands were dead. He took in their moist eyes and sniffling noses, and he saw the quiet resilience of new widows who had risen from their beds, dressed in their Sunday clothes, and came to church to claim the same pews they had sat in for years with their mates.
And they clung to the only words they could hear—that Jesus loved them.
Those ladies have passed on, and no one remembers that moment on that Sunday forty years ago, except for the boy who became a preacher and who is now an old man.
