One meeting after another in the morning, enough time to run out and grab a quick sandwich, another meeting in the early afternoon, then on to the pile of paperwork on the desk and the backlog of email in the computer. At 4:30 I thought: this is necessary work but.

I grabbed a few minutes and climbed up into the attic space over to the left of the pulpit where there is a stash of old sermons. At random I pulled out “Jesus the Man” preached by Rev. Richard Huff in 1954. Back in the office I blew the dust off and started to read. But. Bible scholarship has made a lot of progress in the past fifty years. I didn’t agree with Richard Huff’s main line of argument. There was the inevitable disappointment of reading something meant to be listened to during a complete worship service. I grew annoyed. But. I couldn’t help thinking of the 150 people who probably heard it that long-ago Sunday morning before I was born. I couldn’t help getting a feel for the congregation that listened to that sermon. People grounded in good common sense. People willing to use reason in religion. People who were headed somewhere. Oh yeah I said that’s why we do this. To keep the doors open for people like that. To keep the doors open for us. So we can do religion together not agreeing completely and arguing and annoying each other maybe even loving each other under all the annoyance. As we head in the general direction of truth and goodness. There’s more to it than that but that was enough for this afternoon. A good thing this was enough because just then the phone rang.