I had a lot of bad theology as a kid, a lot of bad ideas which clung like the Sunday blue blazer I had to wear in late-August. Or the dust in our ancient church library that I accidentally wandered into once. Or the Caucasian flannelgraph dolls in Mrs. Jeffcoat's third grade Sunday School Class.
I have already said that most of these ideas came from the sermons I heard. But maybe I should be honest and admit that when I was a kid, I didn't listen to most sermons. I endured most sermons by winding and unwinding my mother's pin-lever watch until she grew visibly irritated. After that, I signed my name to bulletins. I did this repeatedly and with such concentrated effort that my fingers hurt. I loved the carbon-copy effect on the backs of hymnals that I could achieve by pressing harder with my pen. Maybe I imagined that once my brightest and most promising years, the precious years of my childhood, had all disappeared into years of sermon-listening, I would have a last will and testament in the form of scribbly indentations on all the covers of hymnals in the church.
Anyway, I would have succeeded.
But all of this should begin to explain why I despised church sermons... and why I loved church plays. Plays were stylish, and rare. Sermons were not. Sermons were artless, and very common. If I would have been a more cerebral kid (like my boy-genius brother), I could have learned something from them. But to me, they were useless. Deadwood. If they went anywhere, it was on the ambling current of my imagination.
To be continued...
Click here to read the previous post in this series.
By: Chad
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