This is a work of fiction.
The church was empty when Harold arrived, which was not unusual for a Sunday morning at seven forty-five. What was unusual was that it was still empty at ten forty-five, five minutes before the service was scheduled to begin.
He stood at the window of the small room off the sanctuary — they called it the pastor’s study, though nothing studious had occurred in it for some years — and looked at the parking lot. Three cars. His, the organist’s, and a vehicle he didn’t recognize, parked at an angle that suggested its driver had given up partway through the act of parking and simply stopped.
Margaret appeared in the doorway. “I saw on the Facebook that there’s a thing at the lake today,” she said. “Some kind of festival.”
Harold nodded slowly. A festival.
He looked at his sermon. Forty-five years of Sundays had produced in him a reliable method: three points, a scripture, an illustration, a closing appeal. Today’s text was John 11. Lazarus, come out. He’d preached it six times before. He knew where the jokes were, where to pause, where to lower his voice.
He folded the papers and put them in his jacket pocket.
He walked into the sanctuary, where Margaret and two others — elderly women who came every week regardless of festivals — waited in their usual pews. The unknown vehicle, it turned out, belonged to a young man in his thirties who was sitting in the very back row, coat still on, looking at his phone with the expression of someone who hadn’t fully decided to be there.
Harold stood at the pulpit.
He opened his mouth to begin, and what came out was not the sermon.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time,” he said. “Long enough to know that I don’t know very much.”
The women in the front looked up.
“Lazarus came out of the tomb because someone called his name,” Harold said. “That’s the whole text. I used to have a lot to say about what it meant. This morning I mostly just find it beautiful.”
He stood quietly for a moment.
“Let’s sing,” he said.
He never gave the original sermon. He never missed it.