Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: At the Pulpit (11/15/07)
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TITLE: The Upper Room | Previous Challenge Entry
By Harriet Sabatini
11/18/07 -
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I shouldn’t be here, I thought. My head ached, my were dry as toast, and I had the awful feeling of total memory lapse. Quiet murmurs echoed, dreamlike, around my sodden frame.
“I am a worm and no man, scorned by men and despised by the people.”
The thought came, unwelcome, unbidden to my mind and described me a little too aptly. I hunkered down in the pew as if everyone could read the memories from last night that I could not recall. Surely it was from a psalm? Where and when had I heard it? How could I apply something Jesus thought on the cross to my own decrepit life?
“Peace be to you.”
The calm, friendly voice eclipsed my mental agony with hard, piercing clarity. I inched my fearful (blood-red) eyes up a notch to take in the preacher. He looked the same as last week when I crept in, liquor sodden, penitent, somehow convinced that I could overcome the next time.
He wasn’t looking at me but I felt his eyes nonetheless illuminating my soul as he repeated, “Peace be to you.”
Peace? Ha! Where? Certainly not in this ungainly, turgid, stiff necked soul! God please help me!
The preacher went on, “Jesus said these words after the Resurrection. He appeared to the twelve in the upper room where they huddled, afraid. And what was Jesus walking into? A room full of friends who supported him in his hour of need? No! He was facing those who ran away. One, at least, betrayed him with curses. One ran naked. All had scattered but one. Jesus’ friends had failed him.”
My ears unwillingly, hopefully perked up. Was there hope for me after all?
The preacher paused for a moment and let his eyes scan the sheep before him. He looked upon them with love….he didn’t thunder at them. He exposed them with the truth of the Word spoken with love.
He continued, “So Jesus greets them with, “Peace be to you.” My brothers and sisters we all have a place in that upper room. We have all at one time or another huddled, afraid, no, terrified of God because we have failed and betrayed him. But what does Jesus say to us – before we can make our amends, our excuses? He says, “Peace be to you.” So my friends – no matter what your place is in the upper room, hear that benediction from the Master today. Hear that welcome from the One who bore sin – mine and yours – on the cross and beckons to us to take on the yoke of His peace!”
Something washed through my soul at that moment like a tidal wave. Before it was the crutch and seducer of alcohol, the ‘scene’ the need for sedation from my weakness and failed intentions. I belonged somewhere! I had a place in that upper room! I had a place! Someone, Love itself, was looking for me and saying ‘Peace be to you.”
Shocked I got up from the pew and stumbled down to the foot of the pulpit. My beleaguered brain registered the preacher’s calm foreknowledge, his spiritual insight. I knelt at his feet. He left the pulpit, put his hands on my head and said, “Peace be to you.”
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