Blessed are those who doze
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My friend Lew Webster may have the answer.
Lew was hard of hearing, so just as a sermon was about to begin he would surreptitiously turn off his hearing aid and sit blissfully for the next 20 minutes alone with his own thoughts. He called it “taking advantage of a natural infirmity.”
There are a lot of jokes about people falling asleep in church, usually when the sermon is being preached. Have you heard the one about the minister who paused during his sermon and directed a remark to a man sitting in the congregation?
“Wake up that fellow sitting next to you,” said the preacher. “He’s fallen asleep.”
The man replied, “You wake him up. You put him to sleep.”
On a recent Sunday morning, I sat behind an elderly woman who snoozed contentedly during the sermon. Every so often, when the minister would raise his voice to make a point, she would be roused from her slumber, then promptly drop off again.
“Lovely service, pastor,” I heard her say later as she shook hands with the minister at the church door.
She meant it. She is obviously one of those people who enjoy simply being in the house of the Lord. They don’t feel they have to listen to every word being said.
They’re probably in the minority, however.
“I can tell you what bothers Catholic churchgoers the most, it’s poor sermons,” says Catholic priest, sociologist, author and journalist Father Andrew Greeley.
In one of his columns, Greeley passes along a suggestion from one of his readers that a “worst sermon” contest be held.
“There would be awards,” said the reader, “for all-around worst sermon, for longest, dullest, most inane, most juvenile, least comprehensible and for most pointless sermon.”
Winners, this reader suggested, would be locked up in a room where they would have to listen to tapes of their sermons played over and over!
When I was a boy in knickers, I used to spend the time during the sermon memorizing the Cleveland Indians’ batting averages with the help of the numbers in the hymn book. To this day I can’t open a hymnal to 288 without recalling that was Earl Averill’s batting average in 1935. (As Casey Stengel would say, “You could look it up.”)
While I would have jumped at the chance to escape going to church in those days, I am now inclined to agree with a mother I know who makes her children go to church whether they want to or not.
“If they don’t want to listen to the sermon, they can think about something else,” she says. “Children don’t always have to be doing something. Let them daydream. That’s good for everybody once in a while.”
As for sermons that put people to sleep, a Lutheran pastor in Cleveland says it no longer bothers him if somebody in his congregation nods off while he is preaching:
“In our troubled world, filled with so much anguish and anxiety, it is difficult to find peace and calm,” says Rev. Richard Marcis.
“Our minds and spirits are so cluttered with pressures that it is often difficult to find even a few moments of temporary relief.
“If somebody falls asleep while I am preaching I no longer become upset. As a matter of fact, I am even glad, for among the benefits of God’s word is refreshment — physical and spiritual. If the atmosphere of the church is able to accomplish that by enabling such a person to find a few moments of refreshing sleep, thank God!”
Blessed are those who doze.
George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.