“But Obadiah, being a normal man like the rest of us, he was subject to doubt, even when the Lord was speaking to him directly. He looked around and said, ‘Um, Lord, I don’t know what You’re seeing here, but all I’m seeing is a dried-up marsh and a few half-starved jackrabbits. There’s no one here, Lord.’”
The audience chuckled and smiled.
“But the Lord said, ‘You’re right, Obadiah: there’s no one here. But there will be, Obadiah. Oh, there will be.’”
“Hallelujah! Praise God . . .” came the response.
“And Obadiah replied, ‘Lord – maybe we could check a map or something, because I’m not seeing any milk and honey anywhere around here. You know I wouldn’t doubt You, Lord, but this doesn’t look exactly like a promised land. . . . I know the Israelites were Your chosen people, so I can understand their getting a promised land that was a bit nicer, but there’s not even a single cow for milk here, Lord, not a single bee for honey. . . .’”
More laughter and praise.
“God replied: ‘Obadiah, I made the world out of nothing, and I made the Garden of Eden out of the world that I made out of nothing. Don’t you think that with a little work we can green this place up and make a beautiful city for my Flock?’ Obadiah looked around at the sand and the scrub and the barren salt flats. He scratched his head, wondering where he was going to get a flock of anything, and if he had a flock, what on earth they would eat.”
Simon had taken the microphone from the stand on the pulpit. He was pacing with it, fully into his preaching. “And in answer to Obadiah’s doubts, God asked a question. He asked, ‘Do you love me, Obadiah? Do you love me? If you love me, just answer, Yes, Lord.’”
He pointed the mike to the audience for their response.
“Yes, Lord!” they shouted.
“‘Obadiah, if you have faith in me, just say, Yes, Lord.’”
They needed no further prompting. The “Yes, Lord!” came ten thousand strong.
“‘Obadiah, have I ever lied to you?’”
“No, Lord!”
“‘Will you believe me, despite what your eyes are telling you?’”
“Yes, Lord!”
“‘Will you obey me?’”
“Yes, Lord!”
“‘Then know this, Obadiah Skairn: this valley is where I want you to build my church. Do you understand me?’ And what did Obadiah reply? He said – ”
“Yes, Lord!”
“Hallelujah, yes, that’s what he said, and that’s what he did, hallelujah, and that’s what we’re still doing here today – we’re building God’s Church in this valley, and we’re spreading the Prophet’s message of Christ’s love to the whole world, bathem!”
“Bathem!”
“Blessed are the meek, bathem!”
“Bathem!”
He paused. He glanced down to the third row where the well-dressed young man sat next to Sophia Hale. He looked away. His cheeks were already flushed. His eyes had darkened. His focus faltered momentarily. He bowed his head and uttered a quick prayer under his breath. He looked heavenward, as if searching for words.
“Now, there were others who came to this valley. . . . others who came here for different reasons.” He hesitated, less certain than he had been.
“Amen!” the audience answered in support.
“Yes, there were those who came to this valley to seek their own wealth, to seek an earthly fortune, to make money – and some of those men indeed found wealth and fortune. Many of those men also found drunkenness, prostitution, usury, gluttony and gambling – but this was still God’s valley, bathem.”
“Bathem!”
With their affirmation he began to regain his footing.
“And today, this is still God’s valley, bathem.”
“Bathem . . .”
“Some of those men might have presumed that their newfound wealth was due solely to their own mortal efforts. Some of those men never stopped to give God credit for leading them to the treasures He had stored away here for His Flock’s benefit.”
The audience affirmed again, though with slightly less volume.
“Some of those men refused to acknowledge that they were harvesting those materials and building this city only because God had willed it to be built on behalf of His Church, because God had given them the knowledge and means necessary to do so. Indeed, there are those who are still taking advantage of the earth’s resources today who fail to give God all the credit He deserves.”
They were still responding, but more lightly. The older gentleman sitting in the tall chair behind him shifted in his seat, watching and listening intently. But Simon Paulson’s focus and fervor increased as the path of remonstration became clear to him –
“There are so many in this country today who take for granted what they have been given, so many who are ungrateful, who are spoiled by the great riches God has bestowed upon them, who lust after yet more and more earthly things while they give back to the Church only a small fraction, only a modicum of what God has bestowed upon them, not even the tenth of a percent that the Lord has asked in tithe. They seem to believe that their own happiness and pleasure on this earth is the only thing they need to be concerned with, with all the nice things they can buy. . . .”
Paige noticed Sophia Hale studying the young man intently as well, and that the gentleman in the tall chair was now watching Sophia Hale.
“Some seem to think, in their gluttony for material things, that they can just grab anything and everything they want, no matter how little others may have. Some are blessed with so much that perhaps it seems like a birthright to them, to be taken for granted just as Esau took his birthright for granted, trading it away to his brother Jacob for the physical comfort of a bowl of porridge. But in the end, God will bestow everything and all upon those who, rather than grasping for earthly things, choose to serve the Lord with all of their body, mind, and heart. God tells us that those who will inherit the earth are not those who have their noses in their bank books and their stomachs filled with expensive food and wine – ”
Sophia Hale’s head tilted almost imperceptibly, but not so imperceptibly that the man in the high-backed chair didn’t notice it. He glanced across to the organist and gave a slight nod. The organist began playing, ever so quietly, the first chords of a hymn.
Simon paused mid-sentence, taken aback, his cheeks reddening as though someone had just slapped him in the face, and hard. He blinked twice, gathered himself, paused for a moment, and shifted tack.
“But those who are gathered here today, we know what we owe in full to our Lord and Savior – we owe Him our everything, we owe Him our lives and every minute thereof – and over this next week, we’re going to praise Him and give Him everything we have as we worship Him and share His love and grace with the world. . . .”
The volume of the music was gradually rising. Recognizing the melody, with apparent relief, Simon cleared his throat and began to sing, lifting his hands to lead the audience in a song about being taken up to heaven when the troubles and trials of life were through. The music reinvigorated the mood, but before the song concluded, the older gentleman rose from his seat with his two books. He approached and laid his hand gently on Simon’s shoulder. His smile, Paige thought, didn’t seem entirely joyous. Simon handed over the microphone, his posture slumping as he returned to his seat.
Paige checked her program. The man who stood now at the pulpit was the Reverend Cole Lundquist. Paige recognized the name as that of the author of the best-seller she had seen stacked in the window of the Christian bookstore. After returning the microphone to its stand on the pulpit, he scanned the audience. Even in silence, he dominated the stage and the whole of the auditorium with his presence. She felt it in those around her. This man was what they had come for. They were hungry, to the bottom of their souls, and would be satisfied by nothing less than what he could give them.
Without saying a word, he raised his eyes and hands to heaven. The audience, without he
sitation, followed his lead. With hushed and murmured invocations, they looked to heaven, awaiting further direction.
He said nothing for what began to feel like an interminable duration before uttering the simple words, “Thank You, Lord,” as though he had heard the answer to a prayer. Lowering his hands, he took hold of the sides of the pulpit and surveyed the auditorium again, from the heights of the balcony to the seats in the front row. Scanning the cameras, he found the one on the back wall atop which a red light glowed. Smiling to the remote audience, he nodded graciously, then looked heavenward again and prayed aloud in his deeply sonorous voice.
“Thank You, Lord. Thank You for every soul in attendance today, whether they have come to Your house here in Your valley or are watching and listening from afar. We thank You for every member of Your Flock and for every guest, here and abroad, to the ends of the earth, and we thank You for the devoted support You provide for this humble ministry through them. During this week in which we remember your greatest sacrifice, we thank You for each and every gift from Your Flock – the gifts from Your lambs who have little, like the poor widow who gave her last coins in the temple, and we thank You for the gifts from those of greater means, like Joseph of Arimathea, who gave his own tomb so that the body of our Lord Jesus could be buried honorably. We know that You see all things. We know that You know each heart and that You bless each gift. We are so mightily grateful for all of these blessings, Lord, great and small, and we know that it may be, as You have said, easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God – but we believe in Your power and Your miracles, O Lord, and we believe that You can do anything You want to do, that You can make a camel as slender as need be, and You can make the eye of a needle as wide as a barn door if You will it to be so – hallelujah and bathem!”
As he finished his prayer, the reverend gave a glancing, reassuring smile to Mrs. Hale in the third row.
“As Brother Paulson has ably reminded us this morning, we owe so much not only to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, but also to a humble man, a man who was willing to do whatever God wanted him to do, though it caused him great suffering. Brother Obadiah knew that the Lord was storing up rewards for him in heaven. He knew and believed what the Lord had said, that there was a place reserved for him on the other side of those pearly gates, a beautiful mansion somewhere along those streets of gold. But as Obadiah wrote in his own good book, that isn’t why he did what he did. No, it wasn’t. Brother Obadiah said, ‘Though the Lord may choose upon my passing to give unto me the just reward for my sins and failures, though He may choose to send me to the deepest depths of the fiery pit, where the lost and damned gnash their teeth and rend their garments in pain and despair, yet in this life I would sacrifice all of my earthly possessions and my desires. I would give unto my Lord, even unto my last breath, my all – ’”
The young man sitting beside Sophia Hale whispered something in her ear; he leaned into her affectionately again, stood, and made his way out of the row. He walked back up the center aisle with the same unselfconscious ease with which he had entered, and he left the building.
The reverend took the interruption in stride, but his eyes followed the young man from the moment he stood, all the way out the door. Paige, watching one of the screens, noted that the video director had maintained a close up on the reverend throughout: no one other than those in the auditorium would have been aware of the incident.
Indeed many in the auditorium were distracted, but Cole Lundquist, being the consummate professional, reeled them back in, beginning with a dramatic synopsis of the setbacks, trials, and tribulations Obadiah Skairn had endured on his journey to the valley and through the rest of his short life. It was three years before Obadiah won his first converts. The audience was well in hand again when the reverend paused to take a sip of water. He scanned the auditorium. Ten thousand pairs of eyes and ears were his, and through the cameras, multitudes more.
“Brother Obadiah wasn’t born a preacher,” he continued, returning the glass to its shelf inside the pulpit. He removed the microphone and began pacing with it, using the full width of the stage. “Brother Obadiah didn’t know how to preach. He had gone to the local Indians to share the story of Jesus, though doing so nearly cost him his life. He lived with them nonetheless, until they accepted him as one of their own. As he learned to share God’s word, he preached in the dirt streets of Aurelia. He preached to the miners who flooded the valley in the gold and silver rushes. He preached to the prostitutes and the barkeeps, to the store owners and the bankers, to the gamblers and the lawyers – to all who followed the miners. Obadiah and his Bible were thrown out of the saloons, out of the houses of ill repute, out of even the hardware store. He was cursed at and shot at, he was spit on and laughed at, until his handful of followers pooled enough resources to build a modest chapel at the end of Saloon Row – only to find, the morning after it was consecrated, the structure burned to the ground.
“The congregation eventually moved to the safety of the other side of the river, where they spent years worshiping in a canvas tent before building our original chapel here, the bell of which still calls the faithful. The prophet’s own hands built the chapel’s pulpit, the same pulpit that every leader of the Flock since has stood behind, the same pulpit that was moved here to this beautiful new place that the Lord has provided, the same pulpit that I am blessed and humbled to be standing behind today. With his own hands, the prophet carved these very words on our pulpit’s face, to be an ever-present reminder to himself and to the Flock of the Lord’s sacred promise: Blessed are the meek.
“Blessed are the meek, bathem. And on this Palm Sunday before Easter Sunday, what does it mean for us to be meek?”
He had arrived at the theme of his sermon. He related Jesus’ trials and tribulations leading up to his entry into Jerusalem. He spoke of how the Son of God had fasted and was tempted by Satan for forty days and nights in the desert, of how Jesus had the power of God flowing in his veins:
“Jesus could have done anything he wanted, with the wave of his hand. With the blink of his eye he could have destroyed all of the enemies of God’s people. He could have destroyed Satan himself. He could have brought down cities. He could have brought the world to its knees and forced every inhabitant on the planet to worship him by merely commanding it. He was the Son of God! He was God incarnate! The power available to his body and mind could make every fictional superhero ever created by man look utterly puny and helpless by comparison. Jesus Christ needed nothing and no one – and yet, he effectively tied his own hands and gave himself up to be tortured and brutally killed by those he could have incinerated with a blink of his eye, at any moment of the process. But why did he willingly suffer? Why didn’t he stop those who were persecuting him? Why did he restrain his mighty powers?
“Jesus subjugated himself. He submitted himself to the nature of a base human existence, and though flawed by human desire and temptation and want, he kept his powers in check. It’s true, he healed a few people. True, he turned some water into wine. He fed a few thousand souls with a couple of loaves of bread and a few fish. He even walked on water to strengthen the faith of his disciples. But what he did was nothing compared to what he could have done, had he so chosen. He exercised his power, just a minute measure of his immeasurable power – but always for the sake of others, never for himself. But why . . . ?”
Paige was as fascinated by the reverend’s style as by his message. She recognized elements of the techniques from the church sermons of her childhood, and more recently from having watched television evangelists on Sunday mornings, and more recently yet from having sat through long hours of preaching by some of the world’s most popular imams. The mesmerizing, rich timbre of Cole Lundquist’s voice was only one ingredient of the carefully measured, highly practiced, potent recipe. There was a poetic, musical quality to the cadence of his delivery that drew the listener in, taking advantage of the mind’s desire fo
r the completion of patterns initiated but still open, the pleasure in the continuation of pleasingly narcotic rhythms, the desire for fulfillment of expectations sown. There were the repeated, long drawn-out vowels, the assonance and alliteration of the words, the lifting lilt and extension at the ends of questions that left the listener waiting for the fall, for the completion – the minor chords wanting major resolutions, the emphatic punch and pound that drove home the statements of certainty. It was a form of communication designed to be fully seducing and engaging, a passionate dance with the listener’s mind and emotions. Each question asked was to be answered as the listener would answer, but always with a clear implication of what the right answer should be, an answer that could not be doubted. The volume, rhythm and percussion of the delivery was artfully varied and composed, flowing and ebbing from a low, gentle, soothing tone, transitioning with building momentum to an energetic, pulsing, finishing drive.
He spoke of Jesus enduring all that Jesus had to endure – and willingly. But why had Jesus done so? Why? Because his Father had sent him on a mission, and he was going to fulfill that mission no matter what. Because God so loved the world that He gave His only son that whosoever believed in him might not perish but have eternal life. He spoke of Jesus asking humbly to be baptized by John, and of Jesus submitting himself to the forty days and nights of hunger, thirst, and heat in the desert – not unlike the ordeal endured by Obadiah Skairn – of the blisters on his exposed body and feet, the cracked lips, the near-blindness from the sun, the lure of shimmering mirages – yet he fought down and suppressed his ability to turn stones into bread or sand into water or to speak a solitary word that would cause a tree to appear, to shade and to cool him.
The girls sitting next to Paige were wide-eyed, licking their drying, parched lips, trying to swallow.
The reverend had many tools and he used them all – cajoling, tempting, teasing, frightening, threatening, relieving. He urged, demanded, shamed, caressed and beckoned, keeping the listener always slightly off balance, never knowing quite what to expect next. The shifts were sufficiently unpredictable that one’s mind couldn’t possibly wander – the master played with the reins, changing pace and direction while leaving one uncertain, yet ever curious, as to the destination. One would be climbing a hill, only in the next moment to find oneself free-falling into an abyss – only to be caught up gently and safely by the strong hand – before being allowed to tumble and free-fall again, allowed to think one was about to plummet into the black flames of perdition – before being scooped up again and lifted and carried until one had no doubt that one’s eternity would be spent tucked away in a heavenly nest on a bed of angels’ feathers, in blessed peace and secure comfort. Above and below all, a power greater than oneself was in control. One could let go. One could stop worrying. All would be well, if only one would submit, if only one would kneel, if only one would give in, give up, give over. . . .
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