WOMBS AND TOMBS

by Adam Harbinson

I got an email the other day from a pastor I used to know who now lives and works in Alabama. Charles is a man with the most unconventional approach to all things Christian that you’re ever likely to encounter. I think I like him because while some folk call a spade a spade, Charles calls a spade a shovel.

He was preaching in my hometown once, and I still remember the atmosphere as the gathered crowd waited expectantly for the ‘wise man from the west.’ And what did he do? He told the most outrageous story I’ve ever heard. It was about two friends, one a predictable civil servant type, the other an incurable practical joker. The sensible one had had a minor accident and was in hospital, and when joker boy talked to him on the telephone, offering to visit him, he was told, ‘Only if you promise that there’ll be no tricks.’ So the promise was made and off went the fun-lovin’ guy to visit his injured chum in hospital. However, as joker boy trundled down the ward when visiting time was over, he couldn’t help noticing a surgeon’s outfit hanging on a coat-hook in an unlocked office just off the corridor. Quickly he donned the blue paper hat, gown, mask and shoes, and made his way back to the ward where Johnny Sensible was recovering from the onslaught of in-laws.

‘I’m here to take your temperature,’ he announced, disguising his voice. But as his friend opened wide his mouth he was told that the investigation was to be done at the other end; ‘So roll over and pull down your pants.’ Dutifully he obeyed and later, much later, when Mr Joker Man had long since beaten his retreat, a nurse appeared and wondered why the screens were drawn around the bed. ‘A doctor has been, half an hour ago, to take my temperature,’ he told her as he lay there with his bare backside still hanging out.

‘Take your temperature?’ she said. ‘With a Daffodil?’ So runs the story which I’d love to believe is true. But then Charles, having softened his audience, delivered one of the most life-changing sermons I think I’ve ever heard. He talked about wombs and tombs.

Think of an unborn baby; comfortable, safe, well-nourished and warm in his mother’s womb. However, the child out-grows its little environment and is born amid much pain and blood, screaming and smacking of innocent buttocks, into a large and hostile world. But if the baby had a say in the matter he might think, ‘I like it in here. I think I’ll stay,’ what would happen? The womb becomes its tomb. So it is with you and me, life is a series of wombs, each bigger than the previous one. It’s all about change and growth, for we will surely out-grow our world, however big it is. I look back over the last twenty years or so since Charles sought to blast us out of our comfort and complacency, and I see so many former colleagues and friends for whom the womb of life has become their tomb. They refused to move on to inhabit a bigger world, and they shrivelled and died.

I think of another man, Michael McNamee, of whose sermon on another occasion, I recall less than twenty words. He said, ‘If you want to see things you haven’t seen before, you’ve got to do things you haven’t done before.’ Just another way of saying the same thing; break out of your womb. There’s a big, big world out there.