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of feeding and healing the multitude if we will only use them rightly.”
    So far, pretty telling, although the point ought to be made that poverty had been inevitable in Jesus’ day, owing to primitive methods of production; this explained His doctrine of Christian resignation—appropriate in its time-frame but now in need of updating. The whole passage could be expanded when he sat down with pencil and paper. And he would have to look up the words from St. Matthew in the revised version; when drafting a sermon in his head, he fell back, perforce, on King James, which memory—like Helen and her three young allies—was always eager to supply. But he never let details get between him and a powerful idea, such as the one his inspiration had been working toward. Experience had shown him that he might lose it if he did not swiftly clothe it in words.
    “And what of civil rights, you may ask, dear friends. And the right to a fair trial and to speak our minds openly? Don’t they belong to the political rather than the religious sphere? Yes and no, depending. If the craving for justice and equality was put in our hearts by God (you will not tell me they came from the devil), and in all our hearts to the same measure, then it is God’s business that this yearning of the spirit be recognized as belonging to all alike and be loved in all alike….”
    That was the real meat of the sermon, and he had been keen to hear Gus’s reaction to it. It was a ground-breaking argument for the pastorate’s joining in activities (exemplified by today’s mission) still looked on by many, in the Church and outside, as extra-curricular. An overwhelming argument, he had thought. But somewhere along the way he had lost sight of Jonah. This morning, while shaving, he had been wondering how he could work Jonah back in. “We in the ministry, like the prophet Jonah, have accepted a special function of attending to the Lord’s business, wherever and whenever it calls us. But the world is a bigger, more complex place today than it was in Jonah’s time, while we, poor mortals, are still man-sized, like the prophet. We evidently cannot answer, with holy alacrity, all the calls that come in to our spiritual switchboard. Not long ago, for instance, on the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of our Christian year, a young Iranian came up to your rector, after divine service…. What was I to tell him, dear friends? That because he was a stranger and we had our own vineyard to tend, his call, though seemingly urgent, must be placed on ‘Wait’?”
    Jerked awake, like Saul struck down by the questioning Saviour on the road to Damascus, Frank now had the awful suspicion that “Wait” might indeed have been the right answer. He watched the airport Hilton go by and was assailed by a crowd of tardy second thoughts. He was no longer proud of his sermon draft, which to his mind, more uncertain with every passing second, appeared as self-serving. The unfortunate switchboard metaphor pointed to what looked like a basic unwillingness to think through the question of their mission: “Those figures of speech are cop-outs, Father,” John had told him. “You bring in astronauts and space modules when you don’t want to say what you mean.” Frank now admitted the charge. To somebody of his democratic temperament, he guessed, the idea of greater and lesser as applied to other people’s emergencies was troubling. Yet a man doing the Lord’s business had to budget his outlay of himself.
    He asked himself whether a warning—or a sorrowful reproach—could really have come to him from on high as he dozed. Or was the sinking feeling in his stomach due to unseasonably early rising and an undigested breakfast? If God had spoken in his ear, it would be something completely outside his experience. Gus was on close terms with his Maker and seemed to converse with Him intimately as a friend, but Frank, while envying this, attributed it to Rachel’s loss. He himself,