{If you are coming in late, during Lent 2021 I am writing about sanctuaries of various sorts. The church kind, not the bird or wildlife ones — just to be clear. With the pandemic keeping many of us away from our congregational spaces for perhaps a few more months to come, I’m revisiting churches, chapels, and cathedrals through the photos in my files.}

Now, there’s this guy. He’s attending the Hubbell/Hubble family reunion. (You should hear the song!) Yes, it’s the family of the Hubble Telescope Hubble, as well as the Baseball Hall of Fame Hubbell, Carl. And of my maternal grandmother. No matter how you spell it, it’s one family tree. Never having been to that national reunion of Hubble/Hubbells, we traveled to Long Beach, California and stayed at a floating hotel, the reunion’s home for those three days. The place was just a bit frayed, but given its age and experiences, it was kind of cool to live on the Queen Mary!

Like most of the classic ocean liners, the Queen has a chapel. Many of the modern cruise ships we’ve been on had chapel-like meeting rooms, with the space used for small affinity groups (the model railroad enthusiasts, Friends of Bill W., Weightwatchers, and the like), in addition to worship services and ship-board weddings. Sometimes the only thing that distinguishes the “chapel” room from any other meeting room on those ships is the nice sign on the door. But in the golden age of the Queen Mary, seafaring guests actually went to church on Sundays and the chapel looked like a small sanctuary, albeit an interfaith design to accommodate people of all creeds. (I remember seeing in seminary a cross used for military chapel services. Turned one way, the metal figure was a Celtic cross; but turned around, it was a crucifix. One size fits all.)

So all these years later, the Queen Mary is a permanently docked hotel, and the chapel is still used for worship. I’m thinking that the room is probably stripped of much of the sanctuary look it once had. But there are still Colonial style pews (white with natural wood trim), a stained glass window, flower stands, and a pulpit. (It’s either a simple pulpit or an elaborate lectern. You decide.) If you search on line for the Queen Mary Chapel or “wedding venue,” you’ll see lovely images of the room. But the only one I have is the one posted here, taken by my wife Joan that day I ad-libbed a sermon for the reunion crowd.

Ad-libbed. See, that flies in the face of what I wrote yesterday about serious sermon preparation and preaching. But under the circumstances, I did the best I could with what I had. What I had was a last minute invitation to speak, a Gideon Bible from the room, and some quick thoughts about “fathers.” It was Fathers’ Day. (Or Father’s Day? — or leave out the apostrophe altogether? Never mind.) The Hubbells gathered there, along with the Hubbles, and maybe some Hubbels, learned from some informal conversations that I was a minister, and since I was a new member of the club, maybe I’d lead a short Sunday worship service and use “fathers” as the theme. I was flattered (it doesn’t take much, believe me) so I said yes. I should be able to pull this off.

So, I flipped through the hotel-room Bible, chose a passage, used a Psalm to line-out some congregational participation, and assembled a sermon, more what we in the business call a “meditation.” It was adequate for the occasion. Not exactly five stars.

But two things stand out from that hour in the Queen Mary’s chapel. First, trying to build a service on short notice, one that is authentic, helpful, inspirational, even fulfilling, (“…in spirit and in truth”) is out of my wheelhouse, er, shipyard. Most ministers and priests I know, and presumably rabbis I don’t know, like to sit with a scripture text for some time before a sermon takes any shape. Prayer and study, even research and theological reading, lead to a good outline, solid sentences, the addition of helpful illustrations and personal stories — all playing out over several days at least. After my Sunday church work was done, I’d take Monday off, but still glance at the texts for the week ahead, begin study on Tuesday, and continue the process until Saturday night. (I worked most creatively under pressure — I think.) When I was in seminary, the guide was this: a “good sermon” took an hour’s prep for every finished minute. A 20 minutes sermon? 20 hours.

But on Saturday, they asked me to preach on Sunday. It was what it was.

The second thing might have been very surprising to some of the more religious Hubbells, no matter their spelling. Over my fifty years in ministry, I had never preached a Fathers’ Day sermon. Nor, for that matter, a Mothers’ Day sermon. In my tradition, as much as we loved our parents, those special days were not liturgical or church holidays or holy days. They are considered nice Hallmark Card days, and worthy of loving phone calls or visits. But my churches didn’t interrupt the flow of the Christian calendar to mark secular occasions. Not to belabor the point (though I do have a habit of doing that), if we preach sermons about our fathers and mothers, what about our grandparents? Or, marking Presidents Day? Or, any number of other greeting card or internet-induced special days? That said, on Fathers’ Day and Mothers’ Day, since it was expected among many church folk to say something about our parents, I’d always mention the day in the pastoral prayer or in the announcements.

The thing is that not everyone has good experiences with, or memories of, their parents. For many folks in the pews, home life was (is) complicated. So, many of us preachers would include in our prayers gratitude for those who were like a loving mother or father to us, not necessarily related biologically.

Today’s post wasn’t exactly about a sanctuary. But it was that little chapel on the big ship among all those Hubbells that got me thinking about the thread I started yesterday: those sacred spaces from which the Word and its adherents go forth. Yes, there is more to those sanctuaries than beauty, majesty, and glorious music. There is the Word.

And now and then, I can articulate it ad lib. The way many of us live each day as it comes.