Sermon for August 22, 2010

Brothers and Sisters, I stand before you today to proclaim, I have been to the mountaintop!

Well...technically we only went halfway up the mountain, and then down into the batcave, where we shimmied along a ledge and then squeezed through a crevice named "Fat Man's Misery" and then back outside again and over "Tadpole Rock," before we finally came all the way back down to the Jones/Finley/Espy cookshed for dinner.

But brothers and sisters, I do stand before you today to proclaim, I have been to campmeeting!

You see, I grew up hearing about campmeeting from my best friend John Wahrmund. Remember the scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest's friend Bubba is describing all the different ways to cook shrimp, and he goes on and on through several scenes and late into the night? Well it was kind of like that every August when John got back from campmeeting: "And then at campmeeting we did this, and at campmeeting we did that, and campmeeting is soooo amazing, and there was this girl at campmeeting, and oh yeah, you would have loved the part of campmeeting when we...Sometimes we wanted to tell John to put a sock in it, but inside we were all secretly jealous of this apparently wonderful, harmonious, and spirit-filled place John went to once a year in the middle of nowhere-ville, Texas. It wasn't just when he came back -- John went to camp meeting for just one week every year, but talked about it that way year-round. And it wasn't just John, either. Chances are, if you've known someone who's been to camp-meeting on a regular basis, you've heard the same story. So what is this place, this gathering of people, this...campmeeting?