Leslie D. Weatherhead was a well-known British pastor, who served famous City Temple of London for many years. In 1945, he published a book of the sermons he had delivered to his people during the war that was just concluded. Only the first sermon had this as its title, but the entire book was named “The Significance of Silence.” The book is available online, which is where I found it and learned quickly to treasure its content. (My favorite source of old books– www.alibris.com.)

A pastor friend told me one day that he finds great sermon illustrations from this website, for which I am grateful. Waylon Bailey is going to love these three short vignettes.

About Gratitude

Weatherhead repeats a story Prime Minister Winston Churchill had recently told in a speech, about a sailor who dived into the waters of Plymouth Harbor to rescue a drowning child. Not long after, the sailor bumped into the little boy and his mother in the streets of Plymouth. The child nudged his mother and she stopped the sailor. “Are you the man who pulled my little boy out of the water?” The sailor was glad to acknowledge that he was, and thought possibly the mother might have in mind some kind of reward. “Yes, madam,” he said proudly.

“Then,” said the mother, with fire in her eyes, “where’s his cap?”

About the Really Important Stuff in Life

“I sat with another minister in the home of a charming and wealthy layman who was entertaining us both. The talk turned on Wordsworth’s poetry, and our host said, ‘You two make me jealous talking that way. I have always thought I would like to read a lot of poetry, but I have never had time. When I have made my pile, I shall take it up.’

“He was quite sincere about it, but he never did take it up. A sense of values is not a thing you can switch over, like turning the dial of a radio. You cannot engineer an interest in it, let alone attach dynamic purposefulness to it. It becomes harder and harder, as the years pass, to direct your life by a new star…. If you spend fifty years with the dominating aim of making money, you can’t suddenly say to your self, ‘Now I will like poetry.’ You lose your taste for the lovely things, or, worse still, they don’t seem worth so much…. ‘He who stays in bed on Sunday morning,’ said Dr. Selbie of Mansfield College, Oxford, ‘may not be committing a great sin, but his sense of values is being filched from him. He is putting the value of comfort higher than the value of self-discipline and worship.'”

About the Death of the Faithful

We are not here to be happy, Weatherhead asserts in a sermon called “Is It Really Good to be Alive?” He writes, “We are here to glorify God in a character which has been schooled in such a way that it finds its joy in communion with him.” And he tells this story about his sister who had died of cancer some years earlier.

Weatherhead had bumped into an old friend who said, “I wonder if I ever told you of what your sister’s ministry meant to me. She would be astonished if she knew (perhaps she does). I often went to see her during her long illness…. I can never forget my last visit. It was about a fortnight before she went. We had two hours together, and she was full of fun and laughter and a wonderful anticipation. I could repeat today some of the very words she said. She was like a child going home for Christmas! I never knew anyone who more completely and literally ‘ran up with joy the shining way.’ Her influence has lived with me all through the years.”

This causes Leslie Weatherhead to think back to his visit with his sister just after she had received word that her recovery would be, humanly speaking, impossible. “She was in a Liverpool nursing home. It was a dark, dull November afternoon, but when I went into her room, I can only say that it was just as though someone had lighted a beautiful lamp. Nobody had really done so, but the glory in her face seemed to illumine the whole room. I suppose she saw the dismay in my own, because she said, ‘Don’t be troubled at the news. Everything that you preach is perfectly true.’ And then she added a sentence that is written on my heart in gold forever: ‘I am proud to be trusted with cancer.’ Now, what do you make of that? ‘I am proud to be trusted with cancer.’ Not that she did not fight it. Cancer is not the intention of God…. God did not will it, but God had allowed it, and that was enough for her. By the time it had won a victory over her body, her soul was more than conqueror through him who could use even cancer to bring her where he wanted her to be, to make her soul greater than ever, and to express his own glory in a human life.”

(There! Thought you’d like those. Now, want a silly one from more recent times?)

I read this the other day in a Readers Digest. Not sure of the date, but it was in the last year or two.

As Halloween approached, the mother asked her little boy what he planned to wear when he went trick-or-treating. “I’m going as the pope,” he said. She said, “Well, honey, that might be a problem. You see, the pope is Catholic, and we’re Lutheran.”

He thought a moment, then said, “Well, is Dracula a Lutheran?”

(Have a great day.)