Sweet Corn from the Pastor

On July 1, 1998 I began my pastorate at the Olathe United Methodist Church on the western slope of Colorado. I was initiated into the Olathe community, an agricultural town of about 1500, rather quickly. A week after I arrived I had a funeral service to do, and then another, both for old-timers so I had quick exposure to the community. Then, barely settled into the parsonage with my dog Ipolani, I began hearing about the Olathe Sweet Corn Festival, how on the first Saturday in August the town expected 25,000 people to descend upon the community park for free "Olathe Sweet" sweet corn which grew in the fields around the town. The one-day event featured food and drink concessions, craft booths and music by local performers all day long. The big draw beside the free sweet corn was a rock and roll concert by the Kansas Band when the sun went down followed by a fireworks finale.

My first reaction was: Twenty-five thousand people! That many people in this small town? I found it hard to believe.

But I became a believer that first Saturday morning in August, as I helped to judge floats in the Sweet Corn Festival parade and watched the cars parked every which way on Highway 50 and people--young and old, whole families with children--streaming into the park to sit on the grass before the bandstand and eat the delicious roasted and boiled sweet corn. I sat with them, too, and learned to eat sweet corn dripping with butter and peppered, not salted.

Where did all these people come from? I wondered. It was then that I got the idea for the name of my pastor's column for the church newsletter: "Sweet Corn from the Pastor." This collection includes a number of articles I wrote for "Sweet Corn from the Pastor." It also includes excerpts of sermons as memoirs. I have always been interested in memory, especially in our memory of God, and I have long thought of my sermons, for better or worse, as memoirs.