Sunday afternoons found Donald on the old corduroy sofa, inert, a glass of sweet tea shedding tears of condensation all over a coffee table too wretched to protect with coasters. Most of his parishioners would be in the same position, though alert, not inert, a six-pack near at hand, suffering through the spectacle of the Angels creaming the Yankees with a superstitious attention that reminded Donald of Luther’s dictum: if only I could pray the way my dog looks at a piece of meat. He accepted the dictum but not the beer—there are limits to what post-Holiness piety can enjoy in good conscience. Communion wine was his only indulgence on that score, and he suffered no small amount of ribbing from his colleagues for it. Occasionally Donald considered spreading a rumor that he was a recovering alcoholic, as that seemed to be the only acceptable excuse for abstinence. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to lie.

As a rule, baseball was just compelling enough to absorb Donald’s depleted post-church consciousness, but on this day, by the innocent fault of the Sunday School, he was instead back in the grip of his mental debate with Grandfather Abney.

After the service, Donald had led Bible study for the adults upstairs in the sanctuary while the children trooped downstairs to sing with Mrs. Forrad and Ms. Gross. Afterwards they split up into makeshift classrooms partitioned by dividers hanging from the ceiling. When the education hour was over, Pastor Donald came downstairs to pray everyone safe and healthy through the week ahead before the mass exodus to baseball or football or lunch or shopping in Kuhsota.

But when he arrived downstairs, the children were twitching with excitement, the teachers beaming proudly. Before he could even open his mouth to ask, he was informed that the whole Sunday School had prepared a special treat for him, and wasn’t it lucky that he had chosen Joshua out of all the lessons to preach on that morning? The teachers had decided that chapter 24 was a bit abstract for their small charges, but it was a great opportunity to cover the battle of Jericho—a real favorite when they were kids, how come it never came up in the Sunday lessons?—and they had a song to go with it. Maybe Pastor Donald knew the song. Would he like to sing along?

Of course he did, and of course he would…

Donald rose with the sun, whatever the time of year. At the summer solstice that meant quarter to five and by Christmas nearly seven. Late August was a comfortable sort of time with a reasonable wake-up call of six o’clock. He made his own coffee. Carmichael scoffed at the “swill,” as she called it, that fueled him, and would not suffer her own coffee, brewed from beans dutifully toted northwards by her discriminating City parents or purchased at no small expense from the Shibboleth Co-op, to be wasted on his tastebuds. He was amused by her snobbery and made a point of smacking his lips on his “ditchwater” (another term of disapprobation) whenever she saw him drink it.

On this particular morning, the pleasure of sunrise, coffee, and quiet vanished the moment Donald flipped open his pastoral agenda to find the next Sunday’s lessons.

He should have seen it coming. It’s not like he hadn’t come across it before. Donald was on his fourth trip through the three-year lectionary, a curiosity that remained unfathomable to his assorted cousins and uncles, for whom there was no preaching but expository preaching, straight through one book of the Bible at a time, one verse at a time. Donald had in fact always taken wary note of this particular Sunday, the Fourteenth after Pentecost in Year B, for its distinction of featuring the one and only passage from the book of Joshua in the whole cycle…