Sermon #58 (17th April 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
Last Monday – no, Tuesday – it was sometime past midnight, I was sat with my dad – my 85-year-old dad – in a pretty crowded A&E waiting room at the Royal London Hospital over in Whitechapel. We’d been there since teatime, nine hours, advised by 111 to go and get him urgently checked out for a symptom that was potentially ominous (he’s fine now, by the way, turns out it was nothing too serious in the end, but that’s not the point of me telling you about this). I just want you to imagine the scene. In the A&E waiting room, in the early hours, surrounded by human suffering and grim-faced endurance, people in all manner of states of pain, misery, and disrepair, each with their own personal ‘cross to bear’. Nobody wants to be in A&E at 3am on a Tuesday morning – neither patients nor staff – unless you are driven there by urgent need or dire suffering and you’ve got nowhere else to turn.