Why Did the Rubber Chicken...

Pastor Randall Nathan, [Retard],is filling in for Pastor Patty this morning. He found out about this only yesterday afternoon, when Pastor Patty was suddenly called out of town to attend to her ailing mother.

Pastor Patty is in the midst of a sermon series, "The Difficult Questions." Pastor Nathan figured he would fit right into the series with his new sermon, "Why Did the Rubber Chicken Hit the Road?"

On their way back from Randall's high school reunion, they were following an ancient Honda on winding two-lane Highway 57. The back deck and seat of the Honda were stacked to the roof with all sorts of stuff. As the car went around a curve, it hit a bump, and something flew out the back window. Randall swerved to avoid hitting it, which wasn't difficult, since they weren't traveling very fast. Claire looked out the window. "It's a rubber chicken," she exclaimed.

Thus the difficult questions of Pastor Patty's sermon series: What did this mean? Why carry a rubber chicken in your car? Was the Honda driver a chicken thief who stole from grocery stores and when confronted with the theft of a dressed chicken [which is strange, since the chickens we call "dressed" are actually "undressed"] pulled the rubber chicken from an inside pocket and said, "Oh, the clerk must have seen this, officer?" Was there a little boy who could no longer practice his magic act? Was the Honda driver a CIA interrogator who beat suspects with a rubber chicken? Was there a little girl who could not go to sleep without her rubber chicken to cuddle?

People talk about the road and chickens and rubber often. They say they "hit the road" when they are going on a trip. They say that the pavement is "where the rubber meets the road." They ask why the chicken crossed the road. But it is remarkably strange that no one ever asks the question of why and how the road and the rubber and the chicken all come together, and what happens when they do.

There are many difficult qustions in life: Why do good things happen to bad people? Why is there something instead of nothing? Why is Glen Beck not in rehab? Why is Tony Hayward not in jail? What happens when an irresistable force meets an immovable object? Why do rubber chickens ride around in cars and fall out on the highway?

There are some questions, Pastor Nathan said as he concluded his sermon, that we simply have to accept as mysteries without answers.