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I could remember only bits and pieces of Frank Valenti's message that first Sunday when I sat down to take notes later. I did not yet feel comfortable taking notes during the service, which I soon began doing, discreetly, from my seat in the back-right pew. Without the church's own routine tape recording of each service—the only physical record of Frank's sermons since he preached rather freely and spontaneously from rough notes—I would have had a very limited account of it.

I could remember him hitting out on public issues like abortion and a bill before Congress that would permit a child to sue his parents at state expense. "If you raise your child scripturally," he warned them, "and make him go to church, when he gets old enough, he can sue you for forcing your religion on him. And that bill is in the House," he growled, "r-i-g-h-t n-o-w!" He banged his fist on the wooden lectern.

But when he spoke of abortion as "murdering and virtually butchering babies," I forgot his effort to quickly reassure those present "who have been in that situation before" that "God's forgiven you." Above all, I had trouble following how his points of social criticism connected with the story from the text that day, about King Jeroboam, who made molten images for his people to worship and turned his back on God.

Frank, in fact, took considerable time to bring King Jeroboam's story to life, reenacting the experience of his wife, who, following the king's orders, disguised herself to consult a blind prophet. Since God had already alerted the prophet before she arrived, the blind man recognized the wife immediately. "Can you imagine the look on this woman's face?" Frank asked us wide-eyed. "Instead of having her hair up all in braids like the queen, she had it all stringy, made it kinda greasy." He cuffed his hand around his own head as if doing up his hair. "She wore ragged clothes so she wouldn't be recognized." He turned sideways from the podium, lowered his head and shuffled a couple of furtive steps acting her part. "And she walks to the door, she knocks and steps through it … and this blind old prophet says [Frank paused, then declared with contempt], 'Whaddya doin'? … Whaddya look like that for? … I know who you are!'

"Can you imagine the look on her face?" Frank paused, cocked his head and grimaced. "She probably turned around and said, 'I'm gonna kill whoever squealed!'" The crowd howled with laughter.

But what did this story, as Frank brought it to life from the archaic prose of the King James Bible, have to do with abortion or the despised bill before Congress permitting children to sue their parents? Listening to his sermon again, I realized the connection simply was that, just as God destroyed Jeroboam for his sin, so, too, we would be judged for abortion or for neglecting our children. Here Frank pointed to his own "sin."

"I do not spend the quality time with my children that I ought to," he confessed, "and then, when I do spend that time with my children, it seems like they see it as a hurried time. You know," he said, rattling off the kind of attitude he took, the attitude of This-is-something-I-have-to-do-kids-so-hurry-up-and-let's-do-it-so-I-can-get-back-to-the-important-things.

"And I ask for their forgiveness at this very moment," he said, wrapping his two hands around the lectern and leaning toward the side of the sanctuary where the teenagers were sitting. "Pop's on the right road, Tim," he said, addressing his own son, and declaring he now had a plan to spend "good, pure, quality time" with his children.

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October (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48