When James Adams, that is, Serenity Jones asked me some time ago about the possibility of having Drag Worship and Brunch, I said, ‘why not?’ I mean, Catholic priests get to be in drag every day in worship. Why should they have all the fun? And Jesus was certainly all about gender-bending, with his long hair and doe eyes.

I’m going to call out John Olson, the tall guy in the choir who has a hard time hiding, in any case. When I was newly First Church Somerville’s pastor, and had not known him very long, I asked him why he came. He said he first came because he was friends with the pastor, though he was more or less an atheist, and when he sat in the pews that first Sunday, heard the choir sing. “I could make that better,” he said to himself.

Today we have a parable before us which is so Christian it is likely to make me become an infidel.

Under the category of Things I Never Thought I’d Be Doing: twelve hours ago, I was drinking tequila at church camp. I knew I was going to be preaching about the Prodigal Son and his brother, about goodness and badness, and I believe in method preaching, so I thought I should be a little bad last night, to make the sermon truly authentic.

If this sermon were the gospel according to Molly, I’d preach it this way: a putterer went out to putter. She puttered in basements and she went through drawers and she took everything out of her closets that was. And she separated the good from the bad, the useful from the useless, the whole from the broken. And she put the good and useful and whole on her left hand, because she was a leftie, and the bad and useless and broken she set upon her right hand, and then she loaded the hatchback of her Prius with all that lay upon her right hand, and she drove it to Davis Square and cast it into the outer darkness, otherwise known as Good Will, where there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth, but also often good bargains.

I don’t want to talk about sowing seeds today. I don’t want to talk about good soil and bad soil and weather conditions, the path and the birds and the rocky ground, the thorns and the harvest.