
To say that Padre Clark got a little off-topic in his sermon the other day would the be understatement of the year in Malden, a bustling town of 4,000 or so located in the Missouri Bootheel, which sounds like a place you would rather risk hitchhiking out of carrying a severed human head in a gym bag rather than be stuck in overnight.
This man of the cloth apparently looked out before him on a Sunday, at the faithful women of his congregation, made portly with the products of the many bake sales they had held to pay his salary, and no doubt rendered additionally plump in appearance by their winter outwear, and decided he had had enough. Maybe someone burped, or the pews were making loud creaking noises as the faithful shifted their weight. Anyway, the Rev started in on the fluffy females in his flock, advising them to start going to gyms and cutting out the calories in order to become trophy wives for their husbands, or at least “participation trophy” wives, as he so sensitively put it, and cited the example of Melania Trump.
Now, not all women can look like Melania, simply because they cannot afford the plastic surgery involved, or just don’t care to have their faces botoxed into immobility. And she is an excellent example of a woman whose looks are vastly superior to her husband’s, a fox married to a warthog. What inspired the pastor to drag Melania into his recriminations against his flock cannot be known. Perhaps he had recently committed the sin of Onan while contemplating her famous nude pics. Maybe his own partner in matrimony had fluffed out, over the pandemic and the Missouri winter, and he was lashing out secondhandedly at that long-suffering woman by attacking the big gals gathered under his steeple.
The first thing you notice about Stewart-Allen Clark, though, besides that the hyphen in his name seems to be in the wrong place, is that he’s a bit of a pork chop himself. It is highly doubtful that the Christian men of Malden all sport six-pack abs and tight, muscular buttocks. No, they, like the cleric himself, likely look like they have finished off a plate of loaded nachos or two in their time. The quest for physical perfection is one they want their wives alone to undertake.
This is a time-honored tradition among human males. Who among us has not listened to an intoxicated, overweight friend with a bad complexion sneer at the alleged physical flaws of the contestants in a wet t-shirt contest or a Miss Universe pageant, as few as they may be, especially comparatively?
What this has to do with God or Jesus is not readily apparent. There were no fat people in the Bible. I mean, if there were, God would probably have fat-shamed them, as He was constantly concerned about even more pointless things, like people having tattoos or not being virgins when they were married, to the point of ordering them stoned to death. People in the Bible were usually starving, except for the Romans, and those guys had bulimia parties to keep their weight down.
So, Clark has probably ascertained the will of God, but unfortunately fell afoul of the Baptist powers-that-be, as he has been ordered to forsake his pulpit and contemplate offending the women that fill his collection plates.
Or, as the Baptist honchos probably put it, “Good time to wander in the wilderness, bro.”