A Jealous God
29 Aug 2020Today’s prompt: “Write a sermon for a beloved preacher who has been caught in a sex scandal.”
“My fellow worshippers, we all face temptation in our lives.” And what temptation it was, too, you think – those curves…. “Yes, temptation. There have been times that I myself thought the very notion of it was quaint. Are we not above this world’s morality, by virtue of who we worship? What mankind sees as good or bad – what does that matter? This fallacious notion of sin – does it mean anything to the members of the Black Brotherhood?”
You see some of your parishioners nodding, and you continue. “I truly believed that,” you say, “but I was wrong. Sin does exist for us. It may not be the petty sins of weaker humans, who believe that to kill, to steal, to commit adultery, is wrong. We are above that. We can kill. We can steal. We can fuck around.
“But if the Black Brotherhood collects a human sacrifice and you are chosen to guard him, and he provokes you into killing him before the appointed time? Now that is a sin.” The nods resume. “If you find yourself in dire financial straits, and you take an artifact the Brotherhood was planning to use in a ritual to bring the Old Ones to Earth, and pawn it, why, that is a sin.
“My brothers and sisters,” you exhale, picturing once again her perfect coils, writhing and wrapping around you, “you know that I have committed adultery. I will not pretend that I can be the arbiter of whether or not this was a sin. If I had simply slept with a man or a woman, then no. That would not be a sin.” You inhale, and a vision of her tentacles sweeps across your memory. “But I slept with Kassogtha. With the mate of Cthulhu himself.
“Some of you might call this a sin,” you say, and you notice the ground beginning to tremble. “I have almost certainly brought Cthulhu’s wrath down upon our temple, bringing about our destruction before the rest of humanity’s. Others might call it a blessing. If Dread Cthulhu comes here to enact his revenge upon me, then have I not achieved our goal of hastening the Old Ones’ return to Earth?
“One thing is certain,” you say, as quakes ripple through the building, and the roof is ripped apart by terrible claws, “our god is a jealous god.”