My first Sunday at my first appointment was exciting, of course. I wasn't sure how I would be received but things had gone well at the rural church. So we shared worship together at my other church in town and I preached well, I thought. So I was only a little surprised when one gentlemen took my hand as he was leaving the church and said, "That was a great sermon, Pastor, a great sermon!"
"Thank you," I responded. "Why, may I ask, did you like it so much?"
"It was only seventeen minutes."
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The rural church on a two point circuit I served when I became a minister in Wisconsin was physically too small for a wedding involving two large families. So the couple chose to be married in the small town church, the larger of the two on that circuit. It is a good thing because even that church was filled to capacity with the large number of family and friends.
Both churches has been founded with German families by German circuit riders in that part of the state. Both had been conducting English-speaking services for only two or so decades. You can imagine that even the young people were inured with the seriousness of church.
Seated in the second row on the bride's side were the bride's girl friends. I had gone over what my sermon was to include with the bride and groom. Both of them had been okay with my material. Both, by the way, were headed back to his farm near the rural church after the honeymoon. As part of my homily, I included an old joke which the couple had enjoyed. To that phrase in the wedding ceremony where part of the vows I point out that the wife is to obey the husband, I addressed the bride with tongue-in-cheek saying, "When he says jump, you say 'How high?'" I presented the line with no unusual inflection, as straight as I could say it.
I paused just long enough to see that the older folks in the congregation accepted the line with no realization that I had laid out a joke. The bride's girl friends, however, faced a huge dilemma. They got the joke and wanted to laugh out loud (it was new to them). But they didn't dare laugh in church, which is the very dilemma I think was what the bride and groom hoped for.
Fortunately, the girl friends did not explode from keeping their laughter inside. I found out later they went from laughter to anger at the bride. Who says there isn't conversion in wedding ceremonies?
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My second appointment was as associate pastor at a large church. My job during worship was as liturgist, which meant I was the reader of the Scriptures, offered the pastoral prayer, and took care of the offering and its prayer.
During my third month there, the Holy Spirit struck me and inspired me to give the following prayer.
"Dear Lord, we know you love a cheerful giver. Receive our gifts and love us anyway. Amen."
Not even a titter. The service concluded and no one commented except my wife. I explained my inspiration and her response was, "Next time, have the Spirit check with me first,"
Two weeks later, at a couples' fellowship, one young bank manager sidled up to me and said, "Did you really say that?"
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In a small church up north, the warmth of the day required that we open the windows and a door to the outside for cross ventilation.
As worshippers gathered, one older couple showed me their tiny pet dog which lay quietly in an oversize bag. They apologized but could not leave him home. This was forty years ago, long before such a thing became so popular. They promised to leave if the dog made a fuss so I accepted their bringing him in.
I was in the middle of my sermon, not having heard a sound from that tiny dog, when I caught a bit of movement out of the former of my eye. The door to the outside was to my right and in walked a cat. It came into the worship area in the general direction of where I knew the little dog to be.
The cat paused, looked around at the people, turned around, and sauntered back to the door and out the way it came in.
The whole congregation, not knowing about the dog but seeing this cat enter the sanctuary, was almost as relieved as I and the dog were. I had to comment.
"I don't think it was a Methodist. I think it left when it realized we were not cat'olic."
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My wife and I were celebrating our 25th anniversary on a Sunday afternoon after church so my brother, sister, and their families all came to church. None of them have ever held me in awe and there was always that implicit threat that they would conspire to crack me up during the service at some point that would catch me by surprise.
The service went smoothly. There was no incident during the sermon when I was most vulnerable. I breathed a sigh of relief as I announced the closing hymn. It happened to have six verses but not long ones. As the hymn began, I looked down at my brother-in-law and his straight-laced conservative Lutheran son-in-law seated right in front of me.
They were both wearing "Groucho" glasses, fake mustache and all.
It look me till the middle of the last verse to stop laughing so I could catch my breath and close the service with the benediction.
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A month ago, I wrenched my back. Since then, I have had a bout with lower back pain, something I've been able to minimize because of previous bouts. When I first started having problems when I was in my thirties, I was fortunate to have a chiropractor who was of immense help. Along with his usual routine meant to get all the vertebrae in the right place, he had a good way to realign my neck bones using a technique involving Thompson table counter-pressure. Since lower back pain was associated with a misalignment of certain neck bones, he set my head on a small platform and pressed my head until the platform structured to spring back upon a particular level of pressure had been applied. He set the thing so that by pushing down with, say, 2.8 pounds of pressure, the small platform would pop back with 2.8 pounds of counter pressure, thus putting my head back to its proper position at the top of the spinal column.
This recent period of painful back spasms reminded me of one such bout many years ago when I was allowed to be a weekly resource at the youth shelter in our county. It had been built to house kids who were run-aways, got involved with drugs, and other activities that had landed them in jail previously.
One of those afternoons, before I met with the youth, I was discussing some important matter with the administrator. As I carefully stood, tending my sore back, he held out his hand and said, "Jerry, you know what I most appreciate about you? You are one of the few people I know who really has his head on straight."
I thanked him for his gracious comment and replied, "That's so nice of you to say. My chiropractor thinks my head is on crooked."
Maybe you had to be there . . . .
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When we were in college, we belonged to the Wesley Foundation. Everything year, it held a retreat at one of our church camps. Among the tasks facilitating the retreat was getting everyone to the campsite a hundred miles away. The guy who coordinated that task, mainly lining up students and staff who could take attendees in their cars, was an engineering grad student named Bob Sparks. Quiet, unassuming, and responsible, he did that task very well.
During supper that night, Bob rose, tapped his coffee cup with a spoon to get us to look his way, and intoned, "May I have your attention?" We all quieted our table conversations. When all was silent in the room, he said, "Thank you, I just love attention." And he sat down.
If you had been there, you would have laughed too.
