Though I was not scheduled to preach at the early service, I was directing the worship time. Jimmy Smith, our soloist, was singing from the piano. It was powerful, moving. “I will pour water on him who is thirsty . . .”
As he finished, I whispered to the guest preacher seated beside me, “I’m going to minister a bit before you preach.” He nodded. I walked to the pulpit just as the music finished.
“Please bow your heads and close your eyes,” I said. Jimmy caught the mood of the moment and continued to play softly. I talked about the water of the Holy Spirit that softens the parched earth of our lives. I asked the people to let him come into their lives. Jimmy sang another stanza. Some people slipped to their knees. I closed by asking them to receive the seed of the Word the preacher was about to sow in their lives.
After the service, the guest preacher said, “That was great. Could you repeat it at the second service?” I swelled a little. It was a good word. Fresh. Spontaneous. I nodded. If a thing is good for one group, why not for the next?
In the second service, before a much larger crowd, Jimmy sang the same song. But something was different. The people were not as responsive. My course, however, was set. Again, with solemn drama, I called the people to prayer.
My own eyes were closed. My head bowed. I waited, piously. Instead of the expected silence, however, I heard laughter. It started on the side where my wife and grown children were sitting. It rippled across the congregation, like dry leaves before the wind. I stood there, puffed-up and dumb, wondering what was happening. People were laughing louder and louder.
I opened my eyes and immediately squeezed them shut. In that horrifying way, I knew they were laughing at me. Only then did my mind replay what I had just said: “Please bow your eyes and close your heads.”
Memories raced wildly through my mind:
The time I strode to the platform to officiate in a formal wedding. I had just left the restroom and didn’t realize until I was in front of all those people that stuck to my shoe and trailing behind was an eight-foot stream of toilet paper.
The time in the middle of my sermon that I saw my pants were unzipped-and my shirt tail was sticking out like a flag.
The time I put my hand on a casket at the front of the church, and the flimsy stand it was sitting on gave way.
Then I remembered that Easter morning baptismal service twenty-five years ago. The baptistery was high above the choir loft. My plan was to baptize at the beginning of the service and then rush to the platform during the hymn so I could preach. That morning I wore my new waders-huge rubber boots that came up to my chest, held in place by suspenders. The last person I baptized was a portly woman. When I lowered her beneath the surface, she displaced far more water than I had anticipated. The overflow rushed into my waders, filling them to the brim. When the woman came up, the water went down, leaving me standing in four hundred pounds of water-filled boots. I was rooted to the bottom of the baptistery and couldn’t move. In front of the entire Easter congregation, I finally had to lower my suspenders and crawl out of the boots-in my underwear.
As all that ran through my mind, I realized, I’ve been here before. I knew if I tried to correct my mistake, it would get worse. But what do you do? The one thing I didn’t want to do was laugh. I wanted to be like Elijah and suddenly disappear in a whirlwind, never to be seen again. But the more I thought of what had just happened, the funnier it seemed. Here’s a pious stuffed shirt strutting to the pulpit with soft music, and with ministerial pomp intoning, “Please bow your eyes and close your heads.”
I began to giggle. The congregation was now laughing so hard, people were holding their stomachs.
Gradually I realized what had happened. What God had done in the early service, I had tried to replicate in my own strength. God, who enjoys a good laugh, too, figured since I was going to take the credit, he would let me do it my way. And my way is to stick my foot in my mouth.
When you want the people to notice you, God usually says, “Be my guest!” But what they remember is often something you wish they’d forget.
I couldn’t salvage the moment; it was too far gone. The best I could do was to turn to the preacher, who was sitting there shaking his head, and say, “You’re on.”
The preacher did his best that morning, but he would have been far more effective had he just said the benediction. The sermon had already been preached by the dumbbell who tried to upstage God.
-Jamie Buckingham, Tabernacle Church, Melbourne, Florida
Adapted with permission from Charisma & Christian Life magazine. Copyright 1987, Strang Communications Company.
Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
