Why is it that things happening in the most serious of contexts come across as funnier than they would under normal circumstances? I recognized this church phenomenon early in life and had it completely confirmed on a particular Sunday when I was in the eighth grade.

It was Lord’s Supper Sunday, and I had just come off probation. In the case that you aren’t of a particular denominational persuasion, you may not realize that Baptists usually refer to Communion as the Lord’s Supper and usually partake (good church word) of it on a monthly or quarterly basis rather than every Sunday. In our case, it was quarterly.

And in case you’ve never been a junior high boy in church, let me explain what I mean by probation. I had been having the distinct pleasure of sitting with my Mom for the better part of three months due to a previous “funny at the wrong time” incident, and this particular Sunday, having proven that I could be “good” was finally back to sitting with my buddies on the back row of the church.

And we were being good, too, and not just by standards set for early adolescent males in the church house. Like I said, this was Lord’s Supper Sunday and even we knew how important it was to take it on as seriously as one might take on anything else in life.

After the pastor finished his shorter than usual sermon (time allotted for the serving of the Supper elements), the deacons began to pass the bread plates down the rows of pews, which was to be followed by the passing of the wine (juice actually) in miniature cups on silver trays. (Yet another distinction of my church’s tradition is to usually pass the elements out rather than have the worshippers come forward to receive them. The theological, doctrinal and ontological reasons for this are vast, varied and verbose, not to mention poly-syllabic, and have no particular place in this work.)

As I said, we were being good and serious, and that sometimes, it seems, is when the funniest stuff happens. The bread was on its way, about three rows in front of us, when Deacon Jack, having retrieved a bread plate from the last person on the row, miscalculated the height of the end of the pew, hung the bread plate on it just right so as to flip it over, dumping the entire contents onto the red-carpeted aisle.

It happened so fast, that you would think nobody would have seen it, but another interesting quirk about things that happen in serious moments is that they tend to catch the eye of every one in the near vicinity.

Believe it or not, we were holding it together pretty well at first. That is, until Deacon Jack loud-whispered a little wordy dird that he must’ve thought only him and the Lord could hear. It was more than we could handle, and our shoulders, knees and pew shook from our trying to hold in the laughter.

Mom was in her usual spot on the third row, and I could the see the wrinkles in her neck as she began to turn around to see what was going on in the back of the room. In a split second with no thought of trying to out perform Deacon Jack, I made my own miscalculation. Thinking that she would assume I must’ve had something to do with the situation, I ducked down behind the pew in front of me to escape the wrath of her considerable gaze.

Well, it worked. She didn’t see me. And when she didn’t…! Evidently, she must’ve thought I had slipped out the back door of the church to skip the service, because out of her seat and up the aisle she came. I peaked over the pew to see if the coast was clear just about the time she was detouring Deacon Jack’s lil’ clean up project, and our eyes met.
Now, seeing me in full hideout position, she could only assume that I must’ve had something to do with the mishap, and she marched me out the back door of the church.

I have to tell you that as sweet and loving as my Mom is, she takes church stuff very seriously, and the only reason I’m alive to tell this story is that my Dad happened to be sitting in the choir that day. He had seen the whole thing unfold from the beginning.

Just as I was about to face the firing squad (and it would have been sans the one last smoke), Dad came around the side of the building in his bright, sky-blue choir robe with the white lapel a flappin’, and rescued me with the explanation of what had really happened. My memory of it to this day is that Dad came floating, no, flying around that church building like an angel of light, sparing me not only from an early death but something even worse, an unjust sentence of additional probation.

Copyright © 2005 by Joe Loughlin. All rights reserved. (Excerpt from Church Happens and Sometimes It’s Funny: Hilarious Stories from My First Twenty-One Years of Ministry by Dr. Joe Loughlin. Due out in late summer 2005 from Infinity Publishing.)