Have You Always Been Baptist?

 Funny things happen at most weddings.  This story from my new book, Laughing with the Saints, describes one such moment.   

I visited our local bank to deposit a check when the teller, a friend and member of another church, asked me an unusual question, “Dee, have you always been Baptist?”  I answered that I’d been in a Baptist church as a member or minister since my earliest days. I returned the favor by making an inquiry of my own, “What raised that question in your mind?”  She told me that she had attended a wedding I had recently officiated at the church I served. She said she enjoyed the ceremony and thought the service was beautiful, but she was confused by a gesture I had made over the couple while I pronounced the benediction. Seeing my hand move up and down and back and forth during that closing moment led her to believe I had made the sign of the cross or some other symbolic gesture from a faith tradition more liturgical than most Baptists. In my mind, I replayed the end of that wedding and realized what she had witnessed.

A pesky fly had harassed the groom through much of the wedding. This obnoxious insect had buzzed around the groom’s head and actually landed on his face at one point during the ceremony. I was concerned by how this uninvited guest might alter the service. What if the groom became so frustrated that he yelled out, in the middle of his wedding, “I can’t stand this anymore!”  What if the groom sucked that fly into his mouth while reciting his vows? How could he graciously get it out?  Would the bride let her groom kiss her at the end of the service if she knew a fly had been in his mouth? Fortunately, none of these disasters unfolded. When we neared the end of the service, I looked for an opportunity to shoo that fly away from the couple or, if possible, commit insect-icide. As I began the benediction, believing that most Baptist eyes in the building would be closed, I took a few appropriately dignified swipes at the fly. Sure enough, he forgot about the couple and decided that I was a more interesting human to harass. As the couple walked up the aisle, freed from a pestilence by my pastoral pest control, now bound in the covenant of holy matrimony, a pesky fly crawled around on the left lens of my glasses. I hope that fly didn’t land on a camera lens and appear in the wedding pictures.