Mincey’s Musings
Year One, Week Seventeen

There are times in everyone’s life at church when there is a strong desire to laugh, but it would be most inappropriate.

One of my very favorite services is the Lord’s Supper (otherwise known as “communion” to some believers). At Maynardville (now the First) Baptist Church, this service has always been conducted with the utmost propriety. This is the service that commemorates the broken body and shed blood of the Lord Jesus, sacrificed that the world might be saved.

When I was young, Maynardville Baptist had a full, regular church service, then after the invitational hymn everyone was seated and the Lord’s Supper was observed. Those Sunday services were extremely long, but it seemed Baptists could endure longer in those days without padded pews and air conditioning, even with Sunday dinner waiting on the stove at home. Now the entire Sunday morning service is the Lord’s Supper, which not only speaks to the special reverence due the sacrament, it makes a shorter service than usual. Short services are looked upon favorably by many of this age, as that is sometimes the only time to beat other denominations to the restaurants!

The covered table with the sacred bread and “wine” seemed so mysterious to me when I was a child. In actuality, the “wine” was grape juice, the unfermented fruit of the vine, all except one time at Maynardville. This was according to my mother, as I was then too young to participate.

I always wanted to participate in the service, but I was made to understand that a person could not do so until they had been saved from the effects of sin by belief and trust in the broken body and shed blood of Jesus. I always felt left out until I got saved and could partake. If I felt that left out then, imagine how much worse sinners will feel on that Judgment Day when they are left out forever!

I still love to go back to the First Baptist of Maynardville for the two yearly observances of the Lord’s Supper. It just never felt the same anywhere else. The observance is very formal, made all the more sacred by organist K. David Myers’ playing while the elements are served to the congregation. Jerusalem had its King David and the harp, but Maynardville has its David on the organ.

One fear I have always had at the Lord’s Supper is that of dropping the vessels with the elements as I am passing them on to the next person, in particular the fear of spilling the “wine”. If I did so I would be mortally embarrassed, but if someone else did so, I’m sure my tickle box would be turned on. Did you ever notice how hard it is to stop laughing in church when something’s not supposed to be funny?

I remember once when I was a child the solemnity of the occasion was broken by the unrestrained laughter of part of the congregation in the back. It seems one of the young children had captured and gulped one of his parent’s wafers and grape juice all in one swallow. This must be what happened, for surely no parent of a child that young would have allowed them to participate otherwise.

On another occasion, I was sitting between Adrian and Rick Shoffner during the observance. I would have expected it to have been Adrian, but in this case it was Rick who provided the hilarity. These days the “wine” is served in plastic, disposable glasses that make hardly any sound at all. In the “olden” days, the “wine” was served in non-disposable glasses that were hand washed and re-used from sacrament to sacrament. At the end, there was the delicious tinkling sound of many glasses being placed in the cup holders at either end of the hymnal racks on the backs of the pews.

As one sacrament ended, Rick Shoffner tilted his head as far back as he could, turned his glass straight up, gulped his grape juice, loudly placed his glass in the rack, and said, “Ahhhhh! Just enough to make you want more.”

Rick, like Oliver Twist, might have wanted more, but he has now gone on to the Great Marriage Supper of the Lamb in Heaven. I know he now has all he wants, but I never partake of the Lord’s Supper that a fond smile of remembrance fails to cross my lips as I remember my good friend and his moment of hilarity at a solemn occasion. Rick was proof that God does indeed have a sense of humor.