Posted by:
Myron Donnerbalken
(
)
Date: August 30, 2016 09:58AM
I'm sure some of you have stories about sacrament services that ended in comical failures. Here are a couple from my mission:
We all had heard of miraculous and touching sacrament meetings from the foxholes of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam--two lonely soldiers huddled over a canteen cup and a broken C-rations biscuit, having a touching sacrament meeting down in a foxhole. But in reality, it could not have happened, because sacrament requires many trappings and protocol that two lonely soldiers just would not be able to offer.
1. Missionaries start preparing the sacrament table in the small branch, only to realize with horror that the cloth was missing, forgotten back at the apartment. I say,"I think it was originally just to keep flies off." The district leader says,"No, you have to have it. It's to keep you from blessing the water instead of the bread." "What about the fact that there is are two separate prayers for the bread and water? Doesn't that protect the water from inadvertent blessings? If you're blessing the bread, how can you accidentally bless the water?" Well, in spite of having a branch president, the DL insisted that he was in charge of this thing, being American and all, and we had to endure a sacrament meeting without actually offering the sacrament because we had stupidly left the cloth at home and might have accidentally blessed the water when we meant to bless the bread, words and meanings of the prayers, notwithstanding.
2. Sacrament hymn starts. Missionaries pick up cloth to break the bread. Horrors! No bread! Nobody had brought the freaking bread! A missionary runs out, knowing that in this country nothing is open for bread-buying of a Sunday. But wait! What about one the bars? There's always a bar! So he trots a couple of city blocks to the closest bar and buys whatever bread-like product they have, in this case a couple of sticky buns. He comes back, and, Horrors! again, nobody thought to just go on with the meeting and start the talks while he was out. Everybody was there just sitting silently, waiting for him to return with a bread-like substance. The missionaries took the sticky buns and pulled them apart as best they could, wiping their sugary fingers on the their stained suit pants. People thought it was weird, but we know that Heavenly Father accepted this willing sacrifice, and all was good again, the equilibrium of Mormonism restored.