God's Sense of Humor

From time to time I am privileged to catch a glimpse of God's sense of humor. For example, when I tell God my plans and God laughs or when I see some of the animals God has created and think what a good time God must have had creating them.

Such was the case this Sunday as I presided at communion. We receive communion every Sunday at New Season and so there are some great and worthy helpers who bring bread, set the communion table and most of the time pour the grape juice into the chalice. So you can imagine my surprise when I got to the words of institution and lifted the cup as I always do and said "After the supper was over he over he took the cup..." and there was nothing in the cup!

I thank God for the genius of the human brain because I had a couple of parallel thought processes going on. One was I knew I had to continue with the liturgy (which I usually flub up anyways even when there are no Eucharistic catastrophes) and second I was thinking "what the hell am I going to do?" I mean should we do the Quaker thing and receive spiritually! Should we pretend like we are dipping the bread into the chalice (we always receive by intinction, we don't use the little shot glasses). I don't remember exactly what I said or whether it was the smirk on my face but when I was giving instructions about receiving I said something like "if there were any grape juice in this cup" you would take the bread you have received and dip it here. At that point I think four people jumped up to look for grape juice which we thankfully store and had on hand in one of the bins we load and unload from our truck every Sunday. So, after a good laugh we had grape juice.

I was thinking about this whole situation and was thinking if it was real wine instead of grape juice then I would have immediately had a few suspects from the church who would have come to mind who may have drank the wine before the service started (so they wouldn't have to drink it with the nasty bread crumbs in the bottom after the service was over). But alas, it was grape juice. Some have said they were waiting for me to call for a miracle and make the grape juice appear. I mean come on, Jesus didn't even do that. He started with water at least. And, if I could ask God to perform a miracle such as that and God did then I would be working for Welch's or Boones Farm (sorry I am showing my utter lack of bad tastes and cheap self from my college days when it comes to wine).

Thanks Lord for your sense of humor!