Sometimes we forget that priests and preachers are human as well. We so much want to hear their insights that it is easy to forget that they are not all that different than the rest of us.
In the Church I grew up in, we had an assistant Rector decades later who was very popular among many of the adults engaged in intentional ministry within the church. I and 12 or 15 other people were part of an adult study group that he was facilitating. He could be very funny. One evening he shared the following joke.
A southern belle was entertaining her friend on the porch of her new mansion. The hostess said, “When my husband and I got engaged, he gave me this 20 karat diamond ring – flawless” (as she waves it in front of her friend’s face). “And when we got married, he bought me this beautiful mansion, complete with riding stables, tennis court and Olympic swimming pool.” Her friend looked around and nodded her head and said, “That’s nice. That’s very very nice.” And then the hostess said, “And when I had my first child, a boy of course, my husband gave me that stretch Mercedes limousine complete with chauffeur“ “Hi Clarence”, she said as she waved and her friend examined the limo and nodded approvingly. The hostess, then asked her friend what her husband had given her when they got engaged. The friend replied, “He sent me to charm school.” “What kind of engagement present was that?“, asked the hostess. “ Well“, replied the friend, “it used to be when I was around my obnoxious, stuck up, holier than thou, self righteous friends, and they started bragging, I would say ‘fuck you’. Now I just say ‘that’s nice, that’s very very nice’.“
Several months later, the assistant Rector accepted a position as Rector of a new church a couple hundred miles away. We were sorry to see him go. As is tradition in the Episcopal Church, he gave a farewell sermon on his last Sunday. He and the Rector had never really gotten along well. The Rector was a good administrator, but not particularly spiritual and a serial adulterer, which was basically ignored by the congregation, though well-known.
As the about to be Assistant Rector went through the history of his ordination, and the parishes he had served at before, ending with his current position in our church, he expressed how much he was going to miss the people he had come to know. When it came time to talk about his relationship with the Rector, he said that their time together had been interesting. He said it was unique. He said, “How else can I say it? It was nice; it was very, very nice.”
Immediately the 12 or so of us in the congregation who understood the reference burst out laughing. The other 8-900 people present (the church was packed because it was the Assistant’s last Sunday) all looked around perplexed. It was as if they were saying, What? What did we miss? What was so funny? It was priceless.
While an amusing incident, there is a more serious point as illustrated by your selections. Everyone, even clergy, makes mistakes. Sometimes the faux pas are amusing and innocent. Other times they are appallingly insensitive. And sometimes, even those clergy members with a good heart whom we admire the most, cannot resist their inner snarkiness to say something they probably wish they hadn’t in retrospect. I do not hold the comment against that Assistant Rector and hope he has done well in the decades since. He is one of the good ones.
