Long ago, during a stretch of midnight dreary, I visited the booze-soaked delights of my dear lady friend’s Super Bowl afterparty. Things were going swimmingly until an obnoxious buddy of mine reminded me that we had drunkenly placed a bet on the game. This was, of course, a bet that I did not recall making in the slightest (thanks whiskey) and apparently one in which I now found myself on the losing end of (thanks San Fran). The bet, however, was not in currency, but more like the ‘dare’ option of the truth or dare game. The dare, according to my porky little bastard friend, was to attend his parent’s megachurch the following Sunday. Not too bad, right? Ah, but there’s more.
I had to attend the first service (traditional, old, white, nearly dead) not the afternoon service and I had to go dressed completely as a homeless person. My buddies wasted no time. Filthy fourth hand rags, dirt on the hands, fingernails and face. Soles ripped from the shoes. Olive oil into unkept hair. They even splashed some whiskey around my neckline, like gutter-soaked cologne.
The entrance into Blood of the Lamb Assembly was ecstatically bright and colorful. A huge banner loomed over the driveway reading ‘Welcome Home, Everybody!’. My buddies let me out far enough from the front door that no one saw. They went in ahead of me and awaited my arrival.
A friendly old man in a maroon jacket stood at the door shaking hands with the widest smile plastered across his wrinkled face. That smile faded as he turned to me. He instinctually withdrew his hand before correcting himself, rapidly shoving it into his pocket as if that were his intention to begin with. He looked me up and down and managed to put half of the smile back. He kept his eyes low and mouth closed as I entered through the door.
Walking through the funeral home-styled lobby, you would have thought I had the coronavirus. Noses turned up. Faces twisted in a disapproving gnarl. The scathing glares and turned, hushed whispers as I slinked my way to the main sanctuary door. One lady tossed her empty Chick-Fil-A bag at my head. A small, balding fellow held his fingers in a cross and hissed like he had seen in some old vampire movie. My, it felt good to be in the Lord’s house! Inside the temple doors, a choir of the walking dead clapped as they sang “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” from Toy Story while a youth pastor dressed like Jesus chased the kiddos around the stage pelting them with Jolly Ranchers whilst screaming ‘Repent! Repent you, abominable sinners! For you know not the day nor the hour of my return on the warhorse to cast my fiery eternal judgment on thee!”. A little girl spontaneously burst into tears as the boy next to her tiptoed to the corner of the stage and proceeded to quietly shit himself.
Not wanting to miss a beat, I took a seat near the front as the nearly four hundred pound preacher arrived at the podium to announce his new message series ‘Adam and Steve, Or: Biblical Proof as to Why God Hates Certain People and Why You Should Too!’. I tried to sit in the front row, but a white-haired saint moved her purse to my chosen spot in the pew before I could take it.
Moving back a few rows, I tried yet again only to have a younger male tell me only ‘leadership’ could sit in that row. I scanned the rows for an open seat, not wanting to miss a single word of the preacher’s sure to be dynamite sermon. Alas, turning I spotted an usher in a maroon blazer coming toward me. “Praise God, help has arrived!” I thought to myself.
A pleasant fellow, he cheerfully informed me that the ‘colored’ section was in the balcony, the last row of the far left to be precise. I looked to the area he had spoken of only to find it empty. Surely, he was mistaken as I wouldn’t be able to converse with my brothers and sisters from such a far distance. Politely thanking him for his recommendation, I took a seat a few rows back and wouldn’t you know it, a nice older gentleman in a suit and tie grabbed his things and took a different seat a few rows ahead. ‘How wonderful,’ I thought. ‘The kind man gave me an entire row all to myself!’
The sermon raged as pure fire, while the audience lifted their hands in rapturous solidarity. They shouted ‘Yes Fuhrer!’, I mean ‘Yes Pastor’ as the man on the stage revved them up into a passionate political frenzy that called for the liberation of fetuses and the monthly town center stoning of anyone displaying same-sex tendencies.
The congregation foamed at the mouth as one pulled a pistol from his hip and began randomly firing rounds into the air. Oh, what a riot! The pastor went out on a high note and the worship team erupted into a fiery rendition of ‘We Are The Champions’.
It was upon the chorus, somewhere during the ’no time for losers’ lyric, that I found myself wrapped on each side by two, rather hefty, security guards carrying AR-15 rifles. Repeatedly, they asked me to exit the premises, despite my insisting that I was indeed a Child of God. They asked for proof via a record of my being a regular tithing member of the congregation. When I could not provide such documentation, I was immediately jabbed in the stomach with the butt of an AR-15 and embarrassingly drudged through the aisles.
Over my incessant cries and pleas, I could hear the congregation break from their unified worship and instead began to shout ’SHAME!’ Seemingly in my direction. Apparently, angels were not coming to my aid. My two rifle-wielding friends kicked open the front doors and tossed me onto the outside walk just like my father used to toss me into the deep end of the pool before I knew how to swim.
I thought to myself that this episode could possibly trigger some past traumas, but lucky for me, my porky little bastard friend had seen the commotion and rushed to my side. After picking me up and dusting me off, my buddies wanted to know if I had met the Lord Jesus Christ and come into the glorious family of God and become the literal light of the world. As we made our way to the car all I could think was:
‘Damn, I guess Jesus was waiting for the second service. Maybe we can catch him at brunch over mimosas’.