Always the minister, never the bride

That was going to be the opening line of my stand-up routine, but I got married and never actually tried doing stand-up comedy, so now this great line is reduced to a blog post title.

When I was in my first year of professional ordained ministry, I was visiting a parishioner in the hospital. He was an irascible guy, and he was dying of lung cancer. Once when I went to see him, he was on his balcony smoking. In those days at that hospital, if your room had a balcony you were allowed to go have a smoke. I was appalled, but because I was still so wet behind the ears ministerially speaking, I pretended like that was normal and I saw it all the time.

Anyway, during one of our visits I mentioned that I was meeting with a couple to do premarital counseling with them. He asked how I could be qualified to do that since I had never been married. I replied, with no paucity of pastoral insensitivity and a general lack of human compassion, that I had never died but I was still qualified to do funerals. He was taken aback, as I should have been.