Sometimes when church is really dragging, I daydream about the perfect sacrament meeting talk.

It’s a survival mechanism for a short attention span - and because Mormons pull church speakers from the congregation. The quality of these amateur sermons ranges from pretty good to getting a hair cut from a belt sander.

You know you’re in for a fine bit of misery when the speaker starts a talk with, “Brothers and sisters, Webster’s Dictionary defines blood atonement as . . . ”

In an effort to catch the congregation’s attention, nervous speakers will sometimes bring stuff to the lectern and use it to make their point. It might be a picture of Jesus, or a glass of water, or even a kid dressed up like a Nephite.

The speaker in my daydream hauls a bag up to the stand and gives it a whack or two. Then he opens it and removes a seriously annoyed cat. The two pitch into each other as a gospel demonstration on how to properly wrestle with the devil.

But this cat is tough. He wraps his legs around the speaker’s head and starts gnawing his eyebrows. Eventually the bishopric realizes the two are hopelessly deadlocked and drags them out.

It’ll never happen. The LDS Church presidency just issued a general order banning show and tell during Sacrament meeting talks. Speakers are now forbidden to use object lessons.

For this to have become important enough for a letter from the First Presidency something horrible must have happened. Maybe someone shot a hole in the ceiling of a chapel demonstrating the Russian roulette nature of sin.

It’s possible that a speaker used a golf club to illustrate the importance of sticking to the straight and narrow, and hooked a ball into the side of a deacon’s head.
Church headquarters is taking no chances. Not only are object lessons banned, but also they want speakers to refrain from inviting the congregation to look up scriptural references. The mass rustling of turning pages is distracting to the spirit.

I understand this last one. What’s the point of following along in your own scriptures? If you can’t trust a speaker to read it correctly, maybe someone should make an object lesson of him.

Also, audience participation is tough. In younger LDS wards it consists entirely of keeping your kids in a pew. Who has time to look up the last half of Isaiah when 2-year-old Monson is fighting to get out of his diaper? I’ll miss the object lessons, though. Most of them were tame to the point of boring, but there was always the hope it might be truly memorable. Who could forget a talk about baptism from a speaker who dragged in a fire hose?