Don't make God mad.

EVERY SUMMER, our church held a revival. Brother Joe H. West, our grandfatherly pastor, invited Baptist preachers from all over the country to travel to San Antonio and speak to us. It was a week-long event, Sunday to Sunday, with two sermons a night for eight straight nights. To a boy like me--one acclimated to weekends ruined by church--revival week gave me a full-blown Job complex. Every night I'd have to get dressed up to listen to some preacher I'd never heard of--or would ever hear from again--and fight the small, intense struggle to keep my eyes open.

Brother Joe hadn't trained us to stay alert during sermons. Our poor pastor was a natural-born bore, lacking the spitting gusto that spawns a megachurch or a Sunday morning TV show audience. The Prodigal Son was his go-to sermon: a sweet tale of unconditional forgiveness, perfect for a sweet old patriarch who was better suited to running a staid Sunday school discussion than jolting sinners into repentance. Sometimes he created object lessons out of gewgaws he found around his house, or he complained about uncontroversial sins like homosexuality and abortion. Even as a boy, I knew that if our church was going to have a real, spontaneous revival, Brother Joe couldn't be expected to deliver the rhetorical spark that would light the fuse. No, if our revival was going to produce a spontaneous groundswell of Christian passion, it would have to involve visiting preachers and, so, needed to be scheduled weeks in advance.

When I was ten years old the headliner for the 1989 revival was to be none other than Dr. Joe Boyd. I can't remember when I first heard about this holy man, but to the Baptist children of South Texas he was a mythical character, like Moses, John the Baptist, or Ronald Reagan--someone who enters your consciousness so early you can't remember not revering him.

Naturally, Dr. Boyd was the final speaker of revival week. I'd never seen him, never heard him speak. But he loomed big and bearded in my mind, someone who grumbled on mountaintops, swollen with indignation and seeding great thunderheads of heavenly retribution. I knew he'd been an offensive lineman at Texas A&M back in the fifties, that he'd been part of a national championship team. This seemed exactly right to me: of course he was an O-lineman; of course he was a champion. I remember thinking he could probably eat more than anyone alive. At the Sunday potluck, I looked for the man with the largest mound of ribs on his plate, the biggest gut, the strongest jaw. How could I possibly miss him?

I didn't actually lay eyes on Dr. Boyd until that night when he stepped behind the pulpit. From the youth section, where I'd fallen asleep a hundred times, I watched this grey-haired old man climb the stage. He wasn't that tall. He was overweight, but not gigantic--more jowl than jaw. He wore a plain brown suit and a wide brown tie. A real let down.

And then came the voice--slow Texas sugar that would have easily filled our church without the use of the PA system. It was quiet but powerful, threatening imminent explosion, as though his belly housed a brigade of broad-shouldered offensive lineman waiting to crash into each other. At its deepest, it sounded like his words percolated in a gravel-filled gizzard.

Like an old uncle, he joshed us about Sister Nugent's pecan pie, Brother Larry's expanding waistline, and Grandma Schendell's screeching but praiseworthy accordion recitals. He even complimented our mentally disabled janitor on keeping the crown molding dust-free, lovingly hinting that a more competent man might not have bothered. The women smiled, the men laughed, the kids--all but me--yawned, and the usual suspects shouted "Amen."

But after the pleasantries, Dr. Boyd didn't waste time. Like most Baptist preachers I'd heard, he announced his topic in no uncertain terms: "I'm going to preach tonight," he said, "on foolishness--the silliness of man." The crowd chuckled.

I'd heard the intros to thousands of sermons in my life--I knew all about tithing, gambling, the devilment of rock music--but silliness was a new one.

Dr. Boyd's text was the book of Jonah: the fish, the dank cavernous belly, the resurrection symbolism. All of it was old hat, even to a ten-year-old, and I was surprised when Dr. Boyd glossed over it. He read the two relevant verses in which Jonah makes his hasty, strikingly unprophetic choice to hide from an omniscient God. He paused, letting the measure of Jonah's myopia sink in. Then he announced the sermon was titled "Don't Make God Mad" and said a prayer.

The sermon's basic structure was this: Dr. Boyd explained Jonah's folly and then followed with anecdotes in which believers knowingly committed sins, trying to hoodwink the Almighty. At first the sins were minor, begetting lighthearted punishments, like a plague of pimples on a foulmouthed teenager. But, like a practiced teller of tall tales, Dr. Boyd knew how to exploit "rising action" and so the sins steadily worsened, resulting in bone cancer, or shattered spines, or, in high Old-Testament style, dead babies.

The story that stuck with me concerned a man who inherited $50,000.

"This man, a Christian," Dr. Boyd began, "he walked to his accountant's office, happy as a pig in poop and asked him to figure out how much of this money he'd get to keep. The accountant told him $30,000. So, he rendered unto Caesar that which was Caesar's, and he went home. Sunday services rolled around and he marched into the church and proudly presented a $3,000 tithe.

"The next day this Christian man went to work feeling sly, proud as he could be. He was in road construction-a good hardworking Christian profession. But then what happened that day, about ten minutes before he was going to dig into his lunch pail? He fell from the back of a dump truck and got ran over.

"The back tire smashed his head like a pumpkin!" Dr. Boyd was suddenly shouting. "God is not mocked!" he explained. "He thought he could cheat God! You can't cheat God! The tithe is ten percent of the gross, not the net! He stole two thousand dollars right out of God's hand!"

Each cautionary tale was finished off with a pause and then the warning: "Don't make God mad" Or, "Don't make GOD MAD!" My personal favorite was the cold whisper: "Don't ... make ... God ... mad."

But the sermon wasn't your standard screed; it was both funny and menacing, as memorable as an Abbott and Costello bit and as chilling as the rant of a homeless street preacher who, for some reason, knows your full name. Despite God's curious and horrible visage (I imagined him holding a hammer over his head, teeth bared, waiting to bonk us) I listened to the tape of "Don't Make God Mad" so many times that summer I memorized it. It was, to my ten-year-old consciousness, high comedy and high tragedy at once, a true work of art.

I'm lucky Dr. Boyd wasn't my regular, weekly pastor. Breaking from the religion of one's parents is difficult enough without the beguilement of a truly entertaining preacher. As it was, I was raised on the Prodigal Son as told by one of Judeo-Christianity's most ineffectual commissars. Different religions have different appeals: I have effectively irreligious friends who attend Catholic mass for the aesthetics, for the pleasing baroque ritual; I have family members who attend liberalized non-denominational churches where the hymns are drum-driven, the sermons veneered with friendliness, and the Bible's more poisonous passages are pleasantly deranged. Some people just like being told what to think. My own weakness is for stories, for inventive language, for the satisfying familiarity of a plot expertly unfolded, for complication, climax, and resolution. As a bored church-going child, I would have followed an entertaining preacher anywhere. Dr. Boyd had a way with words and, at the time, that was enough for me.

I no longer have the tape of "Don't Make God Mad." Once, I ordered a cassette with that title from Dr. Boyd's website. I wanted to hear the awful stories exactly as before, with all the violence and pathos packed in. Perhaps I wanted to see if the performance would live up to my memory of it. To find out what it was that sucked me so completely in.

I received the tape in the mail and listened a few times, but this version lacked the fervor I remembered. Dr. Boyd occasionally managed to rise to his old and famous form, and as before, the men in attendance shouted their amens as though the tape would be placed in evidence at judgment day. Mostly Boyd sounded exhausted, like his lungs had a leak. His website was outdated, and I wondered if he was even still alive. There was a time when I couldn't imagine him dead, couldn't imagine that bellyful of toiling lineman taking a breather.

Eventually, I fell out with the Baptist crowd. My father was a fiery evangelist himself, the kind who saved some fire for home, and I suppose I got fed up with all the yelling. Beyond ordering that one tape I never actively sought out Dr. Boyd or other preachers of his ilk, the kind who are able to mix the brimstone with the belly laughs. And it wasn't that I was too reasonable and enlightened--that would come later. It was more that the comedy, the entertainment, rarely outweighed the brow-beating of a Baptist service. In truth, the brutality simply wore me down.

To be sure, Dr. Boyd was a special case, a storyteller so smooth, charming, and passionate that when he descended into the dark realm of a ranting, vengeful, and dangerous deity, I didn't even notice. It's amazing what ideas--even horrible ideas--can slip into your mind while you're still smiling.

Pete Jones is a graduate of Oregon State University and the University of Montana. He lives in Arlington, VA.