It is, at once, my least favorite and most favorite thing about being Mormon.

Fast Sunday.

On the one hand, I’m asked to go without food for an entire day — no small feat for a man so completely addicted to stuffing his face. On the other hand, there is the wholly unpredictable fast and testimony meeting.

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Here’s how it works: Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe in regular fasting — voluntarily denying themselves food, water and breath mints on the first Sunday of every month — in order to show their devotion to God and seek his divine help. They’re also commanded to donate to the needy the equivalent monetary value of the foodstuffs they would have eaten that day, something called a “fast offering.”

But the best part? On the first Sunday of every month, the faith’s worship services are turned over to the unwashed masses in “fast and testimony meeting.” After the opening hymn, prayer and partaking of the bread/water, the microphone is left unguarded for those who feel inspired to come up out of the congregation, step to the pulpit, and share their innermost feelings about God, Jesus and church life.

The homilies at Mormon worship services are already something of a mixed bag, quality-wise. With no paid clergy on the local level, members of the ward reluctantly accept assignments to speak in church. Which means one week you could get Martin Luther King Jr.’s impassioned “I Have a Dream” speech, and the next week it’s the droning “Anyone? Anyone?” economics lesson from Ben Stein’s character in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

And Fast Sundays are even more uneven. At least on most other Sundays the lay sermons involve some degree of preparation and thought. But those who speak at fast and testimony meeting are almost exclusively working without a net, so to speak.

Basically, it’s open mic night down at the local ward.

And it’s a recipe for disaster, these unprepared remarks from a bunch of people whose abstinence from food and hydration has clearly made them cranky and even a bit lightheaded. Of course there will be awkward moments.

Don’t get me wrong. For the most part, the testimonies shared in the typical fast and testimony meeting are pretty routine — folks who know The Church is true, who love God, who are thankful for family and friends.

Still, there’s always the possibility that, at any moment, things could go completely off the rails. Because whenever you invite people to say what’s in their hearts and on their minds, you risk getting something you simply didn’t want to hear.

And once in a great while — if you’re really lucky — somebody in the congregation throws a big-league curve ball.

That happened last month in Utah County.

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I’m referring to Savannah, the 13-year-old Eagle Mountain girl who used her ward’s fast and testimony meeting to inform the rest of her congregation she’s a lesbian. Two minutes into her testimony, church leaders turned off the microphone and asked her to sit down.

Same-sex advocates say it’s further proof the LDS Church hates gays. Church supporters say Savannah’s testimony was political theater, pointing to the fact that it was written down (it’s fairly rare for someone to read a prepared testimony) and that it was surreptitiously filmed.

I was trying to think of the last time I’d heard of someone getting the hook at a fast and testimony meeting, and I had to go all the way back to the summer of 1980. I was serving a Mormon mission to Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee at the time — arriving in the South just a few months after the June 1978 lifting of the ban on blacks holding the church’s priesthood.

In one area, my missionary companion and I learned very quickly never to bring visitors to church on the first Sunday of the month. The local congregation had an elderly Southern gentleman who stood up every fast and testimony meeting, and invariably his remarks would devolve into a rant about how blacks should never have received the priesthood, how their skin color was the mark of Cain, and how they were less valiant in the spirit world before coming to earth.

It was a monthly embarrassment for everyone in the congregation; church leaders had to regularly interrupt the man and ask him to return to his seat.

Whether or not we believe Savannah’s remarks were appropriate for an LDS testimony meeting, I’d like to think we’d have a similar reaction if someone stood and began preaching the exact opposite — that homosexuals aren’t valiant individuals, that they’re somehow more broken than the rest of us, that they don’t deserve happiness.

Because that person would deserve the hook, too.

Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272, or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/MarkSaal.