…Ogre is going to eat it, anyway.
I lasted as long as I could stand it; really, I did. So many people are saying how wonderful and spirit filled it was today. It looked to me like the Holy Spirit left the building. I’ll go over the morning up to the point that I left, and then relate some things that I’ve heard about third hand.
The key to good snake oil salesman is to know your audience. To have identified our church as Pentecostal was half of his battle. He didn’t care if there were a few dozen like me who have a more orthodox bend to us. He wanted to whip up the majority into a frenzy by the end. While I don’t like salesmanship at the front end, the advantage of doing it that way is that people get to leave the building on their adrenaline high and go straight to the product tables. He’s probably tried it both before and after his pitch and knows that he gets higher sales doing it before the pitch. After he spent ten minutes selling us stuff, he got down to business.
When he was selling a CD on prophesy and Egypt, relating Isaiah and Jeremiah passages to the “rapture,” I knew that his website was fairly accurate. I was about to experience the full blown American Pentecostal revival. His ability to quote scripture in person was about as skilled in person as it was on the website. This guy claims to have been a pastor for 42 years, a number that meant either serious hair dye or pastoring at the age of 5. In all of those years, I have serious doubts that he has actually read whole books of the Bible in one sitting. I don’t think he’s ever had any serious Biblical study. He seems to open the Bible and pick a verse; then figure a way to explain how that verse fits what he wants to say. But let’s try to go chronologically, so that I don’t leave out anything fun.
Once he finally got to the beginning of the speech or sales pitch (I can’t bring myself to calling it a sermon,) he used the word “Jesus” for the first of only two times in the next 45 minutes. We heard him quote 1 Corinthians 12 as all good Pentecostals do. And then the message began. We were being taught the ten ways the devil attacks you. Just so you know up front, I made it through seven and I can’t remember them all, so relax. The one that made an impression was that the devil always attacks you before a blessing. The other major point was that the attack is proportional to the blessing. Therefore, a Christian wants to have misery and misfortune because there are certainly great blessings at the other side of these problems. Another point in this series was that curses from the devil have a shelf life, sort of like bologna or ham. God already knows the expiration date of your suffering and the onset of your blessing. You can’t make this stuff up, actually you can, but I didn’t. It seems sort of convenient that these attacks come before a blessing starts. I’ll let you guess how to get your blessings started. It really isn’t that difficult. Look down, in your back pocket, in that folded piece of leather, that has paper in it….
Here is the point when my brain shut down completely. Our hero says that he didn’t get this message from the Word; instead, he got it from his experience. Talk about the wrong thing to say to me! So, instead of hearing any actual preaching today, we were going to hear him wax somewhat eloquently about his experience…his experience of what? I’m still not sure.
Eventually, he got to the point where he needed to start riling up the crowd. Because we are a skeptical group, slow to catch on to the cues, he started shouting into the microphone. Wow! What incredible insight! If you shout, what you have to say is more important! Who knew? Once we had an adequate level of whooping and hollering going on, it was time for the strutting across the stage and the glossolalia. Yes, he went there. In my defense, I wasn’t the only person who walked out just then. There were at least a dozen who found exits amongst the clamor.
After I left, I heard there was an alter call. Hundreds of people came up to the stage for him to sort of randomly touch a few people. Those who were missed got a sort of “oh, well, I’ve done this before” feeling out of it. I would say that was true, but I don’t want to be too obvious.
Now, let’s analyze what we saw. First, there was almost no discussion of the Bible. For any Pentecostal worth his salt, the New Testament consists of 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, James, Mathew 5 1-16, and that’s about it. A few key verses can be pulled out of context to supplement our knowledge as needed. The Old Testament consists of Psalms, Proverbs and the major prophets, but you may never tackle more than 2 verses at a time. That would be contextualizing, and that is not a Spirit led way to read the Bible. Verses from the Pentateuch can be used as needed for insertion of imperatives.
Revelation exists in so much as you must learn to interpret all of the bowl judgments and seals. This is considered advance Bible study and requires a series of CDs on the topic, that incidentally must be updated every time a date for the rapture passes with all of us still here on planet earth. There will be a new book or CD to explain each news flash from the Middle East.
Jesus? Oh, the Bible is about Him, but we need to stay relevant. Relevance is like clothing styles: if you are relevant today, you are obsolete tomorrow; therefore, you must keep changing. The problem with that is that the Bible hasn’t changed in a few centuries or more (17?). Not only does being relevant quickly make you irrelevant, once you are irrelevant, you aren’t even true. Think about that line for a moment.
I have to say that my pastor invited this nut case to my church. He endorsed this nonsense. He is usually better at quoting Bible passages than our guest wolf, occasionally venturing even into the safe parts of Romans, chapters 12 and up, on rare occasion. But the fact that he saw this charlatan on television and decided that we needed this stuff in our church may have been the proverbial last straw.
Tuesday is the new Sunday, at least for me. Come on homily! I’m ready for you now.
--Ogre--
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