Scriptureless Pulpits

It’s Thursday afternoon. I am running to get material for my shop and I turn the truck radio to the local religious station. Chuck Swindoll is laughing and promising to tell me how his passage of Scripture can help me stay young. Naturally, my curiosity is piqued beyond anything any middle-aged man could possibly stand! Still, I turn the station.

It’s Friday morning. I’m up early. O goody, goody, goosebumps. Benny Hinn is on healing hemorrhoids, taming tumors, and sellin’ the spirit cheap. Call in now. Glory be to Benny’s god, whoever THAT is. I turn the station. Doubly excited, I discover another faith healer that has found it pays more to hock health food than do the healing himself. Hey, it HAS to be easier than sweating buckets into a microphone and pushing some overweight guy to the floor to cure his arthritis, leaving him still curiously overweight. (Benny’s god is very modest that way, I guess. Only heals the stuff that ain’t real showy.)

It’s Sunday Morning. The preacher is simply THRILLED by his cute story. So are several others. It’s all about himself, his car, his wife, his dreams, or his whatever. It helps manage the 36 minutes left in a 40 minute sermon block because he only studied two verses this week. Even HE isn’t able to stretch the spiritual lesson he got from his dog, Poopsie, for 36 minutes. No worries, though. He will slip in five or ten more words from those two verses. You know, the two that are so profound he just has to spend the entire 40 minutes on them. Then and only then will he go into the story about what he saw on that disgusting TV no good Christian should watch and what his neighbor did to his cat. That will leave about 4 minutes for the last phrase of the last verse, and a quick song about accepting Jesus because He really, really, really, really, really, really wants—no NEEDS—you to love Him. Feeding the sheep, right? Yeah, huh.

Fascinated by the story of the time the pastor’s fish tank blah, blah, blah…I somehow force myself to go back to studying and memorizing Scriptures on my own in the pew because I ought to make good use of the time used to get here and sit here. But I’m worried. There’s that lady who dressed me down for twenty minutes for not walking around and talking enough during Greeting Time (another great pastoral time management tool.) She might just light into me for studying the Bible instead of learning about Judge Judy and the pastor’s reaction to the case of the bad hair dryer that made the dog bite the neighbor who got thirteen stitches and an infection and dented his left rear right front fender on the way to the clinic, all of which cost twelve hundred, seventy-eight dollars and thirteen cents. This worries me until I look over to her and see her husband is fast asleep. Alright! I’m home safe for one more week.

I’m jealous, though. Amazingly, many Evangelicals get MORE than two verses! That’s right, they do. I didn’t believe it either until I tuned in Charles Stanley. They may get seven ways to improve your (insert the most disconcerting subject you can think of here) mixed with parts of twelve quickly spurted excuse verses. Excuse verses—some call them proof texts—are very important passages of Scripture that only the speaker could possibly have figured out had ANYTHING to do with the subject he MADE UP for this morning’s sermonette on dating, buying a car, raising pigeons, bicycling, swimming the back stroke, or whatever to the glory of God and the giant cardboard thermometer in the foyer.

If you can relate to any of this, lobby hard to fire your pastor and change the channel. Quickly.