MONEYCHANGERS?

Zombyboy had a strange, disturbing experience at church this past weekend:

My tolerant smile had started slipping a touch when the pastor made the remark that almost got me to stand up and shout in church. And not in a good, Holy Ghost Spirit kind of way. You’ll forgive the fact that this isn’t a perfect, word for word retelling of what he said, but I was stunned and had forgotten to pack a notebook and pen.

“I know that Republicans haven’t historically been sensitive to minority issues, but Whatsherface isn’t like that.”

My jaw dropped, blood rushed to my face, and I wanted to shout back at him. My looked at me in shock and leaned over, asking me if I wanted to leave. “Maybe…”

I sat there brooding for a moment, missing most of what was being said while I ran over every possible response in my head. Then I realized that Leonard was holding up a book.

It wasn’t the Good Book, but according to him, it was a good book. He proceeded to tell us how good Christians need to be well read, and that a good step in being well read was to read his book. Or, if you’ve already read his very important book, to get it for a loved one who he guaranteed would be blessed by what it had to say.

Wow. He hadn’t managed to break out the bible, the holiest of Christian texts, in the first forty-five minutes of the show (and, yes, I mean that in the nastiest possible way), but he did manage to start hawking his own work. Apparently, the word of God isn’t necessary when you have the word of Leonard guiding your way.

Somewhat miraculously, the ushers appeared with stacks of this book while the pastor told us that the book would be available in the bookstore after the sermon, but that if we purchased it from an usher right now, we would save five dollars. It was the Church Shopping Network playing out in ugly colors right in front of me. That’s when we stood up to leave. It was nearly noon, and we had yet to hear the pastor’s sermon. I had heard enough and seen enough to know everything I needed to know about that particular church, though.

It was the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen in a church. I had just witnessed an Anglo preacher playing racial politics in front of a mostly minority congregation, and then capitalizing on it by peddling his own goods during the services. I was offended, angry, and disgusted.

Worse, I was thrilled to be leaving what was supposed to be the house of God. I think that made me angriest of all.

You can’t make stuff like this up. (Peter DeVries could, but he hasn’t been writing lately.)

It’s a disturbing trend, this tendency to turn churches into mini-malls. Sure, we do fundraisers at our church, but they’re always for specific purposes–they’re never just to raise funds, period. And they’re certainly not a supplement to my income. But out there, in warehouses (probably in Dallas) are acres of unsold “WWJD?” merchandise, “Butterfly Kisses” t-shirts, Promise Keepers swag, and other, unknown efforts to milk the devil’s mammon from the better angels of human nature.

Why? Why do people think there’s no difference between a business and a ministry? How can you miss something so fundamental? How can you live in such ignorance of Jesus and the moneychangers?

I’ll never understand, I guess. Talk about straining and gnats and swallowing camels . . .

EVENING UPDATE

College basketball remains dead to me. And what on God’s green earth is a “Billiken,” anyway?

Crimony. We got beat by a soccer school.

I’VE GOT A LITTLE LIST

11 Reasons Not To Be So Nostalgic About Your 1970s Childhood:

1. Tennis shoes were advertised as being able to make “skateboard-style turns” . . . and you believed it.
2. The only Disney movies of note were Robin Hood and The Rescuers . . . and they both stunk to high heaven.
3. Nobody believes your argument about how Atari was superior to the PS2, especially the part about how new-style video games just aren’t violent enough and fail to teach children that the universe is a hostile place.
4. You cried at the end of Bridge to Terabithia, didn’t you?
5. For every good Saturday morning cartoon in the 70s, there were three shows like Devlin, These Are The Days, and The 3 Robonic Stooges.
6. You were there for the first cynical attempt to force soccer down America’s throat.
7. Likewise, you remember when “reality TV” meant stuff like “Real People” and “Battle of the Network Stars”–yet, somehow, you maintain an attitude of smug superiority whenever “Survivor” or “The Real World” is mentioned.
8. You remember what it’s like to get a friction burn from the T-strap of an SST car. And what it feels like to get Bactine splashed on it.
9. While punk and new wave were happening, you were stuck listening to Peter Frampton and the Bay City Rollers.
10. Sometimes, when you close your eyes, you can remember the clingy/itchy feeling you got from all those synthetic fabrics, and how they offered no insulation or pretection from the wind, and the massive, atmosphere-igniting static electricity shocks you got from walking across a shag carpet in your DuPont finest, and the sick, creepy memory of it all causes you to wonder why anybody would ever bring the styles and culture of that hideous decade back, then you realize that this ill-placed nostalgia is not being driven by our own generation but the one after us, and you also wonder if the baby boomers feel this way about what we Gen Xers did to the 60s, then you remember that they didn’t care, because they’d figured out how to make money off our naivete, and doggone if the slippery creeps aren’t doing it again, this time to their own children, which they were too busy to have back in the 70s because you couldn’t bring your kids to the est seminar. Thus, you brace yourself for the inevitable wave of 80s nostalgia, which should be starting any day now, for which you are perfectly positioned, since you still have all your old “Bloom County” books on the bookshelf.
11. Erm . . . no, you traded all those in at the used book store for the first three “Far Side” books sometime around ‘93. Crud.