Daddy, why is the preacher talking so funny?
When it comes to fundamentalist preachers, there is nothing like the way they choose to express themselves from the pulpit. What they say, in itself, can be quite surprising. Like the recent fight with Mrs. Benny Hinn, doing her best to give a good ranting sermon to the masses and making a fool of herself. In the typical breathless tirade of evangelical theatrics, she told the audience that what they needed was “an enema of the Holy Ghost, right in the butt.” Honestly, that was what she said and repeated it. She then went on to tell the audience not to be “butt kissers.” Considering that she had probably crossed too many lines, she tried to recover by saying that people like her have that kind of humor, but it was too late and the tape spread all over the world, and not in a good way. She then frantically paced back and forth until she broke her shoe and told the audience that they didn’t need shoes anyway, they had to put on combat boots for Jesus. I guess this got her out of the embarrassment of breaking her shoes. The end came mercifully as she fell face down on the stage, and everyone started clapping as if this was from God and the perfect ending to a perfect sermon. It was pathetic and the scary part is that not one person in the audience got up and said “I’m out of here.” They loved him.
The fact is that nothing he said in the “sermon” was helpful. Nothing he said was correct and practically nothing he said was anything other than an attempt to sound inspirational and ended up being absolutely silly. Poor Mr. Hinn was so angry that the video was being played all over the world, he threatened those who showed it, as I understand it. I do not blame him. What a moment at the breakfast table the next day old it must have been!
What is it about fundamentalist preachers who apparently have to lose their minds and common sense in an avalanche of “techniques” that leave most educated people cracking up? Don’t they realize that you are laughing at them?
When a preacher tells the audience that the reason Bathsheba was called Bathsheba was due to the fact that, while King David was looking down on her from the roof, she was Bathing!
I’m not kidding, I heard it with my own ears and wrote to the man suggesting that if she had been taking a shower, we would have known her as SHOWER-Sheba. The man was just ignorant and I nearly ran off the road laughing. On the other hand, he was pathetic and I often wonder if anyone in his congregation called him out for that little piece of ignorance. Sometimes I wonder more about the audience than the preacher.
What can be said from the pulpit can be incredibly silly or incredibly damaging. Pat Robertson tells us that the hurricanes are from God punishing New Orleans or that Ariel Sharon’s coup is from God for giving up part of the West Bank to people who also need a real place to live. His comments are wrong, ignorant, foolish and dangerous in these pronouncements. It suddenly saw the light (most will do that when you challenge a particular part of the ignorance and you never do when you never question it) when the State of Israel canceled their affiliation with them and one of their pet projects in Israel, but it was too much afternoon. Good for them to put a price on talking nonsense from the pulpit. I guess the State of Israel was able to discourage Pat’s inspired comments. God, I suppose, was forced to rescind his inspiration and give in to the current dilemma.
Time would not account for all the ignorance that comes from the pulpits of untrained, uneducated, uninformed, and unaccountable men and women for their presentations. Sanctified ignorance is still ignorance as far as we know.
There were dinosaurs in the ark…wrong
The Earth is only 6000 years old…wrong
Our church is the only true church on earth…wrong
Evolution is a doctrine of Satan… evil
Dancing is a doctrine of Satan…wrong
Everything you ask in the name of Jesus, you will have… wrong
“I am the true representative of God on earth and I am obliged to say these things…” incorrect
If you title, God will bless you and pour out the windows of heaven on you…evil
God is doing this…wrong
God is doing that…wrong
Jesus thinks this about that…wrong
Jesus thinks that this… evil
“I know I’m going to go on a long way in this sermon… but you need to hear this…” wrong
“You need to put Church and Bible study and being here first in your life…” wrong
…and so on, so that it would be wise for most preachers of this character to join On and On Anonymous!
Perhaps most irritating and pathetic of all is the WAY many evangelical, television, and fundamentalist preachers present themselves. What about the cadence from hell in the presentation? What about the “eh” “eh” “eh” at the end of every sentence. Physiologically I realize it helps them breathe or they would pass out, and while it may be a “tradition” it is not helpful for educated parishioners. Maybe that’s the problem too.
What about the screaming? Always yelling and always giving the appearance that they are angry. Preachers are angry because they think they can’t be preachers without showing their righteous indignation at every single thing on the planet that they decide is bad and needs the iron rod of Jesus to hit it.
I heard a preacher this morning walk into work only to see if he would pass out and become absolutely speechless trying to scream, speak and breathe at the same time. I don’t think a weak human being was missed in his introduction that he wasn’t hitting his congregation over the head with. Sometimes I intuit “it seems to me that you protest too much”. I have learned that much more often than one thinks, simply look at the topics on which the preacher criticizes repeatedly and you can get a good clue as to what worries his own ignorant soul. Every minister in my personal experience who was known to rant about this or that “sexual problem” was struggling with himself. Projection is something that most parishioners of fundamentalist preachers don’t understand.
No one can sacrifice the English language like a crazed preacher behind the pulpit. Imagine a meeting at IBM or the Oval Office (well, I can there;), conducted in that tone and style, and you’ll find someone being escorted off the premises in search of a new job.
The sermons are full of meaningless phrases and pronunciations. If I were to write down what was said and reread it, it would sound ridiculous. From “Jaaa..eeeeeezus says”, to “days (there’s) a time to come…”, a clever and meaningful introduction gets lost in a flurry of excitement and drool. HOW you say something for many preachers far outweighs whether what one says is true. Remember, in fact, science by the nature of being science has to be precise and admit errors. Right now, we have some very embarrassed and angry South Korean scientists who discovered and admitted that their recent cleanup projects were bogus. Sorry about that, but good for them.
Not only do preachers rarely admit their mistakes, they seem to have a need to perpetuate error. As God is never wrong, they are never wrong either, since they think they speak and are inspired by this external force called “God”. Just ask yourself how many times have you heard a preacher or church say that he was wrong when he said this or that and you will understand what I mean. Because of this, many fundamentalist sermons are delivered in angry, emotional, threatening, self-righteous tones. I can only imagine what some of the kids are thinking as they watch the show. They will often tell you years later how crazy the church they grew up in was.
Every scientific fact that the church has ever scoffed at for being contradicted by the Bible, they have eventually had to admit is correct. Of course, many do not, and never will. They praise Jesus for my ignorance because “the wisdom of man is foolishness before God” and “my ways are not YOUR ways… saith the Lord.” The preachers hid a lot of ignorance behind those two quotes.
It only took the Pope 350 years to apologize for almost burning Galileo at the stake for thinking that the earth was not the center of the solar system and that the sun surrounded it. He didn’t apologize for doing it to unnamed others. Science has yet to recognize a biblical allegory as literally true of its actual findings. Eventually, the “facts” that the church promotes in areas where they don’t know what they’re talking about boil down to the real facts. Even more so now in these days of easy access to the Internet for information that was previously unavailable to the average person.
And so sometimes we have to ask ourselves, “what are our chillins in the Church learning from such preachers?”
To begin with, they are learning:
Shouting trumps teaching.
Good grammar doesn’t count in church.
God is a consuming fire if you question the preacher.
Emotions trump good information.
One can be poorly programmed for life and not realize it.
The brain and YOUR intelligence and common sense can certainly be checked at the door when you go to your church.
Preachers are never wrong.
YOU are seldom right.
“Jaaaaaaheeeezus” loves the sinner but hates the sin, but it seems that he hates the sinner too.
Mom or Dad never seem to think that what I think the preacher is saying and doing is stupid…something must be wrong with me.
God and Jesus must be raving mad if this man or woman is their personal representative on earth to me.
Narcissism must be a spiritual gift.
Take some time and just listen to the words of those who fit these ways of talking about God. Notice the antics they feel they have to use to convince. If your head says “it must be like this” while your belly says “no, no, no,” go with your belly. He will tell you the truth of what you feel more accurately and you will not feel that something is wrong with you for observing that although he is sincere, this man is really not qualified to teach me who and what God is and what he is. he or she isn’t doing on good ‘ol planet earth. He will also be able to more genuinely answer the question his children are asking, whether he knows it or not. “Dad, why is the preacher yelling and why is he talking so weird?”