Urban Legends

Okay, so I'm not a preacher, though I give sermons occasionally.

Usually, I sit in the pew and listen to sermons. Sometimes over the years they have contained "preacher stories". I'm not talking about their own amazing testimony or some other activity of God they have witnessed or of which they have heard.

I also don't mean a parable that symbolically represents some truth so that it touches our hearts or minds with freshness, one which we usually are told or can easily understand to be fictional. "There once was a man with two sons...."

I mean stories delivered as factual which often either illustrate God's amazing power, society's corruption, the limited knowledge of scientists or the stupidity of our government.

These days I can check them out at www.snopes.com. Now, I don't take everything they say there as "Gospel" either, but usually I find that they point out some logical flaw to the story, which should have been obvious to me.

Or in some cases, they are able to trace the story back to what is likely to be its original and possibly factual version. That way a preacher (or anyone) can repeat that story without its exaggerations and (in some cases) added falsehoods.

To be accurate I should say that these days most of these come to me by email and I take the thirty seconds I wish the sender had taken to Google key words and end up at Snopes or a similar site (or go straight to Snopes. I'm just suggesting what they should have done, if unaware of Snopes. Surely they know Google.)

However, if you are a preacher reading this, picture me sitting in your congregation (and people like me ARE there). I hear your story. I get suspicious. I go home and I do YOUR work for you.

I find out your story is bullshit. Hey, I think, maybe your testimony is bullshit. Maybe that miracle you heard about or claim to have seen is bullshit. Maybe that "Word from God" of His vision for our church is bullshit. Maybe almost everything you preach to me is bullshit.

Then you tell me "No. Sometimes fictional stories illustrate great truths about God." Okay, I can believe that, but because you presented the the "illustration" as fact, I actually now feel greatly relieved. Many of the miracles and other events of Scripture sound bogus to me, but are presented as fact (apparently). Whew! My pastor believes that some (all?) of them are illustrations, perhaps of the truth that God has the power to do great miracles (though He didn't do THIS one). What a relief! Now I can avoid being one of those crazy Bible-believers. That's what my pastor taught me -- by example -- about truth.
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Later, without mentioning names I'll explain what gave rise to this post.