rustypants speaks

quote of the day:

“To all those who name the name of Christ who plan to willfully disobey Him by voting for Obama, take warning… No, this election is not about race. It’s not about the economy. It’s about obeying God… Obey Him in the voting booth and out of it. If not, do us all a favor and quit calling yourself a Christian.”
– radio host and commentator Janet Porter

i suppose i’m helping to send this country to hell in a handbasket. DANG it!!

truth is, though, it’s folks like this who scare the crap out of me. single-issue voting is unwise, and folks like this – the zealots – they worry me more than either of the candidates.

and these folks also embarrass me as a christian.

maybe i ought to take her advice and stop calling myself one.

where is satan sockpuppet today?

why there he is! on the beach soaking up some rays
after a long day harvesting souls!

a gentleman in tennessee is suing his church for when he fell and hit his head after being slain in the Spirit last year.

the full article is here.

maybe that fall was supposed to help him achieve humility and show grace in the face of God-given pain?

when i was in middle school my family went to catholic church every sunday.

it was lame no matter how “cool” they tried to make it (the “guitar service” at st. theresa’s comes to mind…) and it always seemed to take forever – but i always loved staying overnight at my best friend’s house on saturdays – besides the fact that we had a great time being silly and staying up all night, ken’s family went to St. Simon’s church – NOTORIOUS for the 15 minute sunday morning mass!

wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, drop your dollar in the hat, dominus vobiscum, sit, kneel, stand, greet your neighbor, “body of christ” “amen,” Christianos ad leones, “great sermon, father!” *ken’s dad starts car up* back to the house you go.

surely our motivations were wrong, but doggone it – it’s middle school, dude! long live st. simon’s 15 minute mass!!

one painful aspect of having been subjected to catholic school education was the weekly grade-level church service we had to go to.

my school, st. antoninus, didn’t have a lot of good choices of priests at this point in my catholic school career. the old one was father hagedorn – he was probably 107 years old, shook uncontrollably, smacked his lips a lot, and paused too long and too often. father mick was no better – he was probably 21, a little too chummy with the guys and waaay too physical with the girls – we didn’t care for him and it was obvious that he was either on the lam or made too hasty a decision to enter the priesthood.

my best friends and i did our best to keep it as low key as possible but still eke some fun out of the experience. we sit together each week against better judgement but up to this point we’ve not gotten into too much trouble.

catholic church, in and of itself, has always been a boring thing for me. too pious, too organy, too… churchy, i guess. and when we had to go with our grade each week, oh, sheer torture! what’s worse: being in CLASS or being in CHURCH – haha, it’s a hard choice!

so picture this: four 14 year old guys: ken. brian. tony. scott. it’s spring. thursday morning. eighth grade church. front row. bored. hyms. father hagedorn. jesus hanging on the cross. robes. solemnity. holy water. communion. sit. stand. kneel. stand. sit.

and when the next hymn started up, my friend tony had apparently had enough.

we’re singing this hymn and this garbled noise starts coming from my left. it sounded like… a cat stuck in a washer? no. a record being played backwards! YES! that’s it!!

i and my other friends look at tony and he has his hymnal turned UPSIDE DOWN and is singing… backwards.

i’m not sure who started laughing first, but it was SO FUNNY. oh, we tried so hard to stop, but there was no place for the laughter to go. we grabbed our faces, nudged tony, laughed and hoped no one noticed. then, since we couldn’t stop, we started singing backwards, too. and laughed even harder.

we were lucky – no one came over and smacked us or told us to stop. we managed to get ourselves together enough that we got through the service and back to class in one piece. short bursts of laughter still plagued us during the day, but we were ok.

and then. at the end of the day. the very end of the day… we came back into our homerooms and sitting on our desks? THREE DETENTIONS EACH. signed by the director of catholic education for our school. he had been sitting in one of the wings of the church, hidden, and had seen everything.

and church, my friends, was NOT where we were to be goofing off and screwing around!

was it worth it? oh, when you can still laugh almost to the point of tears 26 years later – it’s definitely worth it.

“… i have a prayer language,” he said, almost hesitatingly, as though i might suddenly storm out of the restaurant.

“oh, cool,” i said.

“i’ve had it since i was younger. i’ve never had any kind of public pronouncement or anything, it’s something done in private, during my personal prayer time.”

“Oh, well that’s Scriptural.” and it’s true.

despite my background in non-charismatic churches, i have no problem with tongues and prayer languages that are exhibited in a Scriptural manner and context. why? um. well, it’s Scriptural, duh! now, having said all that, i have never been so moved by the Spirit to speak in tongues or prophecy, or any other type of Spirit-motivated manifestation of messages from God.

but the conversation i had with my new friend greg the other day brought back a rather amusing conversation had several years ago during bible college.

several of us were sitting around talking about the fruits of the spirit – my college was not a big tongues kind of place – if i remember correctly they believe that speaking in tongues ceased a couple generations after the apostles. i must’ve been sleeping during that class.

but there we were, talking away, and one of the guys was from the church of god movement – a charismatic / pentecostal / full gospel denomination that, if this dude represented all we knew about them, then the representation would be rather frightening – he began telling us how, when he was a young boy in the CoG church, they would “help the Spirit along” with certain phrases.

and we genuinely didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.

“certain ‘phrases’ – what does that mean?”

“well, if we were at a revival or something and we weren’t speaking in tongues, we were taught that after a while we should start saying the phrase ‘my knee, my toe’ over and over, slowly at first, then faster, ‘mykneemytoemykneemytoemykneemytoe’ until the Spirit finally kicked in.”

“kicked in,” i said, “like a lawn mower or something?” i had begun to visualize the Spirit waiting for the gas to meet the spark and then saying, “ok! here i come! you got the right combination at last!”

“well, kind of. it seemed to produce the right atmosphere for the Spirit to come.”

and the rest of us didn’t know what to say. so we said nothing, sitting in awkward silence until class started.

later, two of us were recounting this conversation with one of our professors. he said the phrases varied and the one he heard the most was “see my tie, tie my tie” – again, starting off slowly, increasing in speed until miraculously you were “filled with the Holy Spirit” and suddenly you’re speaking in genuine tongue-like fashion.

that kind of “priming the pump” completely takes away from everything the bible says about this type of spiritual gift – there’s no magic incantation or phrase or hokus pocus that will suddenly motivate the Spirit like this.

but when greg talked about tongues as a private prayer language, there is evidence of this in Scripture. to be certain, we could argue (and many have) until we’re blue in the face on the question of whether speaking in tongues genuinely exists in the present or not, but the bottom line is that the focus needs to be on the giver of the gift, not the recipient – working yourself into a babbling lather with ‘conducive’ phrases gives no glory to God.

gosh. i have no pithy one-liner with which to end this post.

“…but he’s a good dog!”

“oh, i’m sure of that!” the prosecution sneered. “is it not true that on two separate occasions this holiday season, your ‘good dog’ barked viciously at the lord jesus?”

“uh, well, um… that would be difficult as the lord is in heaven, right?” i asked hesitatingly.

“your insolence will not be tolerated, nor will the anti-holiday, anti-jesusness of your mangy mutt! your dog had the trained inclination to growl and bark at the graven images of the lord jesus in two separate manger scenes! confess your dogs’ sins and this court will go easier on you!”

“ok, look. my dog did, in fact, bark at the image of jesus in two different manger scenes this past week but…”

“ah HAH!!! you’ve been caught! your honor, this heretic has confessed and i demand swift and appropriate justice!”

“…but wait. let me explain.”

“oh, you need not explain, you perverted anti-jesus lunatic!”

“no, no, no! please understand: my dog isn’t barking at jesus per se, he’s barking at the nerve that some people have in thinking they can depict the lord in a certain fashion – to pigeonhole him, as it were. these WASP-y images of jesus are not only grossly inaccurate, they also go against carving images of god and worshiping them (as you seem to be doing with this prosecution). my dog simply wants christmas to be taken back to the important things and less on the worshiping of physical things like images, money, presents, etc. surely you can agree with that!?”

“were you just doing your mr. know-it-all routine there and making all that up on the spot?”

“um. yeah. ha. haha. pretty good, huh?”

“send him and his dog to the brig!”

image borrowed from marriedtothesea.com,
a website that is both hilarious and quite
off-color at times. if you’re sensitive to this
type of thing, don’t go check it out.