brainrow

The PBS program Frontline recently observed 25 years of AIDS by airing a 2-part, 4-hour program on the subject. Very enlightening. I especially liked this, from Rev. W. Franklin Richardson of Grace Baptist Church, about churches that turned their backs on AIDS and AIDS sufferers:

“Bad Bible” is what I called it. We used to do Bad Bible, and make HIV some kind of plague that God had sent upon homosexuals. It was a terrible time for the church.

In his book God’s Politics, Jim Wallis tells how he and several fellow seminary students “scoured the Old and New Testaments for every single reference to poor people, to wealth and poverty, to injustice and opression, and to what the response to all those subjects was to be for the people of God.” They found thousands of verses.

After we completed our study, we all sat in a circle to discuss how the subject had been treated in the various churches in which we had grown up. Astoundingly, but also tellingly, not one of us could remember even one sermon on the poor from the pulpit of our home churches. In the Bible, the poor were everywhere; yet the subject was not to be found in our churches.

Then we decided to try what became a famous experiment. One member of our group took an old Bible and a new pair of scissors and began the long process of literally cutting out every single biblical text about the poor. It took him a long time.

…

When the zealous seminarian was done with all his editorial cuts, that old Bible would hardly hold together, it was so sliced up. It was literally falling apart in our hands. What we had done was to create a Bible full of holes.

I began taking that damaged and fragile Bible out with me when I preached. I’d hold it up high above American congregations and say, “Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible; it is full of holes.”

It seems to me there’s a lot of Bad Bible going around these days, and the proponents of Bad Bible seem awfully quick to call down condemnation on those who resist.

Susan B. Anthony was onto something:

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.