7.29.2007
Dear Reverend Fry
Dear Reverend Fry,
With due respect, are you getting fried?
Every Friday in the Plattsburgh (news)paper you run an ad in the Faith and Spirituality section that at first glance looks like a weekly column. Entitled “I Was Just Thinking About…” there’s a photo of you sitting in your study, a bespectacled middle-aged man wearing suspenders and a tie, a learned look on your face. Each week you take a news item and relate it to the Bible. You wrap up with the statement: “It would be an honor to speak with you further about this at the Bible Baptist Church.”
While your choice of new items are interesting, I think lately you’ve been writing too many sermons and are getting a bit burned out. Your last two ad-columns have been stretching the point too far in trying to connect the incident with a Bible quote.
For example, you talk about a man named Scott Naylor who found a five-foot boa constrictor emerging from the engine of his car. The event was mysterious because Naylor didn’t own the snake and he couldn’t figure out how it got inside his car. This event reminded you of a Bible verse:
“And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.” (Numbers 21:9)
Then you state that this verse speaks of the healing that Christ provides.
So what’s the connection between the news item and the Bible verse? Did Scott Naylor have Moses’ brass serpent in his trunk and that’s why he wasn’t bitten? Or did the Saint Christopher statue on his dashboard save him?
A week later and you write about a fox that attacked some people in a steakhouse. The fox (apparently rabid from what is described) chased customers into the restaurant and bit the manager. This Bible verse came to your mind:
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, waketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)
OK, a rabid fox can be dangerous but it isn’t a lion. I can’t see a fox devouring a person like a lion; a few good bites and it would be stuffed. And as you stated, animal control officers put down the fox. What did they use – a crucifix to corner the crazy critter?
What’s next week? One item that got a lot of play recently in the press was the nursing home cat that seemingly predicts when death is near for a patient. The foreseeing feline wanders around and sometimes jumps up on a bed, sitting there just hours before the patient dies.
But maybe that cat isn’t making predictions. After all, some people believed that a cat would climb into a crib and smother a baby. (If the poor little soul hadn’t been baptized, he would end up in purrgatory.) And then there are all those stories about witches and their familiars…
So what Bible verse would be appropriate? How about:
“He lies in wait like a lion in cover; he lies in wait to catch the helpless; he catches the helpless and drags them off in his net.” (Psalm 10:9)
That does tie in better with the news item, albeit in a warped way. But warping works better than stretching. Try it some time, Reverend Fry.
© Copyright 2007 Stan Spire
