Burning Love

My wife posted a status on her Facebook a couple of days ago that is so true to anxiety and frustration that I feel in my heart. She said “You can choose your friends, but you cannot choose your family.” I want to say from the start of this that I love my family deeply and would never “choose” to be removed from them, although at times my frustration towards some of their actions runs extremely deep.

For those of you who do not know what I am talking about, let me just say that a few days ago the news received word that my brother, the pastor of a 14-member, hyper-fundamentalist church in Canton, NC, was going to burn some bibles that were not the King James Version. If this was merely the case, it would have been bad enough, but he wants also to burn music CD’s (some of which I humorously admit is worthy of being burned), but to top it all off he has decided to incinerate books of Christian authors, some as even aberrant as the clearly evil…BILLY GRAHAM. Now, to be fair to my brother these authors are only nominally Christian (just as I am), but are in fact “heretics”, predominately because they do not use the King James Version of the bible. If anyone thinks that I am employing hyperbole in this, they should take a look at my brother’s website and they will find this extreme view to be one of many radical positions being propagated by my brother.

I have for a while tried to ignore my brother, as he has at least tried to steer clear of attacking me, although everyone else seems to be named and called out on his website. In my discovery of this recent venture he has taken up, I decided to contact family the other night and instead of finding common ground I was surprisingly met with something that utterly astounded me: this person in my family was actually defending the radical antics of my brother, positing that “many people actually agree with him”. Well, this may be true in terms of sheer numbers, but I would suspect the vast majority of Christianity find the habits of people like this not only widely suspicious, but also blatantly absurd. In fact the idea of someone in the hills of NC burning bibles smacks of Nazism and Communism. Let me be clear: I am not calling my brother a Nazi or a Communist, but am merely suggesting that habits of this type seem to be similar to attempts of oppressionistic movements of the past to squash attempts of freedom of religion.

Of course, as quickly as I state this, my brother or someone who agrees with him, may cite the obscure Scripture from the Book of Acts on which they are basing this practice. But the problem is that in the passage the only thing that is being burned is book of spells or magical incantations from which the pagan magicians would cast spells. Their decision to follow Christ was so radical that they wanted to make a break with their pagan, demonic, and clearly unscriptural practices and this was the way that they chose to do it. To cite a source like this and say it is justification for burning bibles or even books by Christian authors or even music is a far cry. There were all types of practices in the bible that we no longer adhere to and I would offer that Pastor Marc does not either, such as casting lots to make large decisions or burning cattle as sacrifices or celebrating weddings over the course of a week as opposed to a day. I don’t think these are things we want to recreate, but if we did that would make more sense than using this isolated passage from Acts makes.

I know that for those who still esteem the King James Version of the Bible as the only Word of God, these points will seem to be, in, fact, beside the point. For them, this is the foundation upon which everything else rests. On my brother’s website, for example, you will quickly gather what is the theme on which they stand: the King James Version of the Bible. For most Christians this will seem strange, as Christ seems to be the Rock upon which our faith is based (at least this is what the King James Version of the bible actually suggests). To be fair again, though, this website does include some about Jesus being the rescue for man’s soul, but the main emphasis is clearly on the King James Version of the bible, with a secondary emphasis on rebuking all that is not in agreement with their very rigid doctrinal statement, and then maybe thirdly on a hodge podge of other things. Christ seems to be an afterthought in all of this.

One of the most disturbing things about this though is that there are others in my family that continues to see these trends as wholesome and ultimately beneficial to preaching the gospel. But, is this the trend that Paul spoke out against in many of his writings? Is this the very thing that is actually counterproductive to the gospel? Is this the gospel of circumcision spoken out against in Galatians where Paul was rebuking them for adding things to the gospel of grace? Does this make people in the world who do not know Christ want what these nutty people from the backwoods of NC want, or is this one more thing that secular people will cite as reasons for not trusting Christ? I know that people will always look for excuses why they won’t do what they need to do, but should we give them reasons for not believing? It seems that “the goodness of God leads men to repentance”, not the condemnation of man.

My overall point in writing this is obviously to convey not only frustration, but ultimately sadness. I am sad and disappointed that my family fails to see this and apparently will only continue to go on in their positions of polarizing religion (I don’t even say Christianity because I am ultimately unsure if this is true). I am ultimately brought to much sorrow because this is not the image of Jesus that I grew up loving to hear about and loving to follow and eventually embracing with my life. For that I am thankful, and my prayer at this time is that somewhere in the madness Christ will again resurge amidst the struggle and it will become more about him and less about a 17th century translation of God’s Word. That is it for now.