Okay, here’s another reason why I love Holy Trinity Lutheran Church so much. Last night at our Bible study we got into a discussion about people who read all kinds of secret messages into the Scriptures that were never intended to be read that way. Like people who go goo-goo over Revelation, thinking they have cracked the code that not even St. John himself could have considered.
So a member of the group told us about a conversation from her pew this past Sunday. The sermon hymn that day was “What Wondrous Love Is This”, which happens to be number 666 in the hymnal. We’ll call this person in our Bible study group, Woman A. She was sitting next to Woman B and the conversation went like this…
Woman B: “Oh, I can’t sing this. It’s 666.”
Woman A: “And why not?”
Woman B: “It’s 666. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Woman A: “It doesn’t mean anything. Just sing the damn hymn!”
Yes! That’s how a dyed-in-the-wool Lutheran with just plain sense deals with Biblical nonsense.
At Holy Comforter Lutheran (in Belmont), we for years have had PO Box #666. Several years back, during a period of upset about "the number," it was brought up at a council meeting that perhaps we should get another box number. Someone (perhaps my Mom, who was on the council at the time) said that it was only a number, and all the confusion that would be caused was hardly worth the trouble -- to this day, PO Box 666 is still our mailing address.
ReplyDeleteAnd there are some Christian churches (which will go unnamed) where having a PO Box 666 would be considered aligning with the devil. Such a fuss over a silly number.
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