Return of Brother Biddle

It has been a long time since I got a note from Brother Biddle who used to be over at the East Burlap Protestant Parish.  He and I used to write each other about twice a year. Once after Easter on the Low, slow week after Easter and once after all the activities of Christmas had finished and we were waiting on the New Year.  Brother Biddle retired from East Burlap about the same time I retired from my work in Henderson. So we kind of dropped the correspondence for a while.

But I got a note from him this week, telling all of the strange goings on at East Burlap. He said that some eager bunch of folks had decided that the Christian faith needed a little more purification. They thought, how could they ever think this, that there were too many non Christians in the Bible. So they formed a committee to try to rectify the situation.

They found they had a lot of problems with the Old Testament because it had a lot of Jewish people in it and they probably needed to be converted or those books needed to be revised so that it was good Christian people who were in God's special city.

Brother Biddle said what had really started them thinking this way was when some scholar visited the church and mentioned that the Wise Men might have been Muslims or Hindus or some other pagan religion.  These people did not want any foreigners messing with the lovely Christmas story so they were going to leave out the wise men. The Shepherds were not middle class but they were in the same country so they must have been of the right race.

This committee was not very excited about all that early church socialism either. That was certainly unAmerican and anti-capitalism and the committee voted to make sure that story never came up in the lectionary that East Burlap used.  The committee wanted to add a story about God's special blessing on America, but the new Pastor finally put his foot down and said that they were not going to write new  books for the Bible. It might be possible to edit the current version but he was not going to let them write new stuff.

Brother Biddle said that he though that was a pretty bold and courageous stand for the minister and Brother Biddle said he sent him a note congratulating him.

Brother Biddle's notes always made me realize that things where I was were not nearly as horrible as I might have imagined.