DavidFilmer wrote:
The pastor is wearing an inner-ear bud that lets him listen to instructions from the control booth about who to pick and what to do.
When I was a kid searching for faith, I used to donate to a televangelist by the name of Peter Popoff.* He had a healing ministry where he would call people out of the audience by name and tell them their ailments.* He would go over to these astonished people and in a “Holy Ghost” moment he would slap his hands on their baffled heads in a kind of a yelling fit, scream a command in the “name of Jesus” to be healed, and they’d fall to the ground in tears with their quivering hands raised high up in the air.
I was convinced.* So I handed my lawn-mowing money over to him thinking this was the guy that had the bat-phone to Jesus.
Several years and dollars later, I sat down in front of the TV, and started watching an investigative journalism piece about some huckster televangelist, and* recognized the name right away.* It was Peter Popoff.
The investigator was an experienced magician, and he simply took a radio scanner into one of Popoff’s healing rallies and turned it on.** Right away he zeroed in on a frequency that wasn’t there the night before and heard a woman feeding Popoff instructions with names, ailments, and personal descriptions.* With the camera rolling, he walked into the control booth where Peter Popoff’s surprised wife was reading off the cards that people filled out right before taking their seats, into a microphone–listing their names, aliments, and seat number into a small hidden earbud in her husband’s ear.* I don’t think I picked my jaw up off the ground until the next day.*
A few years after that I found myself in an evangelical church where a woman was praying–not for great things, but just a new set of teeth because the ones she had were in pretty bad shape.* One of the evangelists there asked her if she wouldn’t mind opening her mouth to show the rest of us what she was taking about.* She opened her mouth but didn’t show us much since most of her teeth were missing.* But this evangelist prayed for her as we looked on, and while I watched her mouth from no further than three inches away, I saw a molar grow into the back right, top-side of her mouth.* My jaw hit the ground again.
There are lots of evangelists that make great claims about the miracles of God, about how their lives have changed, and about how yours will too.* Some of theme are real, a lot of them are fake (and let’s face it, there’s real money out there to be had from gullible people).* But for the real miracles there, for the good Christian pastors that really tend their flocks to the best of their knowledge and ability–without the Magisterium, without Tradition, and without the Church and any real authority, these miracles are the only things they have to prove the Bible is true, and that God is real.* So I don’t begrudge them God’s favors.*
But I also don’t envy them either.
Because in the Church, we have all these things and so much more.* We have the Eucharist–which might seem like not so spectacular a miracle at first blush, but is the greatest miracle of all.* And I think that’s how people reacted to Jesus when He walked the earth.* A sign of contradiction, just a simple man, but God incarnate.
