Last night I read the third book of the prophets found in the Protestant Old Testament – Lamentations. In the fat little Bible dictionary I’ve been reading along with the scriptures I learned that the book was originally called the “Lamentations of Jeremiah.”
Jeremiah’s book is the second book of the prophets and like other prophecies contained in such books it has lots of “predictions” that scholars explain were easy to predict because the events had already taken place. As I keep plowing through the Bible the full title will help me remember Lamentation’s placement on the list of Bible books.
Even before the Moral Majority decided that the Republican Party was the Party of God I’d put reading the Bible on my very short bucket list. I felt that since I was treated as a moral monster I ought to read the scriptures that the Republican partisans based their denunciations of me on.
Like earlier American religious revivals the current one is petering out done in by its own excesses, hypocrisies and venalities but not before it helped elect President Pussy Grabber.
A few weeks back I calculated I’ll come close to finishing the Bible after my January trek to the Holy Land. It will require stepping up to three from my current average of two pages a day. I have 139 pages of OT from Ezekial to Malachi to read and 67 pages from Galatians to the beginning of the end – Revelations. (I read that final book ahead of the rapture predicted for the year 2000) My hero, Abe Lincoln, also shared a few laughs at the expense of the end of timers in his lifetime. They were the Millerites and they were an improvement on the current rapture crown. The Millerites kept their religion out of politics.
Speaking of that, I made an interesting personal discovery in my recent trip to Topeka, Kansas. This:
I believe this is the building where my Mother took me to Nursery School for a couple years while she worked in downtown Topeka. Apparently this building was the site (or at least one of them) of the Evangelical movement. If so, it was ahead of the Azuza Street movement by five years. Its a little ironic that the modern evangelism that bedeviled my Republicanism began where I attended nursery school. I might even describe it as lamentable.
I sent an email to the church asking them to confirm my memories, limited as they are. I described one of them in an earlier post about a bus trip to the school. I recall that the women who seemed ran the school were all black. I also remember an auditorium in the building which we kids filled up at Christmas time so that Santa Claus could hand out gifts to us.
