My House Shall be a House of Prayer

By Gene Ogorodov

As much as it may surprise many of our readers, I have friends who live in the US South. This morning one of them shared a news flash about a Southern Baptist Church that resides in her town. This church has been constructing a gaudy monstrosity to house a new gymnasium for the past several months. The inclement weather that has characterized this January and February in the South has forced the contractors to get behind schedule. In response to the delay the Baptist Church has been paying the workmen to work overtime during the evenings and weekends. Saturday and Sunday have now become part of the workweek.

At first glance this might not seem particularly strange in the modern United States to ask people to work on weekends. I myself have worked on weekends and I cannot think of a single person who has not avoided the inconvenience of working on Sunday and Saturday at some point during their working life. However, this is a Christian Church that has required contractors to work on their Sabbath.

Although it is common, and always has been, for a church to pay clergy and musicians to preform specific functions on Sunday to facilitate worship services, the buzz of a saw and the incessant beep of fork lifts cannot be described as helping anyone worship. It may be a common practice to demand secular work from people on Sunday, but it is one that is decidedly at variance with Christian tradition. Sacred is acceptable; secular is not.

Exodus is quite unambiguous about who shall work on the Sabbath and who shall not. Although many people interpret it as "I shall not work, but the hired help most certainly will" that is not quite a valid interpretation.  Exodus 20:8-11 actually says,"Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave [also translatable as "servant"], your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it." (NRSV)

In other words, no one shall work on the Sabbath. Christ gave an example of allowing work for mercy and not just ceremony, but I hardly think that forcing people to work day in and day out without a break to meet an outrageously short deadline is hardly merciful. A Church demanding this kind of work on Sunday is a flagrant example of hypocrisy.

I will not pretend that it is uncommon for a Southern Baptist Church to continue unnecessary construction projects on Sunday. This Southern Baptist Church is behaving like overwhelming majority of Southern Baptist Churches, but it is still an expression of hypocrisy. If an institution espouses a world view the least, it can do is try to live in accordance with the tenets of their world view. The fact that as a denomination the Southern Baptist Church does not simply shows a systemic lack of belief in their world view.

When a religious institution spends more time demanding the acceptance of unbelievable delusions like a Six Day Creation and Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch rather than practicing the ceremonies and ethics of the religion that is a clear sign that no one honestly believes. Their actions prove that to them their God is a false god.

I do not wish to bash Christianity. I think that the good honest practice of Christianity has a lot to give the world. This kind of Christianity isn't good Christianity. The Southern Baptists and their Evangelical and Fundamentalist brethren pretend to be the only representatives of the true Christian Faith. That is very far from the truth.