Evil Tidings From Miami

I got some sad news tonight. A pastor from a church I used to belonged to has just died. I hadn’t known he was ill.

To avoid writing critically of a freshly deceased person by name, I will call him Ned Ryerson.

I’m not going to pretend to be broken up about his death. I didn’t know him well. He knew who I was. He once got a church volunteer leader to ask me to perform a service for a Christian band which was truly degrading. I spent several hours driving in murderous traffic to save them the small cost of an airport limo to haul their luggage. That’s about the extent of our relationship. I’m sorry to hear he’s gone, but I will sleep tonight.

He died from cancer. In February, he was preparing to have some dental work done. He ground his teeth at night, so his teeth were in bad shape. He wanted total sedation dentistry. That meant he had to have a physical to make sure he was strong enough to be sedated safely. During the physical, they x-rayed his chest and found a big tumor in his right lung. Either at this time or later, they also discovered a large number of brain tumors.

Ned was the head pastor’s brother-in-law. He married the pastor’s wife’s sister. That made him a pastor, like the wife and the sister. In that church, virtually everyone who was related to a pastor was also a pastor or at least a paid employee. I have probably joked that their dogs were pastors. Qualifications weren’t an issue; genes were all you needed.

What did Ned do for a ministry? Real estate. He sold real estate for profit. That may not sound like much of a ministry, and that’s because it isn’t. The church was a monument to Mammon, and they talked about money and success all the time from the pulpit. They were huge promoters of “marketplace” Christianity. The idea is that you use your business to meet people and witness to them, but in reality, it works the other way around. You use your ministry as a way to make business contracts and increase profits.

What else did Pastor Ned do? Nothing I’m aware of. I saw him speak at a men’s conference once, and he led a prayer cell, but by preacher standards, that’s nothing.

As far as I know, Ned was a genial, warm-hearted guy, but no one would ever mistake him for Smith Wigglesworth. He didn’t do anything for the church’s actual ministries. He just showed up, occasionally said something or sang, and went home and sold real estate.

Ned had a Facebook page. I don’t mean his personal page. He had more than one additional page. He used one of his pages as his blog. He used it to tell people wise things about God, allegedly. I saw the page for the first time today. It’s not a great source of wisdom, even though Ned used the word “wisdom” to describe his content.

Ned believed he had a lot to say, but he was just a typical lukewarm, inattentive Christian who liked the limelight. If you read Ned’s page, you won’t come away wondering how to thank him for changing your life. It’s full of platitudes of the sort you might find inscribed on the sides of scented candles. That’s normal for teachers who don’t hear from the Holy Spirit.

Ned used his page to write about his disease. He suffered terribly. They gave him chemotherapy. They pulled a bunch of his teeth and gave him implants, without the sedation he preferred. He started having seizures and paralysis. He got a severe infection.

I’ll tell you something good about Ned. If he portrayed himself honestly on Facebook, he took it like a man. He didn’t complain. He didn’t give up his religion. He was cheerful, brave, and grateful. When things got bad, he didn’t log into Facebook and cry about his woes. He made some effort to stand in faith, and when that didn’t work, he accepted his situation without fear and looked forward to leaving his suffering body behind so he could be with God.

This is how people should face death. Some cancer patients behave disgracefully.

Here is what bugs me about Ned’s story: he was a pastor at a church that teaches that God heals people, and he didn’t know how to get healed.

When I was at his church, God showed me that sin and iniquity mattered. Christianity wasn’t all about being forgiven, feeling great all the time, and being rich. Obligations went along with it. We’re supposed to confess our sins and iniquities to God and get rid of them. We’re supposed to become sanctified. Failing to do these things leads to problems, and cancer is such a problem.

My mother died from cancer. She didn’t get cancer because bad things happen to good people. She got it because she was a drug addict. Using drugs is a sin. A drug habit is an iniquity. Nicotine is an extremely addictive drug which came to us from Indians who used it while worshiping demons.

My mother smoked heavily for 50 years, starting when she was a kid. I’m not bashing my own mother. I’m just telling you why she got cancer. She sinned every day, and there was a cost. Sometimes the consequences of sin are very obvious. Cirrhosis, syphilis, AIDS, type 2 diabetes, morbid obesity…we know what usually causes these things. It’s not random bad luck. It’s sin.

My mother wanted to quit smoking, but she didn’t know how to get God’s help. There was no one to teach her. Iniquities start out voluntarily, and then you lose your free will and become enslaved by resident demons. She was trapped. Churches couldn’t do anything for her. They should have taught her to confess and repent. That would have been a start. But they didn’t know anything, so she died without help.

If she could have gone to church in 2018, she still wouldn’t have found help. Churches have made no progress at all. Christianity is one of the few pursuits in which people become less knowledgeable and capable with time. Imagine what life would be like if medicine worked that way. Next year, we might forget about antibiotics and go back to injecting people with arsenic.

God showed me that it was important to get rid of iniquity, but no one at the church wanted to hear about it. They got angry at me. I didn’t beat a drum and tell everyone they were going to hell. I was polite. I was nice to people. It wasn’t my attitude that made them angry. It was the message itself. They treated me as though I were a prophet, and by that, I mean they got very angry with me and treated me with great disrespect because I told the truth.

It’s easy to make proud people angry. They overreact, and they take every suggestion as an attack. They see each correction as an insult offered by an inferior who shouldn’t have the audacity to speak.

A few people at the church listened to me. Generally, they did not. The pastors went beyond not listening. They fought me. They actually preached against things I said. I may have been partially responsible for some of the very few original sermons they wrote.

I found out about Ned’s death while talking to a friend tonight on the phone. He called for a prayer session. He prayed for me. He said things like, “I speak defeat to Steve’s pride.” I didn’t get angry. I was thrilled to have someone who was willing to do that. Man. You have to grow up and learn to be enthusiastic about taking your medicine eventually.

After we prayed, he told me about Ned, and I looked Ned up. While I was talking to my friend, I expressed my discouragement with the church and the people who run it. Let’s say the ruling family is named von Trapp. I said, “I’ve never seen a von Trapp get a healing.”

That had never occurred to me before. My friend was surprised, too.

The head pastor has, if memory serves, two new knees. He went bald, and when he had surgery, the incision from the flap refused to heal. He grew weird calcified things in his chest. He has a blood disease. He had to have horrible procedures for kidney stones (mine were healed without medical help at his church). He’s diabetic. I don’t know what holds him up.

Question: how many things have to go wrong before you ask yourself why the things you preach aren’t helping you? If there is one person at the church who should be able to get a healing, it’s the pastor. Every single time a preacher who was supposedly a healer showed up, the pastors received their best efforts, and they also got to spend time with healing preachers behind the scenes.

I get healings. Lots of people get healings. Many people have been healed of cancer. Christianity works for many people. We all know that, so why aren’t the people who run this church making any effort to find out why it doesn’t work for them?

They’re not questioning themselves, 8 months after Ned’s diagnosis. What will it take to snap them out of their coma?

They must not believe God will help them. That has to be the answer. Either that, or they’re convinced they’re doing everything right. But if they’re doing everything right, why can’t they receive healings? I don’t think they ask themselves. The inconsistency is just part of the hypocritical life they accept.

In some ways, Ned’s writings concerning his illness were inspiring, but in other ways, they were frustrating to read. He kept writing as though he had superior knowledge of Jesus. His illness was “a journey.” It gave him an opportunity to pass on all the things it taught him. Nonsense! If you’re dying of cancer, something is wrong with your relationship with God. You should be asking questions and admitting ignorance.

People commented on his posts. You would think he was preaching the Sermon on the Mount to read their responses. They seemed to be in awe of him. In awe of a man who was in the process of losing a battle with a bunch of filthy, defeated demons that should have been terrified to be near him.

Respect his courage? Yes. Honor his refusal to complain? Absolutely! But praise him as a teacher? No. That’s wrong.

If all you can do while you die is share warmth and make people feel good, I suppose you should go ahead, but that’s not Christian teaching. When things go terribly wrong, you should say, “I’m missing something; someone tell me what it is. Help me find out what’s wrong. If I don’t make it, keep looking at my life and trying to learn from my mistakes.”

I don’t think he ever expected to be healed. He was so used to carnal preachers who said things they didn’t believe, he probably thought there was no hope. Yet somehow he continued to play the game.

When my mother died, it was not a victory. It was a humiliating defeat for all of us. It was a glaring indictment of me, personally.

I was away from God when she got diagnosed, and I was so weak, if I had prayed for the sun to come up in the morning, it would probably have refused. I was full of lust and pride. I was ignorant because I had defied God’s instruction to pray in tongues every day. I sinned a lot because, like the people at Ned’s church, I thought salvation was a license to sin. “I shouldn’t do this, but I’ll pray for forgiveness right afterward.”

I helped kill my own mother. Who knows what I could have done for her, had I been praying consistently? The night she died, I was praying, and I felt sure she could not die. Then it happened anyway. I had some faith, but I didn’t know unconfessed sin and lack of repentance block prayer. For a long time after she died, I wondered how it happened. Now, too late, I know. Faith isn’t all it takes.

If I had been in good spiritual shape, I could have helped her. You could say she perished for my lack of knowledge.

Is it wrong to write something negative after someone dies? If so, then coroners and pathologists all over the world are sinning right now. When something bad happens, an intelligent person of integrity sifts the wreckage and looks for a reason, so he can prevent it from happening again. How can we help the next Ned if we pretend this one did everything right and still died?

It’s too bad people can’t return from heaven and hell to rebut the nonsense people say at their funerals. Or is it?

“No, I don’t smile down on you. I look up from the flames, see nothing but the ceiling of hell, and wish I were still here.” “No, I didn’t come back in a new body. I’m gone forever, and demons eviscerate me several times a day.” “No, your mom and I are not together in heaven waiting for you; your mom was an agnostic, and she didn’t make it.” “No, God my death wasn’t a victory. My death was not in God’s plans, and we did the wrong things.”

At funerals, we pretend everyone goes to heaven. Shows how we prefer comforting fantasy to liberating reality. I know people who are in hell right now, unless God took extraordinary steps to get them to repent as they were dying.

My high school classmate Ken shot himself in the head with a Desert Eagle at 25 after spending the day with me. He was a Jewish atheist. Another classmate who was Jewish fell into a crevasse in the Himalayas. Another died while scuba diving drunk. My aunt died, and she was an atheist who attended Mormon services purely for the social connection.

At my aunt’s funeral, we heard very funny stories about her.

Abraham was right when he spoke to the rich man. Most people wouldn’t believe the dead if they came back to help us.

People say God doesn’t always want to heal us, and that’s why we stay ill. How do they know? We don’t do what we’re supposed to. How can our experience be a valid test of Christianity if we don’t do what Christianity tells us to do?

If you Google a cake recipe, and it says to use eggs and sugar, and you use tofu and stevia, and it tastes like garbage, do you conclude the cook who wrote the recipe wanted the cake to taste like garbage?

I believe God wanted Ned to get well. Jesus healed people right and left. The apostles healed people right and left. I don’t think Jesus would have walked by Ned and told him his cancer was God’s will.

Very sad story. Whatever his shortcomings as a pastor may have been, Ned was well-liked for the most part, and his passing will upset many people. It will be even sadder when the next von Trapp dies unnecessarily.