In the world of homiletics, at the bottom of the food chain lie the hardened cases who make their living compiling and selling books of canned sermon illustrations. In their pure, non-redacted form, these stories are recognizable from their unvarying introduction (“The story is told … “) and the odds of their being true (roughly the same as the odds that the South will rise again).
Since we are unable to get these people off the streets–the law reading as it does–I suppose the only recourse is to put a few of the hoariest and most unlikely of these stories out of their misery. Anybody caught using them should be the object of church discipline–preferably involving the loss of ordination–and require a restoration process of not less than one year before being allowed to even make the announcements again. Here are the worst offenders, and the truth that lies behind them:
1. The story about the guy who pushed a wheelbarrow across a tightrope strung over Niagara Falls, then challenged one of the people (all of whom said they believed in him) to get in the wheelbarrow for the return trip (commitment). In actual fact, it wasn’t a wheelbarrow; it was a hot air balloon. It wasn’t Niagara, it was Nigeria. But then, maybe real faith is figuring your congregation will believe the story.
2. The old story of the railroad engineer whose son fell into the gearbox and who had to choose between wrecking the train and killing his son. In the first place, it wasn’t a train engineer, it was a postal employee. And his son didn’t fall into a gear box, he fell into the dead-letter bin (that’s where the theme of death–always a big attention-getter–first crept into the story).
3. Then there’s the one about an evangelist who watched a bulldog sneak through the gate to fight his two big bird dogs. He decided to let them fight it out to “teach the bulldog a lesson,” and sure enough, in short order the bulldog was a bloody pulp. That day the evangelist had to leave for several weeks. When he got home, his wife told him that every day that bulldog had come back, fought the bird dogs until the blood flowed like water, until eventually by sheer persistence he cowed them into submission.
This woman–the wife of an evangelist–watched brutal dog fights in which her own dogs were eventually mutilated, destroyed physically and psychologically, not once, but every day for several weeks. What kind of sadistic wacko was this man married to? Did it never occur to her to close the gate? And her husband not only thought it was okay, he repeated the story as a model for spiritual growth. Has anyone reported these people to the SPCA?
4. Then there is the old canard, used to illustrate the doctrine of substitutionary atonement: A judge with a strict reputation whose own guilty son is brought before him for sentencing. After pronouncing him guilty and assessing him the highest fine possible under the law, the judge gets up, takes off his robe, and pays the lad’s fine himself.
This is all true. But the judge also served as the Justice of the Peace, and as such got to keep all fines as a form of judicial gratuities.
I could go on like this for hours. There is the story of the bill marked “paid in full”; of the son who pleads with his father to let his friend into the circus “in my name”; and of the church janitor who finally allows a stranger to play the church organ, only the stranger turns out to be a musical genius, like Julio Iglesias, leading the janitor to muse: “And to think I almost refused to let the master play.”
Oddly enough, some New Testament scholars think this may have been the illustration Paul was using in Acts 20:9 that put Eutychus to sleep and caused him to fall three floors to his death. It just serves to indicate the lengths to which sane people will go to try to get away from these stories.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
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Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
