The God Test
I’m still not quite convinced Paul is alive.
I’ve been a Beatles fan since I was a kid. I discovered my mom’s albums quite by accident while leafing through my parents’ collection when I was about nine years old. She had both the red and blue albums and I must have listened to each of them a hundred times. It helped that some of my closest friends were also Beatlemaniacs. As we got older, we went to Beatles conventions, saw a Beatles cover band, and even collected some of the Apple label Beatles albums. Then one day, I read about this strange conspiracy theory that Paul was dead. According to the theory, he had been replaced with a guy named “Billy Shears,” the name mentioned in the song “With A Little Help From My Friends.” In fact, all of the clues about Paul’s death came straight from Beatles songs, lyrics, and album covers, most specifically Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There were a lot of clues in that one. You could almost hear John whispering in a creepy voice “I buried Paul.” And when you played the song “Revolution 9” backwards, John could be heard saying, “Turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man.” It was FASCINATING! Paul McCartney was REALLY dead!
But of course, he isn’t.
He’s still alive and well, appearing on television and making new music. His Carpool Karaoke with James Corden was fantastic! And he even released another solo album, his 18th, in 2020 – McCartney III – which made it to number one on the Billboard top rock albums charts and where he played all of the instruments. If the guy we think is Paul McCartney isn’t really Paul McCartney, he’s done one heck of a job channeling his talent. After all, this is the guy who wrote “Hey Jude.” So how in the world were so many people convinced it was all a cover up? Why would they believe there was this massive conspiracy that one of the most popular artists the world has ever known would be dead and no one would know about it. And why would the group then leave clues through cryptic messages left on album covers and backward tracking? I don’t know. But it’s not the first time the public has fallen victim to a false conspiracy theory. No matter how outlandish, people still believe in them. Like the belief that the Apollo moon landings were staged. Did you know 1 in 8 Americans still believe they were faked?[1] Despite all of the physical evidence and testimony contrary to it, that’s 12.5% of Americans believe it was faked. Of course, those same people probably believe that Walt Disney is frozen beneath Disneyland in an experimental cryogenic chamber.[2] I still hear that one to this day. Then there’s the very sad conspiracy theory advocating that the Sandy Hook massacre was all a hoax. I can’t imagine how devastating that must be for the families to first suffer the death of their child and then to have people send them hate mail accusing them of perpetuating the hoax. What kind of hate do you have to have in your heart to do that to someone? By the way, that’s only a few of the many outlandish conspiracy theories out there.
And while these are extreme, many of us hold onto false beliefs, too.
They don’t all have to be as earth-shattering as the ones we just mentioned. Sometimes they are things we believe about people we think we know. Sometimes we simply remember events differently and it colors how we interact with others. Sometimes we get it wrong in the beginning and we never get corrected and so we carry around this belief for a long time. I’ll give you an example that isn’t contentious. I’ve always loved the song “Careless Whisper” by Wham! It’s one of those songs from my high school days that bring back good memories. I don’t know if it’s because I danced with someone to that song or if I imagined dancing with someone to that song (probably the latter), but I’ve sung that song hundreds of times. I knew it like the back of my hand. That is, I thought I did. Just a few days ago, I was watching a musical game show, “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” and I’m singing along to this song and as I watch the lyrics pop up on the screen, I realize I was singing it wrong. It was only a couple of words, but for forty years I’ve sang this song the wrong way! And I would have gone on singing it the wrong way until I died if not for this show. I never even thought to look up the lyrics because I was so sure! Now something like this is silly and minor and who cares if I sang it wrong my whole life? But when it comes to the important stuff that affects how we treat one another or what we think of one another, we need to do a better job of getting it right. So how can we protect ourselves from getting caught up in falsehoods and misinformation? How can we make sure we make informed decisions?
We can take a lesson from the Apostle Paul.
If you think conspiracies are limited to the present day, you need to know they were happening as far back as there were people. Remember when Joseph’s brothers conspired to sell their brother into slavery? Or when Delilah betrayed Samson so the Philistines could enslave him and use them for their entertainment? Or the most famous conspiracy in the Bible, when Judas betrayed Jesus for a mere 30 pieces of silver. But these were ACTUAL conspiracies. What we need to guard against is believing in false ones. Paul knew that people were susceptible to being fooled by those who had agendas of their own. He knew we needed to be prepared to weed out truth from fiction as we hear in this passage.
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: 2 Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. 3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 5 But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry. – 2 Timothy 4:1-5
It sounds like Paul was writing to us.
Today. Here and now. His words could not be truer. “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” We believe what we want to believe. And now we have news feeds and social media to give us exactly what we want to hear. Thanks to The Algorithm. Sounds like an awesome name for a super villain. THE ALGORITHM! But we can’t just blame these tech companies for the divides we see in society today. It only feeds us what we want to see already. It’s up to us to seek out the truth for ourselves.
John Wesley used a method that today we call the Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
He believed if we turned to Scripture and used our powers of reasoning, took into account our experiences, and learned from our traditions, then we could better understand the truth of what God is asking from us. We call this the Wesleyan Quadrilateral because it emphasizes a four-fold understanding of God’s will. My Methodism professor in seminary thought it might be better imagined as a three-footed stool where Scripture is the seat upon which everything rests, but it is informed by our reason, our experience, and our tradition. For us and for Wesley, Scripture was always the basis of our understanding of God’s will, but as you can imagine (much like our Constitution), things we encounter today can’t always be found in the Bible. We have to discern from our knowledge of God what God wants for us in those situations we find ourselves that aren’t always covered. Like back then they didn’t have guns, but they had weapons and Jesus told his disciples to put theirs away “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52).” John didn’t have a Facebook account, but he knew you couldn’t just believe everything you heard because he wrote in one of his letters, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” John’s advice is solid. Test it out in the world. Don’t just rely on your gut or your instinct to see if it’s true because we know those can be highly unreliable. Instead test your theory and see if it matches up to reality. Just on the face of it, what’s more plausible – that California wildfires are caused by many years of drought and increasing temperatures that make our forests like kindling or that there are seriously Jewish space lasers firing at the planet and starting them? That was an actual conspiracy floated out there by Majorie Taylor Greene in Congress. Jewish space lasers. Not everything will be that obviously false. Most of the time there will be a grain of truth or more. Most of the time we will have only received half or less of the available information. It’s up to us to be diligent and refuse to fall victim to those who would divide us.
As Children of God and followers of Christ, we are rooted in Scripture.
But our understanding of Scripture has changed over the centuries as we have better understood what God expects from us. No longer are we so narrow-minded as to think that women cannot be teachers of God’s Word. No longer are we so blinded by racial disparity to think that a person is less based on the color of their skin. No longer do we think God brings forth the storms to punish the LGBTQ community. Because we have grown beyond that. Or at least most of us have. Sadly, there are still, even now, people who cling to these outdated and wrong ways of thinking. That is why we have to heed the words of Paul (not the dead one, the other dead one) to be wary of those who will not listen to sound doctrine. That is why we need to take an approach like John Wesley and examine our beliefs to discern God’s will for our lives. Because as human beings, we are prone to fall off the wagon from time to time. We have to get up, learn from our mistakes, and do better every time we rise again.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2024/07/07/moon-landing-hoax-conspiracy-theory-apollo/
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-a-strange-rumor-of-walt-disneys-death-became-legend
Craig's Corner 