The pastor fell for want of a nail

Just yesterday I commented on how easy it is to begin with a small, maybe petty, sin that if ignored may lead to Satan winning a major battle. Little did I think that I would so quickly read an example of that. The quote below comes from a news story.

In the wake of the dramatic Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound earlier this month, it was perhaps to be expected that some expansive soul would step forward to claim the prestige of a fabricated tour as a SEAL for himself. … This time the exposed fabricator was a preacher–though people who monitor this brand of public lie note that members of the clergy are often tempted into such misrepresentations.

Did you catch that last sentence? Clergy are considered to be particularly prone to the public lie! I would be offended, were it not that I have felt the same temptation myself more than once. It is the art of the embroidered story in order to make a point. No, I am not defending it, but it is all too easy to cross the line from evocative rhetoric to evocative fiction.

… [Name withheld by OrthoCuban] told his church for five years that he was a former SEAL, and even once wore the elite program’s gold Trident medal around town. He elaborated on that tale when his local paper contacted him last week as it was reporting a story about the rigors of SEAL training in the wake of the SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. …

… [Name withheld] fessed up to his whopper, and admitted he bought the Trident medal at a military surplus store. “I never was in a class, I never served as an actual SEAL. It was my dream. … I don’t even know if I would have met the qualifications. I never knew what the qualifications were,” he told the Patriot-News. [Name withheld] did serve in the Navy from 1970-74, but did not fight in Vietnam.

… In 2005, President George W. Bush signed the Stolen Valor Act into law–legislation that made it a federal crime to claim false military honors. A recent federal appellate court ruling determined that the law’s provisions were an unconstitutional abridgment of free speech. A version of the same legislation is now before Congress, with language designed to avoid the free-speech quandaries raised by the 2005 law.

So, what went wrong here? Probably something very small at the beginning. The pastor was probably preaching a sermon. He had been in the Navy, which meant that he had probably met some Seals. He probably heard a story, and somehow, in the midst of the sermon, what came out of his mouth was that the story was his rather than the Seal’s. It makes the story more dramatic if it is told in the first person. All that he would have had to do would have been to give an introduction that made clear that he was repeating someone else’s story, just as he had heard it. I doubt that he meant to lie, but somehow his tongue said the wrong thing.

This is all guesswork on my part. But, my personal experience is that in the midst of a sermon is the time when a pastor is most tempted to make something sound more dramatic. And, Satan is always there to whisper to me about how much more esteem I would have in the congregation if only they thought that my missionary service was more heroic than it actually was. Satan’s temptation to me is always to “enhance” my missionary tales, just like veterans and fishermen tend to do.

What is a magnificent tale of God’s grace can all too easily become a tall tale. At that point, the process begins. The “tall tale” can rapidly be expanded until the pastor’s life is all tied up in the lie, a lie which he himself somehow begins to beleive, until the day that the kingdom falls, and a congregation is heavily damaged, and the pastor realizes that tying a millstone around his neck and jumping into the sea a few years previously would have been a better ending than the ending to which he has come. That is the process that we see in the news story. I cannot imagine getting to the point that you self-justify buying an honored award in order to keep the lie going. But, I can certainly imagine Satan whispering in the pastor’s ear about the harm that would result if the congregation were to find out that it was all a lie. Well, that is, until the lie had grown big enough that it was time for the pastor to fall with a resounding thud. And Satan’s plan, aided by our own inner sin, came to fruition.