“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshal, Wednesday, part 1

Posted by Caleb Coy on

“My Week at the FUll Armor Lectures”
by Jeremy Marshal
Wednesday, part 1

from Wednesday:
“Brother Sharp was acting like a game show host announcing that I’d won the grand prize. “Besides the vacation, Calvin, the Cortez church is going to be donating these books to you, for your personal library.” He handed me the list to look over. Debates I’ve Won; More Debates I’ve Won; and Debates I’ve Attended and Really Enjoyed, all by Dr. Remus Philbert. A Critique of Everything Written By Strudel Harrison Since 1985 (Including Church Bulletin Articles), by Mance Tatum. Whores of Babylon: Why All the Liberals Want to Score, by Flavil Waddey. A Preacher Boy’s Guide to Pulpit Humor and Potluck Etiquette, by Herbert and Edwina Sharp. “What do you think, Calvin?” he asked. You might have thought he was telling me I just won a new BMW the way he was going on.”

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall Day 3 (pt. 2)

Posted by Caleb Coy on

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures”
by Jeremy Marshall
Day 3 (pt. 2)

From day 3.2:
“After my talk with Beauregard Jones Tuesday morning, I decided to skip the pre-lunch lectures and go to the Memphis Zoo. It dawned on me that the Full Armor Lectureship—indeed, our entire fellowship—was its own menagerie, a stationary Noah’s ark whose inhabitants refused to leave, all blaming one another for the stench in there. We are not exotic breeds from faraway lands in the First United Primitive Christian Church, however. We are more like stubborn relics of the recent past, looking at the world through nauseatingly garish Technicolor lenses. We live on in the rubble of Modernism, proudly making no concessions to the rest of the world as it evolves without us, flinging our filth at each other. I felt quite at one that day with the animals in the zoo, for it came to me that I, too, had been bred in captivity.”

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall Day 3 (pt. 1)

Posted by Caleb Coy on

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall
Day 3 (pt. 1)

from Day 3.1:
Brother Jones waved a dismissive hand. “My views on Hell were well known amongst those people years ago, Calvin,” he said. “Up until a few months back, they just thought of it as one of those pet anomalies every preacher is allowed to have. Let me give you a few examples: Alasdair Cornwall, one of the eighteenth-century visionaries whose ‘back to the Bible,’ non-denominational preaching spawned our little movement, was an Arian, and I’m not even sure if he knew who Arius was. The pioneer revivalist ‘Onion’ Jim Throckmorton taught that it was a sin to get sick. O. D. Gypsum, the much-venerated Greek professor at Steed-Ramrick University from 1923 until 1965, was a staunch pacifist. Yet all these men are quoted freely from Brotherhood pulpits. Then, there’s a slew of outright bigots, such as Lloyd Q. Sargent, Jephthah Wigglesworth, and Zebulon Butcher, who put down their black brethren in their journals and belittled any white congregation that allowed a black evangelist to come preach there. But they are still seen as heroes for their strident defenses of orthodoxy, despite such blatant manifestations of a sinful attitude. It wasn’t an odd perspective on Hell that caused them to put the ban on me, Calvin. I’m in trouble for a much graver display of heterodoxy than annihilationism. And now that I’ve offended them in a great matter, they are calling me to task for every small matter, as well.”

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall Day 2 (pt. 5)

Posted by Caleb Coy on

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall
Day 2 (pt. 5)

from Day 3.5:

“Excuse me,” I said. More applause, more whistling, more stomping feet. So I spat the words out like a school teacher who has returned from a restroom visit to find her classroom baptized in chaos: “EXCUSE ME!” The applause abruptly choked, except for Skeeter McDoogan, whose clapping sort of sputtered out like a dieseling engine. Then I calmly added, “Excuse me, but I do have some questions.”

“Well let’s hear them, then,” replied Brother Snipes, smugly.

“First, I keep hearing Mack Baldato and Strudel Harrison being chastised for wearing sweaters. What’s wrong with wearing sweaters? Maybe they just like wearing them. I don’t see how that’s a sign of apostasy.”
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“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall Day 2 (pt. 4)

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“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall
Day 2 (pt. 4)

from part 4:
“Just look at the logo on the dust jacket. This book was published by the once-sound, now apostate Harlan Publishing House. Let me give you a brief list of titles, so you can see what other heretics they are harboring. They’ve put out My Mama Sang Tenor, Too by the weepy story-teller Buddy Silver. They published the downright odd volume,Jesus and the Art of Volkswagen Repair by the so-called “Hippie Preacher,” Archie Klein. And they also released an awful book called Lessons I’ve Learned About Christian Living From Playing Texas Hold ‘Em, by Francis Spicoli. That Harlan Publishing released this book from Brother Jones is very telling–it means that none of our faithful publishing companies like Banner of Love or Full Armor Press will touch it with a thirty-foot pole!”

 

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall Day 2 (pt. 3)

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“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall
Day 2 part 3:

“Good Brother Mack was shaving the other Sunday morning, and he cut himself several times. I mean he tore his face smooth up! And when he came downstairs for breakfast with several hanks of toilet tissue on his face, his wife asked him how come he’d cut his face all up. He told her he’d been distracted–thinking about his sermon more than he was about shaving. So his wife told him he might ought to think about shaving his sermons!”

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall Day 2 (pt.2)

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“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall
 Day 2 part 2:

“After a wholesome and patently uninteresting luch at a nearby Picadilly cafeteria, I arrived back at the Doogood Ave. building about half an hour before Brother Mack Snipes’ lecture, “Hell is ETERNAL,” was slated to begin. I checked the lectureship schedule, and saw that the session was to be held in room 17 of the children’s wing. It turned out to be a classroom for five-and-six-year-olds.”

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall continues with Day 2 (pt.1)

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The week continues with day two, in which we scrutinize hymns.

“My Week at the Full Armor Lectures: Day 2”  Part 1
by Jeremy Marshal

From Day 2 part 1:
I told him I wasn’t rebuking anyone. “Besides,” I said, “wouldn’t he have to be here at the table with us to qualify it as me rebuking him? I just want to know why we can’t sing ‘Just as I Am.’”

“I’ll tell you why we can’t sing that song,” croaked the man with the hearing aid who’d been shushed for “Amen”-ing the evening before. “It encourages moral laxity. You start singing a song like that and people get too comfortable with being sinners. They’ll say, ‘If it’s all the same, I’ll just go on sinning, since Jesus will take me just as I am.’”

“My week at the Full Armor Lectures” by Jeremy Marshall

Posted by Caleb Coy on

Over the next week (or two) I will be reblogging a series of installments by my friend and fellow blogger, Jeremy Marshall.  As he himself will tell you, these installments are completely fictional.  I mean, no church would ever dare to limit God’s grace to the event on the cross, let alone mark hymns as “dangerous” that focused on God’s grace.

My week at the Full Armor Lectures: “Day One”.  by Jeremy Marshall
an excerpt:
Brother Olley continued this way: “See, God’s only just so gracious. You know John 3:16, that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have e-ternal life!” Brother Olley’s delivery of that verse was rapid-fire; he can quote Scripture with the speed and force of a machine gun. “Now that’s all the grace a man or woman could ever need, folks!” He concluded, “And there’ll be no repeat performance of that, Hebrews 9:25-28. Essentially, the message of the Gospel is that we’ve gotten all the grace we’re going to get, so stop messing up! Or what? Should we continue in sin, so that grace may abound, Romans 6:1? Certainly not, because there’s no more grace to be gotten!”