9/21/22

Baloney. N. Informal form of bologna. Slang meaning: nonsense.

Did you grow up eating bologna? I did. I have a vivid memory of being on the merry-go-round in the 3rd grade, singing, “My bologna has a first name, it’s O-s-c-a-r. . .” There were bologna sandwiches for lunch and fried bologna and eggs for breakfast and sometimes there was even a bologna salad at the church potluck. Now, don’t get me wrong - my mother was an incredible cook and usually the table was filled with good things, but when you’re a kid there’s nothing better than greasy fried . . . well, anything!

Now, there’s bologna and then there’s just plain baloney. When I was teaching piano, if a student told me they practiced a lot the previous week and it was obvious they didn’t, I told them they were feeding me cheap baloney - sliced thick!

Speaking of that sort of baloney, I have a TikTok account. I never post, but I got it to keep up with the current trends when I had a student choir. It started out being nothing but short videos of silly dances but as time went on I discovered all sorts of TikTok worlds. Right now I’m in Jewish TikTok (comedians and rabbis), History TikTok (World and US), Travel TikTok (which I love, except somehow I ended up with all this Vegas stuff which can go away), Literary TikTok (rare books and writers) and a Music TikTok (how many versions of Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria can there be? Too many). And I’m on Religious TikTok.

Here’s where the baloney comes in.

I don’t know why people post stuff that can be debunked by spending 5 minutes on Google! And this isn’t anything new; I remember about 20 years ago, dad and I watched a sermon from a very popular TV preacher. He spent his entire sermon preaching about Jewish prayer shawls and how Jesus used prayer shawls when he healed (no, I couldn’t remember a single time either - the closest is when the woman with the issue of blood touched the hem or the fringe of Jesus’ garment). We didn’t have Google back then, but it took me less than 5 minutes with a Bible Dictionary to discover he didn’t know what he was talking about. But at the end of the sermon I found out why he was so focused on prayer shawls; he was selling them!

Religious TikTok covers a lot of different subjects. There are a lot of people talking about bad church experiences they had, and I usually trust what they say (I know a lot of church “leaders” who are full of baloney). I’ve run across former-Christians who try to debunk the Bible, and most of that is repeating the same tired, already debunked nonsense about the church suppressing books of the Bible it disagreed with (again, 5 minutes with Google corrects that). I run across that a lot.

There are also legitimate scholars on TikTok as well. Even if I don't always agree with their conclusions, I can still learn from their research.

But a lot of Religious TikTok baloney involves someone enthusiastically spouting on about what the original Greek or Hebrew says. They will take some simple Hebrew or Greek word and create a world of nonsense about it. They’re repeating something they heard their youth leader say or something they read in some pseudo-historical book. They’ll talk about the books of Enoch or the Enuma Elish, or the Dead Sea Scrolls (a lot of which I’ve read, thank you, and never have to read again). They get away with it because most of their followers will never read these ancient texts (if you attempt it, you probably won’t get very far - much of it is like reading through Leviticus over and over and over . . .).

It reminds me of the furor Dan Brown caused when he published his silly thriller, The Da Vinci Code. The book asserted that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci painted her into his “Last Supper” because Da Vinci was in on the plot to protect the physical descendants of Jesus and the Catholic church suppressed the “truth” throughout the centuries. Stupid stuff, but people bought into it as if it were gospel, even though it was one of the most ridiculous mish-mashes of conspiracy theories I’ve ever read. It was readable, it was fun . . . but it was dangerous because people actually believed it.

So, as believers, we have to be vigilant. Paul told the church in his very first letter (I Thessalonians 5:20-22): “Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.”

Test everything. Don’t just eagerly swallow anything someone tells you (even me). I have a heathen friend who tells me I have a fine-tuned baloney detector (only he doesn’t use the word baloney).

Baloney detection is an important skill for believers.

How do we do it? The first and most important way is by reading and studying the Bible on our own. When we are faithful to read and study, we build up our own personal encyclopedia of Biblical knowledge, and when someone spouts some nonsense we’re prepared to counter it with truth.

A second way is to take part in our Bible studies. We’ll be starting a new one next week on Genesis 1-11. These are important foundational scriptures for the rest of the Bible. There’s a ton of baloney written about these passages because people don’t take the text seriously and “wander off the page,” speculating about matters Genesis 1-11 doesn’t deal with. We’ll talk some about the baloney, but mostly we’ll stick with the text - that is, we’ll stick to God’s agenda when he inspired these chapters, and not to the agenda someone else might want to impose on it.

So join us in our quest to be faithful stewards and students of the Word! Join us in a quest to carve away the baloney, and dig down using the spades God has blessed us with to uncover the Truth of His word.

Blessings!
Pastor Terry