The Gideons were on campus today. They always come near the start of the fall semester. There were a half-dozen white-haired white men posted along my route to campus, and I'm sure they were just part of the detachment. They hand out little Bibles, KJV New Testaments with Psalms and Proverbs. Most students don't make eye contact with them. Some take a Bible and then drop it on the ground a little bit later. A Buildings & Grounds truck pulled up to one of the Gideons as I was walking past, and handed him a stack of 8 or 10 that he had picked up on his rounds.
I always say something friendly -- it seems like a pretty thankless task. This morning a woman was at the spot closest to my building. I said, "I don't think I've ever seen a lady Gideon!" She explained that she's part of their sister organization, the Gideons Auxiliary, and it had been decided that the ladies could join the men today. "They think some people would rather talk to a woman," she said.
The Gideons always make me a little thoughtful. They are handing out KJV New Testaments to students who don't read a lot of stuff written in English in the last century, let alone texts from the Jacobean era. I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to transform hearts, but I don't know what an average 21st-century college student is going to do with a passage like this:
For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year.
Maybe they drop the book on the ground, maybe.
This morning I was thinking that giving people Bibles and nothing more is the equivalent of handing out swords with no swordsmanship lessons. How can you know unless you're taught? (It's just like teleporting St. Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.) Maybe, I thought to myself, the idea of handing out weapons on a college campus is not a great metaphor. Maybe I should turn that sword image into a plowshare image.
I don't think many people know what to do with a plowshare these days either.
Recent Comments