Social Action & Social Justice

Since Pastor Patty was so worried this morning at worship about how she looked, she wore two pulpit gowns and three stoles to be sure she was adequately covered. This prompted Claire Nathan to tell her husband, Randall, to take Patty's husband and children to Hot Dog Heaven for lunch while she took Patty to Buddy Mutts to cheer her up. She couldn't take the whole bunch because each diner must be accompanied by a dog at Buddy Mutts, and Claire had access only to Franklin and Eleanor, Jake and Jenny Newland's potbellied pigs. The brothers Jim, who run Buddy Mutts, think that Franklin and Eleanor are deformed poodles.

Woodrow "Wooly" Mather, Chief Apostle of The Harvest Time Praise Center and Pumpkin Stand, who claims to be a direct descendant of Cotton Mather, famous as a prosecutor in the Salem Witch Trials, was eating at Buddy Mutts, with his pit bull, Bubba. In Bubba's case, Muddy Butts was the more appropriate name for the eatery. Also Bubba was quite sure that Franklin and Eleanor were not fellow canines, and put up quite a fuss about it, but that's a different story.

"I assume nobody was at your church this morning," Apostle Wooly said to Pastor Patty, "since The Methodist is one of those social justice churches, and Glen Beck told everybody to leave any church that used phrases like 'social justice' or 'economic justice,' because those are Nazi and Commie churches."

"We had a remnant," said Pastor Patty. Attendance was actually better than usual, but she likes being part of a remnant.

"They must not have gotten the word," said Apostle Wooly. "Next Sunday you'll be empty, and Forsythia Lutheran and St. John the Baptist Catholic, too. They'll all be out at our place."

"Probably so," said Pastor Patty, "but I don't see how we could be both Nazis and Communists, since their philosophies are completely opposed to each other, and Hitler sent Communists to the death camps just like Jews."

"Ah, yes, that myth of the Holocaust," said Apostle Wooly, "and that myth that Nazis and Commies are different. They're both enemies of the greatest military nation the world has ever known, and that is what makes them the same, they both hate the freedom we so graciously insist that they embrace, and why they must be... well, they must be tea partied."

"The well have no need of a physician," said Pastor Patty.

"You won't get anywhere quoting Mau to me," said the Apostle.

"But yours is a social action church, Apostle Wooly," Claire Nathan said sweetly.

"Yes, indeed, social and economic ACTION, but not JUSTICE. That's the difference, and it is what makes Brother Beck the true prophet of our times, even more so than Brother Rush. He said to leave the social JUSTICE churches, not the social ACTION churches. He knows that it's incumbent upon all true Christians to take ACTION against homosexuals and taxes and gun control and abortion and Moslems and school textbooks and women preachers and evolution and health care reform and presidents without birth certificates and immigrants and science. We must have ACTION, but justice? Never! I expect to see you at our church next Sunday, too, or are you going to admit that you are not true Christians?"

"Oh, we'll be there," said Claire Nathan, very sweetly.

When she got home, she said to her husband, Randall: "I'm going to need a bunch of cardboard, and markers, and those sticks you use to hold up signs. I'm going to a different church next Sunday."