Genesis redux

A friend from church regularly sends me e-mails that have been forwarded to her and asks me for my comments.

Given the makeup of our church, it is not surprising that the e-mails are almost universally anti-Obama, though occasionally Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and illegal immigrants make an appearance, all always in a negative light.

The most recent e-mail amazed and amused me greatly.

It purported to be a sermon that had been preached at a predominantly black Virginia church and used Genesis 47 as its text.

I immediately had a number of questions. Who preached the sermon? What town in Virginia? What church? When exactly was this preached?

Now, when you're trying to sell a bogus e-mail you do one of two things. You include enough details to make it seem plausible, or you don't include any details, which makes it virtually impossible to track down.

In either case, the author trusts that readers won't bother to check.

This e-mail's author was obviously hoping to gain the sympathy of the conservative church-going crowd, which for some reason I've yet to figure out has decided that Obama isn't just wrong, but evil and bent on the destruction of all things good, beautiful and American in life.

I guess the author, I'm going to say "he," figured he could get away with a little creative exegesis as well.

I'm pretty sure he's not actually a preacher because it's way too short for 99.44 percent of the preachers I know.

In his version of the end of Genesis, Pharoah has taken advantage of a famine to nationalize the grain supply in Egypt and suck his subjects into slavery.

Obama, our exegete proclaims, is following the path of the Pharoah.

Only one problem, though. In the Genesis story, it's the hero, Joseph, who comes up with the idea of buying up all the grain, and when people bargain with someone to buy that grain during the famine, they bargain with Joseph, not Pharoah.

Now one of two things has to follow from that. Either Obama is like Joseph and therefore a hero, or Joseph is the bad guy in the story.

Somehow I doubt our biblical "scholar" would be willing to concede either point.

That church people would be fooled by such an e-mail tells me the complaints about biblical illiteracy are valid, and that their distaste for the president so distorts their thinking that they can't recognize nonsense when they see it.

Either way, or both ways, it's a sad commentary on the state of the church.