Sent on a Mission... "Thus Saith the Lord."

Posted by rjhmoore at 2:55 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, December 2, 2008

As it turns out, Brigham Young had a nasty little habit for doing things that only benefited his well-being and perhaps, if he's lucky, that of the Church's too. As leader of all of these people, the Mormons, he was expected to be intelligent, wise, and profitable. Not only did he have to fulfill these titles, but he had to be the best at them. So when a person or two came along with a promising future as a rising star, he "put a stop to their growing prosperity," (Young). A.E. Young, the wonderful spiller of truths, tells us, "His usual method of doing this [was] by sending them on a mission." That doesn't sound to bad you say. Listen as A.E. Young tells you a story of two men who were treated to such a "mission."

"For a number of years, two men -- named Badley and Hugh Moon -- worked a whiskey distillery in Salt Lake City, and appeared to be becoming rapidly wealthy. They were good Mormons, staunch defenders of Brigham Young, ready in every good work with open purses and generous deeds, and they were highly respected by the entire body of Saints.

What was the consternation of the Church, when, during the delivery of a temperance sermon on Sunday, the President, waxing more personal, more eloquent, and consequently more abusive, "cursed, in the name of the Lord," the men that ran the distillery!

They knew very well that these men paid their tithing promptly, -- the greatest virtue a Mormon can possess, by the way, -- and that they were foremost in all charitable works, and they marvelled very much that the Prophet should deal so hardly with them. His language was so abusive that Badley, who was especially attached to the President Young, shed tears during the denunciation. He finally finished his anathemas by ordering them to take their families and go on a mission to an unsettled portion of the Territory, leaving their homes to "the Church," which, of course, meant Brigham Young.

As soon as they had gone, the Prophet removed the apparatus for distilling a few miles from the city, and commenced making whiskey for the Church. But, unfortunately, the Church whiskey did not prove to be so good as that made by Moon and Badley, and the Church distillery was short-lived.

The men who were thus heartlessly ruined and unjustly exiled never returned. Their homes were broken up, their property taken from them, and themselves and their families banished to the wilderness, to gratify the covetousness and grasping of an avaricious tyrant, who committed this outrage, as he had all others, with a 'Thus saith the Lord.' "

Not such a harmless mission after all. The men and their families weren't even allowed to return; they were banished. This passage just got me thinking, what if the circumstances were the same today? You're sent on a mission trip, by your church, out to Kenya. After the work you've done is completed, your pastor says, "Well, you can do more, in the name of the Lord." So you do, but the pastor keeps telling you to do more and just stay over there. Essentially, he won't let you come home. If you did come home somehow, you'd find that all of you stuff is gone, your house has been torn down, and your property has been sold. What would that be like? It's hard to imagine, but I have a feeling, it must be similar to what victims of natural disasters feel when they return home after escaping a storm, only to find that a few boards and a couple of windows are all that remain of their past life.

Is being banished by a storm just another way of being banished by "God" (or in this case Brigham Young)?