We’ve all heard the saying: Familiarity breeds contempt.

It’s often used when discussing human relationships, because when we spend too much time with certain people, we eventually want to push them out the door as soon as possible, praying we won’t see them again for at least another year. Or as Benjamin Franklin so colorfully put it: “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.”

On Super Bowl Sunday, February 11th, 2024, a church in Cincinnati performed a skit during their service. One of the pastors kicked a Bible as if it were a football across the stage and into the crowd.

I’m sure you can will imagine the furor it caused on social media, X (formerly Twitter) in particular.

Some didn’t have a problem with it saying, “It’s just a book made from paper and ink. Maybe leather for the cover. Although they contain holy scripture, they’re not holy objects.”

I responded to one of them with, “But if you intentionally mistreat the vessel that contains the holy, are we not—at least symbolically—mistreating the holy? After all the Tabernacle was only a structure, and our bodies are only basic elements such as carbon, hydrogen, etc.”

My post isn’t necessarily about the rightness or wrongness of the church’s actions, but our attitude toward the Bible in general. Especially in the States. I myself own over a dozen. If something happens to one of them, I don’t have to drive far to buy a new one. If I’m feeling particularly lazy, I can even order one online from the comfort of my chair. Plus, if I so choose (if I’m feeling even more lazy), it is literally at my fingertips. Not only are there multiple websites of Bibles in almost every translation, one can download plenty of apps for their phone or tablet.

Nor do I have to worry about being imprisoned, or worse, for owning one.

Go to a country where owning even a single page of the Bible will get a person killed, I’ll bet they would not only be shocked, but perhaps even horrified that we would care so little about our own Bibles.

Because the Bible is so abundant in our country, we take it for granted. We don’t consider the possibility that a day will come when our Bibles will be taken away, or we will face persecution, imprisonment, torture, and death for holding on to them.

I don’t suggest we turn our Bible into an idol, but perhaps we should treat it with less contempt and more respect. Certainly not kick it across a church sanctuary because a football championship happens to be playing that day.