by Pete Earley
According to the Mormon scriptures, God told Nephi to kill Laban, but Nephi hesitated because he knew that murder was wrong.
And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me again, “Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes.”
Nephi grabbed Laban by his hair and cut off his head with the golden sword. He then took the brass plates and the sword with him. Although the sword appeared in other passages in the Book of Mormon, it wasn’t clear what finally happened to it, and over time it developed into a symbol of mystical power. In December 1836, for example, the sword was mentioned in a prophecy that Joseph Smith, Sr., the father of the Mormon prophet, said in the Kirtland temple on behalf of his grandson, Joseph Smith III. [It was Joseph Smith III who eventually became the leader of the RLDS Church.] The senior Smith prophesied that his grandson would someday “have power to wield the Sword of Laban.” From that point on, the sword became synonymous with the leadership of the church. As with the mythical Excalibur that young Arthur pulled from the stone, proving that he was the rightful heir to the English throne, Jeffrey believed God would permit only His chosen prophet to wield the Sword of Laban. Obviously, if someone found the sword, he would automatically be declared the church’s true prophet. At least that is what Jeffrey thought.
“Do you think it could really be hidden in the park?” Alice asked.
Jeffrey was sure of it. He showed Alice a map of New York and drew a line from the spot where Joseph Smith, Jr., said he found the golden plates to the Kirtland temple. The line went directly through Chapin Forest. “It’s entirely possible that the angel Moroni hid the Sword of Laban and other golden plates in a secret chamber in Chapin Forest while he was alive and on his way to New York to hide the other golden plates,” Jeffrey said.
“Do you think you can find it?” Alice asked.
Jeffrey wasn’t sure, but he intended to try.
The next morning, Alice told Jeffrey that she had something important to share with him.
“I had a dream last night,” she gushed. “You were standing in the temple and a tall thin man was on your right and a shorter, more muscular man was on your left. I was sitting in the temple in the back row and when I looked up, there was this beam of pure white light coming down on the three of you and it was so white and so intense that all I could see was the outline of you three and then a pure white personage appeared and talked to you and exchanged something with the three of you. I couldn’t quite make out who it was until I saw his hands.”
“Who was he?” Jeffrey asked.
“His hands had nail prints in them,” Alice said, her eyes filling with tears. “It was Jesus, Jeffrey! Jesus appeared to you!”
She was certain, she added, that the two men in her dream with Jeffrey were Ray Treat and Tom Miller.
“Oh, Jeffrey,” she continued. “This is just like the patriarch said it would be. God wants you to bring forth a great message. He wants you to prepare the way for Christ’s return.”
That night, Ray and Tom again drove to Kirtland from Pittsburgh. Alice didn’t mention her dream and Jeffrey didn’t mention his theory about the Sword of Laban. If it was there, he was going to find it by himself.
The three men ended up talking about the symbols in the temple just as they had the day before, and then Jeffrey suggested that the three of them spend the night at the temple praying. If they did, perhaps God would show them a sign. Ray and Tom agreed to stay over. Jeffrey was excited. He had successfully set the stage for Alice’s dream to come true.
“All of them expected something to happen that night,” said Alice. The three men prayed and meditated until three in the morning, but despite their efforts, nothing happened.
“So much for your dream,” Jeffrey told Alice the next morning.
Ray and Tom returned to Pittsburgh and Ray taught his last class that night. The next afternoon, he and Tom left for Independence. They stopped in Kirtland around dinnertime to say goodbye to Jeffrey and Alice. Jeffrey invited them in and both men were shocked when they saw what the family was having for dinner. All the Lundgrens had to eat was a basket of biscuits. It looked as if there was only enough for one biscuit per person.
“We had asked Jeff earlier how he survived and he had told us that he depended on the Lord to feed his family,” said Tom. “It was pretty clear that they were broke and the kids were hungry.”
Even though Tom was unemployed and strapped for cash, he gave one hundred dollars to Jeffrey. Ray added another hundred. Jeffrey thanked both of them and they left. A few miles outside of Kirtland, Tom began to feel uneasy. He and Ray had told Jeffrey that they would be stopping by their house around dinnertime, and for a brief moment, he wondered if Jeffrey hadn’t staged the dinner table scene. There was something about how he and Ray had gotten there at exactly the same moment that Jeffrey and Alice were sitting down at the table. It all seemed too perfect. But then Tom pushed his suspicions out of his mind. It was his old police training, he decided.
Saints were supposed to trust each other.
Chapter 16
ALICE would claim later that she never knew that Ray and Tom had given Jeffrey money. She never knew where any of Jeffrey’s money came from, she said. She never asked. The $1,500 that she and Jeffrey had raised to finance their move to Kirtland was quickly spent. The church didn’t pay Jeffrey. He didn’t have any obvious financial support. Yet whenever Alice and Jeffrey went to the grocery store or to buy clothing, he would pull a five, ten, or twenty-dollar bill from his pocket. “I just assumed that the Lord was providing,” she later claimed.
Had she asked, Jeffrey was ready with a heart-tugging story. “We ran out of money almost immediately,” he later recalled. “There wasn’t any food in the house and everyone was hungry. It was just about dinnertime when two elderly ladies knocked on the door and I explained to them that the temple was closed. But they had driven a long distance, so I decided to break the rules and let them in. They were inside the temple for only about fifteen minutes, but when they came out, they were crying and one of them took my hand to shake it and when I took her hand, I felt paper. ‘This is for you,’ she said. ‘God made me aware that you need this.’ I didn’t look at it until she had gone. It was a one-hundred-dollar bill and that is what we lived on that week. The rules said we were supposed to turn in all the money that we received. But she had told me that God wanted me to have it and that’s how I operated. If people said it was for me, I kept it. God had directed me here. He wanted me to do His business, so I expected Him to take care of me and my family.”
In October, a group of priesthood members from upstate New York held a weekend retreat at the temple. Most arrived Friday afternoon but it began to snow and some were delayed. Bill Lord gave the men a tour of the temple. Jeffrey stood inside the temple at the door waiting for stragglers. When he heard the sound of footsteps, he opened the door. As soon as he saw who was coming, he began to smile. Kevin Currie, his buddy from the navy, walked up the steps. They hadn’t seen each other in ten years. Jeffrey quickly explained that he was a tour guide and pointed next door to the white house where he lived.
“Be sure to stop by later,” he said. “There are some things that I’ve got to share with you.”
Jeffrey hurried to tell Alice about Kevin. When he came over to their house, Alice gave him a big hug. Kevin told them that something significant had happened that night. Back in 1974 when Jeffrey first introduced him to the Book of Mormon, Kevin had seen a vision. “Just for an instant in my mind’s eye, I saw a door and it had a brilliant white light coming from behind it,” he said. Kevin didn’t know what it meant so he hadn’t paid much attention to it. “But tonight as I was walking up to the temple, I saw that very same door and it opened and there was a bright light shooting out from behind it,” Kevin said. He paused and then continued: “Jeffrey, the door that I saw in my mind ten years ago was the door to the Kirtland temple. It was the door that yo
u opened tonight.”
Kevin didn’t think their reunion was a coincidence. There had to be a reason why he had had his vision. “Why are you here?” he asked.
Jeffrey said that he had come to Ohio “to be endowed with the power-just like it says in the scriptures.” He then told Kevin that he had recently made an astounding discovery. After swearing Kevin to secrecy, Jeffrey opened his copy of the Doctrine and Convenants and read out loud the first eight paragraphs of Section 83, a revelation that Joseph Smith, Jr., said God gave him on September 22 and 23 of 1832. The first three paragraphs were about Independence, but it was the fourth paragraph that Jeffrey wanted Kevin to hear:
Verily, this is the word of the Lord, that the city New Jerusalem shall be built by the gathering of the Saints, beginning at this place, even the place of the temple, which temple shall be reared in this generation.
“Kevin,” Jeffrey said excitedly. “I’m going to prove to you that for all these years everyone has been waiting at the wrong place for Christ to return.”
Kevin was intrigued.
“I’m going to prove to you,” Jeffrey continued, “that the real site of Zion is Kirtland—not Independence.”
During the next hour, Jeffrey read Kevin more than a dozen scriptures from the Bible and the Book of Mormon that were messages from God delivered by prophets. In each case, the prophet began by saying “This is the word of the Lord” or “Thus saith the Lord.”
“A prophet has got to make it clear right upfront that he is delivering a message from God,” Jeffrey explained. He then told Kevin to read the first three paragraphs of Section 83. Those paragraphs didn’t have any such declaration. “The reason is because God never said those three paragraphs. Those were words written by men,” Jeffrey said, his voice becoming a whisper now, as if he were afraid someone might overhear. “Those words were added after Joseph fled Kirtland to justify the saints moving to Independence.”
Jeffrey told Kevin to read the fourth paragraph of the revelation. It began with the sentence: “Verily, this is the word of the Lord.”
“This is where God’s message really starts,” Jeffrey explained, “and it says ‘the city New Jerusalem shall be built’ at the same spot as the temple-right here in Kirtland.”
That night in the Lundgrens’ kitchen, Kevin once again felt that God was speaking to him through Jeffrey. What Jeffrey was saying seemed to make sense. Other revelations in the Doctrine and Convenants began with a “Thus saith the Lord” preface. Why didn’t Section 83?
“It became clear to me that Jeffrey was correct. The only commandment that God had ever given was that He wanted His people to go to the Ohio to be endowed with the power.”
Kevin was hooked. Every weekend during the next two months, Kevin rode the bus to Cleveland on Friday nights. Jeffrey picked him up and they studied the scriptures together until Sunday afternoon when Kevin caught another bus back to his hometown of Buffalo, New York. During their visits, Kevin confided in Jeffrey and Alice. He had gotten married after he left the navy, he said, but it didn’t last and he ended up divorced and depressed. He’d stopped going to church, started drinking heavily, and had gotten involved in a homosexual relationship. Nothing in life seemed important. Eventually, Kevin had returned to Buffalo where his mother lived and gone to work at the Veterans Administration hospital. He had started attending church again, but he still was miserable—until he started studying again with Jeffrey.
“For the first time in years,” Kevin told them, “I feel a purpose to my life.”
This is how Jeffrey later recalled his feelings toward his navy pal. “Kevin was a leech really and a leech needs to be attached to a host. I became that host. You see, religion seemed to touch Kevin from time to time, and give him stability and a purpose in his life. He also wanted to be part of a family. He’d never had his own. In a way, Kevin wasn’t that much different from all the others who eventually joined my group. They all were drawn to me because there was something lacking in their own personalities and lives. They wanted me to provide it for them. They were weak. I was strong. I was their host.”
In January 1985, Kevin requested a transfer to a VA hospital outside Cleveland, and when it was approved, he moved in with Jeffrey and Alice. He slept on a bed that Jeffrey put in the room where Damon and Jason slept. In the beginning, Kevin gave Jeffrey money each week to help pay for groceries. But Jeffrey and Alice took Kevin aside in early March and suggested that he give them all of his paycheck each month. “They told me that in order for Jeffrey to maintain respect in his children’s eyes as the breadwinner of the family, I needed to turn over my entire paycheck to them,” Kevin said. “And that is basically what I did.” Kevin earned about $1,600 per month. On paydays, Kevin would find Jeffrey waiting on the porch for him when he got home. Jeffrey said that he didn’t want to get the money inside because the children might see it.
Kevin was happy to turn over his pay. “I was having a good time. Jeffrey and Alice were fun to be around and Jeffrey was revealing new things all the time in the scriptures. I was glad I lived with them.”
Besides, Jeffrey was making more-and-more-dramatic discoveries and Kevin was eager to hear about them. One night, Jeffrey shook Kevin awake and motioned to him to follow. They walked into the kitchen where Alice was waiting. Jeffrey quickly explained that he had been praying in the temple when he saw a ghost.
“I saw a personage, totally white, moving up the stairs,” he explained, “and I knew who it was—I immediately recognized him.”
Jeffrey paused to catch his breath.
“I asked God, ‘What do I need to do to repent before I meet this person? What would you have me do?,’ and after a period of time, I felt that God was telling me that it was okay for me to go before this personage, to meet him, so I followed him up the stairs.”
Alice and Kevin were clearly mesmerized.
“I could feel the power of his glory as I walked up the stairs. It was like when you get near to an electric power generator, you can feel the power. I went up to the third level and there he was and—”
Jeffrey stopped. He suddenly began crying. “When I came into his presence, I suddenly saw myself as I truly am. For the first time in my life, I saw myself as a dirty rag, the filthiest thing on the face of the earth. I didn’t have a right to be in the same room with this figure. I was so unclean. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t engage him in conversation because I was so unworthy. I had to shrink away because I was so filthy.”
“Who was it?” Alice asked, excitedly.
“It was Joseph,” he said. “I saw Joseph Smith, Junior, in the temple.”
The next Sunday, Jeffrey stood up during the worship service at the RLDS Kirtland congregation and recalled what had happened, only rather than telling everyone that he had seen Joseph, he simply said that he had seen an “angel.” He also added a moral.
“If I had been clean, who knows what I could have asked or what this angel could have shared with me. But I lost out because I am a sinner and unclean.”
Afterward, some members of the church said it was the most dramatic personal witness that they had ever heard. As far as Kevin was concerned, it was completely believable.
“Among the more traditional RLDS church members, spiritual experiences were something sought after because having a spiritual experience is a sign that God is communicating with you. I figured that if God was going to talk to anyone, it would probably be Jeffrey because he was the most pious person I knew.”
Chapter 17
TOM Miller kept in touch with Jeffrey after he returned to Independence, and by the spring of 1985, the two men chatted weekly on the telephone about their scriptural studies. A robust, powerfully built man with short blond hair, chiseled features, and a hearty laugh, Tom was having trouble with the liberal changes taking place in the RLDS. “Things have to be logical for me to accept them, and when they aren’t, it’s tough for me to believe in them,” he told Jeffrey during one call. Lots of c
hanges in the church, he added, weren’t logical in his view. “I find nowhere in the scriptures where it says women should be priests.”
Tom had always had problems with the church, dating back to when he had served a stint as pastor of a small RLDS congregation in Iowa. While he enjoyed preaching on Sundays, he felt uncomfortable when it came to recommending young men for the priesthood. What bothered Tom was the church’s policy about having each candidate recommended by two priests who both felt that they had received a “call” from God. Pastors were supposed to recommend young men, but no matter how hard Tom prayed, he never felt that God was telling him to “call” anyone. So Tom didn’t, and the men in his Iowa church who wanted to become priests began to complain. “I got to thinking, ‘Hey, is it me or are all these other guys who are claiming to have revelations from God about who to call just a bunch of liars?”’ Tom decided to ask the pastor who had submitted his name as a priesthood candidate. What sort of revelation had he received about Tom? “I asked him: ‘Why did you recommend me for the priesthood? What did God tell you about me?’ And this man sort of hemmed and hawed, and he finally admitted that he really hadn’t had any special experience. He just felt that it was the right thing to do, so he did it. I began to wonder if the whole process was all a farce.”
Tom might have left the RLDS had it not been for the voice that he heard a short while later. He was asleep in the bedroom of his house when it woke him up. “I mean to tell you it was a voice! I thought it was my imagination at first, but then I heard it again and then it repeated itself one more time. The voice said: ‘Arise, cleanse thyself and clothe thyself for I am coming.’ My first thought was that I should take a shower and put on my suit because the Lord is coming tonight, but then I thought, ‘Come on, is putting on a suit going to make me less of a sinner?”’