IVP - Strangely Dim - January 2006 Archives

Good News, Sports Fans

There are three (count em) televisions in the men’s locker room at my gym. That’s approximately one every twenty feet—except that two of them are five feet apart. They’re also about seven feet off the ground, which means I can’t change the channels (I’ve got a pretty unimpressive standing vertical leap), which means I’m at the mercy of everyone else for what I watch.

Of course, television is even more captivating in a locker room than in the comfort of your own home, largely because in a locker room anywhere else you look is likely populated by some naked guy. So imagine my distress when I’m happily listening to Katie Couric telling me all about the latest person to get kicked off American Idol, and some seven-foot-tall, python-armed naked brute unceremoniously changes three television stations to SportsCenter. It’s disorienting, it’s emasculating, it’s . . . hmm . . . interesting . . .

There’s no doubt about it: sports reporting is a lot more captivating than news reporting. Part of that is the silliness that often gets reported as news: what Paris Hilton wore to Amy Grant’s CD release party isn’t technically news, and compared to the excellence being celebrated in sports reporting, the overnight weather forecast isn’t terribly compelling. But more than anything, sports reporting is distinctively exciting because sports reporters can often barely contain themselves.

They might be reporting plays that happened moments ago in a key contest or decades ago in career highlights for some sports luminary. They might be looking at the week in review or the season to come. Whatever they’re reporting, sports reporters are passionate about it. Even the most inconsequential sporting event of the week—say, a high school JV football preseason scrimmage—holds the reporter’s full attention and occasionally elicits a yell or a scream right into the microphone. We the viewers find ourselves on the edge of our seats, waiting along with the reporter for someone on the field to wow us.

That’s not so much journalism as it is witness: the sports reporter mediates the experience of unleashed potential for the audience, and we’re all wowed together. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, it all gets chronicled for us, and we trust that one day we will remember not just what these athletes did but how we felt when they did it. And it’s entirely possible that future generations of fans will be able to revisit this moment and witness what we’ve witnessed. The span of time may make news old, but it will never make witness obsolete.

We memorize facts and figures that at some point were news—George Washington was the first president of the United States, the Allies won World War II—but we’re inspired by the chronicles of witness. The Gospels, for example, don’t tell us what we often tell one another about Jesus: “We are all sinners; Jesus came to earth to die on a cross and save us from our sins; Jesus rose again and went to heaven to prepare a place for us.” All this is true and important, which is why we call it the good news. And all of it is contained within the Gospels. But the Gospels tell us Jesus’ story more completely than that, and they tell it through eyewitness accounts. We watch Jesus confront the Pharisees, we hear him raise Lazarus from the dead, we see him transfigured and resurrected, we even touch the scars on his hands and in his side—all vicariously, all through his awestruck witnesses. And their awe becomes our awe, and we realize experientially how awesome Jesus really is.

But we also hear through these witnesses that Jesus calls us to be witnesses as well: not cold, dispassionate purveyors of the mere facts of Christianity but witnesses. That’s how the faith has been communicated down through the centuries and throughout the world, and when people witness Jesus, they can’t help but hear what he says as good news.

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This piece originally ran at the Sports Outreach website. If you're wondering why a sports ministry would have any interest in what I have to say, I'm wondering right alongside you, but they're good people doing good work.

Stalled

May I be frank? If not, click here.

Still with me? Thank you very much. I have a favorite toilet.

Perhaps favorite is too strong a word. But somewhere along the way at work, I realized that whenever I went to the bathroom I gravitated toward the same stall. In fact, I reckon that if you lined my shoes with some kind of ultra-violet ink, and then replaced all the light bulbs at my workplace with black light, you’d notice a remarkable continuity in the path my steps take—even beyond the bathroom.

I’m a creature of habit, I guess. I have a number of routines, from the steps I take in making coffee to the alarm I set for purging my spam. In that respect I could be the poster child for Presbyterianism, where everything worth being done ought to be done “decently and in order.”

For the most part I’m comfortable with a life marked by routine; predictability can be quite comforting. But there’s an opportunity cost to routines in that they are highly resistant to change, and sometimes change is needed.

It’s possible to get stalled in life. I’ve certainly been there, in relationships, in my profession, in the state of my soul. If we are people in process, which I think we are, then stalled is a dangerous condition, which makes routines, for all their day-to-day value, dangerous. My dad often explores new routes when he’s driving to familiar destinations. Sometimes we get a little lost, but only temporarily; when you ask him why he’s taking a different direction, he replies, tongue in cheek, “So the terrorists can’t find us.”

The history of the church can be understood (though probably oversimplified) as a cycle of renewal—followed by routines—interrupted by renewal. We have some experience that spurs new creativity and energy in our self-discovery or our understanding of God and his claims on us. New church movements, from the formation of the Franciscans to the emergence of Emergent, inspire new hope and enthusiasm for the things of God. Gradually these new movements, in order to move from vague enthusiasm to meaningful impact, create systems and routines, even jargon, to empower their day-to-day progress. Over time, these systems and routines can cause a movement to atrophy, until they are interrupted by some kind of renewal.

It happens at the personal level as well. I like to read, and when I started taking my faith seriously my reading life was revolutionized. The things I read and the duration of my reading time were entirely different. But I reached a point where people started telling me I needed to get out of my head and into my body. I had atrophied in my routines. I needed renewal.

I’ve had a hard time getting out of my head and into my body. The routine is incumbent; it’s difficult to unseat. But I know my routines can be changed, because I’ve done it. My favorite toilet for 2005 was not my favorite toilet for 2004. And so far, my favorite toilet for 2006 is one other than the title-holder for 2005.

Changing a routine is difficult, however: I get a bit of vertigo when I remember to change at the last minute, and when I forget I’m tempted to chastise myself. And let’s face it: changing toilets is not going to change the world or the fundamental condition of my soul. But it’s a good occasional reminder that change is possible.

The most meaningful renewal, of course, doesn’t originate with us. Most often we are the objects of renewal—not the subjects. God is in the business of renewing and has been since the second week of the world. Our routines are practiced in response to that renewal, and in the process redemption is taking place. In the words of the psalmist:

These all look to you

to give them their food at the proper time.

When you give it to them,

they gather it up;

when you open your hand,

they are satisfied with good things. . . .

When you send your Spirit,

they are created,

and you renew the face of the earth.

Off My Archives

I spent about an hour yesterday clearing all the spam comments off my Strangely Dim archives, so I'm afraid that we'll be severely restricting the comment options from now on. Too bad--so sad. My apologize to the handful of regular poster-children and to the legions of spammers whose lives are inconvenienced.

In the meantime, post all you want at www.loud-time.com. Tell your friends too.

Quantum Phamily

A friend of mine is working on her master's degree, and as she was selecting courses for the coming quarter she was proselytized by an instructor to take her family ministry course. My friend, however, works a full-time job here at IVP and doesn't have time for classes that demand a lot of extra time or don't nicely fit her educational goals: I suppose you might say she's purpose-driven(tm). So my friend asked if she'd be obligated to do family ministry in a local church setting as part of the course. The professor replied, "Not likely; I don't think any churches around here do family ministry."

Now, I have great respect for theoretical studies, but family ministry? Sure, you can do math with imaginary numbers or do quantum physics based on last week's Star Trek, but "family ministry" seems like simple arithmetic: family + ministry. Two great tastes that go great together.

I suppose it's idiots like me that are keeping churches from fully understanding the intersections between family as a social complex and church as a social complex. How your family functions shapes your expectations and your participation in church, and so every local family system directly affects the life of every local church. And how ministry is practiced, because it is intrinsically relational, places obligations on every family touched by it. The bringing together of family and ministry becomes less like math and more like a marriage.

Ah well. I just thought it was funny. Diana Garland's exhaustive Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide defines family ministry as

any activity of a church or church representative(s) that directly or indirectly (1) develops faith-families in the congregational community, (2) increases the Christlikeness of the family relationships of Christians and/or (3) equips and supports Christians who use their families as a channel of ministry to others.

I'd be interested in what you think of that definition and how you'd characterize the state of family ministry in your own church. Play nice though, please.

Headless Faith

There’s a church near my house that recently updated its billboard to say “Our faith is 2000 years old. Our thinking is not.” I hate it.

Oh, I suppose I understand the sentiment: it’s a more braggadocious way of saying “Don’t check your brains at the church door”—or something like that. But I still hate it, because it insinuates that thinking has nothing to do with believing.

Why is it OK for our faith to be two thousand years old, while our thinking has to be somehow novel? What bragging rights does longevity grant to faith? For that matter, why is longevity a detriment to thought?

Oh, I suppose I understand not all that was considered true in the early days of Christian faith is still counted as true today. We now acknowledge that Christianity allows no space for slavery, for example, and the humanness of women is more readily acknowledged in our time than in the dawn of the Christian era.

But I’d argue that faith had a hand in forming that understanding. That’s long been a credo of the church: “I believe that I might understand.” And the act of believing certainly involves thinking, so to divorce thought from faith is to hamstring both.

Meanwhile, quick thinking with no respect for history is an embarrassing hallmark of our era. “Chronological snobbery,” I’ve heard it called. Everything dead is dead because it wasn’t as smart as us—I mean, we. So we should probably be suspicious of our own fresh thinking, because once we've segregated our thinking from all the thinking that’s gone on before us, we’re free to cause all sorts of trouble for the people around us, or the people who will live on when we ourselves are dead.

The idea that new thinking is vulnerable to error is proven in our own experience, but it is grounded in ancient history. The Bible counts gray hairs as the crown of the righteous, while God shuts up Job by saying “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” Meanwhile, faith is defined as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for” (Hebrews 11:1-2).

If the ancients are to be commended for their belief, then at least some of their thought processes are to be commended, as well how they acted on that faith. Believing, after all, is a function of both brain and body. We encounter God in some capacity, which sets in motion a response that involves both thinking and doing. That’s not all faith is, but it surely isn’t less than that.

So I celebrate my old faith, and I welcome fresh perspectives, but I will not reject the understanding of my forebears. To do so would be to cut off my brain to spite my face—or something like that.

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While you're out surfing, check out my new blog: Loud Time. Here I'm strange; there I'm loud.