Past Articles from 2004 until last year. Many important lessons can be found in each of these articles.
Owen Schmitt was always a favorite player of mine during his tenure as starting fullback at WVU. Tough-as-nails, but always playing for the joy of the game, he seemed to like hitting more than positive yardage. He plays for the Seattle Seahawks, and is number 2 on their depth chart at fullback so I thought I’d have to wait a while before he made the top ten plays of the week on Sports Center. I was wrong, because he made it last Sunday. He didn’t make it for a spectacular carry (he didn’t have any), for a great catch (he had one reception for 3 yards), or for a crushing block (he did have a few of those). He made Sports Center’s Top Ten Plays (coming in at #4) for what he did as he came onto the field at the start of the game. To pump himself up he was hitting himself in the head with his own helmet. The place where the face mask bolts into the visor cut a sizeable gash in his forehead and blood gushed everywhere – mostly down his face. With his face covered in his own blood, he was still grinning, and screaming, and pumping himself up for the game. Awesome.
Also awesome is the pre-game war dance some teams are doing in High Schools and colleges. It is called the “Haka,” and comes from a war dance done by Tongans, and by the Maoris of New Zealand. The Haka was first done at a sporting event by New Zealand’s rugby team in 1905, and became a tradition. One hundred years later the dance made its appearance at a high school football game in Euless, Texas. Many Tongans had immigrated to the area, and Tongans on the football team taught the dance to their teammates. It was an effective way to pump the team up, and frighten the other team (something worked, Euless won the State Championship). If you have ever seen the Haka then you know how impressive and frightening it is.
My High School soccer team used to listen to KISS and slam each other into lockers to get pumped for games – but we went 1-12, so maybe we should have learned some Melanesian war dances (or made sure all the locker doors were closed first).
Successful teams have rituals to get focused and pumped up. By “pumped-up” I am describing a real, physical response – a self induced state of heightened energy and aggression that all who have played competitive sports have experienced. Maybe it just happens in your head. Maybe you induce yourself to release endorphins, and fight-or-flight hormones. But something happens. If it doesn’t – if the adrenalin doesn’t flow – then you get run over by the guy who is jacked-up on adrenalin and endorphins.
The New Testament uses sports to describe our daily struggle against Satan. Paul talks about training as a boxer, and a runner (1 Corinthians 9:24-27, 1 Timothy 2:6). The Hebrews writer gives an extended description of our Christian life as a stadium event, a distance race to be run (Hebrews 12:1). These passages emphasize the self control, and attention to the rules of play each successful athlete maintains. But there is more.
There is motivation. One motivation in these passages is the spectators – the “great cloud of witnesses” in Hebrews 12:1, and the “others” to whom Paul has preached (1 Corinthians 9:27). We’re not playing one on one with the Devil in the back yard, after sunset, under a single dusk-till-dawn light. We are playing in prime-time, on CBS, in the Superdome, for the National Championship. There are myriads of others who care – who are invested in our success.
A second motivation is the price of failure itself. When Paul describes being “disqualified” (1 Corinthians 9:27) we know what that means – the terminality, the finality of it. Satan is a predatory beast who wants to devour us (1 Peter 5:8). Many of our brethren had to face predatory beasts in the stadiums of the Roman Empire, in front of paying fans who considered the Lions the home team, so his words are particularly resonant. Preparation is necessary – we must be ready to fight. Hebrews talks about taking off the leg weights before the race starts (Hebrews 12:1). Paul, the spiritual boxer, talks about “buffeting his body” to stay prepared (Hebrews 12:27). Some translations use the word “discipline” for “buffet” but the word, specific to boxing, means to punch in the face, to give a black eye – which is the preparation boxers make when they spar, and something like what Owen Schmitt did before the game against the Jacksonville Jaguars Sunday.
A third motivation is Jesus himself. This is nothing so sentimental as winning one for George Gip. We “fix our eyes” on Him when we run our race, because he suffered more than we have (or will), and because he has already attained the victory for us all (Hebrews 12:1-4). He faced Satan down in the wilderness and Satan left in defeat (Luke 4:1-13), and so when we are told “Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7), we’ve seen Jesus do it so we know that it can be done.
We are given ample motivation – the fans, the price of failure, the face of our savior. It is now ours to prepare – to cultivate discipline, to develop strength and endurance, to focus, to energize – to be ready. New Zealand and Euless, Texas footballers do the Haka. Owen Schmitt hits himself with his helmet. What will we do?
The latest issue of the Atlantic (October 2009) has an article entitled The Doctor’s War. The subtitle is, “For Wounded Civilians at a U. S. Military Hospital in Afghanistan, the Gatekeeper is God.” As I thumbed through the magazine, I dog-eared page 23 as a possible topic for a bulletin article. I knew just how I was going to approach it, because I’ve had to deal with hospital gatekeepers myself at Johns Hopkins (actually, Teresa has for me). I was going to write about God as gatekeeper – determining right from wrong, good from bad, saved from lost. But as I read the article, I realized that it is about something more.
The story is about Afghanistani Civilians coming for treatment to U. S. Military Hospitals – and often being turned away. It is a credit to our Military, and to our nation that we accept all the civilians we can into these military hospitals. But they are military hospitals, and, with a limited number of beds available, military personnel take precedence – there is no other way.
The thing about the article that persists in your memory is how anguished these gatekeepers are when civilians have to be turned away. The Egyptians have a military hospital where civilians can go if ours is full, but they have neither the resources, nor the skilled medical staff our hospitals do. The successful field medicine practiced by our Military is one of the (many) underreported stories of the war. So, if a boy whose jaw was blown off has to be sent to the Egyptian hospital, it is less likely the boy’s face can be repaired, and it is questionable if he will survive at all. That man who had to turn that boy away called it “One of the worst calls I’ve ever had in my life.” The boy eventually did get treatment at the American hospital at Bagram, but as the war enters its ninth year, and intensifies, the job of the gatekeeper will become increasingly difficult and anguishing.
This piece in the Atlantic is not really about who God is, but about who we are not. We are not God.
I cannot imagine being a gatekeeper at an American Military hospital, making the decisions they have to make. I know they have guidelines and protocols. I know they are well trained, well intentioned, and wise. I know these decisions have to be made. But to decide who lives and who may not live – especially when children are involved – is a responsibility that must bring with it lasting trauma. It is the kind of “Sophie’s Choice” decision that has to be made by transplant committees. When anyone is forced to “play God” they play the role poorly at best, because “poorly” is the best anyone can be expected to perform when asked to play God. We are not God.
It is a theme resonating on every page of the Bible – the otherness of God – those transcendent “Omni-s” He is, and the persistent flaws we have which make His grace necessary. We know the verses:
I know, O Yahweh, that a man’s way is not in himself;
Nor is it in man who walks to direct his own steps. (Jeremiah 10:23)
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
Neither are my ways your ways,” declares Yahweh.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My thoughts higher than your thoughts,
And My ways higher than your ways.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
One could follow those verses with a reading of Job 38-42, and the books of Habakkuk, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. We are not God, and although some, like the gatekeepers at military hospitals, are forced to make God-tough decisions (and we should be thankful for their service, and pray for them), we should otherwise refuse to fill roles that are proprietarily His.
God decides right from wrong, good from bad, saved from lost. We chose between them, but have neither the right nor the power to redefine them.
I’m reading Larry McMurtry’s 2005 history, Oh What a Slaughter Massacres in the American West: 1846-1890, which is, as the title suggests, a history of massacres – mostly by white settlers against natives – in the old west. None of the slaughters he covers includes a death count that rises above 200. Compared to the slaughter of Armenians by the Turks, the Cleansings of Stalin, the Holocaust, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, and the recent genocide in Rwanda – which include death counts ranging from 800,000 (Rwanda) to 20,000,000 (Stalin) – these Massacres of the Old West seem minor incidents. They were not minor incidents to the victims. Also, the events he covers often involve family men with no real history of pathological violence. These massacres were not the products of men who seem to embody evil the way Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot do. McMurtry’s own grandparents pioneered Archer County, Texas, in the 1870’s. He writes about the constant threat of attack they faced from Kiowa and Comanche raiders, or from bands of Indians drifting south from Fort Sill. They homesteaded just 15 miles from the infamous Warren Wagon Train Raid, in which several teamsters were dismembered and burned by Kiowas. His grandparents did not have a waking moment (or even a sleeping one) which was not clouded over, to some degree, by this sense of dread. The tension must have been unimaginable.
Something of it is captured, I think, in the opening scenes of John Ford’s classic Western, The Searchers, (and captured even better, I think, in Alan LeMay’s novel). It is sunset. And the sunset over the desert is breathtaking. But the sun sets amidst dread because rancher Aaron Edwards hears an owl’s hoot that is not quite an owl’s hoot. His dog sniffs something and whimpers, and He knows – they are about to be attacked.
It is this constant tension and dread that McMurtry feels is the hidden factor behind much of the carnage he considers. He writes: “This deep, constant apprehension, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary literature of the pioneers…In my opinion this grinding, long-sustained apprehension played its part in the ultimate resort to massacre.” (p.6).
This helps me understand. It wasn’t just greed, racism, religious zealotry, or bloodthirstiness – although each person who participated in group slaughter may have been motivated, to a degree, by a mixed bag of factors. It seems to me McMurtry is right. The constant, unrelenting dread that weighed upon natives and settlers brought events to the tipping point.
In the same way, learning about the Great Awakening (1720-1750) helped me understand how we sustained a lengthy, painful revolution against the British crown. It is one thing for men educated at William & Mary, Harvard, and the College of New Jersey to read Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, and formulate ideas about democracy which lead them to believe Independence is necessary – but what about the farmer, the cooper, the tinker, the printer, the apothecary who only reads the Bible and the newspaper if he reads anything at all? These men and their wives heard preaching every Sunday. Most of them were members of denominations who were here because of religious oppression in the mother country. So when men like Muhlenburg, here in Virginia, preached that “Tyranny is Idolatry,” their message resonated and was received. Without this religious factor, I don’t understand the American Revolution.
These hidden factors are like air we breathe– not readily noticeable, but ubiquitous, and necessary.
There are so many things I don’t understand about “people” (the species), and I know that my lack of understanding is caused by my inability to identify the hidden factor – the constant influence of that thing I haven’t perceived yet. Why do people touch something they know will burn them? Why won’t drivers merge in a timely manner? Why do the Detroit Lions still have fans?
The great mystery to me, though, is how someone can continue to refuse the Grace of God. I couldn’t wait till my tenth birthday before receiving it in baptism, and rarely wait till 10 am each day before I have to access it through repentant prayer. When it comes to Grace I have to have instant gratification. And so, as a communicator of the Gospel I am at a great disadvantage – because I am completely clueless as to why a person who knows she (or he) is in need of baptism would refuse so simple an act for so great a gift. This hidden factor is almost certainly something different for each person – but I’d still like to know. If you are such a person would you tell me why?
Understanding why Pioneers and Indians massacred each other – after the fact – doesn’t make any of them less dead. But if I knew why you resist the gift of eternal life I (or someone wiser than I am) might be able to tip things the other way.
Etta Wilson handed me a news item last Sunday which reported that a new company, Eternal Earthbound Pets, offers, for a fee of $110, to take care of your pet in the eventuality of your being caught up in the rapture. When I read this I kicked myself for not thinking of it before. What a great way to collect some free cash. Eternal Earthbound Pets currently has locations in 20 states, but none here in the Commonwealth of Virginia. When I finish pecking at these keys, I’m going to hit their website and see if I can’t get in early on a D.C. area franchise. And I have an improvement on the scheme. It seems that the fee of $110 is a one time charge. But the tribulation is sure to last longer than the 10 or 15 years Killer, or Fifi will live – so I think it should work like an insurance policy that will pay off, when the rapture comes, for a monthly fee. Also, if the tribulation gets bad enough, we may start to think of Killer, or Fifi as an important source of protein. So I think a “No-Stew-Meat” rider ought to be an extra charge.
Of course, to make the money, one has to assume he or she will not be raptured. I freely admit that I expect not to be raptured. I am confident not because I won’t qualify (although I wouldn’t), but because I don’t believe there will be a rapture. So if you do, and want me to take care of your keeshond, or beagle, I am ready to accept dollars or euros.
My father did not expect to be raptured. He expected to profit by it, and he let everyone know it. At the Rome Church of Christ, in Rome Ohio, where he was (and my mother still is) a member, there is a brilliant shaft of light the shines down on sunny mornings from the windows in the middle of the auditorium ceiling. It comes straight down in a perfect circle of light. My dad called it the “rapture beam”, and told everyone that when the rapture came, those sitting in that shaft of light would be the ones taken to heaven. My dad made sure he never sat in the rapture beam. When asked about this he replied “When the rapture does come, I know there will be an empty, red, Lincoln Continental in the parking lot that I intend to drive home.” Of course you can tell from his statement that he didn’t believe there was going to be any rapture either. You can also tell my sarcasm is genetic.
LaHaye and Jenkins have made a lot of money off the rapture – through the sales of their popular “Left Behind” book and film series. They make lots of money because lots of people believe in a rapture – a moment when the chosen are spirited away to heaven as the rest of us are left behind to endure the Great Tribulation and the reign of the Antichrist while we wait for the return of Jesus who will reign in Jerusalem for a thousand years before final judgment. Charles T. Russell made a lot of money off the rapture at the turn of the last century – the commonwealth of Pennsylvania determined that much of it was not made legally. He taught that the rapture would come in 1914. This all makes for exciting pseudo-science fiction. But it is bad theology.
None of it comes from the straightforward language of the gospels, or the letters – where the end is discussed at length. Jesus describes it in Matthew 25; Paul does so in 1 Thessalonians 4-5, and in 1 Corinthians 15; Peter speaks about the end in 2 Peter 3. All these passages agree that the end will be an unexpected instant (Paul calls it a “blink of an eye” – 1 Corinthians 15:52). They all agree that in that instant there will be a sorting out of humanity. The dead in Christ will rise first (I Thessalonians 4:16), then all who belong to Him will be joined with Him (v.17, also Matthew 24:40-42). There is that moment when the lost see the grand reunion, but are not a part of it. They are left behind, but not for long, because then we will all be gathered for immediate judgment (Matthew 25:31, 2 Peter 3:8). Nowhere, from Genesis to Jude, is there any hint that one should plan for post-rapture doggie care.
To find the single reference to a reign of 1000 years one has to turn to the pages of the highly symbolic and cryptic book of Revelation, and a passage (Revelation 20:1-10) clearly connected to the fall of the Rome. I will not argue that I know exactly what Revelation 20:1-10 is describing. I will argue that you don’t either. I will also argue that one does not take a single passage - especially one filled with symbolic numbers and imagery – and use it to rewrite what is clearly communicated in the rest of scripture,
No matter how neat the special effects would be,
Or how much money there is to be made.
The Bible does not teach that there will be a rapture. If, however, I haven’t convinced you, and you are a dog owner…
On our what's become an annual end of summer getaway, I watched a rebroadcast of the events of 9/11 as they happened. Not the kind of cheery television fare you usually want to numb your mind with on a getaway trip. Much like 8 years ago when we were starting our vacation habit, I turned on the TV one sunny morning to catch the local weather and instead tuned in just in time to see that horrific, tragic day unfold. And just as before, there was no turning it off. There were people I knew, or knew of, in those buildings, like most of us here did - excluding Brother Bill and others who were actually inside. How could you turn it off?At the end of the program the producers said the reason the show was rebroadcast was so we would never forget. But I already had.
I had forgotten the initially passive description of events from the morning show personalities who were used to describing the world in sunny terms. I had forgotten the disbelief - not yet shock - reaction many people originally had. Were they couldn't accept what was happening as real, and tried to explain it away. I had forgotten the confusion that permeated everything; the news reports, the man on the street, officialdom's coordination. I had forgotten how ignorant we really were of other people's cultures - some of which include extensive hate of us - and how clueless we were about who could do such a thing.
I had forgotten that White House tours were once very open to the public, where folks could walk right up to the building and get in without having to beg their senator’s office for days - and still have to go through intensive security screenings. I had forgotten that such tours were still going on that morning even after the attacks had happened because security wasn’t that big of a deal. In Washington? I had forgotten.
I had forgotten how the evening news anchor folks took over from the cheery morning people when it became evident that there was no explaining away that we had been attacked; and that thousands had lost their lives, or were about to. I had forgotten how tall the towers really were against the Manhattan skyline. Unimaginably tall, dwarfing the Empire State building which looked impossibly high on our recent visit there.
I had forgotten the plume that rose, and spread, and covered, and lingered, choking the air out of people, and birds, and life.
Apparently I had forgotten even more than a whole lot.
The rebroadcast rebroadcasted, I turned it off.
I suppose that’s the way we deal with things we don’t want to see or hear or remember. We turn it off, tune it out, remind ourselves less and less about it until we’ve forgotten it mostly.
Scripture says in 1Thessalonians 5 that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night. What I had forgotten the most in watching the rebroadcast was the utter shock and uncontrollable fear and hysterical fits that many people on the ground in New York City as things worsened. Not the folks in the middle of the crisis, but the folks who were watching from the front row, not to be glib. Folks, unhurt, were screaming, sobbing, crying out the Lord’s name, some in vain, some for mercy. Folks, looking on, panicked, were scared to death of what might be next, or that they might be next. Most were freaking out, as our teens would say. Hearing someone truly freak out is unnerving, makes you sick at your stomach because you see how real their pain and fear is.
I had truly forgotten.
And what I couldn’t get off my mind after seeing the rebroadcast was how that must be exactly the kind of reaction many of us will have at the Lord’s coming. Utter shock, and uncontrollable fear, and hysteria. Too late.
There were folks at the scene who weren’t hysterical. They were the firefighters and policemen. Going in, going up. They had a surety about them. Weren’t scared, visibly. They were prepared. They had trained for it. They had dedicated their lives to it. So when the moment came, there was no fear. And I couldn’t get that off my mind either. How much like the firefighters I’m often not. Prepared. Trained. Dedicated. Ready. I suspect that goes for most of us.
Few of us can relate to a thief in the night, thankfully. Few know the fear associated with waking up scared to death ‘cause there’s someone in the house and we might not live. Our cushy world is just that, cushy. To the point we pay to go to the movie theater to be scared. But all of us can relate to 9/11. And whether we sobbed uncontrollably or not, we all vividly can relate to waking up to a sunny day only to see things change forever; and to realize but for the grace of God, there go I.
If we just won’t turn it off.
For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night. While they are saying, “Peace and safety!” then destruction will come upon them suddenly like labor pains upon a woman with child, and they will not escape. But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day would overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness; so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober. I Thessalonians 5:2-6 NASB
