« August 2007 | Main | October 2007 »
Dirk Mitchell just posted a couple of videos he shot about the church over the last two years. The first video is a general video about the church and the second one looks at a Habitat for Humanity project we did in 2005. They're really cool. I think it adds some of the "sublime" to the normally "ridiculous" stuff that people post on YouTube!
Our Jewish friends just finished the celebration of Yom Kippur over the weekend, which is one of the holiest days of the year. Yom Kippur is the day of atonement and Jews are to spend 24 hours fasting and asking for forgiveness, approaching God and those whom they have wronged with contrition and a vow to never repeat the sin again.
An interesting article on Slate this morning exposes one of the ways in which Yom Kippur may be perfunctorily performed, however. Rather than do the hard work of actually getting together and looking people in the eye, owning up to their own sin, some have instead opted to simply broadcast a general "Gee, I'm sorry if I offended you this year in anyway" email to everyone in their address book. This kind of "spray-fire atonement" is more of a way of covering one's bases than actually asking for forgiveness. Says Michael Weiss:
"Operating on the Don Corleone-ish principle that a request can't be refused during a blessed event, these Jews literally phone in their apologies and expect forgiveness for all sorts of trespasses, be it a missed birthday, an unpaid loan, or nasty gossip...Spray-fire atonement does for the immortal soul what crash dieting does for the body—the weight almost always piles back on. Worse, it's psychologically debilitating because the more a person grows habituated to cyclical behavior, the more desensitized he becomes to original purpose. It helps to think of teshuva as sin OCD."
Both Christians and Jews talk a lot about forgiveness, but real repentance is often overlooked. Truth is that it's hard to ask for forgiveness if we're truly being honest with ourselves. We have to be willing to expose the darker parts of our soul to another person and to God. Failure to do that means that we are bound to keep repeating the same sin over and over. Repentance can never be a perfunctory exercise. Breaking "sin OCD" is an intentional process.
Ritual days like Yom Kippur in Judaism and Ash Wednesday in our tradition call us to get serious about our sin. We shouldn't just wait for those assigned days, however. On the other hand, we shouldn't be in the habit of offering blanket apologies as a way of absolving ourselves. Asking for forgiveness is a spiritual discipline!
Audio of this week's sermon is now posted on the church web site. Click on the audio link on the right side of the page and you'll find this Sunday's sermon as well as an archive of some recent ones. I'll post the text in this space occasionally, but sermons seem to always more effective if they're heard rather than read.
While you're at the church site, check out the new Amazon widget and some of the other new features. We're adding new content everyday (which is a slow process given that I am the web content creator as well as the preacher).
A.J. Jacobs has a new book coming out describing his experience of living nearly every rule in the Bible for a whole year. Jacobs was a self-described agnostic before the experiment and now calls himself a "reverent agnostic." The book, The Year of Living Biblically, is now available.
An excerpt from the Newsweek interview with Jacobs: "The experience changed me in big ways and small ways. There’s a lot about gratefulness in the Bible, and I would say I’m more thankful. I focus on the hundred little things that go right in a day, instead of the three or four things that go wrong. And I love the Sabbath. There’s something I really like about a forced day of rest. Also, during the experiment I wore a lot of white clothes, because Ecclesiastes says let your garments always be white, and I loved it, so I look like Tom Wolfe now. Wearing white just made me happier. I couldn’t be in a bad mood walking down the street looking like I was about to play in the semifinals at Wimbledon. One thing I learned is that the outside affects the inside, your behavior shapes your thoughts. I also really liked what one of my spiritual advisers said, which was that you can view life as a series of rights and entitlements, or a series of responsibilities. I like seeing my life as a series of responsibilities. It’s sort of, "Ask not what God can do for you, ask what you can do for God." Check out the full interview and I'm sure you'll be as intrigued as I am about his findings.
Fascinating stuff. We tend to use a "cafeteria" approach to the Bible, picking and choosing what we want to believe. Jacobs lived it literally and indeed proved that some things in scripture aren't meant to be taken that way, but a lot of things that even professing Christians skip are things that we should be embracing--things like Sabbath and taking sin seriously.
I'm really interested in this book. I've put a link to order it on our new Amazon widget on the blog and on our web site. Every time you order a book through that link, Amazon donates back 4% to the church.
I was surfing on Slate this morning (which is a cool site if you're interested in all things cultural) and came across a piece talking about the heavy price cuts Apple and its retailers are making on the new IPhone--dropping the price from $599 to $399. Now, if you bought one of the $599 phones aren't you feeling a bit, well, hacked off today?
I've had a couple of PDAs over the years and I usually get the basic cell phone (the free one, in other words). The problem for me has always been keeping up with things like charging batteries and synching the thing. Plus, I never liked the fact that I had to use that stylus to write anything in it, meaning that it actually took LONGER to put information in the PDA that it would to write it down on paper. Then there's the fact that your PDA/IPhone is already obsolete as soon as you put your hands on the box. There's always some new upgrade coming out. Finally, carrying around something that costs $599 or $399 always makes me a little paranoid--what if it gets busted or I forget it somewhere? I already have a laptop that I like and it's plenty enough responsibility.
Recently I went back to a paper planner--the trusty old Franklin planner. The refills cost me $25 and I splurged on a $2 mechanical pencil. Maybe I'm becoming more of a Luddite in my middle age, but there's something very satisfying about putting something down in my own handwriting, even if it is sometimes illegible to other human beings.
When you think about it, too, putting things down on paper may actually make them last longer--like say, after you die. Scott Lemon, who's a member of the church and a tech guy, recently wrote a piece on his blog about the interesting problem of maintaining your life in cyberspace after you pass on. It's a complex problem--one I never really thought about. If you've written stuff down in pencil or a nice pen, on the other hand, it'll still be viewable no matter what happens to technology in the future.
So, if you're beating yourself up today for having spent all that money on a soon-to-be-obsolete-anyway IPhone, I invite you to consider stepping back in time and pick up a pencil. The upgrade is cheap and simple and may soon mark you as being on the cutting edge of cool (at least that's what I tell myself). Of course, I was a history major which is the equivalent of taking a vow of poverty, so what do I know?
A Nebraska state senator has filed a lawsuit against...God. Yep, Sen. Ernie Chambers accuses God of causing untold death and horror. He filed the suit in Douglas County, but claims that it's a universal lawsuit because God is everywhere.
Turns out Senator Chambers is upset because of another lawsuit and is suing God to make a point--that anyone can file a lawsuit against anyone anywhere anytime. Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terrorist threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused “widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants.”
The Omaha senator has long been a critic of Christianity and skips morning prayers in the legislature.
Frivolous lawsuit? Sure. Here's another politician doing some grandstanding. But the story does raise an interesting point--well, at least it would if your theology has God being the cause of all the evil and destruction on the earth.
What the senator probably doesn't realize in his diatribe is that he's raising the issue of theodicy--the problem of evil. He's not the first one to do that, of course. Even the psalms question God about the apparent unfairness in the world--that the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer. Job questions God and is basically told by God to be quiet. There's no easy answer here.
The whole thing gets me to thinking, though. I mean, I wonder how God would respond to the lawsuit? What kind of arguments would God offer in his defense? Some, no doubt, would expect God to simply smite the accuser, but God doesn't seem to work like that. In fact, if you read the Bible carefully, you notice that often it is God who suffers the most when humanity becomes the victim of its own sin. That's really the story of the cross when you get right down to it.
Chambers is another in a long line of folks recently who want to blame God and religion for all the evil in the world. Agressive atheism has dominated the bestseller list with books like Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Bashing God is the subject du jour.
Problem is that all these critiques of God come from the outside. Those who have taken the time to know God see things very differently. I find it fascinating that God's critics spend some much time denouncing that God exists--it's almost an evangelical atheism. Perhaps they "doth protest too much."
It'll be interesting to see what happens with this suit and fun to imagine what would happen if God shows up in court. What do you think?
Oh, and if you're interested in reading more about theodicy, N.T. Wright's latest book Evil and the Justice of God is just the ticket. Wright talks about God as one who works in the midst of and in spite of evil to bring justice to the world. It's a good read. Maybe we should send the senator a copy!
* Yesterday's sermon had some copyrighted material in it, but you can listen to it online at our new web site. I got a lot of reaction to the Tony Campolo story I told and, if you want to read more, his book The Kingdom of God is a Party is a great one. I had dinner with Tony when he came to speak at our church a few years ago, and he's as genuine as it gets. You can't help but get inspired by his passionate faith that is lived out in action. Yeah, he's controversial...but then again, so was Jesus!
* I drove down to a Salt Lake hospital yesterday right after worship to visit one of our members who had been very sick due to a bad reaction to some medication. I talked to her husband the night before and he was very concerned. I prayed with him over the phone. When I got to the hospital yesterday, he told me that right after we prayed together she immediately started to improve.
Understand, I'm not an expert prayer practitioner, nor do I see myself in the Benny Hinn healer model (actually, I pray I'm not at all like Benny Hinn!). But incidents like this do convince me that there's a real value to prayer. It's not so much that fervent prayer gets us what we want--clearly, that doesn't always happen. What prayer does, however, is put us more firmly in the mind and will of God. When we do that, amazing things seem to happen. We're going to be exploring that in this week's upcoming sermon based on I Timothy 2:1-7.
* Says here that OJ Simpson got arrested over the weekend. Now there's a surpise. He says that the police have not responded well to him since his "acquittal" years ago. If there's a better illustration of our sins finding us out I'm not sure what it would be.
* After last night's Red Sox-Yankees series finale, I decided that I'm very glad I'll be in Israel during some of the playoffs. Too many of those "down-by-a-run, bottom-of-the-ninth, bases-loaded" scenarios can't be good for the old blood pressure. I'd have to get up at 3AM to watch the games there...not gonna happen (well, ok, it might, but...)
* The Steelers won yesterday in convincing fashion, although they looked bad doing it. No, not their play so much as the throwback unis they wore. Yellow helmets and dark brown jerseys? There's a reason they were such a bad team early in their history!
This has been one of those intensely busy weeks around here, full of meetings and running to and fro. In that vein, some things I've observed this week:
- I read a review of Patrick Lencioni's latest book Three Signs of a Miserable Job. Interestingly, the number one sign you have a miserable job has to do with whether your boss knows you and values you. We had a staff retreat all day on Monday and part of it was simply telling our life stories to each other. I've been working with some of these folks for four years and didn't know all of their stories. Man, that was a powerful exercise. You can tell that it has bonded us a little closer as a team, too. I'll be buying Lencioni's book ASAP so that I don't create a "miserable" environment for my team!
- We had 21 people come out for a study on Christianity and world religions on Tuesday night. I got inspired by Stephen Prothero's new book Religious Literacy, which says we should be teaching religion in schools as a point of awareness for our children of the different worldviews of the people around us. It's good stuff and the class is great. We looked at Hinduism this week. Some good karma in the discussion, I think (if you don't know what that is, really, you oughta join us!).
- I joined three other guys from our church today in playing in a golf tournament to benefit the Park City chapter of Young Life. We came in 10th at six under par. I'm always the weakest link in these best ball things, but I figure if I can hit at least two good drives and make a couple of putts they'll keep asking me to come back. I'm not a passionate golfer, but it's a good social game. Most of the time I could quote Mark Twain about golf--it's a "good walk spoiled."
- I'm reading Jon Dominic Crossan's latest book God and Empire and it's really good. I'm not generally a fan of Crossan and his friend Marcus Borg--I think their view of the early church is sometimes more fantasy than fact--but this book is some top-notch scholarship. I'd recommend it highly if you're looking for a book that is extremely relevant in understanding the role of Christianity in the Roman Empire and in our own American Empire today. Good stuff, intriguing stuff and sometimes disturbing stuff.
- Turns out my favorite restaurant, Chipotle Mexican Grill, is finally coming to the Salt Lake area. They open a new store in Union Park tomorrow. I'll be there munching on a chicken fajita with hot sauce. They say you can register to win free burritos for a year. I'm so there! If you're a fan of Chipotle, write to them and encourage them to put one in Park City. Of course, were that to happen I would likely not be in the office very much and you members of PCCC would have to get used to meeting me at the same place for lunch all the time.
When I was in college I worked out at a little hole-in-the-wall gym on Philadelphia Street in Indiana, PA. The fitness center at school was always crowded or being used by a class, so I’d scrape together a few extra bucks to work out in this place that looked very much like the gym Rocky Balboa worked out in—you know, heavy bag in the corner, metal plate weights, dim lighting, the smell of decades of sweat, that kind of thing.
I was always the smallest guy in the gym. There were guys there who could lift a small town, wearing their weight belts and grunting furiously when they’d rack a bending barbell over their heads. The music was loud and classic rock (not the poppy stuff they played on campus—no Madonna, no Depeche Mode) and guys were not afraid to grimace, grunt, and groan.
Those kinds of gyms have largely been replaced these days by sleek, ultramodern fitness centers. I work out at the Fieldhouse and really like it there, and I’m sure many of you work out in similar places. While the equipment is better and the place much cleaner, with flat panel TVs and such and showers that aren’t growing new species, there’s something kind of antiseptic about it. You can sweat and do all the working out you like, but you’re pretty much expected to be quiet about it. I have to supply my own classic rock and it’s got to be injected directly into my ear via my MP3 player.
I read an article recently about a guy named Albert Argibay who worked out at a Planet Fitness gym in New York. Albert is a New York State corrections officer—he works in a prison and working out for him is really about survival, so he takes it pretty seriously. One day Albert was doing a clean and jerk of about 500 pounds over his head—try to fathom that—and in the process Albert was grunting like, well, like a guy lifting 500 pounds over his head. When I hear somebody doing that, I turn and look and am often impressed. After all, I grunt when I’m on the 8th rep of a hundred pounds—not exactly world class strength.
Turns out, though, that Albert’s grunting was a big no-no. See, Planet Fitness has banned grunting during weightlifting at their 120 locations. In an attempt to eliminate any gym practices that might intimidate workout novices, their locations each come equipped with a Lunk Alarm. The Lunk Alarm is a giant purple siren mounted on the wall next to this definition: “lunk – n. [slang] one who grunts, drops weights, or judges.” When a manager approached Albert about his grunting, a tense conversation ensued which led to Albert being escorted out by police and his membership revoked. That’s right, Albert got tossed out of the gym for making noise while he exercised. In the gym I worked out at in Indiana, PA, that kind of grunting would’ve gotten high fives from everyone.
Two questions leap to mind here: 1) Would you confront a guy who just lifted 500 pounds over his head? and, 2) Doesn’t a serious workout require some expression of pain?
Sure, grunting may be mildly rude if uttered loud enough to carry across the gym floor, but it’s merely an exaggeration of a healthy function during weightlifting. Exhaling during the exertion portion of a lift is important for lowering the high pressures in the chest cavity which can lead to broken blood vessels or even a hernia. Physical therapy research even shows that grunting can create 2 to 5 percent greater force during lifting as it helps stabilize one’s spine.
Did you watch any of the U.S. Open Tennis this week? How many of these professional tennis players, playing in expensive outfits before quiet crowds, keep quiet when they hit the ball. I mean, come on, if you just put the TV on and weren’t watching you’d swear you were hearing someone being tortured. Maria Sharapova, Andy Roddick—all grunting and yelping. Yet, somehow they don’t get tossed off the court.
OK, I’ll admit that Planet Fitness is probably right in trying to promote a non-judgmental environment, but have they gone too far? Is banning grunting turning the workout world into a coddle culture? If you’re going to get the gain of a workout, you’ve got to be able to do the work full out. It’s a work out, not a work-in. It’s a gym, not a library.
You might have read my little piece for the newsletter this month talking about people who join a gym but almost never go. Their commitment stops at the point of pain. If it hurts, even a little bit, they don’t want to do it anymore. That’s why the gym is packed the first two weeks of January and then back to normal by Groundhog Day. Pain tends to weed out the uncommitted.
When I read this passage in Luke’s Gospel I hear Jesus sounding like a serious personal trainer reminding the crowds of the pain that weeds out the uncommitted. The crowds have been following Jesus, seeing him as being very popular. They like to listen to him, and they like the idea of following him. Jesus is at the height of his popularity, but rather than bask in the glow, he whips around and tells the crowd point blank that following him will be spiritually and physically demanding. There’s no five happy hops to heaven here, no promise of spiritual fitness if one is just nice to one’s neighbors. Jesus clearly defines discipleship in terms of the cost in blood, sweat, and tears.
The conditions for discipleship that Jesus sets are muscular indeed. Take a look at these in order. First, Jesus says that unless a would-be follower “hates” their family and even “life itself” he or she cannot be Jesus’ disciple. Jesus is using some exaggeration here for effect, which was one of the characteristics of rabbinic discourse, but the point is still pretty clear. This doesn’t mean you get to write-off your irritating in-laws (if you are unfortunate enough to have them—I like mine). “Hate” here is a word that denotes contrast. For Jesus, a disciple’s priority must be so evidently on Christ and kingdom that by comparison it’s as if they hate their family.
For the twelve who followed Jesus, this was the real deal. They literally left their families behind to follow Jesus around. Many never returned. It seems unthinkable in a culture like ours and, in many ways, it was unthinkable then, too. Subjugating one’s family to following Jesus is, indeed, a groan-inducing call. But there it is. Now, you may not be called to leave your family behind to be a disciple, but we are all called to evaluate how our love for family compares to our love of Jesus. What about the amount of quality time we spend with family as compared to God? Is worship on Sunday morning, for example, more important than a kids’ soccer game. When Church, a child’s spiritual formation, setting aside time for God, becomes less of a priority than a game, we’re elevating the comfort of family over following Christ. A soccer team is great, but it doesn’t compare to the grace and love of God. What are we teaching our kids about the value of faith when it is always put on the back burner for something else?
Or, how about this? Think about how much money you spent on family vacations and outings this summer. Got a rough figure? Now think about how much you gave to causes that serve those in need—the church, charities, other avenues that make an impact for God’s Kingdom. How do those two figures compare? How much have you spent this year on things to make your family more comfortable, versus how much you gave to make the lives of those who are poor and marginalized more comfortable? Those comparisons will tell you a lot about your priorities versus that of Jesus. It’s not that we shouldn’t take our families on vacation, it’s just that disciples of Jesus are called to re-order our priorities.
But Jesus doesn’t stop there. The grunts and groans just keep on coming. The short parables about building a tower and going to war are all about what it costs to be a disciple. It’s easy to start, says Jesus, but are we willing to finish the work?
Truth is that it costs a lot to be a follower of Jesus, that is, if you’re doing it right. Add up the amount of money we spend on tithing, supporting missionaries and Christian charities, the church building fund, buying books and paying for kids’ camps, etc. Now think about the fact that a nonbeliever doesn’t spend any of that money the way we do. It costs a bit, doesn’t it?
But the question Jesus is raising is whether or not it costs us enough. The idea of starting to build a tower and not having the funds to finish it points out the crowd/fan club’s shallow view of how much financial sacrifice goes into vibrant faith. To love Jesus means loving money, possessions and comfort so little that we give uncomfortable amounts of it away. That’s what Jesus means about giving up possessions in order to follow.
The classic thought from C.S. Lewis drives home this idea of the financial cost of discipleship: “I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditures on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charity expenditure excludes them.”
Family and money are two areas of huge personal value, and Jesus wants to know how he stacks up next to them. Interestingly, these are two of the highest cultural values in America. Jesus calls those values into question. You can’t be a real disciple, he says, a real follower, unless your willing to do the grunt work of giving up the things that are most important to us.
But as if that weren’t enough, Jesus goes further. He pushes the crowd with an even more personal demand. To follow me, he says, you’ve got to be willing to let go of family and finances—but even more you have to give up yourself.
The most powerful image to convey this in today’s passage is verse 27: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” Not may not, cannot.
And remember that Jesus had not yet gone to his own cross, so he is not referencing any spiritualized understanding of what a cross meant. For Jesus, “bearing one’s cross” wasn’t about struggling with some physical ailment or problem. He is in fact referring to the Roman torture device, the universally recognized instrument of execution. The cross is that thing which costs people their very lives. Jesus is warning the crowd that no one can follow him unless they are prepared to suffer the same fate that Jesus would suffer—death at the hands of a sinful humanity.
Now the truth is that you and I may not be called to martyrdom, but we are called to die. Paul uses this language throughout his letters. To “die” with Christ means to put to death our old, sinful, self-indulgent lives and embrace instead the Jesus way of living. “I have been crucified with Christ,” says Paul in Galatians, “and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” To pick up cross means to put to death everything that holds us back for living the life we were intended—lives that reflect the glory of Christ in us.
But like the real cross of Jesus, putting something to death is a painful process. C.S. Lewis is again helpful here. I’ve been reading and re-reading Lewis’s allegory about heaven titled “The Great Divorce” and there’s a part in the story that grips me every time I read it. A ghost, a spirit of a man, comes to the shores of heaven but he has a little red lizard on his shoulder that whispers things into the ghost’s ear. The man knows that the lizard is telling him lies, but he listens anyway (the lizard represents lust). An Angel, a figure representing Jesus, meets the ghost and offers to kill the lizard for him. The ghost hims, haws, and hesitates. He wants the lizard dead, but he’s afraid to let it go because it will hurt to give up the guilty pleasure. He’s afraid that killing the lizard will mean his own death.
The Angel, however, persists. He reminds the ghost that he can kill the lizard, but the Ghost will have to give permission.
Eventually, the Ghost gives up in desperation. “You’re right,” he says to the Angel, “I would be better to be dead than to live with this creature.”
The Angel kills the lizard, which transforms into a beautiful stallion. The Ghost jumps on its back and rides into heaven. The moral? Putting sin to death in us is a difficult process, a process that may even make us cry out in protest and pain. But it’s the only way we can really follow the way of Jesus. Every one of us has some kind of lizard whispering in our ear—a lizard representing lust, money, work, status, power—and that lizard has to die if we’re going to experience real life in Christ.
There’s no “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” here. This is a Jesus calling people to hard work, grunt work. Is Jesus graceful? Yes. Is he loving? Yes. But does he overlook what we do? Not at all. Our entire life must be given to him.
This is hard stuff, to be sure. It’s so hard that many Christians believe that discipleship is something that’s reserved for just a few faithful fanatics. For most people, being a Christian is about going to church, being nice to people, subscribing to a particular set of beliefs, being a respectable and moral person. All those are good things, but they are not what Jesus called people to be. Interestingly, the word “disciple” appears 269 times in the New Testament, while “Christian” is found only three times, mostly to differentiate this group of people as distinct from the Jews. Says Dallas Willard, “The New Testament is a book about disciples, by disciples, and for disciples of Jesus Christ.” To be a Christian is to be a disciple.
The crowd must have balked at what Jesus was saying. I imagine many turned away at that point. We know that many would later. It seemed that the more Jesus talked about this, the fewer people he retained. So much for church growth.
What’s important here, though, is that the life that Jesus was calling people to wasn’t simply a religion—it was a whole lifestyle. Dallas Willard, whose book The Great Omission has been gripping my soul this week, says that Jesus never commanded his disciples to “go and make Christians”—members of a religion. Instead, it was “go and make disciples”—people who will reflect the character of Jesus and change the world.
This has been a painful week for me wrestling with this text. It convicts me, both as a person and as a spiritual leader. Have we been “making disciples” as a church or have we simply been playing the part of Christians? Is the world around us different because we have followed the radical call of Jesus, or do we simply accommodate our spiritual lives to the culture around us, earning more, spending more, using our prime time for ourselves, coming to church occasionally and calling it Christianity? These are questions I think we need to wrestle with individually and as a church.
Some questions for reflection:
On a 1 to 10 scale, how would you rate your own discipleship after Jesus right now?
• What things keep this number from being higher?
• What habits, actions or attitudes would help that area of your life?
• What changes can you make to start living out those habits, actions and attitudes?
• Whom do you need to share these things with so they can help you and pray for you?
This is a conversation I’d love for us to have together as we seek to be Christ’s church.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was martyred by the Nazis during World War II, offers soul-rattling words that fit well with Jesus’ teaching: “The call separates a small group, those who follow, from the great mass of the people. The disciples are few and will always be only a few.”
How can each of us be more of the small group, the few, the disciples? Go ahead and grunt if you need to. A little hard work and sweat comes with kingdom exertion.
Source: “Grunting Allowed,” Homiletics, September-October 2007, p. 21-23.
My son Rob recently joined a youth flag football league at the Basin Rec Fieldhouse, which is really good for a little guy who inherited his father's stature. It's supposed to be a league for kids in 3rd to 5th grade, though some of these kids look like they're ready to drive.
Rob's coach is a great lady who loves the game and is way more knowledgeable about the nuts and bolts of the game than I am. I mean, I'm a football fan, but I'm also a big picture guy. I don't know cover-2 from a nickel package but I do know what the results are supposed to look like. Baseball is really more my thing.
This afternoon was the Charger's first game. On Monday, the coach called and asked if I'd fill in for her since she had been called out on a business trip on short notice. That meant I would have to organize the team in practice, draw up some basic plays (we hadn't gotten that far yet in the other practices), and manage 13 kids who all want to be the quarterback. I said, "Sure, I think I can handle that." Maybe it was that dad gene that makes you think you know everything. Or maybe it was some secret buried fantasy about being a football coach with a headset and clipboard. I don't know. All I do know is that I had to get busy.
Wednesday afternoon I scrawled out six plays and they were named, very originally, plays one through six. The odd plays would go left, the even ones would go right. For defense, well, I figured I'd just get the kids to cover somebody. If these other kids are like mine, their short-term memory isn't developed quite yet. I'm pleased if they remember to wear shoes.
We had an intense practice with lots of questions and lots of hand-raising and asking to be quarterback/kicker/receiver/running back. They looked like a nest full of baby birds with their mouths open. Another dad and I sorted things out, got a few plays run...sort of, then noticed that an hour had passed in nanoseconds. "Study your playbook," I said as they left. I'm sure they got right on it.
Game day, today, was tense. A quarter of the team was late, which blew up my whole scheme. Yeah, they knew where to line up, but just about every play was going to be an audible. The other team was filled with kids who seemed like they played for Notre Dame at one time and ate the equivalent of a grocery store every day. Ours are, well, small and several aren't exactly sure how the game works. One kid made a point of telling me, "Coach, I've never even seen a football game. What do I do?" I put him on defense and told him, "Grab the flag of any kid in red who has the ball." He actually had two sacks. God is good.
Our kids fought hard, doing better than I ever imagined. They scored two touchdowns--one on a quarterback scramble by Curtis, our left-handed QB, and another on a punt return by Marina, one of our great girls. The ladies seem to understand the game better than the boys, which proves that women being smarter than us starts at a very early age. We even punched in an extra point after one of the TDs. Defensively, I discovered that the blitz is an effective weapon and very easy for the kids to understand. They like the blitz, too, mostly because they all know what to do--GO!
We lost 25-13. The league isn't exactly set up for parity and one of the kids on the other team was heavily rumored by our kids to be a sixth grader, a clear ringer. Well, at any rate, the kid was fast and burned us good for most of their scores. Still, I was proud of the Chargers for even managing to score despite a coach who's biggest exposure to football is the Steelers on TV and marching on yard lines in high school.
Coach Margaret is back next week and, man, am I glad. Maybe I'll volunteer to put the half-time show for the next game.
Recent Comments