Christianity

Eric Show and the wrong side of history

Dave Farquhar Baseball, Christianity, Human Interest, Music , , ,

ESPN has a moving article about Eric Show today. Eric Show was one of several tragic figures from the mid-1980s San Diego Padres who stood in the shadow of Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, one of the greatest hitters ever.

Show’s family would prefer that people remember him as the millionaire pitcher who was fond of inviting the homeless people he passed on the street to dinner.

But generally speaking, people remember him for a hit he allowed in 1985. A hit to a much lesser man. And nine short years later, Eric Show was dead at age 37.

Show’s tragedy, sadly, wasn’t unique among his teammates. Left-handed pitcher Dave Dravecky lost his arm to cancer. Second baseman Alan Wiggins became the first baseball player to die of AIDS. Tony Gwynn, of course, died much too young as well.

Supposedly the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs are cursed, but their 1980s teams have nothing on that.

But I’m way ahead of myself.

In some ways, Eric Show was a Greg Maddux-like pitcher. He didn’t have overpowering stuff, but he threw a lot of pitches well, and was much smarter than most of his opponents. Show never matched Maddux’s best numbers, but spent most of his career just short of the brink of Maddux-like superstardom. Scarred by a poor relationship with an abusive father, Show’s difficulties bouncing back when little things went wrong turned him into an all-or-nothing pitcher, and those occasional games where he had nothing were the difference between him and guys like Maddux.

Show put together a perfectly respectable career, even if he never lived up to his full potential. During his career, the Padres went from last place to the World Series, and he played a key role in that transformation. Even ignoring what he did off the field, people should remember him as a very good pitcher for a very good team.

Instead, he’s the guy who gave up a record-setting hit. He’s also the guy who hit Andre Dawson with a beanball in 1987. That is, when someone remembers him at all.

But there was a lot going on with him behind the scenes. Show was a gifted musician. Routinely he asked homeless people to join him for dinner. He handed out $50 bills like candy to people less fortunate than him. He was a committed Christian. Finally, he was a deep thinker and only two of his teammates understood him.

Show started falling apart in 1987, when the Padres traded those two friends–Mark Thurmond and fellow tragic figure Dave Dravecky. That was the same year he hit Andre Dawson. I’m familiar with the other side of that story. I was a Cubs fan in 1987, and I’m related to ex-Cubs pitcher Rick Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe had lobbied hard for the Cubs to sign Dawson. When he saw his man go down, Sutcliffe went after Show. The commissioner fined and suspended him 8 games for his role in the brawl.

What I didn’t know was that Eric Show hand-wrote an apology and tried to give it to Dawson.

Abandoned and injured, Show did something completely out of character. The man who talked junkies on the street into going into rehab turned to drugs himself. First it was greenies, which propelled him to his last great season in 1988. But that soon led to crystal meth, cocaine, and heroin. After two barely mediocre seasons, the Padres let him go, and at age 35, he signed with Tony LaRussa’s Oakland Athletics. The ESPN article calls the move naive, but I disagree. Show was exactly the kind of reclamation product that LaRussa’s longtime pitching coach, Dave Duncan, specialized in.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, it didn’t work out. Show didn’t turn into one of Duncan’s success stories.

In 1992, Show was out of baseball and in rehab when he went to see his former teammate, Dave Dravecky, give a lecture. Dravecky wrote two books about his battle with cancer and embarked on a long career as a speaker and author. Dravecky recognized him and asked him to call, but Show lost his number.

ESPN has the rest of the story.

But I agree with his family that Eric Show’s legacy ought to be as a man who took homeless people out to dinner and who forgave and repeatedly tried to reconcile with his abusive father.

I’ve been following baseball for as long as I could read. I’m sure Eric Show isn’t the only baseball player who ever took a homeless person to dinner. But I never heard of any other.

The American Dream vs. the American Greed

Dave Farquhar Christianity, Genealogy, Human Interest, Society , , ,

Last week at church, our newly-installed vicar preached about greed vs. generosity, and he ripped a little on the American Dream, which he defined as each generation having better stuff and living more comfortably than their parents did.

I think he’s right, letting that consume you definitely leads to problems. But I was taught that the American Dream was more about opportunity than it was about materialism. And maybe that’s where we’ve gone wrong.

I’m probably 10 years older than the vicar is, and I attended schools that didn’t exactly value new history books. So what I was taught probably dates back two generations, not just one.

And when I was in school, for the most part they taught us that the American Dream was about opportunity, and about parents giving their kids better opportunities than they had.

Today, I hear marketers on the radio saying, "That’s the American Dream, isn’t it? Owning a home?" Or tying the American Dream to any other materialistic thing.

Note the shift. It shifted from the kids to self.

I don’t know exactly why my direct ancestor, Adam Farquhar, came to the Americas in the 1700s (perhaps 1729). Presumably it was because he couldn’t get land in Scotland. But you see the American Dream working from generation to generation. Adam’s son Benajah owned land. Benajah’s son Edward became a doctor. At least five of Edward’s sons, including my ancestor Isaac, became doctors. Isaac’s son Ralph didn’t become a doctor, but he became a successful businessman who hobnobbed with some very powerful people. Ralph Jr. revived the family tradition of being doctors, and he was wealthy enough to give my dad every opportunity in the world.

My dad never did become as wealthy or as successful as his dad was. But by Dad’s own admission, he was a slacker. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity. Look at things strictly in material terms, and Dad set the Farquhar line back a couple of generations.

But Dad gave me opportunities. Wherever we lived, he got me into a good school. When circumstances found us living in a town that didn’t have a good high school, Dad moved us out before I turned 14, so that my sister and I could go to good high schools. And Dad saw to it that we would be able to go to college.

My sons aren’t old enough to go to school yet, but they live in a good school district. And I did what I had to do in order to ensure they would have a choice between several good preschools, to get them a good foundation. I don’t know if either of them will be reading at age 3 like I was, but I’m going to make sure they have that chance.

I may have to make some personal sacrifices in order for them to have what they need. But for what Dad spent getting me a good high school education, he could have been driving Lincolns instead of those Dodge pickup trucks he drove. (And this was before pickup trucks became status symbols. Dad didn’t want his patients thinking they were paying for him to have an extravagant lifestyle.)

So I don’t have any problem brown-bagging my lunch, driving an older car, or using an older computer so my sons can go to good preschools. And given the choice between a smaller house in a great school district and a bigger house in a bad district, I’ll keep what I already have, so they can go to good schools.

What they make of it is up to them. But never let it be said that I didn’t get them the opportunity.

Joel Osteen considered

Dave Farquhar Christianity

Every once in a while somebody asks me about Joel Osteen. Osteen is the pastor of the largest of the megachurches, and the author of a runaway bestselling self-help book.

I’m not a student of Osteen. I haven’t read much of his book, nor have I seen him much on TV. I may have an incomplete view of what he teaches, but I have a problem with the things he does teach.The biggest problem is that Osteen teaches that if you’re a Christian, God rewards you materially. Even with the little things. Osteen says that it’s not just OK to want the best spot in a parking lot, or to be seated quickly at a busy restaurant, but to expect it.

Here’s the problem with that. What if somebody else genuinely needs that spot or that table more than I do? I don’t know what’s going on in everybody else’s day, but God does.

The Bible tells me to deny myself, pick up my cross and follow Jesus. It also tells me to love my neighbor as myself.

Sure, I’d like to have the best available parking spot. But if one of my coworkers has a blister on his foot or a sore knee and it hurts him to walk, and if God intervenes so that coworker arrives exactly 30 seconds before me and he gets the prime spot, I should be OK with that. Sometimes the next-closest spot really is half a mile away (the parking at my workplace is extremely messed up), but if me walking half a mile saves someone else some pain, I’m supposed to be OK with that.

And I’m not in a position to judge all of that. God is.

For that matter, maybe God making me walk that half mile and back is the bigger blessing. Maybe I need the exercise. God knows more about what I need than I do.

Sometimes we don’t recognize God’s blessing until much later, and Osteen’s teaching doesn’t leave a lot of room for that. I got married in 2005. It was a tough year. The marriage wasn’t the problem. The problem was that for the first time in my life, I couldn’t hold down a job. I worked for three different employers that year. (In my defense, I’m still working for that third employer.) I didn’t recognize it then, but that was a big blessing. The first job I lost that year was literally taking years off my life. The second job had much better pay and much better hours, but it was repetitive and boring. The third job never was my dream job by any stretch, but they pay me what the salary engines say I should make, and I’ve been able to solve some real problems and make myself and my coworkers more productive. We’ve had our differences in the past and we’ll have them again, but my boss is willing to tell the higher ups that it’s a better place for me being there.

But besides all that, I learned a lot in those weeks in between jobs, things that I will use for the rest of my life, and things that I probably wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Painful? Definitely. Blessing? Most definitely.

The danger is that if I’d been attending a church like Joel Osteen’s in 2005, it would have been very easy to come to the conclusion that God wasn’t blessing me, and something was wrong, even though I was doing all the things I was supposed to do. The danger there is walking away.

Indeed, it was when I was going through another one of life’s valleys, a little more than 10 years ago now, that I realized I needed to walk away from the church I was attending because they were saying a lot of these kinds of things. And there’s nothing wrong with that–but it’s really best that you go find someplace else that tells the truth. Otherwise there’s a great danger of walking away from God entirely.

There’s an acoustic duo called Lost and Found. They’ve been traveling the country for the last couple of decades, at least, singing mostly original Christian songs targeted at teenagers. There’s a lot to say for them, but the biggest compliment I can give them is that I’ve seen them reach people in ways nobody ever did before, and possibly nobody has done since.

In 1999, I went and saw them play at my old high school. I was one of the oldest people there but I didn’t care. About halfway through, they warned us that they were going to sing a couple of songs that were controversial. One was a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Used to Be,” complete with the line, “in a world where people gave a damn.” The other was a song one of them had written years earlier, after a breakup with a girlfriend.

After the concert, I talked to them about those two songs. They were used to that. But I thanked them for playing those songs, because they’re a reminder that being a Christian doesn’t mean everything’s going to go your way every time. That wasn’t the reaction they were used to getting–they were more used to saying what I said, not hearing someone else say it.

They stopped singing “Used to Be” soon afterward, because of the d-bomb. I wish they hadn’t. They could always sing “in a world where people gave a care” instead, and still get the point across. And if anything, the older that song gets, the more relevant it becomes.

The point that Lost and Found make, and that people like Joel Osteen would like to ignore, is that Christians can’t just have mountaintop experiences all the time. We spend time in the valleys too, because we’re flawed people living in a flawed world.

But God is great enough that He can turn even those times in the valley into blessings too, even though sometimes it takes us years to recognize it, and even then we may be reluctant to admit it (or maybe that’s just me). At best, ignoring it loses out on those blessings. At worst, it diminishes God and who He is. I don’t really want to do either of those two things.

Being more interested in growth than being Lutheran? Hardly.

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , ,

On Monday, a group of protesters gathered outside the Vatican, er, 1333 S. Kirkwood Road.

Their complaint: Issues, Etc., a popular radio show on the LCMS’s unpopular talk radio station, got cancelled without warning, and the host and producer were fired.

I know from personal experience that this is how the LCMS does things. About this time of year, people come into work like any other day, and they lose their jobs. The next day, everyone else comes in and finds out a bunch of people are gone. Sometimes there’s an announcement, and if everyone takes it like a man there might even be a little fare-thee-well with cake and punch and a picture for the internal newsletter, but it’s just as likely there’ll be nothing but a few whispers.

Several years ago it happened to me. It still bugs me a lot, since I moved 120 miles, made a less-than-lateral move, and worked for far less than fair market value for those people.

So I feel for The Rev. Wilken and Jeff Schwarz. I’ve been there. And I really hope they find stable employment very soon.

I happen to know David Strand, the LCMS employee quoted in the article. In fact, if my phone rang and I saw it was him on my caller ID, I’d probably pick up. There are maybe a dozen people who work at The Vatican that I can say that for. I spent a fair amount of time with him and I trust him. I also know in the past that his department has been ravaged with cuts. It seems like pretty much every time the LCMS loses money (which they’re very good at doing), his department takes the bullet. So when he throws the monetary figures out there, my inclination is to believe him.

So while I sympathize with those who lost their jobs, and while I’m very disappointed in how it was handled (but not surprised), I very much take issue with what one of the protesters said: “They’d [the LCMS leadership in Kirkwood] like to be more in the mainstream of American evangelicalism as opposed to distinctly Lutheran.”

I’m not sure what Bible the so-called confessional Lutherans read, but my Bible doesn’t say, “Wait, therefore, for 15th-century Germans to come to you, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” It says to go–don’t wait, GO!–to all people, all nations, and baptize them.

The church I attend takes that seriously. And we attract an interesting mix of people. A lot of people are lapsed Lutherans, like I was. But we also attract a very large number of lapsed Catholics. We also have a small but vocal group who have, shall I say, some Calvinistic sympathies.

Our church looks more like a library or a community center than a German cathedral, and we don’t have a pipe organ and we put–gasp!–Bibles where other Lutheran churches put those horrible blue hymnals. I’ve had people tell me it doesn’t look or feel like a Lutheran church. But the theology that our pastor preaches is extremely Lutheran. The confession and absolution of sins is as Lutheran as it comes–the difference slaps me in the face any time I go to a non-Lutheran church–and in fact, if anything I hear more references to things like sola scriptura, grace alone and faith alone than I did in more mainline Lutheran churches.

And that’s good, because that’s what the people God brings us need to hear more than anything else. Isn’t that what God wants us to do? Heal the hurting? What could be more healing than the message of God’s grace?

We Lutherans have a near monopoly on perhaps the most potent force in the entire universe. I don’t think anybody understands grace as much as we do, and certainly nobody else has studied it like we have, because perhaps nobody in history needed it more than Martin Luther did. But all too often, we just sit on it. Or we bury it in tradition that people don’t understand.

The church I attend does a few things that draw people in, the upbeat, modern music being the most noticeable thing. But I don’t think that’s what keeps people there. Lots of churches have good praise bands. Lots of churches have eloquent pastors. But not a lot of churches have that plus the Lutheran doctrine.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. My church is one of the few Lutheran churches that’s growing, but that’s not necessarily a comfortable place. Growing is painful, and it’s expensive. It’s been a while since I was the one counting attendance, but I believe we can fit about 700 people in our sanctuary comfortably, and sometimes we have to squeeze a lot more than that in there. On Christmas and Easter we have to go to extreme measures to fit everyone in. Some people end up watching the service on closed-circuit TV in another room. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than turning people away.

Our life really would be a lot easier if more churches would make their services a bit more friendly for people who didn’t necessarily grow up in the old German Lutheran tradition. Play a new song occasionally. Preach practical sermons that people can use to apply to their lives, rather than sermons that sound like seminary lectures. Look at the problems we face in life every day and tell people what the Bible has to say about that, and make sure there’s a good helping of grace in the middle and at the end. The word will get out, and people will come. And then maybe my church’s buildings will last 10 or even 15 years before we outgrow them, instead of seven.

I think my church goes beyond what most of the current administration finds comfortable. I occasionally spot some higher-ups in attendance. I don’t know if that’s a sign of approval or if they’re keeping an eye on us. I do know they wish more churches would try an approach like ours, however.

I got a good healthy dose of decision-based evangelical theology this weekend, and it reminded me of how I ended up at this church. CBS News did a special called God’s Boot Camp. That movement is real, and in college it found me. It finally caught me a few months after I graduated. At least it got me in church when I hadn’t been going at all, which I think pretty much everyone would agree is a good thing. But the gospel they preached was very works-based. For a time it was really nice, because I’d never seen a church like this one before, but eventually I realized the burden was literally destroying me.

I found an evangelical-minded Lutheran church that knew what a guitar was, had a pastor who knew how to apply the Bible to daily life and preach a sermon about it, but most importantly, that pastor and his church knew what grace was, and all of a sudden, it was like all was right with the world.

I have a question for the Lutherans who are reading (both of you). Those people are out there. They will find your children. Given a choice between guitars and pipe organ on Sunday morning, your children probably will pick the guitars, unless you’ve somehow managed to spawn a teenager who prefers Lawrence Welk to MTV. So which gospel do you want them to hear? Works, or grace?

I want my son to hear about grace every Sunday. And I couldn’t care less what the rest of the church service looks like as long as the pastor’s definition of grace is something along the lines of “God’s riches at Christ’s expense.”

Speaking of expense, I also have one more request, although I’m pretty sure it will fall on deaf ears. I worked nearly seven years at 1333 and other LCMS office buildings, and I saw a lot of waste–waste that wouldn’t be tolerated in the corporate world (I know, because I’ve worked in the private sector too). By and large, the money that flows to 1333 flows there via the offering plate every Sunday morning. Please remember that it’s offering money that funds everything there, and in some cases it comes from people who really don’t have a lot to give. With that in mind, please use it wisely, carefully, and honestly.

The waste I saw wouldn’t have been enough to make a difference in Issues, Etc. being on the air. But it’s a symptom of a large but solvable problem. If the LCMS had addressed this problem seven years ago when layoffs and huge cuts became an annual event, then it’s entirely possible that Issues, Etc. would be on the air, I would be working at 1333, I wouldn’t be writing my offering check in such a way as to minimize the amount of money going to 1333 to be wasted, and none of this talk would be happening.

Good night.

Misplaced faith

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I know a man in his late 30s. He’s not all that unusual. He was raised Christian, then sometime during his teenage years, whether it was in high school or college, he pretty much stopped going to church. He got married young, had a couple of kids, didn’t live as comfortably as they would have liked at first, and he and his wife put their focus on improving their careers and trying to raise two children.

Something happened within the last couple of years, and now he’s extremely interested in going to church. He reads his Bible, listens to Christian radio, and talks about it. None of this is terribly unusual. But he’s been having some health problems, and those are a bit unusual.A few months ago he and I talked about it. We were sitting in a restaurant, waiting for our wives to finish shopping. He told me the things that were going on with him. I hate to say it, but he was precisely the kind of patient Dad used to come home and complain about: No end to his problems, yet medically, there was nothing wrong with him. And he admitted as much.

"People keep telling me it’s all in my head," he said, sadly. "I guess I just don’t have enough faith."

I really think he has two problems. I think the first problem is that he eats too much unhealthy food. I don’t know how he eats all the time, but when I’m around, he eats too much fried food, too much meat, and not enough fresh fruits and vegetables. From my personal experience, one of the fastest ways to put myself into a funk is to eat fast food every day for a week.

But now let’s talk about that lack of faith.

It’s a common problem, and when I hung out with a lot of evangelical-minded people, I saw it a lot. I had it too. People have a tendency to keep score a lot, which is a real problem. Read the Gospels, and you see Jesus pointed out people who had lots of faith, or way too little of it. The problem is, He was able to see it. He could see things that the rest of us can’t.

We do not have the perspective to judge our faith in relation to that of other people, so we just shouldn’t do it. We can see signs, but signs can be deceiving. We can’t see what’s really going on in the other person’s head, nor can we see what the other person is like when we aren’t around.

I see my pastor about an hour and a half a week. I don’t know what he’s like the other 166.5 hours. He says if I did, I wouldn’t trust him during that hour and a half. Yet, by all outward appearances, my pastor is a spiritual superstar. He came to a small, struggling church on the outskirts of the St. Louis metro area, and inside of a decade, turned it into one of the largest Lutheran churches in the St. Louis area. For that matter, it’s one of the fastest-growing Lutheran churches, period.

So if this superstar who lives and works about four miles down the road from me struggles sometimes, the rest of us shouldn’t be surprised if we struggle sometimes. It doesn’t make it right, but it makes us human.

Jesus had something to say about lack of faith. He said if you have faith the size of a mustard seed–at the time, the smallest seed known to his audience–you can move mountains.

When people have problems that their faith can’t overcome, often they come to the conclusion that their faith is smaller than a mustard seed. Unfortunately, many Christian circles perpetuate this. The contemporary Christian hit "Faith Enough," released by Carmen a few years ago, is a good example of this. The song’s lyrics talk about all the things you can do if you have enough faith.

Yet very few Christians are doing the things Carmen says are easy. Why?

The mindset doesn’t work.

The mindset puts the focus on faith, when the focus needs to be on God. Let’s look at what he said again: People keep telling me it’s all in my head. I must not have enough faith.

What are the nouns and pronouns in those two sentences? People. Me. My. Head. I. Faith.

Where’s God?

The amount of faith doesn’t matter. When your faith is in your ability to believe, the focus comes back to you, not to God. In that regard, our faith almost becomes an idol.

It’s easy to say how to get enough of the right kind of faith, but it’s much harder to do. Look back on your life and the lives of others. Read the stories of the Biblical heroes. Look at everything that went wrong with them, and look at what God was doing with those circumstances. Did God ever let any of these people down? Ever? What kinds of things did God carry you through? What kinds of bad situations did God make good things come out of?

And when the situation doesn’t let up, it could be that we aren’t ready, or something else isn’t ready, and God isn’t finished with us yet. Remember that God works for good in all situations and circumstances, and look back at your own past for the proof.

And by all means don’t compare yourself with others. A decade ago, another Christian got very frustrated with me because I wasn’t in the same place in my faith as she was in hers. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, because nobody else is either. Not then, and not now. We all develop a little bit differently. My cousin learned to walk and ride a bicycle at a younger age than I did, but I learned to read and write at a younger age than he did. Why is faith any different?

As long as that faith is in God, and the focus is on God and not on ourselves and our own abilities, God will take care of the rest. It’s exactly like when my son cries out to me. He’s not old enough to understand much of anything except hunger and maybe sleep. He knows that when he cries and I pick him up, he’ll get milk. Depending on where Mom is, sometimes it takes longer than others, but he believes in me.

Sometimes our understanding of things is almost as limited as my son’s. But God can still work with it.

Well, I\’m a Christian and I don\’t crave violence

Dave Farquhar Christianity ,

I saw a particularly ignorant comment on Digg today in regards to Christianity (blaming evangelical Christianity for G. W. Bush’s misguided tortue policies). I know I really shouldn’t dignify ignorant comments on Digg with a response, but this time I have to. I responded there, and I’ll respond with more detail here.Here’s the quote:

Evangelicals love torture, they are taught it in spectacular detail in the Bible, and they are taught from a young age to abhor nudity and sex, but crave blood and sacrifice, any form of violence really, as it signifies the “end times”. So, the logical extension is, a state where torture is encouraged. The real problem is, like a cult being lead by a twisted, violent leader, Evangelical christianity needs to be treated as a sickness in society.

I (somewhat reluctantly) fit the definition of an evangelical Christian and I take issue with this comment. I say reluctantly, because I don’t like being associated with this stereotype.

Bloody, old-testament-style sacrifices have no place in evangelical Christianity, or any Christianity. The ritual of sacrifice pointed toward Christ. It was replaced by Holy Communion (aka the Eucharist, if you come from a Roman Catholic background). The whole idea of Christianity is that GOD shed blood (HIS OWN blood) and suffered himself, so that we wouldn’t have to. Substitution. Period. Ritual sacrifice was just a ritual, because animal blood cannot attone for human sin, any more than cheap wine can. Both the animal blood and the cheap wine remind us of the blood of Christ. (If you’re Lutheran or Roman Catholic, it goes even further and you’re taught that the wine is the blood of Christ.)

A central point in the Bible is this: I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. It appears in the Old Testament in Hosea 6:6, and in Matthew 9:13 and Matthew 12:7, Jesus quotes it when the scholars of his day lose sight of it. I would agree with the statement that many people today have also lost sight of these verses.

Few evangelicals I know look forward to the End Times, because if you actually read the Bible (and I have read it cover-to-cover), there’s nothing pleasant happening in the End Times. It’ll be nice when it’s over, but if we had a choice, most of us would choose for our lives to occur entirely before the End Times happen. Those who would like to live in the End Times generally crave it just because they believe there may be some position of honor in heaven for having lived through the End Times and survived it.

The Bible actually spends more time talking about money than it spends talking about what’s going to happen in the future. But that isn’t its main premise either. Most of what the Bible is talking about is the dual idea of “Love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” The bad things that happen in the Bible are illustrations of what happens when people don’t do those two things.

The Old Testament started with Adam and Eve having paradise and losing it because they got greedy. And it goes on down the line, telling the stories of people who did good and bad things and what happened to them. Read the newspapers today, and you’ll see that human nature hasn’t changed much since the time these books were written.

Do I believe that God punishes people, or uses other people as agents of his wrath? Yes, sometimes. But I believe usually there’s no need. The natural consequences of our actions are usually enough. If anything, I think God in his mercy often intervenes and lessens the blow of those consequences. You see it in the Old Testament, and I certainly see it happening today.

I believe the Left Behind books are partially responsible for the stereotype of evangelical Christians as blood-craving, eschatologically obsessed fanatics. But “Left Behind” is based on questionable theology, and the concept of a Rapture originiated in the United States and started to take hold roughly in 1837. It makes for much better sci-fi than traditional interpretations of scripture.

The ads for those books promote co-author Tim LaHaye as a Bible scholar, but he is not universally regarded as such. Sales of his books should not be interpreted as an endorsement for his belief system. From what I understand, Roman Catholics won’t buy them, period. Some Lutherans will buy them, but regard them strictly as fiction, as they would a Tom Clancy novel. Lutheran scholars vigorously oppose the theology.

I won’t get into the details here, because I’m not qualified, but I’ll sum up the problem. Most “End Times”-obsessed theology is based on overemphasizing the books of Revelation and Daniel. Revelation and Daniel are probably the two most difficult books of the Bible to understand. When Jesus was trying to make a point, he generally tried to make it very easy to understand. And when he didn’t, he took the inner circle aside and explained it to them, and the Gospels include that explanation.

The Bible isn’t the only book that’s fuzzy on some details. And what you do when, say, Shakespeare, is unclear is you read the unclear parts in light of the things that are clear.

And this is the reason I left evangelical Christianity for an evangelical-minded Lutheran church. I got tired of having a pastor whose college degree was in math, who had no formal training in theology and who would have difficulty picking out the finer points of Romeo and Juliet, telling me how to read the Bible. I hate to say this, but many evangelical preachers are in over their head, teaching on subjects that they have limited understanding of themselves.

It’s interesting to me that the most evangelical-minded denominations have too many pastors, so their ordained pastors have to have another full-time job. Meanwhile, the Lutherans and Catholics don’t have enough. One reason for this is that it’s really hard to get through Lutheran and Catholic seminary. While I’m painfully aware that the ability to pass all the tests doesn’t mean you have any people skills (and I’ll risk enraging some people by saying many people who make it through Lutheran seminary have no business whatsoever running churches), the fact is that if you manage to make it through a Lutheran or Catholic seminary, in the end you really do have a thorough understanding of the Bible.

I believe some of the backlash against Christianity is due to the unpopular wars that this country is waging. Most Christians I know oppose this war too. We don’t necessarily talk about it a lot. But it’s about as easy to find a Christian who thinks this war is illegal as it is a non-Christian. I know some evangelical Christians who were bailing on Bush in 2004, voting for third-party candidates who had some of the same ideas as Ron Paul. My pastor certainly distanced himself from Bush, and any presidential candidate who ran on Christianity. He said that when things go wrong (and it will, because something goes wrong with every presidency), people will blame it on Christianity. And for that reason alone, it’s not a good idea to vote for a presidential candidate based solely on the faith he or she professes.

That’s obviously what’s happening here–noting that an unpopular president professes to be an evangelical Christian, and blaming the failings of his administration on his religious beliefs.

I’ll buy the argument that there are people in Arab states who dislike the United States because the majority religion in the United States is Christianity. Maybe they’re fighting an Islam-vs.-Christianity war. But we’re not. If it weren’t for the oil equation, we wouldn’t be in these wars.

Bush is more than happy to trade with China and Japan. They have things we want, and they’re happy to take our money. Neither of them are Christian nations.

Most South American countries don’t think too highly of the United States either. The majority religion in those countries happens to be Roman Catholicism, a form of Christianity. But they also happen to be willing to sell us the coffee and metals that we want at prices that we’re willing to pay. We aren’t actively waging war with them, but that has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with trade.

Mixing beer and evangelism

Dave Farquhar Christianity

There’s a story in today’s Post-Dispatch about a local congregation and its dispute with the Missouri Baptist Convention. It seems the church has been encouraging its members to go to bars, and the convention isn’t happy about that.

I agree with the pastor of the church: The people aren’t going to come to you, so the church has to find people where they are.I don’t drink. I don’t remember now if the last time I drank alcohol outside of communion was at a friend’s wedding in June 2003, or at my sister’s wedding in September 2003, but in either case, it’s been three years since I had a drink. I generally agree with the Southern Baptist idea that the world would be a better place without alcohol. Alcohol destroyed my relationship with my Dad, and alcohol played a role in the disintegration of two romantic relationships before I met my wife. So I’m not a fan of the stuff.

But there was a time, when I was 23, when I’d go out for a beer with three of the guys from my Bible study group in Columbia, Missouri. We’d meet up for the group, go through the lesson and discussion, then go get a beer. Usually the discussion from the study carried over there. While some fundamentalists disagree, the Bible doesn’t say alcohol consumption is a sin. It says drunkenness is a sin.

I’d rather people didn’t drink, but that’s not practical. Nothing I can do is going to stop people from drinking, so there’s no point in me making a big deal about it.

The Bible is very clear about one other thing though. They say to go find hurting people and bring healing to them. And I really can’t think of a better place to find hurting people than at a bar. When people have had a bad day, a bad week, a bad year, or a bad life and they don’t know what else to do, frequently they go have a drink. It doesn’t solve their problems, but at least it helps them forget them for a while.

And that’s no secret. Even alcoholics know that alcohol doesn’t actually solve any of their problems.

And that’s the natural place for a church to come in. The bar doesn’t have any solutions, but the church does.

Evangelism, whether at a bar or anywhere else, is a gift and it’s possible to do as much harm as good. So if the Missouri Baptist Convention doesn’t know how to evangelize in bars and doesn’t want to do that, it should stay out.

But if a group knows how to do it and is helping people–and The Journey must be doing more than one thing right because it has 1,300 members and has planted another church and is planning to do another–then it shouldn’t be condemned for it. Most churches are aging and shrinking; The Journey’s median age is 29. It’s reaching a generation that very few other churches have had any success reaching.

Frankly, other churches need to be learning from it.

A Gospel according to Judas?

Dave Farquhar Christianity

I don’t know if I should be admitting I watched the segment on Primetime on ABC tonight about the alleged Gospel according to Judas. But I made a conscious effort to watch it.

You don’t get much depth in television sensationalism, er, news, not even in a 10-minute segment. So my reaction may be a bit unfair. Still, I’ll give it, for what it’s worth.First, although Christian tradition says a lot of things about Judas, the Bible itself says very little about what happened after Judas took the money. Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Then, at some later point–I was going to say when Judas realized Jesus was going to be killed, but that’s actually more than the Bible says–Judas was remorseful, and tried to return the money, saying he had betrayed an innocent man. The high priests told him that wsan’t their problem. The Bible then says Judas hanged himself.

That’s all it says. The Bible doesn’t say there’s a special place in Hell for Judas. He hanged himself. Done. End of story. For Judas, at least.

One of the questions the Primetime segment raised was the possibility that Judas could have been forgiven. Well, it didn’t even state it as a question–it’s a "controversy."

There is no controversy. There is one and only one difference between Judas and Peter, the disciple who denied three times that he even knew Jesus (and added profanity for emphasis the third time). Peter asked for forgiveness. Judas didn’t.

There are a couple of places in the four Gospels where Jesus makes comments such as "One of you is a devil," which we interpret as Jesus meaning Judas. From that, we can take it to mean Judas wasn’t penitent.

Now, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John aren’t exactly unbiased sources, of course. Judas killed their hero and friend (assuming Luke knew Jesus–while Christian tradition may have an answer to that question, the Bible itself doesn’t). If one of my friends played a role in the death of another friend, I wouldn’t have nice things to say about him either. Of course those four guys were bitter. And while Christianity teaches that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, the individual personalities and feelings of the writers are still present. That’s the main reason I don’t like Eugene Peterson’s The Message–you can’t tell from reading The Message that Luke was a better writer than Mark, because the only voice you hear in The Message is that of Eugene Peterson. But I digress.

Growing up in the ultraconservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, I remember virtually every year there was a service that dealt with Judas and explored that very possibility.

Betraying Christ wasn’t Judas’ biggest sin. If he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. The forgiveness was there. Judas just didn’t reach out and take it.

The other "controversy," whether Jesus asked Judas to betray him, also isn’t a controversy. It’s right there in John 13:28: "What you must do, do quickly." There is a difference between Jesus knowing beforehand that Judas would betray him, and Jesus wanting Judas to betray him. You and I both know that if my car sits outside long enough, it’s going to rust. That doesn’t mean I want it to rust.

But Jesus knew that the entire reason for His life was His death. The message of the four Gospels can be summed up in this: Since God didn’t want to live without us, He became a man and died, because to Him that was the preferable alternative.

Nothing they said in that 10-minute news segment contradicts that.

So, on to the other questions. Who wrote it? That’s difficult to say. Judas didn’t live all that long. But the book is only 13 pages long. I suppose Judas could have written it before he hanged himself. I can think of two times when something really traumatic has happened to me and I wrote down the whole story right after it happened. It didn’t take me very long to do it. And one of them probably was about 13 pages long in its first draft.

The segment dismissed the possibility of it being a forgery, based on the obscure language it was written in, and the age of the papyrus. But being written in a language Judas might have known, and being approximately the same age as the oldest known Biblical manuscripts doesn’t prove Judas wrote it. It could just as easily be an old forgery, intended to embarass someone.

I can just imagine if someone were to unearth my library in 2000 years. Not every statement in every book on my bookshelf is true. But when you find an old book in isolation with little else to compare to it, it can be difficult to know whether what you’ve found is that day’s equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, or the Weekly World News.

And "Lost Gospels" aren’t exactly new. The Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas are two examples that have been with us since very close to the beginning of Christianity. What happened to them? They aren’t in the Bible because they weren’t considered reliable by the people who saw what happened.

A Gospel of Judas, hastily written in the hours between the time he betrayed Jesus and the time of his death, would certainly qualify. The Gospels of Matthew and John were carefully considered, after the fact, and undoubtedly the conversations and recollections of the other 10 surviving disciples colored what ultimately went into those books. Mark and Luke weren’t disciples, so they weren’t even there to see firsthand much of what is in their accounts; the books were assembled from eyewitness accounts. Mark was a good friend of Peter, while the introduction to the book of Luke suggests it might have been a commissioned work.

This doesn’t make a possible Gospel of Judas an uninteresting work, nor does it necessarily make it unimportant. And without having read the upcoming books or the big feature in National Geographic, I don’t have enough to say much about it. But from what little I have to go on, even if this book is exactly what it claims to be, I don’t see that it shakes Christianity at all.

The most important thing it brings up is what the news segment didn’t say, of course. If forgiveness was available to Judas, and if God had a plan for Judas, both are true for you and me as well.

Why I\’m Lutheran

Dave Farquhar Christianity

Reading Charlie’s blog pointed me at a debate (I’ll use polite words) between a Calvinist and a Lutheran. I’m vaguely familiar with the Calvinist; the Lutheran is someone I’ve met personally and I’ve even fixed his computer and on one or two occasions ate lunch with him.

I’m going to keep my diatribe simple. Very simple. Because I fall somewhere in between the two of them. (But I am Lutheran.)I’m Lutheran because of doctrine. Period. I don’t give a rip about Lutheran tradition. I’m not a 16th-century German. I’m an American of Scottish, English, and Irish descent with just a little German in me. Jesus wasn’t German and neither am I, so there’s nothing sacred to me about German traditions. If a church hocked its pipe organ and used the proceeds to buy bagpipes, I’d try to turn a cartwheel.

Music is one of the first things people notice about a church. So I fall in the camp that the music ought to be something that people can relate to. If the people who live around the church happen to be 16th century Germans, well, Martin Luther had an answer: Pipe organs, and sing in German. Novel idea. It worked. If the people around you are Scottish nationalists, then bagpipes would be a good idea. If the people around you are 30something 21st-century Americans, then it makes sense to consider guitars and drums. At my church last Sunday, horror of horrors, they actually used a Leonard Cohen song with Christianized lyrics as a hymn.

So, to some Lutherans, that makes me a Calvinist. And I do have some experience with Calvinism.

It was at a retreat sponsored by a Calvinist non-denominational organization (Great Commission Ministries) that I sang in church for the first time in nearly a decade. It was at that same retreat that God actually felt real for the first time in more than a decade. I suppose some Lutherans would call this a neo-Pentecostal movement because they talked about the Holy Spirit. Lutherans don’t talk about the Holy Spirit very much. It makes them uncomfortable.

I have to agree with the Lutheran that Calvinists tend to keep Jesus on the bench a little too much. But Lutherans keep the Holy Spirit on the bench too much.

And it’s not like the message at that retreat was emphasizing speaking in tongues or anything like that. I guess the reason he got through to me on that Sunday afternoon was because I’m a guy, and the Holy Spirit he presented was a tool. Plug the Fruits of the Spirit into you, and you see what’s wrong. If you read the fruits of the spirit and you don’t see you, then that means God isn’t working as well in your life as He could be. So what do you do about it? It has nothing to do with speaking in tongues, or that weird feeling in your stomach (I’ve had that). Ask Him to come in! What a novel idea…

So why am I Lutheran? The events that followed that weekend, frankly. Soon afterward, everything fell apart. And I mean everything. When I asked the people in my church home what everything that was going on meant, I got a long list of things I was supposed to be doing. None of it sounded right. So I started reading the Bible. Cover to cover. It took me about 10 weeks. I took the advice to heart and asked God what was wrong, what was missing. And you know what the answer was?

Grace.

My old Lutheran confirmation class definition of grade came to mind: God’s riches at Christ’s expense.

No room for Dave in that definition.

I asked around a little about grace. The definition I received had Dave in it.

So I asked whether I wanted to rely on Dave to get it all right, or whether I wanted to rely on God.

Well, if Dave could get it right, there wouldn’t be much need for Jesus, would there?

Over the course of the next few months, God led me to a Lutheran church that remembered the definition of grace and also offered the things I’d liked about that Calvinist evangelical experience: sermons that were relevent to daily life and music that helped me look forward to church, rather than being something that has to be endured.

I would have traded away the music and the easily applied messages for that correct definition of grace.

To me, that’s the great hidden treasure of Lutheranism. Grace. And those are the roots. It was grace that told Martin Luther that indulgences were wrong, not hearing the tune of “A Mighty Fortress” outside the door. (Not that there’s anything wrong with “A Mighty Fortress.” Our church plays old songs too sometimes, to remind us that the God who was there for our multiple-great grandparents is the same God who’s with us today.)

A couple of years ago, I found myself in a Methodist service. I’ve always admired the Methodists. My wife was raised Methodist. But there was something about the service that reminded me of why I’m Lutheran. Again. We confessed our sins. And then that was it. There was a sort of brief assurance that you’ll do better next time.

Hello? Forgiveness? Please?

Half of the equation was gone. After we confess our sins at my church, my pastor always says something like this: “It’s my great privelige to announce to you that your sins are forgiven in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Exactly what he says varies sometimes, but he always starts out with something like, “It’s my great privelige.” This is good news he’s delivering! It’s the only reason we’re all still here! He should be glad to be saying it, and we should be glad to be hearing it. And yes, I know what he’s saying isn’t exactly what the blue book says he’s supposed to say. It’s more important to him to tell us this is good news than it is for him to tell us he’s called and ordained. We already know that because he’s the one who’s up front and talking.

Sometimes he even reads a verse from Scripture to prove it. I kind of wish he’d do that a little more often.

The great theologians will be annoyed that I didn’t throw Bible verses around. But I’m reminded that Jesus said this is simple enough that a child can understand. A lot of times–well, most of the time, probably–we make this way too complicated. Christianity is very simple.

A pastor put a question on a confirmation test once. It read: “If you died tonight and God asked you why He should let you in to heaven, what would you say?”

The right answer (which, as I recall, I got wrong) was one word. Don’t read on. Stop for a minute and see if you can figure out what the answer is supposed to be.

Jesus.

If you get that answer right, and you know why that answer is right, then it doesn’t matter all that much what else you believe. If everything else you believe is wrong, you’ll get to heaven by the skin of your teeth. But so will those rare people whose beliefs are 100% dead on right. (I don’t know who those people are, by the way. I’m pretty sure that I’m not one of them and that I fall somewhere in between. And even if I had all the education in the world, I doubt I’m smart enough to be able to figure out who they were.)

But at least I got that important question right. And hopefully you do too.

No, Pat Robertson\’s comments aren\’t \"very Christian.\"

Dave Farquhar Christianity

Venzuelan vice president Jose Vicente Rangel is now calling Pat Robertson a terrorist and saying his statement that the United States should assassinate neo-communist, neo-Mohammedan Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is “very Christian.”

I’m not comfortable with the evangelical Christian label, but people frequently make me wear it. Statements like this are a big reason why I don’t like the label.

Most Christians will say they know Christianity when they see it. And this isn’t it.Hugo Chavez isn’t the reason gas costs $2.61. He’s part of the problem, but so is George Walker Bush. And it’s not right to kill someone just because he doesn’t want to lower his price on something you want. By that logic, it would be right to kill every store owner that isn’t Wal-Mart.

The problem is there’s something wrong with every major source of oil in the world right now. There’s instability in Saudi Arabia. The problems with Iraq should be self-explanatory. The rest of the Middle East is torqued off about Iraq. Russia is pumping the oil out as fast as it can. Our offshore operations have been pounded by the weather. Venezuela is mad because, well, Hugo Chavez looks at history and sees that the United States has a bad track record with Latin American countries. It also has a bad track record with oil-producing countries. Then he realized that Venezuela is both. If I were Hugo Chavez, I might be a little bit scared too.

Meanwhile, China is sucking down oil as quickly as it can because we outsourced all of our manufacturing there so we could pay 10 cents less for trinkets at Wal-Mart. It takes energy to make that stuff and ship it over here. The same energy we put into our gas guzzlers.

It’s not Chavez’s fault the entire Middle East hates us. Chavez didn’t cause the hurricanes, and Chavez didn’t sabotage the Russians. Chavez didn’t make us empty our factories and ship everything to China, and Chavez didn’t hold a gun to our heads and make us buy cars that get 9 miles to the gallon, and he doesn’t hold a gun to our heads and make us drive 15 miles per hour over the speed limit every day. We did (and do) those last three things on our own accord, and now we’re paying for it.

Most of these problems are beyond our control. We can’t control the war in Iraq. To a certain degree Bush can, but there’s little reason for him to do so. He wanted this war; he doesn’t have to buy his own gas, and he doesn’t have to worry about re-election. He has what he wants. Nobody can do anything about the weather, and while the war rages, nobody can do anything about the Middle East.

The only factor you and I can control is our fuel consumption. Sales of Toyota Corollas are at record highs, which is a step in the right direction. Not everyone can afford a hybrid, and not everyone who can afford one can get one. The next-best thing to do is to buy Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics.

The Bible very clearly says that killing outside of war is wrong. Pat Robertson needs to read Exodus and Deuteronomy a bit more carefully before he opens his mouth next time.

I’m not sure what the Venezuelan government wants us to do about Pat Robertson. Our laws allow him to say whatever he wants to say. So there isn’t a lot that we can do about him.

Except we can stop listening to him. And, come to think of it, that is an awful lot.