Posterized
By Andrew Larson
Copyright 2011 Andrew Larson
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Every March, madness begins. I’m not talking about the beginning of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. I’m talking about Luther Vandross. More specifically, I’m talking about the thing my body does at the tournament’s end, when CBS runs its highlight montage over the song “One Shining Moment”, Luther Vandross’ ode to college basketball. I confess when I first heard the song, I didn’t know it was Luther, and I’m not convinced CBS knew either.
TV Executive: Luther, thanks so much for recording “One Shining Moment. “ After all, you’re a Grammy nominated artist, a multi-platinum record seller, and I respect that. I’m just such a fan. I really love that one song you sing about how cotton feels on your body. That’s phenomenal.
Luther: How’s that one go?
Exec: You know, “something, something, the fabric of our liiiiiives.”
Luther: I think you’re talking about Aaron Neville.
When ‘One Shining Moment” starts playing, I become a musical werewolf, and R&B is the moon. All it takes is for the first words to hit my ears and the spirit of David Ruffin takes over my body, commanding me to dip my shoulder and sway like the first-ever white member of the Temptations. So by the time Mr. Vandross gets firing on all pistons and sings “…ONE SHINING MOMENT!” I’ve got a full blown case of ‘diva hand’, which is a real medical disease.
Here’s what the Harvard Journal of Musical Pathology has listed under ‘diva hand’
…presents abruptly with few known triggers. Initial presentation is a slight tremor of the hand at the wrist, with accompanying factors of humming or foot-tapping. More advanced cases see the hand become rigid and move up or down in conjunction with loud, ‘I don’t care who’s looking!’ styles of singing. Diva hand is not contagious except in large groups such as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Is a sister disease to head-banging and air guitar. Belongs to a family of diseases known as auto-pavlovian musical responses. See also, ‘Beatlemania’ and ‘Bieber Fever’”
The other madness that March brings is the madness of deciphering why exactly your VP of Sales’ wife won the office NCAA bracket pool. This is the same person who once asked if the NFL should draw a face on the football so that wide receivers could improve their catching skills by imagining it as a loved one. In her bracket she correctly picked the champion, called several of the first round upsets, and nailed the Elite Eight Cinderella team, all by asking which university in any given match-up is more haunted by ghosts.
Meanwhile, the genuine college basketball fan in the pool, you- the one who took in enough basketball to see Doug Gottlieb’s entire wardrobe more often than his immediate family, the one who watched Holy Cross play Bucknell on your iPhone during your son’s dedication ceremony- had your bracket trashed by the end of the second round. It makes no sense. You made intelligent, rational picks based on spreadsheets and calculations. You selected a sleeper based on hours of intense scouting and matchup comparisons. Yet your bracket is in flames and you’re assailed by self-doubt, like some sports-crazed Hamlet, wondering how you could be losing to someone whose sleeper team is called the ‘Banana Pelicans’. It’s madness.
This madness is part of the NCAA tournament’s appeal. Year after year, we celebrate its unpredictability- the upsets, the Cinderella runs by mid-majors, and the number of times a ref will ignore a blatant charge by a Duke player because Duke is God’s new chosen people. Tournament time causes college basketball enthusiasts to yank out their hair, as all their expertise is laid siege to by a sophomore shooting guard from New Mexico A&M suddenly getting hot from 3 and upsetting the 2 seed. Chaos reigns. Nobody, but nobody, has any idea what’s going on, least of all the experts.
Rece Davis: Digger, recap the upset of North Carolina by unheralded Wyoming Rodeo University.
Digger Phelps. Rece, I watched a lot of tape on North Carolina coming into this game. They really looked unbeatable. But nothing on that tape suggested that their shooting guard would go 0 for 24 from the field and then curl up on the floor, sobbing like a basket case.
Davis: When he lay down at center court with his teddy bear, that was a big turning point in the game.
Digger: All the momentum shifted when that happened. You could see Wyoming Rodeo start to play with some extra confidence.
Jay Bilas: The fact that Wyoming Rodeo was allowed to use their lariats in this game also gave them an edge. Their zone defense gained an extra dimension when they roped the Carolina center and tied him up like a calf. Several of those were borderline fouls.
Davis: Yeah, that was a grey area in the rules. Those referees probably won’t ref another game in this tournament.
Digger: Jay, do you think Wyoming Rodeo’s strategy of bringing the North Carolina shooting guard’s long-lost father to the game and introducing them moments before tip-off had any effect on his play? Remember, he believed his father died in a rafting accident before his birth.
Bilas: Absolutely, I think it was a factor.
Christians love to know what’s going on. Nothing makes us happier than to absolutely, totally, without question know what God is doing at any given time. If you asked a random sampling of non-Christians what the overall purpose of something or anything that’s happening in their life at the moment, I imagine you would get an awful lot of “Oh, I don’t know, man” and “Why did you bring me to Hardee’s just to ask this?” But if you ask any Christian, without fail the majority will tell you that there is a 1 to 1 correlation between a life event and something God is trying to tell or teach them.
“Tyler won’t sleep through the night. I’m just really being taught to be patient right now.”
“My Hawaiian Shave Ice kiosk is not flourishing. I think God’s trying to tell me to work in His strength and not my own.”
“I wasn’t picked to go on that short-term missions project. God just wants me to focus on my relationship with Him right now.”
It’s not just in our own lives where this tendency comes out; it’s in the wider world as well. For example, there have been enough pop eschatology books written in the history of Christianity that we could wallpaper Thailand with the pages. I don’t think Jesus could havebeen much plainer when he said that nobody knew the day or the hour of his return. Yet we call President Obama the anti-Christ and name Belgium as one of the seven stars on the crown because their waffles are too delicious, all in an effort to predict the end of the world. Why? It’s not because we eagerly expect Christ’s return. It’s because we have to know what’s going on. Always.
I’m the king of needing to know what’s going on. I always have to know what God is up to in my life, to the point of acting in ways that are completely irrational. For instance, I can’t listen to my car radio because I get convinced that whatever song is currently playing is talking directly about my situation and has been ordained by God to communicate to me in that moment. I can’t tell you how many times, like a bona fide crazy person, I’ve parsed a random Gin Blossoms song for secret application meant just for my spiritual and earthly guidance.
Why? Because I can’t just let life happen and let God be at work on my heart in His mysterious ways. I have to know- am compelled to know- what’s going on all the time. Is He tackling my anger? What about my lust? Is He working on my patience, or my many idols, or my doubts, or my fearfulness? Which events in my life correspond to each? Which books can I read to better assist the process? How can I be more repentant so that the Holy Spirit’s work isn’t checked by me? And on it goes, ad infinitum.
I try to know because I think it’s spiritual to know. Nobody wants to sit in church and admit “I have no idea what God is doing in my life, and I haven’t for some time. Or ever, really.” That looks like we’re not trying, and if there’s a cardinal sin in church, that’s the one.
The madness of God’s work in the world and in our lives is that we honestly don’t know what’s going on most of the time. Consider that confusion is one of the most common themes in the Bible. Imagine Abraham looking at the stars. Or Moses at the burning bush. Or the Israelites in Lamentations. Or Jonah responding to Nineveh’s mass conversion. Or Mary talking to the angel Gabriel. Or the disciples practically all the time. Do they seem to have a firm grasp on what God is up to? Could they have written a book on knowing the will of God that would sell in LifeWay? Could they deliver a sermon in synagogue that would satisfy the congregation, or tear up the lecture circuit, or double as a successful podcast? I doubt it.
The NCAA tournament is fun because it mocks our ability to analyze it and predict the outcome. How it unfolds is always completely different from the way we think it will. We smile when a true sleeper surprises us, or when a result baffles the experts. We never know what’s happening, and so we don’t obsess over the question, which gives us the freedom to enjoy it. God asks the same attitude of us. But I still wonder if bracket-picking is a spiritual gift.
TAE KWON DO
I wish I’d known that tae kwon do was for kids before I started doing it.
The first thing I noticed when I showed up on the first day of class were all the children everywhere. It looked like ’Jon and Kate + Albuquerque’. I thought a Bakugon truck jackknifed on the highway next door.
Look, I know that, technically, tae kwon do is for people of all ages. I have no doubt that an actual black belt can generate some serious self-defense if necessary (“Your elbow joint will regain normal function in several weeks. From now on, do not reach for the same DiGiorno’s pizza as I”). But the fact remains, when I look around, I can only draw one conclusion: I’m learning martial arts at a KinderCare.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Tae kwon do is now as dominant a part of suburban childhood as Mr. Rogers or stealing candy from Walgreens. The parking lots of most dojos look like Land Rover dealerships. If one caught fire, we would lose half of all the existing copies of ‘Eat, Pray, Love.’ What will the next generation of Americans look like? I’ll tell you: they will all have flawless axe kick techniques, lacrosse jerseys and no idea how to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
From the Korean, the literal translation of ‘tae kwon do’ is “martial arts for those who fear pain”, which makes it perfect for me. When you fight someone in tae kwon do, they pad you up until you look like Joy Behar- the headgear alone looks like the bouncy castle from a princess-themed birthday party. Once you add in the white cloak that doubles as the uniform, the total effect says, “I’m here for the costume party. If there’s a fight, don’t panic, I’m a level 51 cleric with +14 fetal position bonus.” Threatening, you are not.
And the whole time you’re fighting (“Did you put all the pads on? Safety first!.” “No kicking in the arm!”), the guys who do muay thai are 8 feet away, aiming roundhouse kicks at each other’s jaw and laughing about the blood in their stool from the night before. It’s an amazing scene. It’s like an accounting group doing a team-building exercise with the Oakland Raiders.
So it turns out I accidentally decided to learn a toddler’s martial art. I’m not losing sleep over it- I look young anyway. When I buy a bottle of scotch at a liquor store, the guys at the counter tell me I’m adorable and ask what science fair project I’m working on. When I mail in my taxes, the IRS sends them back and tells me I can keep my allowance. So if tae kwon do is for 11 year olds, I can roll with that. Plus, adult participation in something that’s meant for children is not unusual for me anyway. I’m a Christian.
The Gospel of Mark records the story of Jesus blessing the children. Some parents brought their children to Jesus for him to bless, but the disciples turned them away, thinking he had more important things to do. Jesus notices this and corrects them. “Let the children come to me. The Kingdom of God belongs to such as these,” he said. “Anyone who will not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child will not enter it.”
When we say something is ‘childish’, it’s not a compliment. It means we think something is simple, unsophisticated, beneath the station of an adult, as in, “Why does Barry always brag about his SAT scores while he’s playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on Xbox Live? It’s so childish.” Sophistication is complication, and adulthood is all about complicating things. We adults don’t save money, we invest. We don’t just relax; we do yogalates with the optional chakra alignment. We don’t just hang out, we have a cocktail party with hors d’ouevres and a piano man playing “Welcome To the Jungle”. We don’t just hunt, we smear doe urine on our legs and use rifles that make Civil War muskets look like paper footballs. Nothing simple there. It’s all very complicated. Very grown-up.
I think we read this story and gloss over it sometimes. “Yes, yes, bring the children to Jesus. Why not? He loves kids, they’re adorable- or mine is, at least. Let him kiss some heads and maybe play some patty-cake, and then he’ll get down to business. How serious a passage of Scripture could this be, anyway? We use it to dismiss our kids for their ‘special time of worship’ before the adults get serious and listen to the sermon.”
We’re like the disciples. We don’t really think Jesus values child-like faith. His time is more valuable than that. He wants us doing more important things, more mature things. So we do our grown up faith instead, with all its eschatology, and soteriology, and other serious theological considerations. We put so many moving parts on our faith that it’s like a Rube Goldberg machine. It takes gears and sprockets and wrenches and blueprints to build a faith that flies, we say. It can’t be as easy as pixie dust.
Why? Because we’re adults. We don’t do childish things. And a faith that just sits and receives love from God, one that trusts that Jesus died for every single one of our sins and then lives from that place, is just that. Christianity can’t be childish. It should be sophisticated. Complicated. Hard. Grown-up.
Following Jesus is like my tae kwon do class. It’s adult participation in something that’s meant for children. “Anyone who will not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child will not enter it.” Jesus says plainly that the heart of faith in him is childish. The psalmist echoes this inPsalm 131, saying “I have stilled and quieted my soul. Like a weaned child is my soul within me.”
I’ll keep going to tae kwon do. I like it, and it doesn’t matter that it sometimes looks like they’re training an orphan army, and I’ll get over the awkwardness that comes when I practice my knife hand strikes next to an 11 year old. Plus, it reminds me that the door to the Kingdom is two and a half feet tall, plastic and sticky and caked with mud. Am I coming in?
POSTERIZED
Sometimes I wonder who invented getting posterized.
The smart aleck answer is, 'the poster', although the question of whether the poster created posterization, or whether the concept of getting posterized existed before the poster gave it expression is one that philosophers have been arguing about since antiquity.
Plato: I'm glad we could all assemble here in Ancient Greece. I just wanted to make sure everyone was clear on my philosophical teaching that the universal ideal of 'posterization' is independently real of the particular act of posterizing somebody.
Socrates: I think we are confused, actually.
Confucius: I'm definitely confused. I'm on the wrong continent. Has anyone seen my little cookies anywhere?
Plato: Let me clarify. Posterizing is what happens when a basketball player dunks on another with such force that, on a poster of the moment, one player is captured in the dunking act, while the other is usually falling down or cowering in the corner of the photo. Socrates, a good example is that poster you have of Achilles about to club the Trojan warrior; the one where he's oiled up and flexing.
Socrates: I don't have that poster. I don't know what you're talking about.
Plato: So what I'm saying is that when Clippers power forward Blake Griffin drop-steps on Anderson Varejao in the low post and makes him his girlfriend, Blake Griffin's posterization is merely the imperfect embodiment of a larger abstraction known as 'posterizing'.
Aristotle- I see where you're coming from, Plato, but I have an important question which philosophers such as ourselves have been wrestling with for ages: what about Tim Hardaway's crossover dribble? We called it the UTEP Two-Step. It had nothing to do with dunking.
Plato: Many things can be considered 'posterizing', not just dunking on somebody. Each individual act is a rendering of something larger, more elemental. When we see a defender get his ankles broken, we recognize instinctively that he was just posterized. How? Because it represents the larger ideal of posterization.
Socrates: Look, my mom gave me that poster. It's the only reason I hung it up. I don't like Achilles or anything.
Confucius: Both of you should take a page from my book- if you say practically nothing, there's nothing to argue about. For example, take my saying, "Use 'no way' as a way." Who can argue with that? It's six words long. It's not even a haiku.
Aristotle: Bruce Lee said that, actually. Plato, consider what I call the Third Man Fallacy, which came to me while I was watching an Orson Welles marathon. If all different kinds of posterizing are representations of an ideal Posterization, we only know that because that ideal itself is in relation to another, larger ideal of Posterization, and so on to infinity. Your argument is refuted. Boom!
Plato: Fascinating. I think I just got posterized.
Aristotle's point about Tim Hardaway aside, most posterizations are dunks. Elevating for a real dunk is a heady, electrifying experience, but it's one typically reserved for those with the spiritual gift of hops. I personally have no chance of ever dunking a basketball, except, perhaps, on the surface of the moon.
This is partially because I'm Swedish. Swedes are good people, honest and straightforward, excellent at drinking coffee, but in the leaping category, we make the Budweiser Clydesdales look like pole vaulters. At the Stockholm police department, running hurdles is actually an interrogation technique. And Swedish high jumpers have been banned from Olympic competition since 1964, when one competitor set the Scandinavian high-jump record at 2.1 feet, got an altitude nosebleed and nearly died.
The other problem is that I grew up on a street named 'Holly Springs’ in a neighborhood that was whiter than a mini-marathon**. Nobody has ever dunked a basketball that lived on a street named for either a flower or a naturally occurring water phenomenon. It just hasn't happened. Kevin Harlan has never shouted into his microphone, as a player loaded up a hellacious breakaway dunk, "Buckle up for Andrew Larson! Straight from Carnation Meadows- with no regard for human life!"
**--Would also accept “… the smiles in Guideposts magazine”, “… Kanye West’s fan base.”
Now, if you grew up in playing basketball in a place with a little more street cred, you're probably asking yourself, "What's the big deal about dunking?" You're bored of dunks. The very idea of dunking gives you ennui out your De Gaulle. It's entirely possible you've been posterizing people and dunking basketballs for your entire life. You might be dunking at this very moment, even while reading this**. If so, I'd like to be your agent.
**-- Let's see someone in the dunk contest try that.
Posterization is about helplessness. It's that moment, captured in a photograph, where one player is completely humbled by another. There is the dunker, in flight like Phaeton, above the one who is being dunked on, who can only watch the action unfold from below as he is beaten. Posterizing someone is fun. Being posterized, on the other hand, is not.
That helplessness is at the core of the Christian's experience with sin. The best known expression of it comes from Romans 7. The apostle Paul, in his discussion about the Law and sin, says these words:
“(v. 15) I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.... (v. 17-21) And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it. I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong.”
Smack in the middle of a treatise on the relationship between the Law and man's sin nature, Paul reasons his way to a place of surprising frankness. If I know one thing, it's that I don't get myself. I know the right thing to do, but I don't do it. Something inside me wants to do something else, and so I do that instead. Everywhere I look inside me, sin is winning.
It's hard to know if Paul's tone here is didactic or confessional. Is it the calm voice of a teacher, or the anguished cry of a beaten perfectionist? The point is clear in either case: by his own admission, at the core of the life of Paul- Paul the indefatigable missionary, Paul the firebrand defender of the Gospel, Paul the chosen apostle to evangelize the Gentiles- is the fact that sin continues to posterize him.
For most Christians the experience is the same. Our minds are made up: we are following Jesus. Our hearts have been transformed, our wills baptized into an awareness of the presence of God in our lives. And yet, we fail. Anger surges over our dams of self-control and peace. Lust blows off the storm windows off our supposed purity. Pride quakes down all our reinforced buildings of humility. Everywhere we turn, in some crevice of our lives, we find sin leaping high above us, dunking with glee on our best efforts at trying to be good. No amount of spiritual elbow grease can change it. Our honest efforts at the Christian life are a sham- we are getting posterized, over and over again.
The power of sin lies in the poster. Sin papers the walls of our heart with picture after picture of the times it has dominated our willpower. Our good works are no match. Any posters of our victories over sin are sparse by comparison. As a shrine to our good moments- calling timeout while falling out of bounds, or shooting underhanded, Rick Barry free throws- they embarrass us with their measliness. Meanwhile, wherever we look, the posters of sin condemn us with the volume of our failures. Paul asks at the end of Romans 7, 'Who can save me from this body of death?", but he may as well ask, "What can anyone do about all these posters?"
The power of sin lies in the poster. The power of Christ over sin and death is that it coats the walls of our heart in Teflon. No posters will hang up- not of sin's power over us, nor of our own personal goodness. In their place come the famous words that begin Romans chapter 8, and put an end to the problem of posterization from Romans 7: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…”
What can anyone do about all these posters? It was Paul's cry, and also that of every Christian who still struggles with sin. It's the wish of every non-Christian who wants to be made right with God but doesn't know how. It was the desire of every Jew from the time of Abraham that ever sacrificed a burnt offering. What can anyone do about all these posters?
The cross of Jesus eradicates posterization forever. We've heard it said that our sins will be cast to the bottom of the sea, or as far as the east is from the west, but maybe we need to hear it another way: no longer can our sins taunt us from the walls of our hearts. The staple gun has been taken away. The posters never stay up.
LEATHER
The day you receive your first baseball glove is a beautiful rite of passage into boyhood.
It can be other things too, of course. It may be that first moment when you realize that your dad is a relentless stage father, although that realization typically comes later, such as when you notice that your homemade quesadillas are always stuffed with Big League Chew, or that you are wearing eye black in all of your baby photos. It can also be a reality check for your father, as in a situation where you are actually a girl, you resent being named after Tug McGraw, and it’s time for him to admit that your ballet recitals are not “spring training”.
But mostly it’s a powerful coming-of-age moment. Of course, the beauty of that moment is immediately ruined by the fact that new baseball gloves cannot be used by anyone of normal human strength. We think that just anyone can close a baseball glove shut because pro ballplayers do it with ease. But this is only because they have done massive amounts of steroids, mostly derived from brontosaurus chromosomes. Those players could squeeze the quadratic formula and get Fermat’s Last Theorem. A five year old boy versus his Weapon X glove stands no chance.
Since these new baseball gloves are armor plated, to use them one first must first “break in” the glove. The first step is to pour neatsfoot oil, or lanolin, onto the glove to soften the leather, although if neither is available, Valvoline 10W30 works just as well. After the application of oil, father and son commit acts of increasing violence on the glove in an effort to make it more pliable, similar to an IRS audit. Most experts suggest placing a ball in the webbing of the glove to form the “pocket”, and then repeatedly dropping a baby grand piano on it. It should be noted that Steinway does not endorse this method and recommends using a pipe organ instead, although they do not say how.
I’m certain people would change the breaking-in process if they could. But the one thing nobody would change about a baseball glove is the way it smells. The aroma of a baseball glove is pure magic. There’s a reason that ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson mentions in it in the movie ‘Field of Dreams’, and it’s not because he was hopped up on corn allergies and ghost Claritin. The smell of baseball glove leather has a strange power over men. In fact, if women could somehow create a perfume that smells like baseball glove, there would be no single ladies left in America. If they’re smart, they’re already working on it.
GREG: Did you guys hear about Russell? He’s getting married.
LARRY: To that one girl? The welfare queen with the beer gut?
TOM: That’s her.
LARRY: What? How? Russell rowed crew at Dartmouth. His hedge fund outperformed the Dubai GDP last year. He told me that he was only going out with her once, as a dare. He said it right to my face.
GREG: Yeah, but she was wearing the new Eau du Rawlings. Poor guy never stood a chance.
LARRY: Oh, that’s powerful stuff. Last week I nearly tackled a woman at the mall who was wearing the Rickey Henderson version- you know, the ‘nachos’ one?- but the three guys already with her knocked me out cold. I think she was the one.
TOM: No surprise there. I mean, look at Greg and his wife. She got him by smearing pine tar all over herself at their senior prom.
GREG: She sure did. It went exactly 18 inches up her arm, like the rules of baseball say. I liked that.
LARRY: Speaking of which, Tom, how did your date the other night go?
TOM: Not good. She had that ‘Can of Tennis Balls’ perfume on. I think we’ll just be friends.
But the baseball glove is more than just an untapped resource for world domination by the fairer sex. It’s also a powerful symbol of God’s love.
The Bible says that God loves us. That’s a foundational Christian truth. The idea that we matter to God in a personal way fills page after page of Scripture, and that’s great for it to say. For some people, that’s all they need to hear. They’ll say “Oh, the Bible says God cares about me. I guess it must be that way then!” and then go along, never wondering about it again for another second of their lives. I envy those people. I’m not one of them. Sometimes I wonder.
I used to be really angry about being a Christian because I thought I’d been tricked. I felt like Christianity was a bait-and-switch job where I’d been told about a God of love, and then after I’d promised my life to Him, He turned out to be a drill sergeant who was mad because I was always doing it wrong. And so I was stuck. I couldn’t go anywhere, because God was real. I believed that. But I also believed that His modus operandi was to sign people up, and then hold them to impossible standards of behavior for the rest of their lives. The only reward was to go to heaven at the end, and that only if you managed to make it that far without breaking down.
God felt a lot of things about me, I was sure. He was exasperated with me. He expected more from me. Tolerated me. Was frequently embarrassed by me. But under no circumstances did He like me very much, let alone love me or care about me at all. So what if the Bible said he did? I’d never seen it. Had I missed something?
I had, indeed. As it so happens, leather is God’s love language.
In the Easter story, before Jesus’ crucifixion, he was first tortured by Roman soldiers. The Gospel accounts record how the guards struck Jesus with their fists, spit on him and beat him with a club. On top of that, they whipped him. The whip of this time period was a “cat o’ nine tails”, a thick cord handle that bloomed into nine separate strands, each tipped with lead hooks. And it was made of leather.
At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptist prophesied Jesus’ coming Messiah-ship. But some people misunderstood and thought John was the coming Messiah. And so he answered them this way:
“The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah. John answered them all, “I baptize you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”
When John testified that he was unworthy to touch Jesus’ sandals, he spoke a powerful message about a God whose ways and character were infinitely different from his own. This Jesus is so awesome and holy that even the leather on his shoes is untouchable to me.
For many years I knew that I, too, was unworthy to touch the sandal straps of Jesus. Nobody had to tell me this. Undeserving-ness was a fact- the fact- of my life. I knew it instinctively. Further, the concept of God dying on my behalf didn’t always dispel that feeling in the way that preachers assumed it should. After all, Jesus was also omnipotent God. If He dies, coming back to life is probably not that hard for Him. So what did that show me, really? I knew I was unworthy. But my question still persisted. Was I worth anything to God?
Leather is what answered that question. At the hands of the Romans, Jesus let leather scourge His body, where once leather had adorned it. God incarnate allowed a symbol of His perfection become a tool to humiliate him. The cross showed me a God who died for me, but the whip showed me a God who would give up his majesty for me.
Our salvation is not a cosmic technicality. It’s not like God said “I wish I didn’t have to save these guys, but we checked the paperwork here and it turns out that I’m perfectly love, so I’ve got to beam down and get crucified. BRB, cherubs.” And we’re not incidental to the equation, either, as if the Easter story only happened so everyone would know how awesome God is, and we just happened to be sitting in the audience when it happened.
No, before Jesus died to take our sins, he was whipped. And in the whipping He showed us our value to Him. God chose to let nothing stand in His way, not even His holiness. He laid everything down to get us. He came to save us from sin and death, and to blaze a salvation trail we could walk in. He would do it because he loves us. Loves you. Loves me. The leather proves it.
The beginning of baseball season and the Easter season often coincide. It’s probably just a fluke of the calendar, but maybe not. After all, baseball has every element of the Easter story in play: grass, horsehide, wood- and leather. So the next time you watch a game, pay attention to the huge Easter symbols on the players’ hands- and control yourself around the women wearing baseball glove perfumes.
SLUMP
Nobody in the universe is cockier than a pedestrian in a crosswalk.
Your average person, when approaching a busy street, has a healthy attitude of caution. Their brain analyzes the variables and flashes two thoughts on to the cerebral JumboTron:
1) Those cars are moving very fast.
2) I remember what roadkill looks like.
So most people plan their street crossings with the precision of a jewel heist. At any given time at an intersection, the intensity of tactical planning going on makes the Joint Chiefs of Staff look like a flash mob. If Starbucks could harness this strategic power, they would finally find a way to graft espresso makers onto our thighs and then debit our bank accounts for it.
But inside a crosswalk, something changes. Normal street traversers become Kanye West pedestrians, drunk with their power to halt multiple tons of steel with a single step. The crosswalk’s magic turns what should be a Frogger-esque race across six lanes of danger into an asphalt Lazy River. Instead of sprinting for their life, people float from one side to the other, fully aware that if any any car touches them, they will lawyer up and feed that driver's life savings to the pinball machines.
This is the cockiness that makes people hate pedestrians in crosswalks. And it's the cockiness I hope you'll forgive when I say this:
I just don't go through slumps.
Other people do, or so I'm told. I don't know what that feels like. I'm sorry. I can't empathize with this phenomenon of "going through a slump". I've only ever heard rumors that such a thing exists. Sometimes friends will confide that they have had periods where "things didn't go quite right", but the concept eludes me. My entire life has been an uninterrupted symphony of winning, and there are no false notes in the movements. Slumps? I can't fathom them. Je ne comprends, mon frere.
Sure, there was that stretch from elementary school until college where any social contact with girls was a little erratic. But that was mainly due to watching 'Say Anything' and assuming that it was an instruction manual on effectively courting ladies, when it is, in fact, the opposite**. There was also the 2.7 GPA from my career in higher learning, a hiccup I could have avoided had I not tried to go as long as possible each semester without buying any textbooks. And I'm definitely not counting the forty one consecutive games of online Risk I once lost to my friend Matt because- in my defense- I was supposed to be working at the time.
**- Young men, take note. If I ever become rich, I want to establish the Foundation for Men Whose Game Was Radically Damaged By John Cusack Movies. Our meetings will fill up the Pontiac Silverdome.
But I'm ignoring all that. The point is that slumps don’t happen to me, they happen to other people. Specifically, athletes.
Athletes are our best examples of slumps because so much of what they do is quantifiable. Also, like the first American colonists, results alone dictate their success. In the sports world, you're either getting it done or you're not. There's not much room for argument. A three-point specialist sporting an 0-20 streak from beyond the arc can't debate the numbers. '0-20' doesn't mean he's a bad three-point shooter, but at the moment, he's shooting threes badly. His current performance is falling short of his usual standards. He's in a slump.
Facing some kind of slump, everyone's first instinct is to change something in the way they play, unless they are a United States Congressperson, in which case the solution involves borrowing massive sums of money from China. But in fact, changing approach only prolongs the slump. A basketball player who counters a poor shooting streak by altering his shot mechanics always prolongs the agony. Any baseball player who overhauls his swing to combat a slump just compounds the problem.
In both cases, the player misunderstands the nature of what is happening. Generally speaking, the way out of a slump is not changing everything. The way out is persistence.
In Paul's letter to the Galatian church, he ends his remarks with a section that encourages the Galatians to live rightly. After instructions on correcting another wayward believer (gently, Paul says) and how to evaluate their lives (pay attention to yourself, not to others), he caps the section with an agricultural metaphor:
“... You will always harvest what you plant. Those who live only to satisfy their own sinful nature will harvest decay and death from that sinful nature. But those who live to please the Spirit will harvest everlasting life from the Spirit. So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up.” (Gal. 6: 7-9, italics mine)
Christians flip out a little bit when we read the parts of the Bible that tell us to do good things. It seems like half of us are fleeing from a legalistic brand of Christianity, and the other half of us are determined not to go that way ourselves, which leaves us wound a little tight.
For example, when I was in college, a professor almost didn't show up to give us a final exam. In classic "this could only happen at a Christian college" fashion, after 20 minutes of professorial absence, all 50 students remained in the classroom. Not one person left. No one moved a single Birkenstock-ed toe. To this day, I can't believe it really happened. At any other school, the students would have overrun some hapless TA while leaving the room, like rioting serfs, and hogtied him as a warning to the administration.
We couldn't contain our growing delight over the professor’s truancy. Was this really happening? What are the rules here? No professor, no final, right?** We knew we were dodging a bullet- the course had been difficult, and the final was reputed to be a GPA assassin. But soon our inexperience showed. We didn't know what the next move should be- stay or go? - and conflict soon harshed everyone's buzz.
**- I know what you’re thinking, and, sadly, Saved By the Bell lied about that whole ‘five minute rule’ thing.
We divided into factions and bickered about what to do, speaking mostly in action movie cliches. “We have to get out of here, we're running out of time” ”'But if you do this, you’re no different from anyone else! It doesn't have to end this way!” “If we want to survive, we need to leave right now!! Just STAY TOGETHER!”
Stay together, we did. After an hour we were still there, all of us, with half of the allotted test-taking time elapsed. The stand-off ended when, under cover of argument, a sophomore slipped away and called the professor at home. He arrived, disheveled from over-sleeping, and promptly administered the exam with no bonus time and no grading curve.
And that's how Christians feel when we stumble onto the parts of the Bible telling us to be good. It's like thinking we had a free pass on a final exam, only to find out that we have to take it after all- and knowing it will demolish us. It's discouraging.
Life compounds the discouragement. The most common feedback the world has for our good actions is indifference. It may be true that no good deed goes unpunished, but it's truer that most good deeds go unnoticed. Worse yet, accumulating good deeds doesn’t seem to help us avoid life's calamities. 'Rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike' as the Psalmist says. So, absent any visible cause-and-effect, how can Paul honestly encourage the Galatian church, and us by proxy, to keep going in doing good? How can he tell us to continue follow Jesus through life’s slumps?
He can do it because God owns the soil.
Paul's use of farming language echoes the words of Jesus in Matthew 9, where Jesus refers to God as the "Lord of the harvest", alluding to the many people that were ready to hear Jesus' teachings and be saved. Later, in John 12, Jesus foretells his death by saying that "unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds."
By persisting in obedience to God to his death, Jesus secured the salvation harvest by being the seed that falls to the ground that God placed under curse back in Genesis. He was pleased to sow Jesus into the spiritual soil of the world, and after his resurrection Paul calls Jesus "the firstfruits" of God's kingdom- a farming term. Because Jesus died and rose again, God repossessed the soil.
Likewise, when we sow our good deeds into the world, as Paul tells us, we sow it, not into hardpan that yields only thistles and frustration, but into rich loam that Jesus' obedience unto death has tilled to fertility. "Don't tire of doing good..." Paul says, and he can say that with confidence, because Jesus drains the word 'tire' of its spiritual connotations:
1) Exertion. Because Jesus' death means that our salvation is secure, He removes the physical fatigue of racking up good work after good work in an effort to earn it. We can stop the frenzy of activity that surrounds working so hard to please God, and catch our breath. He's pleased in Jesus, and that's enough. No need to get tired out.
2) Patience. Just as Jesus' resurrection secures the harvest of salvation, it also secures a harvest of blessing. This promise removes the taxation of our mental strength that comes from thinking that our actions are futile. Whether we see it or not, nothing is wasted in God's economy, least of all the things we do. Our attempts at obedience are not fruitless, or in vain. So when the slumps come where nothing goes right, don't stop doing good. Keep trying.
In both cases, discouragement is banished, and encouragement reigns. Though obeying God seems like a daunting task, we can do it, because, through Jesus' persistence, God owns the land. Or, as the old hymn says, "...This is my Father's world. O let me ne'er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet."
SPIKE
My brother and I once decided that we wanted to play in a beach volleyball tournament.
I'm not sure where that decision came from. Certainly not from reality, where our major qualifications for volleyball success were:
1) When standing in good light, my brother looks like a leaner Channing Tatum. In bad light, he just looks like the Silver Surfer in profile, but with less body fat.
2) In college, I once had an ill-advised crush on Logan Tom, Stanford's six-foot-one volleyball prodigy. Proportionally speaking, this was like a sidewalk deli falling in love with the Empire State Building. She could have picked me up and carried me around in a Vera Bradley bag like a baby kangaroo.
Luckily, lack of qualification has never stopped either of us from pursuing anything that we wanted to do, such as attend prom. As a breed of man, we are of the "go for it" variety. We say that, if something is worth doing, it is also worth getting in way over your head for. Our entire lives are LiveStrong bracelets.
That volleyball tournament taught us a lot. For one, it turns out that if you host a beach volleyball tournament in Kentucky, it’s likely that the other players will fall well short of the standard of sexiness that is mandated by most pro events. This was a big deal because the AVP is very serious about policing the attractiveness of their competitors. It is at the top of their priority list, right alongside negotiating sponsorship deals with bronzing lotions. If they had scouted this tournament, they would have discovered that it violated bylaw 6.15, section 3, under the heading “Failure To Utilize Model-Hot Athletes For Volleyball Tourney/Possible Impromptu Fashion Show” and shut it down immediately.
We also learned that, when it comes to competition, most people will not respect the ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ divisions of play. My brother and I registered to play in the ‘C’ division, which we thought was appropriate for two people who spent ninety percent of their practice time either attempting to jump-serve (me) or get a tan (him). Thus, in the 'C' division, we expected to compete against players with an equally shallow grasp on the nuances of competitive volleyball. So imagine our surprise when all our opponents came out spiking on us.