Okay, here’s some perspective from a non-NFC north fan.

I’ve lived in five NFL markets: Pittsburgh, Miami, DC, Detroit, and now the TC. Again, I’m a Miami fan.

The Pittsburgh fan base is one of the most loyal, faithful, authentic groups in the league and in my opinion one of the top 5 in the league. I have every reason to hate them and they Miami. The Stellars (w. pa. accent) essentially ended the Miami dynasty in the 70′s and the two cities are complete existential opposites. Yet never once was I drilled by a Pittsburgh fan for my Miami aqua #13.

Miami fans are among the most definitively fair weather in the league. Most of the true Phins fans moved away in the 80′s when the racial issues killed the city’s authentically blue collar population. Its not that the remaining don’t care but why would you spend time on a mediocre team when you can enjoy one of the largest party towns in the US where you can party way better on South Beach among far more visually pleasing scenery and cheaper with less emotional cost. Plus you’re only 90 minutes from Margaritaville. Nothing better illustrates the Miami situation than the fact that every home game this year has been a ticket sales sellout including next week’s pre-playoff, playofff vs the Stellars; but none has been an actual gameday attendance sellout.

As for the Skins, I think for the most part you can apply the statements about the Stellars to them as well. Miami ended their perfect 72 season with a SB W vs the Skins and about a decade later they pummeled a David Woodley led Phins team in the SB. The Skins are old school, the DC community is as unique an existence as there is in the NFL, and they love their team regardless.

No team better represents the state of their city/state better than the boys in Honolulu Blue. The fans are there in Motown, but they’ve been punished like very naughty children since anyone still alive can remember. Why would anyone still go to a Detroit game? I mean 10+ years with #20 only got them one NFC title game. What makes anyone with any common sense believe anyone on the current roster is going to lead them out of NFL purgatory? Yet, like robots they tune their DTV Sunday Tix package (games are blacked out like the sun rises) to the Lions and are safely asleep by halftime. Ford Field is gorgeous but in the end if the girls in the shoulder pads aren’t attractive why is anyone gonna care. That said, the minute the Lion-Cubs grow into men for a decade or so, watch out, the fan base will rise from their slumber and be one of the most rowdy in the league. They’re so bad they don’t even have the energy to notice I’m even wearing my Danny Marino threads.

That takes me to the TC where the first time I suited up in my Dolphins stocking cap and #13 and headed to class at NCU I was promptly informed by a well educated person wearing purple that “Miami sucks!”. And the echo resonates nearly half a dozen times a season since I came in the fall of 1999. While I’m not so much arguing that in fact “Miami doesn’t suck,” I am oft left wondering why anyone in the TC would even care if that statement is true. I say that to illustrate a point about Vikes fans, of which I can honestly say there are the faithful. But most of the vocal “fans”, for what ever reasons there might be good or bad, are so bitter about history in general that they are not able to rationally deal with losing a game even in the midst of a decent season. They have a great tradition and are very rarely truly awful but if you lived in a vacuum and landed on earth in December of any of the last 10 years except 1998 and spoke with the average Vikes fan, you would feel like they were supporting a team suffering through a Detroit Lions-like slump. Whether that frustration is a sign of passion or being sore losers (I don’t care how long its been since Tark played at the Met or if the Vikes ever won a “big game”) its a tired act the MN fans put on every year. I can fully see how Vikes can be annoyed by the Cheese or Halas Hall each year. But so many of the loudest Vikes fans couldn’t tell you who won the SB in 1977. That was the last time the Vikes played on Super Sunday, albeit, a loss to the Fighting Jon Maddens. The bottom line in my experience is they don’t even really know why they’re so bitter, its just an inherited sin of their fathers. Are the fans good? Maybe. Are they loyal? Sure. Are they tolerable. Just barely. Again not all are this way but every real fan is bitter when their club loses so, as hard as it is to believe, EVERYONE hurts when their team disappoints.

I know what its like to watch a team in your division rise from ashes to dominate the NFL. Remember I grew up with Indy in the AFC east. To know that the Pats and the IndyPonys have risen from classic NFL mediocrity to be two of the 3-4 premiere franchises just makes me ill. Plus our franchise’s greatest player was denied SB glory by the NFL’s most pure chokers, the Jills, through out the early 90′s. Top that off with an owner who threw $$$ at the Marlins to earn WS rings with money he made selling stadium naming rights to our building that only made profits during FB not Hardball games. And how Marc Anthony? That’s another blog. But never once have you heard me present scenarios for me to disown my team or create my own personal global warming bonfire with all the Dolphins gear I’ve collected over 28 years. Yet both have been bullet point items in many dissertation speeches presented to me by Vikes fans.

Nothing against Vikes fans or any other team’s supporters but this is just one guy’s experiences.

I haven’t yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a “script” that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven’t been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell’s old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven’t yet agreed on the terms.

[Andrew] Wilson [of New St. Andrews College] isn’t one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just “metaphors.” He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn’t waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he “allows” it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing. (Incidentally, just when is President Barack Obama going to decide which church he attends?)

Usually, when I ask some Calvinist whether he is really a Calvinist (in the sense, say, of believing that I will end up in hell), there is a slight reluctance to say yes, and a slight wince from his congregation. I have come to the conclusion that this has something to do with the justly famed tradition of Southern hospitality: You can’t very easily invite somebody to your church and then to supper and inform him that he’s marked for perdition. More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don’t truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think. Every now and then I read reports of polls that tell me that more Americans believe in the virgin birth or the devil than believe in Darwinism: I’d be pretty sure that at least some of these are unwilling to confess their doubts to someone who calls them up on their kitchen phone.

The battle that Paul fought and won was to keep conversion, understood not as a mere change of religious or doctrinal allegiance but as the transformation of the human self in all its spheres or strands, squarely in the center of the Christian way. Many since Paul’s day have sought to evade this experience to a few exceptional individuals, or shunning it to Christian groups said to be marginal or socially dispossessed (heretics, dissenters, baptists, pentecostals) or subordinating transformation to the orderly rhythms of an organized church life with formalized ‘initiation rites’ and ‘confirmations’ and ‘ordinations’ and ‘consecrations.’ Yet the hot breath of the Spirit blows, the liberating air of the resurrection rushes in, the rumor of the new that comes in Christ breaks the old molds of convention time and time again, not merely in the so-called marginal churches and social strata (though perhaps especially there) but within the high structures of ecclesiastical convention and Chrsitian social control as well.

-James Wm. McClendon, Jr., Ethics, 254.

Without blushing, Paul is simply stating that when it comes to leading in the church, women are unfit because they are more gullible and easier to deceive than men. While many irate women have disagreed with his assessment through the years, it does appear from this that such women who fail to trust his instruction and follow his teaching are much like their mother Eve and are well-intended but ill-informed. . . Before you get all emotional like a woman in hearing this, please consider the content of the women’s magazines at your local grocery store that encourages liberated women in our day to watch porno with their boyfriends, master oral sex for men who have no intention of marrying them, pay for their own dates in the name of equality, spend an average of three-fourths of their childbearing years having sex but trying not to get pregnant, and abort 1/3 of all babies – and ask yourself if it doesn’t look like the Serpent is still trolling the garden and that the daughters of Eve aren’t gullible in pronouncing progress, liberation, and equality.

Mark Driscoll, Church Leadership: Explaining the Roles of Jesus, Elders, Deacons, and Members at Mars Hill, Mars Hill Theology Series (Seattle, WA: Mars Hill Church, 2004), 43.

-James Wm. McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, 227. 

-James Wm. McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology (Vol. 1), 225.

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“It is nearly killing me! Help me. . . if you can.”

Painful divorce. Senseless death. Mind-numbing loss. 1-2-3! Deploy airbag! Jesus be near, NOW!

Please do not misunderstand what I am saying and bear with me as I progress through my own internal logic diagram towards a coherent statement. I think it quite obvious that Christ and his Holy Spirit are those on whom we are supposed to call in time of disturbance or unrest. This, I think, even my most diametrically opposed comrades would agree on. None the less, it is foundation which must be poured so that no one can confuse what is being stated as something other than what it is. That being a person who values a side of cognitive coherence with his meal of spiritual submission while working out his salvation with a very localized sense of fear and trembling.

It is within this context of working out my end of this salvation process that I find myself challenged and sadly lacking. Please again, do not purpose to me various flaws in my soteriology. Simply stated there are things we’re responsible for in the process of becoming more like Christ and those are the stairs of which I am stumbling up and down in this post. In Christ in his place of prayer in a garden historical moments before his salvation act was put into play, I see the model of a human life so otherworldly from the one I am able to approach. Because He was and is God he was fully aware, not merely of his pending physical torture, but also of coming face to face with being made sin for an entire history of people living and yet to come. From this he was not able to escape his human emotion as exhibited by his prayer for God to potentially intervene. But in the next, in my imagining, excruciating, exhaled, exhausted statement he offers the submission that I find so lacking in my own life.

“Father, not mine, but your will be done.”

And from there all of history is different, regardless of your understanding of the historical value of the synoptic gospels. At some point Jesus, fully God, gave himself to his Lord and Father. Willfully, though not without a recognizable humanity that questions even the most loving father. At various times in my life, profession of faith and creed have been self serving and passionately fear based responses to distasteful circumstance. But a question arises in my soul in these moments. Where does my human hard work and desire to get the job done while relying on no human assistance infiltrate my spiritual humility to acknowledge basic existence, Christian existence, is only but a gift hinging on the next God given breath? No intent is here being offered to spiritualize the basic things like getting out of bed and taking a shower or shifting in a seat while watching the 6 pm news. Interestingly though, when those precious human faculties are take from us by disease, accident, or age we suddenly crawl humbly to a merciful God begging his hand to make sacred those abilities that were wholly our own but a few days, weeks, or months ago. In a humorous and not intentionally offensive mental metaphor, I picture myself driving in a car nearly externally wall papered with Christianese bumper stickers, maybe even a God is my co-pilot somewhere on the rear. Sticky note Bible verses are at every eye level on the interior and are completed with a ‘Smile! Jesus Loves You!” air freshener on the mirror. But never is Jesus consulted before or after every voyage in that car. I travel on and on in all directions. Is God in the seat next to me? And Jesus surely loves me, but what of me towards Him? Let me not pretend I feel for His nearness as I operate that vehicle and certainly not on a sunny day. But when the accident happens, without fail I call out, “Help me, if you can.” Hoping for the Jesus air bag deployment. Hoping.

Of course as the vehicle spins slowly in freeze frame I do not expect that God desires us to offer the blood tinged sweat of Jesus as we cry out “not mine, but your will be done!” But I do think that He might like more than the occasional deductible payment in acknowledgement of the debt we owe. Instead He gets the auto pay, direct deposit version from us for weeks and months and years between incidents with maybe a few verse-a-day recitations and Passion Live album sing alongs while commuting so we do not have to change our life to model His. A life that, when made flesh and lived among us, was not a marketable “counter culture” figure head nor a slogan engineering entity, but instead was the One and Only full of unfailing love and faithfulness which led Him to bare the scorn of our sin and close the divide between us and our heavenly Father. And all to often I realize how separate I allow myself to get from that Love and Faithfulness which shines in the darkness that masquerades itself as light when life is going by so smoothly.

Obviously these thoughts are tied to the first chapter of the Gospel of John. In that text there is a statement about darkness that I miss often when I breeze through that early text before the testimony of the Baptist in regard to our Savior. The later portion of verse five says, “..and the darkness can never extinguish it.” But my NASB has a footnote that reads, “and the darkness has not understood it.” That sounds more familiar to my experience. Because my life exists in a darkened world its all too easy to misunderstand the Light, misunderstand my Savior, my salvation. Salvation is always salvation. Not just on days where the water is deep and the wind is strong. Not just on days when ease of life is mistook for self sufficient light.

Reading through an old book that I was to have consumed as a freshman in college ten years ago this fall, I found John Fischer and his writing in Fearless Faith. His question resonates within this internal conversation.

How much does my faith in Christ have to do with what I actually put my faith in? How connected to the things of this world do I remain place of willful and prayerful reliance on Christ and Him crucified, dead three days, and risen again? How much of my existence is based on my grasp of who I am in this world verses who I am in the eyes of my Savior? I am in deed far short of the model set by our Lord and no one I have ever met who has truly set out on that goal has ever felt differently. To pursue Him is only to find out daily more and more how Great he is and how small I am. None the less there is more than the way I have known the true Light that is the Life for man.

Being deeply wounded or afflicted in our day to day existence is authentically painful. But often my fear is certainly greater than my faith and that is the greater pain now realized. I cannot really have immobilized faith. More truthfully that would be doubt realized. Jesus response to our recognizable friend in Mark 9 reveals the offense I feel guilty of when he tells the man, “What do you mean, if I can? Anything is possible if a man believes!”.

There is no certain answer that I can know about the journalism questions of life. The five W’s and an occasional H of our human challenges and struggles will crush and rebuild us over and over again and in that I have no doubt. Who, what, when, where, why and how are never so easily deciphered as the issues they cause. Inside of these questions however is the life we are living. No one completely ever knows except God himself. Questions like the ones connected to an old man’s suicide or a young girls sudden unexplained death will most likely go by our sphere of understanding no matter the examination process we put them through. People who operate much like myself will certainly lose sleep at various times in those foggy paths.

My roommate and HQBR comrade Sports Dave and I have often stated that theology is not so much written as much as it is lived. Everyone is living an orthodoxy regardless of their awareness to that. As I experience more of the devastating quandaries this human life creates, it has become more and more of my desire to live a theology of belief. That is so simple and really silly and my seminary friends will all quickly lunge forward with their far more polished or at least examined views. There are choices we all make and within my life there is a thirst to be something closer to consistent. Something closer to not just a lonely everyday sameness, but a regular functioning believer despite circumstance. Choosing to believe will create a new frame to my everyday life because I will always be living what I believe whether I acknowledge that or not. Pairing down those beliefs is a never ending task that is a part of that working out my salvation that I spoke of earlier. Trembling and fear need not be regarding my situation, but instead in awareness of a great and mighty God who did for me what I profess to believe he did. Forward progress is difficult to discern in something as challenging this, but it is my hope that the orthodoxy I live is not made up of trite scripture quotation but the feel of my Savior speaking his words to me through the truth that was hidden in my heart as I grew in Him through out my life. It is with an intellectual understanding being connected to my spiritual need that I pray the words of the father in Mark 9.

“Lord, I believe, forgive my unbelief.” For with that unbelief lessened, it might be that my Lord is more of a savior and less of personal flotation device.