Note: My wife and I send out a monthly newsletter by e-mail. This is taken from our Sept. 1, 2011, edition. – DAS

It’s the summer of 1957 and I am in the kitchen of our home, a pastor’s parsonage in a little town about 90 minutes outside of New York City. I’m 11 years old, and indulging in one of my favorite summertime activities – listening to the Yankees on the radio (it’s hard to believe how much I now dislike the Yankees). My mother is ironing nearby. And now time stands still because my hero, Mickey Mantle, comes to the plate.

Mickey wore #7.  Now if that isn’t theologically significant, I don’t know what is! Bible scholars often say that seven is the number of perfection. Mickey’s teammate, Clete Boyer, once said, “What does seven mean? It means Mickey Mantle.”

I stand still as I envision the Mighty Mick at the plate. He takes a powerful swing and breaks his bat. Over a half century later I still clearly recall my euphoric jubilation as I ran around the kitchen shouting to my mother, “He broke his bat! Mantle broke his bat!” I also can visualize her motherly smile at my childish exuberance. Back then I didn’t realize that it doesn’t take much to break a bat – that it’s usually a flaw in the bat that breaks it, not the power of the swing.

But the Mick could do no wrong in my eyes and pretty much everybody else shared that opinion. In the words of a teammate, “His aura had an aura. The way he walked, the way he ran, and the way he presented himself once he put on the uniform – he was a symphony. Ever hear Beethoven’s Ninth? The Ode to Joy? You see him hit and then you see him run, and it’s like going into the chorale.”

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m currently reading “The Last Boy” by Jane Leavy. It’s about “Mickey Mantle and the end of America’s childhood.” If I close my eyes, I feel like I’m eleven years old and The Mick is coming to the plate. Flies buzz at the screen door, my mother is ironing, and I stand mesmerized in the middle of the kitchen floor trying to imagine someone whose craft is so sublime, so perfectly executed, a person so elite in his profession, that one gropes for a way to tell others about it without diminishing it.

Apart from the nostalgia and wistfulness, I feel another more powerful emotion. It’s the sensation that engulfs someone who has seen Ray Allen hit a jumper, Bobby Orr make it look like he’s playing hockey against a bunch of junior highers, Lou Gehrig or Cal Ripken show up for work night after night, or actually heard Beethoven’s Ninth. It’s the feeling I got when I first viewed “Chariots of Fire” and heard Eric Liddell say, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”

I have just returned from getting my hair cut. The barber asked me what I did for a living. It’s always a challenge to try to explain my vocation to people, so I told her that I do a lot of speaking and teaching about the Bible. She said she could never do that because in elementary school her classmate passed out from nervousness and hit his head on the desk as he was trying to make a speech. I told her I had a similar problem when I was young but now I find public speaking very natural. What I really wanted to say was, “I believe God made me for a purpose, and gave me the desire to teach the Bible. And when I teach His word I feel His pleasure.” But I didn’t. She may have passed out and she had scissors in her hand.

We might all benefit from asking the questions, “For what purpose has God made me? What did He make me able to do well? Do I feel his pleasure when I do that thing?” If anything hits you out of my short journey down memory lane, may it be that God has a purpose for you, He has made you to do something well, and when you do it, you can feel His pleasure.

There has been a noticeable development in our society, perhaps most demonstrable among professional athletes, a theological trend of sorts. It is a worldview that prompts people to give God credit for the good things that happen. What could be more right than that?

It is seen in athletes who give God credit for home runs, touchdown passes, and throwing down a slam dunk. While I like the fact that there are believers in the sports world who are willing to express their faith in that way, I wonder about the depth and breadth in understanding God’s ways when I see this on TV. Here is what these athletes aren’t typically doing: giving God any thanks or expressing awareness of his involvement in their activities when things don’t go well, when they strike out, drop the easy touchdown pass, blow the wide open layup, or strike out on a bad pitch.

During late November 2010, there was an event that served to perfectly highlight this dilemma. The Buffalo Bills were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers. (For Ravens fans like myself, there are few joys in life like seeing the Steelers lose.) In this particular game, the lowly Bills had forced the Steelers into overtime. A perfectly thrown touchdown pass to Steve Johnson (wide receiver for the Buffalo Bills), a pass that would win the game for Buffalo, was dropped in the end zone.

The previous week, Johnson had caught passes for which he gave God the credit. Now that he dropped a pass that would have meant a win for his team, he posted on Twitter that he blamed God for the dropped pass. (At least he’s consistent: God gets the credit when he makes the good catch, and God gets the blame when Johnson drops the easy pass.) This seems to me to be a clear indication of a terribly deficient theology. But it’s not just athletes who can be bad theologians.

More recently, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann suggested that God’s purpose for the recent hurricane and earthquake that impacted the mid-Atlantic region was because of Washington’s out of control spending. Previously we have heard Pat Robertson attribute Hurricane Katrina to God judging America for its position on abortion. John Piper blamed a tornado that swept through Minneapolis and damaged a Lutheran church on that denomination’s position on homosexuality. Westboro Baptist regularly blames military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan on America condoning homosexuality.

The recent weather events in the mid-Atlantic region have given rise to some Facebook posts by my friends and fellow Christians that I fear can reflect this same deficient worldview and send a wrong message to unbelievers.

“Finally our electricity is back on.” “So glad the worst of the storm missed us.” “We went through the hurricane and were totally unscathed!” And each of these is usually followed by a comment to the effect that “God is so good!” In these comments is little thought about how “the goodness of God” was displayed on those who basements were flooded or cars were smashed by falling tree limbs. Or is God only good when the storm passes me by? Maybe we don’t really believe that “God is good ALL the time.”

And then there are the opposite posts. “Our basement is flooded.” Or “a tree branch landed on our car.” Or “the power company is sure taking its good old time getting us up and running again.” These are often followed by something like “Bummer!” Or “I’m pretty upset.” Where is the goodness of God for these people? Is he only good when we like the outcome of events?

Obviously this trend reveals a disturbingly shallow view of God. These opinions have roots in a worldview that assumes I can figure out what God is doing at any given time based on my own opinions. Once I form my conclusion, I can pronounce God’s view on the outcome of the event. So, in the locker room, the victorious athlete can “give God all of the glory.” And the owner of the unscathed home can say “God is good.”

In short – and this is important – when the event has a satisfactory outcome that I am pleased with, I will give God the credit. By this reasoning, “God is good” when I recover from the flu, when the new recipe was tasty, and when I got the job I really wanted.

But when doors I want to go through are closed, when things do not go the way I prefer, God is apparently “not good” since the baseball player never says “God is good” when he strikes out. Does the sick person ever say “glory to God” when he remains sick or his condition actually worsens?

I love the way the Book of Genesis begins and ends. Genesis 1:31 – “God saw all that He had made and it was very good.” Genesis 50:20 – “As for you, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” In other words, not only is God good when He is exerting His awesome creative power. He is also planning good out of the nastiness of life. If Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt was the catalyst for some profoundly good things that God was planning, why can’t God be doing good when my basement floods, when my car breaks down, when a tree branch falls on my car, when my kindergartener has a bad day at school, when my sickness refuses to go away, or when I have to remain on unemployment for another 6 months?

One missiologist has suggested that every breakthrough in the Muslim world has come on the heels of a natural disaster. If that is true, and I tend to think it is, how many other good things does God intend to do through the stuff of life that we naturally don’t like. The outcome that you wish didn’t occur when you would have preferred it work another way, that outcome may actually be the better way that God intends to use for purposes that may boggle our mind. Let’s give God the praise in all things at all times as we wait to see what good thing he is doing through the outcomes we like and the occurrences we do not prefer.

No one likes to have a performance they are watching interrupted by a cell phone ringtone. The Internet was abuzz a few months ago when the conductor of the New York Philharmonic actually stopped the show and humiliated the owner of the offending phone. The crowd (as well as those who read about it) applauded the conductor. As most of us have suffered in silence as cell phones interrupt, we were delighted to have someone in power voice the indignation of “every man” to this all-too-common offense. Recently, at a synagogue in Slovakia, a violinist was performing a beautiful solo. He had gotten to a pause in the piece. It was at that exact moment when the offending cell phone went off. He continued to pause to allow the owner to turn off the ringer. When it rang a second time, rather than resorting to a public rebuke, he started playing along with the ringtone melody, adding some rather creative variations of his own, beautifying that terrible cliche of a ringtone as well as delighting the audience. The piece he had originally been playing was now ended, at least for the moment, but in the process he had done something novel that his audience will remember for the rest of their lives.
My symphony has been interrupted as well. Things are changing and fast. Forms that worked even five years ago no longer do. Yet I have yet to meet the person in my line of work who says the opportunities are no longer there. They are there but try as we might, we’re having a hard time defining them and developing a form that fits. So maybe I just need to be playing my violin and when someone changes the tune, rather than ignoring or rebuking, I might want to play along. But, like our Slovakian violinist, I may just add a few variations of my own.

 ”The Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was up a tree in Kenya gazing at the wildlife below when her father, King George VI, died in London on Feb. 6, 1952. At that moment, 60 years ago today, she was queen of the United Kingdom, at age 25. Only she didn’t know it yet.”  This quote from today’s USA Today got me thinking about who we think we are versus who we are.  When Elizabeth was in that tree in Kenya, she didn’t realize she was now the leader of numerous colonies and nations around the world.  She knew she was a royal, but she was just a royal in a tree gazing at wildlife and not leading much of anything. 

I guess I know I’m a royal too.  No, not that kind of royal.  I have too many horse thieves, drunks and other nare-do-wells in my lineage to boast any connection, distant or otherwise, to past European sovereigns.  But, it is true that “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  Galatians 2:20 So Christ lives in me, huh?  Well, I guess that makes me a royal, doesn’t it?  Philippians 2 tells us we followers of Christ will shine among those around us like stars in the sky as we hold firmly to the word of life.  I am not feeling particularly shiny right now, are you?…which makes me wonder if we, like the queen 60 years ago today, have no idea of who we really are right now.  So we sit in our tree gazing at wildlife around us thinking that it sure would be nice if we were powerful and could change things.  Like the queen, we don’t realize that there was a death that has made us quite powerful.  The only thing is this death came with a resurrection. 

I have watched enough kids sports to know that, to excel, one needs some athletic ability.  That ability only takes you so far, however.  What really matters is what is going on in your head.  Do you really believe you can do it? 

So, as the great theologians have said in the past when asked how one should lead their life, Be who you are!  Christ has made you a royal, an heir.  That doesn’t mean you should be fitted for your tiara just yet.  But it does mean that you should have far greater expectations for your scope of authority and ability to change things.  After all, it isn’t you.  It’s Christ in you.  So, lets stop gazing at the wildlife (or the tv) and get down out of our tree (or off the couch) and take up our royal commission.  The stakes are pretty high, afterall.  We have a kingdom to steward.