A Lot About Baseball, A Little About Politics

The Atlanta Braves are five and a half games ahead of the Philadelphia Phillies in the battle for the National League Eastern Division pennant. Their magic number (the combination of Braves’ wins and Phillies’ losses that would give the Braves the championship) is seven.

The last time the Braves won their division was 2013. They’ve been in rebuilding mode since then. The conventional wisdom going into this season was that the team was at least another year away from being serious contenders. My expert opinion was that if everything went just right, the Braves might win close to half their games. The conventional wisdom was wrong. So was I.

Veteran players like Freddie Freeman and Nick Markakis have had outstanding seasons. Youngsters like Ronald Acuña, Ozzie Albies, Dansby Swanson, and Johan Camargo have contributed greatly. By the way, if Acuña doesn’t win the National League’s Rookie of the Year award, they should do away with it. While I’m on the subject of awards, I’d say the same thing about the Manager of the Year award if Brian Snitker doesn’t win it.

It’s been a long time since the Braves played meaningful games in September. Whether they make the playoffs or not (oh how I hope they do), this has been the most fun of any season since that of the worst-to-first team of 1991. I’m grateful, as all Braves fans should be.

I’ve been a Braves fan since the franchise moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta in 1966. That season, my parents took me to Atlanta Stadium, which held ten times the population of my hometown of Barnesville, to see a game. The Braves won, and I was hooked. I’ve followed them closely ever since.

We who have followed the Atlanta Braves from the beginning know what it’s like to go through cycles of winning and losing. They were about a .500 team during their first three seasons (1966-68). Then in 1969, which was the first year of divisional play, they won the Western Division pennant but lost to the New York Mets three games to none in the playoffs. From 1970-81, they never finished within shouting distance of first place. They came out of nowhere to win the West in 1982, but lost the playoff series to the St. Louis Cardinals three games to none. After a decent season in 1983, they went into a tailspin that saw them finish in last place in four out of seven seasons, including 1990.

But in 1991, the Braves won the Western Division championship and defeated the Eastern Division champion Pittsburgh Pirates in the National League championship series. They went on to lose the World Series in a classic seven-game matchup with the Minnesota Twins. This kicked off an amazing string of fourteen consecutive division titles (they’ve been in the Eastern Division since the 1994 realignment), four National League championships, and, in 1995, the Atlanta Braves’ only World Series Championship.

It’s been a mixed bag since the division championship streak ended in 2005. They won their division in 2013 and made the playoffs as a wild card team in 2010 and 2012. The three seasons leading up to the present one were bad, with records of 67-95 (2015), 68-93 (2016), and 72-90 (2017).

That brings us to the current season, which has been surprisingly successful. A winning season following several losing ones always feels like it comes out of nowhere. In fact, the team’s management has been laying the groundwork for such success by developing and following a long-term plan. If all goes well, this Braves season will be the first in a series of successful ones.

We who have been watching and participating in American politics know that the country also goes through cycles of winning and losing. We’ve endured a couple of years of serious losing. I’m optimistic that the groundwork has been laid for a turn in 2018 and 2020 toward better leadership.  

So go Braves!

And go 2018 and 2020 candidates who will offer effective, principled, civil, compassionate, and decent leadership!

Authenticity

Sometimes before a worship service in which I’m going to preach, I’ll tell the folks staffing the soundboard, “Try to make me sound better than I am.” We share a laugh. But I’m always suspicious that they’re thinking, “We would if we could!”

I don’t really mean it, though. I want my real voice to be heard. I furthermore want my real voice to reflect my real life.

In a recent RollingStone article, Eric Church was talking about losing the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year award to Garth Brooks. He said he didn’t mind losing to Brooks. What he did mind, he said, was that Brooks lip-synched his performance on the awards show. The reason Brooks gave for doing so was that his voice was shot. But Church said that the Entertainer of the Year shouldn’t fake it. He said, “If I can’t sing, I won’t sing, or I’ll sing badly. But at least you’ll get what you get.”

Church’s point was that singers should give the audience what they have. They should be authentic. And if they aren’t at one hundred percent, then so be it. That’s what’s real, and you should give them what’s real.

I remember watching a SaturdayNight Live episode in 1978 (this was back when I was young and could stay up that late). I was excited because the Rolling Stones were going to perform. They opened with “Beast of Burden,” which was (and still is) a favorite of mine. The band played very well. Mick Jagger’s voice was shot. He croaked through it. It wasn’t good. But it was cool. It was real. It was authentic.

About ten years ago, Rolling Stone produced a list of the top one hundred singers of all time. Aretha Franklin (who died on August 16) was #1. Most of the others are generally acknowledged to be great singers. Here’s the rest of the top ten, omitting #7: Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, John Lennon, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown.

If I asked you to guess who #7 is, chances are you wouldn’t say Bob Dylan. But he is. We might wonder how in the world Dylan got listed along with those other marvelous singers. Let me quote what Bono (singer for the band U2) said in the article:

When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby Womack, Womack said he didn’t understand it. Cooke explained that from now on, it’s not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It’s going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth.

It’s all about authenticity. That’s what we need from our singers, our preachers, and our politicians. It’s what we need from each other.

In Praise of Old Southern Seminary

In some ways, what I want to say here doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. The past is the past and the present is the present. We can’t go back to the way things used to be, and we shouldn’t want to. Put succinctly, it is what it is.

But it also was what it was. And that’s what I want to talk about.

I have two degrees from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS). I earned a Master of Divinity degree (a professional ministerial degree, similar to a lawyer’s law degree or a doctor’s medical degree) in 1982 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree (Old Testament major, New Testament minor) in 1986. Those degrees in hand, I’ve spent the last three decades as a pastor, a preacher, a professor, and now, an editor. 

Those of you who are Baptists of my generation and earlier don’t need me to rehearse what happened to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) or to its seminaries, including Southern. For those of you who aren’t, I’ll just say that in 1979, right wing elements of the convention undertook a long game to gain control of the convention. By 1990, the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC was complete. During the intervening decade, the convention’s six seminaries in general, and its flagship seminary SBTS in particular, were repeatedly attacked. You are no doubt aware of how Donald Trump talks about the press as the enemy of the people. That’s how the people who orchestrated and led the takeover of the SBC talked about the seminaries. And they were as wrong about the seminaries as Trump is about the press. The seminaries fell with the convention. Those of us who attended them back in the day received a different kind of education than current students do. That’s why, when I tell someone that I graduated from Southern Seminary, I always specify that it was the pre-1990 version. 

This is all ancient history. It’s on my mind because I just read some things that some of my contemporaries recently said about their experience at SBTS. They spoke as if their experience at Southern Seminary was something they had to survive and overcome. I’m in no position to comment on their experience. We all brought our own lives to Louisville, and we all heard what we heard with our own ears, processed it with our own minds, and filtered it through our own experiences. 

I just want to testify that my experience at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was excellent. It was not just less negative than these contemporaries of mine say it was for them. It was the opposite of negative and hurtful: it was positive and helpful. One of the reasons is that I had already figured out before arriving at SBTS that a person, and especially a preacher and teacher, could (and should) simultaneously possess a deep faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, a profound devotion to the Bible, and a critical (meaning a carefully analytical) approach to the biblical text. I had learned that as a seventeen-year-old freshman at Mercer University in an Introduction to the Old Testament class taught by Dr. Howard Giddens.

Please understand that I was not prepared to hear what I heard Dr. Giddens say. The beloved church and pastor of my childhood knew nothing of critical approaches to the Bible, so I didn’t either. So when Dr. Giddens told us about how the Pentateuch developed over an extended period of time, which meant that Moses didn’t write it (or at least not much of it), I was a tad confused. When I told my father what Dr. Giddens had said, he gave me one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me (and he gave me many). Before I tell that part of the story, let me say that my father, while a very smart man, had only a high school education and was a lifelong textile mill worker. What he knew about the Bible, he had learned on his own. When I told him that Dr. Giddens had said that Moses didn’t write everything in the Pentateuch, his eyes glimmered as he said, “You know, I’ve always wondered how Moses managed to write about his own death.”

And the light came on that has never gone out. My high school-educated, textile mill-working father loved the Lord and the Bible as much as anyone I’d ever known. Now he was setting me free to take seriously what Dr. Giddens and other scholars, who loved the Lord and the Bible as much as he did, and who knew a lot more about Scripture than he did, said.

That was the mindset with which I entered Southern Seminary. What I found there were teachers who gave their lives in service to the Lord. What I found there were professors who had a burning interest in understanding what the Bible actually says and means. Yes, they used the best that current scholarship had to offer, but that was part of the wonder of it all. My experience was that they used such methods in service to the Lord, to Scripture, and to the church. I am and always will be grateful for how they shared their faith and knowledge with me and inspired me to engage in a lifelong pursuit of a growing, honest, Christ-centered, biblically-guided life and ministry.

As I said earlier, maybe none of this matters now. But when you read or hear preachers say bad things about their experience at the old (pre-1990) Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I want you to remember that I always have said, still say, and always will say good things about mine.