Nostalgia

My Good Wife and I recently traveled to Champion Stadium at ESPN’s Wide World of Sports at Walt Disney World to watch the last two Atlanta Braves Spring Training games ever to be played at that venue.

It’s the end of an era that lasted twenty-two years. The Braves moved their Spring Training headquarters from West Palm Beach to Lake Buena Vista in 1997. In 2020, they’ll move it to a brand-new complex at North Port, Florida, which is in Sarasota County. In fact, they played the final game of this year’s Spring Training in the new stadium. Reports are that it is fantastic.

I look forward to visiting the new place next spring. I’m sure it will be a great place to watch a baseball game. I understand that it’s configured so that 70% of the seats will be in the shade for a 1:00 p.m. start. It has the added advantage of having beaches nearby.

But I’m sad about the end of the Braves’ relationship with Disney. I admit I won’t miss such silliness as having Mickey or Goofy accompany the tossers of the first pitch to and from the mound. Still, Champion Stadium is the only place I’ve ever watched Braves’ Spring Training games. I will always wax nostalgic about it.

I expect to tire of hearing myself say, even as I sit in utter contentment at CoolDay Park (that’s it’s name) in North Port over the next couple of decades, “Remember how back at Disney/ESPN’s Wide World of Sports/Champion Stadium/Lake Buena Vista they used to…?”

We tend to be nostalgic. After the new Lamar County High School opens this fall, students who have attended classes in the current facility since 1975 will smile and say, “Remember when…?” People of my generation who grew up in Lamar County are that way about the schools at Booker, Gordon, and Milner.

And that’s okay. Memories that bring smiles to our faces are good things. Change is okay too, because it creates opportunities for the creation of new memories that will bring new smiles to our faces.

My nostalgia will always be tied to Dr. Howard Giddens, my teacher and mentor with whom I went to Spring Training every year from 1995-2005. For a few years, I went with a small group of friends. One year our son went with me. For the last few years, my Good Wife and I have made the trip together and will, Lord willing, continue to do so. (She loves baseball. It was a necessary prerequisite for marrying me.)

The best kind of nostalgia isn’t so much about missing the place or wanting to go back to the time. It’s about remembering the people with whom we shared the experiences.

The Braves have signed a thirty-year lease with Sarasota County to hold Spring Training at CoolDay Park. By the time it runs out, I’ll be ninety years old. Maybe the Braves will be ready for another change by then. Maybe I will too.

Who knows what I’ll be experiencing at that point (if anything)? Perhaps my wife, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be with me as I watch the Braves play some Spring Training games.

Wherever I am and whomever I’m with, I’ll cherish the people who are with me. I’ll also cherish the memories of the people who have been with me in years gone by.

Some Thoughts About Politics

It’s early in 2019. So far, roughly 197 Democrats have announced that they will be candidates in the 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, a couple of Republicans are reportedly weighing the possibility of running for their party’s nomination against the incumbent president who really isn’t a Republican—c’mon now, you have to admit he isn’t—but who won their nomination and the presidency in 2016. Oh, and there’s a super-rich guy who used to sell coffee that costs three times as much and has no better taste than what you can get at McDonald’s who may run as an independent for some unfathomable reason.

So yes, the 2020 election is already on our minds. Lord have mercy.

Still, 2019 is a non-election year, so I thought it might be a good time to talk about politics before we start thinking and talking too much about the candidates. It might do us good to think and talk about the ways we think and talk about politics.

I’m going to focus on the ways we think and talk about presidents, but I suspect my observations are more broadly applicable.

Let me put my main thought right up front: when it comes to evaluating presidents, we aren’t objective. How we judge a president’s actions depends largely on whether we voted for him.

(For simplicity’s sake, I’m using “him” to refer to presidents, since thus far they’ve all been men. I hope and trust this will change soon.)

Here’s my main evidence for saying we aren’t objective in the ways we evaluate presidents: a president we approve of can do and say controversial things and we defend him, but if a president we don’t approve of does and says the same (or the same kinds of) things, we attack him.

I wonder why that is? I can think of several possible reasons.

First, we have trouble separating legitimate criticism from partisan attacks.

Sometimes when a new president is elected, his opponents (enemies might be a more accurate word) throw every accusation they can come up with at him. Some of their criticisms are accurate, some are extremely exaggerated attack versions of accurate criticisms, and some amount to fictional conspiracy theories. The enemies’ approach is to throw as much at the president as possible, knowing that some of it, true or not, will stick.

One reason we have trouble separating legitimate criticism from partisan attacks is that we tend to limit ourselves to media outlets that confirm our preconceived notions. Another is that we tend to get a lot of our information from Internet sources that aren’t vetted well for truth and accuracy—or aren’t vetted at all.

Second, we don’t like to admit that we may have been wrong to support and vote for a candidate who became president.

We may have what seemed to us good reasons to support and vote for a candidate. We heard the warnings about him and we thought they were exaggerated. After he has been president for a while, we realize there are reasons to be concerned. But to acknowledge it is to admit that we were wrong to vote for him. That’s hard to do, especially since it implies that those who voted for the other candidate may have been right (or at least less wrong).

Maybe we should remember that a vote isn’t a marriage vow. We didn’t pledge to be faithful to the president no matter what he does. And faithfulness to the country, to the Constitution, and to our neighbors might compel us to change our minds about a vote we cast.

If we do decide it wasn’t the right vote, we can’t go back and change it. But we can try to do better next time.

What can we do to try to think more objectively about a president for whom we voted?

We might try regularly asking ourselves this question: if President #1, for whom I voted, does something that I criticized President #2, for whom I didn’t vote, for doing, then shouldn’t I also criticize President #1 for doing it?

A Letter to Our Granddaughter

Dear Isabella,

Welcome to the world! We are so glad you are here and that you are part of our family!

You are a gift we don’t deserve, but we gratefully receive you as the sign of grace you are. Every time we look at you or think of you, we are reminded of how good God is.

We love you. We don’t love you because of who you are or because of what you are. We love you just because you are.

As you grow, you’ll discover who and what you are, and we look forward to encouraging and supporting you in your journey of self-discovery. It matters who and what you become, because only as you do so will you be able to realize your full potential.

But it doesn’t matter as far as our love for you goes. We love you because you are you, and we will always love you, whomever you grow into being and whatever you grow into doing.

I do have some hopes for you. There are certain ways that I hope your life will go.

Every morning, I begin my prayer time with three one-sentence prayers. I want to pray those three prayers for you because they express my hopes for you.

The first prayer is called the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It’s hard to imagine right now in these early days of your life, but you will eventually do, say, and think things that you shouldn’t. Everyone does. You will find yourself in need of God’s mercy. I hope and pray you will turn to God for mercy when you need it. I hope and pray you will know that God is merciful.

I also hope that you will, having received God’s mercy, extend mercy to other people. Every person you will ever know, meet, love, or pass on the street has pain, guilt, and regret. Be kind. Show mercy.

The second prayer is a line from the Prayer of St. Francis: “Make me an instrument of your peace.” I hope and pray that you will know God’s peace. I also hope and pray that it will flow through you to other people. The world into which you have been born is fractured. Relationships are strained. People live in a frenzied state, driven by greed and fear. I want you to be at peace with God, with yourself, and with others. I hope you will be so filled with peace that it will flow out of you and onto the people you encounter.

I call the third prayer the Gethsemane Prayer, because it’s based on the prayer Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night he was arrested: “O God, our lives are in your hands. Not our will, but your will be done.” You are now part of the “our” in this prayer.

I pray that you will learn who God has made you to be. If you do, you’ll live a fulfilling life. I pray that you will do what God has made you to do. I’m not saying there’s only one thing you are made to do; there may well be many options under the umbrella of your purpose in life. I hope that you will discover, develop, and utilize your gifts to do good in the world, in your vocation, in your community, and in your family.

Isabella, you are a beautiful baby. I hope and pray that you will live a beautiful life. If you live in God’s mercy, God’s peace, and God’s will, that’s what you’ll have.

And remember: we’ll be on your side for as long as we live—and longer.

Love,

Duke

Isabella Austen Gunter was born on February 20, 2019.

Confessions of a Former Meme-Sharer

The word “meme” has two primary definitions, according to merriam-webster.com.

The first definition of “meme” is, “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” The scientist Richard Dawkins, who came up with the word in 1976, called it “a unit of cultural transmission.” Spending a lot of time on Facebook is an example of this kind of meme.

The second definition of “meme” is, “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.”

Those of us who spend a lot of time on Facebook know about the second kind of meme. Many of us share them. We see one that seems to summarize our attitude about or opinion on something, we think “Oh I need to share that,” and we click the share button. And off it goes to that magical cyber place where all our friends can see it.

I used to do that often, but I’ve stopped. I have several reasons.

First, I often shared memes to irritate people whose opinion differs from mine. That’s not nice. Nor is it productive.

Second, I’d rather speak for myself. I don’t claim that my words express new or unique ideas, but I think it’s important that I speak my own words and not someone else’s. To be sure, I sometimes quote someone in a sermon or an article (and I always give credit), but the points and positions I present, be they right or wrong, are my own.

Memes may be right or wrong. So may I. But I’d rather be held responsible for what I say than for what someone else says.

Third—and this is my main reason for not sharing memes anymore—memes don’t do nuance. They fail to acknowledge the existence of gray areas in ethics and morality. Memes make blanket assertions without acknowledging the exceptions or taking other possibilities or complicated circumstances into account.

Some of you will recall the late Doug Marlette’s comic strip Kudzu. (Those of you who don’t need to go find it. It’s great.) One of the characters was Reverend Will B. Dunn. Reverend Dunn hosted a television talk show. Another minister named Reverend Fallout was an occasional guest. In one appearance, Reverend Fallout explained that he liked theological statements that would fit on a bumper sticker. Reverend Dunn asked him something like, “But what if a theological idea is too complicated or nuanced to fit on a bumper sticker?” Reverend Fallout replied, “Then it’s secular humanism.”

It’s not just that Internet memes don’t cover all the bases. They couldn’t if their creators tried. It’s rather that they don’t even acknowledge that there are other bases to cover. I can’t share such expressions and maintain any integrity.

I can’t cover all the bases either. One of the problems I had in the early days of my preaching career was that I always wanted to share all the “what ifs” and “maybes” and “on the other hands” that arose from my subject. I exhausted my listeners and myself. Even as I approach the end of this column, I want to raise some counterpoints and other possibilities.

I won’t. But you see, I know they exist. I think that’s important. And necessary.

A meme doesn’t know that. If I share it, I’m saying that’s okay.

It’s not.

First Haircut

I don’t remember my first haircut. I don’t know how old I was when it happened, but I have short hair in every picture of little me that exists, so I must have been real young.

I also don’t remember who gave it to me, but it was probably Mr. Spears, whose barbershop was located at the corner of Market Street and the Main Street alley. I assume he sat me up on the board he laid across the arms of the chair to elevate little boys’ heads to the appropriate level for trimming. I remember sitting on that board when I got to an age at which things happened to which I could look back and say, “I remember that.”

The first time Mr. Spears let me sit in the chair without the board marked a major milestone in my journey toward manhood.

Our grandson Sullivan had his first haircut a few days ago. He’s eighteen months old and needed to get cleaned up for the arrival of his new little sister in a few days. I’m grateful that the curls on the back of his head were spared. But he got a nice trim job on the front and sides.

He’s even cuter now that he was before the haircut, if you can believe it.

His parents didn’t take him to a corner barbershop or to the chain his father uses. They took him to an establishment that specializes in children’s haircuts.

You can do that sort of thing when you live in Alpharetta.

His barber chair was a little red car. His parents stood right beside him. A monitor in front of him featured his favorite animated movie, “Trolls” (which is spectacularly entertaining, by the way). He held tightly to one of his favorite stuffed animals, Plato the Pirate Penguin.

(Quick aside: his Honey and I were in Blue Ridge and went into a gift shop looking for a stuffed bear to get him. We came out instead with a Pirate Penguin that his parents named Plato. What a Pirate Penguin has to do with Blue Ridge, I can’t imagine.)

Now, some of you are reading this and thinking things like, “That’s another example of how we make life too easy on our kids” and “To get my first haircut, I had to crawl three miles uphill in the snow so the guy at the general store could do it with a sling blade and a straight razor.”

I have three responses to such thinking.

First, he’s not going to remember it anyway. So what would he learn from it being a non-fun experience?

Second, we’re talking about my grandson. He wasn’t treated well enough. They should have put him on a throne, fanned him with ostrich feathers, and gently snipped his hair with golden scissors, one strand at a time, while he drank milk from a jewel-encrusted sippy cup.

Third, I know his parents quite well. He’ll grow up to be quite the responsible human being who sees the world as it is and does all he can to make it better. He can learn how later. Right now he’s a baby. He’s our baby.

I was once Champ and Sara Ruffin’s baby. But I grew up fast. I preached my first “sermon” when I was thirteen. I started working after school and on Saturdays at Thriftown Grocery Store the week I turned fourteen. I left Lamar County High School after my junior year to attend Mercer University when I was sixteen (full disclosure: I turned seventeen the first week of class). I got my first ministry position at the same time. I graduated from Mercer when I was nineteen. I got married six days after I graduated.

For some reason, I was anxious to be responsible. I was in a hurry to grow up. Or maybe I was like George Bailey, the central character in It’s a Wonderful Life (the Christmas movie with quotes appropriate at any time of year) whose father told him, “You were born older, George.”

I don’t regret a bit of it. Those things I was in a hurry to do are all good things. My actions reflected who I was, who I wanted to be, and even who I was meant to be.

The half-dozen or so people whose opinion really matters to me think I’ve turned out all right.

Maybe Sullivan will want to be responsible at an early age too like his Duke (that’s my grandfather name) was. Or maybe he will want to live a little more freely and have a little more fun before he buckles down.

I have three bits of grandfatherly advice for him.

Whatever. Let it be. You do you.

What Are You Immersed In?

In a recent service at the First United Methodist Church of Barnesville, Georgia, Pastor Cyndi McDonald led us to remember our baptism. At the end of the service, she invited us to dip our hands in the water in the baptismal font as a way of doing so.

During her excellent sermon, Pastor Cyndi explained that Methodists baptize in three ways: sprinkling (which requires just a little water), pouring (which requires more water), and immersion (which requires a lot of water).

I’m a lifelong Baptist who often attends a Methodist church and often preaches in Presbyterian (PCUSA) churches. I used to be Southern Baptist, but now I identity with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I’ve often said that I was Baptist before I was Christian. A few of you will know what a Cradle Roll is. It was a big deal back in 1958 when I came along. When babies were born into a Baptist church, they were placed on the Cradle Roll, which meant they were enrolled in Sunday School. I can’t prove it, but I suspect someone was standing in the delivery room at the Lamar County Maternity Shelter to sign me up the second I entered the world. My mother would have wanted it that way.

When Reverend Bill Coleman baptized me one Sunday night in 1966 (along with others, including my friend Debbie Smith Haywood and my distant cousins Bruce Swatts and Rudy Knight), it was by immersion, which is a fancy word for dunking. There’s a scene in the 1970 film Little Big Man in which a frontier preacher holds Dustin Hoffman’s character under the water for so long that he almost drowns. Preacher Bill didn’t do that to me, but he did dunk me thoroughly.

Whenever I participate in a service in which we remember our baptism, I remember my first one. I was doing some continuing education at Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. During worship, we were invited to remember our baptism. I think I was the only Baptist among a bunch of Presbyterians and other Protestants. One of the Presbyterian ministers asked me what I as a Baptist thought about putting my fingers in the water to remember my baptism. I replied, “I found it very meaningful, but I did have to fight off the urge to jump into the bowl.”

I find it helpful to remember my baptism. It’s encouraging to remember the warm water enfolding me. I realize better now than I did then (and if I didn’t after the passing of fifty-three years, how sad would that be?) what the act symbolizes: I have been buried with Christ and raised to new life in him.

What does it mean to be immersed in the death and resurrection of Christ? What does it mean to be buried with him and to be raised to new life in him?

Surely it means that we are immersed in the love, mercy, and grace that Jesus embodied. Surely it means that we live in faith and in hope. Surely it means that we practice acceptance and inclusion.

I don’t know what to think when I encounter baptized folks whose lives indicate that they are immersed in fear, in despair, in hate, in anger, and in prejudice. I don’t know Christ that way, and I don’t understand how someone can follow Christ in those ways.

Don’t hear me wrong. No Christian fully follows Jesus all the time. We stumble and fall. We sin and fail. But surely we should always be growing toward living in the way our baptism points us toward.

The water of baptism dries, but the effects of baptism continue.

I hope my fellow believers and I will continue to grow in practicing Christ’s love, grace, mercy, faith, and hope.

A Broader Perspective

1968 was a tough year. The Vietnam War was raging. Assassins struck down Dr. King and Sen. Kennedy. Riots tore apart major American cities. The divisions between people were sharp.

But something happened at the end of that year that showed us something we really needed to know. And many of us watched it on television.

I was ten years old, sitting on the floor in front of our nineteen-inch black and white television set in the little den of the little house on Memorial Drive. I joined millions of other people in watching the images of the moon’s surface being beamed to Earth by the astronauts aboard Apollo 8. I listened as the three explorers— Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders—read the opening verses of the creation poem found in the first chapter of the biblical book ofGenesis.

It was—and I am very selective in how I use this word—awesome.

As Apollo 8 took its ten trips around the moon, Astronaut Bill Anders took many photographs of the moon’s surface to help identify possible landing sites for future lunar missions. On one of the craft’s revolutions around the moon, Earth came into view. As it did, Anders took several shots of it. One of those pictures has become iconic. The photograph, with its image of a blue globe rising over the bleak lunar landscape against the blackness of space, is known as “Earthrise.”

The astronauts aboard Apollo 8 were the first human beings to travel to the moon and back and to see the far side of the moon. In an essay written for space.com on the occasion of the fiftiethanniversary of their Christmas Eve 1968 experience, Anders reflected on the Earth that he and his fellow astronauts saw from their lunar orbit:

The Earth we saw rising over the battered grey lunar surface was small and delicate, a magnificent spot of color in the vast blackness of space. Once-distant places appeared inseparably close. Borders that once rendered division vanished. All of humanity appeared joined together on this glorious-but-fragile sphere.

Anders went on to say,

Fifty years later, "Earthrise"—the lingering imprint of our mission—stands sentinel. It still reminds us that distance and borders and division are merely a matter of perspective. We are all linked in a joined human enterprise; we are bound to a planet we all must share. We are all, together, stewards of this fragile treasure.

We had never seen Earth from the perspective of astronauts orbiting the moon. We had never had the privilege of seeing it as a unified whole rather than in its constituent parts.

Fifty years later, I’m afraid we’ve forgotten that we’re all in this together. I’m afraid we’ve failed to remember that all human beings share responsibility for this planet. I’m afraid that we seldom think, talk, and act as if there is more that unites us than divides us.

In the 1996 film Independence Day, aliens launch a devastating attack on Earth. Eventually, forces from all over the world band together to carry out a counterattack. Former foes join to fight against a common enemy in order to save humankind.

I know that the divisions in our world—and even in our nation—are deep. But I believe that we need to come together to combat our common enemies. The list of those enemies is long, but I’ll mention just two: climate change and poverty. Both of these crises drive and will continue to drive the problems of war, famine, and mass migration that beset our world.

 I realize that our perspective tends to be narrow: we focus on our nation, our state, our community, and our family. But I want to call your attention back to the perspective the Apollo 8 astronauts gave us. Let’s adopt a broader perspective.

We all live on this planet. We’re all in this together. We need to work together for the sake of all humanity.