Retired Pastor Ruminates

Get out your old Etta James LP, put it on your turntable, and go to her iconic song “At Last,” because Jim Rice is being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown tomorrow, and it’s about time.

This settles years of heated arguments among the citizens of Red Sox Nation, in bar-rooms and around dining-room tables, about whether this would, or should, ever happen.

My son Andrew, who is one of my best friends and has many admirable qualities, has been arguing with me for years that Rice isn’t Hall material. The basis for his position is the tyranny of something called Jamesian statistical analysis, which crunches numbers in new and interesting ways.

But Andrew is innocent of actually ever having seen Jim Rice play, and my argument was based on the old-fashion method of being thrilled to watch a superb athlete on your team come up to bat, something I was privileged to see many a time in the late 70’s and 80’s.

The critics say Rice didn’t have the numbers, that he hit into too many double plays, that he struck out too much, that his career wasn’t long enough, that he wasn’t a great fielder. He did hit into too many double plays, because he hit the ball so hard he couldn’t beat out the throw. And he did strike out a lot, because he had a big swing (so did Babe Ruth). And he didn’t start out as a great fielder in the tricky Fenway left-field, but he became one.

But I’ll give you some numbers: a life-time batting average just under 300 (298); 382 home runs; 1, 451 RBI’s; 8 times on the All-Star team; 2 Silver slugger awards; 1978 AL MVP.

He came up to the big leagues in 1975 with another rookie, Fred Lynn, and the two, nicknamed “the Gold Dust Twins,” set Boston ablaze with their exploits. Lynn ended the season as Rookie of the Year and AL MVP. It could just have well been Rice, who came in second in the ROTY voting and third in the MVP voting. Hit by a pitch in the final week of the season he missed the spectacular ‘75 World Series that the Sox lost in seven games to the Reds. Sox fans have always wondered what the outcome would have been if Rice had played.

In 1978, a year I went to far too many games at Fenway, including the final tragic play-off game against the Yankees when Bucky Dent hit the winning home run into the Green Monster, Rice was about as good as it ever gets. He hit 3.15, and led the league in triples, home runs and RBI’s, the only player to ever do that in the same season.

Rice came to Boston during a time of great racial tension, and played for a team whose management at the time was not known for its advanced views (not to put too fine a point on it.) He was a proud and dignified man, who developed an awkward relationship with the Boston sports press, perhaps the most knowledgeable (and arrogant) in the country. He replaced Carl Yastrzemski, a Boston icon, who had himself replaced Ted Williams, in left field. The comparisons were daily and got under his skin. He stopped talking to certain reporters, some of whom got to vote for the Hall of Fame, and this, in my view, delayed his entry.

But he put up amazing numbers in the pre-steroid era, and was the most feared batter in the game for many years. And I saw him play in many a game, and I can testify that his coming to bat brought energy and anticipation to the Fenway faithful.

This was his last year of eligibility, and a great injustice has been avoided by his induction. I’m glad to see him in the Hall of Fame, where he surely deserves to be. At last!

Welcome to Pittsfield. I believe this is the first time that the Mercersburg Society has traveled so far from its geographical center of gravity in Pennsylvania to cross into New England.

Since two of the historical traditions that went into the creation of the United Church of Christ are the German Reformed and the New England Congregationalists I thought it might be interesting to explore the question: “What was happening here in Pittsfield during the Mercersburg Movement?” To answer that question we need to go back to the gathering of this church (First Church of Christ in Pittsfield) in 1764, and trace the contours of its life through the tenure of its first eight pastors, which will bring us to 1873, the year John Todd died (pictured, above left.)

Pittsfield was settled late by Massachusetts standards. The Berkshires are naturally isolated (or protected) from the rest of the world by the Taconic range on the West, which you traversed if you came in from New York State and the Hoosac Range to the East, which you climbed if you came up the Mass Pike. When Jonathan Edwards was exiled from Northampton to Stockbridge in 1750 the description of the Berkshire Hills as “a howling wilderness” was not metaphorical. Thomas Allen sometimes referred to Pittsfield as the farthest outpost of Christendom; never mind that for centuries French Jesuits had been up and down the Mississippi, and Spanish Conquistadors had been in Florida and the Southwest, the perception had the ring of truth to this eighteenth century New England Puritan.

The Berkshires have always been insular, politically independent, and somewhat suspicious of the outside world. This area was a hot spot for the insurrection known as Shays' Rebellion in 1786, and you can still hear locals speak with suspicion of Boston or congregants of the Conference at Framingham. Before the Massachusetts Turnpike came through the hills it is fair to say that New York was a greater influence than Boston, but both were less than proximity would seem to dictate.

In the days of this church's gathering Northampton was the outpost of civilization which influenced Pittsfield the most. Colonel John Stoddard, a brother to Solomon Stoddard of Northampton and an uncle to Jonathan Edwards, was one of the original grantees of Pontoosic Township, the early name for Pittsfield. Parson Allen himself and four of the “eight foundation men” who gathered the church were from Northampton. On February 7, 1764 these eight laymen signed a document, made up of two parts, a Confession of Faith and A Covenant, which formed a Church of Christ in Pittsfield. Present at that gathering were representatives of other churches, including the Reverend Stephen West of Stockbridge, Jonathan Edward's successor and The Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Great Barrington, two important figures in the Edwardsean School and the emerging “New Divinity,” which would help to spark the Second Great Awakening around the turn of the nineteenth century. Two months after the gathering of the church, the first pastor, Thomas Allen, age twenty, a newly-minted Harvard graduate, was duly ordained on April 18.

Even in 1764 the foundations of Puritanism were eroding. Jonathan Edwards is the last best example of Puritanism, in much the same way as J. S. Bach is the final flower of the Baroque. In both cases, others would claim the name, but the movement's best days were behind it. The presence of Samuel Hopkins at the gathering of this church is intriguing. I am inclined to think that the camel's nose of liberalism was already in the tent of orthodoxy, for Hopkins's theology was trimming the doctrines of human sin and divine sovereignty to fit his moral and evangelistic vision.

For Hopkins sin was “actual” rather than “original,” and conversion was the result of the active enterprise of the human will. These motifs would be taken still further by the next generation in men like Nathaniel Taylor and Lyman Beecher. It is not hard to see how these impulses would provide fertile soil for the controversial “new measures” of the Second Great Awakening, and later the excesses of Charles Finney to which John Williamson Nevin (pictured left) took such exception.

Pittsfield's Thomas Allen has become a legendary figure, “The Fighting Parson,” who carried a musket into the pulpit and was chaplain to the revolutionary forces at White Plains and Bennington, where he is reputed to have fired the first shot. He was a fiery Patriot during the war and a fiery Jeffersonian Democrat after it, and continued to harass the Federalist parishioners from the pulpit, so much so that a large number of deacons and members seceded in 1807 and formed and incorporated a Union Parish in 1808. Allen served for 46 years and died in 1810. During his tenure, in 1793, the second meeting house was built, from a Bulfinch design (Some years after this paper was given the first citation mentioning baseball in America was discovered in the Berkshire Atheneum, in a statute prohibiting ball-playing outside the new meeting house.)

Parson Allen was followed by one of his sons, the Reverend William Allen, who resigned in 1817 on the same day as the pastor of the Union Parish to facilitate a reunion of the two congregations. He became Professor of Theology at Dartmouth under the presidency of his father–in–law, John Wheelock, and later he was appointed president of Bowdoin College in Maine.

The Reverend Heman Humphrey was invited in 1817 by the newly reunited church to serve as the third minister of the First Church. You can see his portrait in the church parlor. A Connecticut man and Yale graduate he had studied with President Timothy Dwight, and come from the pastorate of the First Church in Fairfield, Connecticut. A supporter of the revivals Humphrey invited the evangelist Ashahel Nettleton as a guest to the church on several occasions. Humphrey left First Church in 1823 to accept the presidency of Amherst College.

He was succeeded by the Reverend Rufus Bailey, who had a short pastorate of three years, during which time the highlight was the hosting of General Lafayette at a lavish reception in the church. In later years Bailly became President of Austin College in Austin, Texas.

The fifth minister here was the Reverend Henry Philip Tappan. Tappan also had a short pastorate of three years. Like Nevin he was a graduate of Union College in Schenectady, at roughly the same time. Union College was a united effort between the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Dutch Reformed. Tappan had done his divinity degree at Auburn Seminary, the new Prsbyterian school in Western New York, and he had been an assistant of Dr. Van Vechten of Schenectady. Tappan left Pittsfield to become Professor of Moral Philosophy at NYU, and later became president of the University of Michigan and the creator of their curriculum.

The Reverend John Williams Yeomans was the sixth minister of the First Church. He graduated from Williams in 1824, with the second honor of his class, Mark Hopkins taking the first. He completed his theological studies at Andover in 1827 and came to Pittsfield in 1831, remaining for over two years. In 1834 he became Pastor of the First Presbyterian church in Trenton, New Jersey, and lived out his days as a Presbyterian. In 1841 he became President of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

The seventh minister The Reverend Horatio Nelson Brinsmade, came in 1835 and left in 1841 to become pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Newark. New Jersey. He became president of Beloit College in Wisconsin in 1879, the sixth consecutive pastor of First Church to become a college president.

The eighth pastor was the Reverend John Todd, the quintessential nineteenth century man, who was born in 1800, and came to Pittsfield from Philadelphia as a 42 year–old man with several successful pastorates behind him to build his ecclesiastical empire during Pittsfield's growing period. It was during his tenure and by his impetus that the present Victorian Gothic church (no longer called a “meeting house”) was constructed. He led First Church out of the period of waning Puritanism, disestablishment, and into Congregationalism and the emerging theological liberalism. His “carriage trade” congregation was proud of their “prince of the pulpit” and the new meeting house was the pride of Pittsfield. Todd still contained some lingering vestiges of Puritanism and more than a little Calvinism, but we need to view him as a transitional figure into the period that Yale historian Sydney Ahlstrom calls “The Golden Age of Liberal Theology” (see Chapter 46 in Ahlstrom, The Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.)

This brings us from the beginnings of the church to its heyday at the time of the waning of the Mercersburg theology. What patterns can we discern? First, that six pastors became college presidents should alert us to the fact that Congregationalism during this period was not a denomination so much as a civilization rooted in the old New England theocracy, but moving well beyond it in scope and substance. The founding of colleges, missionary movements, and other voluntary associations was an important part of the religious impulse of these New Englanders.

Notice too, how many of the pastors of this church either came or went from or to Presbyterian churches and institutions. This period from 1800 to 1850 was during the time of the Plan of Union between New York State and Western Presbyterians and the Consociated Congregationalism of Connecticut. Nothing illustrates this discovery better than the fact that Jonathan Edwards, Jr., a Connecticut Congregationalist became President of Union College, and later was a Presbyterian delegate to the Plan of Union meetings. Keep in mind that there was no Unitarian Schism in Western Massachusetts. Here the influences were not Harvard's Arminianism, so much as Yale's New Divinity and the Second Great Awakening, a somewhat different response to the Enlightenment, but one no less shaped by it.

Geography, too, no doubt played a part in this county's religious traditions. I remarked on the early influence of Northampton, but later both men and ideas seem to flow up the Housatonic from Connecticut. There was some interaction with the Dutch Reformed Churches 50 miles west on the Hudson in Albany and Schenectady, but it was limited by language and ethnictiy. There was a great deal of interaction with Presbyterians during the Plan of Union years. The Congregational Synod of Albany in 1850 was the real beginning of Congregationalism as a denomination as well as the official end of the Plan of Union. Then Pittsfield saw itself less as on the boundaries of the mission field and more in the thick of things. John Todd's crowning moment was giving the invocation at the driving of the golden spike in 1869 at Promontory Point, Utah, when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads met to form the first transcontiinental rail line. The enterprise was no longer the churches of the established order, but the vast new continent that stretched from shore to shore.

The Berkshires place on the edge of New England gave it a front row seat on the expansion to the west in the early years of the nineteenth century. The Second Great Awakening washed over its towns and churches. The modern missionary movement began under a haystack at Williams College in 1806. Shakerism, that very American phenomenom, flourished at Hancock on the edges of Pittsfield. And it was also just over the mountain in New Lebanon, New York, near the mother colony of Shakerism, where, in 1827 Charles Finney met with his theological opponents from New England and defended his new measures. Among the accusers were Lyman Beecher and Asahel Nettleton. Not long after that Finney led a successful revival in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and, well, you know all about that!

So Pittsfield, and its surrounding county, represent in micrcosm the contours of America's religious story from Puritanism to the Gilded Age. That story tells of the rise and fall of the evangelical consensus, and the erosian of a vital Reformed Theology. It tells too of the strange failure of the churches of the Congregational Way to maintain themselves as a churchly movement rather than as a loose federation of congregations. I think one strong clue to the question of why a vital theological movement such as Puritanism, for all its contributions to American life, failed to perpetuate itself institutionally in the churches can be seen in this comment by Douglas Horton: “ . . . For the first two hundred years of the history of Massachusetts and Connecticut the state in completely Erastian fashion did duty as the denominational framework for the churches: it provided a unifying bond between them. No inter–colony or inter–state, and remarkably few intra–colony and intra–state synods were called in American Congregationalism between 1648 and 1852 because none or few were needed, since the colonial and, later, the state legislative assemblies were available for the discussion of all relationships among the churches. Meetings of ministers and, in the early nineteenth century, of voluntary associations, such as those which launched the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, provided forums for the fellowship, but the bedrock legislation as to the founding, maintenance, and ministry of the churches was in the hands of the state in Connecticut until 1818 and in Massachusetts until 1834. It is not strange that the overwhelming number of congregations under the Plan of Union in the early part of the nineteenth century became Presbyterian: the wonder is that more of them did not, for when a Congregationalist crossed the Western border of Massachusetts or Connecticut into New York State, he left behind him the primary symbol and organ of connection in Congregationalism.” (Introduction to Williston Walker, Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, p xiii)

That legacy is still alive in the churches of New England, as it is indeed elsewhere in America, and the insights of the Mercersburg theologians offer much that can correct it.

(This is a paper I delivered to the Mercersburg Society at their Annual Meeting held at the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on June 18, 1997. It was published in the Fall 1997 issue of The Mercersburg Review)

When I was a child it was the very foreignness of the church that intrigued me. There I learned about what Karl Barth called “the strange new world within the Bible,” a world where a shepherd boy could slay a giant, where angels appeared and made strange promises, where a virgin could conceive and bear a son, and where a brutal execution was somehow seen in Easter light to be nothing less than the victory of God. I was fascinated by the language. In those days we “vouchsafed and beseeched.” I wondered what the “seed” of David was. There were weighty Latinate words such as “propitiation” and “incarnation”. There were strange ancient creeds that one said for years waiting to understand them. There were hymn texts that shaped piety and theology. One of my favorites was this one: “Crown him the Lord of love; behold His hands and side, Rich wounds, yet visible above, In beauty glorified: No angel in the sky can fully bear that sight, But downward bends with burning eye At mysteries so bright.”

What was one to make of such language? Long before I had a theology of the atonement I sang those words passionately. I still do.

And then there was the music: the strange modal sound of plainsong, the emotion of gospel, the pathos of spirituals, the stately progression of chorale tunes. In my childhood our preachers had other, better gifts, so I learned my faith from singing it and hearing it.

I knew this was a different world and in many significant ways a better one than the world I inhabited at Norwood School #2, where the big kids might decide it would be amusing to kick the living daylights out of me at recess.

So let me suggest that “enhancing OUR song in the new century” will mean attending to this alternative world. And I think increasingly so, as the values of a global consumer society and the values of the church of Jesus Christ part ways. Walter Brueggemann suggests, rightly I

think, that the best biblical analogy for church life today is the Babylonian exile.

Christians today live as dispersed aliens in a foreign world. Constantinian Christianity is gone for good. And in America the day is over when the Protestant mainline is seen as the golden thread in the seamless robe of culture. We are increasingly marginal to what really matters in the eyes of the world. Or at least of the Empire. By the Empire I means the official normative construal of the world—the world as seen on TV. For advertising is the liturgy of the Empire. Take Nike's ads. They hold out the world of the competitive autonomous individual, free from community, free from tradition, free of constraints, and free from fair labor practices. “Just do it!” If you don't think that is a counter message to the Gospel, listen to this: There is a T-shirt that says: “The meek shall inherit the earth” on the front. On the back it says, “Yeah, right! Just do it! Nike!” Now that's Babylonian!!

Those of us who are parents of teenagers know the power of this dominant world and its liturgy. But the church at its best offers an alternative liturgy. Brueggemann call it a “sub–version” to the official authorized version of the Empire. For in worship we exiles remember our true home. Recall Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying “sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?’”

That is the question for the twenty-first century: how do we sing the Lord's song in exile? And with it the related question : how much Babylonian do we want to let in to the church's song?

When church musicians and ministers of Word and Sacrament collaborate on the congregation's liturgy there is nothing less at stake than what version of the world the congregation will experience in worship. Will the church's liturgy create a world where God alone is to be worshipped, where people are treated as people and things as things and we know the difference?

The tools we have to work with are words and music. If we are wise we will go about our work like the scribe in the parable, taking out of our treasure something old and something new. Jesus said, “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” (Matthew 13:52)

On the one hand we take out something old. The church is a community of recollection. It has a culture, whose roots are in scripture and whose development has grown out of tradition. It wasn't born yesterday, and for us to think that we are wiser than previous generations just because we came later is the silliest form of hubris. The church is a foreign country and its language takes learning. Some church people today are like American tourists in Paris who resent it when the locals don't speak English. A tourist bureau can help make the locals more friendly to tourists, but there are limits to how much a culture can be translated. So we need to value what the church has always valued and bring out the best of what is old.

Yet we need to bring out the new as well. “Sing unto the Lord a new song.” After all God is a living God and “there is yet more light and truth to break forth from his Holy Word.” The content of revelation doesn't change: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.” But there are always new ways to witness to that enduring truth. There are new works of art, new texts, new music. It has always been that way. The music we now consider part of the canon was once new, and much of it was controversial in its day. Watt's metrical paraphrases of the Psalms were considered scandalous. Bach's chorales were considered unsingable. Much of what is new now will not last. The wheat and the tares grow together and time's harvest will separate them. Over the generations the faithful will retain that which does the job. The ephemeral by its very nature won't abide. As George Steiner says: “Fashion is the mother of death. Originality is antithetical to novelty. Art that is stupid won't last.” (George Steiner, Real Presences)

So good liturgy is created by taking in proper measure something old and something new. Which means we are already acquainted with blended worship. Think about it. Let's say you play a Caesar Franck chorale for a prelude, the choir sings an anthem by Palestrina and one by Virgil Thompson, the offertory is “Rhosymedre” by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the hymn texts are by Michael Praetorius, Isaac Watts and Carl Dawe. That can take place within the most ordered liturgy and it is still utilizing musical and textual materials from several centuries, countries, styles and traditions.

In other words we do it all the time. The question then becomes, not whether we do it, but how do we do it so that it has integrity for Christian worship? What criteria do we use?

New or old, does it create that alternative world to the world of the Empire? In other words, is it a song of Zion? Or is it just Babylonian? Does it tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love, even if it does it in a new, new way? Can it bring people to faith, to devotion, to worship? Can it warm hearts and change lives?

In other words, the task of choosing our song for the new century takes spiritual discernment. It is a task that takes thought and prayer, knowledge and skill, an appreciation for scripture and tradition and an openness to the creative process. It is a task too important to be left to ministers alone or musicians alone but demands collaboration and collegiality. What is at stake is nothing less than how we see and hear the world which God loves and for which Christ died.

You are a church musician. At some time in your life you were moved to do this. It may have been a long time ago and you may be tired—tired from living in Babylon, speaking Babylonian, even singing Babylonian songs.

I am here to remind you that you are a citizen of Zion. You have glimpsed her walls, worshipped in her temple, heard her songs. Don't forget who you are, even if remembering Zion sometimes makes you weep.

Don't forget who you are! Because if you forget, and I forget, musicians and clergy, who will sing the songs of Zion to our children? No one! They will learn only Babylonian.

So that is how you know what song to sing. It can be something old, or it can be something new, but sing me one of the songs of Zion. Amen.

A Sermon preached on July 27, 1998 at the United Church Musicians Conference.

Trinity Church Retreat Center, Cornwall, Connecticutt

They call it “the mid-summer classic, ” and for me it is aptly nicknamed, for Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game marks the emotional mid-point of summer. Let me offer my apologies to my several “down-under” readers, for whom both North American summers and the game of baseball are terra incognita.

But stay with me because what this post is about is not baseball so much as some of the moments and men in my life that I associate with the All-Star Game. The All-Star Game is played annually in mid-July, and has been a feature in my life for as long as I can remember. I have never been to one, but I have watched most of them on TV throughout my life.

This year my team, the Boston Red Sox, had six players on the American League team (one, last year’s MVP Dustin Pedroia, couldn’t attend because his wife is under medical observation for her pregnancy.) But it was a thrill to see Jason Bay and Kevin Youkilis get hits, and closer Jonathan Papelbon get a 1-2-3 out inning and get the win (as it will appear in the record books, but those who watched it felt like he thought he was pitching for Home Run Derby, which was the night before.) One of my favorites, 42 year-old knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield, didn’t get to pitch, but he was there for the first time after 17 seasons in the big leagues. Part of the fun is seeing your team’s players showcased to the world in the big game. And as a Red Sox fan, I had plenty to be happy about.

It wasn’t always thus. My Dad, Larry Floyd, was a New York Giant’s fan (our family always hated the Yankees), and had his baseball heart broken when they were moved to San Francisco. I watched a number of All-Star Games with my Dad in my early days, the era of Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Stan Musiel, all National League All-Stars.

Baseball in America is a rite of passage for many fathers and sons, and it was for me and my Dad. Baseball was a bond between us. He taught me to throw and catch and hit. We would play catch for a half-hour when he got home from work in the evening before it got dark. He would loft the ball way over my head to see if I could run it down and catch it. I always liked to show off my speed and ability to my Dad, and these are happy memories. And we watched All-Star games together. He would talk of the greats he had seen play that were recently out of the game like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, the “Splendid Splinter” as he called him (my Dad was from Boston).

But the first team that I was really emotionally involved with was the New York Mets, an expansion team that came into the National League in 1962 after the Giants (and the Dodgers) left New York in 1957. I was 13 years old in 1962, and that is prime-time for a boy to be a fan. The Mets were an endearing team, but found more ways to lose games than one can imagine. They had been put together from the casts-offs of other teams, and were called the “loveable losers.” The first run scored against them came on a balk when pitcher Roger Craig dropped the ball during his wind-up. They lost their first nine games and finished with a 40-120 record. Not a team to put a lot of guys on the All-Star Team.

So it was a big thrill for me when in 1964 the Mets hosted the All-Star Game at their new stadium (Shea Stadium, just replaced), and their second-baseman Ron Hunt was named to the All-Star Game. In true Met’s style Hunt’s best-known offensive weapon was being able to be hit by a pitch. I watched that All-Star game with my Dad, too.

I headed off to Iowa for college in 1967 and never saw the Met’s get good, which they did, for in 1969 they won the World Series against a strong Baltimore Orioles Team.

I don’t remember many All-Star games from my college years, since I was busy changing the world, stopping the war and bringing in peace, love and understanding. I went to a few Cubs games at Wrigley Field with friends, but they never became my team.

That would happen in my next move, to Boston in 1971 to go to seminary at Andover Newton Theological School. The Red Sox had recently captivated their fans with a trip to the World Series in 1967, and had a bona-fide big star in Carl Yastrzemski , the last man to hit for the Triple Crown (hits, home runs, and RBIs). In the 1970 All-Star game, Yaz got four hits and was named MVP.

I became a big Red Sox fan. I could take the Green Line trolley to Fenway Park and buy a cheap ticket and sit in the bleachers. My college friend Eric Thompson worked for a local TV station where he had contact with the players, and his enthusiasm rubbed off on me. I went to many games during my four years in Boston.

My next All-Star memory involves my younger brother Bill. I graduated from seminary in 1975, and that summer drove all over New England seeking my first ministerial call. My brother moved in with me for the summer at the parsonage of the Smithfield Monthly Meeting of Friends in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where I had been the student pastor for the previous year. I was 26 and trying to be a responsible adult and get my first real job. Bill was 21 and looking for a party.

Some friends of his had invited him (and me) to go camping with them on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. So we drove down to Wood’s Hole to catch the ferry, and that is how I came to be in a bar watching the All-Star game when Yaz came in as a pinch hitter. I remember he was facing Tom Seaver, the dominant Mets’ (remember them) pitcher. Yaz got up without a batting helmet, and took the first pitch out of the yard for a three-run homer. This little packed Massachusetts bar went bananas (although the American League went on to lose, as they usually did in those years.) I also remember that we slept on the beach waiting for the morning ferry and were eaten alive by sand fleas.

My next All-Star game memory is 1983. My Dad had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the surgery had left him without speech and in a wheel chair. My wife, Martha, and I had gone down to the Jersey Shore to be with him on what were to be his last days. He couldn’t speak, but I sat next to him in his wheelchair and watched part of the All-Star Game. I don’t remember anything about it, except the feeling that the big wheel of life had made some more turns, and here I was with this once strong man as his life was leaving him. The father and son baseball bond had never needed words. The next day, July 14, I took a break to go swimming at the beach, and when I came out of the water, Martha was waiting for me, and I knew he was gone.

Since then I have watched many an All-Star game with my son, Andrew, who is now himself a grown up. They mark the mid-point of another summer. I don’t take them for granted.

Martin had just created a blog for The Monday Evening Club, a group you could call an old boy’s club, except none of us are boys anymore. The club goes back to 1869, and Martin was lamenting that the papers club members had delivered over the years were mostly lost. He had suggested that we start archiving them on-line, and he began doing that as members made current and older papers available to him.

So archiving was part of my first model for blogging, and since I have written quite a lot over the years, I began to archive some of my writings, mostly on theology and ministry, onto my blog. None of these have been very popular, but they get a steady stream of hits, and it feels gratifying to have them available in this new format. Since my retirement in 2004 I have been casting about for something that feels like ministry, and blogging seems like it may be that. Since I have a disability (Traumatic Brain Injury) that limits my activity, blogging is good for me in that I can do it when I feel like it, and not do it when I don’t.

Due to the wonders of Google Analytics one can see how many hits each post gets, along with way more information than anybody needs to know about it. Its fun to begin the day with a visit to Analytics to see how many hits you’ve got, and where from all over the world they have come. There is a map of the world that shows you where and how many hits you get. Most of my hits come from the USA, with a number of others from English-speaking countries such as Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

I have to confess that watching Analytics brings out the competitor in me, and some days watching my blog’s progress feels less like a ministry and more like a game, like World of Warcraft without the killing part.

So my blog has a heavy theology/ministry focus, but Analytics reminds me this is not a world-beating formula to get a popular blog. My most popular single post was an interview of Martin I did on the future of newspapers. He referred to it on his NiemanLab blog, and the traffic spiked up, as well as the international diversity of the hits, including many from Europe. Of course, not everybody who is interested in the future of newspapers is interested in theology (the soteriology of P.T. Forsyth, for example). And so I wonder if some of these visitors wonder if they had landed on the blog of some strange Christian cult.

Likewise, my Facebook “friends,” many of whom are not Christian or even religious, and who get a notice of any new posts on their wall, must wonder just what Floyd is up to. Now that Facebook has put us back in touch with friends from High School and University that we may not have seen in thirty or forty years, I sometimes get messages such as, “You’re a minister?” Yup, for 34 years! And they may have trouble equating that with the basketball player, beer-guzzling frat boy, or hippie mystic they remember, depending on when they knew me.

So the blog is there each day to post or not to post, and some days it feels good to do it and other days it feels like a job.

And then some days I feel constrained by the theology focus and want to post about other interests in my life, such as cycling, food and wine, music, TBI, and the like.

One of my more popular posts was one I did on my first trip to Scotland and my first taste of single malt whisky. Why that one is more popular than my one on eschatology is anybody’s guess.

So it’s been fun blogging and I’m going to keep at it. It has put me in touch with some people around the world. The coolest connection was when I blogged on my love of books, and mentioned that my mother, who died in 1967, had been a middle school librarian, and one of her former students made this comment: “If your mother was the Mrs. Floyd who was the Wandell (Middle School) librarian in the '60s, I remember her! She was wonderful. In fact, I use FLOYD as a password on book-related websites (what greater homage?)” That comment means a lot to me.

So if anybody is actually reading this, I hope to continue the theology and ministry focus, and archive some more of my published and unpublished articles, book reviews, hymn texts, lectures, etc. But I also hope to blog some recipes (I’ve been working on a cookbook for several decades), and touch on wine and whisky, Van Morrison, traumatic brain injury, and other various and sundry topics. As one of my friends likes to say about some preachers: “When you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know when you’ve done it!”

Will Lance Armstrong win the 2009 Tour de France? Probably not. He’s 37 years old and out of the sport for four years, and there is lots of young talent that has come along since his last tour. He’s not even the team leader of his own team, Astana; that would be Alberto Contador, a talented young Spaniard who won the Tour in 2007, and most likely would have won again last year if Astana hadn’t been banned. So he went to Spain and Italy and won their tours. It is arguable that Lance isn’t even the second best rider on his own team, if you think as highly as I do of American Levi Leipheimer.

So the Lance Armstrong comeback was a feel-good story, he’s riding for cancer and not getting paid, but it was good to see him in a Tour again on Saturday’s opening time trial. He finished a respectable tenth place and looked in good form, but Contador was second, and three other Astana riders came in ahead of Lance, so there it is.

But wait! In today’s stage, a flat ride along the Mediterranean, things suddenly got exciting. These early flat stages are showcases for the sprinters, and unless you get a successful breakaway (hard to do) they unfold pretty much according to script. But in the high winds of today’s stage the talent-rich Columbia team managed to send several riders ahead at a bend in the road and open up a gap. Fabian Cancellara, wearing the Yellow jersey, alertly made the jump, along with a number of other riders, and, yes, Lance Armstrong, reminding us that Lance wasn’t just the strongest rider in his day, but one of the smartest.

This twenty-seven man break swallowed up an earlier four man break, and off they went. The remaining peloton, full of GC (general classification, the team leaders) rivals, was caught napping and never got itself organized to catch the break. Lance had two teammates with him, domestiques Heimar Zubeldia and Yaroslav Popovych (but not Contador), and they all worked with Team Columbia and others to keep the main pack at bay. At the end of the day Columbia’s rocket Mark Cavendish won the stage as expected, but the break group had put forty seconds into the main pack.

Lance is still 40 seconds behind Cancellara, but is now in third place overall, and with the team time trial tomorrow, and a strong Astana team, could find himself in the yellow jersey tomorrow. And as pundit Bob Barsanti just wrote on my Facebook wall, “Wouldn’t that just be a floater in the Beaujolais!’

My former teacher and now Berkshire neighbor Max L. Stackhouse has been writing for decades about the way societies are put together and interact. He has produced a magisterial series called God and Globalization. His Vol. 1, Globalization and the Powers of the Common Life is newly out in paperback. Max, recently retired from Princeton Theological Seminary was the Stephen Colwell Professor of Christian Ethics and director of the Project on Public Theology, and the Rimmer and Ruth de Vries Professor of Reformed Theology and Public Life. He has served on the editorial boards of The Christian Century, First Things, and The Journal of Religious Ethics. In a recent Confessing Christ Open Forum, he offered this concise and passionate summary of his views:

Dear friends discussing globalization.

Gabe (Fackre) told me to jump into this group since my name has been mentioned a couple of times. I did not know how to find this discussion, so Rick (me) told me where and how to look for these posts. It is my first excursion into group blogs. I would like to make a couple of points. The main focus of my research and writing on economic life and on globalization is that economic dynamics are not autonomous.

Herb (Davis) is right in thinking that I try to see what theology, and more broadly religion, has to offer to the understanding of economics -- and I think it is a lot although it is indirect. My convictions come out my experience working for the old Board of World Ministries, which sent me to India, S-E Asia, the Pacific Islands, and I later represented Princeton Seminary at conferences and symposia in China, Korea, and Latin America. The economies in each area have some things in common, such as whether people have little or much, they want more, and in all contexts the laws of supply and demand operate. But, what people want more of and why they want what they want, and what they are able to supply and what they demand for what reasons are quite different. These things differ according to their view of and experiences in family life, political power, legal systems, educational opportunities, medical conditions and technological capabilities. In other words, economics is less an independent cause in social stability or change, than a result of the cultural and civilizational fabric. And, here is the main point, these are all deeply influenced by the dominant religion as shaped by the professional leaders of that religion -- the clergy, intellectuals, theologians, and charismatic leaders who appeal to the core of the faith and relate it to the social realities the civilization faces. Under the influence of the secularization hypothesis, religion is a by-product of economic (and psychological) factors.

The view I have come to turns this around and puts the economic question in a larger comparative civilizational context. It also puts the ongoing debate about whether we should have a more socialist or a more capitalist economic system, for both sides of these debates presume that economics is the basic force in human relations and social life, and is either more or less just, defined by one or the other economic ideology.. On one side justice is defined as equality by political policy, on the other side as freedom under legal guarantees of access and opportunity -- now modified into a little more or a little less social democracy or democratic capitalism.

What this has to do with globalization is that globalization is a world-wide civilizational change that involves the wide-spread adoption of patterns of family life, political order, legal definitions, educational patterns and medical and communication technologies that were historically formed by Christian theological influences. That is now making economic globalization possible and in some cases necessary, although the massive transition leaves the playing field open to corruption, exploitation, and high risk behaviors -- none of which are new and specific to globalization.. I think contemporary Christians should baptize globalization, washing it of its sins and set it on the paths of righteousness and developing a theology of globalization that can guide it in our post-nationalistic world toward the New Jerusalem to which all peoples can bring their gifts.

Theology is the clue to the understanding and guidance of

globalization.

In Christ,

Max

In a certain city there lived a young pastor who was starting her first day at her first solo pastorate. She had met the staff, put all her books on the shelves, and was arranging her desk when a curious thing happened. She opened the desk drawer, and there were three sealed envelopes, numbered one, two, and three, encircled with a rubber band, and with a note attached.

She eagerly unfolded the note, and this is what it said: “Dear Successor. Welcome to the Old Church on the Green. When I arrived here many years ago I found three envelopes in my desk as you just have. They were from my predecessor and his note told me to open each of them in turn whenever I found myself in difficulty in the parish. This was very helpful to me, so I am providing you with three numbered envelopes to open when you need them. Blessings on your ministry. Your Predecessor.”

She didn’t know what to make of this, but soon forgot about the envelopes amidst the whirlwind of starting a new ministry, meeting new people, putting names with faces, in the general excitement and anxiety of the first months. And truth to tell, she had a joyful honeymoon period where she learned to love the congregation and they learned to love her, and everybody was very happy and content.

But in the fullness of time some discontents could be discerned among the faithful. Well-meaning advisors came to her to tell her things they had heard, not that they felt that way, but others did. None of the complaints were major, but they ate at her morale. Some said she had annoying mannerisms in the pulpit, that she was never in the office, that she didn’t do enough pastoral visitation, that she had been seen coming out of a yoga class during the daytime when honest hard-working people are at their jobs.

All these things got her down, and one day she spotted the forgotten envelopes in her desk drawer. She wondered if she should open the first one, and after some struggling and prayer about it, she did so. Inside was a single sheet of paper and on it were the words: “Blame your predecessor.”

She had once taken interim ministry training so she knew how to do this and immediately put the strategy into play. She told her boards and committee that congregations were really dysfunctional family systems and the dysfunction was caused by the former pastor. They all nodded their heads and agreed to be healthier, and they forgot all about their complaints against her, since it is always easier to judge someone that isn’t around. And once again everybody was happy and content.

There came a time, however, when new discontents emerged. The economy went South, pledges were down, fuel cost were up, the endowment which many worshipped had taken a hit, new members were slow to arrive to help pay the bills. She was no longer the new pastor, and there were hints and rumors that a different kind of a leader might fix the problems. She didn’t know what to do. She tried everything she could think of. She went to a centering prayer workshop, she got a Day-Timer, and she attended the Alban Institute conference called “When your Job Sucks.” But none of it seemed to help, so one day, after much struggle and prayer, she opened the second envelope. Once again it was a single sheet of paper and on it were the words: “Reorganize.”

So she convinced her board to create a long-term planning committee, write a new mission statement, and re-write the by-laws. And everybody got very busy, and worked hard together, and there wasn’t enough energy left to complain, and the church thrived for many seasons, and everybody in the congregation felt proud of themselves for having such a well-organized church and such a clever pastor. And, once again, everybody was happy and content.

By this time our pastor was frankly getting a little bored, and not a little burned-out, and wondered just how long she could put out the energy it was taking to keep such a well-organized church going. And her soul was disquited within her.

Once again she tried everything she could think of. She joined a pastor’s support group, she went on a Conference Committee on pastoral excellence, she bought herself a smart-phone and started a blog. But none of it seemed to help, so finally one day in desperation she went to her desk drawer and she opened the third envelope. Once again inside was a single sheet of paper and on it were the words: “Prepare three envelopes.”