Fall TV: Set DVR To Stun

Posted on September 19, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

Every year for the last several years, I’ve listed the television shows that I’m the most keen on. Usually, I include the returning shows and the new ones, because, quite frankly, I’ll start with a group of twenty-five shows and slowly wheedle them down to the ones I watch every week. This year, I’m going after the new ones, and some of them may seem obvious. I’ll admit that I’m excited to see Agent Poulson return to the land of the Avengers in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and the idea that everyone has the capability to be a hero whether they’re super or not is intriguing… but I don’t expect that show to last.

On the other hand, here are my picks to be worthwhile out of the new shows headed to the small screen. Which ones seem worth it to you? Which ones did I miss? In the second half of the article, I acknowledge the returning shows that I’m still eager to catch up with.

#1 Almost Human (Mondays @ 8 p.m. on FOX): As a huge fan of Michael Ealy (Sleeper Cell, Flashforward, Common Law), I’m hooked. But when he’s playing a free-willed robot cop, partnered with the emotionally hurting Det. John Kennex (Karl Urban… can he show emotion?), I think that FOX may be able to bust back into the sci-fi business. It’s been slogging along since The X-Files, with more misses (Terra Nova, Alcatraz, Dollhouse) than hits (Fringe). But Fringe alum J.H. Wyman heads it up, and FOX isn’t afraid of spending money on special effects. The pairing seems to be pretty amazing, and it definitely raises the question that’s expected: what does it mean to be human? Of course, we figure that the human partner will learn from the inhuman one what it means to actually love, live, and process moralistically. It’s like the cops of Detroit learning from Robocop about being good cops and good people. Do you have soul… does soul exist? I’m hooked.

#2 Lucky 7 (Tuesdays @ 10 p.m. on ABC) Do you play the lottery? If you’re reading this and you play, you’re probably financially better off than the average person who plays. But with this television show, we’ll see how winning the scratch game benefits and hurts a group of folks, like we’re seeing Hugo’s pre-plane crash life in Lost. It’s a blessing and a curse, and it challenges what we think we think about money, class, life, and our changes of station. Economics versus morality seems to be a pretty high bar, but it’s one that easily has contemporary ripples. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?”

#3 The Blacklist (Mondays @ 10 p.m. on NBC): Stargate’s James Spader plays Red Reddington, one of the worst criminals on the Most Wanted list, who turns himself into the FBI with the promise of capturing the other “baddies” on the list. But he refuses to work with anyone other than newly-minted agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone). It sounds like Covert Affairs meets White Collar with a darker side that will make for some interesting material on NBC. Is Spader’s villain really going good or is he some mash-up between a supposedly altruistic Lex Luther and a genuinely scheming Hannibal Lecter? This seems like a one-shot deal, but Spader isn’t as big time as he used to be. I like the premise of Hostages, too, with Dylan McDermott taking a doctor’s family hostage to control a presidential operation, but I don’t see it being sustainable.

#4 The Michael J. Fox Show (Thursdays @ 9 p.m. on NBC)
NBC used to own Thursday night comedy. Some might say they’ve done okay by The Office and Parks & Rec but anytime they could find the next Friends, they’d be overjoyed. So, why not turn to the guy that baby boomers trusted with their Deloreans and their beloved music? Everyone wins if Fox can rediscover funny, and show how Parkinson’s is debilitating but hasn’t held this child actor-turned-movie star down. Sign me up for that one, and I’m a hard sell for comedy! Fox is a funny dude, and there’s part of me that wants to see it work just to show there’s hope in the midst of a less-than-favorable situation, that Fox didn’t give up. It’s art imitating life imitating art imitating… oh, I give up!

#5 Sleepy Hollow (Mondays @ 9 p.m. on FOX): The guys who re-invented Hawaii Five-O and helped do the same for the big screen Star Trek are taking a crack at the best Halloween tale, providing something that looks more Grimm than Once Upon A Time. Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) gets yanked from the Revolutionary War battlefield to the present day, where he and the local sheriff (Nicole Beharie) join forces to stop the Headless (?) Horseman who may or may not be bringing the Biblical Apocalypse with him. Everyone wants to get on the fairy tale bandwagon (ABC and NBC are already there), so it’s not surprising that FOX is giving it a shot. From what I’ve read and seen, it’ll be a love story, a thriller, and a conspiracy mystery, with the added touch that it’s a “man out of time” who is trying to make his way in the world, while dealing with a context that is morally and socially different from what he comes from. Does he adapt or does he stay the same and let the world around him cope?

#6 Ironside (Wednesdays @ 10 p.m. on NBC): Raymond Burr’s detective is getting a redo here, a la Jeffrey Deaver’s Lincoln Rhymes (Denzel Washington played him once). Will it be engaging? Will it be different or the same old procedural we’ve seen, Law & Order with a different name? Blair Underwood may be what NBC needs to jazz up its schedule but time will tell. The preview shows off action and humor, but one has to wonder if there’s room for a new procedural or if we actually need another one. It is certainly true that there aren’t a ton of minority leads on prime time television, so it would be nice to see a solid television show with a diverse cast do well.

#7 Welcome To The Family (Thursdays @ 8:30 p.m. on NBC): Fox’s lead-in looks promising (not as promising as Fox’s though) with the story about two polar opposite families who find themselves inextricably meshed together after their children’s teenage coitus results in a baby. Mike O’Malley’s facial expressions are a big draw here, but the awkwardness of the family we really didn’t choose for ourselves beckons me to give it a spin (at least for a few episodes). Up All Night kept my attention for a few weeks… can WTTF keep me all season? What kinds of things are you dealing with that would make a sitcom funny? It’s ironic that this situation is so sad, but it shows a glimmer of what it’s like to be stuck in a situation that you can’t get out of, to see the people you need supporting you bickering, to recognize that the bonds of family are think and relatively unbreakable.

And the returning shows…

The Amazing Race (Sundays @ 8 p.m. on CBS): It’s a race, around the world. That is all.

NCIS (Tuesdays @ 8 p.m. on CBS): Cote de Pablo AKA Ziva is leaving. And we last saw Gibbs (Mark Harmon) with Fornell (Joe Spano) in the cross-hairs of his rifle. We know he wouldn’t shoot, but this show has me emotionally wrapped up. If you’ve never seen it, then go back to the beginning and check out the first season.

Arrow (Wednesdays @ 9 p.m. on The CW): While Marvel has been pounding the big screen, DC has dominated the animated, straight-to-DVD fair… and the small screen. I still think Oliver Queen’s backstory is compelling, and the stunts are legit.

Elementary (Thursdays @ 10 p.m. on CBS): It’s Sherlock Holmes. (crickets, crickets) It’s S-h-e-r-l-o-c-k H-o-l-m-e-s. And okay, Johnny Lee Miller plays him to a “t” in the modern age.

The Big Bang Theory (Thursdays @ 8 p.m. on CBS): At this point, I don’t care if all of the jokes are insider, geek-related, and driven by dialogue that wouldn’t make sense if you pulled it apart. This is the one show I can count on making me laugh.

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Sunday’s Sermon Today: Are You For Or Against? (Nehemiah 2:11-20)

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

I love to go to different stadiums, to see teams play. There’s something about being there in person that brings a different degree of enthusiasm out, as the crowd chants, and you can hear the sounds of the sport. But I have to admit that while I can go to an event without an allegiance to either team, it doesn’t take long until I have sided with one over the other. I’m just not wired to sit on the fence: there’s ultimately a team that impacts my emotions, whether it’s a spectacular play on one side or a dirty play on the other. I just can’t stay impartial to the way that the game plays out.

In our story today, Nehemiah finds that the people of Jerusalem are either on one side or another of the rebuilding process: no one simply sits back and says that they don’t care. He finds it out the hard way, without training or warning, as he’s thrown into a red hot mess of tribal arguments and socioeconomics.

At first, Nehemiah was “just” a cupbearer, a slave whose sole purpose was to drink what the king was served to see if there was poison in the cup. How would the king know there was poison there? The cupbearer, Nehemiah, would drop dead, of course. But Nehemiah heard about the suffering of his nation in Jerusalem, and he prayed that God would give him the opportunity to speak to the king, to make change happen.

Our story today picks up when Nehemiah arrives in Jerusalem. He hasn’t told anyone why he’s there or what God had put on his heart to do. He spent the first few days meeting people, and assessing the “mood” of the people around him. But on the third night, he set out by himself and rode around the city.

Nehemiah had heard all about the ways that the once great city of King David had been broken down and left in pieces. He saw the way that the stones of the walls had been knocked down, and the wooden gates burnt to ash. He went at night to see what he could see without being jaded or impacted by the opinions of other people. He went at night so that he could avoid anyone else’s recognition of his exploration, and ask questions about his purpose there.

Nehemiah already had the permission of the king to be there; he already had a plan, the supplies, and the time. But what he didn’t have was a group of people who could perform the labor. He literally had a task that he believed in, and that he knew was worthwhile, but that he could not physically accomplish on his own. So, he went to the people of Israel, the ones who were left behind when the rich and the powerful were carried off. He went to the people who were hiding amongst the ruins, who had never mattered to anyone.

The cupbearer, the disposable one, went to the people that everyone else had forgotten about, who were of no consequence.

Nehemiah pitched them their way back to respectability, their way to discovering hope and a future in God’s plan. He told them that if they could rebuild the wall that they would win the respect they had longed to secure. He told them that not only was the God of the universe was behind the plan, but that the king himself had given them the go ahead.

And the people embraced the opportunity, and dug in. They replied, “Let us start rebuilding.” So they began this good work. Given the opportunity to continue hiding or to build something for themselves, and for God, they dove in.

But not everyone is thrilled about the opportunity to create something new. Not everyone can see the opportunities available to the people of God who have been reduced to fugitives and outcasts in the ruins of their own city. Not everyone wants the redemption of the city to happen, because some of the people living in Jerusalem have found ways to get by, have found ways to make the status quo to work in their favor.

And Nehemiah’s arrival, and the plan he brings from God, are not welcome. The voices of despair, frustration, and fear arrive next, in the person of Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem. They mock the plan and they ridicule it, they challenge Nehemiah and ask him why he’s wasting his time? They ask him who he thinks he is to rebuild Jerusalem, because it’s obvious that the king wouldn’t support this plan??

Nehemiah is clear about who he is and what he represents. And it doesn’t matter what he has to do to work around the dead weight in front of him. He doesn’t care that they don’t think he can succeed; he doesn’t care that they don’t understand the word that God has given him. He’s going to keep moving forward, and trust God for the rest.

Nehemiah says, “The God of heaven will give us success. We his servants will start rebuilding, but as for you, you have no share in Jerusalem or any claim or historic right to it.”

You’re either for the kingdom God is building here or you’re not. You can either participate and appreciate what happens, or you can mock us, and fight us, and try to bully us, and you can miss out on the awesomeness that God is doing.

Nehemiah foreshadows the sentiment that Jesus will share with his disciples in Matthew 12: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him.” We can try and re-articulate it anyway we’d like, but ultimately, Jesus says we have to choose a side.

God speaks these words, using the image of water, in Revelations 3: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.” Lukewarm water is useless! It doesn’t make for good tea, either iced or hot; no one wants to bath in it because the water doesn’t soothe the skin. Lukewarm water is nothing worth keeping.

Ultimately, whether it’s Nehemiah or Jesus or the angel of God speaking, there’s a less-than-subtle challenge: Are you with God or against him? Are you following love and truth and hope, or are you operating out of fear and falsehoods and selfishness?

Nehemiah can see the fear and frustration in the faces of his three challengers. He knows that they’re afraid that they will lose space, and comfort, probably income, and status, if the people of Jerusalem are able to stand on their own and defend their city. He knows that they know that they have benefited from the pain of others, and that they have a lot to lose.

His challenge to them is their last chance: either get on board or get out of the way.

It’s a challenge that lingers in my mind, and makes me ask: am I bought in? Am I pursuing God with my whole heart? Am I representing God in everything I do, or am I only half-baked in my theology, my actions, my thoughts? Am I keeping Jesus as the center of my decision-making and the hopes and dreams I have?

What does my prayer life look like? Am I praying by myself, with a friend, with my spouse and my kids? Am I giving God lip service on Sunday and checking back in with him a week later? Our own Bishop Cho says it’s not enough to just “check in” with God at meals and bedtime, but that we should be in a relationship with God that is meaningful, deep, and fully integrated into our lives.

I’ve heard people use the example that when we were in hot-blooded pursuit of our spouse or someone we were romantically interested in that we didn’t just show them attention at certain points, but that we were “all in,” that we pursued them so that they would absolutely know that we were interested. The longer I work in church and listen to the stories of people in committed relationships, the more I understand why that analogy can break down: we sometimes forget to be truly “all in,” tuned in, absolutely attentive to our significant other once we’ve grown comfortable with what it means to be in that relationship.

Do we need to be as annoying as golden retrievers in relationships? Of course not. But aren’t human relationships better, deeper, fuller when they are cultivated? What if we practiced on God and on our loved ones a fully participatory attentiveness? What if rather than working on what was next or down the road, we were “all in” at home, at church, and in prayer? That would be expectation defying, wouldn’t it?

But you better watch out, because it might change your life!

I hope you’ll reflect with me on the way we live, and the truths we believe. There is hope and grace in the person of the resurrected Christ. But you have to be all the way in, burning white hot. Otherwise, it’s merely going through the motions, simply lukewarm.

And we know lukewarm only gets spit out.

This sermon is for the 11 a.m. worship service at Blandford United Methodist Church in Prince George, Va.

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Sunday’s Sermon Today: Rebuilding Mode (Nehemiah 1)

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

Sometimes, broken things have to be broken even more before they can be rebuilt. But an eye for what things can be shows the beauty in the broken.

In The Six Million Dollar Man, the astronaut Steve Austin is nearly killed in a crash. Fans of the show will remember that the narrator acknowledges that he is barely alive, while another character states:  “we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better…stronger…faster.” Of course, Austin goes on to be a one-man justice squad, a defender of the weak and a protector of the defenseless. But he doesn’t become the “six million dollar man” without the crash first.

Are you broken? Do you recognize things about yourself or your situation that you want to change? Do you recognize attitudes or circumstances that leave you shaking your head, wishing that there was something more? Are you moved by the struggles of others to recognize their need for healing so that you become part of their healing process?

Nehemiah knows what it’s like to have a heart broken for someone else’s situation. He’s a slave in a strange land, but he has the king’s attention. It’s his job to drink whatever is served to the king to drink, so that if someone has poisoned the king, Nehemiah will die and the king will not drink. He’s like the canary sent into the mine shafts with the miners to check for oxygen levels. He’s treated pretty well, fed well, and given nice clothes, but he is expendable. And yet, when his brother brings news of their ancestral home, it’s Nehemiah the cupbearer who sets in motion the actions that cause real change.

Nehemiah’s brother tells them that their home city, Jerusalem, has been destroyed, that the walls that kept their enemies and wild animals out have been broken, that the gates have been burned. The people who still live there are humiliated but they also fear for their lives.

I don’t know what you do when bad news comes, but it says in Nehemiah 1:4 that the cupbearer to the king, who would one day be one of Israel’s great prophets, did five things.

One, Nehemiah sat down: he stopped doing what he was doing before. I’ll admit, when I receive bad news or even ‘sorta-kinda-maybe-not-great-news,’ I tend to make myself busier. When I’m concerned about something, there is no dirty laundry in the house, because I wash it all (but unfortunately, I don’t always have the energy to put it all away!) But Nehemiah basically stops doing all of the unnecessary present things and focuses on the problem itself: his city of Jerusalem is in ruins.

Two, Nehemiah cried. Too often, when trouble strikes, when sadness happens, we try to cover it all up, tuck it away, and we fail to engage the pain we’re feeling. We don’t let ourselves process what is really going on! But here, Nehemiah doesn’t “fake it until he makes it,” he doesn’t ignore the pain that is tearing up his heart to bubble out of his eyes and mouth.

Three, Nehemiah mourned. Now, mourning is deeper, reflecting over what has been lost. (I initially put crying and mourning into the same action, but the truth is, mourning is deeper!) We cry when we stub our toe, or break a bone, or see our pennant-starved team when the World Series, but we mourn when we lose a loved one. It’s not just a momentary pain but a lasting loss. And while pain may cause momentary change in action, what or who we mourn can lead to life-altering change!

Four, Nehemiah fasted. We tend to not place as much emphasis on this spiritual discipline, but it’s understood that a person fasting will be focused absolutely. The hunger forces them to concentrate absolutely on what is most important and in front of them. It’s a sacrifice that the church has employed as a way of making oneself available to God for God’s voice to have the floor unilaterally.

And finally, five, Nehemiah prayed. Now, the prayer comes mixed in with the mourning and the fasting. It doesn’t come in isolation, or in deep space, or disconnected from real life. It’s not saccharine, or white-washed, or purified. It’s the cry of Nehemiah’s heart. All of the things before, the sitting, the crying, the mourning, and the fasting, all of them are before God, and washed over with prayer.

Nehemiah’s prayer covers the basics of prayer. He remembers the good things God has done in the past; he confesses his sins and the sin of his people in not obeying God. He puts before God his promised redemption: “if you return to me and obey my commands, then even if your exiled people are at the farthest horizon, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place I have chosen as a dwelling for my Name.” He lifts up the people of Jerusalem as God’s people in intercessory prayer. And he asks that God would give him success in Nehemiah’s approach to the king.

As many times as I’ve read that, I don’t see that Nehemiah ever asked for anything specific in what would happen with the king when they talked. Nehemiah simply asked God for success in that conversation. He approached God, the creator of the universe, and asked God’s blessing in approaching the king, the king of the known world. He knew that if God ordained it, then the king would get it. He knew if God was with him in spirit and purpose, then the king would be, too.

Nehemiah prayed all of this out of the brokenness of his heart for the people and city of Jerusalem. He worked it out with God in a painful, true, and unapologetic way. But he constantly focused on the fact that God was God and he wasn’t. It wasn’t his will that he was passionate about, but God’s.

Let’s be clear: Nehemiah was a nobody. He was a disposable cupbearer to the enemy king.  He had no status. He had no power. He was replaceable.

But when his heart was broken, he knew to turn to God. He knew that God had promised a plan for his people and that God would faithfully see it through. The prophet Jeremiah would later say that God knew the plans he had for his people, to prosper them and not to harm them, to give them hope and a future. But Jeremiah understood that God’s people don’t always stay on the straight and narrow, they don’t always seek after God. God’s plan for good, for joy, for hope, for love, for purpose would be found when God’s people sought him with their whole heart.

A nobody in the world’s eyes, in the hierarchy of a whole kingdom, was the person whose heart was broken, was the person who God would use to rebuild God’s kingdom. Do you think that you’re a nobody? Do you think that your position, or lack of authority, mean that God can’t use you? Do you recognize that because Nehemiah was willing to seek God’s heart that God was able to use him regardless of what anyone else thought?

In the feature film follow-up to Bruce Almighty, Evan Baxter (Steve Carrell) asks God to help him change the world. He sees something that needs doing, and he sets out to do it, even if he doesn’t know how. But when he prays, it’s not just that God taps him with a magic wand or zaps the problem he’s recognizing, he expects actual participation by Evan to make the change in the world that he wants to see. Evan doesn’t know where to begin, but God tells him to get started with one act of random kindness at a time; his wife actually struggles with where to begin in regard to bringing her family closer together, and God says to start with the little opportunities.

Are you broken for something that matters? Are you seeing the homeless, or the malnourished, the lonely, the ostracized and wishing God or someone would do something about it? What if you are the person? What if your broken heart is the wall of Jerusalem and your prayer will be the thing that will build a relationship back up?

We need to admit that we’re broken. We don’t always get it right. We fall down, we sin. We see issues in the world that we want to fix and it tears us apart. But we have the power of the risen Christ, we have Jesus’ sacrificial love on the cross that shows us that God will rebuild what is broken by any means possible. Whether it’s your relationship with God or someone else, or your desire to make an injustice right, you have the tools before you to call on the King of Kings, the maker of all things, and to say, “you promised to watch over us, to bring us back, and we need you now.”

Joseph Campbell wrote that “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” Campbell also wrote that, “if you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.”

It seems that too often we have an expectation of what life will look like that never plays out, and we are set back by our own sense of failure and dissatisfaction. Admittedly, it’s good to set goals, to have dreams, to push toward something. But whose dreams are they? Where do our dreams come in? How do we recognize when we’re being called, or pulled, in a different direction that should have our full attention?

Are you prepared to be “all in” for God’s plan? Are you willing to admit you’re broken to be rebuilt, piece by piece? I hope today that you can recognize that God’s plan is better than what you expected! For Nehemiah, the life of the city builder was intimidating (and dangerous), but it was a significant improvement on cupbearer, right? God knew Nehemiah had gifts that were underused and underappreciated as a taste taster for poison, but that would be maximized as a leader of the new city God was rebuilding.

Nehemiah was meant to live for something more. We’re meant to live for something so much more. But are we recognizing our passions, the things God is breaking our heart about, and then doing something about it?

Switchfoot puts it like this in “Meant to Live”:

Fumbling his confidence
And wondering why the world has passed him by
Hoping that he’s bent for more than arguments
And failed attempts to fly, fly

We were meant to live for so much more
Have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside
Somewhere we live inside
We were meant to live for so much more
Have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside

Dreaming about Providence
And whether mice or men have second tries
Maybe we’ve been livin with our eyes half open
Maybe we’re bent and broken, broken.

Are you seeing the world around you as a mission field, full of people who need help and situations that require healing and compassion? Are you troubled by human trafficking, or challenged by something immediate, like hungry families in your neighborhood? Are you recklessly searching for God in others, or longing to know how to show them that Jesus loves them? Can you see that you are meant for something so much more?

May God see your brokenness and show you the beauty of a new plan, a new dream, a new vision. Call on God now.

This sermon is for the 9 a.m. service for the Stand worship at Blandford United Methodist Church in Prince George, Va.

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FF Rant: Free Agents Of Change Week 2 (Fantasy Football)

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

As a New England fan, last week’s Thursday night game was… underwhelming. On one side of the ball, you have a quarterback who has thrown twice as many interceptions as touchdowns in his young career, and only started because his arrogant coach threw the “Sanchize” out there in the fourth quarter of a meaningless preseason game. On the other, you have a championship-level QB whose receiving corps represents a who’s-who from the practice squad. Julian Edelman? Aaron Dobson? Kembrell Thompkins? Say what you will about Gisele and Uggs, but he deserved better.

I felt the same way watching some of the “feature films” released the last few weeks. They were good but not spectacular. I deserved something better to watch; Robert De Niro (or Bob, as someone referred to him) deserved better than The Family. So, here are my potential adds for the week, for those who deserve better than what they’re getting, with some cinematic flair…

QB: Philip Rivers. Your #3 QB scorer in ESPN standard, he’s dropped 22 and 29 points, but like Jed Cooper in Hang’Em High, the average fan has left him for dead (Eric Karabell certainly has). Is it time to admit that Norv Turner lost it in SD and that maybe, just maybe, this Wolfpack QB’s arm isn’t dead just yet?

RB: James Starks, Bernard Pierce, Andre Ellington. We knew coming into the season that Mike McCarthy wanted to have a mix of RBs for the Green Bay Packers, but when Eddie Lacy went down with a concussion in the 2013 version of the NFL, it became the Starks show (22 points, 26 in PPR). Pierce had a decent game with 11 points, but he’s the speculative add if Ray Rice misses any time (and given his size, it’d be no surprise). But in the “where did he come from department,” meet Ellington of the Arizona Cardinals who looks to be the rookie of choice there over Stephan Taylor. His four carriers weren’t spectacular but he caught the ball twice (including a TD) and looks like the third-down back in a mix where Rashard Mendenhall is no iron man…

WR: DeAndre Hopkins, Aaron Dobson, Eddie Royal. If the first two guys (both rookies) are still available in your league, you should be giving them a long look, especially in a keeper or PPR league. Hopkins had 17 points (24 PPR), and scored the game winner when the Texans’ Andre Johnson left with a concussion. Dobson had some serious drops in the rain in Foxboro and earned Tom Brady’s wrath, but he caught the game’s only TD and went for 11 points (14 PPR). But there’s the annual Royal sighting, who jumped from 14 to 27 points (34 PPR!) The way that Rivers is playing and the obvious chemistry he has with Royal mean you should be giving him a good long look. He doesn’t play a solid D/ST until week 10, even if he’s turned into a pumpkin every season since 2009.

TE: Charles Clay. I’m still snagging last week’s picks (see below) ahead of him, but he went from 5 (10 PPR) to 16 (21 PPR) points in a week, and the Dolphins are playing like it’s 1972 and Al Pacino is coaching instead of Don Shula. The next two weeks, against the NFC South, feature games that would rather outscore you than stop you, and I think there are enough balls to go around with Brian Hartline, Mike Wallace, and Clay. Give it a shot.

K: With apologies to Allen Iverson: “Kickers? Kickers? Are we really talking about kickers?!” I’m rarely one to care about kickers, but after Randy Bullock cost me points this week, it seems relevant to point out a “sleeper kicker” (I think I invented the term). San Diego is playing every way but loose (thank you, Ryan Matthews) but doesn’t have the punch to put it in from close, so their kicker, Nick Novak, is getting plenty of work. His 23 points last week beat most kickers’ two-week total for 2013.

D/ST: And my sneaky defensive pickup is… the Buffalo Bills! The Bills have done well-enough causing fumbles and taking interceptions away, and this week, they get Geno Smith and the N.Y. Jets. Remember Smith? He’s the one that kept the Jets close, but gifted the win with his three INTs to the Pats…

Bounce Back Candidate From The Obvious Name Department: Pick an RB not named Marshawn “Skittles” Lynch, and you have an option. The Muscle Hamster, Doug Martin, of the Mighty Mouse size and the Rock-size biceps? Plenty of carries but underwhelming points with no TDs (see also: AP, Alfred Morris; these guys are disadvantaged because they don’t catch the ball). LeSean McCoy? Plenty of opportunities (receptions helped out his total in PPR) but no TDs last week (see also: Matt Forte, the perpetual Ben Affleck to Jay Cutler’s Matt Damon… could this be the year for Argo?)

Sell High Candidate: DeSean Jackson. With 16 (23 PPR) and 25 (34 PPR) points in the first two weeks, Jackson’s value is as high as it’s ever been. But he’s not exactly the most durable guy or the biggest, and he’s playing in a run-heavy offense that leaves him susceptible to plenty of hits. D-Jax wants to rap; I’m sure he’d be all over the movies. But can you trust a guy to carry your team when he thinks playing in the NFL is comparable to life for Boyz in the Hood? Get some perspective.

Trade Target: Chris Johnson. Yes, there’s a scary back-to-back with Seattle and SanFran in weeks 6 and 7, but other than that, it looks like this offensive line could assemble like the Avengers and start throwing down defensive linemen like puny gods.

Let’s look at last week’s “add” suggestions and other relevant comments…

TE-Julian Thomas/Jordan Cameron/Jared Cook: In standard ESPN scoring, Thomas had 10 points and Cameron had 9 points, but Cook had… 1 point. So Thomas and Cameron carried Cook like he was Bernie for the weekend.

WR-Julius Edelman/Jerome Simpson: In standard ESPN scoring, Edelman had 7 and Simpson had 4. But if you were looking hard at Edelman last week, you either had Danny Amendola and had to have a replacement, or you play in PPR (point per reception). In a PPR league, Edelman went for a fat 20 fantasy points. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Brady has replaced one Smurf (Wes Welker) with another (Edelman).

RB- Joique Bell/Fred Jackson: Bell rolled out 7 points, and Jackson rolled for 11. But honestly, if you’ve picked up Bell, then you’re ahead of the Reggie-Bush-is-Mr. Glass movement that will be sweeping the nation soon. Jackson is getting plenty of run in Doug Marrone’s run-heavy play calling, and C.J. Spiller isn’t actually “unbreakable” himself.

Last Week’s Bounce-back Candidates From The “Obvious Name” Department: Chris Johnson (I had a typo… going against HOU not SD): only 7 points. His owners have to be wondering. Calvin Johnson vs. ARI: From 3 to… 23. What a week it was. And that’s not even in PPR.; Stevan Ridley vs. NYJ: He got plenty of carries, but the offense couldn’t get going. I’m still willing to cut him a break… for now. Johnson played like he could leap tall buildings with a single bound, but Ridley is going to start avoiding The Hoodie like he’s the guy from Scream.

Last Week’s Trade Target: Marshawn Lynch. Doesn’t look like owners will be hot to unload him after he went for three total touchdowns against one of the league’s toughest defenses. There still hasn’t been as dynamic a run since Lynch broke off eight Saints in the playoffs, but he’s soon going to be hanging out with Machete while he carves people up.

Last Week’s Sell High: Peyton Manning. Owners are probably still happy with 20 points, but that’s more than a 50% drop-off from 46 against the listless Baltimore Ravens. Wait until that gets cut in half… Sell him for a top-rated RB or WR to fill your needs, and pick up a QB like Rivers off the waiver wire to increase your productivity at one position and maintain the output at QB. I’m not saying Manning is terrible, but he’s going to tire/get rested and they’re going to run more. It’s like going to The Escape Plan and expecting that Sly Stallone is going to be Oscar-worthy again or expecting that Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to suddenly have learned how to act! His fantasy production won’t be 46 points every week…

And now…

They’re Dead To Me (Almost…): Chris Ivory (Powell got equivalent carries and the TD), Maurice Jones-Drew (sprained ankle, horrible team), and (is it too soon?) Roddy White.

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The Journey So Far: Can You Have Too Many Churches?

Posted on September 16, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

If we expect to baptize and teach, then we’ve got to make some moves toward going. 

Have you ever done something really insane? Have you ever done something so different that someone you knew and loved was forced to ask you, “what were you thinking?” (I remember being asked the question several times during the ordination process by folks who weren’t sure why I’d plow through that, but that’s a whole different post.) When it’s using the slip’n’slide meant for kids, and you’re an adult, it’s one thing. But what happens if it’s something more serious, something ideological, fundamental, theological?

After sharing why I’m a Christian, why I’m a pastor, and why I’m a Methodist, I come to the fourth and final installment in this series, The Journey So Far: why I’m a church planter. It’s a response to the question, “can you have too many churches?” And it follows this kind of conversation.

Me: “I want to plan a church.”

Local church (size is unimportant) pastor: “But there are, like, ten churches [wherever].”

Me: “How many people live in the area?”

Local church pastor: [Really big number].

Me: “How many people are in those churches each week?”

Local church pastor: (Long pause that amounts to [Really big number minus much smaller number].)

In Matthew 28, Jesus lays out his final instructions for the disciples who remain after he’s been crucified on the cross and then raised from the dead by God:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

It’s the very core of why I’m called to plant a church. Jesus basically broke down “the mission” into three, ‘easy’ steps: 1) Go and make disciples of all nations, 2) baptize them in the name of the Trinity, and 3) teach them what he’d taught them. So, if our local churches aren’t reaching the average person, if the communities we live in are responding less and less frequently to the established churches in the area, then why aren’t we recognizing that something has to give? Is it because the established church has grown too comfortable, and assume people will come to them? Is it because we’ve lost sight of the going, and assumed that the people who don’t know Jesus, who haven’t met him, will do the coming to us?

If we expect to baptize and teach, then we’ve got to make some moves toward going. It’s not that the preaching in churches is bad or that we don’t have great programs, but we can’t get people to just show up and try it out. And we settle for spending more money on cute mailers and taking out adds on Facebook, and intermittently-read newspapers, etc. We’ve got to recognize that not everyone is comfortable in worshipping the way that the average, localized, traditional church does it, and that those reasons don’t have to make sense to us, but they’re real. That people won’t come to our churches because:

-They’ve been burned by a church in the past.

-They’re related to someone who has been burned by a church in the past.

-They’ve never seen a real Christian, and what they’ve read in the paper doesn’t sound like anything they want a part of.

-They’ve never seen the church, or a relationship with Jesus, change anything, so why would they give up the one day a week they can sleep in, or get their housework done, or spend time with their kids, to sit and sing songs they don’t know and read a book that may or not be made up?

-They don’t believe that there’s a god, or that if there is one that he even cares about them.

-They don’t think the church really cares about them.

-They don’t have an expectation that God either cares or has a better plan for them, for a variety of reasons including that they weren’t raised in church or they were taught that God doesn’t even exist.

Now, obviously, there are established churches that break through, that strike the blend of compassion and truth that impacts a community and draws people in. But the statistics, and the movement of people toward atheism and out of church in the United States, show that our churches aren’t getting any more full and we’re not thinking far enough out of the box.

[Sidebar: There’s a great scene from The Big Bang Theory where Wolowitz’s space toilet is sending everything backwards. Sheldon simply wants to switch the location/movement of the toilet’s handle, and Leonard responds with a quip about Sheldon ‘climbing out of the box but clinging onto the box for dear life.’ Too often, that’s how we think ‘differently’; we just re-order the same parts or only change the superficial.]

But then there are the outliers. There are the churches launched in movie theaters and strip malls, the ones that aim to show people how they’re impacting their communities’ hurting spots, like hunger, or homelessness, or education, or [fill in the blank]. There are the churches that are using the social media, the integrated relationships, the times that no church would ever hold a service, who are daring to meet people where they are in bars, in book groups, in schools. There are the churches that are daring to strip back their messages til they are preaching the gospel and reminding people that they don’t have to come clean, they just have to come, and that Jesus will meet them where they are.

You can read the work of experts like Andy Stanley in Deep & Wide or Nelson Searcy in Launch: Starting a New Church from Scratch. You can see the ways that these patterns defy our standardized church patterns of spending, of the use of our time, of our explanations of theology, of the ways we view people who haven’t met Jesus yet, and of our understanding of how we’re supposed to interact, the church and the world. You can see that we’re not here to conserve, but to empower the coming kingdom (H. Richard Niebuhr, nearly a hundred years later), that it’s not about maintaining the status quo but building a new level of expectation.

Planting churches is grassroots. It’s gospel. It’s what I believe Jesus would do.

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The Family: Old Habits Die Hard (Movie Review)

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

Based on the audience in the theater, quite a few folks had turned out to see Robert De Niro as another mobbed-up character. Unlike his psychiatrist in Analyze This, the person in question is Giovanni, who has been forced into witness protection after snitching on his fellow mobsters. He, his wife “Maggie” (Michelle Pfeiffer), daughter “Belle” (Diana Agron), and son “Warren” (John D’Leo) are now located in Normandy, France, as the habits which made him a good mobster not only penetrate his new life but also infiltrate the life decisions of his family members. He’s overseen by Tommy Lee Jones’ Tom, and his two subordinates (Domenick Lombardozzi and Jimmy Palumbo), but we know that no amount of protection can keep the family safe from the Mob… and themselves.

Watching Belle and Warren work their way through their new school provides some of the funniest and most disturbing moments. Warren is clever and knows exactly what the stereotypical groups need/want, and provides services that move him up the food chain a la Mean Girls; Belle seeks love as “the only way to escape this crazy family,” finding the tough lesson that sex doesn’t equal love, commitment, or meaningful relationships. Both of them seek in some regard to move past or exceed the levels reached by their parents, and unfortunately, they only make it so far.

But this is definitely a dark comic look at De Niro’s roles, and a study in the way that individuals can’t easily escape themselves. The pattern of violence is almost impossible to break, and at the same time, the audience’s response says a lot about what we expect about violence. De Niro’s Giovanni does to people what we might imagine doing to people (only more violently); what happens when the plumber sticks it to you, or the politician glad hands you while covering up globally-unacceptable conditions? We think that’s how De Niro acts, because he’s played it so often, but unfortunately here, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I won’t deny that there are parts of the film that are funny, and some that are so shocking that they make you laugh. But some of the moments that are played for laughs are… disturbing. I was flashing back to my “take” on the Mandy Moore movie Saved, as Maggie finally braves the community in the institution of the church, and gets rejected. In a moment where she takes the local parish priest at his word, she confesses her sins, and those of her family, and subsequently finds herself turned away from all church functions. It’s a truth that made the audience laugh, but which I believe has too often been the experience of people who were deemed “too dirty,” too sinner-ish for the church. And the church would be foolish to believe that wasn’t how many people saw religion, especially Christianity, in general. Personally, I don’t see anything in the Bible that says we can be too far from what God could redeem.

The Family is entertaining, and funny, but it’s also violent and profane. But in its entirety, we can see a clever look at what it means to teach our kids even when we don’t know they’re learning, how hard it is to change who we are, and what it means to long to fit in without ever knowing why.

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The World’s End: Where Do You Run? (Movie Review)

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

I caught Shaun of the Dead thanks to a friend’s recommendation, and my (then) growing interest in zombies, and thought that it was one of the funniest movies that I’ve ever seen. Then, I saw Hot Fuzz and was underwhelmed by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, or rather, the goofy plot that revolved around serial killers (with a cameo by one James Bond, Timothy Dalton). (I saw Paul, and marveled at the humor that poked fun at beliefs in higher powers that weren’t green, bug-eyed, and saucer flying, even as they challenged my own understandings of the universe.) But I had to come full circle. So, I shelled out $8 to check out the final element of the trinity of the Pegg/Frost/Simon Wright team-up about a one-night pub crawl that ends violently (with a cameo by another James Bond, Pierce Brosnan).

And I found a funny flick, with some interesting commentary on the way we deal with our pain and our expectations, and the way we organize what we believe.

Gary King (Pegg) was the man in high school, and on graduation night, he organizes his friends in a pub crawl of the twelve watering holes in Newton Haven. But they never finish the quest, and years later, it is literally all that King has left. So, he reunites his childhood blokes, Andy (Frost), Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steven (Paddy Considine), and Peter (Eddie Marsan), and drags them along for a recreation of what they were supposed to do that night, even as Oliver’s sister Sam (Rosamund Pike, Bond girl) ends up coming along.

But this isn’t just about completing the crawl, this is about saving the world from utter annihilation! Yes, this time, there are aliens, who are gradually replacing people with robots, all in the name of protecting us from ourselves and ordering the world in the way that is best for everything, globally. It’s funny, and definitely seems to channel V and Terminator, but it also has something to say about our ability to deal with adversity.

I want to write this again: the quest for twelve pubs in one night is literally all that King has left. He’s dealing with a bunch of stuff, but while the other guys have turned into responsible human beings, he’s a million-time loser. And an alcoholic. And a womanizer. And a good-for-nothing friend. He copes with his depression, his loneliness, his left-out-ness with drugs. His friends, his followers, didn’t have the stones to set him straight, and he never had anyone really care enough about him to try and get him help. Sure, he’s defiant and contains the “human spirit” in terms of the movie’s final third, but he’s a broken guy who has lived much of his life alone.

Is it funny? Sure. But it also shows us a more vulnerable side of what it’s like to really struggle (like Christian Bale’s druggie in The Fighter), and lose over and over again. When we don’t have anything to believe or hope in (and we know we ourselves aren’t enough to put all of our hope in), where can we turn? King turns to the bottom of the bottle because community, and faith, and love never really showed up for him in a major way.

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Sunday’s Sermon Today: Muddy Water (II Kings 5:1-14)

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

I have a confession to make: I am in the top 10% of the whiniest people when I am sick. The top thirty to forty percent is probably filled with men, as women seem to be more capable of getting the job done while not feeling at their best. Seriously, have you ever considered what a pregnant woman accomplishes during her time carrying a second soul around? Pregnant women with children and husbands should be nominated for some sort of civil medal!

When I’m sick, I am notoriously bad about looking up solutions on the internet. WebMD is probably one of my favorites. I’ll check out the pictures, and the symptoms, and ask if any of those sound like anything close to what I’m actually dealing with. It’s incredible how many times I’ve suffered from appendicitis based on the online surveys they provide!

But when the time comes to actually visit a real, live doctor, I tend to dutifully follow their instructions… for awhile. And suddenly, upon starting to feel better, I’m off to behaving however I did before. Will you admit to that, or are you still holding onto the fallacy that you actually follow directions??

In our story today, a very powerful man is sick. Naaman is a non-Jew, someone who doesn’t believe in God but he is someone that God has used to bring victory to another nation, Aram. God wants to get his people’s attention, but he’s using this time to get the attention of some other, non-Jewish people. In this case, it’s Naaman.

Naaman has leprosy, a disease that is uncomfortable and irritating at its simplest, and deadly at its worst. Some people lose significant amounts of skin, others have lost whole limbs. We’re assuming that Naaman’s is diagnosed early, before he’s suffered too much, but we know that it’s of great concern to him. And while he’s in the midst of checking with physicians and getting second opinions, he encounters a Jewish girl who has been captured, who tells Naaman’s wife that he should go to Elisha the prophet to get cured.

Naaman gets permission from his king and goes to Israel with a treasure trove to pay for the cure. The king actually writes a letter to the king of Israel, who is terrified! He knows he can’t cure Naaman, and he thinks, as a captured, subjected people, that the king of Aram will destroy him if Naaman comes back and he’s still sick. He thinks Naaman is there as part of a cruel joke. So he has a hissy fit, tears his clothes, and mopes.

Apparently it’s such a big deal, that word gets to Elisha. Notice, the king didn’t know who to turn to, he was so tuned out about what God could do that Elisha wasn’t even on his rolodex. So Elisha sends word that the king of Israel should send Naaman to him.

Naaman arrives with his entourage at Elisha’s house. I don’t imagine much. He’s not living in splendor, and here’s this conquering general riding up with his treasures, and half of his army, stopped outside his house. Elisha doesn’t even come out of his house! He sends a messenger to tell Naaman to go wash seven times in the Jordan, and he’ll be healed.

Imagine if you came to me with a problem, or went to your doctor for that matter, and the advice you received was, “Go to the James River, up by the Canal Walk, and jump in and out seven times.”

Wait, you ask, do you mean the area where they pulled out a few dead bodies last year? Or the part that overflows into the sewage lines? Or the part where people dump their trash and dogs go to the bathroom?

I don’t know about you, but none of those options sounds top-notch. And they weren’t received well by Naaman. Naaman basically rebuffs the advice, because he thought he deserved a face-to-face with the prophet. He thought Elisha would just wave his hand, and Naaman would be well. The fact that he calls the leprosy “a spot,” minimalized as being pretty trivial, makes me wonder if it wasn’t like when your spouse hounds you to go “get that checked out.” Naaman expected to be treated like he was all that and a bag of chips, and he’s certainly not getting into the Jordan river. In fact, he says if he wanted to wash in a river like that, he could’ve just used the ones by his house!

Naaman’s servants must’ve really liked him. Or his wife. Or something. Because his servants argue with him, this great foreign general! “If Elisha had told you do some great thing, like the challenges of Hercules, wouldn’t you have done it? He told you to wash, so you should go!”

So Naaman relents and goes down and washes in the river seven times, and his skin is restored. Naaman obeys and he’s healed, even as he accepts that what God wanted for him wasn’t what he expected, but it was best. And it says in II Kings 5:15 that he acknowledged that Yahweh God was the one and only God, an unbeliever converted.

Let me put that out there again, with a twist: God’s plan was what was best for Naaman, and what he actually wanted, even though how Naaman got there wasn’t what he expected and seemed pointless to him at first.

Are there any examples of that in your own life? (I’ll wait, while you think.) Are you expecting God like this, when God shows up like that?

Consider a couple of the takeaways here:

1- Naaman has a problem, but he finds a solution thanks to people who care about him enough to go out of their comfort zone.

2- Naaman’s plan isn’t what God has planned for him, and given that Naaman’s other outlets weren’t working, he had to try something else.

3- Naaman’s desire (long view) is achieved when he does what God wants.

Are you surrounding yourself with people who fear God who are willing to tell you when you’re wrong? Who love you enough to risk your anger or your frustration because they want what is best for you?

Are you opening yourself to the possibility that God has something in mind for you that is better than what you could’ve expected but will take you down a road where you have to rely on God?

Are you being obedient to the call of God on your life in a way that you recognize your obedience puts you in the path of God’s plan?

I see life as a current. It’s up to you whether that’s the ebb-and-flow of the ocean or a river. But I don’t think of it as a pond or a lake with edges and finite definition. I think that we make the decisions to go where God wants us to go, to recognize that there are tides that are God’s best for us, and there are pulls and pushes that are from other, less savory influences. We can bob along, never wrestling, never putting ourselves in position to swim in the flow but be thrown wherever and by whatever, or we can enjoy the journey, and recognize that sometimes, God’s current is going in the opposite direction than everyone else’s. That sometimes, we have to flow upstream.

It’s true, the Jordan River isn’t the cleanest river around. But it’s where Jesus was baptized. And if the plan was good enough for Jesus…

This sermon is for the 11 a.m. worship service on September 15 at Blandford United Methodist Church in Prince George, VA.

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Sunday’s Sermon Today: Resurrected Dreams (II Kings 4:8-35)

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

My dad preached a sermon several years ago about what love was. He said that love was a relationship that must include God. We say we “loved” a movie or “love” that jersey/sweater, but that love involves people and our interaction with God in that situation. That’s quite a switch from what popular culture tells us about love, about relationships between people, and about what it means for us to hold things dear in our world.

So, take a moment and consider what it is that you love? Do you love your spouse, your parents, your children, your friends, your job, your hobby? Do those people or situations matter to you in a way that you would be lost without them, or struggling to focus?

I’ll admit that when it comes to preaching, the stories involving children are the toughest ones for me. Abraham prepares to sacrifice his son on the altar; Mary stands beneath the cross on which her son hangs dying. But then there’s this stranger one, strange because it involves death and resurrection in the Old Testament, and strange because it doesn’t often make it into our sermon series.

In II Kings, the prophet Elisha is on his own, having assumed the mantle of the nation’s prophet from his mentor, Elijah. In his travels, he finds himself in a relationship with a Shunammite woman and her family. It’s sort of like being in your grandma’s town: every time you’re passing through, you have stop by for a bite to eat!

This woman is a stranger but she believes so fiercely in the hospitality codes of her culture, and the respect she should pay the prophet, that she tells her husband, “we’re giving him the spare bedroom, whenever he wants.” It would be expected that she’d feed anyone who came to her door in need of food, but to house them? That’s extraordinary. [Sidebar with me for a moment: who would you be so moved to offer up your guest room for whenever they wanted? It’s a short list, right? Are there any absolute strangers on there?]

Elisha decides one day, during his visit, that the Shunammite woman has been so faithful to her beliefs, so hospitable, that he should do something for her. He first offers her protection from the government, but she resists accepting that favor. So Gehazi, Elisha’s personal assistant, suggests that maybe Elisha could give her a son.

Political protection is one thing, but a son? I mean, it says her husband is old… so she’s probably not any spring chicken herself!

Elisha tells her that she’s going to have a baby in a year; she tells him not to tease her. But she becomes pregnant like we knew she would, and eagerly welcomes a son into her family. She was hospitable to a prophet of God, she was obedient to the teachings of the Torah, and she was rewarded for it.

Beautiful story, right? Wonderful, everything-ends-well kind of “work hard and prosper” story. But it doesn’t end there, unfortunately or not.

One day, when the boy is old enough to visit his father in the field, he complains of a headache and subsequently dies. We don’t know if he had a seizure or an aneurysm, but this great gift that the prophet has given the Shunnamite woman is dead. In her arms.

As I read through the Scripture over the course of the week, I thought of the way that the peoples of Narnia had been awaiting Aslan in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, and how at the seminal moment, he allows himself to be taken to the stone table and killed. It’s a wonderful, horrible, dreadful image of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, but it’s also so telling in the way that Lucy mourns the death of this dream she shares with the Narnians. She knows that so much has been lost as the dream dies with Aslan, she doesn’t know that there’s a resurrection coming.

In our story today, the Shunnamite doesn’t know it’s coming either, but she believes in its possibility. While Elisha is the means by which blessing came to the Shunnamite woman, this story is way more about her faith than it is about the prophet. Because her response to the death of her son is not to fall into a depression, it is not to curse God, it is not to succumb to the natural feelings of a mother who has just lost a son.

No, instead, she saddles a donkey and heads off for the place that Elisha is. Elisha sees her coming and sends Gehazi to ask if everything is okay, and she desists from telling him. She will only speak to God’s representative, like she is telling God himself.

Again, the Shunnamite woman doesn’t waste time stopping to tell eight people along the way, she doesn’t even bother telling Gehazi, the prophet’s right hand man. And all she does is ask two questions: “Did I ask you for a son? Didn’t I tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes?'”

The Shunnamite woman isn’t pointing fingers, but she is challenging Elisha. She’s wondering why she’d have this dream, and then have it taken away. She’s wondering what many of us have wondered along the way, “why did it work out this way?”

But in this situation, whether it’s a response to her initial hospitality or the boldness of her approach, Elisha doesn’t verbally respond. He simply tells Gehazi to take his staff and lay it across the boy. He knows that God can raise the dead. He knows that there is real power in the situation.

And the woman refuses to take sloppy seconds. She doesn’t want Elisha’s right hand man. She wants Elisha himself. She wants the representative of the Almighty God on Earth to show up at the deathbed of her son and to make good on the dream. Still, Gehazi went ahead and laid the staff there, and nothing happened.

Now, we have plenty of examples where a mere touch or a representative object caused a miracle to occur. I would argue that the staff could have raised the boy from the dead if that is in fact what God had wanted. But I believe that God wanted the widow and Elisha to witness the miracle. In the same way that Lazarus was allowed to die, be buried, and begin to decompose before Jesus raised him from the dead, so that there was no doubt about the powerful resurrection (not just a “waking up”), the Shunammite woman’s son was dead as a doornail.

Still, the Shunnamite woman’s insistence means that Elisha is on the way. Remember, she said she wouldn’t leave him. He had to go, because she was not ready to let go of the dream. She wouldn’t give up what God had given her without a fight.

Langston Hughes wrote this about “Dreams,”

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes knew what it was like to have a dream that was necessary to life as a black man growing up in a segregated nation. But without the dream, life wasn’t much. It was like the barren field during the winter or like Narnia during the reign of the White Witch, full of untapped, forgotten possibilities.

It’s a reality that the Shunnamite woman understood: her son had been her dream-made-reality, and she was not going to give it up easily.

So Elisha arrives, goes in, and prays for the woman’s son. He laid out over him, interceding to God on the woman and her child’s behalf. I imagine him entreating, begging even, that God would show up as Elisha knew he could, to bring this boy back from the dead.

And the boy came back. His life returned. The woman’s dream was resurrected.

In his book, Me, Myself, & Bob, Phil Vischer lays out the way that Veggietales was his dream, one given to him by God. He talks about the way his desire to tell the stories of God in a way that children would receive and understand was coupled with his sense of humor and his drawing ability. He shows the company’s success… and he explains how the dream came crashing down.

Left without the dream, bankrupt and out of work, Vischer talks about going into his office, closing the door, and reading the Bible and praying all morning. He says that he didn’t know what else to do, and that nothing else seemed important. Stripped of a dream that he knew that God had given him, he didn’t know what else he should do with his life.

Slowly, over the next three years, he started to tell stories again, for God, not for the company. He realized a new dream, a resurrected version of the old one. He began to draw his characters again. He realized that doing for God had replaced being with God, and he rediscovered his focus to follow what God willed regardless of how it was received by others. He currently works on Veggietales and on a new venture, JellyTelly, sharing God’s stories with his audience.

But Vischer still says that the dream had to die first, so that he could recognize the emphasis was on the wrong syll-abus: he had put the dream ahead of the dream giver.

Both situations seem pretty harsh, don’t they? In both situations, someone had something given to them by God and then it was taken away. Both of them had to wrestle with the fallout. And both of them got their dreams back, one way or another. I’m aware that we don’t always receive the things we’ve dreamed of, and that sometimes they’re stripped away, and we don’t ever see them return.

Life doesn’t always work out the way we want it to…. but that doesn’t mean that God is absent from us, does it?

I sometimes marvel at people I know who don’t believe in God, and that they can even function when the dream dies. What are they leaning on? Are they really making it, or just faking it? Can they recognize that there’s a plan or do they just muddle through from one day to the next, hoping it’ll work itself out?

For me personally, I’ve seen dreams die. By twenty-nine, I had achieved the impossible, I had my dream job as the associate chaplain at my alma mater. By thirty, my time there was over, thanks to my ordination status and some other factors. But now, looking back, I recognize that my dream was too small. I never thought I could/would pastor a church; I never thought God would see fit to use me that way.

I still dream about working with college students. I still dream about planting a church from scratch. But I am recognizing that God is in the dream, that God is in the passions, the things we love and are called to do. And the truth is, God’s dream for our lives is bigger and better than we could ever imagine.

And I hold onto hope. Not the kind of hope that is unanchored and flailing in a sea of storms and unseen dangers, but the kind of hope that is forever planted in the love of God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I’m convinced that the same God who loved me enough to sacrifice his son on the cross for our sins cares too much about us to leave us abandoned and alone.

Does it hurt to see a dream die? Of course. But the beauty of resurrection, the power of God’s grace, those things are enough to bring me hope and faith and love.

“And love, sweet love, is the only thing there’s just too little of.”

This sermon is for September 15 at the 9 a.m. Stand worship service at Blandford United Methodist Church in Prince George, VA.

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FF Rant: Free Agents Of Change (Fantasy Football)

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Jacob Sahms

I’ll admit it: I want to pretend like another new television show matters this fall, but now that Agent Coulson is back in our lives on the small screen, Marvel’s Agents of Shield is leading my list of new television shows I have to watch. With friends who checked out Comic-Con, I’ve heard nothing but good things about these real world, powers-free heroes who save the world from situations that our genetically-mutated (and otherworldly) heroes can’t. These folks are substitutionary heroes who go uncharted, unwatched, and unregarded, but who, as the show highlights, are crucial to the success of the world.

And so begins my season-long, weekly post on free agents you should consider to gain a leg up (like Stephen Gostkowski’s last-minute kick to put the Pats over the EJ Manuel-led Bills) or rush for greatness (the Giants’ real-world free agency bidding is still too muddled to figure out). But in a year when Jimmy Graham is head-and-shoulders above everyone else (unless you believe Gronk is really coming back sooner rather than later), your TE slot is probably the one needing the most help.

D/ST: If you’re streaming defenses in a 10-team league, I’m looking at the Oakland Raiders, who get the Jacksonville Jaguars (you know, the team that scored 2 points…)

TE: Jared Cook, Julius Thomas, and Jordan Cameron are in the top-5 on standardized scoring this week. Cook and Cameron were hot preseason names and given the shallow gene pool of the TE crowd this year, someone has probably plucked them already. But after Peyton Manning’s otherworldly Thursday night game on national television as the only show in town, it’s doubtful anyone doesn’t know about Thomas. So, it’s not advice to go pick him up, it’s rather, how much are you willing to pay for him?

WR: This one comes down to Julian Edelman and Jerome Simpson. Simpson is supposed to lose receptions to Cordelle Patterson over the course of the season, but he clearly was the class of the receiving bunch that Christian Ponder had to throw to. But there’s the catch (pun intended): it’s Ponder throwing to him. For my buck, I’d rather pick up Edelman, who is in line for plenty of reps with Danny Amendola injured at his position, and all-purpose back Shane Vereen out several weeks with a broken wrist. Next to Thomas, I’d expect Edelman to be in the “most added” column today.

RB: Joique Bell. Who?? Reggie Bush was the big offensive pickup in Detroit in the offseason, but Bell only scored five less points. Bell capitalized on the goal line opportunities and caught five passes to bump up his fantasy total. There’s a significant drop-off, but Fred Jackson racked up some points unexpectedly, with sixty-seven yards rushing and four receptions. While Daryl Richardson had ninety-plus all purpose yards, I say the door is still open for currently-suspended Isaiah Pead of the St. Louis Rams to get some serious run when he comes back. Or you could track down Pierre Thomas because Mark Ingram still can’t get it done.

QB: A motley crew of passers from the waiver wire (Sam Bradford, Terrell Pryor, and Carson Palmer, Alex Smith, and Jay Cutler) outperformed a bunch of stock names that people may have overpaid for (Tom Brady, Russell Wilson, Cam Newton, and, so far, RGIII). If you’re already contemplating the waiver wire for a QB, then you probably ended up picking up one of those guys to begin with. None of those guys has a huge roadblock coming up (except for Bradford in a few weeks), but I wouldn’t bail yet. I’d rank this crowd this way, if you’re desperate: Bradford, Smith, Palmer, and Cutler. Real world records won’t matter much to this crowd.

Bounce-back Candidates From The “Obvious Name” Department: Chris Johnson vs. SD; Calvin Johnson vs. ARI; Stevan Ridley vs. NYJ

Trade Target: Marshawn Lynch. After Carolina and San Francisco (next week), the schedule gets a lot better…

Sell High: Peyton Manning. I don’t think it gets any better than Thursday night. We know from last year that he wears down over the course of the season, and I’m not sure anyone can play as listlessly as the Baltimore Ravens did on Thursday.

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