Unusual Suspect: One Man’s Calling to Help a Team Embroiled in Controversy

What is the Christian life supposed to look like?

This is perhaps the most asked question in Christianity with answers that vary as much as New England weather. Some feel the Christian life should look, well, Christian. Moral people who help others and go to Bible College and are employed in full-time ministry. Others would say it is less about degrees and church membership and more about an attitude of forgiveness and benevolence toward others. Treat others like you want to be treated, right?

What if a great example of the Christian life took place within the walls of Gillette stadium? Yes, Gillette stadium. The home field of the New England Patriots who are not only current Super Bowl champions but entangled in a ball deflation controversy stemming from their footballs being under the league required air pressure range during the American Football Conference Championship game played on January 18. A game in which they won incidentally 45-7.

With a blowout win in hand and a trip to the Super Bowl on the horizon, surely no one would care about football air pressure? That might have been true if these same New England Patriots had not been caught illegally videotaping opponents defensive signals in 2007. A rule violation in which the league handed out its harshest penalty ever, fining owner Robert Kraft $250,000 and head coach Bill Belichick $500,000 and docking the team a first round draft pick.

It would seem that if this football deflation controversy proved to be true than the New England Patriots would be as synonymous with winning championships as they are with being habitual cheaters. An image and a brand that would be tough to swallow for management and its players.

Enter Jack Easterby – a lanky and balding former college basketball player and golfer with a thick Southern accent. Easterby was hired by the Patriots in July 2013 as the team’s chaplain.

According to Seth Wickersham, a writer for ESPN The Magazine who profiled Easterby just prior to the Super Bowl, Easterby’s first words to the team were, “Tonight, my goal is that you will never be the same.” Wickersham goes on to say that Easterby says that often in his devotionals, with the swagger of a hitter calling his shot. It's an invitation, and dozens of athletes and coaches – from Tom Brady to Brady Quinn, from Bill Belichick to South Carolina women's basketball coach Dawn Staley – have accepted it. They don't always buy into Easterby's gospel, but they buy into Easterby himself. His job is to be trustworthy, and it doesn't help him earn trust if he's out there talking about it, which is why he politely declined to speak to Wickersham for his story. "He's just a great person and friend," Brady says. "You feel a special connection with him and with his genuine caring for all the people in his life."

The typical team chaplain, Wickersham explains, is a pastor at a local church who volunteers to host Saturday chapel for 10 or so players who attend and is compensated with cash in a collection plate. In New England, Easterby has an office – and it's near Belichick's. He is a classic Belichick hire: The more he can do, the more he does. He hosts Bible study, works coaches' hours in his office counseling players and their wives, throws passes in practice to Darrelle Revis and sometimes even jumps in on scout-team drills. When he's not listening, he's texting. When he's not texting, he's writing players and coaches individual notes, recapping their personal goals and reminding them of how thankful he is to know them.

Like Belichick and Brady, says Wickersham, Easterby is obsessed with process – only his process is self-actualization. He challenges those he counsels to be better people the way coaches challenge them to be better players. He's written a devotion called the Competitor's Creed – I am a Competitor now and forever. I am made to strive, to strain, to stretch and to succeed in the arena of competition. ... My attitude on and off the field is above reproach, my conduct beyond criticism. Whether I am preparing, practicing or playing, I submit to God's authority and those He has put over me. I respect my coaches, officials, teammates and competitors out of respect for the Lord.

Many Patriot coaches and players credit Easterby and his presence as one of the reasons the team won the championship this season. High praise for a man teaching his listeners about the higher power found in Christ and his gospel message.

Often we think of the Christian life being spent on the mission fields of Africa or India not on the football field. But here is Easterby, at Gillette stadium, the home of the NFL's most notorious cheaters or so the narrative goes but make no mistake, if the Patriots are exonerated from this latest football deflation controversy, he will have helped them weather the storm. If not, he will embrace the chance to help them learn from it, underscoring that life and its ups and downs are temporal but eternal life is offered to anyone who comes to Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins. In short, Easterby will be ready to serve.

Grabbing Hold of God

Much of the contemporary church has lost its reverence for God. He is too often viewed as a sugar daddy, a sort of cosmic automatic teller machine. If we say the right words and punch in the right code, He is obligated to deliver what we want.

True prayer, according to pastor and acclaimed Bible expositor John MacArthur, often involves struggling and grappling with God, proving to Him the deepest concern of one’s heart. Prayer is to be a persistent, courageous struggle from which the believer may come away limping.

Virginia Stem Owens wrote the following about wrestling with God in earnest prayer. Her sentiments stand in marked contrast to the glib, self-centered prayers of our day:

Christians have always interpreted the splitting of the temple veil during the crucifixion as symbolic and the liberation from the mediated presence of God. Henceforth they were “free” to approach him directly which is almost like telling someone he is free to stick his head in the lion’s jaws for once you start praying there is no guarantee that you won’t find yourself before Pharaoh, shipwrecked on a desert island, or in a lion’s den.

 

This is no cosmic teddy bear we are cuddling up to. As one of the one children describes him in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, “he is not a tame lion.” Jacques Ellul is convinced that prayer for persons living in the technological age must be combat, and not just combat with the evil one, with one’s society, or even one’s divided self, though it is also all of these; it is combat with God. We too must struggle with him just as Jacob at Peniel where he earned his name Israel – “he who strives with God.” We too must prepare to say, “I will not let you go til you bless me.”

 

Consider Moses, again and again intervening between the Israelites and God’s wrath; Abraham praying for Sodom; the widow demanding justice of the unjust judge. But in this combat with God, Ellul cautions, we must be ready to bear the consequences … “Jacob’s thigh was pulled out of joint, and he went away lame. However, the most unusual experience will be God’s decision to put to work the person who cried to him …whoever wrestles with God in prayer puts his whole life at stake.”

 

Awful things happen to people who pray. Their plans are frequently disrupted. They end up in strange places. Abraham “went out, not knowing where he was to go” ... After Mary’s magnificent prayer at the annunciation, she finds herself the pariah of Nazareth society.

 

How tempting to up the stakes, making prayer merely another consumer product. How embarrassing to have to admit not only that prayer may get you into a prison, as it did Jeremiah, but also that while you’re moldering away in a miry pit there, you may have a long list of lamentations and unanswered questions to present to your Lord. How are we going to tell them they may end up lame and vagrant if they grasp hold of this God?

(“Prayer – Into the Lion’s Jaws,” Christianity Today, November 19, 1976. pp. 222-223, italics in the original)

 

What Would Jesus Post?

Evangelicalism today appeals to people on the basis of what they want. The contemporary church for decades has been more interested in meeting the needs of its members than urging them to follow the commands of Christ.

Neil Postman, a Jewish humanist from the 1980’s wrote a book entitled, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” He felt back then that there was a tragic loss of serious thinking in Western civilization which he attributed to television. He could not have possibly imagined the big screen going to a small screen – from being a group experience and public experience to being an intimate, personal, private experience. 

The iPhone and other small screen devices enable every person to become a creator of his own private world. “It is a secret world,” explains pastor and acclaimed Bible expositor John MacArthur. “It is a secret world of preferences. It is a secret world of temptations. It is a secret world of relationships. It is a secret world that has a force and ubiquity that is unparalleled in human history. Unparalleled.”

The small screen is the most selfish necessity ever devised. Once, you had a phone to talk to someone. No more. Technology has put in the hand, and soon, on the ears and the nose, of everyone, the most constant, incessant, accessible, visual, private world of self-centered indulgence, temptation, and entertainment ever conceived.

“You choose everything,” MacArthur continues. “Choose your entertainment, and no one knows. You choose your music. You choose your relationships. You become God in your little world. And on your little screen, you create the world that you want. You are the creator of your own private universe.  And outside your own private cyberspace, and your Facebook friends, is the outer darkness of whatever and whomever you reject.”

Theologian Carl Trueman writes, “The language of friendship is hijacked and cheapened by the internet social networks. I don’t know what friendship is anymore.  The language of Facebook both reflects and encourages childishness. Childishness, he writes, “has become something of a textually transmitted disease.” 

A very astute comment by Trueman as the number one characteristic of a child is complete self-centeredness. He goes on to say that relationships play out in the disembodied world of the web. The latest statistics indicate that on average high school students look at a small screen nine hours a day. Nine hours. Trueman further writes, “Such are human amoebas, subsisting in a bizarre non-world that involves no risk to themselves, no giving of themselves to others, no true vulnerability, no commitment, no sacrifice, no real meaning, and no value.” 

Real fellowship cannot exist in a world of self-created avatars. It requires real persons.  Christianity is not an individual or private experience. We were not meant to live by ourselves in a world of isolation where we control everything without anyone else’s knowledge. That’s a recipe for disaster.

“The current trend is for people to create their own virtual world of virtual self,” observes MacArthur. “They recreate themselves as wonderfully as they would like themselves to be, and then project themselves that way. You can upload your self-creation into the Eden of the internet, the perfect you. Beautiful, indomitable, intelligent, wise, cool, self-actualized like some technological form of science. You can create a digitized self-projection of your idyllic design. I tweet, therefore I am.”

The culture of this is becoming more isolated, more narcissistic, more self-absorbed, more individualistic, more morally relative, more entitled. Deadly.

This might be tolerable and maybe understood if it stayed outside the church, but it doesn’t. According to MacArthur, the evangelical church has been trying to give the culture what it wants. And what is it that people want? “They want privacy,” he says, “They want convenience. They want low commitment. They want anonymity. They want unaccountability. And mostly, they want self-promotion and self-actualization. Church life is falling victim to this seductive self-design. People say, oh, it’s so hard to find a church. Well, of course. You have created the first church of my personal iTunes.  You’ve created your own music. You have your own playlist. You’ve created your own messengers. You know who you want to hear. You’ve created your own friends. You don’t feel comfortable at a church because you might run into an enemy.” 

And at the same time, there’s pressure from church growth experts saying, “What are you doing with social media? What are you doing with technology to help people know your church?” Of course the church has to embrace technology and social media on one level and use the tools for good – to connect and inform. But, as with everything, they can also be a source of isolation, disconnection, and ultimately temptation if not properly handled and monitored.

As a church body, we have to keep fellowship at the forefront. True, personal fellowship is the foundation of the church as underscored in the Book of Acts which details the early church and its ability to sustain its existence largely because of the strength of its fellowship. Everything about Christianity fights against privacy, and yet, we live in a world where privacy dominates. If we are not actively fighting against it than we are being pulled into it.

As ambassadors of Jesus Christ, it is our mandate to share his gospel – the forgiveness of sins at the cross of Calvary. It is a personal relationship that Christ beckons and then bids us to share with others. Fellowship at its essence.

Healing through Christ’s Sufferings

“God lets Himself be pushed out of world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which He is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of His omnipotence, but by virtue of His weakness and suffering … Only the suffering God can help … That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Christianity is full of paradoxes but perhaps none bigger than a crucified Christ offering liberty from the power of the present time, from the laws and compulsion of history, and from sin. Only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom which changes the world because the fear of death is defeated. 

In his landmark work, The Crucified God, Jurgen Moltmann asserts, “We have made the bitterness of the Cross tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a theological necessity for the process of salvation.” Of course, theological necessities do not sweat blood in the night. Yet the Son of God did.

“The passion of Jesus did not take place on a cold, intellectual, starlit plain,” declares Brennan Manning in his book The Signature of Jesus, “It occurred in the deepest expression of emotion, amid dirt and sweat, blood and tears. Christ’s passionate outpouring of love on the cross is not only the source of our salvation; it is the source of God’s power and wisdom in our daily lives.”

There is no mention in the gospel of Christ’s sufferings coming from nature or fate or from the economic hardships of being a carpenter’s son. "Rather, His [Jesus] sufferings and humiliation came from His actions," underscores Moltmann. "From His preaching of the imminence of the kingdom as a kingdom of unconditional grace, from His freedom towards the law, and from His table-fellowship with ‘sinners and tax-collectors.’ Jesus did not suffer passively from the world in which He lived, but incited it against Himself by His message and the life He lived. According to the gospels, Jesus Himself set out for Jerusalem and actively took the expected suffering upon Himself. The more the mysticism of the cross recognizes this, the less it can accept Jesus as an example of patience and submission to fate. The more it recognizes His active suffering, the less it can make Him the archetype of its own weakness. If men and women in misery understand Him as their brother in their sufferings, they in turn do not become imitators of His suffering until they accept His mission and actively follow Him.”

The cross of Christ is not some relic that we wear around our necks. In the first century, the crucified Christ was regarded as a scandal and as foolishness. As the Apostle Paul confirms in I Corinthians 1:18, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Today the church must turn to the crucified Christ in order to show the world the freedom He offers. Everything else is ornamental. Christ crucified is the very fingerprint of our faith.

Following Him means living dangerously and without compromise; it means living outside of our comfort zone and preconceived notions; it means reaching out to the outcast as well as the religious fanatic; quite simply it is having His signature written on the pages of our lives.

Living with Thanksgiving

"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice." ~ Meister Eckhart
 

Once again the holiday season is upon us. The stores are filled with Christmas decorations, children are wondering what they will find under the tree, and Mom and Dad are wondering how they will pay for it. These days Thanksgiving is basically a pre-season holiday, something you do to get in shape for Christmas. We eat, we sleep, we watch football, and we don’t stop until January.

That’s a shame because the art of giving thanks is one thing that separates man from the animals. To receive a gift and say, “Thank you,” is one of the noblest things a man can do. There is nothing small or trivial about it.

To say “Thank you” is to acknowledge that we have been given something we did not earn and do not deserve. Happy is the man who understands that all of life is a gift of God and that life itself is the ultimate gift. Which is why the Bible says, “In everything give thanks” (I Thessalonians 5:18). When we can’t do anything else, we can always be grateful. As someone has said, “If you can’t be thankful for what you have received, be thankful for what you have escaped.”

As Americans, our hearts should continually overflow with thanksgiving. Author and Bible teacher Beth Moore, in her DVD study series on the Book of Daniel, acutely captured what it means to be "rich" when she contrasted resources and education in America with the rest of the world. She said that if a person has the resources to buy a book and the education to read it then that person is rich compared to 80 percent of the world who live in extreme poverty with no access to books or the ability to read them. That is a staggering thought as I own hundreds of books and have read thousands since I first learned how to read in first grade.

But as Christians, our thanksgiving should never cease because of the One who gave everything for us. We understand that happiness does not "consist in the substance of things possessed" ... but by "every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."

And this really is the key to sustained happiness and thanksgiving - a relationship with the Living God. While we need to be thankful for the material things we possess and our family our friends - true thanksgiving flows from a heart knitted together with the God of the universe.

The Apostle Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that "while we yet sinners, Christ died for us" and that "whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." This is the greatest love story ever told - the God of the heavens becoming a man, suffering and dying on the cross of Calvary to pay for men's sins and then rising on the third day. For those that put their faith in Him and His sacrifice for sin, He promises that they too will rise one day from the grave as He did.

When one begins a relationship with Jesus Christ, God takes out his stony heart and replaces it with a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26 ). The happiness that results from this miracle of God does not fade when life takes a sharp turn and leaves us homeless, jobless, or parentless. No, this joy is rooted in a God who promises His followers "a future and a hope." A God who tenderly whispers that "He will never leave us or forsake us." And a God that comforts us with the reality that "all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose." 

This Thanksgiving season, let's do what the psalmist says in Psalm 100 and "enter into His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise." There is much to be thankful for and a God who awaits our presence.

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"Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed.  Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude." ~ D. Waitley