Meanderings, 9 August 2025

Hello friends! We’re glad you have joined us for this installment of Weekly Meanderings, which are well over twenty years old these days. Yikes, that’s lots of links.

Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash

How ‘bout that!?!

NEW YORK (AP) — Jen Pawol is set to become the first woman to umpire in Major League Baseball when she works games this weekend between the Miami Marlins and Atlanta Braves.

Pawol will work the bases in Saturday’s doubleheader at Truist Park and the plate on Sunday, MLB told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

“This historic accomplishment in baseball is a reflection of Jen’s hard work, dedication and love of the game,” baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “She has earned this opportunity, and we are proud of the strong example she has set, particularly for all the women and young girls who aspire to roles on the field.”

Pawol, a 48-year-old from New Jersey, worked spring training games in 2024 and this year. She will become the fifth umpire to debut this year.

“Baseball’s done a great job of being completely inclusive,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I’ll be watching. It’s good for the game.”

Speaking of baseball, this story about the Guardians’ Nic Enright is wonderful:

NEW YORK -- The first career save for Nic Enright was a particularly meaningful one.

Enright, who was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in late 2022 and is scheduled to complete his treatments later this year, allowed an unearned run in the 10th inning Monday night to close out the Cleveland Guardians' 7-6 win over the New York Mets.

"He was almost crying on the field just now," Guardians manager Stephen Vogt said. "If you read his story, it's pretty inspirational."

Cleveland selected Enright in the 20th round of the 2019 amateur draft out of Virginia Tech. He received his diagnosis Dec. 22, 2022 -- 15 days after the Miami Marlins took him in the Rule 5 draft.

After four rounds of immunotherapy in early 2023, Enright made nine minor league rehab appearances for the Marlins before being designated for assignment and returning to the Guardians in late May.

He missed most of last season due to a right shoulder strain but went 2-1 with a 1.06 ERA in 16 appearances with Triple-A Columbus.

The right-hander has one more round of cancer treatment scheduled for November.

"I made the decision when I was diagnosed in 2022 with Hodgkin lymphoma that I wasn't going to let that define my life and dictate how I was going to go about my life," Enright said. "It's something where, for anyone else who is going through anything similar, [it shows] I haven't just holed up in my house and felt sorry for myself this whole time."

How long did music lessons last for you? (My piano lessons got me through a book or two and then, when Mrs. Wheat asked me to raise my hands and wait for the perfect moment to crash into those keys again, I told my mom “I’m done.” And done I was.) I did play the “mellophone,” a kind of right-handed French horn, until junior high when sports team (very happily) knocked me out of the mellophone.

If music is so much fun, why are music lessons so painful?

I’ve often pointed out that only three careers turn work into play. Even our choice of words reveals that. An athlete plays a sport. An actor plays a role. And a musician plays an instrument.

Everybody else goes to work.

Anyone who has the privilege to pursue one of those three careers is truly blessed. You can complain as much as you want, but the rest of us see that your job is just play.

The reason most people abandon music lessons isn’t cost or time—they just don’t want to keep doing it. It doesn’t feel like play to them.

The shift from elementary school to high school is the typical time when youngsters abandon music.

This is puzzling for many reasons. For example, I found that I only started gaining social esteem and other benefits from my music-making around the time I turned sixteen. And that’s when most teens stop learning music.

I hadn’t expected that all those hours at the piano would give me a popularity boost—that wasn’t why I studied music. And it surprised me when I started experiencing it, but I certainly didn’t complain. Maybe playing the piano wasn’t quite as cool as being captain of the football team, but it turned out to be pretty cool nonetheless, especially if you knew how to play some of the hit songs on the radio.

The funny thing is that I’d experienced piano lesson burnout—but that happened back when I was nine years old. I hated my piano lessons, and asked my parents if I could stop taking them. They agreed, and so my musical education came to a grinding halt after 4^th grade.

But here’s the interesting thing. I continued to play the piano after I stopped taking lessons—but now I did it for fun.

I made up my own songs. I learned other songs I liked by ear. I actually played the instrument more after those awful lessons had been terminated.

Ian Paul suggests we stop using the word “church” … well, it’s impossible he admits.

For all these reasons, as we read the New Testament, we cannot talk about ‘the church’ as though this was some new entity created by God as a result of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Yes, the people of God look rather different now than they looked in the Old Testament. But they also look remarkably similar!

And it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the contrast between ‘the church’ and ‘Israel’, since the scriptures use the same terminology for both.

So what language should we use? There are two questions being asked here, one in relation to the NT, and the other in relation to contemporary practice.

In relation to the NT, I adopted using the word ‘assembly’ to translate ekklesia in Revelation 7, following the example of Craig Koester in his Anchor Bible commentary. Using the word ‘church’ leads to the problems we can see in the picture at the top of this article, drawn from the Anjou Apocalypse tapestries. Elsewhere in the NT, where the reference is to a local gathering, or the Christians all in one place, I think congregation would do. Where it refers to the whole people of God, as in Ephesians, there is more of a challenge; I don’t think we normally consider the whole people of God in every place together as a ‘congregation’—but perhaps we should! I don’t think ‘church’ is any better.

In relation to contemporary life, it is impossible to avoid the term, and perhaps we should continue to use it for the ‘Church of England’. But we need to be clear that we should not use the same term for buildings and for people; so I would normally try and make that explicit. If you are going to use the word church for local things, use it to refer to the people, and describe the building in other terms.

[SMcK: As I read him, if we use “church” for the people, then we’ve used a word for buildings for the people and have to invent another word for the building.]

John Fea and the Johnson Amendment:

What is the Johnson Amendment?

Back in 1954, Texas senator Lyndon Johnson introduced an amendment to article 501(c)(3) of the tax code prohibiting charitable organizations from intervening in “any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.” (The words “or in opposition to” were added to the amendment in 1987).

Johnson likely proposed this amendment as a form of political revenge against tax-exempt organizations that supported Dudley T. Dougherty, the conservative Texas Democrat who mounted a challenge to his 1954 re-election bid. Dougherty had the support of Facts Forum, an ultraconservative non-profit organization funded by Texas oil magnate H.L. Hunt. Facts Forum ran a Joseph McCarthy-style anti-communist “public service” radio and television ads in Texas and throughout the country. Though Facts Forum did not attack Johnson specifically, the senator expected the organization to back Dougherty in the Democratic primary.

Ever the shrewd politician, Johnson managed to slip an amendment into a massive rewrite of the U.S. tax code that prevented non-profits like Facts Forum from engaging in political activism. The Johnson Amendment passed with little fanfare. The Senate did not debate it. And beecause religious organizations were not specifically mentioned in the amendment, evangelicals did not throw up any roadblocks to its passing……

But the attempts to repeal the Johnson Amendment exposed something deeper: a serious flaw in the way that many conservative evangelicals think about the relationship between church and state.

Those who do want to endorse candidates from the pulpit, and have turned the Johnson Amendment into a political issue, seem more concerned about freedom of speech than they are about the way this kind of political partisanship undermines their gospel witness. There is an old Baptist saying about religion and politics that goes something like this: “If you mix horse manure and ice cream, it doesn’t do much to the manure, but it sure does ruin the ice cream.” (I remember this phrase as a staple of Tony Campolo sermons. I have used it as well.)

When the government starts telling evangelical pastors what they can and cannot preach in terms of theology, biblical interpretation, or ethics (even sexual ethics), we have a problem. But the Johnson Amendment is not this kind of problem. Evangelicals should be thankful for the Johnson Amendment: it is a useful reminder from an unlikely source about the spiritual dangers that arise when sanctuaries are used as campaign offices. Even the most cursory look at the last decade reveals how politics has deeply divided local congregations. Back in 2020, I conducted a Google Forms survey about the state of American evangelicalism. (One of these days I will get the time to organize the results and post them.) Over 1,100 people responded to this question: “Over the past five years (2015-2020), have you experienced divisions or divisiveness in your congregation as a result of political differences? 63.4% of responders said “yes.”

Now the IRS says that candidates can endorse politicians from the pulpit. The federal government, of course, allows people to do a lot of things. We live in a free society. But that doesn’t mean everything the government allows us to do is a good, or even Christian, idea.