Dan Albrecht and his coffee…
“I never see you without your cup,” another someone recently pointed out. “I worry about your caffeine intake.” Worry not. After the first cup in the morning, it’s decaf from that point on—or it’s decaf from the very beginning. I like coffee, but I’m not too crazy about caffeine. It makes me twitch.
That said, my tolerance for caffeine is lower than average, which means one cup of Dan’s stuff at 8 p.m. means I’m still conscious at 3:40 a.m. I’ve been trying to flush it out of my system with herbal tea (decaf, of course), and still no success. But it’s my own bloody fault for accepting the coffee.
I don’t remember how it was exactly presented but it was something along the lines of this. Some students were discussing an ethical dilemma from their class. I don’t know which class; I’m presuming it’s the kind filled with fools. That is, a class in which such ethical dilemmas are discussed so that you kinda know where you fall in case these things come up in real life. Trouble is, a lot of students are young and idealistic, and their ideals tend to come before the people in such scenarios.
The situation is this: There’s a church split. The smaller group wants some money from the larger group over something that sounded petty. I don’t remember what it was; maybe they paid for new hymnals; it’s not relevant. What do you do?
What came immediately to my mind was my Rabbi’s teaching, “Don’t resist evildoers. If anyone wants to sue the shirt off your back, throw in your jacket. If a press-gang forces you to carry a load for a mile, go two.” [Mt 5.38-42] So my response was, “Give them the money and wish them Godspeed.”
The students’ reply was that this was a legal issue, not a theological one. Or so it was determined in the class.
My reply was that if a pastor is separating matters into legal and theological categories, and following Jesus depended upon the category, then there’s something wrong with that pastor’s Christianity.
One of the guys began to defend himself—a little too vigorously, so maybe he identified with that hypothetical pastor too much, or he had come up with the conclusion. I had better things to do than argue with a closed-minded idiot, so I let him have the last word. Unfortunately, he’s the kind of fool who believes that if he got the last word, that means he won. I don’t want him to feel he won; I want my comments and questions to bug him in the middle of the night. It’s more fun that way.
Jesus’s teaching is meant to build relationships for the sake of the kingdom, and these yutzes want to get legal—probably the fastest way to destroy relationships. What the hairy burrito are they teaching in these classes?
…Well, probably not that. Being an optimist, I would presume that the professor is enough of a Christian to know better. More than likely, the “get legal” idea is the product of immature students. I hope this is the case. Otherwise we’re not producing Christians at this school; we’re just producing more Americans.