The Cheap Seats

I recently was in Wisconsin on business, arriving in Milwaukee mid-afternoon, The Brewers were in town and the colleague I was traveling with had not been to Miller Park there, so we decided to see the game that night. Neither he nor I are big Brewers fans but it was a perfect evening for baseball and so we decided that would be a fun way to have dinner, grazing at the ballpark instead of going to a restaurant. Also, we are both engineers and find the stadium with it's retractable roof interesting enough all by itself.

Arriving early at the stadium,  I asked at the ticket window what the cheapest seats might be. The agent started with the $30 seats but we quickly got down to the $15 level. I was still hesitating, as was my colleague. We were clearly out-of-towners so I don't know that he wanted to offer it up, but he finally allowed that there were a few other tickets available: the Bob Uecker Obstructed View seats. Those were priced at one dollar. These are limited in number in just one section of the park and only available at the door, they cannot be reserved in advance.

One dollar! Now that was more like what we had in mind! The name alone made me want them! Bob Uecker is something of a tradition in Milwaukee as he has done the radio play-by-play for the Brewers for many years and also played there briefly in his brief major league career. These seats are reminiscent of his seat up in the 'nose bleed' section in one beer commercial he did a number of years ago as they are in the top section of the stadium underneath the mechanism that opens and closes the roof. There are 2 large steel beams that hold up that mechanism, so this is the only small area of the stadium where a few seats have an obstructed view. They are right behind home plate, so they still are not such bad seats.

But since we were early we decided to sit down in the Terrace level during batting practice and we could leave if folks showed up with tickets for those seats. No one showed up, so we got some good seats for a dollar! Unfortunately, right behind us some folks showed up in about the second inning who were obnoxious, and one woman in particular was a combination of loud-mouthed, rude, and somewhat obscene all in one. Since she was at least 50 years old, I expected at least slightly more maturity. No such luck.

Since we had gone to game on a lark, and had finished grazing on brats and nachos, after 5 innings we had our fill of obnoxious ballpark fans. We had a 2 hour drive still ahead of us, too, so we left. I was reminded, though, of many things I have come to dislike about professional sports. In this case we avoided the ridiculous cost of tickets nowadays for a ballgame, but were unable to avoid the seemingly ever-present obnoxious drunken fans. When that is added onto the steroid-inflated players and the greed of both the players and owners I find myself less and less interested in professional sports as time goes on.  I enjoyed looking around this interestingly constructed stadium, the perfect summer evening weather that night, and even the junk food. But overall my feeling that the game has lost its way was reconfirmed.  So I will continue to be one who only very rarely visits a ballpark, even in the cheap seats.

Reflections on Cheap Grace

Reading the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has given me a bit more insight into his comments about 'cheap grace' in his book The Cost of Discipleship that I did not appreciate just from reading about it in The Cost of Discipleship.

The first insight has to do with his Lutheran upbringing in Germany. Eric Metaxas, the author of Bonhoeffer:Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy comments on this several times, such as this: 'After four hundred years of taking for granted that all Germans were Lutheran Christians, no one really knew what Christianity was anymore' in Germany (page174 in the paperback edition).  Again in the opening of chapter 14, 'He (Bonhoeffer) had begun to see  that the overemphasis on the cerebral and intellectual side of theological training had produced pastors who didn't know how to live as Christians.' Again on page 249, 'But how could one hear the voice of God, much less obey, when prayer and meditating on the Scriptures were not even being taught in German seminaries? Neither were worship and singing taught.'  It is entirely possible that Bonhoeffer himself may not have been a born-again believer until after he had finished his doctorate, had served in churches, and then came to America for a time. In a letter Bonhoeffer wrote in 1936 he wrote this, '..something happened that changed and transformed my life to the present day. For the first time I discovered the Bible...I had often preached about it--but I had not yet become a Christian...Also I had never prayed or prayed only very little. For all my loneliness, I was quite pleased with myself. The Bible, and in particular the Sermon on the Mount, freed me from that.'  While he never became quite comfortable with the personalized faith of the German pietists, he clearly came to see that the 'Christianity' of much of the German church was not Christianity at all but rather a mere intellectual interest for some and even less than that for most. To call this 'Christianity' was cheap indeed.

Yet there was more than that, too.  There was also the way certain well-meaning evangelicals tried to convert Hitler by first appeasing him. One August Buchman,  a New York evangelical pastor and leader of the Oxford Movement  was a case in point. Buchman had tried to evangelize both Himmler and Hitler. Hitler, of course, claimed that it was God's Providence that was making him able to carry out his murder of the Jews, and in public often said things like his declaration in 1933 that he would make Christianity 'the basis of our collective morality' even as he was beginning to persecute the Jews and anyone supporting them. Yet Buchman would later state, 'I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism.' The ease by which Buchman was taken in by Hitler's pseudo-Christian propaganda was repulsive to those like Bonhoeffer who knew what was going on inside Germany. It cheapened the gospel enormously when it was offered up to Hitler as if it required no change, no repentance, no confrontation of the hatred that Hitler embodied.

When I first read The Cost of Discipleship I read it as an American for whom there had never been a state church in a nation that had never endured a Hitler. The free offer of salvation through grace by faith did not seem cheap to me. I did agree, though, that many who claimed to have 'accepted Christ' seemed to never have been changed by it, and that kind of grace did appear 'cheap' to me, and so I thought that was Bonhoeffer's main message. I think his message did include that, but the context of Nazi Germany also shows that it also was more than that. He objected to those who make God into a beggar to the likes of Hitler; those who grovel while putting pearls before swine and thereby make cheap that which in fact deserves the utmost respect. Hitler sought to use Christianity when it served his purpose even while killing those like Bonhoeffer who were truly Christian. To fail to recognize evil when it is before us and to make the gospel grovel before evil worldly power is to cheapen that which is beyond price. Bonhoeffer's opposition to Hitler and death as a result of that opposition embodied that view of a grace which is by no means cheap.