Today’s Scripture Reading (October
14, 2015): Numbers 33
Last week
the Seattle Seahawks and Detroit Lions played American football in the Monday
Night Game and there was an odd play at the end of the game that was actually called
wrong. I admit that I missed it - and if I was playing the game I would have
done exactly what the Seahawk’s player did. A ball was fumbled on the playing
field and then bounced into the endzone and was heading out of bounds. If this
had been done anywhere else on the field, then a fumbled ball that is heading
out of bounds would be the possession of the team that touched it last.
Football strategy in such a case is to just make sure that you touch the ball
last, or often that you hit the ball out of bounds. But apparently in the
endzone, for a reason that no one has been able to explain to me, the rule
changes. You can’t hit the ball out of bounds. In this case the ball is given
to the team who did not hit it out at the point where it was fumbled. In last
week’s game, Detroit fumbled the ball at the half yard line and Seattle hit the
ball out of bounds. According to the rules the ball should have been given to
Detroit at the half yard line. But no one seemed to understand the rule, so the
play was adjudicated as if the ball had been batted out of bounds in the field
of play – Seattle ball on the twenty. (It seems likely that the rule was made
to prohibit a team from fumbling the ball into the endzone and then trying to
score by hitting the ball out of bounds, but there is a different rule that
actually covers that situation - a ball may not be advanced by a fumble. In
that case, if Detroit have been the last to touch the ball, the ball would have
been given to Detroit Bat the point of the fumble and no score would have been
recorded.)
As far as I
am concerned, the rule is stupid. I don’t understand why the same action is
legal at one place on the field and illegal at another place. Our lives are
built around the idea of consistency and what some would call “the Law of
Repeated Events.” My favorite definition of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over again and expecting a different result. The quote has been attributed
to Albert Einstein, although it is not likely that he actually said it (at
least we can’t find it in any of his writings.) As one person observed, it is
not surprising that it has been attributed to Einstein, since it seems
everything but the book of Genesis has been attributed to him at some point.
The quote has also been attributed to Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain, but
they are even more unlikely authors of the quote than Einstein. But the
statement is true. The same action should provide the same result. If you want
a different result, then you must do a different action. It seems fairly simple
– but in American Football, apparently it is not.
God
instructs Moses to record the stages of their journey. And there is a grand
purpose to the recording. Israel is about to step out into yet another stage in
their journey. There is no doubt that this next stage is going to be a
dangerous one. There will be times when Israel may want to give up and go back
into the desert. So God wanted to give them a list of where they had been. Let them
remember the stories of the journey together. Help them to understand that they
had met the dangers that were in front of them in the past, and that they will
do so again in the future. Why would Israel do things in the future the same as
they did in the past and suddenly expect a different result? God would be with
them in the next step the same way that he was with them in all of the previous
steps. Apparently unlike American Football, the rules have not changed simply
because we have entered a different area of the field. God is still God, and
God would still be with them.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Numbers
34
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