A 1972 Dime with a Roosevelt Imperfection

I really enjoy a television show called Scrubs.  Maybe you’ve seen it.  If you haven’t, it’s a hospital show, but nothing like ER or Grey’s Anatomy or House.  The series chronicles the life and innermost thoughts of Dr. J.D. Dorian, a young doctor at Sacred Heart Hospital.  There is a unnamed janitor at the hospital who finds significant enjoyment in tormenting J.D. in all kinds of creative and not-so-creative ways.  In one episode, J.D. sees the janitor and his friend from food service waiting to thwart him in some new and ridiculous manner, so he acts quickly and distracts them with a riddle:

“What two coins, when put together, make thirty cents, and one of them is not a nickel?”

So the janitor and his low-IQed buddy spend the remainder of the episode slaving over the solving of this query.  After some research at the local library, they return to J.D. with an answer:  you can make thirty cents out of a penny and a 1972 dime with a Roosevelt imperfection, which today is worth twenty-nine cents.

Or, as J.D. points out, you can avoid searching through United States Mint files and simply make thirty cents out of a quarter and a nickel.  Remember, only ONE of the coins isn’t a nickel.  We never specified anything about the other coin.

Hmm . . . the janitor worked pretty hard to come up with an answer that is correct.  There’s no denying his logic.  Yet finding two coins that add up to thirty cents really isn’t the point, is it?  The point is recognizing and exposing the nuance in the riddle itself.  It could be so very simple, but somehow, the way our minds process things, it becomes so very difficult.

So when a well-known pastor writes a book that asks a few questions that challenge the way we typically process this existence we call life, he gets death threats.  And if not death threats, he gets told that he can’t ask those questions.  No, because to ask those questions is to undermine what we believe, and this would change far too much about how we live our lives, and that’s absolutely unacceptable.

This post, contrary to what it may appear, is not a defense of Rob Bell or Love Wins, though I’m happy to have that conversation in another setting.  This post is a critique of the state of the Church that has been exposed in obvious ways since even before the book hit the shelves.

See, we Christians are pretty quick to pull out our long-winded explanations for how and why everything is the way it is, and these spiels are often quite similar to the janitor pulling out a collector’s book and pointing out this particular dime’s current value.  It’s intelligent, sure, and it’s the kind of knowledge that will get someone his or her M.Div.  But is it the point?  And if it’s not, then what is the point?

When asked what motivates me to be an English teacher, I respond with a quote from literary critic Roland Barthes:  “Literature is the question minus the answer.”  Harriet Beecher Stowe could have released a pamphlet explaining academically why slavery is unjust, but she chose to let readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin make their own decisions.  Jane Austen could have written a convincing essay on the flaws of the Victorian class stratification in Britain, but she chose to tell several stories in which this struggle was explored.

It is astounding to think that most of the things that are supposedly a part (or not a part) of a Christian’s life or church organization are not discussed in the Bible at all.  They were decided somewhere along the way by church leaders who spent their lives searching for Truth.  Except, for some reason, church leaders can’t challenge the status quo anymore.  We can’t ask those questions, because our beliefs have already been established.  We can’t add to doctrine because doctrine is already complete.  Says who?  Not Christ, and isn't that who we're following?  The truth is the story is still being written.  The question hasn't yet been answered.

Because it’s not really about finding an enigmatic dime worth twenty-nine cents; it’s about knowing that, despite the fact that one coin isn’t a nickel, the second coin may be exactly that.