San Lorenzo Community Church United Church of Christ
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San Lorenzo Community Church United Church of Christ Sermon: God and Baseball Preached extemporaneously by Rev. Annette J. Cook “The New Kid” A Poem by Mike Makley published 1975 Our baseball team never did very much, we had me and PeeWee and Earl and Dutch. And the Oak Street Tigers always got beat until the new kid moved in on our street. The kid moved in with a mitt and a bat and an official New York Yankee hat. The new kid plays shortstop or second base and can outrun us all in any place. The kid never muffs a grounder or fly no matter how hard it's hit or how high. And the new kid always acts quite polite, never yelling or spitting or starting a fight. We were playing the league champs just last week; they were trying to break our winning streak. In the last inning the score was one-one, when the new kid swung and hit a home run. A few of the kids and their parents say they don't believe that the new kid should play. But she's good as me, Dutch, PeeWee or Earl, so we don't care that the new kid's a girl. Thanks be to God for poets among us. Page | 1 San Lorenzo Community Church United Church of Christ Sermon: God and Baseball Preached extemporaneously by Rev. Annette J. Cook Back in the day when Abner Doubleday invited the game of baseball, he must have gotten some of his ideas straight from the Bible: In Genesis, it says “In the big-inning, God created the heavens and earth.” And on the seventh day of creation, God stretched and rested. In chapter 3 of Genesis, we read that Eve stole first from the forbidden tree, Adam stole second and God ejected them from the game – I mean the garden. It goes on to tell us that Cain struck out Abel and later, well, much later, the Prodigal Son came home and Jesus saves the game. Yes, baseball has all the makings of God’s game. Grace and affliction. Miracles and doubt. Belief and joy and ecstacy, too. Inside the game of baseball are all of the elements of how we build and keep our faith, of how we experience God. Now, truth be told, baseball does not have the exclusive on this. In fact, you may experience God and build faith through music or art, in worship or fellowship, in nature and even hard work. They all hold the potential for spiritual growth and the essence of God. Ah, but in baseball. Yes, in baseball is where we find that time passes more slowly than in the real world. There is no clock to govern the games. Leave the watches at home. A baseball game can go on forever. There is some accommodation to television broadcasts – with an exact two minutes between innings – but each inning itself can go on forever. Of course they don’t actually go on forever and in that nutshell you realize that this is our life too. There is a promise of eternity and we are trained to be more fully aware of all that is happening in the moment. Onetime Yale president and former commissioner of the major leagues, A. Bartlett Giamatti, writes: “Baseball is about going home, and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need. It tells us how good home is. Its wisdom says you can go home again but that you cannot stay. The journey must always start once more, the bat is an oar over the shoulder, until there is an end to all journeying.” And so it was -- Yankee Stadium, Oct. 4, 1955. The Dodgers’ shortstop Pee Wee Reese tosses a low ball across the diamond, and first baseman Gil Hodges catches it. Game over. John Sexton tells the story: “In the basement of my family’s home, my friend Bobby ‘Dougie’ Douglass and I knelt and prayed with all the intensity we could muster, grasping between us in dynamic tension each end of a twelve-inch crucifix we had removed from the wall. We prayed before a radio instead of an altar, which broadcast the sounds of Game Seven of the 1955 World Series instead of hymns. For three innings, time had slowed; but in that moment it froze: The Brooklyn Dodgers had won the World Series! Seven decades of waiting were over! Dougie raised his arms in exultation, releasing the crucifix, whereupon the laws of physics drove the head of Christ into my mouth, chipping my front tooth. I wore that chipped tooth, unrepaired, as a visible memento for nearly fifty years.” “October 4, 1955, for me and millions of others, a sacred day. Why? Hard to put into words. Impossible to capture completely in our limited vocabulary. One catch by a first baseman Page | 2 San Lorenzo Community Church United Church of Christ Sermon: God and Baseball Preached extemporaneously by Rev. Annette J. Cook who throughout a season may catch hundreds and hundreds of tosses across the diamond, who in a career gloves thousands of outs—this catch is a manifestation of the holy, the sacred. Without it, the day might just have fallen into the realm of the profane, easy to capture with available words: Another Dodgers loss. Another season lost. Wait ’til next year. What makes it so indescribable and yet also palpable and real is the wonder and joy, the miracle at long last, of a Brooklyn win.” You see, there is more to existence than we can say. There is God who cannot be described. And there is baseball. It’s about what you see; it’s about how you experience the world around you and whether you see God in all of it. If you blink, you won’t see it. If you aren’t paying attention, you will miss it. I started my relationship with baseball when I was in seminary in Atlanta in the early 1980s. The Braves had finished the 1982 season as the National League West Division champions. They were on a roll. This was the era of pitcher Phil Niekro, outfielder Dale Murphy, and infielder extraordinaire Brett Butler. Several friends at school where going to the game, so I joined along. We stopped by the local Kentucky Fried Chicken, bought a bucket and some biscuits, and headed into the ballpark for our $4 bleacher seats. Prior to this, my only experience of baseball was listening to the Detroit Tigers on the radio with my Grandma Alice. Grandma Alice loved baseball and, though we never made it to a game in person, we listened to many games on her transistor radio together. My grandmother’s favorite player was Pee Wee Reese. I didn’t understand why because Pee Wee never played for the Tigers. She never quoted statistics or mention dazzling plays. But when asked the name of her favorite player, she would always say, Pee Wee Reese. This spring, Cheryl and I sat in a darkened theater and watched the movie “42,” the wrenching story of Jackie Robinson’s ordeal as he broke the race barrier in Major League Baseball. I started to understand my grandmother’s choice of players. In 1945 Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, took his courage, and his life, in his hands and decided to sign an African-American player. According to Rickey, his determination to break the color barrier in baseball stemmed from an incident in the early 1900’s, during his tenure as baseball coach for Ohio Wesleyan University. On a road trip, an innkeeper had denied a room to the team’s only black player, catcher Charley Thomas. Rickey talked the desk clerk into letting Thomas sleep on a cot in his room, but the injustice of the situation, and the black man’s reaction, came to haunt Rickey. He found Charley sitting in the room, weeping and tearing at the skin on his hands. “It’s my skin; it’s my skin, Mr. Rickey!” Four decades later, as he considered signing a black player, Rickey said, “For 41 years I have heard that young man crying. Now, I am going to do something about it.” That “something” was, of Page | 3 San Lorenzo Community Church United Church of Christ Sermon: God and Baseball Preached extemporaneously by Rev. Annette J. Cook course, Jackie Robinson. As Ricky says in the film: “He’s a Methodist. I’m a Methodist. And God’s a Methodist, we can’t go wrong.” Robinson’s mother could offer him little hope for the future in his formative years: “Jackie’s mother told him: you have to put your faith in God.” Rickey and Robinson would call often on their faith in the months to come. The savage abuse Robinson suffered in his first 1947 season with the Dodgers reached into hell itself when the Phillies came to Brooklyn for a three-game series. In the movie, Phillies coach Ben Chapman taunted Robinson without mercy, chanting a racial epitaph repeatedly each time he stepped up to bat. Robinson almost gave up on baseball that day. He walked off the field and into the tunnel, splintering his bat in rage against the brick walls. Rickey found him there, completely in anguish. Turn the other cheek, Rickey reminded him. Don’t fight back. “Have you ever been treated that way?” Robinson asks, glaring at Rickey. “No,” Rickey replied. “But you’re the one living the sermon. Forty days in the wilderness.” Robinson bridles, but Rickey was reminding Robinson that Christ himself “was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.” Tempted to give in to evil, tempted to give up.