San Lorenzo Community Church United Church of Christ

Sermon: God and 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 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 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 the score was one-one, when the new kid swung and hit a home .

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.

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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 – 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 -- , Oct. 4, 1955. The Dodgers’ shortstop tosses a low ball across the diamond, and 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 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

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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 in the early 1980s. The Braves had finished the 1982 season as the West Division champions. They were on a roll. This was the era of pitcher , , and infielder extraordinaire . 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 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 ’s ordeal as he broke the race barrier in . I started to understand my grandmother’s choice of players.

In 1945 , general 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

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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.

“I’ll need a new bat,” Robinson says wearily. In a later Dodger and Phillies matchup in , however, Chapman resumed his taunts, expanding them to include other Dodger players, most memorably, Pee Wee Reese.

Reese responded by trotting over to Jackie and draping his arm around Robinson’s shoulders, all the while staring into the dugout at Chapman. “I want my friends and family to see who I am,” Reese says in the film.

My grandmother always held Pee Wee Reese as her favorite and now I understood why. This game of baseball is about more than hitting the ball.

Here in the bleacher seats in Atlanta, though, you had a whole different view of things. Of course it helped that I was part of six or eight men who all followed and played baseball as boys. I got to ask all of my pressing questions:

 Why does the catcher give signals that everyone else can see and read?

 How many times are they going to let that guy step off the mound before he actually pitches?

 And what’s up with those uniforms? They look ridiculous with the pant leg tucked into their socks!

Right about now they were regretting inviting me along. Still, I also started to appreciate the slower pace of the game, to see the finer moments. You have to watch carefully to see the “1st and 3rd

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San Lorenzo Community Church United Church of Christ

Sermon: God and Baseball Preached extemporaneously by Rev. Annette J. Cook

with 1 out” situation or when the move into no-doubles. You have to be mindful to focus on the catcher stepping out from home to give the short-stop a sign for double-play depth. The game sometimes would be boring if you fail to see the 1st and 3rd basemen shading the line to prevent a base- clearing double to the corner. It is easy to miss that the catcher and pitcher intentionally kept the ball low and away forcing the batter to hit a ground ball instead of a sac-fly. It takes all of the players working together with trust and skill to manufacture a 6-4-3 to end the inning. You have to have patience and eyes to see it.

But when you find that rhythm and that patience, baseball offers a chance to gaze upon the unpredictable horizon with hope. Hope that the ball will bounce your way or miss their bats. Hope that whatever unfolds . . . chance, skill and even inches will find symmetry and the impossible will flash like a stroke of brilliance. Hope that after hundreds of at-bats and thousands of pitches, your team will inch their way into the starry playoffs of October. Hope that when it comes down to one pitch, one play and one out, your instincts guess right, your muscle memory doesn’t fail and your team wins the game.

God wants us to choose to see the finer, albeit slower, moments of life and to notice the unpredictable horizon of hope. God wants us to anticipate how the spirit bounces and to learn how others swing and miss it. God wants us to take chances, to use our skill set and to pray that we find symmetry (even if it’s just for a moment) in order to help create moments for others to see the impossible flash like a stroke of brilliance. God wants us to carry this hope, so that after hundreds of days and thousands of prayers, our church will inch her way closer to grace . . . closer to God.

For when we buy in to this hope, we see how beautiful, how true and how good it is for people to unite their time, their effort and their energy around a shared spirituality that prepares them for all nine innings of life. We realize that no one person can do it alone; it takes a team (a church) moving with a shared vision and dream. God sees all of this in the game of baseball.

So play a game. Play in the street. Scuff a ball. Go for breakfast when your team loses. Long for home. And be rescued by baseball from one more bad day. It’s a generously long season. So live slow. Because it will all, all of it, go by so, so fast.

Amen.

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