On Ballparks and Pencils
(“Take Me Out to the Ballgame!”)
If I sin, you mark me,
and will not acquit me of my iniquity.
(Job 10:14, NKJV)
If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
(Psalm 130:3)
A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the 19th Sunday after Pentecost, October 15, 2006
(Volume 1 Number 17)
First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6th Street, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653
(Visit our website at www.fumcmh.org for more
sermons/devotionals and information about FUMC Mountain Home)
October is a great month for football, whether the Friday Night Lights of Bomber Football, the Saturday thrill of college football, or the Sunday afternoons of the NFL. Football owns a very big spotlight in October. However, I want to quiet for a moment the roar of the gridiron to direct your attention to the first “Boys of October,” baseball’s Major Leaguers. Let’s take a break from touchdowns, field goals, and penalties, to talk instead about runs, hits, and errors.
October is playoff time and, oh my goodness, my Detroit Tigers are hot! Back in the Spring Training, every team wanted to still be hearing the umpire say “Play Ball” midst the changing autumn leaves of October. In 2006 that honor will go to my Tigers, as last night they concluded a sweep of the Oakland A’s and are going to the World Series. The last time the Tigers made it to the play-offs was 19 years ago, in 1987. At that time I was living in Ann Arbor and making some dozen games each summer at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. I was there, with four box seat tickets to the final game of the season, when the Tigers clinched the American League East by edging out Toronto on Frank Tanana’s shut-out, 1-0.
Ah, those were the days. But the Tigers have been dismal since, setting records for losing games in a single season (119 three years ago), the losing-est team in baseball over the past dozen years. Not much to cheer about. Hey, don’t look now, but these Tigers are on the prowl, waiting to see whether they face the Mets or the Cardinals this Saturday night in their first trip to the World Series since 1984. Why, it has me ready to sing, Take me out to the Ballgame!
Baseball talk likely has many of you re-living your past. Nostalgia, I think, goes hand in hand with baseball. As Terrence Mann (played by James Earl Jones) says to Ray Costello (played by Kevin Costner) in Field of Dreams, as Ray contemplates building a baseball diamond in his Iowa cornfield: “People will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past . . . And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh, people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”
Occasionally I dip myself in the magic waters of my youth, our summer vacations to Houston and St. Louis to follow the Astros and the Cardinals. I yet remember the time when, as a boy, I saw Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch on back to back nights at the Astrodome. When I remember those times, I think of long rides with three squirming boys in the back seat of dad’s Oldsmobile, and I think of hotels and swimming, and especially, at the ballpark, I think of hot dogs and Coca-cola and, as the song says, “peanuts and Crackerjack.”
Oh, and pencils.
Now, to be sure, the younger ones among us may wonder at that. Pencils? It’s true. Was a time when pencils were a hot item at major league ballparks. Those days, many fans wouldn’t dream of attending a game without keeping a written record of every hit, walk, out, error, wild pitch, stolen base, and run scored. It’s a venerable tradition dating back 150 years, but scorekeeping by fans has become little more than a quaint relic of baseball’s rich history.
Still today when I’m home in Pine Bluff I will occasionally sift through dad’s programs of baseball games. Dad would never have thought about attending a game without keeping score, and that’s how I learned as a kid, growing up to spend my college summers as an umpire and scorekeeper for Babe Ruth and American Legion baseball.
My friend John Benton Meador showed me a program from when he was a boy, from Chicago’s Wrigley Field in 1949. The pricing section reads like a museum relic. The most expensive admission price was $2 for a box seat. Sixty cents would get you a bleacher seat. Why, even in the 80’s I would go to Tiger Stadium and be a bleacher creature (though unlike most of the men, I kept my shirt on) for $5. Official programs in 1949 were ten cents. Candy bars and chewing gum a nickel. Hot dogs were fifteen cents and Borden’s ice cream one thin dime. And then I saw it. Right there on the program. You could buy a pencil at the ballpark for five cents.
I doubt many pencils are sold at today’s ballparks. Today’s baseball is designed for fans with short attention spans, entertaining you with Jumbotron scoreboards the size of Rhode Island. I guess you could say that 21st century techno-entertainment makes pencils seem, well, somehow silly. Who’s going to look down after a play and write on the program when you can look up and see the replay on the Jumbotron? Pencils? Are you kidding? Scoring rhymes with boring. I lament that it’s true, but for baseball fans scorekeeping has become a lost art.
I’m glad it wasn’t in 1949. John Benton’s dad had kept score that game, so I can tell you that when the Cubs played the Boston Braves 57 summers ago, they faced Hall of Fame hurler Warren Spahn, who pitched a complete game for the Braves, winning 12 - 4, one of Warren Spahn’s 363 career victories.
Now, even though fans may not be keeping score, you can be sure that somebody is. Keeping records is a key part of baseball, and of all sports. The official scorekeeper is necessary, because -- now listen carefully -- inside those baselines, that magical place we call the diamond, a whole world of rules exist which have absolutely no relevance to the outside world. Rules times three. Three strikes and you’re out. Three outs and the team is out. Three by three by three we go for nine innings. This three-ness of the game gives it a divine, Trinitarian aspect, where the Triple Play is the quintessential defensive feat.
I hope, by the way, you don’t mind my using athletic imagery this morning. I follow here the tradition of the Apostle Paul, who often used athletic imagery. To be sure, Abner Doubleday’s baseball wasn’t around 2,000 years ago. Ah, but had it been, there’s no doubt in my mind Paul would have used it, he not being reluctant to make analogies of the sports that were popular — Olympic-style competitions such as running, boxing, and wrestling.
Paul uses athletics to shape our understanding of the godly life in terms of training and accomplishment. With sports terminology he inundates us with the world of the gymnasium. Consider 1 Corinthians 9: 26, “Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win the prize. Athletes exercise self-control in all things, they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one.”
Paul’s gymnasium-oriented language — run, win, prize, athletes, exercise, self-control, trophies — describes the quest for eternal life. He wrote to Timothy, “Train yourself in godliness, for, while physical training is of some value, godliness is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:7b, 8). The Greek word Paul used, translated training, is gumnasia, ancestor to our own gymnasium. For the Greeks, the gymnasium was a symbol of life, the development of wholeness of being — physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. The world of sport involves discipline, perseverance, and work. And that, commitment to discipline, is perhaps the most obvious spiritual lesson to draw from sports.
This sermon, though, will stress quite a different lesson, a commitment to the limitations of rules. What limitations? First, play is limiting with regard to space. We speak of a baseball diamond, a football field, a tennis court, a boxing ring, a golf course. Inside that space the field of play is a hallowed, consecrated spot, a place where special rules obtain, a magic, albeit temporary world.
Speaking of temporary, the second way play is limiting is with regard to time. Games have a beginning and an end. The Olympics have ceremonies to mark both extremes. There is a first pitch and a last out, a tip-off and a final, game-ending buzzer. There comes a time when it’s too late, when the clock runs down to zero, when opportunities for miracles are ended.
Third, play is limiting as to action. Within the boundaries of limited space and limited time exist rules concerning action. I want to shift analogies now, from baseball to golf, because when we speak of rules, I think of no better example than golf, whose rules are often self-enforced. Three years ago, in final round of the prestigious British Open, Ian Woosman was a contender and moved even further up the leaderboard with a birdie on the first hole, now within a single stroke of the lead. Disaster struck. Woosman’s caddie discovered that his bag had an extra club (a golfer can only carry fourteen). Woosnam had been practicing with a different driver on the driving range and the caddie failed to remove it from his bag before the match. The penalty for this infraction is two strokes per hole. Woosman informed the officials on himself, who assessed the two stroke penalty, turning birdie into bogie and throwing him into a mental and emotional agony that virtually demolished any chance he had of winning the British Open.
Why is such a rule necessary? What does it matter if an extra club has made its way into the bag? That extra club on that single hole at the British Open didn’t affect his play, nor the play of others around him. “It’s not fair!” he might have cried.
Sport’s 3-fold limitation -- space, time, and action -- teach that rules are necessary because play makes sense and means something only when the rules are applied. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life play brings a temporary, limited perfection, a place where all goes according to rules. We can’t understand a world where terrorists strap bombs to themselves and enter a restaurant planning to kill innocents, or take over commercial jets with box cutters to fly them into buildings and kill thousands. We can’t understand a world where a man to enter a schoolhouse, lines up little girls, and begins shooting. We can’t understand a world where predators drawn to child pornography become so immersed in their evil that they begin to stalk children on the Internet.
In this world, this real world, the rules don’t seem to apply. Sport, though, is a magical, temporary world where the rules must apply. Play represents the divine because, unlike the real world, it creates and demands order, absolute and supreme. The least deviation from the rules spoils the game, and the play world collapses.
The Legend of Bagger Vance is a movie based on a book by Steven Pressfield. Set in the Great Depression, in May of1931, Bagger Vance is a caddie who appears as if from nowhere, a mysterious, Melchizedek-type stranger without past or future. Bagger Vance represents the divine presence to a tortured soul named Junah, whose wartime experience in World War 1, the only survivor of his unit, had left him empty, suffering an agony he came to treat with the stupor of alcohol. Before the war, Junah had been a local Georgia golf star, and now he is asked to come back and play a Depression-era exhibition match with Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen, two of the great golfers of that day. For those suffering through the Depression, golf offered temporary relief from the hardships and unfairness of the real world.
On the last day of the tournament Junah, unbelievably, has a chance to win. But as he prepares to make his approach shot on the 17th Hole, disaster strikes. I want you to hear the story as it is narrated in 1995 by Dr. Hardison Greaves (who had been a 10 year old boy in 1931, when the now Dr. Hardison Greaves was called Hardy).
“Junah was ready . . . there was a loose stalk of grass blowing about two feet behind Junah’s ball; with his clubhead he nonchalantly flicked it, it blew away in the wind. Junah took a step toward the ball . . . the ball moved! An inch. No more . . . My heart froze in terror . . . He knew the rule as well as I. As well as every golfer. A player may remove without penalty a loose impediment lying within a club-length of the ball, but ‘if the ball move after any such loose impediment has been touched . . . the player shall be deemed to have cause the ball to move and the penalty shall be one stroke.’” It counted for nothing that Junah hadn’t touched the ball, that his actions had not been the cause of its moving. All that mattered was that it had moved . . .
“It wasn’t fair! Then, still in the first two tenths of a second, my brain seized upon a terrible alternative. No one had seen the ball move. Not even Bagger Vance, who was ten feet down the hill. Just Junah and I. In the three-inch grass no one else could see it. No one would know. We could lie. Pretend nothing happened. Just hit the ball. Say nothing. This thought flashed like an evil comet across my brain. Was Junah thinking it, too?
“But he was already turning away toward the fairway . . . Junah’s voice rose clear and firm above the wind. ‘I have to call a shot on myself . . .’
“My glance turned to Bagger Vance . . . he moved beside Junah and spoke, almost too softly to hear. ‘In this hour,’ he whispered, ‘you have reached me.’”
The lesson of Bagger Vance, the lesson of sport, is willing commitment to the rules, even when we know we can’t be caught. This is honor. This is integrity. Any commitment we make to rules is important. For example, let’s move from sports and into a real game of life, marriage. Marriage is a sacred, hallowed ground with rules, and is limiting in these same three ways. As to space, marriage is meant to be a temporary haven from the world, a place of companionship and peace and joy. As for time, marriage has a beginning and an end. It begins at the altar and, ideally, continues “till death do we part,” though our legal system and our faith traditions recognize that sometimes divorce is also a proper ending. Within those limitations of space and time there are rules, rules to which we commit ourselves, vows.
We sometimes face the same temptation as Junah. No one will know. We can lie. But we learn that deviation from our vows, from the rules, diminishes the worth of our marriage. When that happens, at least for a moment, until forgiveness and reconciliation is achieved, the play world collapses.
We may live in an “anything goes” day, a day of living according to the Outback Steakhouse slogan, “No Rules. Just Right.” But we come to learn that there is nothing Just Right about a life with no rules. It doesn’t take long for parents to realize that when they parent their children on the Outback Steakhouse model, they are setting themselves up for disaster.
One more short golf story, if I may, this one from the 1968 Masters. Argentine golfer Roberto De Vicenzo was set for a play-off with Bob Goalby to decide the winner of the fabled Green Jacket. But Roberto had mistakenly signed for a four at the 17th hole, a hole the whole world had seen him birdie with a 3. It didn’t matter that the whole world knew he made the 3. He signed for a 4. That’s a cardinal rule of golf. Once a player signs the scorecard, it is official. The officials could only go by the mark of the pencil! De Vicenzo had lost the match.
I wonder. Is there a scorecard for our lives, a divine marking of our hits and our errors? Job’s tortured soul thought so. “If I sin, you mark me, and will not acquit me of my iniquity.” To Job, it was as if God, like my dad at a ballgame, never forgot his pencil when observing life. God marked everything. Every K. Every strikeout is duly recorded. Is God such a God who will only go by the mark of the pencil?
If so, we’re in trouble, as our scorecards are filled with K’s (in theological terminology -- failures, shortcomings, sins, transgressions). Grace is not that God, as scorekeeper, ignores the written record. Grace means that God accomplished atonement – at one ment. And, at the moment of repentance, of confession – that honest assessment of ourselves, God moves toward us as Baggar Vance came to Junah when he called a shot on himself, and whispers those words of grace, “In this hour, you have reached me, are at one with me. You have found atonement.”
Let us then, with the psalmist, give thanks. “If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered” (130:3, 4).
Sources:
Jonathan Eig, “You’re Sunk If You Can’t Tell the Players Without a Scorecard: Few Ask for Pencils at Major League Games; JumboTron Tells the Story,” The Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2001.
Steven Pressfield, The Legend of Bagger Vance, HarperTorch, 1995, pp. 226 - 230.
Johan Huizinga, “What ‘Play’ Is,” PARABOLA, Volume 21, Number 4 (Winter 1996, Play and Work).
A. R. Orage, “Life as Gymnastics,” PARABOLA, Volume 21, Number 4 (Winter 1996, Play and Work).