Crossing Home Ecclesiastes 3: 1-11; Hebrews 12: 1-3

May I say today that to such an outlook, to such a philosophy; Scripture, Jesus, and baseball would say – no, I protest, there is more. Even the writer of Ecclesiastes said, all is vanity, stupid, dumb, so what, phhhh! And yet, it seems God has put eternity in our hearts, what’s up with that?

Now I know that some or many of you here today may actually care little about baseball – it’s just maybe not your thing, and yet on this tailgate Sunday I ask you to bear with me as we consider the question what might baseball have to teach us beyond baseball, about life, God, and what really matters.

If I had more time today I’d talk about the honor and mystery of baseball. When I was a kid, before any of us could drive, on summer days my friends and I would get a hold of one or two wooden bats, a scuffed up baseball – and everybody had some kind of old glove and we’d go to the corner diamond at Krebs Jr. High school field. It didn’t matter if there were 5 or 6 or 11 or 12 of us we’d just choose up sides and play for hours on end. Even with nobody watching and no roar of the crowd, why is there just something about what Jason Morgan calls “the impossible silence as the ball lofts up into the tent of the sky, and the feeling—it almost makes a sound within you—of liberty?” Where does that sense come from when you’re 13 yrs old looking up on a hot hazy afternoon? Morgan puts it this way:

It’s the very wordlessness of it all. There is a square, a diamond, bounded by two dirt lands and stretching off into a semicircle beyond. There is an interaction. Someone, who is your adversary but who is not your enemy, shows his respect for you by throwing his most difficult pitch at you, and you show your respect for him by trying to hit it so far away that, hopefully, the ball will never be found again. This is the tabula writ in all people’s hearts, this yearning for excellence that the Greeks know as arête. We must strive, we must contend, we must throw and swing and run as hard and as fast as we can. If we can do this while also respecting our rivals, then we can know honor, that rarest of things that even the old Olympian deities were forced to envy, because it is found only among mortals (Jason M. Morgan “Baseball and the Soul,” March 31, 2011, online: http://www.firsthings.com cited April 28, 2012).

I wish I could talk more about that honor and grace and mystery. The ancient sage here in Ecclesiastes did say it’s a mystery, not just baseball but everything, God has hidden some things so that we will never know AND yet, there is also this honor, this grace, this joy. He has set eternity in our hearts. If I had more time I’d talk more about the mystery and the honor but what I really want to impress upon you today is the object and ethos of baseball – these are more tangible, more certain.

You see the object of baseball is quite clear. Everybody knows it. Nobody explains this better than that most incredibly wise and ancient of sages – the guru of gurus, philosopher of philosophers, the late George Carlin (“Baseball, Football, and How We Have Changed,” online: http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/carlin.html, cited April 27, 2012). He observes that for most of our games and sports the objective is to do something with the some object, the ball the puck, whatever it is. It’s to get that thing into the goal or across the line or in the basket or whatever. The object, the focus, the bottom line is not the thing, it is the player, the person, the people, it is to bring the players home safe.

He has put eternity in their hearts. Eternity for the ancient Hebrews was not merely a length of time unending, although it included that, but they also used this word eternity to describe something that happened even in the fairly recent past where they looked back and they knew that God had been there and they had been with God they called that eternity. God was their home. To be in right relationship with God and others was their home. Perhaps God has put eternity in our hearts because eternity with God is our home. The ultimate objective is to bring people home.

In my illustrious and storied little league and Babe Ruth baseball career I hit only 2 home runs both over the fence at the Stanton little league field and for the life of me I can’t remember actually crossing home plate after that, but to me one of the best experiences in baseball is crossing home then turning around and joining the rest as other players round third and you have this gauntlet of people cheering you on and welcoming you home. The New Testament writer of the letter to the Hebrews talked about a cloud of witnesses; cheering us on even as we we’re running the bases [Read 12:1-2].

Home is the throne of God – Revelation 22 – where we are with God and God is with us forever. The ultimate objective is to bring people home and yet it talks about this one who has gone before us, for the joy, the grace, the honor set before him, endured the cross, and sacrificed himself to help us get there. It is as if he then turns around and runs back on the field and says, this is how you play, people, this is how you do it. The object is to bring people home, the ethos is to help and be helped along the way. Nobody, not anybody makes it on his or her own. The ethos is to help and be helped around the bases.

In the first 20 games of the major league season this year the Philadelphia Phillies have scored 64 runs. 13 of those were home runs, 20%. 80% however, the vast majority of their runs have been scored because somebody got helped around the bases by other players. The ethos is to help and be helped along the way, around the bases, to the finish line. Even those who have hit home runs though would admit that it wasn’t totally their own effort that enabled them to hit the home run, they had help along the way.

I’ve been fascinated in the last couple of weeks, not by the big show, or even baseball movies, but by minor league players I know or have heard about. Our own Paul Tebbutt, who played minor league ball in the early fifties, was telling some of us about the advice and help he got not only from coaches but from older players who would never make it to the majors but who made him a better player than he could have possibly been on his own. The ethos is to help and be helped along the way.

I was listening to NPR this week and they were doing a story on a guy named Georecki. He’s 31 years old playing what he says will be his final minor league baseball season this year for an unaffiliated minor league team on long Island. He did get called up to the national league one time with the Atlanta Braves and actually got a base hit in front of all his family and friends in a game in NY against the Mets. 31 years old, knows his baseball days are numbered, recently took the test to become a NYC firefighter. He knows his baseball player days are numbered, but you know what he was doing while they were interviewing him. He was teaching kids on Long Island how to bat, how to play the game with excellence. Why would he want to do that? God has put eternity in their hearts. The ethos is to help and be helped along the way there.

Many of us remember and have been inspired by what happened in a women’s college softball game back in 2008 (Graham Hays, “Central Washington Offers the Ultimate Act of Sportsmanship,” online: espn.com, cited April 28, 2012). Sara Tucholsky, a senior player, part time starter, hit first and last home run of her college career. As she rounded first, in her excitement, she missed first base, and when she doubled back to touch it she twisted her knee in a weird way and landed in a heap. When she couldn’t get up and run or walk on her own the umpires made a ruling on the field that if any of her teammates assisted her she’d be out, that if she were substituted for it would have to be ruled a single and she wouldn’t get credit for the home run. At that point two players from the opposing team intervened, one of whom happened to own just about every home run and batting record ever for her school and their league, and they carried Sara around the bases and gently touched her foot against each one and literally carried her home.

You see the object of our existence is to bring people home to eternity. And when you follow a faith where God himself steps onto the field of play and sacrificially paves the way there, we shouldn’t be surprised that the ethos is to help and be helped along the way.

And so we have a choice today, of how we are to live out our days on this earth, especially with the people with whom we have to deal. As Jason Morgan says, “Some baseball games are played by hulking, drugged men with bad attitudes, millionaires with endorsement contracts for athlete’s foot cream and erectile dysfunction pills.” Our life beyond baseball can imitate that. Life can imitate art; our life can imitate sport in that way. Or, we can choose to be more like the crowd of witnesses who’ve gone before us, often unsung and unnoticed who have understood that the objective is to bring people home to eternity with God, and the ethos is to help and be helped along the way. It’s a choice to be more like Paul and his minor league mentors, more like Georecki, more like two college athletes, who once for the joy and honor set before them, helped a fellow player touch all four, and cross home together.

It’s finally a choice between what you’d like your epitaph to say. I wasn’t, I was, I died, so what – or – more like another: When you go home, tell them of us, and say/ for your tomorrows these gave their today (The Kohima Epitaph, a WWII memorial, written by John Maxwell Edmonds, online: http://english.turkcebilgi.com/Epitaph cited April 28, 2012).

Let us pray: