NOTE: Like many pastors, the sermon I write and the sermon I preach end up having many points of departure. Below is the manuscript of the sermon entitled Foul Pole but please note in does not include the final paragraph which was unscripted. Thanks
I think just about everybody now knows that I am something of a Baseball fan. It is true – I like baseball and just about everything about it. I think that it is poetic that the defense has control of the ball, I like that there is no time clock and that if you totaled up the total time the ball was actually in play during those 9 innings you would get a number perhaps just over a minute. But it is not just the game. One of my true love affairs with Baseball is centered on the Stadiums where there game is played. Walking into a ballpark especially if I have never been before is something like the first bite of the chocolate cake that you have spent the whole day craving. I love the little details of the parks, each with those things that make the stadium unique and for some wacky. Now most ballparks look the same more or less infield-wise. Rules mandate that bases remain a certain distance apart and that the pitchers mound stay a certain height but for all the rules in the game there are virtually none that mandate the construction of the outfield. If you tour ballparks this becomes an obvious fact. Some parks like old Tiger Stadium had an extraordinary deep center field but a relatively normal right and left. Minute Maid Park, where the Houston Astros play have an incredibly odd hill that center-fielders have to navigate as they chase down long drives to straight center. Yet with all the idiosyncrasies there remain constants and the Foul Pole is a great example.
The Foul Pole is hard to miss. Two long yellow poles reside at the coming together of the foul and fair territories and the poles indicate which is which. Sticking straight up in the air at the corners, these poles are there to help, but the truth is that they don’t help out all that much. Balls curve around the poles and in places like Wrigley Field where there are no stands to offer contrast to the poles themselves it is rather difficult to use them well. In fact, the only time that these poles offer a clear-cut, objective ruling is when a ball strikes one dead center anywhere. When that happens every fan will tell you that is a round-tripper (aka. Home run).
I bring this up (because talking about baseball is easy and writing a sermon is hard) because as I read our scripture for today Jesus’ words are something like their own foul poles. His words to love one another reside right at the intersection of good “religion” and real life, splitting the two and drawing sides. On one side is real life where loving everyone doesn’t make much sense and love can get in the way of clear thinking, goal attainment, and security. We don’t love everybody over here, we love some people sometimes and perhaps a handful of people most of the time but no matter what poetry or greeting cards say there are very few, if any that we love all the time. The world doesn’t seem to be capable to withstand loving everybody all the time so we don’t. On the other side of that pole then is good “religion.” Filled with its rules and regulations, it divides up the world into sectors, into groups that may or may not be ok to love, or ok to hate. It creates dogmas and doctrine that direct us on the path that we walk pointing the way that detours us past those places or people that someone/something rationalized it was good to avoid. Good Religion makes these decisions for us, it asks us to follow its signs and go where they take us. And right in the middle of these two sides, at the intersection of real life and good religion is the pole that divides them, a relatively skinny and small target compared to the enormity of the other sizes and yet it is only when the ball strikes that skinny yellow pole that we have a clear-cut indication of what is to happen. It is only when the perfect situation arises, when a well struck ball hit’s the pole square that we feel free to reach out in love and risk modeling Christ. It is only when the decision is made for us by the perfect combination of variables - maybe for you it is age, gender, or maybe background or orientation - that we can safely love. But the truth is in the year 2000 there were a total of 5,693 home runs hit in the major leagues - a record - and out of all those home runs only a handful by comparison hit the foul pole.
If this is feeling a little too theoretical or perhaps my analogy is breaking down allow me to tell you about someone I met in Kenya named Christine. Christine’s mother-in-law had Gang Greene in her right foot. The smell and the decay was more than she could handle and so she contacted the clinic where I was helping out. I was asked to come along with the Doctor because at 60 years old he wasn’t able to carry the feeble woman through the Corn field back and back to the van. With my duties completed I tagged along for the remainder of the ordeal so that I might document it for an independent study I was working on about short-term international medical missions. The doctors and the mother-in-law were busy bribing their way into the local hospital and Christine and myself waited at the van until things were secured. We waiting a very long time. Making chit-chat along the way, Christine asked about America and expressed her desire for her children to one day live in America and become rich. At this point Christine took out a folded photo of two beautiful smiling children, a boy who was young, and a girl who was just a bit older. Christine raised these children alone after her husband and the children’s father was killed along the road one day. She alone was unable to put sufficient food on the table and relied on the generosity of her late husbands cousins and extended family. Looking down at the photo, touching the part that displayed her daughters giant smile she said that her name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth would move to America and go to school to become a Doctor. She would marry a man who would treat her right and they would have many healthy children. Elizabeth’s success here in the states was a foregone conclusion for Christine, she was confident that it would happen and it was just a matter of time. But like someone flipped a switch in the hope that Christine had between the fate of her daughter and the fate of her small young son, her whole demeanor changed. She said that she too hoped that her son would go to America but rather than being a Doctor and having a large family she expressed her desire for this small, young, innocent child to perhaps grow up to be a janitor or something like that. Like many of you right now I wondered why. Here in the USA we say that anyone can grow up to the President, to be rich and to have every opportunity in the world and so I asked, why a janitor? I will never forget her words. She looked up at me like someone who fears the situation is out of their hands and said to me that her beautiful boy was named Osama and her only concern was if we would hate him. Osama was born in July of 2001, just months before the attack on the World Trade Centers. She was convinced that because his name was Osama that the world would hate him, limit his success and keep him from ever experiencing love and the joy of a limitless future.
So, brothers and sisters, shall we love this little boy? He doesn’t look like many of us. He isn’t from around here. He speaks another language or English with a heavy accent. He is poor and whenever someone says his name many people will grow with an anger that some would deem righteous. So shall we love him? Real Life says no way. Good Religion says might say yes but only if he changes. If we leave it up to life or religion he misses the mark and yet I am in the pulpit of this very church for all to hear that Jesus loves this child. Jesus loves him more than you or I could ever imagine. Jesus loves Osama and Jesus loves all the other Osamas in the world that fall short or can’t earn our love because of the sin that grips us and the excuses that fuel us. The love that Jesus commands us to show is not something crafted at Hallmark. The love that Jesus abides in comes from the source of all Love, God and in God love is born. Where the world gives reasons not to love and the thing that we call religion gives us signs indicating who is able to be loved and who isn’t God offers us the only real thing in the world that we can tie into, the only hitching post that remains steady and does not change: radical, universal, superabundant love that can never be depleted and can never run out. For God’s love, poured out on all of Creation creates something not of human hands, something that we can never forge in the mills and the factories of our academies: equality beyond measure.
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