It’s getting down to crunch time in the baseball season, which means it doesn’t take much for my sermon to intersect with the Red Sox. Here’s what I said on Sunday.
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In the fall of 2004, I was the Associate Pastor of the First Congregational Church of Hanover, Massachusetts, which is about halfway between Boston and Cape Cod. We had two morning services, at 8:30 and 10, and there was a group of five or six women who got there early on Sunday morning to put on the coffee as they prepared for the coffee hour between the services. They were all in the seventies and they were all serious Red Sox fans, which meant they talked baseball while they got things ready. I quickly developed the habit of getting to church early on Sunday morning so I could be a part of the discussion.
The summer of 2004 had been hopeful, if you were a Red Sox fan, but so had several other summers between that one and 1918, the last time the Sox had won the World Series. No one in the church kitchen had been alive when our home team had brought home a championship. We stood in the lineage of the broken-hearted faithful who trusted that if we just kept playing things would be different one day.
Every time the passage we read this morning comes up in the lectionary, I think of my early morning coffee and conversations with those wonderful women: “Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised. God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours.”
We are all a part of the lineage of the faithful.
If there was ever a week when it was evident that our scripture passage started in the middle of a larger story, this is the week. Look again at the first two sentences you have printed in front of you:
I could go on and on, but I’ve run out of time. There are so many more—Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jepthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets.
Hebrews 11 is sometimes called the Hall of Fame of the Faithful because the writer goes down a list of people from Hebrew history whose relationship with God had a profound effect on those who followed: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Rahab. Some of the names are immediately recognizable and some, perhaps, are not. All of them are a part of the story of God’s relationship with humanity, but the list is far from exhaustive, even within scripture. And most all of them were flawed in some way and fell short of what God called them to do. Still, the writer of Hebrews notes, they endured many things to live out their trust in God, sometimes painful and difficult things.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews didn’t know anything about baseball, so he turned to another sports metaphor, running. He likened our trust in God to an endurance race, exhorting us to run and not quit, to keep our eyes on Jesus who ran the race before us, to remember those who ran before us.
The problem with sports metaphors is that they make us think in terms of winning and losing. When we hear life or faith compared with running a race, we think we somehow have to win, which runs counter to the reality of life or faith in a way. The Greek word used for race can also mean a heat, as in a qualifying race or one that is not the winner-take-all. There are more races still to come. Everything is not riding on us. We are running our segment of the relay, doing what we can do in our race. It’s not as much about winning as it is about completing our segment, doing what we can, and remembering we aren’t the final runners.
I keep coming back to this verse: “Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised.”
That is a shocking statement that is a bit unnerving. Not one of those people—not Abraham or Moses or Sarah or David or whoever else we want to list—received on what God had promised. They only got part of it. The writer of Hebrews goes on to make it sound as though his readers were the completing piece of the puzzle, the anchor of the relay:
God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours.
And yet here we sit over two thousand years later and the race is still on. If I can return to my Red Sox metaphor, we haven’t broken the Curse. The same exhortation the writer of Hebrews gave those he wrote still applies to us: keep looking at the way Jesus ran the race. He never lost trust in God and the love he had come to share, no matter what it cost, even his death.
I was watching the Red Sox play one night this week, which has been a week when they have struggled a bit, and the commentators were talking about one of the young, promising players who was also struggling. Kevin Millar, who played on the Red Sox team that broke the Curse in 2004, said something that caught my attention. He said, “The guy has good fundamentals and he is going to be great. But baseball is a game built around failure, so he’s going to have to learn how to fail.”
I should probably let him know he helped with my sermon. Theologian Frederick Buechner wrote a book on the Crucifixion entitled The Magnificent Defeat that looked at Jesus’ life and death as failures, in a way that allowed his trust that God’s love was stronger than all of it to bring him back to life and offer us hope and comfort in knowing the point is, as the prophet Isaiah said, “we will mount up with wings like eagles; we will run and not be weary; we will walk and not faint.
Sunday morning, October 31, 2004 had a different feeling when I got to church early to meet the coffee ladies because earlier that week the Sox had won the World Series for the first time in eighty-six years. The cemetery adjacent to the church was filled with Red Sox banners and hats and signs, where people had festooned the tombstones of those who had died before we finally broke the Curse. I was grateful my coffee buddies were alive to share the moment. I was glad to be there, too, since it was a new feeling for me as well.
But even with the championship came the reality of next year. There was another season, another team to field, another game to play, another failure to learn, and another Sunday to gather for coffee and talk and hope. When the Sox won a second championship in 2007, I was speaking to a guy at a different coffee hour in a different church. He had a five-year old son who was dressed in a Sox shirt.
“Look at him,” his father said, “he seven and the Sox have won twice. He has no idea how to be a true Red Sox fan. He thinks we always win.”
Considering that kid is now almost twenty and the Sox have not won every year, I will assume he has a better idea now about both life and the Red Sox.
We are all a part of the lineage of the faithful and the legacy they have handed down is not one of victory, but of perseverance and trust, whether we are talking about the biblical characters named in our passage or those we could name from the history of Mount Carmel Congregational Church. There are very few mornings that we wake up to news that offers hope that love is stronger than greed or power, yet that is what we are called to trust. That is the race we are called to run. That is the failure we are called to learn how to live through. That is the race Christ ran before us. Come, let us run together for as long as it takes. Amen.
Peace,
Milton