Watching the Detectives

Look around this morning.  Take a good look.  If you hadn’t noticed, this is the best time of year at Kent.  The best.  We should have signs put up, so you remember.  Instead, our Advent wreath hangs in the chancel, and you can see that two of the large candles are lit for the season.  We’re half way through Advent, as we prepare for Christmas.  You may remember keeping an Advent calendar as a child.  Those were good times--a time of wonder, but the anticipation and beauty of the season are still here, reaching you in new ways if you stop to look around.  Sure, the weather can be a little gloomy, like it was yesterday.  But the cold can make you appreciate the simple things in life: food, shelter, companionship.  These two weeks are quite a few notches less stressful than any other time.   It is a time to just be.  And it doesn’t end with final exams, or the goodbyes of spring, but rather a chapel service, one that is different from the others.  People really sing the Christmas carols.  Vacation will hang in the air with the Lessons and Carols service, before we go our separate ways.    

One of the great figures of the Advent season is John the Baptist.  John the Baptist was a prophet, one of the most significant in our tradition.  He left society and lived in solitude, in the wilderness.  John went off the grid.  In solitude, he sought God with all of his heart, and society eventually followed him, seeking some small portion of what he had.  He had many followers, including Jesus himself. 

            In today’s gospel, John is shown preparing the way for Jesus: “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.  I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”  What was John’s relationship with Jesus really like?  We don’t know, but it’s certainly possible that they disagreed about some things.  I’d be shocked if they didn’t.  The God of John is a good bit harsher than the God of compassion and love revealed in the teachings of Jesus Christ. But the gospels don’t reveal these details, the relationship of a famous teacher and his pupil, like Morpheus and Neo from the Matrix movies. 

            What is perhaps most admirable about John is his fearlessness with silence.  It terrifies most of us.  Silence.  It is uncomfortable, awkward.  Though he is often crying out in the gospels, John’s normal state, in nature, was silence before God.  But he isn’t remembered that way.  He’s always making a lot of noise, often railing at the establishment.  John was a kind of spiritual detective, one who could hear the voice of God in the silence of nature.    

When I thought about the John the Baptist figures in my own life, I didn’t have to look very far.  Pastor Nick.  Nick was my supervisor for Clinical Pastoral Education, a summer internship in a hospital setting.  Every seminarian headed for ordination has to do it somewhere.  I did it at a mental hospital.  At Napa State Hospital.       

There were lots of rumors about Nick.  I’ll bet John had them too.  I heard Nick had had trouble in his denomination.  What kind of trouble?  He had been tried for heresy, on more than one occasion.  A heresy trial?  How exciting, how delicious.  Episcopalians don’t have fun like that, unless you use the salad fork on the wrong dish.  Nick was found innocent at his trials—not enough evidence was the determination.  Apparently his primary problem, one that attracted the attention of his denomination’s authorities, had been his tendency to use profanity from the pulpit. 

At my seminary, the administrators steered students away from Napa State Hospital.  When this counsel came to me—to stay away, I knew I had found the right posting, and the right supervisor.  I learned that Nick had spent most of his career in the California Correctional System, as a Chaplain at San Quentin Prison.  In prison, at San Quentin, two of his pastoral relationships were with Charles Manson and Timothy Leary.  He eventually left San Quentin for Napa State Hospital.  Nick was described to me as anti-institutional, non-hierarchical, and, as mentioned, some in his denomination found him heretical.  One administrator at my seminary told me Nick was crazy, certifiable.  Say no more, I thought, this is the position just for me.  Pastor Nick’s Clinical Pastoral Education program was not even on the official list, so I had to get special permission from my bishop to do it.  Which I did.  I can do bureaucracy when I need to.           

Next came the interview with my John the Baptist; and that’s when things took a strange turn.  The interview lasted forty-five minutes, give or take.  During the course of the interview, my future CPE supervisor said not a single word.  Complete silence.  We stared at each other for ten minutes to start things off.  Nothing.  His eccentric behavior was incongruous with the plain grey suit.  He combed his eye brows, I noticed.  I love it when older men do this.  When I realized he was going to play the silent Buddha for the whole interview, I just started talking.  Blah blah blah.  Away I went.  When I was talked out, I got up, shook his hand, and left his office.  Several weeks later, I got a letter from the Napa State Hospital saying that I had been accepted to their Clinical Pastoral Education program.        

And so it began.  We were an odd couple, Nick and I.  Nick distrusted words, except for the curse words.  I was in love with them.  I met with him weekly.  During these hour long sessions, he never spoke.  I learned to listen to him, and for him, in the silence.  I learned to listen to myself without words.  Sometimes the silent treatment made me feel a little crazy, but it made me look for my best, the best inside of me, beyond easy answers.  I also learned to listen to God.  I felt liberated doing it this way, without talking.  I’m still a beginner when it comes to silence, but I’ve found this is a good thing to be.  We’re all beginners when it comes to a God of love.  During this season, we feel our way a bit as children, as beginners, in a way that belies our age.    

            In the silence of our world today, John might hear the voice of God.  He might hear a yearning for justice in this Advent season: for Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, for Eric Garner in New York City; and for their families.  For all the voices of injustice that we ignore, or fail to hear.  John would have heard them, the crying of the creation.  What John the Baptist found in the silence, in solitude, he brought back into the world.  When it came to the voice of God, there was perhaps no greater detective, except the one who followed him 

I’d like to close this morning with a passage from The Boy Detective, by Roger Rosenblatt.  In this memoir, Rosenblatt walks the streets of New York that he first knew as a child, as a boy pretending to be a detective.  But the child intuition and the adult reason work together, as do ours during this time of year. 

            “Round and round the park.  Round and round.  My favorite part of being a detective is just this—the walk, just taking in the world.  Soon enough someone will engage us on a hunt, a project.  And off we will go, armed to the hilt with whatever powers we possess, of reason, deduction, and style.  We shall put our powers to use for the sake of honor, decency, and justice.  And that’s all to the good, just as it should be in a life that yearns for honor, decency and justice.

            But before all that, life calls for nothing but itself.  And we do not so much pursue it as let it wrap around us, and just as quickly, unwrap, like the wind…

            How do you walk in the world?  That’s no trick.  The how is easy.  Or if it is not always easy, it is at least clear.  How to walk in the world?  Walk as the private eye walks.  Do right, play fair, ignore the trash, and keep your nose clean.  But why does one walk in the world?  That’s another matter.  Which brings me to you, as ever, and you to me.  Will you be my partner?  Shall we do our walking side by side?  What do you say?  See, I wasn’t tracking you, after all—through the fog and screams and gunshots.  I might have thought I was tracking you.  But all I ever wanted was to face you, in the blessed, blazing light.”

So this is it, settle in for the best time of year.  It’s a chance to be a beginner again.  To listen to the silence with John, and my own St. Nick, as we wait for the one who is coming.    

A Leap of Faith in the Wilderness

The gospel reading from Matthew presents a very short interrogation of Jesus by the Pharisees and the Herodians.  The Pharisees have showed interest in the teachings of Jesus.  They are certainly intrigued by him, but at this point they have joined in opposition with the Herodians, a group closely aligned with the Roman occupation of the Jewish homeland. Matthew’s gospel is very clear that a trap has been set for Jesus; as the Pharisees question him about the controversial issue of paying taxes to the Roman government.  The attempt here is to lead Jesus into a public act of treason, so the Romans can get rid of Jesus once and for all; and his troubling ministry can come to an end without any further disturbance in the status quo. 

What is really at issue here is the radical personal relationship with God that Jesus has offered to everyone regardless of political, economic, religious, and social standing; who is righteous and who is not, who is in and who is out, has been brought into question by this personal relationship Jesus has with God.  Jesus has consorted with the unclean—with tax collectors and sinners—and his teachings have certainly transcended the religious requirements of Jewish Law, often times in direct violation of it.  Jesus aims above the rules to the Spirit of the Law.  And perhaps most important, Jesus calls God, the Master of the Universe, abba—a term of affection and intimacy.  It is much more intimate than calling God his father; it is more like “papa” or “daddy.”  This personal relationship has spilled over the walls of synagogue observance; the relationship with God could be found, and should be found, everywhere, and by everyone.  This is the source of the direct controversy with Jesus, but the Pharisees attack him by way of indirection, by controversy in another area. 

The gospel writer Matthew assumes we know the possible responses of Jesus to this controversial issue and its direct question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?”  As mentioned, there were Jews working directly with Roman authority who supported the taxes collected for the emperor.  On the other side of the issue were the Zealots who are waiting for Jesus to declare himself as a radical messiah who will bring down the Roman Empire.  And the Pharisees, for their part, hated the taxes but feared the political repercussions of just the public position that they are trying to get Jesus to take.  So they lay the groundwork for the treason of Jesus with flattery: “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality.”

Jesus responds by asking for a coin for examination.  “’Whose head is this and whose title?’  They answered, ‘The emperor’s.’  ‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’”

The answer of Jesus is provocative, and unexpected; he seems to condone and support the role of the Roman state.  The role of government in our lives is legitimated by Jesus; there is no revolution here, except in terms of the heart.  We can ponder just what our duty is to the legitimate need for government in our lives.  Yet what belongs to God is the question still hanging in the air.  What percentage belongs to God?

With Parents’ Weekend coming next week, how much time do we owe to our parents?  How much time and commitment do they owe to their children?  Have we given to them what is their due?  Have we rendered to Caesar what is Caesar’s?  How do we know when we have done our time, and fulfilled our duty? 

Pondering this question, I was reminded of something that Abdulaziz Sachedina, the Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Virginia, was fond of saying to his son.  At my request as Chaplain to the University, he spoke and preached many times at my parish, especially after the events of September 11^th.  The professor and his son would often discuss, and argue, about the son’s decisions and his future.  In frustration, the son would often say, “Dad, you’ve had your life.  This is my life, and I get to make my own decisions.”  The professor’s response as a parent was always the same.  “There is no such thing as your life and my life.  There is only our life.  Our life together.”  You can easily imagine what the son had to say to this statement: “Dad, I really hate it when you say that.”  Between parent and child, the compartments and fractions are broken down.  There are no percentages of time; there is only one time.  There is only our time together.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”  So what belongs to God?  There are no percentages that can quantify the debt we owe to God.  There are no compartments of worship, or church or chapel attendance that are sufficient, or commensurate with, God’s abiding love for each of us.  We are all beginners, all children, when it comes to the terrifying depths of compassion and love that God has for each of us. 

In the reading from Exodus this morning, the guidance of God is everything to the Jewish people.  Every single step by Moses in the wilderness was a leap of faith.  The everyday world is much more mysterious when you begin to feel the presence of God in your life.  For the Israelites in the wilderness, the presence of God, even the face of God, was very near.  In his book Thoughts on Solitude, Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and spiritual writer, wrote this about the wilderness in considering the Desert Fathers, the early Christians who left society to live in the wilderness in search of God.

“The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God because it was no value to men.  The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted because it offered them nothing.  There was nothing to attract them.  There was nothing to exploit.  The desert was the region in which in which the Chosen people had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone.  They could have reached the promised land in a few months if they traveled directly to it.  God’s plan was that they should learn to love him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.”

The wilderness comes in many forms.  Our founder Father Sill left his monastery on the Hudson River to go out into the wilderness to found a school, one that would be different from the other Eastern prep schools.  It would be a school for young men of modest means.  His initial fundraising efforts yielded a mere $300, but he kept going forward.  I can’t even imagine the number of times this school might have failed.  But Father Sill persisted, and I have no doubt that he believed he was guided by God.  All of the little details of running a school were put in the light of God’s guidance, including the construction of this beautiful chapel where students might learn about the ways in which we are always part of God’s plan.  What a wonderful journey this school has had, and all of us get to play a part in a school that is now thriving.  It is humbling to be in this space together with the past in mind.  We should always look back to the wilderness of our origins as an idyllic time.  The wilderness is now a land of promise for all of us.     

So back to Jesus and his interrogation.  How much do we owe to God?  The only answer is the one that makes us whole: the answer is everything.  There is not my life and God’s reality.  There is only our life.  One life together.  We cannot stand on our own in the face of such a debt; but we stand by grace, and faith, and the love that surpasses understanding. 

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

In Pleasantville, After the Fall

This past Friday I was able to sneak away from campus for a motorcycle ride.  This is one of the keys to maintaining my sanity, such as it is.  On the ride, I was stunned by the beauty of this river valley where we live.  The weather was like a summer day, yet the turning of the leaves had begun on some of the trees; for others, the golden transformation would come at a later day.  I had to stop on more than one occasion to take it all in.  I watched ducks fishing with their bottoms up, which always cheers me for some reason.  What a great way to look for food.  And yet with so much beauty in the world, many of our students were saying goodbye to Raul at his funeral in New York City.  How does the human heart hold such dichotomies at the same time?  How do we hold it all together without breaking apart?  Even as I went through the routines of my week, Raul and his family and friends were never far from my thoughts and prayers. 

Our community was going so many different directions this week.  For our Jewish students, Rosh Hashanah began last Wednesday, celebrating the Jewish New Year of 5775.  The Jewish High Holy Days will end next Friday with Yom Kippur.  On Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish New Year, apples are dipped in honey in the hopes of a sweet new year.  Rosh Hashanah is a celebration of the precious gift of creation—of sacred life itself.  It is the birthday of the world.  But the Jewish High Holy Days end with the Day of Atonement on Yom Kippur, the day of forgiveness which is much darker in its divine power.  It is a calling to repentance.  During the High Holy Days, the Jewish people are called to reach out to those they have hurt or wronged, in ways both large and small.  The High Holy Days, taken as a whole, include both the power of creation yet also the call to repentance to participate in the beauty of creation.  New beginnings involve soul searching during the turning colors of fall.      

As I tried to make sense of beauty and repentance together, along with love and sorrow, I was reminded of the movie Pleasantville.  It is an excellent autumn movie.  The film came out quite a while ago, in 1998.  The movie is about a perfect television world, a utopia, where there is no pain.  But there is no growth either.  Within the movie, Pleasantville is a 1950s style television show portrayed in black and white.  The show is centered on a perfect family called the Parkers.  They have no problems, and everything turns out just right for them, every time.  There are no arguments, no pain, no aging, no divorce, and certainly no death.  Even the temperature never changes: it’s always 72 degrees.  The basketball team never loses.  Into this utopian world of television are transported a regular pair of high school students from our complicated world named David (played by Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (played by Reese Witherspoon).  The twin siblings try not to interfere with the black and white world, but things begin to change, imperceptibly at first.  The new reality begins with a red rose in full color, blooming at night.  But soon the perfect black and white colors begin to change in wider ripples, following after the rose.   As Ralph Waldo Emerson said of roses in his essay “Self-Reliance:”

            “Man is timid and apologetic.  He is no longer upright.  He dares not say, ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage.  He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose.  These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they exist with God to-day.  There is no time to them.  There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence…Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature in all moments alike…When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of a brook and the rustle of the corn.”

            Because of the arrival of David and Jennifer, the perfect world of Pleasantville is blown apart.  It begins with flowers, but moves onto people.  Black and white characters burst as if into flame, into full color like in The Wizard of Oz.  They become “colored” in the language of the film.  A strong surge of emotion seems to trigger the transformation to full color, and the new identities are not timid, or apologetic anymore.  They are standing upright, as Emerson hoped for in “Self-Reliance.”  They are human—they have discovered their full humanity.  Some of the transformations are inspired by romance, but this is not true in every case.  Jennifer—the Reese Witherspoon character—finds her deeper humanity by reading a book, and David discovers his true identity by defending himself in a fist fight.  The town fathers—still in black and white—fear the independence of the colored people, and eventually put David on trial for the chain of events he has set in motion.  The judge gets so angry that he bursts into full color himself.  The trial becomes a beautiful chaos, with even the town fathers in full bloom. 

The movie Pleasantville urges compassion, in every direction.  The events that give others their full humanity may be different from how you discover your true self.  Pain comes to everyone, and pain has come to us this week.  We all feel differently.  We all grieve differently.  But grieving we are.  And yet the good things in life are still good.  Creation, in all of its majesty and awe, is still here, but it is no black and white utopia.  We live in a reality aflame with color where there is danger, peril, illness, death, and yet great beauty all around us.  Our full humanity can be recognized, one person at a time, and we look at each other in full color this morning.  Grief is not far from us, but neither is the love of God who made things the way they are.     

            The gospel reading from Matthew deepens our awareness of what it means to be fully human.  The scene is in the temple, and an argument takes place, one which foreshadows the trial of Jesus.  In the visual lexicon of Pleasantville, Jesus represents the world of color, his antagonists the black and white status quo.  Everything has changed because of Jesus’ presence, and the chief priests and elders want to know why—by whose authority is Jesus doing these things?  The chief priests and elders live in the safety of the past.  They are timid and apologetic, and they are afraid of the upright personal religion that Jesus is sharing with his followers.  They see its danger, especially in the appeal to his growing followers.  This isn’t the trial of Jesus—not yet, so Jesus answers their question with a question.

            “I will ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will tell you by what authority I do these things.  Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” 

            They can’t answer the question.  Not because they don’t know the answer, but because the right answer won’t produce the desired political outcome.  How often does this happen in our world?  So Jesus doesn’t answer their question, but he does offer a parable of two brothers.  One son refuses to work in the field of his father, but eventually does, while the second son agrees to go, but then changes his mind.  “Which of the two did the will of his father?” Jesus asks.  This parable is so apolitical and innocuous that even the chief priests and elders get it right.  You may say no to God at first right now, but, when the time comes, you change your mind and go to work in God’s field.        

The two brothers represent the choices we have about how to respond to the gift of life, the invitation of creation, even when invaded by sorrow.  We’re asked to go to work for God right now.  As the leaves begin to change, so do our hearts—they are heavy, hopeful, overflowing, and open to the Spirit of God.  We walk upright in full color.   

The gospel from Matthew is not specific about the kind of work needed in the father’s field by the two brothers.  But after the week behind us, I imagine the command is this: Take care of each other.  The command goes out to every member of the Kent School community.  Take care of each other now, and in the days to come. 

The Kosher Boxer: A New Spirit of Adoption

            A few years ago, I spent my spare time going to boxing matches, mostly in the New York City area.  If this seems like odd behavior for a clergyman, you’re just going to have to deal with it.  My passion for boxing is somehow different from the other sports I love.  It is a sport of mystery, and paradox—where you remember that things are not always what they seem to be.  And I think you will hear a sense of mystery in the story of a summer evening when I attended a championship fight in New York City, at the Hammerstein Ballroom in the Manhattan Center. 

Attending a prizefight is a unique anthropological experience.  The scene outside the Manhattan Center?  The best word for it —here’s a Kent word that evokes a rich and textured seediness—the scene was sketchy.  I joined the fight crowd, the many gangster types, wearing a Kent tie.  Not a single person besides me was wearing a necktie.  It is sometimes said that the human face is the construction of the mind.  If this is the case, then everyone there should have been arrested.  Except for me, I’ve got a tie. 

            Just to pick up my ticket at will call, I underwent, and survived, the most invasive pat down in my life.  All pockets were emptied, metal wands were swiped.  Not even in an airport have I been so thoroughly investigated, my necktie notwithstanding. 

And I passed the test.  I found my seat in the balcony above the ring, and I sat back to enjoy the 5 early fights on the under card. 

And that’s when things took a strange and unexpected turn.

            In the row right in front of me, three young men in yarmulkes sat down.  Before I could do a double take, two old men in black hats, long beards, and black coats walked down the aisle; they might just as well have walked out of 19^th Century Poland.  The incongruity of these growing sights at a prizefight was startling.  Something new and strange was in the air.  In a span of maybe thirty minutes, the arena was wholly transformed.  My section filled up.  With Jews.  I was swallowed completely in some kind of Jewish rooting section, and the flags of Israel began to wave.  It was absolutely tribal.  But there was also something more, a new spirit moving among all of us.  Some days have a unique energy.  This summer night had a soul. 

            “What’s the story here?” I asked the man seated next to me.  I had heard enough of his conversation with his friends to know that he was a medical student; and that he and his other medical student friends, all Jewish, had never been to a boxing match in their lives. 

            “What do you mean?” he asked me.

            “Well, this is not a typical fight scene.”

            “More like a synagogue on Friday night?” he asked.

            “Yes.  So what’s going on?”

            “It’s all because of Dmitri.”

            As the championship bout approached, my neighbor told me the story of Dmitri “Star of David” Salita.  Otherwise known as the Kosher Boxer.  He is the only Jewish fighter in professional boxing (there have been just a few in the 20^th Century).  Dmitri is an Orthodox Jew, and completely observant.  He grew up in the city of Odessa, in the Ukraine.  His first experiences of boxing were all on the receiving in the end—the many beatings he experienced as the only Jewish kid in his neighborhood.  His mother had a dream of a different way of life for her only son: in America.  His mother also had cancer.

            Dmitri’s mother was dying just as her family arrived in New York City.  Her son stayed by her bedside day and night, and the family of a Jewish patient in the same room was moved by his devotion.  They took young Dmitri to pray at their synagogue.  They might just as well have adopted him.  The entire synagogue wrapped their arms around the boy, in every conceivable way; and they never let him go.  And the boy became a man.   A spirit of adoption, of God’s presence, came through the love and affection of the second family, the synagogue, and a special rabbi; they got him through the worst experience in his life: the death of his mother.  So Dmitri began to practice his Jewish faith, the faith he had never followed in the Ukraine, the one he had hidden trying to fit in.  And in the meantime, he became an extraordinary boxer.  As the Orthodox community of Flatbush, Brooklyn, once took him into their hearts and lives, he has likewise adopted the entire Jewish community of New York, and beyond.  And I for one did not feel like I was on the outside of his unfurling story.  I was part of a big Jewish group hug at a prizefight. 

            So back at ringside, we all stood as the lights went out for Dmitri’s entrance into the ring.  A soulful song rose from the darkness, a song of the heart, and its beautiful depths.  Lights came on the stage of the Hammerstein Ballroom, and a band, seemingly appearing out of nowhere, played a slow reggae version of Hava Nagila.  Half of the band looked like they were from Phish, the other half from the cast of Fiddler on the Roof. 

            “Who are they?” I asked my neighbor.

            “Oh, that’s the Orthodox Reggae Band.”

            “What?  You gotta be kiddin’ me.”

            “Nope.  These guys are terrific.”

            And they were.  The lead singer, separate from the band, emerged from the shadows, in black hat and beard; the singer led the Orthodox boxing entourage out of the crowd and into the ring.  The song rose in intensity, going faster and faster, a summer swoon ripened to spiritual perfection.  Everyone in the arena was standing.  Goose bumps were now commonplace; everyone had them.  A spotlight fell on the boxer as he walked slowly towards the ring.  His face was hidden under his blue hood, and he wore the Star of David up and down his matching sky blue boxing trunks.  The scene transcended athletics, certainly.  It was liturgical, like what we do, or should do, in church. 

Finally, the boxer and the singer stood before each other.  In the center of the ring.  The reggae singer put his right hand upon his own heart.  Then he reached out and touched the boxer on his heart  It was Dmitri who had brought everyone together.  With his strength, dignity, sportsmanship, loyalty, love, and his courage.  Even after Dmitri won his first boxing championship nine rounds later, the first thing he did was seek out the talented fighter from Mexico, who was also undefeated, to embrace him.  A sense of deep respect was everywhere.

            I have thought back many times to the spirit of adoption that was in the air that night.  A spirit of adoption is very much part of the Kent experience right now as we begin another year.  Bonding is happening everywhere you look, from new classes to athletic teams-- from the dorms to the advisory you will eat with tonight.  This new spirit of adoption can be as simple as explaining the many mysteries of Kent School to someone who is new. 

            A spirit of adoption is much more than being nice; it is more than simply doing the right thing in terms of your own ethical conduct.  It means taking another person into your heart, sometimes into your own home in an hour of need.  There is no doubt that a spirit of adoption, whether you give it or receive it, can change your life, as it did for Dmitri Salita.  It can change the way you see everyone around you, and all of the boundaries that divide us.  The time we get to spend together is precious; it doesn’t last forever.  Embrace the change that is all around us right now, and embrace each other in the name of the one God.  You won’t regret it.  Have a great night and a wonderful year.  Let us rejoice and be glad.    

 

Reverse Hospitality and the Dog Days of August

Life is messy.  But theology is clean.  In Matthew’s gospel this morning, Jesus attempts to clarify definitions of clean and unclean, the crucial dividing line between Jew and Gentile.  In so doing he offends the Pharisees whom he calls “the blind leading the blind.”  In this sweeping teaching, Jesus essentially rejects the Purity Codes—all of them--by arguing that defilement comes from inside a person, and not from an outside source: “Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”

This is an extremely significant change in theology for Jesus as a Jewish teacher.  Kosher laws are now obsolete, Jesus is saying.  It is a shocking interpretation, potentially eliminating any distinction between Jews and non-Jews as people of faith.  The new teaching is arguably the most important thing that Jesus has done in Matthew’s gospel up to this point. 
 Theology is clean.  Life is messy.  After this new theology, Jesus has to confront messy life.  He is tested.  A Canaanite woman comes to Jesus for help, and he treats her as if she were unclean.  He talks to her just like a Pharisee would.  The blind leading the blind.

“’I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.’  But she came and knelt before him, saying, ’Lord, help me.’  He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’”

Yes, Jesus calls the woman a dog.  She is sub-human in their initial interaction.  In doing so, he has failed in his new theology.  It is only the Purity Codes, which Jesus has eliminated, that would make this rejection explicable.  Yet Jesus still rejects her.  He makes a mistake.  But the woman, whose daughter is possessed, doesn’t give up: “’Yes Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.’”

The woman is then accepted, her daughter is healed, and Jesus’s own world gets larger by being able to see people of faith outside the boundary of Judaism: “’Woman, great is your faith!  Let it be done as you wish.’”  This gospel is a wonderful moment where we get to see Jesus actually grow.  

The Canaanite woman, our ancestor mother, becomes a child of God.  But so too does Jesus, and that’s when things get really interesting. 
I recently discovered a new theological concept in my ministry: I call it reverse hospitality.  We know about hospitality, or at least we think we do.  Jesus’s theology is based on it, once he figures things out with the Canaanite woman.  When we welcome the stranger, we welcome God into our world.  Hospitality is at the heart of the gospel; we are called to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.  So what is reverse hospitality? 

Just a few summers ago, I began a new ministry with the Seamen’s Church Institute.  I worked as a maritime chaplain and ship’s visitor at the Port of Newark, and this work introduced me to the aforementioned new concept: reverse hospitality.  As a school chaplain, I get to do many interesting things in the summer months, like being with you this morning, and next week too. 
  
So what did I do at the Port of Newark?  First of all, I boarded ships.  Lots of them: container ships, oil tankers, salt ships, scrap metal ships, car ships, and even an orange juice tanker from Brazil.  I boarded as many as five ships a day at the port.  I visited the crews, and I was always available for counseling.  I also did bank deposits, which got the sailors’ pay back to their families in their home countries.  Many of these sailors supported not just their wife and children, but entire extended families as well.  I sold phone cards, at no profit, which allowed the sailors to call their loved ones, often on phones they borrowed from us.  I took sailors to the mall.  I also prayed with them, and heard about their hopes and struggles.  I made friends with people from all over the world.  I met Russians, Ukrainians, Serbians, Croatians, Indians, Montenegrins (I found them particularly charming), Italians (they had the best food), Germans, Saudis, Koreans, Chinese, Swedes, Finns, Brits, Germans, and the list goes on.  Some of the Scandinavian ships were coed. I met two men from a tiny island in the Marshall Islands that is sinking, and will eventually be underwater.  Many of the crew members were under enormous stress.  Some of the sailors are at sea for nine months at a time.  Nine months on, three months off.  When I boarded ships, I was there to welcome them to the United States and to the Port of Newark.  I welcomed them in the name of my country, and in the name of the church.  

But when I welcomed them, something else happened to me at the same time. 

The crew welcomed me.  Not every time, but sometimes enough that it brought tears to my eyes.  In welcoming them, they instead embraced me even more deeply.  Reverse hospitality.  In many ways, it’s like being a guest preacher in a new place.  On the ships, the symbol of this new friendship often came in the form of an invitation to join them for lunch.  The meals were memorable, like Thanksgiving every day.  The food was as varied as the crews, and I didn’t always know what I was eating.  I ate some fish I had never heard of.  I ate roots as a main dish, along with more American fare.  Needless to say, I became fascinated by the galleys, and the cooks.  I was being treated as a special guest, like a member of their family.  The differences between us didn’t seem so big.  It was a kind of Holy Communion, a spiritual meal, which is what our Great Thanksgiving was in the first century for early Christians.  I felt cared for.  I was something more than an American.  I was a neighbor to the world.  I felt loved in a way both simple and direct; I was a child of God.  That’s what I was trying to make them feel, and yet it came through loud and clear to me.  Maybe they felt it too.  I haven’t been able to get the idea of reverse hospitality out of my mind.  It was mystical and totally ordinary at the same time.  A small taste of heaven in the busy world.  In New Jersey of all places.  
                         
As I thought about the spiritual breakthrough of Jesus this morning, and my own recent experience of reverse hospitality, the writer and professor C.S. Lewis came to mind--in particular, his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy.  Many of you know Lewis as the writer of the Chronicles of Narnia, but he was also a literature professor at Oxford University.  The book Surprised by Joy documents his spiritual journey and his reluctant conversion to Christianity. 

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” 

The conversion was not what he wanted.  Lewis realized that in every passing joy there is something more than the passing experience.  There is something more than joy.  Enjoyment has a residue, a signature, a lingering shadow of the giver.  Blessing has a source, and Lewis finally turned, however reluctantly, to face the giver; the joy of man’s desiring is God. 

“I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I, so to speak, lay my finger and say, ‘This is it,’ had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed….All said, in the last resort, ‘It is not I.  I am a reminder.  Look!  Look!  What do I remind you of?’  I desired Joy itself.  Joy itself, considered simply as an event of my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all.  In a way, I had proved this by elimination.  I had tried everything in my own mind and body; as it were, asking myself, ‘Is it this you want?’ Is it this?’”

For Lewis, joy pointed to something more, and he learns to look for that ultimate source.  In Surprised by Joy, Lewis begins to see joy as the gateway to the Absolute, which is a real presence; he begins to look past the transitory experience to the ultimate reality of the eternal God.  Each of us comes to God a little differently.  But the title Surprised by Joy has a more personal meaning for C.S. Lewis.  Lewis had been a lifelong bachelor, but he makes the decision to marry an American woman named Joy Davidman.  He is not in love with her, and she knows it.  Lewis marries her because she has terminal cancer, and he promises to take care of her two boys after her death, which he does.  This relationship was the subject of the beautiful film called Shadowlands.  The marriage is an act of Christian hospitality.  As I mentioned, Lewis is not in love, not motivated by passion.  He is just trying to do the right thing, even though his decision scandalizes his friends and colleagues at Oxford because Joy is divorced (she’s also very leftwing…).  But then he gets to know Joy.  He has never met anyone like this feisty, opinionated, penetrating woman who is dying without complaining.  And she is able to see the famous Lewis in a way that no one else could; she was made to understand him.  He begins to feel that his act of hospitality is giving a gift to him instead, the greatest one he has ever received in his life.  Reverse hospitality.  Joy changes everything about his life.  Lewis begins to pray to God for the woman he now loves as husband.  He falls for her two boys too.  Lewis prays like he never has before.  Joy’s bone cancer goes into remission, and they truly become husband and wife, physically and spiritually.  It is a sacred gift for both of them.  Yet Lewis still looks for the giver, even when Joy’s cancer comes back—even when she dies, as we all must.  What kind of God would give him the gift of this extraordinary woman?  A God of love, a God surpassing anything we can imagine.  In Shadowlands, Lewis is asked by one of his friends if he thinks prayer can change God. 

Lewis replies.   
“It doesn’t change God, it changes me.”  

When Lewis offers hospitality to Joy, joy literally transforms his life.  Likewise the Canaanite woman liberates Jesus, and he never looks back.  The messy world becomes clean because the theology is now impeccable.  There is something behind every joy you experience, and it can be the center of your life.  When you welcome others into the love of God, God welcomes you too, as a child of God, as the beloved.  When you make room for God in your life, God makes room for you in this universe, forever—a love without end.  True joy can be yours.  And what’s behind it is even better.   

Behind the Ropes: An Outsider’s Guide to the PGA in New England

“Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.”

Since I have been known to travel thousands of miles for a PGA event, I had no choice but to pull myself away from the World Cup this week to travel to the River Highlands course in Cromwell, Connecticut, twelve miles from Hartford.  The Travelers (no apostrophe) Golf Championship was in my backyard, after all.  So I attended alone on Friday and then with my daughter for the action on Saturday.  I made sure my attendance did not interfere with watching Holland and the United States in the World Cup.  Now some would call me a hacker, but hackers live by hope.  I do not.  As a player, I am hopeless.  I am also a hopeless addict of the game (watching the Irish Open right now…).  I live by suffering and realism instead of hope—it’s safer territory, and I also identify with professional golfers who struggle mightily, the ones who never seem to get the big win.  So, I am something less than a hacker because success just confuses me on the course.  I am a spectator, a thinker, a golf intellectual. 

I love golf because I remain an outsider.  I have coached basketball for sixteen years, and I can barely watch a game now without getting totally frustrated, or shouting out instructions, which is annoying to others, and to myself.  That’s what the insider experience will eventually do to you.  Being on the inside of basketball has brought me pain, even though my overall record is above .500.  So outside is good.  I linger on the outside of the country clubs, and behind the ropes at PGA events.  The ropes keep my relationship to the game very clear. 

The Travelers Championship this year in New England was chock full of no name players.  Even those high on the leader board for the last four days were not household names to serious fans, which I am.   Perhaps this was the result of the U.S. Open being just the week before; many of the big names were missing, and taking a much needed break before the coming summer tournaments.

 As the daily pairings were offered to the arriving fans by volunteers, I overheard a man asking his friend, “Am I supposed to know who these players are?”

I was thinking the exact same thing, and the answer was no.  This field even included a player named Noh.  This prompted dialogue possibilities like Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on first?” routine to run through my mind. 
 “Do you know who that guy is?”
 “Noh.”
 “I wonder if anyone knows.”
 “I told you, ‘Noh.’”
 “Does the PGA know?”
 “Yes, of course, they know, it’s ‘Noh.’”

This imagined dialogue scrolled through my mind for quite a few holes until I got sick of it.  By the way, Seung-Yui Noh hails from Irving, Texas, according to the tournament guide, one that included descriptions of the eighteen holes and a small map of the River Highland course. 

For a golf spectator, even a seasoned one, walking onto an unfamiliar course is always a learning experience.  This course is brand spanking new.  All courses are different, and the map in the spectator guide doesn’t help as much as it should.  You have to get out and walk a bit to get a feel for the place.  You don’t need a plan, just a desire to wander.  Golf is about walking, even for the casual fan, and it should be noted that golf spectators are usually in pretty good shape.  They’re dedicated walkers.  The American blubber condition is not on display, and I saw only one truly overweight person in two days (and five African Americans, so you can make of that what you will).  I wanted to ask the big guy some questions for the blog, but I decided that would be impolite. 

The disorientation of a new course is a wonderful awakening, as you try to figure out what the course designer had in mind: how the natural surroundings and the experience of the player on the holes would fit together.  The disorientation goes away rather quickly: as the layout of the course becomes part of one’s walking experience, and you start to notice the curves and puzzle pieces of the holes together.  At River Highlands, the walk from fifth to the sixth hole is far too long—for both the fans and players, and a fan can’t follow the players from the drivable par four 15th to the popular par three over water on the 16th.  You have to walk quite a spell to reconnect on the 17th with your players.  But every course has its quirks, its secrets, which a television experience can’t really give you.  You have to be on the ground. 

Understanding the course layout is a kind of epiphany, a kind of invitation.  But for me the true moment of invitation is when an errant shot comes my way.  This happened for me when Charlie Wi, one of the no names, nearly hit me on the first hole.  His ball landed in the rough just a few feet from my station behind the ropes.  Suddenly the tournament was personal, it had really begun.  These errant shots truly charm my daughter Beatrice as well.  The foul ball in baseball is a similar moment (likewise with potential danger), but no baseball player walks into the crowd to play the next shot.    
Golf is just different in many respects.  No other sporting event demands library conditions for the work of the players as volunteers and marshals hold “Quiet” signs.  Total silence and zero movement are required when a player is taking a shot.  The Quiet signs look like they could be used as paddles if you refuse to follow orders.  Cheers, almost always positive, are acceptable once the ball is struck.  “In the hole!” is the popular cry, but there is the bizarre and yet regular “mashed potatoes!”  No one knows why people shout this, but I threw in a “crème brulee!” just to keep things lively in the same vein.  No one seemed to think this was funny, so I gave it a rest.  A high percentage of golf fans (and players) are Republican, so maybe they thought I was too far out of the box, some kind of subversive who supports the current president, which I do.  But I suspect a high percentage of the GOP really likes crème brulee.  Personally, I love the stuff, can't get enough.  

Despite all the quiet and respect for players’ concentration, there is also quite a lot of freedom on the course.  The librarian law and order government yields completely at some other interesting points.  You can certainly drink on the course (hard liquor is often available if you look for it).  There is also no stigma if you think you need a beer (or Bloody Mary) at…eight in the morning.  Of course, I avoid these hazards.  And, amazingly, you can smoke wherever and whenever you want.  Stogies are plentiful, so your cigar smoke can waft over players on the green.  That’s kosher as long as you’re quiet and don’t move, and can wait until contact to shout “mashed potatoes” or “dry martini.”  I happen to roll my own cigarettes, which I consider to be a hobby, and this drew none of the usual looks of concern.  In other venues, people think I’m firing up the wacky, and I casually explain (for giggles), “It’s medicinal.”  This is just how the Native Americans thought of tobacco, by the way.   You can look it up.

The spectator experience at a PGA event eventually demands a fundamental choice: seeking or dwelling.  Do you want to see most every golfer from the same spot?  If so, you are a dweller.  Or do you want to get maximum exercise by traveling with a group and seeing the whole course?  Then you are a seeker.  I am a seeker (no relation to Harry Potter).  I am on a spiritual quest.  Seekers travel six to eight miles by following a group, sometimes dealing with steep inclines along the way.  For two days I followed Billy Hurley III, one of my three favorite golfers.  I have a soft spot for service academy athletes, which may seem strange for me as a proud West Point dropout.  But there it is.  Hurley not only graduated from the Naval Academy, he taught Quantitative Economics there for two years.  He served on two ships during his full five year commitment, and now he has made it to the PGA Tour.  Jason Dufner is my all time favorite golfer, but he took the week off.  Dufner is like an unmade bed, a shaggy dog, a pair of old shoes that you can’t throw away.  He’s the guy in your fraternity whom you actually liked.  Dufner struggled for years on the lesser tours before winning a major last year at the PGA Championship in his late thirties.  He also chews tobacco quite openly while playing, and I’ve been up close when he pops out his big wad of chew.  I admire any sport where you enjoy a tobacco product while competing at the highest levels.  My last favorite is Lee Westwood.  The man has won forty times in the United States, Europe, and Asia, but he is invariably asked about why he hasn’t won a major.  Westwood always answers politely.  I want him to hoist one of the big trophies before he retires.   

Seekers on the course will have a story of the tournament that is particular to the player followed, one strand on the great narrative web of the players competing against each other.  A dweller can see nearly everyone with a narrative of the tournament as a whole, but they haven’t experienced the course.  You can always seek by following the leaders, but that’s not my style, unless my player happens to be in the lead.  Then it all comes together, and the grand story of the tournament will be precisely my own.  That’s when the seeker and the dweller become one, in the golden moment for the spectator behind the ropes.  I’m at an age where being faithful is more important than being successful.  The golden moment, the holy grail, didn’t happen for me at the Travelers, but the stories of the seeker are always successful in their own way with the details of the course—and a good walk unspoiled. 

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob on a Field of Dreams: In Defense of Baseball Polygamy

I sometimes flirt with books at bookstores.  I give them sideways looks, and the occasional meaningful glance.  Then I’ll pick them up, only briefly, a mild skimming.  But for some reason I’m not ready for commitment--not yet, even though a real connection is there.  I come back a few days later, slink back to the shadowy aisle in question.  I visit the row where the sparks were lively.  Is the magic still there?  Then, finally, I grab the book in a seemingly impulsive flourish, and whirl to the cashier, for consummation. 

I had such a coquettish courtship for several visits with the book Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game at the local independent bookstore.  Though they are a dying breed, like the church and mainline denominations, I love independent bookstores.  And for whatever reason, and questionable taste, I love the church.  If we are dinosaurs, let us remember how much all kids really love dinosaurs.  There are worse things to be in this world. 

But back to baseball and theology.

I was intrigued by the title, but I worried about any Christian piety, especially because this book seemed to be going about its baseball musings in a Judeo Christian framework.  If Ray Kinsella, the mystical Iowan corn farmer in Field of Dreams (1989), had mentioned Jesus, or Moses, just once, it would have ruined the film, but the movie was absolutely theological.  They now show it on Turner Classic Movies, which makes me feel very old.  In my reading past, I have devoured books about Zen Buddhism and sports, from the likes of Phil Jackson and the former Dodger and Met Shawn Green, but I worried about baseball and God from the Western religious traditions.  I have also done quite a bit of baseball theology from the pulpit, and I always get oddly nervous when a book is too much in my wheelhouse.  This book certainly was.
 
The author of Baseball as a Road to God is John Sexton, the fifteenth President of New York University, who used material from his class of the same title to shape the book’s theology.  I’m not sure why he needed the help of Thomas Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz, but there they are on the cover, cited for their baseball and/or theological wisdom.  The course at NYU is geared towards helping undergraduates create an intellectual and personal context for the ineffable.  As any mystic will tell you, or not tell you if they’re really mystical, the ineffable is hard to talk about.  Words fail.  They’re bound too much to culture—they are the very currency of one’s culture.  That’s why Buddhists prefer silence.  Christians and Jews, however, like to yap about a personal God, our loaded and problematic term for the ineffable.  As for other fields, science isn’t generally helpful with the ineffable (and the religious faith it generates).  Theology is the best field to talk about the ineffable, and how it can be found in baseball, according to Sexton: “Whatever its particular manifestation, faith is an affirmation of something that cannot be expressed, for it is rooted in another domain of knowledge, one that is unknowable in scientific terms.”

Fortunately, this baseball theology from John Sexton is not Billy Graham at all, but rather more like Meister Eckhart in its style, or St. John of the Cross, for its capacity to both absorb and articulate the power of suffering, and the joy of partisan baseball endurance: in a religious context with one’s chosen team.  Baseball is just different from other sports.  It abandons time in its system of order--of outs and innings, and the game and the park become a sacred space for the players and the fans alike, as Sexton claims: “In this and many other ways, baseball creates and lives the cyclical, repetitive liturgy and sacramental time of religion.”

John Sexton makes active use of the wonderful and articulate baseball theology done by others: John Updike (who is even better with golf theology), the mystical novelist W.P. Kinsella (whose main character also bears the author’s last name), and the former President of Yale and Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti.  The President of NYU definitely channels the late President of Yale whose passion for baseball was unbounded. 

For Sexton, a major baseball motif is a sense of brokenness and a longing for home.  Everything comes back to home in baseball.  Baseball requires, if one is to be successful, a separation from home, by three stations, and a return when the runners—the former hitters—are somehow changed by the journey.  They score; they return to the fraternity of dugout and clubhouse.  It all comes back to where it started.  But none of this happens safely; there is always peril.  Baseball seems to have a knack for breaking one’s heart, while inviting, on a mystical level, a deeper commitment to secrets, mystical coincidences, and anomalies.  In the words of Sexton:

“Faith is often the handmaiden of hard work, intellectual and otherwise.  In religion thinkers have often tried to use reason to convince others to join them in the faith.  Much ink has been spilled, for example, on various philosophical arguments designed to ‘prove’ God’s existence.  I find it interesting that the argumentative style and logical structure of some of these arguments have parallels used—with equal force—to suggest that something more than coincidence is involved in some of baseball’s delightful anomalies.”

The hard, personal work of religious faith began with Sexton’s love for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and how they embodied the joy and sorrow of his childhood.  Listening to Dodger games on the radio was a magical experience, a scrolling narrative of imagination in every Brooklyn neighborhood.  (At the time of the Dodgers, Brooklyn was the fourth largest city in the United States.)  Going to the park, to little Ebbets Field, was heaven itself.  Sacred places and sacred time at the park require partisanship, and this partisanship creates the suffering, and the glory.  Many baseball thinkers from New York never got over the Brooklyn Dodgers, who won one World Series in 1955.  The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn, is the best book about this fascinating and lovable crew, including captain Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and, of course, Jackie Robinson.  The Dodgers won the World Series in 1955, but they left Brooklyn in 1958, when Walter O’Malley moved his team to Los Angeles.  The New York Giants also left New York and the Polo Grounds in 1958.  Major League Baseball required that if the Dodgers were going to move, they would have to add another West Coast team.  The Giants, my team, came along in the deal and settled in at windy Candlestick Park, a recurring setting in my own childhood and coming of age.  
  
1955 and 1958, there is the theodicy.  The childhood high of victory is eclipsed by heartbreak, abandonment, and intellectual adulthood.  What is one to do?  What moves are available for the baseball lover in 1958?  John Sexton does what many Dodgers fans did for a few years; they rooted for the Los Angeles Dodgers, from 3,000 miles away.  But this was never going to be enough.  Some gave up baseball entirely.  Most refused to root for the Yankees.  The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a former Brooklyn Dodger lover herself, writes of her own conversion to the Boston Red Sox in the introduction to Baseball as a Road to God.  In the book, John Sexton records his religious conversion to the New York Yankees.  I do not dislike the Yankees (or the Red Sox), but I admire those who waited for the New York Mets in 1962, the local team that I have now adopted fully, without diminishing my love for the Giants.
 
Though this may seem immoral, it can be done.  I did it.     

Baseball love affairs are often very complicated, with a nasty thorn for every petal of beauty.  I have lived on the East Coast since 1999, and in the Tri-state area from 2004 to the present.   I found it difficult to follow a team 3,000 miles from my home.  I needed something more.  My current predicament as a baseball polygamist, like Abraham and Jacob, is unusual, but there are others like me who have found the Mets irresistible.  Because of World Series victories in 1969 and 1986, they are much more than lovable losers.  Yet no one will ever accuse you of jumping on the bandwagon if you choose the Mets as your team.  Some baseball lovers and theologians may never understand this position, but here is my apologia, simply stated, and defended.  I love, and root for, two baseball teams: the San Francisco Giants and the New York Mets.  I love Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Leah, and don’t get me started on King Solomon. 

Can this be done?  Is it legal?  Does Major League Baseball approve of this kind of hooking up?  Will free love undermine the institution of marriage? 

“If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” 

Just to complicate matters before clarifying them, I also root for Army and Navy, Cal and Stanford.  Does it ever get confusing?  All the time.  The heart is a fickle organ, and the heart is more faithful to the ineffable than the mind.  As a Giants fan, I do not dislike the Los Angeles Dodgers because of Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese (the captain who supported his black teammate), Sandy Koufax, Shawn Green, and Roger Kahn (the aforementioned writer, and beat journalist for the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s).  Koufax and Green both took public stands for their Jewish faith during their playing careers.  You can look it up.  I live and breathe in the Switzerland of sports.  I blame my education at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and its mascot the Banana Slug (who has no known predators) for my sporting bipartisanship, and free love.  UCSC students tend to look at the world a little differently.  My romantic relationships with sports teams are not normal, and you are right to still be skeptical.  Sexton also makes it clear in his book that doubt is not the absence of faith; it is the beginning. 
 
Ok, here’s why being a baseball polygamist like me is theologically defensible--even coherent, but hardly scientific.  What was the original name of the New York Giants?  The Metropolitans.  The Mets.  They became the Giants in the 1890s.  What were the colors of the old New York Giants (and still the colors of the San Francisco Giants)?  Orange and black.  The Dodgers?  Blue and white.  The New York Mets in 1962?  Orange and blue.  Colors can communicate something at a deep level.  The original ownership team of the New York Mets invoked the National League history of New York City by team name and colors, and thousands of heartbroken Giants and Dodgers fans embraced the lovable New York Mets.  I am numbered among them, strangely faithful to both coasts, and to history.  What happens when the Giants play the Mets, like the weekend past?  I’m happy either way.  And sad too. 

You know that Abraham must have seen a few cat-fights between Sarah and Hagar.  From the biblical record, Solomon seemed to be an able mediator of disputes among women.
    
Religious conversion doesn’t happen just once.  It comes again and again, winding deeper into your heart and soul.  Flirting with the Mets has become a lifelong commitment in my adulthood as I pursue, and cultivate by faith, the ineffable in baseball and religion.  You can too.  Conversion becomes the sacramental rite of Confirmation.  So I stand up for the Giants and the Mets.  Combining unlikely bedfellows shouldn’t be so strange, according to John Sexton.  He did it with baseball and theology.  For those who find their love of God strangely close to their love of baseball, this slim book is right in your wheelhouse.  So swing away! 

Let’s go, Mets!