1
Sermon on the Mound
Matthew 28: 1-10
Sid Batts
First Presbyterian Church
Greensboro, North Carolina
April 20, 2014
New Bridge Bank Park
Easter Sunday
Yogi Berra was a Hall of Fame catcher for the Yankees but is most famous for his Yogi-isms.
One day he was behind the plate when a hitter came to bat and made the sign of the cross. Yogi
said to him, “Can we just leave God out of this, okay?”
But some walk into baseball stadiums and see cathedrals, cathedrals where a game is played that
reveals spiritual truths about life, ourselves, and an Easter God.
It was October 1951, and it was the deciding game of the National League playoffs between the
Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. It was a comeback of biblical proportions that the
Giants were even there. In August they were thirteen games behind the league-leading Dodgers
but proceeded to win seventeen games in a row and then in late September won the last seven
games of the season to force a play-off.
In the deciding game of a three-game play-off, the Dodgers were ahead four to one going into the
bottom of the ninth inning. Dodger fans began leaving their seats hoping to get near the field to
rush out in the after-game celebration. The Dodger pitcher, future Hall of Famer Don Newcombe
was getting tired and he gave up a run to make it four to two. Then two more runners reached
base. Up to the plate came Bobby Thomson. Dodger manager Charlie Dressen decided to bring
in Ralph Branca. On deck for the Giants was the amazing rookie, Willie Mays.
Branca was no slouch pitcher. One year he had won twenty-one games. But what no one knew,
according to reports that surfaced decades later, was that Giant Manager Leo Durocher had
posted a telescope in the centerfield clubhouse to steal the catcher’s signs to the pitcher.
Then the miracle happened. Branca delivered a fast ball and Thompson hit it into the fifth row of
the left field stands. Home run. Game over. Giants win. The Dodgers, who were ahead most of
the season, most of the playoffs, and most of the game . . . lost. It was called, “The Shot Heard
Round the World.” The Giants had staged one of the greatest comebacks in baseball and sports
history.
2
*
*
*
In Jerusalem, around 30 AD, there was another shot heard round the world. Jesus entered the
city during the time of the Jewish Passover. His public ministry began three years earlier about
one-hundred miles north near the Sea of Galilee. He was an extraordinary teacher, preacher and
healer. His word pictures about the merciful and loving nature of God gave people a different
sense of the great and powerful Yahweh; his call to live with radical love towards all, even one’s
enemies, was challenging but replaced legalism as a measure of righteousness by God. Some
believed he was more than a man because of the way he had calmed raging storms, fed large
crowds with a few fish, healed lepers from their hideous disease, enabled paralytics to walk and
offered God’s forgiveness to men and women whose lives were a mess.
Jesus came into Jerusalem with a following, but he also had critics and rivals, those who felt
threatened, and those who saw him as an impostor and blasphemer. Between the religious and
political leaders he was arrested, convicted, beaten, mocked and taken to the place of public
execution where he was given a criminal’s death. Crucifixion. For his followers, it felt more
hopeless than being thirteen games down in August; their season had become tragic and their
purpose a cruel joke.
So when the two Marys’ went to the tomb on Sunday morning, it was an earthquake. An angel
greeted the stunned women with news that would be “The Shot Heard Round the World.”
“He is not here... he has been raised.”
And when they suddenly encountered Jesus, they grabbed hold of his feet in a posture of worship
and Jesus said, “Do not be afraid but go and tell my brothers…”
If anything ever felt like a comeback, it was Easter morning! The Giant fans stormed the field,
and we lift high the cross on Easter morning with alleluias and shouts of joy. Behind our
celebration is a belief that God’s ultimate purposes can never be defeated, that even when things
seem at their Good Friday worst, we can depend on God to resurrect our hopes, our way of
looking at things and our lives.
Allelujah he is risen!
*
*
*
Hundreds of years ago, a monk was pondering the meaning of the events of Holy Week. “What a
surprise ending,” he thought. Then suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, he had a new insight. His
hearty laugh startled his fellow monks. “Don’t you see,” he cried, “It was a joke! The best joke
in all history! On Good Friday, when Jesus was crucified, the devil thought he had won. But God
3
had the last laugh on Easter when he raised Jesus from the dead.” So the monks called it, The
Easter Laugh.
And so began a monastic tradition on Easter Monday to gather to tell jokes, to laugh, to
remember that God had the last laugh.
That’s the spirit of Easter and today!
*
*
*
Easter, for us, is a comeback story of Good News, a day of joy, celebration and laughter. But
when we hear the resurrection story through the eyes of Matthew, that doesn’t seem the case. In
fact, I am struck with how the Easter story is full of fear.
Did you hear it?
When the angel sat on the stone the text says, “For fear of him the guards shook and became like
dead men.” “. . . And the angel said to the women ‘Do not be afraid.”’
Then Matthew says, “The women left the tomb with fear and great joy.” And when they meet
Jesus, what does he say… what are the first words of the resurrected Christ?
“Do not be afraid.”
Fear surrounds Easter. Mary and Mary were afraid. I mean, who would not be, coming to an
empty tomb, being startled by an angel and then witnessing a dead man walking? And the
disciples? Can’t we imagine their fear? I mean, after their leader Jesus had been killed, don’t
you know they felt like the next knock on the door was going to be for them?
We come today sharing some of that fear. For the women and the disciples, part of the fear was
not knowing. Is this real? What does it mean? Are we imaging things?
In the final Harry Potter book, Harry’s teacher and friend, Professor Dumbledore, who had died
a few years before, appears and talks with Harry for a long time. They are in a train station
though Harry doesn’t know how they got there. At the end of their conversation Harry asks, “Is
this real? Or is it just happening in my mind?” And Dumbledore answers: “Why would what is
happening in your mind not be real?” And he disappears.
The fear surrounding the resurrection is that it is unknowable in the way we like to know things.
We want to know who, what, when, where, how ―the journalistic test for truth for most of us in
the twenty-first century. We fear what we don’t understand. We fear the unknowable.
4
But here’s the thing. The only way life ever really makes sense is testing the unknowable. We
won’t understand marriage until we’ve been hitched for a while…and maybe not even then. We
will not know what it’s like to have a baby until we have had one. We don’t know our profession
until we have been in it for a while. This is to say, nothing in life is immediately obvious. It
grows on us and in us and we grow in understanding and awareness. The leap of faith is when we
are willing to have our life changed before we understand fully what is changing it.
*
*
*
But there is another fear surrounding Easter. It’s the fear of failure, or not measuring up, which is
how Peter must have felt after he had denied Jesus, and Judas felt after his betrayal, and the
disciples might have felt when their mission and purpose had failed so miserably.
I think for many, maybe most of us, in today’s American culture there is an agonizing fear of not
measuring up, fear that we will fail, fear that we are not up to the tasks of whatever, and fear that
we will disappoint others or ourselves.
So, sorry Yogi, we just can’t keep God out of this….because baseball and faith have something
to say about fear and failure.
Fay Vincent, a former commissioner of Major League Baseball explained for me why we can’t
keep God in the dugout in this Easter conversation. Said Vincent, “Baseball teaches how to deal
with failure. We learn…that failure is the norm. I also find it fascinating that baseball, alone in
sports, considers errors to be part of the game, part of its rigorous truth.”
A couple of years ago, Phil Humber pitched a perfect game for the Chicago White Sox. For those
of you who may be baseball-challenged, a perfect game is when a pitcher retires twenty-seven
straight batters without allowing any hits, walks or errors. In other words, the opposing team
never gets on base. It has only happened twenty-one times in several hundred thousand major
league games over more than a hundred years.
Six days later, Humber returned to the mound for his first start since that perfect game and
people were excited to see how he would follow up his perfection.
What happened?
Humber gave up nine earned runs in five innings pitched. Then in his next two starts, he gave up
eleven more runs….i.e. twenty runs in thirteen innings.
5
Baseball is a game reminding us that we are imperfect. The biblical word for sin is harmatia.
Which literarily means missing the mark as in an arrow misses the bull’s eye. This is to say, we
miss the mark. We are imperfect.
In baseball, even the best players, fail at getting on base seventy percent of the time. Even as
players are always striving to get better, baseball teaches how to accept imperfection. In the faith,
that’s called grace.
So the early interpreters of faith understood this and so wrote: “For by grace you have been
saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
Someone says that the first step of being a spiritual person is accepting our imperfection. And
when Jesus says, “I came that you may have life,” we know the life is laced with grace and we
need it –




One day we are loving and gracious to our partner and the next day we are irritable.
One day we are patient with our children’s behavior and the next day we are annoyed
with the very same behavior.
One day we are in the flow at work, the next we are distracted and hardly get anything
done.
One day we practice great habits, and the next day we are lazy and undisciplined.
Being unable to accept our imperfection is deadly. It sucks the joy and peace out of our life and
from those around us. And the thing about accepting our imperfection is that not only does it
bring abundant life and peace but we become grace-dispensing and forgiving.
How grace works was seen in 1947 with Joe Gordon, at that time one of baseball’s great hitters.
(Sorry Yogi, we can’t leave God out of this.) Gordon was in his prime when he played for the
Cleveland Indians. In that same year Larry Doby came to play for Cleveland. We hear much
about Jackie Robinson being the first to break the color barrier in baseball, and how it also
changed American culture. But we hear little about the first black rookie to join an American
League team, and that was Larry Doby.
It is hard to imagine the pressure he felt when Doby stepped up for his first time at bat. He
swung at three pitches and missed each of them – by at least a foot. He walked back to the
dugout with his head down, walked past every other player on the bench and slouched in the
corner alone with his head in his hands.
Joe Gordon, a power hitter, was the next man up. The opposing pitcher that day was one that
Gordon had mastered. But this time, Joe Gordon went up to the plate and missed three pitches in
6
a row – each of them by at least two feet. He returned to the dugout, walked past every other
player on the bench, sat down in the corner next to Larry Doby and put his head in his hands. No
one ever asked Joe Gordon if he struck out deliberately. And Larry Doby went on to become an
all-star and a member of baseball’s Hall of Fame.
Sorry Yogi, we just can’t keep God out of baseball….which reveals Easter’s i
resurrecting God of grace.
He is not here. He has been raised.
i
Sources:
“Easter Vision” by Nancy Rockwell, at The Bite in the Apple
“Baseball as a Metaphor for the Christian Life” by Paul Smith, October 1, 2007
“The Spirituality of Imperfection” by Scott Stoner at Samaritan Family Wellness Foundation
“Rigorous Truth: Baseball, Errors, and Resurrection” by Adam Ericksen, Peace & Violence, April 3, 2014