I have often thought of the considerable overlap between the joys of Easter and the joys of baseball season. Baseball, you see, is a game about faith and hope and love, where faith is "the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." It is all about shaking off the mortal coils of last season, and the Good Fridays of being out of the running or losing at the very end, in favor of a brand new beginning and the start of a brand new life.
Spring training begins in Florida, where men stretch out tired muscles and wake up arms and bats to play a boy's game, at a time when most of us are glaring out ice covered windows with 'nary a bud (on branches or in bottles) in sight. As we crunch though snowbanks or turn a collar to the chill, we know that somewhere the sunlight has already turned up its heat and is glowing down, full of promise, on the backs of some spectators in Sarasota or Cocoa Beach or West Palm. We can hear the thwack of fastball on leather and the promising crack of the bat, even from where we sit in Maryland, Michigan or Massachusetts. We don't begrudge those Floridians their time in the sun--it is coming this way, like a royal procession, like Easter morning. We are in Lent, but Easter is coming.
And then there's Opening Day--when it's usually still bitter cold or raining, as here in our nation's capital, where a heavy cold mist falls on defiant cherry blossoms. Opening Day, where green fields and freshly painted baselines chart a new course, and make us feel young again and full of the promise of knowing our best days are yet to come. There's something about baseball that puts us back in touch with all our passions, commitments and dreams. I feel 20 years old every time I go to a game, whether it's A-ball or the Big Leagues, and my husband and I are suddenly dating again, holding hands, laughing, shouting at the players. It is a reminder of God's joy and a throwback to those days when all we ever wanted was Friday night and a full tank of gas in the car, before babies and budgets and biopsies and belly fat. We have our best conversations about our hopes and dreams at the ballpark between pitches. The ballpark is a place to dream outrageously, to speak the impossible, to make bold claims about our future, and to remember our past. Church on Sunday morning, when it's at its best, is also that kind of hallowed ground. And Easter Sunday, is of course, the ultimate "Opening Day."
Baseball is very religious--it's Trinitarian (witness the 6-4-3 double play), it takes patience, and the season is long--carrying us from the Easter joys of April through the endurance contest of the "Season After Pentecost." Prayers are lifted up for teams and players and individual at bats and pop-flies. "Miss it, miss it, miss it," or "Get him, get him, get him..." It is about community and the shared joys and sorrows of our common life. John Fogerty sings about baseball in "Center Field": "Beat the drum, and hold the phone, the sun came out today! We're born again, there's new grass on the field."
As I write this, the Braves (my beloved, beloved Braves, who I have loved as long as I have lived) are 1 and 0, and I have a sermon to write for Sunday, about how Jesus took dirt and spit and worked a miracle, making a blind man see. It's the season for miracles, where new leaves grow on old branches, and the scrappy second baseman turns an "ofer" into a walk-off game-winner, and where Jesus is at work in the ordinary "stuff" of our life, doing extraordinary things. When it comes to discipleship, it's the season for getting the uniform dirty in the name of loving service, and swinging hard and level, and running all the way through the play, in the name of the gameplan of the One who makes all things new.
Easter's a'comin'! Until then, "Play ball!!"
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