Sports and Religion
Sermon by Steve Edington
November 16, 2008
One of the more delightful feel-good movies to come out in recent years - if one happens to be a Red Sox fan that is - was Fever Pitch. It's about the 2004 Red Sox baseball season. When the filmmakers set out to make it they didn't know that would be the first season in 86 years that the Olde Towne Team would win a World Series, so they had to do a quick add-on for the ending before it could be released.
But it's not the ending I'm aiming for here. Good as the entire movie is, it's the opening scene that got to me the most. In this scene the little kid version of the film's main character, Ben Wrightman (the adult version is played by Jimmy Fallon), is taken to his first game at Fenway Park by his bachelor uncle, who is played by the Boston based comic Lenny Clarke. This quick scene serves as a lead-in to the film's story line wherein the adult Ben, who becomes a high school math teacher, inherits his Uncle's life-time subscription of Red Sox full season home game tickets - and the movie goes from there.
In the opening scenes little Ben is driven by his Uncle to Fenway, and comes up one of the walkways to get his first view of the Park as batting practice is taking place. I don't know how many takes of this scene they had to do before the filmmakers got just the right look on the kid actor's face but they pulled it off really well. In no more than a couple of seconds you see the awe and the wonder and some sense of the mysterious come onto this kid's face - and the little guy knows, without even comprehending it in his cognitive mind, that he's in a special, if not sacred, place.
The reason I connected so strongly with that scene is because I played out my own version of it many years ago. I was several years older than the kid in the Fever Pitch scene; and for me it was not Fenway Park but the old Crosley Field in Cincinnati, Ohio - a ballpark now long gone. Like young Ben, I was taken to the game by my bachelor Uncle. And my first sight of little ol' Crosley Field - the first major league park I'd ever been in - stopped me in my tracks as well. It was the smallest and coziest park in the major leagues at the time, but still I was like the little kid in Fever Pitch; momentarily overcome by the grandeur and the majesty of it all. As many of you know I was brought up in a devoutly religious atmosphere, and in a strange and indescribable way I felt like I'd walked into a big huge church.
The irony here is that this uncle of mine, whose first name is my middle name, was the one in the family who didn't buy into the religion that most of the rest of us practiced. He was the one in the family who didn't do church. But he was also the one who introduced me to the religion of baseball. And - yet another irony - while I have drastically departed from the near-fundamentalist religion of my youth, the fundamentals of my "baseball faith," which my Uncle Don instilled in me well over a half-century ago, have gone basically unchanged.
One example: I don't remember too much about my baptism, at the age of 11 in the total immersion method that the Baptists do, other than that it happened. But I remember, clear as a bell, sitting in Crosley Field on a June night in 1965, at the age of 19, several years after my first trip there. My good ol' Uncle Don and I watched pitcher Jim Maloney retire 31 straight batters and then lose the game 1-0 in 11 innings to the New York Mets. The 32nd batter Mr. Maloney faced, a one Johnny Hodges, hit a home run - the only run scored that night. It wasn't just a losing game for the Cincinnati Reds. It felt like something had gone drastically wrong with the very way the universe was supposed to work. It was as if some cosmic injustice had taken place. And the passing of more than 40 years since then has not changed that fact.
Okay, so what's up with all this baseball and religion talk? Partly it's because after all of the heavy-duty historical stuff and social values stuff and political stuff I've been speaking to over the past three Sundays, I - and most likely you too - need a break. So it's quite fortuitous that this is the Sunday I'm doing the Auction Sermon. The Auction Sermon, for the still uninitiated, is the sermon-of-your-choice that I offer up for bid at our Annual Service Auction in the spring. It was a little unusual this year in that the top bid came from within my extended family; and from the New York segment of that family; more to the point, from the New York Yankee faction of my extended family. The actual requested topic was that I speak to how the recently departed Yankee Stadium, the "House that Ruth Built" - now literally being laid, or razed, to rest after 85 years of life - is a sacred shrine. Well, yes it is. And I'll get to that in just a bit.
But those of you who have been listening to - well, perhaps enduring - my sermons over the years, know that for me context is everything. Whatever the subject may be, I very often have to step back and bring in "the big picture." Today is no exception. I cannot talk about the sanctity of a particular sports site without talking about the overtones of religion in sports in this country, with the major focus on baseball. As the opening parts of this sermon have indicated, I've already started down that road, so I'll continue on it now, with one quick note about where I won't be going.
I'm not going to get into the religious testimonials offered by some athletes when they're interviewed after a game about how all that they accomplish on the field is to the glory of God, or for their Savior Jesus Christ, and such as that. I'm sure they're sincere about all they say, but I'd rather just leave that be. I'll be keeping it at the level of how sports itself, and baseball in particular, has a certain religious dimension to it - and then I'll do Yankee Stadium.
To move us along, try these words on for size as they appeared in a book review that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle some five years ago: "Ya gotta believe. Baseball is like a religion with its on pantheon of deities and holy traditions, filing a unique role in American society that goes way beyond mere national pastime...scholars insist that part of the appeal of baseball, more than any other organized sport, is - all rise - its transcendent status in American life. For years sociologists and religious scholars have been calling baseball one of America's great 'civil religions,' a secular affair...but (one that) also exists on a plane of pure faith powered by rituals and lore and immortal records...a game that is full of archetypal heroes and villains, larger than life confrontations, and magical moments that seem to last forever."
The book being reviewed with all this august language is this one, titled The Faith of Fifty Million. It's a collection of essays that flesh out - in great, and sometime tedious, detail - what I just read. Of particular interest to me is that the book's editors are two professors at my alma mater seminary, the Colgate Rochester Divinity School of Rochester, New York: Christopher Evans and William Herzog. They came onto the faculty there long after I'd graduated so I don't know these guys, but if my old seminary now has professors who can talk and write baseball I might just have to throw in a few more bucks into the alumni fund. Here's what one of them, Dr. Herzog, has to say: "People are incurably religious. We (all) have to have some form of religion, and for some people it's baseball. It's only a game, but it has elements that point beyond."
Let's run with that one passage from Bill Herzog for a bit: "People are incurably religious. We (all) have to have some form of religion..." He's not talking about religion here as subscribing to a prescribed set of beliefs, which is a very narrow concept of religion anyway. He means that we all seek experiences - whether we care to specifically label them "religious" or not - that take us out of ourselves and lift us beyond the mundane, if only for a certain span of time. There are any number of ways we can attain these transcendent experiences; for me, reading a good novel or being caught up in the sheer beauty of a natural setting will do it. And Sports, approached in a certain way, can accomplish the same thing; as it often has for me.
I'll offer one more passage from another sports-as-religion text that speaks to this point, and then I'll stop reading to you. This is from a book Playing in the Zone by Andrew Cooper: "For those who love them, sports are indeed a matter of faith, or at least they should be. They are not important in the way medicine or politics or law are important. Their value stems from their being separate from the realm of political affairs we call real life. They require not belief but the suspension of disbelief - in a word, faith. In this regard sports resemble narrative art, myth, and religious ritual. They require that one give oneself over to a story...(wherein) one leaves the self's familiar confines to be enriched by other modes of experience...I don't mean that participation in sports, as athlete or fan, makes one a believer in 'God,' under whatever concept or image one attaches to the name. Rather, sports drive one in some dark and generic sense 'godward.'"
Pull just one line out of all that: "They require that one give oneself over to a story wherein one leaves the self's familiar confines to be enriched by other modes of experience." Staying with the specific sport of baseball, that's what happens when really let yourself get into a good ball game - you give yourself over to a story which takes you beyond what Cooper calls the "self's familiar confines." That's why you can get such wonderful emotional highs or such horrible emotional lows from just watching a game - which, truth to tell, has very little to do with how you live all the other parts of your life. I mean, the game ends and you go back to the same life you had before it began. But you've given yourself over to a story, and for a certain confined period of time that story is all that matters; it momentarily defines your world.
But there are times when the story that is taking you apart from the world also impacts the wider world and makes a profound statement about it. This is my "yes, but" response to Cooper's comment about sports "being separate from the realm of practical affairs that we call real life." That's generally true, but not always. On April 15, 1947 at the old Ebbetts Field, Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African American to play major league baseball; or in what until that time had been the white version of major league baseball. That was a transcendent moment - a sacred moment, if you will - in the social and cultural life of our country that went way beyond being an event on a baseball field.
It would be nearly two more decades before various kinds of civil rights legislation would be passed that would in time lead to the fuller participation of persons of color in mainstream American life. In certain respects baseball was ahead of that curve. And I can see how Jackie Robinson taking the field for the Dodgers over 60 years ago, and the inauguration of Barak Obama as President of the United States this coming January 20th are points on a continuum in the greater story of our nation in meeting the ongoing challenge of racial justice and accord.
Well, now that I've got us in New York by way of Brooklyn and the now non-existent Ebbetts Field, I guess it's time to move over to the Bronx to the soon to be non-existent Yankee Stadium. I refer, as mentioned earlier, to the 1923 "House that Ruth Built" Yankee Stadium that is now giving way to a new ball park stadium near the same site. Given all I've said to this point, you can probably see where this is going. What makes any site a sacred or holy shrine - and this is my humanistic take on the matter - is not because of its being "zapped" as it were by some supernatural outside force or being; but rather it's because of the human experiences that happen at that site, and how those experiences and events elevate the human experience.
That long - but not overly long - ceremony that was held back in September before the last game at the Stadium did had decidedly religious overtones to it in that it recalled some of the sacred moments that had taken place on that site. [If I'm going to speak to this, in detail now, as a Red Sox fan I gotta keep it "fair and balanced". So excuse me while I do a quick change of clothes.]
This list is by no means exhaustive. It's just some of the events that came to mind as I thought of some of Yankee Stadium's "holy moments," as it were. As is the case with some such moments it takes the passing of time to really see their significance. So, here's a few:
*Babe Ruth hit the first home run in Yankee Stadium on its opening day in 1923, and four years later would hit his 60th regular season home run on September 30, 1927.
*Ruth's record would stand for 34 years before being broken on the last day of the 1961 season by Roger Maris - also at Yankee Stadium.
*On July 4, 1939 Lou Gehrig said farewell to Yankee fans and the sports world declaring, "I'm the luckiest man in the world" knowing that his career and life would be cut short by ALS.
*On October 8, 1956 Don Larsen would pitch the only no-hit perfect game ever pitched in the history of the World Series. I actually remember listening to that one on the radio as an 11 year old - and had to cheer him on even though I was rooting for the Dodgers.
*On August 6, 1979 the Yankees played a home game on the same day that they'd all been in Canton, Ohio to attend the funeral of their beloved and cantankerous catcher, Thurman Munson who was killed as he attempted to land his private plane - which crashed near the runway.
*In 1977 Reggie Jackson clinched the World Series for the Yankees by hitting three home runs on three consecutive pitches in the sixth game.
*All in all the Yankees clinched 9 of their 26 World Series titles at Yankee Stadium, and...well... lost seven of them on the same site.
This list could be multiplied by at least a factor of ten and still not be exhausted - so you'll have to consider these incidents as just a representative sample.
To put a Red Sox angle on all this - if a holy place is where one knows both extreme agony and extreme ecstasy, then Yankee Stadium does it for us on both counts. No sports fan in these parts will ever forget the agony of seeing Pedro Martinez left on the mound by manager Grady Little in the 8th inning of the 2003 World Series - with a Red Sox Championship just a few outs away - as he went on to give up the game, and Championship, winning home run to a journeyman player named Aaron Boone.
But there really did seem to be some kind of karmic law in effect when one year later the depths of 2003's despair were matched by the heights of the unbelievable 2004 League Championship comeback the Sox staged against the Yankees, which also culminated at Yankee Stadium. Winning the World Series - even for the first time in 86 years - was something of an extra lap around the track after that.
I'll finish this up - and get back to my regular Sunday garb - by briefly revisiting a couple of the points already made. Whether or not you care about, or pay any attention to, sports in general or baseball in particular there is something about both that is instructive about the nature of religion and about the realm of the sacred. I am in agreement with William Herzog when he maintains that we are all "incurably religious" in that it is basic to the human condition that we seek out experiences or events or just ways of living and being that provide us - however momentarily - with some sense of the transcendent, with some sense that we are a part of something greater than ourselves, however we may choose to name it.
One of the things we seek to offer, in the Unitarian Universalist tradition - as it finds expression here and in our many congregations - is this very way of being religious, without it being tied to the preconditions of a prescribed doctrine. Instead we seek to offer a setting wherein our members and friends - like the new members we welcomed today - may seek and find, in this company of seekers, your path to the Transcendent. And may this be a place where you find that which is Sacred to you, in the Sacred place we are continually trying to create here. This is the community and the tradition into which we welcome new members and nurture those who are already here.
Each new baseball season brings it's hope of renewal. And each life that comes into our midst brings the promise of renewal as well. So let us live in hope and peace with one another.
Stephen Edington
November 16, 2008
