Sermon For September 24, 2000
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: The First Must Be Last ~ Mark 9:30-37
SERMON: Pennant Races and College Ratings
I want to start by asking you to remember the summer that baseball was saved for the Pacific Northwest. You know the year? 1995. Our family arrived here in the fall of '94, so '95 was the first full season in Seattle that we were called on to cheer for the Seattle Mariners. Cindy and I grew up with baseball, worked our way through college at Milwaukee County Stadium watching the transplanted Seattle Pilots playing as the Milwaukee Brewers. I remember the first summer that the Pilots were there, I was working with the souvenir department and we spent weeks and weeks before the season started using bleach to rub off the Seattle Pilot symbol on baseballs so that they could be sold at Milwaukee Brewer games. I wish I had saved some of those baseballs. Then we had to take a piece of scotch tape and remove the decals off the bobbin' head dolls and put Milwaukee Brewer decals on the bobbin' head dolls, those things with the springy papier-mâché heads that bounce up and down.
But that summer, the summer of '95, more specifically the end of the summer and the beginning of the fall of '95 is known in the northwest as the season that saved baseball for Seattle. The season that built Safeco Field. The Mariners, as usual, were in the middle of the pack. In mid August they were thirteen games behind the Angels, caught up at the very last of the season, and had the one game playoff where Randy Johnson pitched them to victory. Then we played the New York Yankees and you remember winning that game when Edgar Martinez doubled to the corner and Griffey scored from first? At that time, I was writing a newsletter article about the New Century Hymnals and I called to talk to the editor of the hymnals asking if I could borrow some information he had written. He is in Boston, and the first thing he said was, "Before you ask me any questions, that was the best series of baseball I ever saw!" So we talked about the Mariners and the Yankees before we talked about the hymn book.
It caught the whole city, picked everyone up. Everyone was listening to the radio and watching, and maybe because of the magic of '95, the ups and downs of this season have been so difficult for us to handle.
Now what is it that makes people sports fanatics, or more to the point, what is it that makes people jump on the bandwagon for a team that is very successful? You have die-hard Chicago Cubs fans who have been fans in good years and in bad, and we all know there have been a lot more bad years than good. We have die-hard Seattle Mariners fans who have been fans when the team was not very good, when they were stumbling along in the cellars of the division. But when a team is winning, all of a sudden people are buying their t-shirts and wearing their hats and the topic of conversations in offices and schools and grocery stores is, "How about our boys!" "How about the team!" "Did you see the game last night?" Now the downside of all of that is that when you start to get so excited about a team that is winning, you get your emotions caught up in all of it. Then, if the team is defeated it throws you into a mini depression. That doesn't happen to all fans, some of what I'm saying are generalizations, I recognize, but I know that it has happened for me. I know that when I came up here from Nebraska that I was so sick and tired of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, who are the only team in the state. There are no professional sports in Nebraska. They are the team, and when they lost a football game, it wrecked the rest of my day. It got to the point where I didn't want to cheer for them anymore because I was getting tired of getting left at the altar. Every year they were supposed to win the national championship and every year they would lose the game they were not supposed to lose. I took it personally, it was my loss, and I wasn't very happy about it.
There is a difference in looking at a sporting event as entertainment - getting to know the ballplayers, being interested in the progress they make - and being able to be objective, be able to stand back and to watch life taking place in front of you. The successes and the failures, the fits and starts as someone grows into a role, all those things are interesting and appropriate for us to watch and be concerned about, but there is that whole other level of wanting to be number one. Even thought we're not the ones who are swinging the bat, or we're not the ones trying to catch the ball before it goes over the wall, it's somehow still us who's winning, or us who's losing. We find our self-worth somehow being tied up in our team, in our success.
The area of sports is not the only place where we are being obsessed with being the greatest, obsessed with being first. I don't know if the baby boom generation is alone in all of this, but I know that when I listen to my friends talk about automobiles or stereos or vacations or whatever else, there is always a concern that they buy the best. Either the best available or the best they can afford. It's always the best. The conversation is rarely about what I need, or what is going to accomplish what I need accomplished, what is going to make my life fuller or richer, but it is "I want the best." When you listen to parents talk, rarely are parents mature enough to be able to say, "I really want what is going to be satisfying and fulfilling for my child." Instead we live our lives vicariously through our children saying, "Well, maybe I wasn't the best, but darn it my kids going to be the best." So we overload our children with classes, with team activities, with every opportunity for them to find a place where they are going to excel, where no one else is going to be better. We have this drive to be the greatest.
Our family is now in the process of trying to sort through colleges for Leah to apply to. We didn't do that with Matthew, because he went to the early entry program at UW and was pretty much tracked through that. But now, Leah has very good grades, excellent test scores, and I can feel in me that gnawing about wanting something for her that Cindy and I didn't have. Both of us stayed at home for college. Lived with our parents, commuted twenty-five miles to school. The whole university, and it was a good sized university, was a commuter campus with only a small percentage of the student in dorms. We came together for classes then scattered to the whole metropolitan area. We crave for our children an experience of community, where they are taught by professors and not teaching assistants, where they are encouraged to become the very best that they can become. It's extremely difficult to sort out the difference between what it means to go to a prestigious school and what it means to go to the right school. This past week we attended a college presentation down in Bellevue, the title was, "Eight of the Best." There were eight small highly regarded liberal arts schools, all less that 2,000 students, all with a teacher ratio of about 10-1. Most of the classes are 20 students or fewer in a class. All taught by college professors, and there is a great interaction. We looked at all of that and said, "How do we sort through all of it?" Now there were some voices of sanity along the way in some of those college presentations. Reed College in Portland, OR, proudly said that their national ranking was not as high as it might be, because their president refused to cooperate with US News and World Report with their great rating service, because the president felt that it was an artificial way of determining what the best college was. Sarah Lawrence College out of New Your City de-emphasizes grades. They do provide grades so that if a student wants to go to graduate school they will have a record to be able to apply, but instead they focus on evaluations a of student's work. They have a mentor that works with each and every student at that school to make sure that they are getting the kind of education that they need in order to live satisfying lives.
I know that when I was in high school and in college, I was caught up in grades. I knew that I had a lot of ability, at least the tests showed that I had a lot of ability, but I never learned how the do the homework and to do the preparation in order to achieve those grades. I always wanted to have the perfect paper, the perfect test, and that was intimidating, so instead, I just kind of slid on through all my classes. I did the same thing in my first year of seminary, then took two years off. When I came back to seminary, I move to pass/fail. I don't know why, but it was available at that time in the seminary I was attending. For those two years I was finally more concerned about what I was learning in class, and how it was going to apply to my chosen life's profession, than I was about what grade I was going to get in the class, or how it was going to compare me to everyone else.
This need to be the greatest, is part of the human condition. It springs from deep within us, maybe different reasons for different people: insecurities, our parents pushing us to be the best that we can, our desire for recognition, for fame, for money. When we look at the scriptures, we can see that this human condition goes back a long, long way. Jesus was trying to explain to the hard headed disciples what it meant to be his follower, what they were going to face when they went to Jerusalem. They didn't get it. As soon as the class was over and they were walking down the road, what they were discussing with each other was, who is most important? Who is the best disciple? Who does Jesus like the best? Who is going to get the special place in heaven? When Jesus overhears the conversation, he says, 'You don't understand. If you try to be important, if you try to be the greatest, you are not going to be successful. It's the person who is humble, the person who is servant of all who will really be recognized as the greatest." This is not a lesson that the disciples learned easily. It's not a lesson that we learn easily. Even when we find our niche in life, even when we find a job that we enjoy most of the time, even when we find a place that makes good use of our abilities, most of us are still tormented by the idea that we haven't accomplished all that much in life. Maybe if we had worked a little harder, pressed a little bit more, we could have achieved something great. But Jesus is saying to the disciples, "Slow and steady wins the race. Take the abilities that you have, use them for the good of others, don't worry about achieving fame and attention. If you do these things, you indeed will be one of the greatest."
We pray for God's Holy Spirit to help us all sort through our desires, our longings and our true needs. Thanks be to God. Amen.