January 13, 2008

Epiphany 1

The Rev'd Lloyd Prator

New York City

Bob had been a semi-professional baseball player in the old Pacific Coast Baseball league, when the teams up and down the California coast bore names like the Los Angeles Angels, the San Francisco Seals, and the Oakland Oaks. I think he played for some group like the Fresno Flyers, but he was a good second baseman, and had a strong right arm which would occasionally allow him to drive a home run right out of the little ball parks made of dirt embankments and corrugated iron roofing which typified these early minor league ball parks in the 1950s. Bob was a tall, rangy guy with big, heavy shoulders and a ready smile, and, as I recall, a funny tendency to make odd little clicking noises with his tongue when he was thinking hard. He married my cousin, and had two beautiful little girls, and they were happy.

But, like many men, for good or for ill, he wanted a son. And, so, shortly after he retired from baseball, he was delighted when his wife bore him his first, and as it would turn out, his only son. Bob smiled a lot, but he smiled even more in those days when little Robbie was born. Not surprisingly, Bob wanted Robbie to learn baseball, and so, as soon as the little boy was old enough, he got him a little mitt and a little bat, and set out to teach him to catch, swing and throw the ball out in their sandy back yard in Bakersfield.

One day, as I was coming back from some errand or another, I came upon a truly wonderful scene in that yard. It will seem somewhat ordinary to you—and at one level, it certainly is—but sometimes the most profound things are revealed to us in the most ordinary venues. Let me reconstruct it for you. Robbie was standing on what would be the pitchers mound, and Bob was at home plate, probably marked with the lid of a garbage can or something equally domestic. Robbie was throwing these soft little balls to Bob, and Bob was hitting them. Sort of. He actually was gently tapping the balls back toward Robbie who would try to catch them—sometimes successful, sometimes having to run all over the yard to collect them. I think I laughed as I saw this humorous picture of this professional ball player with arms like oak branches, and legs used to propelling himself around the diamond faster than a speeding bullet. And here he was, crouched down and tapping these gentle hits back toward his little son.

Robbie was learning baseball. I was learning something important about how to be a man with a little boy. What I learned that day stuck with me for a long time. I learned that the most important thing going on was the way this big man came right down to the little boy’s level. This big man who could take a thirty three ounce oak baseball bat and blast a hard ball right out of the San Francisco Seals stadium was willing to crouch down on his knees and tap a ball gently back to his son. This wasnt what he was capable of doing. This wasn’t what showed himself off to his best baseball potential. But what that simple action was was something even bigger. This tender little father and son scene showed a guy getting down and playing at the level of his little boy. He was identifying with his son’s weakness and meeting him on the little boy’s own level.

Robbie wound up his little arm and pitched a slow ball toward Bob, and Bob struck at it and missed, and Robbie jumped up and down with glee, Bob ran over and picked up his little son and carried him into the house for lunch.

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Today is the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the first Sunday after the Epiphany. Ever since people began to reflect on the baptism of Jesus, the event has caused problems. Everyone else who came out to see John the Baptizer in those days was baptized as a sign of repentance, as a way of achieving forgiveness of sins. But if Jesus is God, as we believe him to be, then how could he be in need of repentance. One early writer suggested that perhaps he was baptized to please his mother and his brothers, but that does not seem very satisfactory. What good, after all, is a messiah who cannot even stand up to a pushy mother and nagging siblings? One of the other gospels, the ones that did not make it into the bible, makes another suggestion about why Jesus was baptized. That writer suggests that maybe Jesus went to be baptized because he might have committed some sin that he did not know about. But again, this perspective makes Jesus seem kind of dense and certainly more self-conscious about his true nature than most of us would prefer.

But, in fact there is at least one very good reason why Jesus was baptized. And, it has to do with baseball and the human condition. Let me explain. In those days, baptism was probably reserved as a rite of initiation for those who came into Judaism from gentile religions or no religion at all. No Jew-by -birth could ever conceive of being baptized, that was for the down and out, for those cut off from God. And, at that point in the history of the Jewish nation, they were coming to believe that perhaps they all needed to repent and turn toward a more honest search for God. By being baptized—and this is the main point—Jesus identified with those he came to save.

The little parable about the boy, his dad and the baseball is instructive. Just as Bob got down on his son’s level, and confined his power and his skill to his boy’s level, Jesus identifies with us by being baptized, an act by which he gets down to our level, and submits to the limitations of the human situation. On that day, Bob taught me why God chose to be born in human form—to identify with us, to get down to our level, and to be one of us. Just as God did for us in Jesus Christ.

Baptism in fact replacates the human situation. Baptism is all about death. In churches fortunate enough to be able to immerse candidates for baptism, this dramatic identification is clearer than it is at baptismal fonts such as ours. If you see a baptismal candidate being immersed in water, you see the symbolism more clearly. This person is dying. And, in fact, death is the inevitable part of the human scene. As sure as God made little green apples, the last appearance we will make in this Church will be in a coffin sitting here before this altar. And that ultimate death is foreshadowed by all the other little deaths which are scattered along the pathway of human life: the death of our youth, as we begin to age and our bodies work less well. The death of lost loves and frustrated hopes for companionship. The death of careers which do not go where we wished them to go. The death of friendships as we must move away from those we care about.

It is as if God saw the human situation with all of its limitations and said, “Yes, this is true. I must come to be with these people in their struggle, I need to get down to their level, I need to identify with them because it is only by identifying with their weakness that I can call them to strength. So, like Bob the baseball player, God got down, he identified with us by being baptized, by going through the death which we must go through.

And, of course, this event we celebrate today foreshadows the events of Good Friday when God himself will indeed identify with us by going through exactly the same death we must face.

So, in the baptism of Christ, there are two central realities which we must face if we are to understand the faith of Christ: Jesus is the chose one of God, the voice from heaven tells us that. But, if voices from heaven don’t cut much mustard with you, consider the second point, the way in front of Jesus was going to be the way to the cross. And there is not a one of us who does not know that the cross is the profound truth about the human situation, full of limitations, poor choices, dashed hopes and death in all its forms. To consider that there is a God who knows how it is because he was once with us in the midst of it, proclaims that God to be authentic in a way that no abstract theology can ever assert. Our God is the true God because our God has been there. There will be a victory over death, but that victory will only come to those who tread the path of suffering love.

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Just a year or so after that wonderful scene in the yard, Bob came home from the railroad yards where he worked, put his golf clubs on the sofa—he had turned in the baseball bat for a nine iron—sat down, and died of a sudden, massive heart attack. His wife knew the kind of father Bob had been and knew how important it was for a little boy to have a man in his life, and so she arranged for Robbie to come and spend summers with his older cousin who lived a few hours away. And his older cousin, in all of his relationship with Robbie, kept in mind that vision of the big man and the little boy and the baseball, because not only did the older cousin learn from that something important about being a man, but he also learned something profoundly true about the God whom we proclaim as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.