First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Exodus 20 and John 2

“For the Love of His Church”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

March 15, 2009

I want to read you a portion of a speech given by Ryan Sanberg. Sanberg was the second baseman for the Chicago Cubs for many years and was consistently seen as an asset to his team and a player of note. After he retired he became eligible to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. In 2005 he was chosen to join the legends of the game. At the ceremony he said this:

I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never disrespect your opponent or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. Make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases; hit a homerun, put your head down, drop the bat, run around the bases, because the name on the front is a lot more important than the name on the back. That’s respect . . . . When did it become okay for someone to hit home runs and forget to play the rest of the game? . . . These guys sitting up here [in the hall of fame] did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up. Respect. A lot of people say this honor today validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect. . . . If this validates anything, it’s the guys who taught me the game did what they were supposed to do and I did what I was supposed to do.

I have a hard time watching baseball today. By and large it is the game I played as a boy. It still has nine innings, pitchers who can throw the ball 90 miles an hour are still the closers, and great plays are still made, managers still kick the dirt and yell, and a double play still conjures an image of athletic ballet. But it’s hard to watch because the glory is gone.

The lost glory is not the glory of my youth. I was never a great baseball player. When I listen to Bruce Springsteen sing “Glory Days” where he says, “I had a friend in high school he throw that old speed ball by you, make you look like a fool. I met him in roadside bar he was walking in I was walking out. We went back in sat down had a few drinks, but mostly what we talked about was glory days and how they pass you by.” There were moments of glory and splendor for me as a youth, but how I played baseball wasn’t it.

The lost glory of baseball is what has been squandered by money and drugs and fame. Every home run is tainted; every player who recovers quickly from an injury is suspect; and the idea that players could be bought for millions of dollars just leaves me cold. Baseball players were never a congregation of angels and devoted fathers and philanthropists who built bridges and parks. Ty Cobb sharpened the spikes of his shoes to induce fear in his opponents. Baseball is not a place of perfection, but it was a place where we could see glory in our community, our culture, ourselves.

Hugh Heclo, a professor of public affairs, who begins a recent book with Sanberg’s speech, sees our nation as suffering from lost glory, we are living in a kind of spiritlessness which comes from a lost sense of awe and respect. We don’t believe in anything beyond ourselves; we don’t revel in the notion of being more just because we are a part. We don’t want to be part of a great team; we want to be a superstar. We don’t even have a name on the front of our jersey anymore. We have raised up generations of children who are catered and nurtured and aided and helped to be “all they can be.” But we have put aside the idea of being “all we can be.”

At Ives Hill this week I listened to one of the members of a bible study lament the last Olympics. I just didn’t enjoy it, she said. How could you when all you wonder is: is that one on drugs? Did they cheat? Winning a medal, it would appear, has eclipsed sport, athleticism, character. The Olympics are not the stuff of great importance for politics or our economy or world peace, but they should be a moment of glory. And this has been lost. They are now a moment of shame.

Where this becomes important for us is this: athletic competition has not become corrupt; we have been corrupted and in sports like baseball our corruptions becomes painfully transparent. When a baseball player swings for the fence every time he is up, we can see how grandiose and self-centered we’ve become. When Barry Bonds says I never took steroids it’s like Bill Clinton trying to suggest he didn’t lie about Monica Lewinsky; in these we can see how self-preservation and self-importance have become the markers, the measures of culture.

This is not a headline or a news flash. You know this; I know this. Christopher Lasch wrote the Culture of Narcissism thirty years ago. I can remember as a kid when the writing was on the wall with sports with Reggie Jackson. You could even go back to Joe Namath. But those were seeds cast. Those people who really stuck out because they were not part of our culture. Today, football teams are filled with thugs who dance after every play; baseball is riddled with players who make Reggie Jackson look humble. Again, the problem isn’t with athletes or sports. The problem is us. This is what we’ve become. We are a culture with no respect- in awe with ourselves, but not for others.

Consider this, we do not feel obliged to offer anyone, any institution, any office respect. We don’t. Ridicule, shame, disrespect, insult: we feel this is our right, our freedom to offer to those in places of power or authority. In fact the common saying is that if you are going to seek office, if you are going to be a leader, be prepared because the abuse will start to flow as soon as you get out in front. Now people in charge have always carried this weight. Moses who gave the 10 commandments was always being questioned, dealing with the grumbling of the Israelites. Grumbling and grousing is not unique to our culture, but the idea that we are in no way obliged to offer respect, that we value disrespect is something we need to see and then repent. Our children feel free to ridicule their teachers; coaches have one opinion to be considered; pastors, lawyers, doctors: they are fair game.

I haven’t banned the Colbert Report or John Stewart from our house, but I have made it clear to my kids that these two fellows are pedaling bad behavior. They are pandering to our poverty of character. For night after night they simply look for something to ridicule. They take the complexity of governing a land awash in selfishness and greed and mock those who stumble through the landmines of our bad behavior. They are troubadours of everything that is rotten in our country today. Ann Coulter and Bill Maher are debating each other this week in a highly publicized event. Essentially, though, these celebrities of trash talk will compete to see who can offer more ridicule and disrespect. This seems to be our new sport.

My friend up in Canton, Michael Cantanzaro, or as he is more affectionately known- Rev. Mike, has a saying. When we discuss the ills and challenges of life and ministry he will sum up his take on somebody by saying, “they get it” or “they don’t get it.” By “it,” I believe, my friend means Jesus. They get who Jesus is. They get the idea that when Jesus said, if you want to come after me deny yourself” or what John the Baptist said of Jesus “he must increase and I must decrease.” The Baptist was someone who “got it.” He knew the name on the front was more important than the name on the back. People who get it believe in the church, believe in the idea that love conquers all, they put obedience to God before their own self.

It’s fair to say culturally today we are not getting it. And it doesn’t work to say some individuals get it. That’s the problem. It’s not enough to say someone gets it; we need to get it. We need to be something more; we need to believe in something more than ourselves. And by belief I mean trust and respect. Early in the week I shared the speech of Ryan Sanberg at the staff meeting and I said, this is why I look at the attendance numbers each week. They all kind of looked at me a bit oddly.

The attendance numbers are not a win or loss to me. I am not looking for notches in a belt or a mark in the win column. I am looking to see if we are getting it. Do we love the church? Do we love being a church? Do we understand what it means to be the body of Jesus Christ? Are we getting it? When a congregation of 550 has 150 in worship it is clear we are not getting it. We have lost what it means to be a church.

We all have a church, but we have lost what it means to be a church. We have personal beliefs, but we have lost what it means to hold those beliefs as a community of faith. And I know it feels mean spirited to preach this to those who showed up; but herein lies the problem. We lament those who are not here, but we don’t see it as our problem, our loss, our becoming less. It is their choice, not our business. In this attitude and resignation is our loss of glory. Baseball and the Olympics have lost their glory. But they didn’t lose it because they had bad players or evildoers. They lost their glory because we as a people have lost our glory. In the players we see our own corruption. The particular metaphors may be greed and drugs and fame, but these are just the manifestations of a lost glory.

The church is just as corrupted, but the corruption is a different path. Here it is the oddity that we are trying to craft a church to suit ourselves, to customize our congregation to our own desires and visions, instead of being a place where we pray, Lead us O Christ. Here there is just as much entitlement and disrespect and ridicule as any place. The church didn’t manufacture this. The oddity is that the church should be a place where glory is protected against such wiles. But it is not.

This culture of disrespect and ridicule is what we have made of our world, our nation, our community. Here it just becomes manifest in empty pews and people unwilling to sacrifice or jaded by unbridled cynicism that masquerades as intelligence or sophistication. I know I am supposed to listen, to give my ear to the people, but I am growing discontent with the idea that I need to hear people spew an agenda of selfishness or self-indulgence. In our corruption even the church is now a place where people can rant and ridicule and offer foolishness unchallenged because it is their right. It may be our right, but it is also our shame.

The Gospel of John was almost excluded from the Bible because of our passage today. There is nothing wrong with the passage itself. The other gospels tell pretty much the same story of Jesus clearing the temple. The problem is that he put it in the wrong place. Jesus cleared the temple on Palm Sunday not on a random Passover early on in his ministry. The early church struggled to reconcile how they could accept this obvious misplacement and still treat the text as authoritative? How could they tell people to respect this gospel as the word of God if there are obvious mistakes like this?

The answer is that the fourth gospel writer didn’t do this by mistake but on purpose. He didn’t care about the order of the story so much as he cared about the order of the church. The church in a generation had become disorderly, had been corrupted by mistakes and misdirection. The misplacement of the story is a claim, a verdict, a judgment upon the church. He is saying I am not trying to retell the story a fourth time; I am telling you can no longer hear the other three if you believe you can live without obedience and passion; you can’t hear the Bible if you have abandoned a sense of spirit. We aren’t getting it.

During every worship service in Geneva in the time of John Calvin, they would read the Ten Commandments. It was a kind of same page moment. It was a moment where everyone was supposed to get it. I didn’t list the second half of the Ten Commandments this morning because I think we get these. We are very bright, very ethical, very upright people who see lies, murder, theft, adultery, and coveting as wrong. We are convinced. No one here feels entitled to break these. But I would never say the same for the first five.

As a people we are convinced today that these do not apply to us. Worship, idols, obedience, a Sabbath rest, and honor: we are not even close. I mean, it’s not that we just don’t get it; we are worse than that. We don’t even know what is there to get anymore. I can’t even imagine what it would look like for us as a people to worship, to honor. I can’t even fathom it we are so mired in our own world and our devotion to disrespect. When I hear someone today speak with unbridled ridicule fueled by a sense of self-righteousness I believe it would be a waste of my breath to contradict. Like John, I don’t believe I can simply say, honor the Sabbath and worship; I feel like I need to turn everything upside down because we have so lost sight of what we are all about.

Don’t have a church; be a church. Don’t come to worship when you can; work six days and rest on the seventh with a time of prayer and thanksgiving. Don’t tell me you are okay with the radio or a couple times a month; tell me what you hope to become as a church. I know this is too radical a notion, the order is all wrong. I am supposed to put your desires and needs and cares before all else, but I don’t believe that really gets us to where we are supposed to be. The church isn’t the sum of our whims and entitled disrespect for authority. We are the body of Christ resplendent in the glory of the resurrection bringing hope to the world.

When you try to put our lack of devotion and obedience in such an image it doesn’t work. It works in our culture; but it should never work in our church, in Christ’s body. “When you hit a homerun, put your head down, drop the bat and run the bases. Because the name on the front is more important than the name on the back.” Amen.