Opening Day Surprise

March 31, 2013

Isaiah 65:17-25

Once every few years the opening day of the baseball season happens to fall on Easter, as it has today, and “opening day” is just too good an image for Easter morning to resist. Easter Sunday and opening day have a lot in common, actually. They’re both all about hope for things to come. They both presage seasons of long, often difficult work. And they both play to full houses.

As Doris Kearns Goodwin put it in her foreword to a recent book on God and baseball, “seasonal ceremonies of rebirth and renewal figure largely in both realms, as do rituals, traditions and superstitions.”

For the Nats fans in the area – and I know there are several of you here this morning – since a little piece of your heart died last October, I’m sure you are ready for a bit of rebirth that comes with the promise of opening day.

Folks come out to both Easter services and opening day with certain expectations that things will unfold as they have in the past, that there will be a comfortably familiar litany, and we’ll sing comfortably familiar music. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame … alleluia!”

There’s nothing wrong with any of that, and I do love baseball.

Easter, on the other hand, should shock the hell out of us.

Seriously. It turns everything upside down and inside out.

Even 2,000 years on, the notion that life does not end in death runs utterly against the grain of everything we think we know. Whether you take the resurrection of Jesus literally or metaphorically, this story of God’s great “yes” in the face of the world’s insistence on “no” flies in the face of history itself.

It would be easy enough to recite a litany of the triumphs of “no” in our time. We all know them, on global and on very personal scales, we know when and where and how death triumphs even if we don’t always know why.

Nevertheless, the shocking news that the women shared on that first Easter morning still rings out and it remind us of who we are, and to whom we belong.

We are an Easter people, a resurrection people. In life and in death we belong to God.

If, as NYU President John Sexton suggests in his recent book, baseball is a road to God, here’s where the road of the church of baseball diverges from the road of the church of Jesus Christ. Baseball is about finding home, but the way of Jesus is about finding hope. Not only finding hope, but also trusting faith and living love.

The liberation movement in South Africa produced a wonderful definition of hope: hope is believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change. I don’t think that’s quite right, though, at least not if the hope is resurrection hope, the hope of the people of the way of Jesus. For hope appropriate to Christian life is not so passive as merely witnessing the evidence change. Hope, for us, means living love as we participate in the changing of the evidence – as we participate in the new thing that God is doing in our midst.

You see, that’s what the women at the tomb did. God raised this Jesus – surely a new thing in God’s world – but the women told the story, they were the witnesses, and in sharing this great good news they participated in changing the evidence.

They didn’t have to say a thing. After all, who would believe them? They could have continued right on living out their days believing that “no” had triumphed despite what their own eyes had seen. Heck, we do that all the time. Given the choice of living resurrection or choosing death, we’ll take the death that we know over the risks of resurrection.

As Parker Palmer posted last week on Facebook:

“Sometimes we choose death-in-life (as in compulsive overactivity, unhealthy relationships, non-stop judgmentalism aimed at self or others, work that compromises our integrity, substance abuse, pervasive cynicism, etc.), because we’re afraid of the challenges that might come if we embraced resurrection-in-life.”

But the evidence only changes when we embrace resurrection-in-life, when we allow ourselves to be transformed by an opening day surprise.

So, on this Easter morning, consider your own hopes, consider the evidence aligned against those hopes, and then consider how you are being called to participate in the changing of the evidence.

Here’s what I hope:

I hope that the seeds and plants that we’re nurturing will help feed a hungry world. I hope that the work we’ll do at the end of the month will help house a neighbor in need. I hope that the nurturing of our children will help them live faithful and compassionate lives in a suffering and broken world. I hope that we who worshipped and witnessed for marriage equality at the Supreme Court last week were heard.

That’s a little bit of what I hope; here’s what I know.

I know that God is faithful still. I know that in responding to God’s call to change the evidence we’ve done a lot of loving work together participating in the new things that God is doing.

I know that we raised 150 pounds of fresh produce for our hungry neighbors last year to change the evidence. I know that we’ve helped rebuild houses for the past five years to help change the evidence. I know that we’ve completely redesigned the way we do ministry here, including with our kids, to change the evidence.

Here’s what I know about hope: we have seen the evidence change dramatically over the past decade. I can remember the anger in this room after the Marshall-Newman amendment codified hate and exclusion in the Virginia Constitution. I can remember members leaving this congregation after our denomination dithered and delayed on ordaining gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Presbyterians.

I know that God has been faithful throughout, and I can remember the work that we have done, inspired by God, called by God, responding to God’s call to change the evidence.

And the evidence is changing as we participate in the work of love that God is doing.

This is the pattern of resurrection life: giving voice to our hopes; trusting God’s faithfulness; living love as we participate in the new thing that God is doing and then watching the evidence change.

God is about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what God is creating; for God is about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.

Friends, it’s opening day! Arise! Shine, for your light is come! We are a people of hope! Amen.