Baseball Time

John 7:1-6

After this Jesus went about in Galilee. He did not wish to go about in Judea because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him. Now the Jewish Festival of Booths was near. So his brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing, for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.” (For not even his brothers believed in him.) Jesus said to them, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.

Matthew 24:42-44

Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

Ever since I started going to baseball games, I’ve had one rule for myself: never leave a game early. (I’ll start out by  confessing I broke my own rule just once about a decade ago when The Red Sox were losing by almost 20 runs against the Los Angeles Angels of all teams). But other than that one game, I never leave early. And that’s because baseball, unlike the other major American team sports—football, hockey, basketball, even soccer, if we want to include that—has no time limit. And as much as the MLB experiments with pitch clocks, with immediate base runners in extra innings (my least favorite of the newer rules meant to speed up the game), it doesn’t stop the fact that in a baseball game, things can change in an instant. Huge leads can be blown with a couple blip hits; pitchers duels can last into the early mornings. As John Sexton writes in his book Baseball as a Road to God,

By its very nature and rules, baseball operates outside of ordinary time; in fact, timelessness is at its essence. The length of an inning or game is not set by a clock; it shares the boundless framework of [philosopher Mircea] Eliade’s sacred time: It is not linear, with a simple past, present, and future; it is cyclical, building and building again toward certain, quintessential moments.

Our scripture readings today are both examples of this idea of Kairos vs. Chronos; that is God-time vs. ordinary time. In our passage from John, we have Jesus’s disciples trying to convince Jesus to go into hiding. But Jesus makes it clear—he’s on a different timeline. He’s on a whole different level. My time has not yet come, but yours is always here. This is Jesus telling his disciples that they must both follow the time rules of their earthly lives, while also doing the work Jesus calls them to do; they must be earthly representatives of Jesus’ mission, inspired by what is possible in the God-time, but doing the work in ordinary time. Not a small task, but a fulfilling and necessary one to bring about an earth as it is in heaven.

And then, in Matthew, you have this other concept of God-time—this idea that only God knows when the second coming will happen, that only God knows when all will be made new. And again, as I’ve talked about before, we don’t always take kindly to this apocalyptic idea of the second coming, this idea that is sometimes enveloped in alienating fire-and-brimstone language… but the point of it is really to just always be prepared—not in a doomsday prepper sense, but rather, in the sense that no matter what kind of lull we may be in, no matter how either wonderful or hopeless things may seem, we always need to be doing the work Christ calls us to do—that is, the work of love, of compassion, of radical acceptance and hospitality, the type of work that seems to have no place in our world of market-driven competition and greed. We are forced to live within the Chronos while working for, working as if we were living in Kairos, in God-time.

Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, The Time that Remains, writes of this push-and-pull between Kairos and Chronos,

The Messiah has already arrived, the messianic event has already happened, but its presence contains within itself another time, which stretches its parousia [the second coming], not in order to defer it, but, on the contrary, to make it graspable… The Messiah already had his time, meaning he simultaneously makes time his and brings it to fulfillment.

Agamben is heady stuff, but what he’s essentially saying here, is that in the life of Jesus, this world received a glimpse of Kairos— a glimpse of God-time. We received this moment of glory in the life of the savior, paradoxically human and divine, living paradoxically in Kairos and Chronos.  

When you’re in a baseball stadium, I think you get a taste of Kairos, of God-time. You get a taste of being outside the real world, within ordinary time, but also within this strange length of nine innings, which could go anywhere from under an hour (like the 1919 Giants vs. Phillies game that lasted just 51 minutes), or to over 8 hours (like the 1984 White Sox vs. Brewers game that went 8 hours and 6 minutes and had to be played over two days). And yes, we are still in ordinary time… but when you’re in a stadium, measuring time in innings, in doesn’t feel that way anymore. In any given inning, time can contract or expand, time can sprint or dawdle, it can go by in the blink of an eye with a 1-2-3 inning, or you might be dying for it to be over after what feels like hours of pitching changes and nonstop foul balls. In his novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Joshua Ferris writes of baseball:

Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It’s the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable.

And a lot of people consider baseball to be boring, and I get it. It is not a fast-paced game. There’s a lot of standing still. There’s a lot of lulls, a lot of breaks between innings or pitching changes. But that’s what makes it so much more interesting (and exciting). Despite the quiet, the stillness, you always have to be ready. You can’t let your guard down. One of my favorite baseball memories was in 1997, when I was 10-years-old, and I know this because it was Nomar Garciapara’s rookie year. I was at a game with my dad, we were in the grandstand, sort of on the third base line. I was zoning out, (as one is wont to do at a baseball game, no judgement here), but I happened to be zoning out looking at just the right spot. A blistering line drive was hit between shortstop and third base and Nomar made this mind-blowing, out-of-this-world, split-second diving catch; and almost 30 years later, I can remember it so vividly, I can remember being absolutely blown away by the athleticism of this catch, by the crowd’s response to the out; I remember asking my dad if he thought Nomar could be Rookie of the Year (he did end up being awarded Rookie of the Year). And I just got lucky that I was looking at the right spot at the right time. I wasn’t actually paying close attention. But this is what makes baseball so special. It doesn’t matter how quiet, how dull, how foregone a conclusion a game might seem to be; it can all change in an instant. And if we blink, if we give up, if we go the concourse to get another hot dog or a beer in the middle of a half inning, there is so much one could miss.

Jesus makes it clear—we don’t know the day, or the time God will come, when Jesus will return. Jesus doesn’t even know, though there he was on this earth, the embodiment of Kairos itself. But we always have to be ready. And being ready doesn’t only mean preparing with compassionate and loving acts towards our fellow humans, though that is, of course, integral. It also means we have to hold onto our faith no matter how hard things get. It means we have to remain faithful no matter how impatient we may feel, trudging along through this earthly, chronological time.

We’ve talked before how much of Paul’s letters include encouraging patience in the wake of a seemingly delayed second coming. In Galatians 6:9-10, he writes, “…let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have the opportunity, let us work for the good of all…”. Harvest time is ambiguous. This divine harvest will come when it comes, not in any chronological timeline we could even begin to predict by weather or the changing seasons. And this idea brought to mind the phrase that so many down-on-their-luck, but faithful baseball fans repeat year after year after year: Wait till next year. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in fact, named her memoir after that very phrase, a memoir about growing up in Brooklyn in the 50’s as a diehard Dodgers fan. She writes when she first began to understand that phrase in 1949, when the Dodgers had an incredible pennant run, but then went on to lose miserably to the Yankees in the World Series:  “It was that October that I first understood the pain, bravado, and prayer woven into the simple slogan that served Dodger fans as a recurring anthem: ‘Wait till next year.’” Because “next year” may not be the next year, the next decade, or even the next century—just ask any Red Sox fan before 2004 or Cubs fan before 2016. And yet, we keep saying it. We keep believing it. Because what other choice do we have?

We live in a world that runs on efficiency, productivity, and convenience, trying to milk every penny out of every second. And while things like online sports gambling and private equity’s involvement and ownership in Major League Baseball teams are  serious existential threats to the sport, (and that’s fodder for a future sermon this Summer); and while baseball isn’t immune from the demands of our world, it remains a sport that cannot be constrained by our concept of time. It remains an example of the push and pull of God’s time and our own. The time spent in a baseball stadium during a game remains, if only we allow it, a time to let God-time wash over us… a time to be still, to breathe deeply, but also to pay close attention. And lifetimes spent as a baseball fan, especially one of a beleaguered, losing team, is a lesson in patience, and a lesson in faith. It’s a lesson in knowing that “next year” might not be next year. And yet, there will always be a next year—a next year to hope, to pray, to love, to root for the home team.

We have to be able to step out of ordinary time and into the sacred in order to do the work we’re called to do by Christ. We have to be able to allow God-time to wash over us, to get a sense of a world without end. And in theory, we get a feel for this right here, in this sanctuary each Sunday. Eliade, in his seminal work, The Sacred and the Profane, writes:

Just as a church constitutes a break in plane in the profane space of a modern city, [so] the service celebrated inside [the church] marks a break in profane temporal duration. It is no longer today's historical time that is present—the time that is experienced, for example, in the adjacent streets—but the time in which the historical existence of Jesus Christ occurred, the time sanctified by his preaching, by his passion, death, and resurrection.

And yet… if the service goes longer than an hour… there’s a solid chance I’d hear about it. And don’t get me wrong, I like to keep things to a tight hour too; but there’s no denying that in this instance, we’re letting ordinary time take over what should be, what is, sacred time.

And that’s what makes a baseball game so special. As much as the powers that be might try to change things, a baseball game will never feel like ordinary time.

Now the lesson of this sermon isn’t to go buy an overpriced ticket to Fenway Park because that’s the only way we can experience sacred time; but rather, it’s about finding ways to step outside of the hustle and bustle, outside the efficiency and convenience of our current day to stop to understand, and to really pay attention to what matters within this ordinary time we have. It’s about the hope and the faith that no matter how badly we may be losing, there is always time to turn things around. It’s about always being ready to experience the awe and the love of the Holy Spirit that is always present, if only we are prepared for it. And we prepare practicing that awe and love, always, no matter how futile it may seem. It’s about loving and hoping and praying and working for a better next year, no matter when that next year may come. Amen.