Sermons

Having Ears to Hear

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
September 30, 2007                    Luke 16:19-31

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but I am a sports fan. There are some Sunday mornings when I try to hold it back and exercise a little restraint; this won’t be one of those mornings.

So I am a sports fan. But I am no Paul and Teri Fields. You may have read about Paul and Teri Fields, the Indiana couple whose naming of their recently born son reflected their passionate devotion to a certain Chicago baseball team – yes, that’s right – meet “Wrigley Fields.” The Fields say they thought it through; and yet I wonder if they will be there with little Wrigley Fields on his first day on the playground.

My first baseball game was at the old, and usually empty, Cleveland Memorial Stadium. Indians and the Yankees, when both teams were what are sometimes called cellar-dwellers. The Indians will face the Yankees this year in the first round of the playoffs, a match-up akin to the Christians versus the lions. In my mind, cheering for the Yankees is akin to cheering for Darth Vader. And I presume as gratifying.

While the Indians were my first attended game, my first love was the Cincinnati Reds, known then as the Big Red Machine. I can still name the starting lineup, the starting pitching staff and many, many other things about that team. I remember back when games were not on TV very frequently listening to them late at night on the radio, or my one day a year trek from Zanesville, Ohio to Cincinnati. I still have the Johnny Bench autograph I collected.

The Reds are not in the playoffs this year. They have recently fallen on hard times. But I never really knew what hard times in baseball were until I went to seminary in Chicago. The seminary was on the South Side of the city, so for a while I went to White Sox games, despite my intense dislike of the American League designated hitter rule. But then we moved to the north side, so for more than a decade, and to some extent even now, I became a Cubs fan. Our children are probably grateful that our last name is not Fields. The Cubs last won a World Series 99 years ago, in 1908. It’s not been a good century for them. They have made the playoffs this year. If I were a betting man, and I am not, I would bet for any team playing the Cubs.

And lest you worry I am one dimensional, I need mention my other passion – Ohio State football. Our children are probably also grateful that our last name is not Buckeyes, or their first name might be “Ohio” and their middle name “State.” The Buckeyes are 4-0 right now; while the University of Michigan, the Darth Vader of college football, lost in the opening week to Appalachian State. My hearts goes out to all you Wolverine fans, but not very much!

So I am a sports fan. But I must confess that it goes only so far. I do not resonate with the famed Packer coach Vince Lombardi, who said one time that “winning’s not everything, it’s the only thing.” Nor do I agree with the late baseball manager Leo Durocher, who some of you will remember as Leo the Lip. Durocher said one time that “nice guys finish last.” That was before, of course, be became the manager of the Chicago Cubs.

I played competitive sports throughout high school and college. I knew that I would never be an elite athlete, let alone a professional one, but I enjoyed the discipline of athletics, the camaraderie of team play, the sense of competition. And so I remain a sports fan. Sports is not life, but is surely enhances it.

It has not been so easy being a sports fan these days. In fact, this summer, I was almost ready to throw in the towel, a boxing phrase, by the way. I listen to talk radio while driving around, sports radio and political radio, and there were some days this summer when it was difficult to determine which was which.

* I remember exactly where I was on April 8, 1974, when Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run off Al Downing of the Los Angeles Dodgers to break Babe Ruth’s decades long career record. I will have no such happy memories of this summer, when the Giants’ Barry Bonds broke Aaron’s record by hitting his 757th home run, under the cloud of the alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs.

* Nearly at the same moment, Tim Donaghy was admitting his guilt in taking bribes to influence the outcome of NBA games, a moment called one of the darkest in the NBA because of Mr. Donaghy’s role as an NBA referee. Such behavior is bad for a player, and so much worse for a referee.

* And to top it all off, one could not go far at all without reading about, hearing about, the plight of Atlanta Falcon quarterback Michael Vick, and the absolutely dreadful stories of dog-fighting. Vick has pled guilty, forfeited his multi-million dollar contract, and still the story causes a deep response, so surreal and so very cruel.

It has been a hard summer for a sports fan like me. What I like about sports – the notion of winning by playing hard and playing fair, that everyone has a chance to win because the judges are fair and impartial, that perspiration and perseverance (rather than pharmacology) matters, that athletes enjoy some kind of positive reputation – all of that seems out the window and up for grabs.

Here is what I heard and read on the talk show and internet circuit…

* That everyone does it…cheat, that is.
* That rules in this day and age are relative and don’t matter, and that I am naïve for thinking differently.
* That no one should look to athletes as role models, let alone heroes.
* All of this spread, like mustard on a ball park hot dog, with an extra layer of racial tension and cultural condemnation.

There are moments when I am not sure who to root for anymore. I don’t want to be cynical, and yet I am not sure who to root for. And why this matters, and is the topic for a sermon rather than a ranting letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated, is that I am not sure whether to root at all, because all of this seems like a deeper matter, how we think about moral compasses, personal and public ethics, what it means to live in a culture that seem so out of control and without direction, what it means in these difficult days to be a citizen, a neighbor, a parent, a fan, a person of faith.

Each gospel – Mathew, Mark, Luke and John – has a unique perspective. Each takes the events of Jesus’ life and tells the story just a bit differently. If you were to take out the verse markings and read each as a short story, you would grasp different emphases, different nuances.

We have been plowing through Luke this fall, though at times it feels like Luke has been plowing through us. Luke’s distinct themes ask the church, and each of us, what it means to be a disciple, what does it mean to follow Jesus, what does it mean to live in a world that is either hostile to, cynical about, or indifferent to religion. These are our questions as well, our very questions. Who is Jesus, and who are we in relationship to Jesus?

Alan Culpepper writes that the Jesus in Luke is “compassionate…a friend to outcasts…the savior who comes to seek and save the lost.” In Luke, Culpepper writes, and we have discovered it to be true over the course of the fall, the people, the ever-growing crowd, is much more receptive to his message than the religious authorities, the ones in leadership positions, the ministers and bishops of the day.

Luke’s continual reference to the Old Testament prophets makes Jesus not only a prophet among prophets, but the greatest prophet, who makes God’s salvation available to all regardless of social standing. That means we should do the same, that is, to be compassionate, to exercise forgiveness, to make sacrifice.

One of the ways that Luke highlights the ethical demands of following Jesus is a stream that flows through the third gospel – the tension and interplay between the blessings of poverty and the dangers of wealth.1

And with that we encounter another demanding parable. Though its implications are complex, its plotline is clear. A rich man and a poor man. Each dies. One to heaven and one to hell. The rich man pleads for mercy. When that fails, he pleas for mercy for his surviving brothers – send Lazarus back to warn them. Why would they listen to him when they have not listened to Moses?

It is a parable not lost on subtleties. Famine turns to feast and feast to famine. The tables, literally, are turned. All that the Pharisees, and every preacher of a gospel of prosperity since then, all that they understand about faith and ethics – that wealth is equated with a blessings from God – is out the window.

The rich man, representing the Pharisees, representing all those with power, has been blind to Lazarus in life. It is only in death that he is seen. And it appears to be too late.

This is a story of ultimate things, and even so a story of how we live our lives in this moment, here and now.

Commentator after commentator writes of the great reversal of the gospel, made as clear as any place in this story. The weak are made strong. The unloved and unrecognized receive mercy and grace. The poor are made rich. Again, Alan Culpepper reminds us that “rather than living separate lives, the fate of rich and poor are intertwined.” 2 This is not simply a story about charity, but rather a story about how we relate to each child of God, to all children of God.

Food and shelter are only the beginning. George Buttrick writes that “as important as it is to share food, the parable is about an even deeper and pervasive attitude of neighborliness toward others. True charity is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it is not spasmodic or superficial, but rather a call to fundamental neighborliness.3

What Jesus does, here and throughout the gospels, is call us to transform the way that the world does things. The ethic of the world places us at the center. Jesus would replace that ethic with one that places others at the center, Christ at the center. It is that simple, that challenging, that clear.

We are called to reject the rich man-poor man dynamics in two ways – by seeing the poor man now, and doing something about it, but more so, by working to change the poor man’s world, by living as a true neighbor.

My feeble attempts to relate this to the world of sports seek to highlight our lack of contemporary neighborliness, to challenge the relativity of rules or the notion that all are doing it and that the rules do not apply to me.

Jesus it talking about us, to us. We are, perhaps, not so much the rich man – his fate is sealed. We may be Lazarus. But we are certainly the surviving brothers, who may still have the possibility of listening, and hearing, and being transformed. Because for every athlete who makes the headlines for all the wrong reasons, there are a handful who do not.

Hear this true parable from sportswriter Rick Reilly: For 46 years Middlebury College freshman athletes have been “Picking Up Butch” for football and basketball games.

Basketball players, men and women, do it during football season. Football players do it during basketball season. Two hours before each home game, two freshmen grab whatever car they can get and drive a mile off campus to the tiny house where 58-year-old Butch Varno lives with his 77-year-old mother, Helen, who never got her driver's license. And they literally Pick Up Butch, 5'3" and 170 pounds, right off his bed.

They put him in his wheelchair and push him out of the house, or one guy hauls him in a fireman's carry. They pile him into the car, cram the wheelchair into the trunk, take him to the game and roll him to his spot in the mezzanine for football games or at the end of the bench for basketball. Cerebral palsy.

And the kids don't just Pick Up Butch. They also Keep Butch Company. Take Butch to the Bathroom. Feed Butch. "He always likes a hot dog and a Coke," says 6'8" Clark Read, 19, a power forward. "It's kind of weird at first, sticking a hot dog in his mouth. The trick is to throw out the last bite so he doesn't get your fingers."

"These kids care what happens to me," Butch says. "They don't have to, but they do. I don't know where I'd be without them. Probably in an institution."

But that's not the question. The question is, Where would they be without Butch?

"It makes you think," says Armstrong. "We're all young athletes. Going to a game or playing in a game, we take it for granted. But then you go Pick Up Butch, and I don't know, it makes you feel blessed." 4

That may put too sentimental of a point on all this, this radical ethical demand that Jesus places before us. But it may not. And sports is certainly too trivial of a pursuit: the real world has more important things to worry about than home runs and foul shots and whether our team wins or not. Even if it is the Ohio State Buckeyes.

But this is true. Jesus said it. If we do not have ears to hear -- we might as well be dead. But if we do have ears to hear these prophets – prophets then and prophets now – we will have life – full, eternal, transformed life, which will make all the difference in our souls, and all the difference in the world. Amen.