It's way too late, the day has been way too busy, and I'm way too tired, after four services with four sermons and baptizing my youngest grandson, and spending an exhausting yet wonderful day with a whole lot of family, that I turn my thoughts to grace, and heroes and baseball. Tonight may be the last night that I'm able to sit out on the deck with a good, but not too good tumbler of bourbon and a good but not too good cigar. (With the way things are in the world today not too good is plenty good enough.) It's been a wonderful summer, but now the brisk air lets me know that fall is here, the long evenings of listening to baseball outside, as the crickets chirp and the bull frogs bellow has come to an end. Frost and ice are around the corner, I can see my breath tonight...yet pour summer business is yet to be completed.
I'm basking in the glow of another improbable baseball moment, the Boston Red Sox, after a truly remarkable season, coming from the worst imaginable last year to the best this year are seemingly on the ropes. In the best-of-seven American League Championship series, after a dismal seven innings, getting only one run, after getting shut out in the previous game; facing probably the second best pitcher in the American League, after losing to the third best pitcher, with the prospect of facing the very best pitcher-with having more strike-outs in two games than any other post-season team; with what felt like the last chance, to have your hero, your Casey-at-the-bat guy not strike out this time, but hit a grand slam to tie the game which you eventually win...it feels like grace; unearned and undeserved, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it.
Yet with all of this, it's not David Ortiz (aka Big Papi) that is the hero I speak of, but it's the great sports writers, the Ring Lardners, and the Red Barbers, and the Jim Murrays that I so admire. It's because they, (let me add my favorite contemporary sports writer, Sally Jenkins to the list), of all of humanity could make some sense of such a moment, such a game as this. When things look the bleakest, the darkest moments; when there seems there is no good news, until the good news erupts, these truly gifted news paper men 9and woman) could put the magic of what was happening into some kind of perspective. Just as one is ready to throw in the towel, to relinquish a season of promise, the unexpected miracle happens, the pitch is a half inch from where the pitcher intends it to be, the batter flicks his wrists, and everything changes. New life, new hope, gtrace has happened again.
Our public life, with the sequestrations, the furloughs, the protracted and demeaning bickering on Capital Hill have the same feeling of sixteen long innings of one-hit ball. Of a season of hope come to an end. Yet as the Red Sox proved for one more night, at least, God's involvement in the world in our lives is a mystery beyond our understanding. With this God all things are possible.
