Baseball and the Mystery of Life

Spring training is finally here.  I am a baseball fan.  Since I was a boy I have rooted for the New York Yankees.  For the last 35 years, I have also become a Minnesota Twins fan. I seem to not have problems with dual loyalty. No surprise there.

I love the game and relax as soon as I begin watching.  But there is a mystery about baseball.  This mystery is not new to baseball fans.  It has been a part of the sport since its very beginning.  Major league baseball teams play 163 games in each of their seasons.  But, and here is the mystery, even the best teams will lose close to one third of their games.  At the end of each season the teams that go to the World Series will have won 90-100 games and will be hailed as having a spectacular season.  Meanwhile in the process of having this great season they will have lost over 60 games.  How can a team be so good and yet lose so many games? Conversely, some of the worst teams will at least win one third of their games.  How did they do that?  I could understand a bad team winning a few games here and there by accident.  But to win over 60 games and still come in last place is a mystery.  If they are so bad, how did they manage to win all those games?  And if some teams are so good, how do they manage to lose so many games? 

I know, some of you will say, this not a mystery.  It is just the way the game and sports in general goes. You win some. You lose some.  Right, I get it. But why are baseball teams so inconsistent?  And, sometimes, a baseball team has a “great” season, wins over 110 out of 163 games, and goes on to lose the World Series in 4 games straight.  What is that?  I know, it’s a short series, 4 out of 7, so anything can happen?  But why should that be?  You’re a great team that has just had a great season.  You have great pitching, hitting and fielding and yet you go and lose 4 straight? 

The game is unpredictable and crazy. I love it but do not understand it.  And by the way, the team that sometimes wins the World Series is a team that struggled the whole season, a wild card team that barely made it into the playoffs, and they become the World Champions?!   I find all this quite mysterious.

The fact is baseball is a game played by human beings.  And human beings like baseball players are consistent and inconsistent, predictable and unpredictable, have the capacity to act well and the capacity to act poorly. That’s what makes them human. On any given day, a pitcher who is having a terrible year can pitch a great game.  As a boy, I recall going to a double header at Yankee stadium when the last place Washington Senators played the first place Yankees.  The Senators won both games.  The Yankees looked terrible; the Senators played like champions.  For good or for bad, such is the nature of the game.  What makes the game interesting and crazy is its unpredictability and inconsistency. 

And that is what bothers and enthralls me the most.  You can plan effectively, cover every position, spend tons of money, do everything right and still lose due to chance. A vital hitter or pitcher, all of a sudden, gets hurt.  A player swings awkwardly at a pitch in the bottom of the 9th, ends up hitting a perfect bunt that allows the winning run to score. 

Baseball like life itself is full of chance events that can radically alter the tenor of the entire game or your entire life.  There is nothing that can be done about this.  And yes, just like our lives, it makes the game fun, crazy, strange, scary, sad and mysterious to watch.  And yet, I love it and cannot get enough baseball.  Like life, the season can be a wild ride, but we rarely feel we’ve had enough and always want more.

A Few Words about Change

After years of using an IMAC, I have changed to a PC.  I resisted the change but was encouraged by my wife.  I was used to the Apple and didn’t want to learn a new system.  Yet, again, with my wife’s help, I am learning how to use the new computer.  I’m getting better at it.  Change may be inevitable and good for us but it is a threat to our stability.

The Biblical God is always trying to change people. Through various messengers, God is constantly calling on people to repent.  Now, the word “repent” means to turn around and be radically changed.  Live your life in a different way.  Every prophet in the Bible harps on the theme of repentance and change.  By the way, that’s why most prophets are killed.

 Here is a truth.  Some people violently resist the change others think is desperately essential. And, let’s be honest, there are times when we desire a change.  There are times when we are not looking to change and yet change comes anyway.  There are times when we purposefully choose to change.  Finally, there are times when we are just plain not sure we should change.  When is change appropriate and when ought we resist change?

I say, any change which gives life and enlivens the soul is a good change.  This change may not make you happy on all fronts but it gives your life integrity.  It keeps you sane.  And that is the key to life, staying sane. The purpose of commandments in the Bible is to keep us sane, help us resist chaos and teach us what it means to be a human being.

Change is part of life.  My advice??? Absorb and enjoy the nice changes. I love the change to spring and summer.  Expect that sometimes change will not work out well. Craziness is, after all, a part of life.  I don’t like it but there it is.  People say, “this too shall pass.”  Yes, but sometimes it passes like a kidney stone.  Do what you can do to transform the unpleasant or unexpected changes into something that gives life. I know, easier said than done.

Finally, remember, and this is key, change is most difficult when you are moving, starting a new part of your life, a new job or working on a new project.  All beginnings are hard.  So, be easy on yourself.  Don't make your life decisions on the basis of fear.  Do the best you can, enjoy your friends, be encouraged and hugged by your pets, love your lovers, get a good night’s sleep.  All the rest is commentary.  And stay sane out there!

Wrestling with Nature

Nature has no conscience.  It does what it does.  It flings its arrows every which way.  Nature can be a beautiful mystery at which we marvel.  The amazing vastness of space, the billions of shiny stars, a beautiful summer night, the sheer power and depth of the oceans, a loud crashing thunderstorm, the massive mountains looming over us, all making us feel small and in awe.  But, nature can also bring disaster, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, ice storms, cancers and diseases of every sort, and many other calamities.  Nature can amaze us and dismay us.  Regardless, we cannot get away from its precarious power.

We survive nature by respecting its power and wrestling to overcome its chaos.  Sometimes we succeed; sometimes we fail.  In the Bible, God is pictured as constantly struggling to contain the chaos of nature, human and non-human.  Sometimes it works; sometimes it does not. 

But, note, the word "nature" does not occur in scripture.  Why not?

For the biblical writers, nature is not mentioned because it is not to be worshipped.  Nature is not God.  Nature is something created by God.  Nature has no morality.  Many times, nature is chaotic, something to be survived, managed and overcome.

It is our lot on this planet to wrestle with nature, for good and for bad.  And wrestle we will, to our very last breath.

Assuming God created nature, why does nature have so much power?  I do not know.  Perhaps it is there to humble us into realizing that we are not God.  Perhaps it is there to force us to wrestle with our lives, to appreciate each day we have on this floating rotating planet.  The older I get the more I realize Seth Godin is right, “We are not grateful when we are happy.  We are happy when we are grateful.”

Have a successful and sane day wrestling with nature.  And be grateful the parts are working well this morning.

The Heart, Soul, Mind of Being Jewish

Being Jewish is, primarily, not a matter of faith, it is a way of life.  Whether someone Jewish believes in God or not, is not as important as obeying the Torah of God.  That ought to strike you strange.  If there is no God, if no one is there, why are you bothering to obey his teaching?  Because God’s Torah is more important that God. 

The Torah or teaching from God about how to live our lives is vital to staying sane and avoiding chaos.  Once the Torah has been given to the Jewish people, it is no longer under God's control.  Jews must determine how to interpret and what to do with God's teaching.  The Jewish tradition believes that the secret to life lies in the doing.  When Jews debate and argue with each other, as they often do, it is over what to do and how to do it.  Long live this argument!

Most Jews do not know who or where God is, nor do they know what God is doing, but they know what God wants.  Torah teaches us to pursue justice, to care for the stranger, to rest on the Sabbath day, to refrain from worship of anything or anyone that is not God, to not murder, to remember the Exodus from Egypt as paradigmatic, to seek forgiveness from those we hurt before we ask mercy of God, to be in awe of, praise, question and even accuse God with equal intellectual and emotional integrity, and finally, to respect any religion that urges concern for the neighbor and clamors for justice.

Jews are people who are called upon to do what they can do to stop craziness wherever they live, from the smallest insignificant kindness to the greatest acts in pursuit of what is right.  To be honest, not all Jews do what they should do, that is true.  But the goal is the goal. The secret resides in the doing.  This is the heart, soul and mind of being Jewish. This goal of doing what you can do, "without God before God", is what gave birth to Christianity and Islam.

 And when a Christian or a Muslim does what he or she can do to stop craziness, they are each acting in a profoundly Jewish manner.  Whatever else those religions are about, they are at their best when they know, the secret resides in the doing and in the arguing about what to do.

Thinking is Work and Worth the Time

The end of the January interim is a time for students and professor to feel tired and exhausted.  For a month now we have been thinking about religious and theological ideas.  Religious questions are rarely easy.  Enough is enough.  Thinking is work.  We are designed to think but too much thinking strains the brain.  It rebels and demands a break.  I get it.

It is my fortune and honor to teach students to think theologically and religiously, to teach them especially to engage difficult questions, different religions, and particularly Judaism.  The fact that some students resist thinking about religious questions is particularly why I teach, in the hope that I can somehow provoke them into caring about these vital questions. In studying religion the questions are more important than the answers to those questions. I don’t have many answers but I work at asking the right questions. Some of you out there have walked with me, know what I mean and I thank you.

There is an old joke about God and thinking:  “Philosophers look for shadows in the closet, theologians find them.” To me the joke begs the question, are we thinking about something real?  Yes, I think we are.  But it is a mysterious, elusive, hidden strange force or energy with a puzzling methodology.  It is well worth the struggle.  But is not easy.

As someone who spends much of his time thinking about God, religion and meaning, I find, after teaching Religion 110 in January, I am tired and yet oddly pleased at the end of the term; we did some good thinking this past month.  I spoke, they listened, they spoke and I listened and it seems we heard each other as well as we could. It was a fine group of students and I am pleased.

Now comes the percolation. What we have studied will now be added to all else that jumbles around the brain and will be digested over time. The seeds have been planted; the land mines set.  We leave each other and will think some more, unconsciously perhaps, about all we have heard here. 

And soon, after a week, it will start again.  Tired as I may be, I look forward to meeting with students in the second semester and struggling against our inherent reluctance to think. 

The scripture reminds us all again and again, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind.”  We have minds to use our minds, especially when it comes to religion. We will soon again give it all we have until we have to stop.  Such is our struggle and privilege to obtain wisdom.  So it goes from season to season, semester to semester and year to year.  I say to you and to me, thinking is work and worth the time.  I am indeed a lucky man!

Seeing is Believing with Mr. Trump

 Religious people often say , “when you believe then you will see.”  I suggest with Mr. Trump, we adopt the contrary saying, “When we see, then we will believe.”  He has promised a number of very general high sounding almost messianic promises.  We shall see.

What a strange person! He is not a politician. He likes to be unpredictable and unconventional.  He loves to tweet and the more people tell him to stop, the more he keeps on.  He is indeed an unprecedented president. I have to say, he has some good instincts and some ideas which might end up helping the country. Other ideas sound bizarre and misguided.  We will give him a chance and we shall see.

He strikes me like a brash bullying businessman who never admits to failing or having made a mistake.  He over confidently trusts his instincts.  He makes the best deal he can and calls it excellent, defends it at all costs.  He uses all sorts of rhetoric, lies and bluffs at will as a tactic or strategy, changes his story, keeps on dominating the news by all his tweets, sending out his sycophants to defend his latest comments, which they routinely declare, is his way of speaking his mind.  He isn’t even in office yet and he’s already successfully confusing and managing the press. The press may not like him but he is definitely not boring; he is a shining novelty in a culture whose head easily turns to every shiny thing.

What can we say about him?  He’s a character and we love characters even when we mock them.  His erratic behavior gets our attention because craziness and unpredictability always has power and makes the News. 

Some hope is that his vice president, his family and Republican leaders will keep his craziness in check.  We shall see.

I am willing to wait and see but am skeptical about what the next four years will be like.  We'll have to watch him and see if he can remain on track. Will he get lost in his myriad of tweets instead of actually governing?  How many times have we heard that he will soon pivot?  And yet he has remained who he has always been.  We shall see.

Finally, Mr. Trump should be aware.  “All glory is fleeting.”  The shiniest of stars inevitably fade and become black holes.  The Republican party will play along for as long as they get what they want from Mr. Trump.  The Democrats will remain wary, regardless.  This is true of the American people as well.  We are still a young country with high hopes willing to take leadership risks, yet quick to grow tired of the very novelties we have created. Let’s give him a chance but keep our eyes wide open.  In this case the smartest religious view is, “seeing is believing.”

The Problem with the Word "Grace."

Perhaps the most popular word in all of Christian vocabulary is the word “grace.”  A seminary professor of mine used to say, "The Lutheran Church is a movement in the Church Catholic to remind the Church about the centrality of grace."  For Christians, the word “grace” refers to the unmerited love of God given to the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.   Arguably,  the Lutheran national anthem which used to be A Mighty Fortress has now become Amazing Grace.

So, what’s wrong with the word “grace?”  The problem is the word is too easily abused.  The old song, Amazing Grace, asserts that God has come to “save a wretch like me.”  A wretch is an unfortunate, disgraceful and unhappy person.  But you and I are not wretches!  We are human beings created in the image of God.  We are not in a condition of sin.  We have the capacity to act poorly and the capacity to act well.  The notion that we are infected with sin, that no matter what we do, the act itself is tainted with sin is just not true.  I know the anthropological and theological arguments but they do not agree with the facts on the ground.  Human beings are not sinful by nature; they are ambiguous and inconsistent by nature.  Let’s not make more or less of what people are capable of doing.  They have the capacity for good, the capacity for evil and they do both.

In the Hebrew Bible, the word for grace is hesed.  Hesed actually doesn’t mean grace in the Christian sense.  The word hesed refers to the kindness or loyal love of God.  Yes, grace can be about forgiveness but grace is not intended to make us all into wretches needing to be saved.  The word “hesed” refers to a force at the heart of the universe that is working for us and not against us.  How this energy or force interacts within our world is puzzling, mysterious, open to doubts and skepticism.  But the word hesed or grace is about the disposition of this force, fighting at all times against chaos and madness produced by human and non-human nature. At least, that is our hope and trust.

And grace is not about diminishing our pursuit of what is right and just,   so we can do whatever we want, knowing we will be forgiven. The kindness of God is about teaching us to be real human beings. Judaism and Christianity are religions teaching us what it means to live as actual human beings.  For Christians, it is fair to say, through Jesus, God loves you the way we are but does not leave you the way we are.  For Jews, through Torah, God is constantly teaching us to live lives of character and to pursue justice.  And that is grace. That is hesed.

Finally, grace goes both ways.  God loves us by hesed alone and we love God by hesed alone.  God forgives us and we forgive God.  In a world that can be a dangerous place, we humans do what we can each day to stay sane.  And God does what God can do to help us stay sane.  Don’t let the word grace become a word that degrades you rather than uplift you. Grace or hesed is the kindness we ought show to each other each day.  It is the kindness of God in a universe that can be quite unkind.