The Kingdom of Heaven is Like Unto a Knuckleball

I know it's the beginning of football season, but it's almost time for the major league baseball playoffs, too, and you know what that means.  I'm watching my Texas Rangers very carefully as they make their way back to the World Series and I'm going to give you an positive, uplifting story about a baseball player.  And today I want to introduce you to R.A. Dickey.

Now Dickey doesn't play for the Rangers, although he started out with them.  He's not going to the World Series or the playoffs because his team, the New York Mets, is not going to make it this year.  But R.A.  Dickey is having one of the best seasons a major league pitcher has ever had.  He's never had more than 11 wins in a season but he's already got 18.  He's got the lowest Earned Run Average of his career.  Almost to 200 strikeouts.  And he is a likely candidate for the National League Cy Young Award, given to the best pitcher in the league.

But why am I telling you about R.A. Dickey?  Because he throws a knuckleball.  Nobody else who is active in the major leagues throws a knuckleball.  Most pitchers rely on a mixture of fastballs, where they try to blow the ball past the hitter, and breaking balls, which can look like a fastball when they come out of a pitcher's hand, but move and curve and break away from the middle of the strike zone.

Knuckleballs don't do that.  Knuckleballs are not fast pitches.  The pitcher grips the ball with his knuckles and kind of floats it to the plate.  When the knuckleball is working it can make hitters look ridiculous as they swing at the air.  Dickey describes it as trying to hit a butterfly in a typhoon.*  But because the knuckleball is usually so unpredictable, when it's not working the pitcher can give up all kinds of walks and runs.  The amazing thing about Dickey this season, and it's something no one else has really ever been able to do so successfully, is that he has been able to throw the knuckleball consistently well without all the walks.  At 37 years of age, after knocking around the league for more than a decade, R.A. Dickey has found his pitch.

Now here's something else to know about Dickey - he's a Christian and his faith is a big part of his story.  He's even got a baptism story, though it's not what you think.  One time, when he was down in the minor leagues thinking that he wasn't going to make it back to the bigs because his pitching just stunk, he was traveling with the team to Omaha.  He looked out at the Missouri River from his hotel room, and he was a good swimmer, and he said to himself, "I'm going to swim to Iowa," which was 250 yards across this big, turbulent, muddy, dirty river.

Some teammates went out with him to watch this event from the shoreline.  Dickey stripped down to his boxer shorts and went down into the water and started swimming.  But he quickly discovered that this was not like any other swimming he had ever done.  About 60 yards out he was being pulled hard by a strong undertow and he felt like he was just treading water.  He looked back at the shore and he could see that the current had already carried him about a quarter mile down from where his teammates had been standing.  He looked across at the far shore and had to decide whether to keep going or to turn back.  And he turned back.                                                                    

But by this point he was so tired and the current was so strong that he was convinced he was going to make it.  He said he started to weep underwater as he sank down.  "I was praying that God...would protect my family and all that.  I had come to grips with dying...and right as I was about to open my mouth and take in all this water...just end it quickly...my feet hit the bottom of the river and it kind of renewed my adrenaline."** He pushed off the river bottom and came up to a place where one of his teammates had run.  And he pulled him out.

That's the moment, Dickey looks back on as the turning point - a baptism he calls it, when he stopped living out of his anxieties about who he was and what was going to happen to himself and his career, and started living in the present.  He started some therapy to deal with problems in his marriage and in overcoming childhood sexual abuse.  And he started throwing the knuckleball.  Dickey says, "I feel like that there was something very divine about that...I began throwing the knuckleball exactly when I really started working on my life and trying to become...who God had authentically created me to be.  And I think those things parallel each other."***

A knuckleball cannot really be controlled.  You have to just take the ball and get your fingers in just the right place and let it go.  It's not about power.  It's about working with the ball with patience and attention.  And in pitching that way - one pitch at a time - in living that way - with patience and attention - R.A. Dickey has found God had created him to be.

OK, there's your uplifting story.  But here's the thing that speaks a gospel message to me: good living, like good knuckleball pitching, is about practice.  It's about giving yourself over to practices that will help you grow in the faith.

The book of James is all about practices and it is pretty fierce about them.  James made the Protestant Reformers like Martin Luther nervous because the book is emphatic about works.  "Faith without works is dead," James says and Luther saw how that kind of theology could lead people to go off the rails.  He grew up with an understanding of faith that was so works oriented that he was always anxious about his salvation, believing that he had not done enough to earn God's grace and mercy.  He believed that he could never do enough to satisfy God's demands for righteousness.  He eventually realized that, even though that was true, his faith in what Jesus had done on the cross was sufficient to grant him salvation.  And he never wanted to stop living out of that freedom, so when he read James, it made him nervous.  People might think that the only way to heaven is to earn it.  People might think that they can do it without any reference to Jesus.

James, however, is not talking about earning salvation.  He's talking about what happens in the Christian community because we have faith in Christ.  Because we have faith, we will do.  And if we don't do, what kind of Christian witness are we giving?  What are we doing to our souls?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book not too long ago called Outliers and in it he examines the lives of extraordinarily gifted people.  Who are these people that so excel in their fields that we call them outliers?  In business, music, sports, the arts there are people who are extremely gifted.  What's going on with these people?

Well, one of the things that Gladwell found is that a common thread for them is that they devote hours to their craft.  He even identifies something called the 10,000 Hour Rule.  Truly phenomenal people become phenomenal, not just by having natural gifts, but by giving hours to what they do.  He looks at violinists who we recognize as being outliers and says, "in fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice."****  "To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.)  And what's ten years?  Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice.  Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness."*****

That's a lot of hours.  And most of us are not going to dedicate that kind of time to a craft.  But what if we tried?  What if we gave ourselves over to something that would form us and guide us?  R.A. Dickey was late in his career before he took up the knuckleball.  What is our calling to which we would give real time and practice and life?

How much are we giving to growing in the Christian life?  An hour a week - let's say 50 weeks a year - 200 years you'll have the chops to be a phenomenal Christian.  Throw in Sunday School and you've got it down to a century.  But what if we gave more?  What do you think you would discover about yourself and God if you gave yourself to growing in holiness - sanctification as John Wesley called it?  And I'm not just talking about in-church time.  I mean living it in the world.
That is where James calls us to live it.  He knows that God is often found in the poor and we live out of an authentic faith when discover God among the poor and refuse to show favoritism.  God loves people in T-shirts.  God loves people with dirty hands from hard work.  God loves people who love their neighbors - all their neighbors.  God shows mercy on those who show mercy.

The church becomes the church when it lives out the gospel message of Jesus who made a point of living among the poor.  He ate with sinners.  He hung out with lepers.  He gave hungry people food.  He healed the sick.  He comforted the grieving.  And he commanded - not asked - commanded us to do the same.  "You will do greater things than this," he said.  "How will we do greater things if we don't ever encounter those in need?"

In her song about God's upheaval of the world as we know it, Hannah in 1 Samuel sings that "the Lord will judge the ends of the earth" (I Sam. 2:10).  It's a statement of God's sovereignty, right?  There's no place on earth where God's reign isn't accomplished.  But it's also a statement that on the margins, at the edge, at the places where you might think God has overlooked what's going on, the kingdom is coming.

Let me let you in on a little secret - you are living at the end of the earth.  The Eastern Shore of Virginia - how many times have people told you that this is the end of the earth?  Around us there is poverty and need and economic impoverishment and scarcity and racial tensions - but the Lord will judge the ends of the earth.  You can do greater things than this.  Faith, if it has no works, is dead.  All ways of saying - the kingdom of heaven is at hand - in your hands.

So put your hand to the work of the kingdom.  You're not gripping it and burning it into the catcher's mitt like a fastball.  It's not your power that's going to bring the kingdom home.  You're not cutting it or sliding it or curving it so that it sneaks across.  It's not your finnesse or style that's going to bring the kingdom home.  Hold it lightly, this kingdom which is God's gift to us.  Give it your patience and your attention.  Live for this moment, this time.  Give all of your life to this work.  Don't hold anything back.  And then let it go.  Let it go.  Do what you can.  Do all that you can and let God do the rest.  Thanks be to God.

*R.A. Dickey, interviewed by Dave Davies, "R.A. Dickey on 'Winding Up' as a Knuckleballer," KERA News, 10 April 2012, http://keranews.org/post/ra-dickey-winding-knuckleballer.  Accessed 8 Sept 2012.
**ibid.
***ibid.
****Malcolm Gladwell, quoted in Erik Deckers, "What Malcolm Gladwell REALLY Said About The 10,000 Hour Rule," Professional Blog Service, 15 March 2012, http://problogservice.com/2012/03/15/what-malcolm-gladwell-really-said-about-the-10000-hour-rule/.  Accessed 8 Sept 2012.
*****ibid.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Worshipping God with Unclean Hands

OK, kids, my first message this morning is for you.  Did you hear that Gospel lesson that we just read?  The one about the Pharisees complaining to Jesus that about his disciples eating food with unclean hands?  The first thing I want to say is - this is not a lesson on how it is OK to eat with dirty hands.  I don't want you going home and saying to your folks, "I don't have to wash my hands because Jesus said it was OK to have dirty hands."  Uh-uh.  Not the message for today.

The message for today is - having dirty hands is the best kind of unclean to have.  But that's not the same thing as saying, "Hey, I'm going to eat my sandwich with dirty hands."  Jesus wants you to be healthy.  And he wants you to listen to your mom.

So, what is going on in this gospel story?  It's a little hard for us to get into because the world it comes out of is so far gone.  The Pharisees who were sitting there watching Jesus' disciples eat were not worried about germs; they were trying to get Jesus caught up in a controversy over legalism.

I've been watching the political campaign and I see some of the same things going on.  There's a kind of "gotcha" game and the sad part is that the political campaigns think that you and I are dull enough to go along with it.  You know, every ad takes some little phrase from a candidate, takes it out of context, and then blows it up so that the candidate looks as bad as they can possibly look.  As if Romney really believes that poor people are not important.  Or as if Obama really believes that business owners didn't build anything.  [Some of you are probably shaking your head right now and saying, "O, no.  He really believes that."  But don't do that.  We're smarter than that.  Don't let the ads tell you what to believe.]

But we'll have plenty of time for politics this fall.  What I'm trying to get at here is that the Pharisees were playing a game in which they were trying to catch Jesus out for not towing their line.  The rules they were worried about were the ones they had outlined.  They had taken the old Mosaic laws and particularly the laws about what made something clean or unclean and they had turned them into straitjackets.  It wasn't about germs - they didn't know about germs then.  It was about doing the right thing in the right way.

Mark outlines all of their concerns in this passage.  They were trying to maintain the traditions of their elders.  You had to wash your hands in a particular way.  You had to ritually wash food from the market.  You had to ritually wash the pottery you ate from and the pitchers you drank from and the copper kettles you cooked with and even the dinner couches where you sat down to eat.  A taco stand would have sent these guys right over the edge.

But they know that Jesus is a radical kind of guy.  They know his disciples are doing things differently.  So they know they're going to catch them and when they see the disciples eating without washing exactly the way they washed, they say to Jesus, "Aha!  You're not upholding the traditions of the elders."  And beyond that what they're saying is, "You're not one of us.  You don't believe like we believe.  You are a threat.  You are not a good Jew.  Let's see your birth certificate."

That's when Jesus turns it around on them.  And he goes back to Isaiah the prophet, to the scriptures that he shared with the Pharisees.  And he quotes a verse (Isaiah 29:13) that says, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me."  What he's saying is - you have made worship and obedience an external act.  But if you only do the act and your heart is not close to God then you have made religion all about you instead of about God.

He spells it out to the disciples later after he tells the crowd a parable.  He says, "Listen.  Nothing is outside of a person going in can make then unclean.  It's what comes out a person that is unclean.  And then later, with the disciples, he gets graphic.  He talks about what comes out of a person and goes into the sewer.  You want to talk unclean - that's unclean.  But you know this is not really about food and digestion.  Jesus is after something more.  And what he wants is not just your diet.  Jesus wants your heart.

Not too long ago I ran across a great book called All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.  OK, OK, yes, they are philosophers, but their book was really interesting.  They set out to read through all the Western classics of literature from the Odyssey to Moby Dick and to look at how our understanding of who we are as human beings changes through those works.  They spend some time with Jesus and they say that one of the most important things about Jesus was that he created the notion that we have an inner life.  We might want to say that there are other important things about Jesus, but stay with them here.

It's not that people before Jesus didn't have inner thoughts and desires.  It's just that they didn't think they were all that important.  As the authors point out, of the Ten Commandments only one has to do with an internal act - the command against coveting.   The rest were external - take care of your parents, observe the sabbath, don't commit murder, don't commit adultery - things you could see.

Jesus turns all of that inside out - or outside in.  He says, "Where do you think murder comes from?  It's not just something that happens out there.  It begins in your heart.  Adultery begins in your heart.  Theft begins in your heart.  And what is it that Jesus wants?  Not just your good behavior, but your heart.  Dreyfus and Kelly say, "Jesus thus brings the purity of one's desires from the margins of the Hebrew sense of what counts as a worthy life to the center of his Christian sensibility."*  The purity of our desires.

That's just what he tells the disciples.  If you are so caught up in washing the dishes that you can't see what's going on between you and God in your heart, you're doing it wrong.
So hear what he's saying.  Jesus says, "It's not about the externals.  You have an inner life.  And that inner life is messed up.  It's disordered.  It's like a wild, overgrown garden.  And for you to get it under control, you've got to give it over to God."

But listen to what Jesus is not saying here.  He is not saying that the externals don't matter.  He's not saying that our actions don't matter.  What he's saying is that obedience to God is the first step.

Now that's not a popular thing to say in our culture.  We don't like that word obedience.  We don't like the notion that we have to give ourselves over to an authority.  Because we have seen enough flawed authority figures to know how that can be abused.  Obedience is a slavemaster's word.  Obedience is a soviet politburo word.  Obedience is something you send dogs to school for.  Obedience feels unAmerican.

But here's the sad truth.  Sin has made such a mess of things that the only way to find freedom is through obedience.  The only way you are going to discover who you are and what the world ought to be is to give up yourself to God.

Because the world doesn't know.  The world will tell you that you are a bundle of desires and subconscious motivations and that you might as well just give them free rein because they're there and we're free.  But what if you are meant for something more?  What if there is something greater waiting for you if you tend the garden of your soul?  What if God means for you to do more than you're doing?

That's where James comes in, because James knows that dirty hands are part of what the Christian life is all about.  James was writing to the early Christian community and he could already see the divide happening.  There were hearers and there were doers and the hearers were falling into a trap.  They believed that because they heard the Word...because they trusted Jesus...because they had made that movement toward God...they were done.

But James says, no.  If that's how you act it's just like somebody looking into a mirror and then walking away and forgetting what they look like.  Hearing without doing is a great way to lose your identity as a Christian.

Doers look into the law, the things that God has given us to get our inner life in order, and they know who they are.  And they will live out of that.  They will watch their tongue for harmful language.  They will care for orphans and widows - those who are living on the edge.  And they will keep themselves unstained by the world.  Not because they live above it, but because they know that the world is not sufficient to tell them who they are.

This week I was on a mission trip with some of our members down in North Carolina.  We were repairing a roof that had been damaged by Hurricane Irene last year.  And I learned a lot.  I learned that construction workers are worth every penny they are paid.  Watching Will Brown and Jack Smith and Glenn Ballon - the Beast - on the roof doing their thing was inspiring.  And they taught me just enough to eventually get me up on the roof, too.  And that's why I've got abrasions all over me.  It was hot, dirty work but very satisfying.  Especially when the family came to dinner with us on Wednesday night and thanked us for taking care of a roof that had been leaking for a year.

We stayed at an old school that now houses a lot of county offices in Hyde County.  But the gym and cafeteria had been taken over the United Methodist Church and it was also inspiring to see the cross and flame up on the side of the wall there.  We are there in Hyde County.  We are the only relief agency that is still there.  And we are there because we are worshipping God with our dirty hands - living out the gospel one roof at a time.

If we make a numbers game out of this or say that if we do so many roofs it will get us to heaven - we're back in the company of the Pharisees.  But if our hearts guide our hands - if God is moving within us - Jesus is here.  Thanks be to God.

*Hubert Dreyfus & Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, Free Press: New York, 2011, electronic version, p. 534.