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.