Jesus and George Steinbrenner

“Jesus and George Steinbrenner” The Dover Church
July 18, 2010 – 8th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Colossians 1:15-28, Luke 10:38-42

My friends, something really big happened this week in the world of sports, specifically in the mythological Gotterdammerung of Red Sox nation. George Steinbrenner, long-time owner of the New York Yankees, the emperor of the Evil Empire, the single most readily identifiable nemesis of Red Sox Nation over the last 40 years…has died.
I myself am not all that much of a Red Sox fanatic, not the way I once was, so I can only claim to be mildly engaged with the story of Mr. Steinbrenner’s passing. I did not shoot off fireworks or light a candle in a shrine someplace this week. I have thought about George and his Yankees and the large shadow he and they have cast over much of my life. I never personally disliked the man, for the simple reason that I never met him. I’m sure he was quite charming at a party. I didn’t even hold his brash behavior and speech, his bullying, his temper tantrums, his seeming egomania, his fist fights with managers and players, against him. With my ingrained New England sense of superiority which looks down on things New York, I just sort of chalked all of that up to being a New Yorker. What else can you expect?
The thing about George Steinbrenner which quite literally ate at my soul for many years was his ability and willingness to spend the money to put together teams that would consistently and thoroughly beat the Red Sox, year after year after year. Anytime a new pitching or hitting phenom emerged somewhere in the major leagues, you just knew it was only a matter of time before Steinbrenner brought them to the Bronx, outbidding the hapless Sox every time. I know it sounds silly, but the ingrained New England sense of superiority which I mentioned a moment ago actually conditioned me to look down in contempt on Mr. Steinbrenner’s payrolls. You can’t hear it, but in my head I am already speaking with the clipped accents of English Public Schools. Bostonians just don’t spend that kind of money on athletes. This is supposed to be a game, a contest, sporting, played in park, not a Stadium, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
So it goes without saying that being down 3 games to none to the Yankees, which felt all too familiar, and then to win the next 4 in the Fall of 2004, which was mindbogglingly unfamiliar, was arguably one of the highpoints of my life. I loved it. I loved that it happened at Yankee Stadium. I loved that the Red Sox with their bad haircuts, messy uniforms, tar spattered helmets, and odd behavior, looked like underdogs compared to the spick and span Bronx Bombers and had still pulled it off. Quite frankly, the 4 game sweep of the Cardinals in the World Series was something of an anticlimax for me. Being all too human, I was glad to turn a blind eye to the fact that the new Red Sox ownership and their deep pockets put that team together. Now we also know that steroids were used on both sides, but we Christians are supposed to be forgiving people. For me it was all the genius of that kid Theo Epstein from Brookline. We finally won!!!
This week I have tuned into some of the commentary about Steinbrenner and his life with the Yankees, the good, the very good, the critical and the comical. I have also been studying theology, in particular reading a book by one of my favorite Biblical theologians, N.T. Wright, called After You Believe. Why Christian Character Matters. Wright is the bishop of Durham in the Church of England. As you can gather from the title, this book is about Christian character and how we go about forming it and being formed by it. A great book, as his many books usually are in my opinion. There I was with Steinbrenner on my mind, the Yankees 5 games ahead in the East at the All Star break, and Wright in my hand, when I came across an intriguing passage, in which Wright discusses the role models of virtue we turn to in our society. He writes, “we have (a)…passion for the heroes and heroines of sport, popular music, and other similar attractions. We expect them to fulfill the role of “celebrity” in being both superhuman in some respects and more or less subhuman in others (in their undisciplined use of drugs, alcohol, fast cars, and sex). They reflect, in fact, an image which is well known to students of the classical world: the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome, who were powerful, dazzling, capricious, licentious, and unusually helpful to people they liked and dangerous to people they didn’t.”
Please believe when I say that I am not a sore loser who is using a pulpit in the heart of Red Sox nation to kick dirt on Mr. Steinbrenner’s grave. Nor am I an uptight, sour grapes Christian preacher, pushing a fundamentalist faith which despises and rejects secular culture. This is baseball after all, which is a game and is supposed to be fun. George Steinbrenner is topical this week and everything about the man is undeniably iconic. Much of the public face of the man, our fascination with and admiration of him, our loathing and fear of him, fits nicely into Wright’s diagnosis. He was larger than life, a living and breathing little Zeus, both superhuman and subhuman. When I said that I looked down on Steinbrenner and his Yankees, that was Bostonian hyposcrisy. The truth is that I envied him and them and resented their negative impact on my life. Even if we pretend otherwise, many of us have a passion for celebrities like Steinbrenner. We want to be like them. We aspire to the glory they live.
And then there’s Jesus. I love the way the lectionary puts these two texts together on this Sunday every third year. The first, an awe inspiring, glorious, mystical, cosmic vision of the Christ. The second, a rather mundane vignette of the man Jesus visiting with two women, one who is busy doing chores and the other who just sits and listens. Why do I love them together like this? Because together they open a window for us into how Jesus the man can open a window into Christ who is God for us. The man who is our pathway into the divine, something we are actually invited to make our daily lived experience. In, through and with Christ, we can transcend both super-humanity and sub-humanity and live into full humanity. That is exciting.
Most people want to be good people and live good lives. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear how we do that or can be certain that we’re on the right track. But what if being good and living a good life are not ends in themselves, but portals to something more? What if being good and living a good life are not ends in themselves, but portals to something more? What if this man Jesus, the travelling rabbi, the earthy teacher of wisdom, the nice man in a real human body living a real human life, the healer, is the doorway into the glorious, exhalted, heavenly, cosmic Christ? This person who wants to take us right into the heart of God? How do we get from the dusty streets of the Galilees of our lives to know the invisible God? How do get from feeling quite far from God to being reconciled with God? How do we get from thinking about God to experiencing the fullness of God? How do we get from a place of ignorance of or doubt about God and life to a place of participatory fellowship with the eternal mystery of God? How do we get from our quite messy lives to lives that are holy and blameless before God? How do we get from a place of feeling broken, drawn in a million directions, worn down, burned out and anxious, to becoming mature, complete, whole in Christ? How do we reach the goal Paul paints for us? How do we get from Martha and Mary’s living room to a direct encounter with the living God?
My friends, it all begins, is sustained by and continues throughout our lives, by following Mary’s example from this morning, listening to Jesus. Just sitting and listening. I know that sounds too simple to be any good, but it is true. It flies right in the face of everything our culture’s many gods and goddesses tempt us with. Listening to Jesus is countercultural. It requires all the Christian virtues of patience, humility, chastity and love to just sit and listen. The people we admire are the ones who do the talking, like George Steinbrenner. And it won’t “work” overnight, or even all that quickly, which is perhaps the most countercultural thing about it. We can’t buy expensive spiritual free agents to win us the championship. We are surrounded by so much noise in our lives, so many competing images to follow, so many different goals to aim for. But if Paul is right, and I believe he is, then communion with Christ is THE GOAL God created us to live into. And the way to begin, the way to stay on track, is to listen. It takes training and practice. You would think it would come naturally, but I had to learn. I have to keep at it. I have to relearn and begin again regularly.
To get from here to there, to live into all the promises, to experience the fullness of God, to become fully human as God intended us to, all ways of expanding on the Christian code words “eternal life,” it all begins and is sustained by listening to Jesus.