Sunday Reflections: The Church of Baseball

By Rebecca Hickok, Pastor of Waverly Presbyterian Church

“I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn't work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring."

Those are Annie Savoy’s opening words in “Bull Durham” and truer words were never spoken, especially if you happened to be watching Game Six of this year’s World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers.

Bloopers, bombastic homeruns, catastrophic calls, caustic comments—much could and has already been said about that game but what cannot be said is that it was boring. As a life-long baseball fan, I never got the “baseball is boring” sentiment. To the unchurched, I suppose, there may seem to be long stretches when not much is happening. But a true believer knows that at any moment, ecstasy … or tragedy …. can strike. A base on balls can lead to a game-winning run. A pop-up to right field can end an inning and a game.  

The two words for “time” in Greek are “kronos” and “chairos”; “kronos” means that every day, day-in-and-day-out-time, the time most of us live most of our lives in; “chairos”, however is a special, once-in-a-lifetime, hold-on-to-your-hat time. We need both so that we can appreciate the Ordinary in our lives as well as the Extraordinary.

And that’s why I love baseball—it’s filled to the brim with both kronos and chairos and you never know when one will give way to the other. From chronos to kairos, from ordinary to extraordinary and back to ordinary again, in baseball—as in life—we continue to trust and hope and believe because, well, there’s always another season and this just might be the year we win the Series.