This is a story that was published in a Middlebury, Vermont newspaper, the Valley Voice. My colleague, Rev. Mary Tiebout worked there several years ago as a reporter. The story came to me from her about a year and a half ago. Since then, I’ve held onto it fondly until this moment. It’s particularly well suited to this season. It holds the underlying theme of the Jewish High Holy Days, and it’s definitely seasonal in relation to the baseball playoffs. The story does hold, at its core, the essence of spiritual experience, as well as some pertinent hints for religious response.

Maxon Eddy, who was born in Middlebury in 1907, wrote the story. Between the time the story occurred and the time of its publishing, Mr. Eddy became a doctor and spent many years volunteering in hospitals in developing countries such as Indonesia, Haiti, Ethiopia, and Nepal.

"Bad Day in Brandon" by Maxon Eddy

(Slightly abridged)

When I was 15 years old, I learned why baseball rulebooks are so fat. To allow the umpires any leeway in interpretation of the rules can be a disaster. It all has to be spelled out in infinite detail. And yet they must make interpretations at times, and we cannot legislate common sense among umpires any more than morality can be legislated among lawmakers.

The baseball game between Middlebury and Brandon High School on May 23, 1923, a day that will live in infamy, was [held] at Brandon. We liked to play Brandon, a school about our size, a team about our equal in its lack of talent.

I was the pitcher for the team, not because I could do it well; no one else could do it at all. These games went very slowly, primarily because of time spent retrieving the ball thrown wildly to the catcher or a member of the infield. The day had progressed into the early evening. Light was fading. We were in the bottom of the 11^th inning with the score tied 17 to 17. Most of the spectators had wearied of the game ever ending and had gone home.

I must tell you about the ball itself. A league baseball cost 50 cents, and our budget allowed for only two. The better one of our two had been scooped up by a small dog that irretrievably hid it in a low air space under a nearby house. The one we were playing with had lost its cover during the seventh inning and had been repaired with layers of black electric tape over the original cover, the customary method of salvage.

Now, here we were in the bottom of the 11^th inning with Brandon batting. There were two outs and no one was on base. If I could fan their best hitter, Lou Harrar, who was at bat, we would still have a chance.

Ray Fisher, a friend of my father and one of Middlebury College’s baseball greats, who had gone on to honorably win a game for the Cincinnati Reds in the scandalous World Series of 1919 against the Chicago White Sox, had shown me a special pitch–a "jump ball." Now was the time to use it. I rubbed the ball in my hands; its condition was tenuous. The ribbons of tape were frayed and loose, but I thought it would last. I reared back and threw it as hard as I could with a counter-clockwise twist of the wrist. It flapped and whizzed its journey to the plate, which it crossed dead center, belt high, without the slightest "jump": a perfect home run pitch.

In the dimming twilight I saw the batter swing and then I heard the whirr of the ball, like a partridge flying over my head. I followed its course to about halfway between second base and center field and at that point I watched it, like a partridge hit broadside, disintegrate and flutter miserably to the ground in fragments.

Zenas Bliss was not only our center fielder and the brightest boy in the class, but he also held the record for consecutively consuming more dishes of Joe Calvi's chocolate ice cream covered with sauce, nuts, and whipped cream than anyone else. However, neither his gastric capacity nor his remarkable ability to translate Caesar helped him much in the field. His width equaled his height–when viewed from the rear, he presented the pyramid shape of a sitting rabbit. I could hear him rolling in from center field.

Lou Harrar, the runner, was galloping around second base thumbing his nose at me as he went. Then I could see Zenas working back and forth across the field like a bird dog searching for the ball. Finally he found it in a high hummock of grass surrounding a lagoon of dry cow dung as the runner rounded third base and headed for home. With a sidearm motion and a grunt, Zenas flung the ball fragment toward home plate, which it reached just in time for our catcher, Fanny Corvin, to tag the runner out in a cloud of dust.

We were overjoyed. We jumped up and down banging each other on the back. It was the third out, the score was still tied and we had another chance. At the height of our elation we were paralyzed by a shout of, "Safe! He's safe!" It came from the umpire who was standing at the plate turning something over in his hands.

We charged at him. I thrust my jaw into his ugly face and screamed, "What do you mean 'Safe?' He was out by a mile. Everybody saw it!"

The umpire raised the fragment of baseball and wad of black tape in his hand. "This is not a ball, this is smaller than a half piece of the ball." He pulled a rulebook out of his back pocket and waved it above his head. Then he thrust his jaw in my ugly face and screamed, "The rule book says an unforced runner must be tagged out with the ball. This is not the ball–the ball is out there [somewhere] in the field. He's safe."

We stood there in stunned silence as he added, "And the rule book says the opinion of the umpire is final!"

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that a sermon should hold up the events and issues of the day to be viewed through the light of religious value. This story is a great vehicle for burnishing the light of religious values. There are so many elements of the story that help it to shine.

There is the whole question of essence vs. substance. Did Fanny Corvin, the catcher, have the ball or not? There’s the issue of the value of outside authority and the need for the discipline of rules. There is the dynamic of community spirit and teamwork. There is the phenomenon of the not-so-pleasant growth opportunity that arises when our expectations aren’t in synch with our evolving realities, and there are a host of other religious implications.

It’s the first one though, the question of essence vs. substance that I’d like to use this morning in order to illuminate some very disturbing events and issues of our day. That is the crisis in our country, not only of children under the age of three as described in the Carnegie Report, but the crisis of abandonment of so many children of all ages in the upcoming generation. To view this crisis within a religious context though, we might do well to first recognize a prevailing but errant theology that allows us to confuse essence with substance.

There are many Christian values that I embrace and admire. Christianity has much to offer, but what I’m talking about here, is what I believe to be a most objectionable legacy infused by Christianity into Western culture. That is the very dangerous notion of individual salvation. Neither traditional Universalism nor Unitarianism ever embraced the notion of individual salvation. Universalism was born out of an objection to the thought that the possibility of damnation existed for anyone.

In contrast to most world religions including Taoism, Judaism, Buddhism, native spiritual customs, and certainly Humanism, traditional Christianity holds out to its adherents the promise that if you are right with God–you get to go to heaven. And somehow, this egocentric spiritual model has prevailed in our culture.

The whole idea of salvation is about a universal human longing for which humanity has turned to religion from time immemorial for assurance. Life, while it may be filled with blessings and ample reason for gratitude, is also filled with suffering, and it’s short. The idea of salvation offers us hope, offers us the potential for the transformation of our lives, and the capacity to transcend our suffering. Salvation, as I said a few weeks ago, is the purpose for our own liberal religion–to save the human enterprise on all levels–in our inner and interpersonal relationships, in our communities and cultures, and in our world.

There is no room for the notion of individual salvation in a world so intricately and delicately interwoven and interdependent as ours. We are either all going to make it, or none of us are. The need for salvation is quite a substantive one. The need has substance in our experience

The fantasy of individual salvation though, while it promises the essence of salvation, fails to deliver that substance. Our entire culture is built upon a religious confusion between this essence and substance. The effects of this confusion can be found in our institutions of economics, commerce and education.

By confusing essence for substance, we run the risk of totally losing the game. The pitcher can’t win unless the whole team wins. And, if we’re not playing with the complete ball, are we really even playing the game?

These questions are very compelling on a theological and spiritual level, but they also have some profound religious implications. By religious, I mean here that integrity calls upon us to respond, as completely as we are able, to the impediments of saving the human enterprise. In mistaking essence for substance, private for corporate, we have created in our culture a stratified system of just deserts.

Calvinism, the theology of divine election is the logical conclusion of a larger theology that purports individual salvation. "Not only can I get there on my own, but if I am a person of means and power and influence, I must have been chose by God (or by luck) for this destiny." The problem is, this theology isn’t so inclusive of those without means, and power and influence.

So what does all of this have to do with children? Everything! In our culture children have the least amount of influence. If they happen to be children of parents who are also without means, they have very little power at all.

I’ve done a fair amount of reading and research this week on New Jersey school children. I was especially interested in comparing educational opportunities children have, and the results of those opportunities, depending on the socio-economic demographics and the communities those children come from. I won’t bother you this morning with a report of the data I’ve seen, but I will confirm what I suspected and what I imagine you might suspect.

Children who live in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods or communities are less safe and more vulnerable than children who live in affluent neighborhoods and communities. They are less likely to score well on college placement exams, if they take them at all, and considerably less likely even to graduate from high school. They are more likely to become involved in the criminal justice system, and more likely, as they grow older, to earn considerably less than their more priviledged counterparts.

This information doesn’t come as news to any of us. The saddest part of it is though, we act as if this is just the way things have to be. "Too bad, poor kids. It’s a shame they can’t have the rich educational experiences and opportunities that our kids enjoy." We offer the essence of education, but not its substance. We expect that some kids will have to play with only part of the ball, and less than half of it at that.

Our school systems carefully screen the student population to make sure that "undeserving" kids don’t sneak in and steal the rich educational experiences that our kids are enjoying. Hundreds upon hundreds of students receive the boot from Montclair, West Orange, Livingston and other area districts each year for trying to abscond with no more than what their more fortunate peers enjoy, supposedly by birthright.

When will we learn, that none of us is going to make it, unless all of us do? The time for the idea of individual salvation has passed. It simply cannot sustain a world of such intricate connection.

We need to come to terms with the fact that the children–all of the children–are our own children. They are our future, and it is secure only when all of them are cared for and secure.

When will we recognize that this is a religious issue that requires a religious response? Religion, through its errant theologies, helped to create this predicament in which we find ourselves. Religion will have to at least help in recreating cultural systems that reflect more enlightened views of the cosmos, of the world and of salvation.

Many of us have left behind religions whose visions we’ve felt undermined rather than encouraged the human enterprise. And so we sometimes feel that we’ve stopped being a part of the problem. The truth is though, that many of the blessings we enjoy are the result of winning by those old rules. If our religion helps us to see new rules, larger, more universal rules by which the world operates, then are we not responsible for making sure that those rules are applied to everyone? And aren’t the children of the next generation a good place to begin our application.

We’re fortunate in our church to have wonderful programs that address these issues. Locally, our After School Program works with neighborhood kids who have been identified as being at risk of losing out. We are part of the state wide network of Promise the Children, a Unitarian Universalist network dedicated to promote legislation and support programs to make sure that none of our children are left behind. And many of us here are part of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee that does the same thing on a national and international level.

In more ways than we may imagine, our salvation–our collective salvation–depends upon our ability to apply natural, integral virtue to the world, to the whole world. I invite you to ask yourself: What do you need to do to be a part of that salvation?

We may be well past the bottom of the ninth inning, but we will not have played our best game until the call goes out that every child is safe. Let’s do our part in putting the battered ball back together so that we will all have the same chance that our religion, our integrity, tells us we were born with. May it be so.