His brothers once told me that my dad, when he was a young boy, was a tremendous athlete.  But he never had a real opportunity to play much organized sports because his family was poor, and he needed to work to help out with the bills.  After high school he enlisted in the Army and went off to fight in World War II, serving on Okinawa and Guam and several of the islands leading up to the Japanese mainland.  After the war he came home and married my mother and they started in on a family, my older sister Karen came first, then me and then my younger brother Steve.  And I suppose it was because my father had this athlete in him that he had never been able really to fully express that he decided that his children were going to have every opportunity to play sports.  So he took it upon himself to train us up in the art of football and basketball, and most especially, baseball. 

As a young child I remember my dad taking me out on the street in front of our house on warm summer evenings and we’d play catch together. I was maybe 5 or 6 years old.  And as I got a little bit older and a little bit better he would throw ground balls to me and I would field them and pretend I was throwing to first base.  And then he would throw high fly balls to me and I would catch them and pretend that I was throwing a runner out at home plate.  When I got to a more advanced stage at about 8 years of age, my dad decided it was time to teach me how to throw a curve ball.  So he taught me the mechanics of throwing a curve ball and that night I threw my first curve ball - right over his head and through the front windshield of his car.  Now he was not upset about the windshield.  He was upset that I did not use the right mechanics for throwing a curve ball.  So he went over that with me and that night I did throw a ball that actually curved.

I think it was because of my dad’s efforts with me that when I was ten years old I was able to make a little league baseball team comprised mostly of 12 year olds.  And it was a great team.  There was big George Erickson who hit, it seemed, two or three home runs every game.  There was George Leslie at shortstop who never made an error.  And there were lesser skilled kids too, like the coach’s son, Paul, who never got a hit and made a lot of errors, but he was, after all, the coach’s son.  You know how that goes. 

Well, our team that year had a phenomenal season.  We won all our games and won the championship of the Tris Speaker Little League.  And that made us eligible for the City Series, playing against the champions of the other eight or ten little leagues in the city.  And we made it all the way through our division and ended up in the City Championship game. 

Well, at that game we encountered something we had never encountered before.  And that was a pitcher we could not hit.  This kid was so fast, that before you knew the ball left his hand, it was thumping into the catcher’s mitt and the umpire was calling you out on strikes.  So things were pretty grim.  He mowed us down in the first inning.  He mowed us down in the second inning.  And the third inning… and the fourth inning… and the fifth inning.  No one had even gotten a hit.  And then we came to the last of the sixth inning, you know, the last inning in little league baseball.

Well our coach called us over to the bench where we had that big rah, rah huddle that you have when you’re behind and you’re going to lose unless something big happens. The coach gave us that big inspiring “win one for the Gipper” speech.  And we were all pumped up.  So the first batter went up to bat - and promptly struck out.  The second batter went up and also whiffed.  Then the coach’s son, Paul, walked up to the plate. 

Now, we all knew what was going to happen.  We were basically packing our bags and thinking about what we were going to do in the off-season, when –all of a sudden - the coach spoke these terrifying words, “Singley, go pitch-hit for Paul.” 

I wanted to say, “Coach, I’m TEN years old.  I’m not ready for this.  I’m too young to die.”   But I was just a little kid and who am I to argue with my coach.  So up to the plate I went with my little bat, shaking like a leaf. I put one toe in the batter’s box and -  whump!  Strike one!  I hadn’t even seen the kid wind up! 

So I stepped out of the batter’s box and regained by breath and stepped back in and …whump!  Strike two! 

Well, at this point in time, I figured I needed my dad.  So I stepped out of the batter’s box again and looked for my dad because I knew he would be able to shout something to me…give me some tip to allow me to at least maybe swing at the ball. 

I looked over there, but my dad wasn’t there.  I looked over there and I couldn’t find him there either.  And I looked over there in the grandstands. But my father wasn’t there.  My father was nowhere to be found. And I was ten years old - about to get killed.

So with great trepidation, I stepped into the batter’s box and the pitcher wound up.  You know what happened…

Slapped a line-drive right up against the right center field fence for a single!

And then big George Erickson came up and hit the first pitch out of the park for a two-run homer and we won the city championship 2 – 1. 

Later I found my dad in the parking lot.  I said, “Where were you?”  He said, “When the coach sent you in, I got so nervous, I got sick, and I had to come out here to throw up.”

Then he asked me, “Well, what did you figure out?  How was it that you got your hit?”

And I said, “All I could remember is what you’ve been drilling into me since I was a little, little boy…

…keep your eye on the ball.”

Keep your eye on the ball.  That’s good advice.  Not only in baseball, but in life.  And it’s an especially important thing to keep in mind when it comes to the Christian life and life in the church. 

Today’s reading from the First Corinthians is one of my favorites because its Paul’s way of saying to the Corinthian people, “keep your eye on the ball!”

Here was a church, maybe fifty or sixty members, tops.  And in that church of fifty or sixty people, there were seven or eight factions that were all the time up against each other.

Some of them argued , ‘Oh, I follow Paul.” Others said, “I like the preaching of Peter.”  Somebody else preferred the preaching of Apollos who was a very eloquent speaker of the day.  It’s sort of like what it is here.  You know we have preaching fan clubs in our church.  Tim has a fan club, Rhonda has a fan club.  Even I have a fan club.  In fact, one of the happiest and funniest moments in our life is when one of you calls the church office during the week and you say, “Who’s preaching Sunday?”  And Pat, or whoever answers the phone says that Tim or Rhonda or Marty is in the pulpit next Sunday. And the person on the other end of the line says, “Oh good! We’re having company in and I want them to hear him or her preach. Otherwise we’ll get a tee time.

Well, the Corinthians had their little preaching fan clubs. And they argued about what to do about people who were committing sin.  And they were worried about whether Christians should file law suits against other Christians.  And they were even arguing about whether or not that there had in fact been a resurrection from the dead in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

They were a church that was fighting about everything.  And so St. Paul needed to write this letter that says “I understand about all the things that you are worried about, but they are not the big things. Keep your eye on the ball.”

And the ball, in this case, is the message of the cross.

We Christians have a tendency to major in the minors - to fill ourselves up with things that - in the long run of life - don’t really amount to a whole heck of a lot.

In my first church there was, what I like to call, the Great Toilet Paper Caper.  It was at an annual meeting of the church when old Jack, who was the chair of the prudential committee (sort of like the board of trustees, except even more conservative than ours) got up and was absolutely upset because someone had gone and bought toilet paper without permission.  And that had blown the whole toilet paper budget for the year! Jack was mad! And Jack wanted judgment and wrath.  So he stood up and demanded to know who it was that had gone out and bought toilet paper without permission.

That’s when Jack’s wife raised her hand and said, “Honey, it was on sale and I thought it would be a good deal for the church.”

How often we worry about things like toilet paper, and lines in budgets, and whether or not it’s too bright in here, or whether it’s too cold or too hot.

What will those things ultimately matter?  They don’t really matter a whole lot in terms of people’s lives.

So what we Christians are called to do is to keep our eye on the bal.

And the ball is the message of the cross.

The message of the cross is first and foremost a message of hope - of unbridled hope.  You know we experienced a miracle in our family yesterday.  Yesterday morning at about 9:00, our little five-month old granddaughter, Avery, rolled over for the very first time!  Her mother, Bethany, our daughter, saw it coming so she ran and got the video camera and just waited for the little girl to do it.  Soon enough, Avery threw her little leg over and rolled from her belly to her back.   And once she was over, Avery threw her legs up in the air and her arms went up in the air and this big smile came across her face as though she had just reached the peak of Mt. Everest!

That’s an illustration, of hope!  You know, we can all see ourselves as being in a particular position in life.  It may be that where you are in life right now is really a hard place to be.  Maybe you are lying on your stomach in the middle of some huge family problem.  Or maybe you’re facing something with your health that makes you feel helpless.

But you need to know that there is another side to the carpet.  There is an opportunity to roll over from your belly onto your back because the gospel is a gospel of hope.  And our job is to help people see that about themselves and to work with people, helping them to find the other side to life.

You know, there’s a lot of violence in our world, isn’t there?  But do we dare see the other side to that?  Do we dare see the coming day of peace?

There are an awful lot of people who do hateful, unloving things to each other.  But do we dare see the other day, the new day, God’s day, when hatred will be turned into love?

And you see, if we can see that there is this other side of God’s hope for us and for others, and for the world, then these are the things that we begin to work towards.  We look into other people’s lives to see how we can help them roll over into the new day.

Last week it was so wonderful to have Sue Anderson from Iva’s Place come and speak to us about the important work they do with abused women.  Many women find themselves at a place in life where they are trapped.  It’s as if they are like little Avery lying on their belly and never able to get out from underneath what’s going on.  And yet, through the work of Iva’s Place, and I know many of you are involved with it, you help women roll over.  You help women find a new day and new hope.  The message of the cross is a message of hope.

And it’s a message of reconciliation, too.  You know, I think every time I come into this sanctuary and look up here and see this beautiful twenty-foot cross, it just strikes me about how the cross talks about people being together.  The upright seems to me to connect God with human beings - to people like you and me.  And then the crossbar, it seems to me, to be God’s arms reaching out to pull everybody in. 

There’s an awful lot of division in our world, but we Christians are called to the message of reconciliation.

One of my favorite stories of the Bible is the story from Exodus 32 where Moses has been walking with the escaped Israelites long enough to know that he does not want to walk with them anymore.  These are the most irritating people in the world.  I mean these are worse than church people. They are complaining and grumbling all the time.  They have been released to freedom but now they are worried that they don’t have MacDonald’s hamburgers to have for supper anymore.  And some of them even want to go back to Egypt because life was a little bit easier there.  So Moses goes up to the top of the mountain one day and tells God about how rotten these people are and how he’s had it up to here with those people.  He just wants to spit them out of his mouth.  And God says, ‘You know, I’m ticked off with them too.  I’ll tell you what, I’ll let you get to the Promised Land, but I’m going to send a B-52 over these people.  We’re going to drop a nuke and that’s going to be it for them.”

Moses thinks about it and then he says, “You know, I really want to go to the Promised Land, Lord, but not without them.”

Not without them.

Can you look east in our world.  And north and south and west and say that?

“Not without them?”

Not without them.

My Bible says God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.  And the world will not be made right just by getting a bunch of us Christians saved and sent up to heaven while the rest of the world goes by.  That’s not God’s plan.

The message of the cross is the message of reconciliation.

There’s been something going around on the internet lately, something that I think is really very touching that is related to the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.  We’ve all been following that and we continue to pray for Mrs. Giffords’ recovery.

What is going around is this, and I think it is just so very poignant:  “This is America where a white, Catholic, male, Republican judge was murdered on his way to greet a Democratic, Jewish woman member of Congress, who was his friend. Her life was saved initially by a twenty - year old Mexican-American, gay, college student.  And eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon. And those who died were eulogized by an African-American president.”

We are at our best when we are together.

This is God’s vision for the world.

God has created a world of interdependence where everyone is needed to make the world right.

That’s what the season of Epiphany is all about.  The manifestation that God’s love is not for you. It is not for me.

It is for US.

All of us.

The message of the cross is a message of hope, and a message of reconciliation.

And it is also a message of commitment. Jesus said if you want to come after me, you have to pick up your cross and follow me. 

The cross demands a personal decision. The cross demands a commitment from you and me to walk with Jesus.  To take our place in building the kingdom of God.

But, you know, many of us don’t want to.  We live in an American culture where everything is done for us. In a church, we want other people to do things for us.

I remember one night in my first church when Henry, the church custodian, called me at about 10:30 at night.  Henry lived a few doors down from the church.  We lived a few doors down from the church in the church parsonage. 

Henry said, “Marty, I just wanted to let you know that I just drove by the church and the lights are all on.”

I said, “Yeah?”

“Well, I just thought someone ought to go in and turn off the lights.”

I said, “Henry, do you have a key?”

“Yeah.”

“Were you by the church with the lights on?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, why didn’t YOU go in and turn off the lights?”

He said, “Well, because I thought that was your job.”

We all want to give the job to somebody else, but that is not where the faith is lived.

In our church we have many people who have made the commitment to serve the Lord in many ways.

Today we are privileged to see before us the commissioning of Stephen Ministers - people who committed themselves to fifty hours of training and then to two years of service as Stephen Ministers.  These are the people who walk with you and me when times get rough - when we have burdens to bear and no one to help us bear them - those times in our lives, and you know what I’m saying, when it’s time for your friends to go back to their lives but you’re still there with your loss – still left with your hurt and maybe you just need somebody to talk to, or go out to lunch with or to pray with.

Stephen Ministers come alongside of us in times like these.  Stephen Ministers are one of the most important ministries in our church.  But they represent the personal commitment that people make to make the church a great church.  And this is a great church because of the commitments that people have made.

So in just a few minutes we’re going to install our Stephen Ministers.  But before we do that I want to say to you what St. Paul said to the Corinthians: 

“Keep your eye on the ball!”