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The scripture reading of the morning is from Paul's letter to the Romans, the fifth chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered one. Therefore since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

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Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand. And we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

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And hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. While we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for a good man one will dare

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even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Since therefore we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.

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For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by his life. Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received our reconciliation.

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May the same spirit that inspired the apostle as he wrote these words inspire us as we listen to them and incline our hearts to their understanding. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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In spite of the way it looks outside, spring is here. Some people determine that simply by keeping an eye on the calendar. When March 21st comes, spring is here. Other people look for the forsythia, and the magnolia, and the crocus, and the daffodil,

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and the tulips. And some of those are already in evidence, and soon many more will be. When they see these flowers, spring is here. But for me, the sure sign of the coming of spring is baseball's opening game.

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When you can hear the crack of the bat echoing across the land, and smell the hot dogs and the mustard on the evening breeze, and when the pirate parrot shakes out his feathers, and the buckoes prepare to begin their 100th season, that's springtime, the opener. You see, baseball is to me a kind of a parable of life.

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Notice for example, how in the game, just as in life, you can almost always tell exactly how you're doing. Wagner Doubleday invented the game of baseball 150 years ago in Cooperstown, New York. He drew a geometric figure, a diamond, and worked out certain ratios and proportions

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within it. And then came up with a game which is remarkably dependent upon numbers. Three strikes and you're out, three outs and the side is down, four balls and you're walked, nine innings and it's over, 90-foot base pass, you know the numbers.

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We've become very, very esoteric with some of them. We have batting averages and fielding opportunity averages and RBIs and ERAs and they work out sometimes to the third decimal point. And by looking at those numbers and comparing those numbers with your performance, you can

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tell if you're a baseball player just how you're doing. These are measurable quantities, you see. And if after looking at all of these numbers, you're still not sure how you're doing, well, there's always some baseball fan around to tell you.

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Lots of critics in the bleachers. What would we do without critics? I don't know, but I sure would like to find out. We have all kinds of critics.

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We have art critics. We have drama critics. We have music critics. We have personal critics.

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And we have baseball critics. Now sometimes what critics say is rather entertaining. George Nathan said once about a play, "I saw the play under the worst possible conditions. The curtain was up."

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George Bernard Shaw was commenting on a performance by Tallulah Bankhead and he said, "Miss Bankhead ran the gamut of human emotions from A to B." And then there was the time when Dizzy Dean was coming off the playing field and one of his critics, a woman, jumped up and said, "If I were your wife, I'd give you poison."

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And he looked at her and said, "If I were your husband, I'd take it." So some critics are funny. And of course critics don't always agree. There used to be an umpire in the American League named Jack Kearns and he would never

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call a game no matter how dark it got. And this was before there were lights on the fields. And they were playing once at Griffith Field in Washington, D.C. Was very dark.

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And the pitcher got an idea and he came in and talked to the catcher and he said, "Look, I'll just leave the ball with you and I'll go out there and pretend to throw it and then you just smack it into your mitt and we'll see what the ump says." They agreed it was a good plan.

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Now the batter already had two strikes on him. So he walked out, the pitcher did, and went through his windup and threw the ball and the catcher went as if the ball had come through the air and the umpire said, "Strike three. You're out."

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And the batter turned around and said, "Ump, you're blind. That ball was at least two feet outside." So critics don't agree even over the things they don't see. And some criticisms are very absurd.

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I remember the day that I was elected to this pulpit. A man in the congregation walked up to me and he said, "I've been a Christian for two years and I think your theology is terrible." Now at that time I'd been a Christian for 40 years and had studied theology for 30 of

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those years. I'd forgotten more theology than that man will ever know. I wondered how he would feel if I were to walk into his office having studied his field for only two years, he'd been in his field for a long time, and made the same kind of

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remark to him that he made to me. That kind of criticism is simply absurd. Some criticism is very, very mean. I remember once being attacked by a newspaper because of some comments I had made against

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a corrupt city government. And I went to my father, who had been a newspaper man in his younger days, and I said, "What should I do about that article in the paper?" He said, "Just remember that only half the people in town will read it and half of those

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who read it won't believe it. And the half who do believe it, half of them will forget about it for tomorrow and you ought to forget about it right now." And that was good advice.

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That's about all you can do with that kind of mean criticism. There's some criticism which is very good and very helpful and very uplifting. But you have to remember, even when you receive that criticism, that it's much easier to criticize than it is to create.

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I mean, you can build a church like this. It takes a long time. To knock it down wouldn't take much time at all. We have a saying, "Rome was not built in a day," and that's true.

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But Rome was destroyed in a day. Within 24 hours, the barbarians sacked it from one end to the other. A people who couldn't even build a doghouse were ravaging the palaces of the Caesars. It's so much easier to tear down than to build up.

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I used to think about this when I was in campus ministry. I used to think if I took a lot of the kids off for a three-day weekend and gave them some stupid and malicious arguments and illustrated it with some evil and filthy stories and had some dirty pictures for them to look at and some drugs for them to use.

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You can get a person addicted to drugs in three days if you go about it right. If I were to do that, there's no telling how many of those kids I would be able to lead in the wrong way. You can do it in three days, but it's a lot harder to lead them in the way of goodness,

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a lot harder to do things that are creative than to do the things that are destructive. So when someone comes to you and says, "Strike three, you're out," or, "Foul ball," well, realize that life is sort of like baseball. The statistics and the rules tell us how we're doing, and there are always some critics about

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who are ready to give us their opinions. But life is also like baseball in this, that even the very best of us don't perform very well at the game. We live in a broken world, a stained and a shadowed world.

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We all know that that's true. And baseball, in a sense, mimics that. You see, you only have to get a hit one out of every three times you're a bat to be counted as a very good hitter.

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If an infielder only makes one error every four games, he's considered to be an outstanding infielder. Here's a pitcher who wins 12 games in a season and loses 10. He'll still find himself in the starting rotation.

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Just think of how many mistakes are made in a game, how many walks, how many wild pitches, how many pass balls, how many dropped flies, how many batters caught off base. Well, just as it is in baseball where the very best are really not very good, so it is in life.

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Look at the heavy hitters in human history. Moses, he murdered a man and at one time lost patience with God. David murdered a man, committed adultery, and was a poor father, leading his own children in the wrong way.

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Here's Elijah, who became so sorry for himself that he claimed a faith that nobody else on the face of the earth had. Here's Jeremiah, who became so angry at God that he said things which I would not quote to you lest you blush from this pulpit.

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Now, these are heavy hitters, but they made some bad mistakes. Here's Peter, who said he would never deny Christ and did. Here's Paul, who stood and held the robes of those who were murdering Stephen. Here's Barnabas, who got into such an argument with Paul that they could not continue on

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their missionary journeys any longer. Here's Demas, a man who was involved in a very disciplined discipleship and then fell in love with the world so much that he gave it all up. You can look at history in general or you can look at your own history in particular

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and you will see that it's full of errors. Sometimes the errors are funny. I love the story, it's true, of a woman named Josiah Leslie, who went to a friend's home for a dinner party one night and somehow or other forgot that she was in a friend's home.

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She thought she was in her own home. Can you imagine everyone's surprise when she said at the end of the dinner, "I'm sorry that this meal was so poor, but my cook is no good." I had a track coach in high school who drove to a distant track meet, then forgot his car

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and came home on the bus. And then when his car wasn't waiting for him, reported it stolen. And then there was Charles Taylor Hickman. Hickman, who played for the New York Giants, holds the record for the most number of errors.

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He committed 91 errors in 120 games. They used to call him Piano Legs Hickman because you see, he wouldn't bend his legs when he went to catch a ball so they'd all go right through him. A lot of people make a lot of mistakes because they don't bend their knees enough.

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Of course, not all mistakes are funny. Some are very tragic. Sigmund Freud was a non-believer, but he gave us many, many salient teachings with regard to the nature of humankind.

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But Freud at one time was diligently seeking for some medication which would heal the mind. And he came across cocaine. And he thought it was the answer. And without going through the proper tests, he proceeded to prescribe it to people for

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indigestion and depression and anemia and as just the thing for those who were trying to withdraw from either morphine or alcohol addiction. He gave it to members of his own family and to his friends as well as his patients. And one of his dearest friends died of cocaine addiction.

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And then it was that Freud recognized the terrible mistake he had made. And people have never forgotten that, that he brought the third scourge of humanity to the European continent. Some mistakes are very tragic.

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And some mistakes are quite deliberate. Let's be honest about that. Strange isn't it? How we come into the world and before we're here very long are convinced we're the most

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important person on the planet. I mean we have only one head and we see about us individuals who have, well if there's 100 million people, 100 million heads. I have two ears and two eyes, two hands and two feet.

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And this 100 million people that I see about me, they have 200 million hands and 200 million feet and 200 million eyes and 200 million years. Yet somehow or other, all of those people are not as important to me as I am to myself. And I look at the world through eyeglasses.

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Let them starve but not me. Let them be without some place to stay but not me. Let them be naked but not we. We fall so quickly into that kind of selfishness.

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Jerry Lewis, the comic, who I suppose is best known today for his work for children, sick children, has written at one point that when he was a little boy, he sometimes turned around and saw a small shadowed figure walking behind him. And he came to understand that that shadowed figure was the ugliness in him.

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And he said, "Even today, there are some times when I turn around quickly and find the dark side of myself following behind." We try very hard to improve ourselves. We go to school to become smarter and we work hard to make progress and we wear the right

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deodorant so we won't offend people and we put on the proper eye shadow in the right way and we give to the right charities. But that dark shadow is still inside of us, isn't it? I won't ask you to raise your hands but haven't you ever been in some quiet place and thought

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to yourself, "What will I ever do if they find me out?" Or haven't you been someplace and said, "In the counsels of your own conscience, what will happen when they discover that I am not as they think I am?" I used to think those kinds of doubts belonged only to preachers.

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I'm old enough now to know that it belonged to other people too. You can stand out here on the porch and watch the crowds come down the streets on a busy day and the faces look like so many dead leaves being blown down the thoroughfare. What I always have to remind myself of is that if I was out there in that crowd, my

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face wouldn't look very much different from all the rest of them. We're kind of like that little boy who wanted to show his dad how good a hitter he was. He said, "Watch me, daddy. See how far I hit this ball."

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And he threw the ball up and he swung and he missed and his father said, "Strike one." "I'll get it this time." He said, "I'm going to really paste it." And he took the ball and he threw it up and he swung and he missed it again and his father

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said, "Strike two." "Oh, you watch this time, daddy. I'm going to knock the skin right off this ball." And he threw the ball up in the air and he swung and he missed it and his father said,

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"Strike three." And then the boy looked at his daddy and said, "Daddy, aren't I a wonderful pitcher?" Well, that's the way it is with us, you see. We come face to face with God or will and we'll say, "Wasn't I a great hitter?"

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Or "Wasn't I a great pitcher?" Or "Wasn't I a great something or other?" And we'll go down swinging. It's because like in baseball, most of us are not very good at the game.

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So life is like baseball in that the statistics and the critics tell us how we fail and life is like baseball in that the very best don't do that well. But life is also like baseball in this. There's always a new season coming.

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This Friday night when our pirates run out onto the ball field, oh yes, the record books will contain what happened in the day's past but they will quite literally begin again. Just like what will happen to us at this table this morning because it's when we come to this table that we begin again.

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We need something, you see, to erase all of our black marks and to eliminate all of our ugly words and to tear out those smudged pages in our past. And this table says to us that God loves us enough to do that. He refocuses our minds here.

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Kenny Hobbs, or Kenny Hubs, was a great baseball player. He played for the Chicago Cubs in the 1960s. He was a second baseman and he went for 87 games without a single error. And people used to say to him, "Boy, Kenny, you sure do have sure hands."

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And his reply always was, "It's not sure hands. It's a sure mind that prevents errors." That's much in my mind this morning because, you see, if we come to this table with what we've done with our hands, if we come here with our good deeds and our accomplishments,

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great or small on the world scale, if we walk up to this table and put our scorecard down on it and say, "All right, we have earned your love, oh God," that's the course of certain folly. Because the statistics and our critics and our inner conversations in the dark, well,

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they all tell us that we've never earned the right to a new season. But remember what Kenny Hubs said. "It's not sure hands. It's sure mind."

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And when we come to this table, we can refocus our minds on the love of God, be transformed by the renewal of our minds, by underscoring for ourselves once again that God in Christ has died for us. That's my text for this morning.

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That God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Now admit, that's not an easy thing to think about. I used to believe that Easter was the greatest miracle in the history of the church. I don't believe that anymore.

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In a certain sense, Easter is altogether inevitable. The God who is above all things and who made all things, that God cannot remain dead. Nothing can finally defeat him so that if he is even for a moment apparently defeated, he is inevitably going to come to final victory.

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The triumph must be his. Nothing in the end can defeat him or put him down. So Easter has a kind of inevitability about it. I've become convinced that the greatest miracle in the history of the church is not Easter,

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but Good Friday. The hardest thing to believe is, is that this God who has made everything and sustains it by his own being, that this God should be willing to die in the person of his Son for people that he loves.

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That's the greatest miracle of faith. And that's what this table speaks about with its broken body and its shed blood. And that's the reason this table can change our statistics and can override our critics and can give to us a new season.

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I had a man tell me once of a small town in which he grew up. And in that town, there was a drunk. The town drunk, a degenerate man. Everybody avoided him.

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He had a very foul temper and a vile way of expressing himself. And one day, drunk, he was staggering along the edge of a swollen stream and he fell in. And he cried out for help. And he managed to catch the branch of a tree and was holding on.

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And people gathered. And they knew he couldn't hold on much longer. And just then, a young high school boy, he was the star of the football team, an outstanding student.

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Everybody liked him. He came running over. He stripped off his jacket. He threw off his shoes.

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And he dived into the water and he swam out there to that man. But when he got to the man, the man grabbed him so tightly that he was not able to swim. And so the two of them lost the grip on the branch and they bobbed in the water as they went downstream.

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And the crowd ran along the shore until at last they got close enough to the shore where someone could reach out and grab them and pull them in. And when they did, the young boy, that brilliant student and fine football player, with all of his life before him, was dead.

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And that, my friends, is the gospel. For Calvary was when a young star who had never done anything in his life except that which was good died to save people who were caught up in their own errors and their ugly statistics.

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And that's what this table announces. That you can come here with every error and every pass ball and every strikeout you've ever made and every time you've been caught off base and all of the bad statistics and all of your arguments with the umpire, yes, let's include those too, you can come here

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with all of it. And it's accepted. And you're granted by the grace of God a new season. So last Monday morning I was flying into Pittsburgh from a speaking engagement in Buffalo last

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Sunday night. And the young man who was driving me in the van from the airport to where my car was parked in the lot said, "Well, new season starts next week. It'll be the Pirates' 100th year."

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"That's right," I said. But I thought, "It's our 2000th year." And the gospel is still true. That when you stand beside this table, you're on the edge of a new season.

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And God is saying to you, "Play ball." Everything I've told you is true. It's all in the book. Remember what Casey Stengel used to say every time he got in an argument with an umpire?

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It's in the book. You can look it up. And so it is. Let us pray.

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Our Father, we thank Thee that here at this table, because Thou art willing in Thy Son to die for us while we were still sinners, caught up in our errors and our bad stats and our dark consciences, that Thou art willing to die so that we could have a new season. Grant that we might come confessing, not holding up what we've done with our hands, but refocusing

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our minds in confession upon Thy grace and send us forth renewed, reconsecrated, reclaimed to play ball. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen.

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