St. John’s Lutheran Church, Toluca, IL – 6th Sunday after Epiphany
Jeremiah 17:5-10; Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26
Gospel
17[Jesus] came down with [the twelve] and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon.18They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
20Then he looked up at his disciples and said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.
“Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.
24“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.
25“Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
“Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
NRSV
Unconventional Wisdom
Grace and peace to you sisters and brothers from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Conventional wisdom would dictate that if I am to talk about sports this Sunday, I should talk about football, but I’ll talk about baseball.
Baseball general manager Billy Beane portrayed by Brad Pitt in the movie Moneyball is flown first-class to Boston and given a limo ride to Fenway Park for an interview with the owner of the Red Sox. The ballpark, the owner’s hospitality, the recognition of his vision and his accomplishments, all leave Billy awestruck. After the interview, he is offered on a piece of paper the size of the offer. That is, how much the Red Sox was willing to pay to get him out of Oakland and become their General Manager. The exact 12.5 million dollars would have made Beane at the time the highest-paid general manager in the history of sports. Anybody would take the offer and move from the Oakland A’s and its tight purse owner and go to Boston. No brainer, conventional wisdom dictated that Beane would do just that.
A couple of decades before, conventional wisdom pushed the California native Billy to skip college and play ball for the New York Mets. Despite having a full scholarship to Stanford, scouts convinced Billy’s family that he was the best thing baseball ever saw coming out of
high school and offered him big money and a promising career. No-brainer, conventional wisdom, he went and did not pan out. It was then that he had his first rodeo with smear campaigns. He did not have in him to be a ballplayer. How much of a disappointment he was.
Beane then quit playing to become a scout, perhaps the first bold or unwise move of his career. He moved through the ranks and became a pretty good general manager. In the previous two seasons, he and his scouts had done a fantastic job despite the extremely low budget of the Oakland A’s and his owner. They were able to find young quality players that most would not value much and piece together teams good enough to reach the postseason. However, that approach would take them only so far. Billy wanted to win all the way. However, they would consistently lose the good players they developed to teams with a higher budget. The result was more negative criticism.
During a business meeting in the 2002 pre-season, Billy travels to the offices of an opposing team to work a trade of players. He then spots a young man called Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill. Brand seemed to have the ears of the local general manager. That is when Billy makes another unconventional decision. See, Peter had never played baseball in his life. He was much like a fan, with a degree in economics from Yale. Beane moves to steal Brand, gives him the job of assistant general manager, and then makes an even more unconventional decision. He buys into Peter’s idea of putting a team together based on pure statistics. The key would be finding value players the other teams would not want, either because they would be looking for something else or the player did not have a “heart for baseball.” Peter would just say, forget it, you cannot afford those guys anyway. Let’s make a team of devalued players, sort of rejected players. However, together, their statistics would give us the numbers to win.
Baseball hated that, and I think they still hate it to this day. I’m not a huge baseball fan, but my impression is that they still hate analytics in baseball. That’s another matter.
The decision upsets everyone, scouts, the coach, everyone. The team loses all games at the beginning of the 2002 season. More smear campaigns come, this time vicious. What is Billy doing? He’s tanking the team! However, Beane and Brand persist. They had to think differently and come up with something new to stand against the bigger budget teams. They continue to shake up the roster based on their analytics, and suddenly the team begins to win.
For those who are not baseball fans, on that year, the A’s ended up breaking the record of consecutive wins in the American League. All the credits went to the coach who was refusing to field players following Billy and Peter’s system. They had to trade away players so the coach would not field them and force him to buy into their system. The coach gets all the praise for the wins. They get to say he was a hero who made the best with the decrepit team that Billy and Peter put together.
With all that, sure, me? I’m taking the Boston job, all the 12.5 million dollars that comes with it, the honor, and the appreciation of his accomplishments. Plus, all the glory that would have come, because two years later, in 2004, the Boston Red Sox would break the Bambino’s curse and win the World Series after applying the system developed by Peter and Billy.
Billy did not take the Boston. He struggled with it. It wasn’t an easy decision. He goes back to the A’s and meets Peter, who encourages him to take the opportunity. Billy resists and says to Peter that he does not do it for the money. Peter answers by trying to convince that it is not about money but the recognition that the money offer represents, which Billy never had there.
Billy decides to go. However, in the movie’s last scene, he’s driving, and he puts on a CD that contains a song that his daughter recorded for him. See, their relationship was sort of stumbling. Billy was divorced, and his ex-wife remarried a big-money guy. They lived in a house with a view of the ocean and all those things. Billy was sucking the punches to keep a relationship with his daughter. Their relationship improves through the movie, they grow closer, and the daughter then works on the song expressing her struggles with his departure, how confused she was, and how she hoped that he would stay. However, she dedicates the CD by saying, “I understand if you go; you are a good dad.”
Billy didn’t want the money. Billy wanted relationships. He came to distrust the people that praised him when he was younger. Sure, you can do it! You’re going to be a great ballplayer. You have all the tools yadda, yadda, yadda. All his life, he regretted the decision to fall for the praise, the lure, and the money. If he had gone to Stanford, maybe he would have become a more successful whatever. He wouldn’t have divorced his wife. He would have had more contact with his daughter. Relationships mattered to him more than what other people thought of him.
Enters the ministry of Jesus Christ and the gospel that we heard today. By all conventional wisdom described for us in Deuteronomy 28, all the blessings, wealth, friends, influence, happiness, whatever, were rewarded by God because one has been righteous. If a person didn’t have any of those things, the conventional wisdom was that the person had disappointed God and was not worthy of God. That was the conventional wisdom, and Jesus flipped it. Not for anything, but for the sake of our relationships, so we don’t give up on one another. So we stay with each other. So we put his ministry, his love for us, as a higher priority in our lives.
As I mentioned before, our Synod commemorates today Gifted for Ministry Sunday. We don’t do it for fame. We don’t do it for the compensation package. We do it for Christ, and we do it so his love may transform the hearts of every believer. That’s more important than anything you can ever imagine.
Thanks be to God, who never gives up on us and hopes that we never stop placing a value on each other. Amen.
Bridging Faith 