God’s children and the New York Mets

So much of my childhood was spent pretending; pretending to be something aspirational; something cool; something other than who I was.

I do not say this to mean that I was unhappy with myself, I mean it in the “what do you want to be when you grow up” kind of way.

At one point I was going to be the second baseman for the Mets but was afraid this might cause a bit of a riff in our family.

My grandfather was born in Brooklyn and he was a die hard Dodgers fan.

He even remained a fan when they moved to Los Angeles and their new stadium was built in Chavez Ravine.

My father was just as much a fan of dem bums.

And so it took a bit of courage for a ten year old to have a serious conversation with his grandfather, a real sit down, and ask him, “would he root for the Mets if I ever played for them?”

(I used the term “if”, but I knew better. It was only a matter of time before I was starring at Shea.)

He replied, very seriously, that of course he’d root for me and the Mets; I was his grandson and he’d support me no matter what.

That meant a lot.

He loved me.

He would love me even if I played against his beloved Dodgers.

“Just don’t play for the Yankees”, he concluded.

Later in life, probably the very next summer, I was convinced I’d be playing running back for the Giants like Joe Morris.

Joe Morris was both an elusive and hard hitting runner whose smaller stature of five foot seven spoke to me.

I would play out this scenario at the beach.

I might have had a nerf football, I think I did.

I would face the waves of the Jersey shore, real breakers and imagined those waves were linemen trying to tackle me.

Time after time, or, I should say, play after play, I would dive into the ocean gaining yards in two and three yard increments.

I was running a conservative offense, you see.

Every now and then, I would let the incoming waves hit my knee and I’d go down with a pretend knee injury.

Thinking back, I am not sure what my fellow beachgoers must have thought about watching an eleven year old writhing in pain on the sand in his 1984 short shorts bathing suit only to get up, waving off the trainers of my imagination and head once more into the breach.

By far my most consistent dream was dam building though.

I had a lot of alone time as a child and loved to use my imagination as a companion.

I spent wonderful days down at the brook at the bottom of my street playing in the water and building dams.

In my imagination, I was building these structures that would have rivaled the Hoover or Aswan Dams though the only real dam I saw in person was the Derby-Shelton Dam down in the Valley.

And yet, these dreams never came to fruition, I never became the two sport pro footballer/baseball star.

That would be left up to Bo Jackson a few years later.

I never became the dam building engineer, that dream was quashed when I realized I would need to become more adept at advanced mathematics when basic math such as carrying the one and long division eluded me.

And really, for much of my life, I spent a lot of time wondering what I wanted to do when I grew up, even long into my adult years, I still wondered, who do I want to be?

To what, to whom, to where should I dedicate my life.

I share these words this morning because I wonder if you might have felt the same, if you might have had some fantastical illusion as to who you would become.

And I share these words this morning to let you know that the idea of playing a day game in August at Shea or shivering through some Sunday afternoon in December rumbling down the field at Giants Stadium or even building a dam just to build a dam, is not so fantastical an illusion as what is to come.

We are gathered here this morning to worship God and as worshippers of God and Jesus, we are and have become children of God.

And as children of God, we are forever being formed by God and forever becoming who God would have us to be.

And still, who we will be, has not been revealed, we only know that as followers of God, as followers of Jesus, we are to be like God and like Jesus.

It is in the becoming where we find those dreams we dreamed of youth to be dimmer than we recall them in memory.

The lights of Giants Stadium on a Monday night will never be as bright at the promise of the kingdom that glows bright with the light of Christ.

The green fields of the heavenly lamb’s meadow will make the green grass of Shea seem gray in comparison.

That is the promise of what is to come; the ultimate end for being followers of Christ.

Yet that promise is yet to be seen, our becoming is not yet finished.

Our promise lies in the becoming; yet those who would oppose God have already become and have made themselves known.

Earlier in John, we read about what is to come and John talks a lot about the antichrist (lowercase “a”) in chapter two, (this morning’s reading is from chapter three.)

As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us.

John is asking us, imploring us, to follow Christ so that we might be like Christ and John is also asking us to be aware of those who might not be like Christ, those who are against Christ, those who are indeed, antichristian or to say it another way antichrist.

And he asks us to be aware of those who come from us, who went out from us.

In John’s context, he is talking about members of his congregation who now oppose him and now oppose him AND that congregation.

Yet we can place his ire in our context as well, we can think of those who might have come from the Christian tradition and yet have now distorted Christ’s message of love and reconciliation so much as to have become anti-Christian.

Friends, I ask you to think of the message God has given us in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus and the message Jesus confirmed for us as being the most important part of being followers of the holy.

Love God.

Love your neighbor.

(You might have heard me say this before, I think.)

So the antichrist then becomes those who proclaim hate, especially those who proclaim hatred in Christ’s name.

We are not Christian if we promise human rewards, the temporal gains of riches on earth as being God given.

No, our reward is to be found in the Kingdom of Heaven; our reward is the sharing of our two coats with one who has none.

We are not Christian if we preach the hatred of those who might differ from the majority, if we preach fear of other races, hatred of differing sexualities, dislike of other genders.

No, we are to love all who God created as they are and as God calls them to be.

We are not Christian if we preach division, if we raise ourselves up as better than others.

No, we are united as Christians and our reward is to be the unity found in God’s love that loves us perfectly.

And so, when we acknowledge we are God’s children, we are acknowledging that we are trying to be like God.

We have the blueprints.

We have the measurements by which we are to measure up to God’s dream for all of us.

We are holier when we love; we are holier still when we love God, God as revealed through Jesus; God who will be fully revealed when the kingdom arrives.

We are like God when we act as God wishes us to act; when we love every skin tone; every gender; every sexuality; everything and everyone just as God loves us.

We are not like God when we proclaim division in the name of Christ; hatred in the name of God; disunity in the name of the kingdom.

Who we are to truly become, has not been revealed.

And, like so many of our dreams of so many yesterdays ago, we might be a bit off in terms of who God supposes us to become.

Yet, if we love, we will become more like God than if we hate.

Remember, if we sin we are lawless and unrighteous.

Hatred is unrighteous.

Love is righteous.

Disunity is unrighteous.

Unity is righteous.

And everyone who does what is righteous in God’s eyes, is righteous just as God is righteous.

Or, as John says so perfectly,

Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

And he, Jesus, is love.

Wholly, totally, and without exception, love.

Amen.