One of the delights of my life is going to a baseball game. Football and basketball and soccer are fine; but give me baseball any day of the week! There’s just nothing quite like the fresh mowed green grass, the smell of popcorn and hot dogs, and the roar of the crowd when the home team takes the field. As far as I’m concerned, that’s summer at its finest.
When my husband and I go to a baseball game, the first thing
we always do is to pick up a scorecard. For you folks who may not be familiar
with that: a scorecard gives you the ability to track every single play of the
game – all the balls, all the strikes, all the hits, runs, errors, and stolen
bases – so that at the end of the evening, you’ve got a little summary of the
whole game right there in your hands! But when you’re working on a scorecard,
you can’t lose focus. You can’t wander off to buy a bag of peanuts, or you’ll
miss something. No, a scorecard forces you to stay tuned in to what’s going on.
It makes me wonder if we might be better Christians if we
had some kind of “spiritual scorecard” to keep us focused on what we are doing.
James tells us to do something like that in the part of his letter that we
heard this morning. “Be doers of the word, not hearers only” is the way that he
puts it. In other words, “Put what you hear into practice. Act on what you know
you should do. Keep trying to do better.” A spiritual scorecard might help us
with that. Of course, we wouldn’t be recording balls and strikes. We’d be
keeping track of things that are far more important to us: ways in which we
would like to improve as Christians.
Wallace W. Bubar, pastor of Philadelphia’s Overbrook
Presbyterian Church, recently wrote about a kind of spiritual scorecard like
this that he used when he was a boy. Here, in his own words, are his thoughts
about his experience. [Bubar’s article
appears on page 21 of the August 22, 2012 issue of The Christian Century.]
“It was called the six-point record system. In the Southern
Baptist church of my childhood, the offering envelopes in the pews had the
usual line for your name and the amount of your contribution. But they also had
six little boxes underneath where you could put a check mark, and next to the
boxes were six actions: worship attended, Bible brought, Bible read daily,
Sunday school lesson studied, prayed daily, [and] gave an offering. Somebody at
Southern Baptist headquarters in Nashville [Tennessee] had decided these were
the six things that were worth recording. Not the Ten Commandments, not the
nine fruits of the Spirit, not the eight Beatitudes, and not the seven cardinal
virtues. No, [these] were [the] six essentials of the Christian life.
As a kid, I took this business seriously. I brought my Bible
every Sunday and did all the other things prescribed on the offering envelope.
I was proud when I could check off all six of those boxes. I knew as long as I
was doing these six things, I would stay on good terms with the Lord. It wasn’t
until some years later that I met James. I’d never really noticed him back
there, hiding [in the New Testament] behind Paul. But [eventually] I met James,
and when he asked me about my faith, I proudly showed him my envelope, with all
the check marks in the boxes. Six out of six! He took one look and laughed.
Then he said, ‘I think maybe you need some different boxes on there.’ [After
all,] it’s not about whether you’ve brought your Bible; [it’s] about where your
Bible has brought you.”
What if each one of us decided to make a spiritual scorecard
for our own use? Think about that for just a minute. What things would you put
on your scorecard? Would you include
the same items that Rev. Bubar found on his childhood offering envelope:
attended worship, brought Bible, read Bible daily, studied Sunday school
lesson, prayed daily, and gave an offering? Or would there be other things
that, in your opinion, are much more important?
I can’t answer that for you. If you make up a spiritual
scorecard, it’s entirely between you and God. But I do have some thoughts about what that scorecard might look like.
First of all, no two of our scorecards will say the same
things. That’s because each of us need improvement in different areas. The
first line of one scorecard might say, “I need to control my temper.” Another
might say, “I want to look for the good in other people.” And a third might
simply contain the reminder, “Pray more.” The areas in which we want to improve
as Christians are as different as the Christians who want to improve!
And that brings me to my second thought. If you can check
off every line of your scorecard every single day, then you’ve made it too
easy. Do you remember how proud Rev. Bubar was to have checked off all six boxes on his boyhood offering
envelope? And do you also remember what he heard the letter of James whisper to
him? “I think maybe you need some different boxes on there.” If we can accomplish
all the goals that we set for ourselves, then we’re setting those goals way too
low! If you find it easy to study the Bible, but it’s really hard for you to be
patient with other people, then maybe “Patience” should have a line on your
scorecard. The point, after all, is not to be proud of what we find easy to do,
but to work towards improving in areas that are difficult.
Finally – and maybe most important of all – we don’t need to
do this all by ourselves! The Spirit of God is eager to help us improve our
Christian lives. Through the working of the Spirit, Jesus Christ is walking
right next to us, offering his help with whatever we find it hard to do on our
own. If you think that you could never
learn to visit a hospital patient… or mentor a teenager from a broken home… or even
find one more dollar to give to the
FISH food pantry… well, maybe you couldn’t do those things by yourself. But
with the help of Jesus, I understand that all things are possible.
In the end, the line that matters most is one way down at the bottom. It’s on every
single person’s scorecard, no matter what the goals are up at the top. It says,
very simply, “Today I did my best with God’s help.” And if you can put a check
mark in the box next to that line, God will always score it as a home run.
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