One of the delights of my life is going to a baseball game.
Football and soccer are fine, and I do love college basketball; but in the
summer, give me baseball any day of the week! There’s nothing quite like the
freshly mowed green grass, the smell of popcorn and hot dogs, and the roar of
the crowd when the home team takes the field. Yes, sir, that’s summer at its
finest. Now, when Fred and I go to a baseball game, the first thing we always
do is to pick up a scorecard. A scorecard lets you 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 a Coke in a souvenir cup. 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 advises us to do something like that in the part of his letter that I
read this morning (James 1:17-25). “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.
Presbyterian pastor Wallace W. Bubar wrote about that kind
of spiritual scorecard that he used when he was a boy in 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.’ It’s not about whether you’ve
brought your Bible, but 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 items would you put
on your scorecard? Would you include
the same items that Rev. Bubar found on his childhood offering envelope? Or
would there be other things that, in your opinion, are much more important? I
can’t answer that for you. One of the aspects of the United Church of Christ
that I cherish the most is the freedom of conscience that we enjoy. 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 off, I’m pretty sure that no two of our
scorecards will say the same things. That’s because each of us need improvement
in different areas. Now, James suggests a couple of things that we might
include. Learning to listen before we speak is one, and controlling our temper
is another. What good advice for today! Wouldn’t it be great if folks stopped getting
angry at people with whom they disagree, and asked them instead, “Why do you
feel that way?” Learning to listen is a great thing to put on a spiritual
scorecard!
But there are other things that we could put there. Patience
is one that springs to mind. Something as simple as learning to be patient with
your infuriating Uncle Charley is a spiritual skill. In fact, patience is one
of the most necessary and least used spiritual skills in our society today. We
want what we want when we want it, which is RIGHT NOW! Should patience go on your
scorecard? I know that it could go on mine. As a matter of fact, patience is
one of the seven great virtues that the Church has always encouraged us to
practice. Patience, together with self-control, moderation, generosity, hope,
kindness, and humility are the virtues that we Christians should be working
toward. I’m willing to bet that you have a problem with at least one of these!
And when you make up your spiritual scorecard, don’t make it too easy on
yourself. If you can check off every line of your scorecard every single day,
then you’re setting the bar way too low! If you find it easy to read and meditate
on the Bible, but you find it very difficult to share a portion of your
paycheck, then don’t include “read Bible.” Instead, add a line labelled
“generosity.” We all know what we need to work on, even if we don’t want to
admit it to other people. The point is not to be proud of what we find easy,
but to work towards improving in areas that are difficult.
As you work towards improving your spiritual score, remember
that we don’t need to do this all by ourselves! The Spirit of God wants to help
us improve our Christian lives. Through the mystery of the Spirit, Jesus Christ
is walking 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 find
one more dollar to give to the FISH
food pantry… well, maybe you should think again. You might not be able to do
those things by yourself, even by gritting your teeth and trying REALLY HARD;
but rumor has it that with the help of Jesus, all things are possible. In the
end, though, the only line that really matters is the one at the bottom. It is
on every single person’s scorecard, no matter what goals are listed at the top.
That bottom line says, very simply, “Today, with God’s help, I did my best.” 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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