Journey at the Movies 2012 - Moneyball - Game Changers

Journey at the Movies 2012

“Moneyball – Game Changers”

based on a sermon preached at Journey United Church of Christ on Sunday, August 5, 2012

Guest Preacher:  Joy Perkett, NY Labor-Religion Coalition

In today’s scripture, Jesus walks into his home synagogue to greet people who had known him since he was a child. Having recently spent 40 days in the desert and been baptized, Jesus had transformed from a little boy to a young man dedicated to God’s mission. Uncertain if his loved ones would recognize him, Jesus summons up the courage to boldly declare, “The Spirit of God has anointed me to proclaim the Good News to the poor, freedom to the imprisoned and liberation to the oppressed.”  Jesus tells his hometown loved ones, this Scripture has been fulfilled!  The once distant promises of the prophets are now a present day reality.  “What?” People responded skeptically, “This is Jesus, Joseph’s son, how could this be?”

How could this be?  Jesus came to herald God’s promise of liberation, of freeing people from what enslaves them, whether it unjust regimes, addiction, economic systems, violence or abuse.  Yet, in this midst of this corrupt and unjust world, Jesus’ pronouncement that God’s Kin-dom is here in our midst is jarring, unbelievable, shocking.  I imagine the people in the synagogue wanted to shout at Jesus: How can you say that? Have you seen what’s going on outside these doors!  I – like the dazed people at the synagogue – find myself asking too: In this midst of this broken world, how can it be that God’s liberation is already at hand?

I ask this question in a world full of oppression.  The Albany Assistant Police Chief was just telling me about the epidemic of racism in inner city schools.  Students of color feel like they have no future – it doesn’t matter if they drop out – because they will end up dead or locked up anyway.  It’s not so different from what’s going on in NYC – where they stop and frisk 573,000 people of color last year.  One innocent African American boy says that he has been frisked so many times that he has stopped leaving his house.  The New Jim Crow they call it.  In1964, two-thirds of all those incarcerated were white and one-third were people of color.  By the 1990s, the stats were reversed – two-thirds locked up where now black and brown and one-third were white - even though people of color had committed no more crimes in the intervening years.  White people had lost the social control they had had through the Jim Crow segregation so they needed a new institution to control people of color and they found that in the criminal justice system.  And Jesus said that the oppressed had been liberated?

I ask this question in a world where restaurants like Chick-Fil-A are celebrated for their bigotry against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender person.

I ask this in a world where poverty is palpable.  Our minimum wage is $15k a year, a poverty wage and some employees don’t even earn that.  In NYC, car wash workers are paid $5.50/hour, work 60-80 hours a week and are often robbed of OT pay by their bosses.  In Florida, a farm worker has to pick 4,900 lbs. of tomatoes (for Chipotle) in order to earn minimum wage.  Where is God’s justice?

It is enough to make one give up on the truth.

This hopeless feeling reminds me of the situation the Oakland A’s were in for the 2003 season. The Oakland A’s were as poor as they come, making players pay for soda and offering them a run-down shack of a club-house.  In clip, we learn that the rich teams bought out the A’s 3 best players – Giambi, Damon and Isringhausen.  Baseball had the greatest salary gap of any other professional sport so rich teams could simply outbid the other teams for all-star players … leaving the poorer teams with nothing.  The A’s considered themselves “organ donors for the rich teams” because they created good players but could not afford to keep them.  For the A’s fans, their team’s situation was enough to make them give up too.

Yet, the A’s manager Billy Beane refused to participate in baseball’s greedy grab for the best players.  He had a game changer: he knew that convention baseball wisdom was wrong.  Traditional baseball wisdom focused on how a player looked – handsome and fit (Fabio?) – and how hard he could hit.  Billy turned the focus from these insignificant factors to stats that actually predicted how likely a player was to get a run.  Billy picked overlooked players with these stats – players that were old, had a club foot or couldn’t even throw – creating an “island of misfit toys” who excelled at getting on base and scoring runs.  In the face of public criticism, Billy’s misfit athletes set the American League record for the most consecutive wins (20 games).  Billy, by winning with the A’s, had changed the game of baseball.  In the clip, the Red Sox staffer says that Billy is threatening not just the game of baseball but the way people do things.  He shows us that this movie is about more than baseball – it is about a revolution that challenges old school tradition and a way of life.

Coming back to the story of Jesus, we see that, in Jesus’ bold prophecy, Jesus was refusing to participate in the greedy grab for money and power.  The crowd – like the critics of the Oakland’s - thought Jesus was “crazy” or “foolish” because what he did was not in line with the traditional status-hungry society.  Yet Jesus had a game changer: Jesus knew that conventional wisdom – that money bought happiness – was wrong.  Jesus was showing us that there is a different way to exist in the world, a way marked by liberation, compassion and inclusion.  Jesus – in ushering in God’s kin-dom in word and deed – had brought about a revolution that challenged old-school me-first thinking. 

Where is God’s justice?  Jesus is saying, it’s right here in me… I am living it out in my loving, my welcoming and my healing.  Where is God’s justice?  Although it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the world’s problems, I realize now that God’s justice is right here – in me and in you - we are creating it.  Journey you create God’s justice through your love and affirmation of people regardless of their sexuality, age or gender; you create it through your commitment to mission whether it be the FOCUS churches or the Interfaith Partnership for the Homeless; you make it real through the fair trade coffee that you drink during the service.  Each and every day God’s vision becomes real as we participate in it.  It is not just Jesus who was anointed to make this vision real but each and every one of us.  At times, the task seems daunting but the story of Moneyball reminds us that if we feel hopeless it is because we are looking through the lens of traditional baseball –or worldly - wisdom and think that power and money rule the game.  No way, Jesus says, you have to change your perspective.  Indeed, it is through our loving, our justice making, our solidarity with the poor, our radical welcome – it is through these things that each of us - as God’s anointed- will make a difference.  The Good News is that God’s peace and justice are already at work in the world: We are creating it, we are the game changers.