|
“Build
it and they will come.” And
they have—time and time again.
Along a
stretch of one of the scores of gravel roads that crisscross
the rich, rolling soil of America’s heartland, you will find
it. A place to which you are drawn for reasons you can’t
explain. A baseball field in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.
Within the
base paths of this simple ball diamond lies a mystic fountain
of youth that rekindles fond memories of times long since
past. Is it heaven? It’s not heaven. No, it’s Iowa. It’s
the Field of Dreams. For almost two decades, this rural area
of eastern Iowa has been a mecca for baseball fans whose
yearly pilgrimages now number in the tens of thousands.
The
movie Field of Dreams opened on April 21, 1989 to
critical and commercial success, sparking interest among fans
as to the whereabouts of the unlikely landmark. Just two weeks
after the movie’s release, the first visitor arrived at the
farm. The fellow had taken a detour on a drive from New York
to California and explained that he had to see the field for
himself before it was plowed up. Soon after, any future plans
for ever farming the plot fell by the wayside as more
onlookers streamed in.
The field
draws between 50,000 to 65,000 visitors yearly to what amounts
to the grandest pick-up game anywhere. No skills? Not to
worry. Players of all abilities and ages routinely take up a
position anywhere on the field to shag balls or take a place
in line behind the backstop to wait their shot at slugging one
into the corn beyond the outfield.
For
whatever reasons compel people to come, there is most
certainly a powerful sense of magic here. Young couples have
become engaged; weddings have been conducted; some arrive to
scatter the ashes of loved ones. There are stories of old high
school buddies who meet there every year to toss the ball
around. And one legend has it that a father once invited his
two sons, who hadn’t spoken in nearly thirty years, to this
place where, by day’s end, catch had been played,
reconciliation had occurred and the family had been restored.
It must
truly be a field of dreams because there, on a baseball
diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, imagination
transcends reality as the air is filled with the laughter of
children as they round the bases. Grandfathers expound the
virtues of the game as it was long ago with tales of Williams,
Mantle and Mays. Families wander together into the tall corn
and return with wide smiles. You can almost hear the
cornstalks calling, “Grab your bat and glove, stay for a
day, and feel the warm sun against your cheek and the grass
beneath your feet. Play ball.” And chances are, before you
journey home, you’ll ask yourself that very same question.
Is this heaven? And the answer will still be the same. No son,
this is Iowa.
So what is
it about baseball in an Iowa cornfield that has captured the
imagination of so many?
Baseball.
America’s pastime is about dreams. When I was a kid,
baseball became the vehicle for my wildest dreams. I would
stand in my front yard with a bat and a tennis ball and jack
“homers” over the back fence. I would do play by play, and
sure enough, it would come down to that last at bat…the game
was on the line…two outs, bottom of the ninth…two runners
on…two runs down…all eyes on me. If I was really
“feeling it,” I’d even call my shot. Other times I was
the center fielder and I would toss the tennis ball up onto
the roof of our house so that it flew high into the sky. Then
I raced to catch it. Sometimes, when I was “really feeling
it,” I would start my chase after the fly ball a little late
so that I could make the shoestring catch. Then I would stand
in the middle of the yard with the ball held high in my hand,
and I swear you could literally hear the crowd cheer. In that
moment, something happened. Everything changed. Even if for a
moment, everything around me was transformed. My yard. Myself.
My world. The power of dreams. The wonder of imagination. It
is one of the reasons so many are drawn to America’s
pastime. It is one of the reasons why I was, and still am, a
baseball fan.
Dreams.
I guess that is why the people will drive to what can
otherwise be considered the middle of nowhere…to a ball
diamond in the middle of a corn field…because deep down it
has something to do with dreams. That’s why we love the game
and the movie that gives its magic center stage. The movie, The
Field of Dreams, taps right into the very power of our
dreams—the desire to reach beyond the visible to the
invisible—and then dares us to imagine what might happen if
one begins to live as if what is unseen, as if what is but a
glimmer of hope, can actually happen. Live as if the dream is
possible and maybe the dream will come true. “Build it and
he will come.” Those are the words that Ray Kinsella, an
Iowa farmer, hears whispering in the wind.
On the
surface, Ray is an ordinary man, living an ordinary life in an
ordinary town. But we soon learn that below the surface there
is a deep sadness…an emptiness…a small but very real sense
of hopelessness. We learn that when Ray was only three, his
mother died. Ray was raised by his father, a relationship that
is described as difficult and distant. In the opening
monologue, Ray says that his dad was a Yankee fan, so of
course he cheered for the Brooklyn Dodgers. When the Dodgers
left and moved to Los Angeles, Ray said they had no problem
finding other things to argue about. Ray left home after high
school, went to college in California, met Annie, an Iowa farm
girl, and never looked back. His dad, John, died just after
Ray had married Annie. Now, as a young father himself, Ray is
coming to grips with his sense of guilt and emptiness for
leaving things with his dad so unresolved.
In
the closing line of the opening montage, Ray says, “Until I
heard the voice, I had never done a crazy thing in my life.”
(I have heard that line before, but it is often spoken by
missionaries, ministers and those who have dedicated their
lives to Christian service. “Until I heard the voice, I
had never done a crazy thing in my life.”) When the
voice comes to Ray, it sweeps him right off his feet. “Build
it and he will come.” It is that still, small voice that
changes everything. It asks him to imagine. It prompts him to
dream. It encourages him to see everything differently.
“Build it and he will come,” the voice whispers,
and soon a baseball diamond appears where there were once rows
of corn. A baseball diamond—the place where boyhood dreams
are played out—becomes the place where new dreams, both
Ray’s and others, would come true.
Field
of Dreams is a great
story. If it is a story that sounds somewhat familiar, it
should. Because stories about still, small voices and
awakening the power of dreams is the story that undergirds our
life of faith. It is a story whose themes run through the
pages of our scripture.
Tonight’s
scripture tells the story of Abraham. See if his and Ray’s
story, and maybe even your and my stories, have anything in
common. Tonight’s scripture comes before “father
Abraham” is “father Abraham.” It is where it all begins.
On the surface, Abraham seems to be a pretty ordinary guy.
He was a good guy, living the good life. But there was
another story going on just below the surface.
Perhaps
our only clue to this other story comes in verse 30 of chapter
11. There it sits, so unlike the verses that precede it.
“Sarai was barren, having no child.” The endless flow from
generation to generation, the turning of season upon season,
all of a sudden ends in barrenness.
Barren.
Empty. Dried up. We are not even twelve chapters through the
biblical journey when we are faced with the reality that the
future is not assured. Abraham and Sarah, people who seem so
ordinary on the surface, are faced with the reality of
barrenness.
Barrenness
enters into human history, disrupting the flow, the pace, the
progress, and even the inevitability of life itself. “Sarai
was barren…” We have all heard similar pronouncements of
barrenness inserting themselves into the flow of our lives.
Everything
changed the year Mom died.
We’d have been fine if the plant hadn’t closed.
When he left, everything seemed to just fall apart.
Life as we knew it changed the day the towers fell.
Abraham
and Sarah live every day with this emptiness…this feeling of
incompleteness. She is barren. There will be no child. No
heir. No namesake. No future. They will do the best they can
to live productive, even happy lives, but nothing will be able
touch that place of bareness. Besides, at their age, they
simply could not afford the luxury of youthful dreaming.
And
that’s when it happens. It doesn’t say where it happened
or even when it happened, but if there were cornfields in the
ancient lands of Haran, then my hunch is that it happened
there. Because suddenly, in the midst of life as they had been
accustomed to living it, a small, still voice whispered.
“Abraham, leave your country, your people and your
father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I
will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will
make your name great, and you will be a blessing… To your
offspring I will give this land.”
You can
almost hear Abraham. “To my offspring you will give this land. Hey, that’s not funny. Knock
it off. Offspring. A
future different than the present we are currently living.
Yeah, right. We don’t like it, but we’ve come to accept
it. And have you
noticed how old we are? Come on, we’ve given up such
fanciful dreaming.
It is
almost as if the voice is daring Abraham to dream, daring him
to imagine a different future, coaxing him to move his life in
a different direction. Was what the voice of God suggesting to
Abraham and Sarah impossible? To the human eye, it was. But
there was something in that persistent whisper that seemed to
suggest otherwise. So what did Abraham and Sarah do with this
improbable dream, this seemingly-impulsive suggestion to pack
it all up, go forth and multiply? Verse 4 of chapter 12 tells
us. It says: “Abraham and Sarah went, just as the Lord
said.” To this unlikely, unbelievable and otherwise
impossible vision God had laid out before them, Abraham and
Sarah went. They took a leap of faith. Abraham and Sarah
listened to the voice of hope that whispered ever so quietly
in the night sky, and they went off in pursuit of God’s
impossible dream. And the rest, as they say, is history.
I bet that
many of us feel like Abraham and Sarah or like Ray Kinsella.
We wonder if we can trust the voice of hope that we hear
whispering in the night. Is God still dreaming? Listen and
I’ll bet you can hear that voice.
-
In the
face of a world at war, the voice of God whispers: “Give
peace a chance.”
-
In the
face of isolation or depression, the voice of God
whispers: “Surely I am with you even until the end of
the age.”
-
In the
face of seemingly-endless job searches and a troubled
economy, God whispers: “I have plans for you. Plans to
bring about the future you hope for.”
-
In the
face of a world full of hunger, poverty and violence, a
world where God often seems to be absent, the voice of God
still whispers: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,
and to anyone who opens it, I will come in.”
Christians
have their own Field of Dreams. It is a field that is found at
the foot of a hill called Calvary. And it happened there one
Sunday morning some two thousand years ago when, for a handful
of people, all of their hopes seemed to be gone, all of their
dreams dashed. For the one in whom they had come to trust, the
one in whom they had placed all their hopes and all their
dreams, was crucified.
But
something was in the air that Sunday morning. Something told
those three women to go to that place where all of their
dreams had been laid to rest. And they went, not knowing what
to expect. They did not know what they were going to do once
they got there. They didn’t even know who would roll away
the stone from the tomb. They didn’t know if those who had
done Jesus in would be there to do the same to them. But there
was something in the air that morning that dared them to
dream.
When they
got there, the stone had already been rolled away. And then a
voice came from the tomb, “He has been raised; he is not
here.” On that first Easter morning, God turned that hill of
shame into a field of dreams. Jesus had risen from the dead.
Hope had not died on that cross. God had not abandoned his
own. Life was given a second chance. Forgiveness was once
again made possible. The dream of reconciliation with our God
and with each other became possible again. Because of God’s
work in Jesus Christ that first Easter morning, all of
humanity was invited to claim their place on this field of
dreams.
The
God made known to us on that first Easter morn is the God who
is in the business of making dreams come true. On the day when
Abraham and Sarah held young Isaac in their aging arms, their
wildest dream had come true. When the first disciples learned
that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead, they couldn’t
help but help others dream of life differently. And in the
closing scene of Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella finally
understands “what was in it for him.” It is the scene that
still brings tears to every man who has ever dreamed of being
able to play catch one more time with his dad.
Baseball,
a ball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, two senior
citizens holding their newborn son and a stone rolled away
from the door of a tomb all point us to a God who gives us
chance after chance after chance to live out the deepest
dreams of our hearts. So with that, let me end with just one
last question. Dad, do you want to play catch?
Note: At
the end of this message my own father, Dennis Nelson, emerged
from the congregation, with his glove and cap and we simply
tossed the ball back and forth.
It will be a moment in my ministry that I will not soon
forget.
|
