Dr. Michael D. Halsey
JOE DIMAGGIO'S BOY
EASTER SERMON (2004)
INTRODUCTION
I remember where I was and what I was doing in October 1989, the night of the third game of the World Series between the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants.
I had it all planned out, I had to go to some miserable church meeting that night, but after the meeting was over, I'd run to the car, turn on the radio and catch up with Game 3. There's nothing like the World Series. The meeting was like some church meetings I've been to, you think they're never going to be over. Finally, this one died a merciful death and I was out of the building and on the way to the car.
I had the station preset; at the click of the button, it'd be on, and so would I. I got in the car, closed the door, turned on the engine and turned on the radio. Some announcer was talking, but this wasn't a baseball game. This was regular programming. Regular programming? What in the Sam Hill was going on? I thought I must have preset the wrong station, but after clicking a few buttons, no, I was right on the right station all along.
It was only after a while that I learned what had happened. Game 3 of that World Series would go down in history as the only game called on account of an earthquake. Sixty-two thousand people in the stands and the San Francisco starts to shudder and roar and splits apart to swallow bridges and cars. I've never been in one, but it would be harder to imagine a more helpless situation when the rocks of the earth smash together and throw houses around like Tinker Toys.
Seated in royal splendor at Game 3 was none other than Joe DiMaggio, the man voted the game's greatest living player in 1969. You'd think that when the earth dances a deadly dance like that, that all people would be the same, that rank and distinctions would go. But no. Not with Joe DiMaggio seated at Candlestick Park that night.
He heard from the radios that fires were raging in the Marina. That was where his old house was, the old house he'd deeded to his 80+-year old sister, Maria. The limo he came in was still waiting for him as the great DiMaggio got in and headed for the old homestead. One heart attack behind her, Maria still kept up the place, mowed the yard and moved the hose around back to water the garden. Joe refused to pay for a sprinkler system. He wouldn't buy her a power mower either. Maria took care of Joe's mail, keeping it in brown grocery sacks, all neat and tidy.
When Joe got there, she was gone. She was safe and was spending the night with a friend. But the block was a circus of fire and authorities battling the blazes and looking for survivors trapped under the crush of rubble. The authorities allowed no one in. But for Joe D.-anything. He got in. The firemen had broken open the door, but everything looked OK. Marilyn Monroe's picture was still on the wall, along with a large painting of DiMaggio himself. His bat signed by Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev was still on the TV set.
Joe went upstairs to his private room and came back holding a garbage bag. Someone asked if he needed any help, and he said he could carry his own. He left and never looked back. He needed to know where Maria was, so the authorities led him to the big green open space where a lot of people had gathered.
The news crews flocked to DiMaggio and there he was on TV, standing so humbly, just like everybody else who were out of their homes. Just look at the great DiMaggio, holding a bag with a few belongings, carrying a garbage bag out of his house. He told the cameras that he was OK, that he'd find a place to stay, that his house wasn't a worry, but he would like to find his sister. The news reached Maria and she called in to say that she was all right. Joe's world was back in place that night. All was well.
Joe DiMaggio would sleep well that night in the prestigious
Presidio
Club. He was an honorary member who didn't have to pay dues. That night Joe DiMaggio slept well there-with the garbage bag, which held six hundred thousand dollars, cash. (Joe DiMaggio-The Hero's Life, pgs. 424-432)
Later, in Louisville, Kentucky, the great DiMag signed a deal to sign bats. On that August day, he spent ten hours signing his name. At the end of that one day's "work," Joe D had pocketed three million dollars. The staff at Louisville Slugger laughed when he wouldn't let them throw away the pens he'd been using. DiMaggio left that day with three million plus the used pens. They still had plenty of ink.
Meanwhile Joe Jr., his son, got a job in Las Vegas driving a cement truck. But he didn't have a place to stay. So, while his father was signing bats for fifty-thousand dollars a day, Joe Jr. was sleeping in an empty cement-mixer drum. "If my father calls," he told his friends, "tell him that you don't know where I am."
When his father died, Joe Jr. in his pony tail and new suit, sporting a new set of teeth a cousin had bought for him for the occasion, attended the funeral with 29 other people. Six months later, crank, heroin, mixed with crack cocaine killed him.
In the late 1960's, he'd called into the Larry King radio
show and told the world how he hated the name, "Joe DiMaggio, Jr." He said, "At Yale,
I played football-I deliberately avoided baseball-when I ran out on the
field and they announced my name, you could hear the crowd murmur."
Who could live up to the name "DiMaggio?" Nobody. No matter what
he
did, he was never "perfect" like his father. Who could be? His father
holds records nobody's broken yet and maybe never will.
Theodore Roosevelt's son once said, "Don't you think it handicaps a boy to be the sane of a man like my father, and especially to have the same name? Don't you know there will never be another Theodore Roosevelt?" Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who ever heard of him? Yet, he was a hero in WWI and WWII, winning every award available to ground forces, including the Medal of Honor. He was the governor of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, serving as the assistant secretary of the navy at one time. He was a brigadier general in WWII and was part of the first wave at Normandy on D-Day. Commenting on his fighting and leadership that day, Gen. Omar Bradley said that Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. committed the single bravest act he'd ever seen. ("All the Presidents' Children," Wead, pg. 352) But who knows all that today?
Sometimes, it's easy to think God's like that, someone demanding, someone who just makes things hard on us, gives us things we can't live up to. Joe, Jr. could never be The Yankee Clipper; nobody has been able to be him either.
And it's right here that we get into it. We have this tendency to make the Bible read like "Robert's Rules of Order." If you ever have trouble going to sleep, go buy a copy of "Robert's Rules of Order," and start at chapter one. "Robert's Rules of Order" is a book of parliamentary procedures, guaranteed to make your eyelids feel like they're wearing concrete boots.
When we read the Bible as a book of rules, we kill it (II Cor. 3:6). We read about prayer and make a rule to pray; we read the Sermon on the Mount and make rules to make sure we give, pray, fast, and whatever else it says to do. Then we read on and on and someone says, "Here's one. Do this." We read on, and another says, "Here's one more, do this." Somebody finds two more rules, and says, "And you've got to do these two."
Marilyn Monroe once said about making movies, "It might be kind of nice to be finished with movie-making. That kind of work is like a hundred yard dash and then you're at the finish line, and you sigh and say you've made it. But you never have. There's another scene and another film, and you have to start all over again." Sounds like the way some people think about God, doesn't it?
I knew a man once that, until I figured him out, drove me nuts. I figured out that with him there was always one more thing you had to do to be his friend. Whatever I did, there was one more thing. I'd get one thing all taken care of, then there'd be another and another, and then one after that. Finally, I concluded, he's never going to run out of one more thing to do, so I just quit and decided to love him, as they say, "from afar," and the farther the better.
But the Bible is a book of relationship, not a rule book. Based on a transformed relationship, you don't have to have a rule to pray, you pray. Based on a transformed relationship with God, you don't have to have rule to give, you give. Based on a transformed life, you don't have to have a rule to mix your Bible reading with your faith, you mix your Bible reading with your faith.
When it comes to salvation, the forgiveness of sin and eternal life, we can turn that into Robert's Rules of Order with "one more procedure." Yes, they say, "It is believe in Jesus, but there's one more thing-feel sorry, walk an aisle, abandon your sin, ask God to forgive you, give your life to Jesus, and, oh yes, one more thing, shed great tears of repentance, and oh yes, one more thing, confess your sins to God, and oh yes, be baptized, and oh yes, . . . It never stops. I John 2:2 says it all and crushes the Robert's Rules of Order approach to salvation: "And He (Jesus Christ) Himself is the satisfaction for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world."
This is what the Bible presents:
Sin arouses the steady, unrelenting, unremitting, and uncompromising wrath of God toward evil.
There is nothing we can do, nothing we can say, nothing we
can offer, nothing we can contribute that can turn away this anger. There
is no way of begging or asking or doing anything to turn this anger away from
us. God's holiness and justice must be satisfied. Where do we find what
satisfied God? At the cross because "Christ is the satisfaction for our
sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world."
The cross didn't change God; it changed the way God deals with us. He's
not an angry God that you must somehow satisfy. He is already satisfied
with the death of Christ. So, what to do? Nothing. Receive
what satisfies God. How did God affirm that He was satisfied with Christ's
death on the cross? The resurrection. That proves it.
So, instead of "Robert's Rules of Order," it's John 6:40: "For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up in the last day."