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JACKIE AND PEE WEE #5
TRADING IN HEARTS THAT HATE
We’re going to do a little Friday time-traveling today,
and send ourselves back a little more than fifty two years. We’ve told
parts of this story already during our Bible study for the week, but let’s
take one more trip to the past. It’s Wednesday afternoon, a May 14, and
let’s say you’re a kid skipping school. Dad is taking you to a ballgame.
Or you’re a businessman sneaking away from the office for a long lunch
and a trip to Crosley Field. The Reds are playing the Brooklyn Dodgers,
and that’s always worth an afternoon of hooky.
Your dad pays for your ticket — I guess back then it was fifty cents or
a buck. You two of you find your seats up in the bleachers; he gets you
a hotdog and a soda, maybe some cotton candy. And you’re way early, because
it’s fun to watch batting practice and see if Al Gionfriddo pops a few
long balls into the cheap seats. Maybe the Reds’ great pitcher, Ewell
Blackwell, is pitching today, and you’d love to watch him warming up in
the Cincinnati bullpen.
So there you are, watching the players warming up, tossing balls back
and forth. Hitters taking batting practice. And all at once you begin
to hear a chant forming. You look down, and there at first base you see
a sight that’s never been seen before: a BLACK player with #42 on his
uniform. What? That’s right. You hadn’t heard about it, but the Brooklyn
Dodgers have a player named Jackie Robinson playing first.
And the wave slowly builds, as the entire stadium begins chanting the
“N-word.” Over and over, those two horrible syllables echo off the concrete,
and across the grassy outfield. Other names, other ugly words, are in
there too, but it’s mostly that one word. People around you are standing
up now, leaning over the railing, shaking their fists at this muscular
black player with a “B” on his hat, and his ebony face already showing
the perspiration. The couple right behind you are shouting out that word,
the “N-word,” over and over. The man has a beer in his hand and he bellows
something about: “Get back to your own league, you black . . .” And then
another word you had always been taught never to say.
All at once, to your surprise, YOU’RE saying the “N-word” too. Everybody
else is doing it; the huge crowd has picked up the rhythm of it, the cadence,
and your thin little fourth-grader’s voice joins in: “Nigger. Nigger.
Nigger.”
Then you see the shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the great, the famous
Pee Wee Reese, slowly walk over. He goes clear from shortstop, between
second and third, over to first base. He drops his glove in the dirt and
slowly, deliberately puts his arm around that black man. He hugs Jackie
Robinson and then looks up at the bleachers. He’s looking right at your
dad . . . and at you. Those two eyes seem to look right at you. And your
tongue stiffens up in your mouth. The stadium grows quiet. You feel your
face growing red with shame over what you just did.
Well, friend, maybe that’s what it was like that day. I don’t know who
won the game; we couldn’t seem to find that out. And maybe it’s fitting
that who won the Reds/Dodger game on May 14, 1947, isn’t very available
information. What IS well known, what has been told around this globe,
is how Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson taught the world a lesson that
day.
At Pee Wee Reese’s funeral 2 years ago this past August, so many Dodgers
from that era were in attendance there in Louisville. Rev. Bob Russell
gave the eulogy and reminded the world what a courageous person baseball
had lost. But a player and teammate named Carl Erskine perhaps made the
best point of all.
“Think of the guts that took,” he said, going back
to that Crosley Field gesture. “Pee Wee had to go home [to segregated
Louisville] and answer to his FRIENDS.” Then he adds: “I told Jackie later
that [Reese’s gesture] helped my race more than his.”
And you know, friend, that is just so huge to think
about. Consider that boy in the stands that day. Now, maybe he’s a racist
kid, raised in a racist home in a racist community. Or maybe he’s just
going along with the chanting of twenty or thirty thousand other Cincinnati
fans. Either way, what must it have meant to actually be there with the
green grass and the pink cotton candy and the black first baseman . .
. and to see Pee Wee Reese take those steps of courage. What a turning
point that day must have provided, not just for Jackie Robinson, but for
so many people watching. White people. Comfortable white people. White
people who were racists. White people who were complacent. White people
who let others speak up while they kept munching on a ballpark frank,
so to speak.
And of course, friend, here in this new millennium, we need to all move
beyond defining this Cincinnati memory as just “black and white.” It runs
in all directions. The compass of hate points North, South, East, West,
and all shades and grades and degrees in between. But mark down that statement
by Carl Erskine: “Reese’s gesture helped my race more than his.” What
can I learn up in the bleachers of my own world?
Maybe you recall the old Broadway play, Twelve Angry Men, later made into
a Henry Fonda film. It’s black and white as well, and Fonda is on a jury
of 12 men . . . eleven of whom are convinced that this Hispanic kid has
stabbed and killed his own dad. The racial stereotypes fill the hot, humid
jury room as the men go back and forth: “You know all THOSE people are
always such-and-such a way.” “You can’t trust a word they say.” That kind
of thing. But one by one, the men change their mind and lean toward “Not
guilty.” Except for one man. Played by L. Jay Cobb, remember? He hates
this kid. He hates all such kids, all people who are “like that.” And
right at the end, Fonda looks at him with sympathy: “What must it be like
to hate the way you do?” he asks quietly.
Maybe some of you have read the powerful book, Black Like Me. A white
novelist named John Howard Griffin colors his own skin dark and then travels
the Deep South as a black man, a “Negro.” This is the late 1950s, and
Louisiana and Mississippi are strongholds of racial hatred. Griffin writes
about receiving the “hate stare,” a cold, venomous look directed steadily
at him in bus stations, in city parks. There were so many people who hated
him, absolutely hated him, for the simple, unchangeable, unfixable crime
of having black skin. And this writer, who was white himself on the inside,
felt such turmoil, such pity. “What in God’s name are you doing to yourself?”
he wanted to cry out at those who fixed him with the hate stare. “You’re
destroying YOURSELF!”
This all reminds me of that Bible story where the priests and Pharisees
were the fans in the bleachers, so to speak. They pointed down on the
playing field where their enemy was cowering in the dust. “She’s an adulterer!”
they shrieked, flashing it up on the stadium message board. “Jesus, You’re
supposed to be so wise. What should be done with her? Should we ship her
back to the minor leagues?” And Christ writes a message in the dust. A
list of sins. A description of changes that need to happen. But the changes
aren’t needed in the woman; they’re needed in their hearts of the men
in the bleachers. “YOU are the ones,” He writes, “who need forgiveness
and a new heart.”
Well, friend, whether you’re sitting in the bleachers of Bethany, or in
Crosley Field on that Wednesday afternoon, 1947, or here on November 1,
in the year 2002, this is the gracious but unvarnished message from our
Savior and Lord. “You need a new heart.”
“I will GIVE you a new heart,” God promises in Ezekiel
36, “and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of
stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
We’ve told this story about Pee Wee Reese and Jackie
Robinson, and the courage they showed. Well, we need courage today, all
right . . . but we need even more a new heart. We talked about understanding
how the other guy feels, trying to empathize with the feelings and hurts
of that enemy, that person who lives on the other side of town. And yes,
we need that . . . but we need more a new heart. We talked about hating
racism — I mean, really hating it. And we should. But we need to hate
it BECAUSE we’ve been given a new heart by Jesus Christ.
I mentioned the other day that quote by Lincoln, which seemed to guide
the actions of this brave shortstop from Brooklyn. “With malice toward
none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right” — and now notice
— “as GOD gives us to see the right.” Friend, that’s a new heart. That’s
new eyesight as given by a divine power. An ability to see another person
— who was once an enemy, who was once “one of them,” who was once one
of the people you thought didn’t belong in your country — but now, because
your eyes and your heart are new, you now see as a fellow citizen, a brother
or sister in Jesus.
A man named King David once begged God for this new heart. He’d committed
the sin of murder, and now he was desperate. “Please, Lord, PLEASE! Create
in me a new heart.” Does the sin of hatred, just as deadly, stir in us
the same desperate plea?
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