The thing that drives me nuts about theology is that so much of it is impenetrable.  I already know that god is really, really hard to understand, so why do I need so-called theologians telling me about the nature of the divine in even more confusing terms?  One of the supposed successes of the protestant reformation was that the divine was supposed to be given back to the people, but it looks to me like protestant theologians have been building a new wall between humanity and god with overly intellectualized bricks ever since.  Now, I may not be as brilliant as Augustine, or Reinhardt Niebuhr, or Paul Tillich, but I hope that I am able to accomplish something that few of their ilk ever did: talk about god in language that anyone can understand.  So, here I stand today in a pulpit in Cotuit, a village of Barnstable on Cape Cod, in the great commonwealth of Massachusetts, the de facto center of New England, and the uncontested capital of Red Sox nation, so I am going to use a language I think any citizen of these parts can understand, to talk about the theology that both Nicole and I subscribe to.  I am going to describe process theology to you today by explaining why our beloved other local baseball team, not the Kettleers but the Boston Red Sox, won the 2004 world series.

Now, to begin with, there are many sports related answers to this question.  It is because of Dave Roberts steal in the 9th inning of game 4 of the ALCS against the Yankees that the tides turned, or perhaps you would insist that it is because Pedro Martinez and Curt Schilling formed an impossible to beat duo that mowed down the opposition, or maybe, you protest it is because of the Cowboy Up antics of Kevin Millar and Johnny “Jesus” Damon, or the relaxed managerial style of Terry Francona, or the boy wonder genius of new GM Theo Epstein.  And, of course, the world series win being the result of plays that occurred on the actual field, it is difficult to argue with any one of those claims, and the sum total is pretty convincing.  But dare I remind you for a minute what it was like to be a Red Sox fan every day of our lives before Dave Roberts stole that base just a little before midnight on October 17th, 2004. 

Let us for just a few minutes venture back in time to that moment when everything changed forever.  Before that steal we fans had spent a lifetime believing that moments like that just simply were not possible for members of our tribe.  This wasn’t some little myth, or a hunch, or even a secret whispered only in the dark of night, but rather it was an accepted fact.  There was simply too much history on the side of Red Sox failure to believe anything else.  Their were even books and a cottage industry supporting this notion that the Red Sox didn’t just have bad luck, but were actually cursed!  Cursed, doomed, never to succeed, it was, as any good New Englander understood, our destiny to lose, and to lose in ever more excruciating ways.

Now, you have probably started to wonder if I really wasn’t just looking for an excuse to talk about the Red Sox, but here is where process thought comes in.  You see, the idea that is central to this theology is that every moment of creation is in fact merely a reordering of all that has come before.  Along the lines of the cliché: you can not predict the future without understanding the past, process thought is saying that nothing is ever truly new, but rather that in every moment all that ‘has-been’ is reshuffled into ‘what-is’, and then quickly reshuffled again into ‘what-will-be’.  And the empowering insight that process thought offers is that the reshuffling process is actually something that we have some amount of control over.  We can nudge that shuffle just so, because our very actions and decisions are part of the shuffle.  

And, process thought, being a theology and not a science, says that not only can we affect the shuffle, but that god lives in that reshuffling of all that is. Contrary to the bearded old man in the sky who is perfectly unchanging and totally outside of history this line of thinking posits a god that is the process of the unfolding of creation, thus the name process thought.  And the last point I will make, before I get back to baseball, is that process thought does not think that god is just simply along for the ride.  Process Thought tells us that god is the lure that pulls creation towards the greatest possible reshuffling for that moment.  God wants that next moment of creation to be as life affirming as it can be, but god has no hands, no feet, no mouth but ours, so instead of making any one thing happen, god lures us, the real created actual stuff of life, towards the greatest end.  Now, that is how the process theologians describe it, but metaphysical talk like this is what helps theologians build that brick wall of impenetrability I was talking about earlier, so lets get back to the Red Sox.

You see, what had been plaguing our hometown team every season since 1918 was not so much a curse, but a crisis of faith.  Every moment of potential Red Sox success was weighed down by the negative expectations of Red Sox nation that were bottom heavy with tragedy.  Beginning with the selling of Babe Ruth to the hated New York Yankees in 1918 to Johnny Pesky holding the relay throw in the 1946 world series, to Bucky bleeping Dent’s homer in 1978, Bill Buckner’s croquet legs in 1986, Roger Clemens untied ninja shoe-laces in 1988 and of course Brett bleeping Boone’s walk-off homer off Wakefield in the 11th inning of the 7th game of the ALCS in 2003, we knew what to expect from our cursed Boston Red Sox.

To make clear the theological implications of our historically self-inflicted misery, lets focus in on a specific moment in Red Sox history, how about a real fun one like game 6 of the 1986 World Series?  The 1986 World Series was a truly magical time for me.  I was ten years old, and my local team, the team that my dad loved, and so by extension the team that I loved, was doing something special, they were making an unexpected run at the World Series.

So I invited my entire little league team over to watch game 6 of the series, which, if the Red Sox won it, would clinch the title for them, for us all. Everyone on the team showed up, and surrounded by soda bottles, pizza boxes, and a bunch of restless boys and girls lay the hopes and dreams of New England.  The game got off to a great start, with the sox taking an early lead, but the Mets kept fighting, and Gary Carter hit a deep sacrifice fly in the 9th to tie the game. 

By this point my party was very tense.  The game had already toyed with our emotions on a few occasions, and all the 10 year-old little leaguers were getting tired.  But we soldiered on with the team, but it was just around this point in the evening that something else joined us around the TV.  As the game moved into extra innings our fathers, who up to this point had been as giddy as we had been, began to mumble a litany under their breath that began with Ruth.  Now, the curse was not fully formed in our consciousness at this point, but its canon was already well known.  The trading of Ruth, Pesky holding the ball, Bucky Bleepin’ Dent and so on.  And one-by-one these ghosts of failures past began to join us in that already cramped living room.  And this litany, this cursing of names and swirling of negativity was being played out all around New England, in fact, as we would come to find, all across the great kingdom of Red Sox Nation the nattering nabobs of negativity began unconsciously summoning the ghosts that would prevent us from hearing the true and transformative lure of the divine.

But back in that crowded living room, a game was still happening, a game that in reality, apart from litanies, and ghosts and curses, was still very much winnable.  And I have no doubt that the divine was right there in that room with us too, and in everyone else’s room throughout Red Sox nation as well, luring us towards hope, towards believing in the divine’s amazing transformational powers, towards another run and towards amazing, indescribable victory!

And it was all unfolding just like that in front of our very eyes.  First, Dave Henderson hit a solo home run deep into the night, and shortly thereafter Marty Barrett singled in Wade Boggs to give the Sox a commanding 5 – 3 lead.  The Mets came up in the bottom of the 10th, and it looked like victory was as good as ours.  Wally Backman and Keith Hernandez were quickly retired, and there the Red Sox sat, one out away from being crowned World Series champs.   In the minds of all the kids in that room, the game was as good as over.  But when I looked around I saw something very different written on the faces of all of the adults.  I could see the ghosts in their eyes, and I could still hear the litany of defeat on their lips.  And now I know that their ears were too full of the pain of history to be conscious of the hopeful lure of the future.  And so, as if out of nowhere, strange things started occurring on that field of play.  I wont recount those painful details, but instantly, and with hardly a solid hit in the rally, the Mets in quick succession scored three runs, the final and decisive score coming as the baseball slowly and maddeningly, as if tugged just so by some unseen force, scooted between the all too-welcoming legs of Billy Buckner. 

Over the following days, I remained crushed by the shocking defeat, but even more saddened by the response from my fellow Sox fans.  Everyone was depressed of course, but all the adults seemed to accept it as inevitable, as the only way it could have gone and the only way it ever could go.  This immense negativity, like a gleaming white snowball with a dirty frozen core, became our sole identity.  We were the Red Sox, the team that was cursed.  And this negativity quickly infected all of our sports teams.  The Boston Celtics, forever the most dominant in all of Basketball, went into a tailspin that would last over a decade, and our rough and tumble Hockey Team who shared a home with the Celtics would quickly follow suit.  Which left us with the New England Patriots, who no one ever expected anything from anyways.  But the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, and as fate would have it, the cure to our regions supposed curse lay not in the hands of our baseball team, but rather in the hands of those New England Patriots. 

You see, this whole time, the divine was out there, sitting next to us on our couches and barco-loungers, crammed into those tiny 19th century seats at Fenway, trying with all her divine might to lure us to believe.  To believe as the gospels tell us that the meek shall inherit the earth, that with faith anything is possible, that New England could know hardball glory. But everything changed when fate, in the guise of a 300 lb linebacker separated Drew Bledsoe from his job as the starting quarterback for the New England Patriots.  Out of seemingly nowhere except perhaps every woman’s fantasy came Tom Brady who simply did not know any better than to think that if he tried real hard and kept at it, he too could be a winner, even as a Patriot.  And suddenly he was, and that amazingly unexpected super bowl run in 2001 changed everything around here forever.  Suddenly, people’s ears were open again, and more importantly, their hearts were open too.  Almost overnight we went from the curse of the bambino to don’t stop believing! 

And, OK, it wasn’t actually overnight.  But lets return for a moment to where we started, 11:59pm on October 17th, 2004, just mere seconds before another magical season would turn into a pumpkin when the clock struck midnight.  The Red Sox were down 3 games to none in the best of seven series, it was the final inning, and they were losing once again to the hated rival New York Yankees.  But there was Dave Roberts dancing just off of first base.  Everyone tuned in to the game anywhere on the planet knew that his dancing was merely a prelude to the action that was about to come.  We all watched as his arms swung loosely at his side, his fingers mimicking the nervous dance moves of his legs, and then just like that, he was off, with absolutely nothing to slow him down, no thoughts of tragedies past, no trades that should have been made or stories of plays that should have gone the other way, no cursing sox fans and no ghosts between him and second base, just all of Red Sox nation free to believe that anything was possible, free to believe that just because life had been one way before, didn’t mean that the reshuffling had to come up snake eyes again, free to hear the gorgeous lure of the divine, who wants nothing but the most beautiful moment to be born. 

So what is holding you back?  What do you have in your ears that block you from hearing that beautiful lure?  What litany, what curse wraps itself around your heart in the lonely dark moment of the night?  Whatever it is it is time to pull it out, its time to listen, because I promise you, if it can happen for the Boston Red Sox, it can happen for you too.  May it be so.