But I Was Right

My son, who will be ten in July, plays on a Ten-and-Under baseball team with other rising fifth graders, like him. My wife does the yeoman’s work associated with having a kid on a sports team, ferrying him to most of his practices and games. With the schedule of synod conference gatherings, recently I had my first opportunity to attend a game. Two games, actually, which is a rather long afternoon on a dirt field in East Kansas City.

He’s in an East KC league for the same reason that we live where we live—we want him to meet and know lots of different people. Most of the kids on his team are black, which is not unusual for Dominic. His school and his other extracurricular activities are all filled with a beautifully diverse array of people from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds.

This particular Saturday, the umpire for our game was a young black man. I’d guess him to be about nineteen or twenty years old. He was calling the game well and very professionally. There were a few groans from the stands about calls, because parents are very engaged in little league sports. If you’ve been there, you know.

Suddenly, right before our eyes, a verbal altercation arose between our coach—a large white man—and the umpire. I don’t know what happened to start the argument, but it seems the coach didn’t like a call, and as their voices rose, while my son stood at home plate preparing to bat, the coach yelled at the umpire “learn the [expletive deleted] rules!” The umpire then threw the coach out of the game. He did leave, but not until he had shouted a few more spicy words at this young black man. The game ultimately finished. One of the parents was also ejected by the umpire for continuing to question his response to our coach.

Some reading this will not like that I have introduced a racial component to this story. Perhaps this is just a story about one man challenging another. I think it is more likely that it is the story of a person from the dominant culture feeling that he had the power to control a situation that was actually supposed to be controlled by the person paid (not much) to control everything that happens on that field. I know as a white person that I have to remind myself that no special power is conferred to me because of whiteness, although the world often sees it differently, and thus my culture has taught me to see it differently. Overcoming those cultural messages is a work in progress.

Later, at home, we received a text from our coach, explaining that his reading of the rules was correct. Then a second text letting us know that he would be filing a complaint. These texts contained nothing about his behavior, his language, or the fact that he had to be removed from the game. Just, “I was right.”

I tell you all this because I think this incident encapsulates a struggle we see playing out in settings all across our context and beyond. We seem to have reached a point in our culture in which many of us care more about who is right than about what is right.

This sort of behavior seems to be human nature. We see the disciples practice it time and again. My favorite example is the time that James and John asked Jesus if they could command fire from heaven to scorch a Samaritan town because that town didn’t want to receive Jesus. (Luke 9 and Mark 10) Jesus rebuked them because they were being ridiculous. Yes, a high value is placed on hospitality in Middle Eastern culture. But we don’t smite people for not being good hosts.

Yes, we want every call at a child’s baseball game to be made correctly. But no umpire is right all the time, as Major League Baseball’s Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System shows. Challenges are won 41-56% of the time. Umpires are wrong sometimes, but we don’t start screaming obscenities when that happens. Parents are wrong sometimes. Samaritans are wrong sometimes.

We are people of grace always. We are called to respond with grace, particularly when we feel a compulsion to respond differently. Particularly when we feel righteous about our right-ness. There are a lot of reasons why this matters. I hope our promise to journey with Jesus is a big one. The biggest takeaway from the baseball game fiasco for us came the next day, when we talked about it with our son. He kept repeating, “But the umpire was wrong.” I explained that umpires will be wrong. I looked up the ABS statistics I just quoted a couple of paragraphs back. He struggled to let go of his conviction that what really mattered was that the coach was right and the umpire was wrong.

I did not rebuke my nine-year-old. He is growing and learning. We’ll keep working on this. However, I would like to rebuke a culture that is teaching my son that asserting your “right-ness” is more important than living by the values of your faith. I would like us all to recommit to Luther’s assertion that the gospel of Jesus Christ and his commandments must be the lens through which we view any assertion or action, be it a Bible verse or a baseball ruling.

We all want to be right. It’s human nature. Let’s focus on doing right. We are blessed to have a perfect example to follow. If we listen to Jesus and walk in his way, we’ll always be right.