Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scriptures: Matthew 7:13-16 and Luke 15:3-7
August 24, 2003
This being summertime, it is not uncommon for me to run into parishioners on days other than Sundays, in places other than sanctuaries, and have them say to me (sheepishly….and more than a little apologetically): “You probably haven’t seen me in a while, Reverend. But it’s summer, you know. And in the summer, I get my religion on the golf course.” To which I almost always say: “Funny, that’s where I lose mine.” Those are the same people to whom, when they inquire as to my handicap, I say: “My swing.”
I enjoy the game. I am lucky enough to have a marvelous place to play the game. But I seldom do. We’re talking four times so far this year….pretty much on a pace to match the seven rounds I played last year. Maybe some day. But when there’s a game you enjoy greatly, yet play poorly, there’s an advantage to playing it seldom. For you can tell yourself that once you begin to play often, you’ll play better. Which may not be true. Probably won’t be true. Still, it’s a comforting thought. And not every illusion in life needs to be shattered.
Concerning the game, I have often said: “Golf is a game you play on nice days, with nice people, in nice places.” Which should be enough. A good score is mere icing on an already-nice cake. At least that’s what I tell myself in order not to sour the sweetness. So I ignore my score. Or I keep it, given that the rules require it. And my playing partners expect it. But I don’t obsess over it. Although people who know me well enough to tell the truth to me, suggest I am more competitive than I let on. So if beating my opponent is not important, beating myself (as in bettering myself) is. So I’ll find myself rolling along, enjoying the day….enjoying the place… enjoying the people….when it will occur to me that I have accomplished the amazing feat of playing the first three holes in fourteen strokes (see, I told you I wasn’t very good). Immediately, I compute a projected score based on those first three holes….42 for nine….84 for eighteen. And then proceed to hit the next three shots in the water. How quickly the wheels come off even the loveliest of chariots.
So when people tell me about worshiping God on the golf course, I hear them. But I don’t comprehend them. To me, it would only complicate the game further. Standing in the tee box….trying to keep my feet planted….knees loose….shoulders square….head down…. backswing slow….impact square….follow-through complete….and then have to add even the most elemental pieces of liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer would overwhelm me and almost certainly defeat me.
Although I did pray once while standing on the tee. It was the only time I played in a tournament….a three-day tournament….with a partner who takes the game quite seriously and figured my handicap might give us enough extra strokes so as to enable us to walk off with a cut glass water pitcher or some equally wonderful prize. What I did not count on was a first day gallery. And what I especially didn’t count on was a guy with a very deep voice saying into a very good microphone: “Now, on the first tee, the playing partner of Brent Slay, Dr. William Ritter of Farmington Hills.” At least I knew enough not to ask whether tournament players ever took mulligans.
Silently, I really did say to God: “Lord, if you let me hit the ball somewhere out there that isn’t embarrassing, it’ll be weeks before I ask anything of you again.” Which, while terrible theology, was calming psychology. For I did hit it. And nobody was embarrassed. But I have never voiced such a prayer again, nor put myself in such a position since.
But people write books all the time about the serious side of golf….even about the spiritual side of golf. And there have been golf stories made into movies (The Legend of Bagger Vance comes to mind) that have been downright mystical. So maybe people do get religion on the golf course. And maybe I should pay closer attention to their claims. So I have. Especially after reading an essay by Jeff Silverman (“On a Putt and a Prayer”) where he invited a holy trinity of friends from Philadelphia (a Jewish rabbi, a Roman Catholic priest, and a Presbyterian minister) to comment upon golf’s moral and spiritual meanings while joining him for 18 holes on a very nice course.
The rabbi, no doubt focusing on the sand in which he found his ball so often, saw the game as a paradigm for the wandering of the Israelites, saying: “If I don’t understand the desert, who does?”
The priest, focusing on the juxtaposition of rough versus fairway, rhapsodized about how the ways of golf and the ways of God are organized so as to reward those who go safely down the middle.
While the Presbyterian, very much a Calvinist, mumbled about the mortification of the soul, claiming that golf was designed to remind us of our frailty, our fallibility and our resultant need for humility. In short, he seemed to suggest that if the course brings you to your knees…. well….what’s so bad about that? Or, as my friend Al is fond of saying: “This game is so frustrating. Just when I think I’ve got it, I lose it.” To which a good Calvinist would say: “Precisely.”
So it occurred to me to probe my own experience with the game, the better to see what biblical insights might be illumed thereby. And, as a closing to my summer offerings from this pulpit, I offer four. They concern:
Lost golf balls
Narrow fairways
Unfair ironies
Sweet successes
First, lost golf balls.
When you play like I do, you had better carry a bagful. And while I love playing good courses in northern Michigan, those courses have been cut out of woods and swamps. So that while the surroundings are lush and scenic, they are also unforgiving. Virtually every errant shot is a lost ball. Here, in southern Michigan, if you hit it wildly you may not like it, but you’ll find it. And if you don’t mind looking ridiculous….holding up some other foursome’s play while you hit a recovery shot from their fairway back into your own….you can do it. My friend Fred says that you should never penalize yourself on a scorecard for a lost golf ball, given that losing a ball is penalty enough. Which is charitable, if not ethical. Still, I have noticed that Fred looks for every ball he loses. As do most of us. There we are, tramping down the rough….risking poison ivy….mud caking our feet….chiggers chewing our ankles. The whole thing is a preacher’s parable.
Jesus talks about searching for missing sheep. But that’s an agrarian image. I don’t know squat about missing sheep. Neither do you (unless you are married to Little Bo Peep). But ask yourself this. How much do you hate to lose a ball? How long will you look for it? How many others will you enlist in searching for it? And how good will you feel when you find it? So here’s the punch line (straight out of scripture). How much more will your Heavenly Father look for those he loses? And how big a cheer will be raised in heaven when the lost is found?
Second, narrow fairways.
For the benefit of the non-golfers among us, I suppose I ought to begin with a brief definition of the word “fairway.” When you drive a golf ball, the fairway is where you want it to land. The grass is shorter there. The ground is smoother there. The route to the hole is free of obstacles there. If your ball should stray outside the fairway, I suppose you could say you have found the “foulway.” And while there is no such word as “foulway” (at least there wasn’t until now), it pretty much sums up the problem. In the lexicon of golf, straying from the fairway (interesting choice of verb, “straying”) lands you in the rough. Which, on more difficult courses, is often described as being “unforgiving.” Upon reaching the rough, three ponderables come into play…. all of them bad. You may not be able to find your ball. You may find it, but not be able to hit it. And you may be forced to assess yourself a penalty.
Sometimes worse things happen. I once hit a shot through some lady’s kitchen window at 7:30 in the morning. She was nice enough to bring my ball out to me….in her nightgown. And as long as she was already out there returning my ball, she struck up a conversation so as to learn a little more about me….such as my address, my phone number and the name of my insurance agent.
Sad to say, God created people who can hit the ball a long way….and people who can hit the ball a straight way. Alas, those are almost never the same people. Which turns “fairways” into “foreign countries” for those of us who have the agility to put plenty of postage on the ball, but can never guide it to the right address.
This summer, I was playing with my friend Al on a championship-level course in northern Michigan known as Cedar River. Al loves that course….in part because he owns a small interest in that course. But he also loves it because, in his words, “the fairways are very forgiving.” Not only are they wide, but they are sloped so the most errant shots are funneled toward the middle.
Truth be told, I’d love to play the game of life on wide fairways. I don’t like playing narrow. Nor do I like living narrow. Frankly, I don’t much like the phrase “straight and narrow.” Which is why I don’t much cotton to Matthew 7:13: “Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction.” That’s because I want to be free to wander any old way and do any old thing. More to the point, I am talking about my way and my thing.
For the longest time, I resisted the phrase “narrow gate” because it sounded like a commentary on the harshness of God….a God who keeps the standards so high and the opening so thin that only a few can squeeze through. Which, I thought, was most ungraceful. But then I realized that the phrase “narrow gate” is a commentary on the harshness of life rather than the harshness of God. My father used to say: “Bill, there is only one right way of doing things.” Which, unfortunately, he seldom found. But which he was certain was there. But he wasn’t talking about there being “one right way” to drive to Chicago. Rather, he was talking morality, not geography.
One of the hardest lessons we have to learn is that while we relish living in a multiple-choice world, most of the choices are wrong. Or, to spin it more positively, there is usually one choice that is “righter” than all the others. When George Russell was trying to teach me how to hit a tennis ball with accuracy and authority, I said: “What I need, George, is one of those big monster rackets.” Which was when George convinced me that it was not a bigger racket I needed to find, but the much smaller “sweet spot” on any racket, including the racket that I was holding in my hand.
Indeed, one of the most amazing paradoxes in theology is this. Life’s margins for error are incredibly slim, while God’s margins for grace are incredibly wide. But a church that preaches only the latter will have done its parishioners a great disservice when they run up against the former.
Third, unfair ironies.
I have noticed something strange about this very structured game. It isn’t always fair. I mean, good shots are not always rewarded and bad shots are not always punished.
I have hit wonderful shots that came to rest under the only tree on the course….or hit a sprinkler head causing them to bounce ninety degrees to the right. I once watched Gary Valade hit a great approach to the green, only to watch an alligator slither over it. My best shots seem to find trouble where trouble has no business being.
Ah, but my worst shots are sometimes golden. I have hit balls headed for some adjacent county, only to have them bounce off a tree and land on the green. While the longest drive I ever hit…. nearly the full length of a long par four….traveled as far as it did because it hit the cart path (the cement cart path) and kept rolling down that hard surface for yards and yards and yards. Go figure. All I know is that there are at least 15 strokes a round when I don’t deserve what I get…. good or bad.
Said the priest in Philadelphia about the quandary I have just illuminated: “Well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, yet we are called upon to handle both with equanimity and play it where it lands.”
As concerns cart paths and sprinkler heads, I don’t think the Lord has anything to do with it. Stuff happens. And few lies are perfect. So what do you do? You play it without any help from the golfing gods, of which there are none. You hit it there. Now you’ve got to hit it out of there. If it’s not sitting “up and pretty,” be careful with your next shot so you don’t make things worse. And, as for mulligans, life doesn’t give any.
Fourth, sweet surprises.
I have never played a round that was so bad….nor have I played with a partner having a round that was so bad….where, before finishing, there wasn’t at least one shot so nice, so sweet, so dead-on perfect, so as to lead everybody to say: “That’s the one that’ll bring you back.” In fact, most golfers even apply a theological tilt to the phrase, as in: “God always gives you one shot that’ll bring you back.”
As for me, the important thing is not how you attribute it (to God or dumb luck), but that you learn to appreciate it. I don’t know where such shots come from, but (in golf) there are moments where it all works….where everything is rhythmic, harmonious and beautiful….so as to lead to the pumping of the forearm and the emphatic exclamation: “Yes!” But there are also such moments in life, too.
The beauty of golf is that for one shot….for one hole….maybe even for two or three holes…. there may be only a hair’s worth of difference between me and Tiger Woods. While the beauty of the Christian life is that for one moment….one hour….maybe even one whole day….there may be only a hair’s worth of difference between me and Jesus Christ.
Golfers live off those moments.
As do Christians.
Why? Because they’re what bring us back.
Note: I wish I could document Jeff Silverman’s article and give you the names of the rabbi, priest and minister who completed his foursome. Alas, I threw it away. All I remember is that I read it in a strange hotel room in one of those “house magazines” for the Preferred Resort chain. Good luck.
