Pastor's Message - September 2025

I didn't play baseball as a kid. Football (briefly), bowling, and Boy Scouts were more my speed. But I came to love the sport as an adult after playing cricket during an extended stay in England and becoming friends with a die-hard Yankees fan soon after I returned to the United States. My favorite baseball is the Little League World Series, held just south of us in South Williamsport every August. I've been a few times over the years, including one recent Friday afternoon.

The baseball was great, better than anything the Yankees and Mets are playing this year. Kids were sliding down the hill at Lamade Stadium on cardboard, admission was free and concessions were cheap, and no one was screaming at the kids from the bleachers.

Among the teams I saw play that day was Nevada, who would go on to win the United States Championship before falling to Chinese Taipei in the final. There are always a few kids who have hit their growth spurt, but the best pitchers on the U.S. side of the tournament were just normal sized kids, from Sioux Falls, Fairfield - Connecticut, and on that winning team from just outside of Las Vegas.

Maxen, from Sioux Falls, was the real phenom, and quite expressive on the mound. Luca from Fairfield and Garrett from Nevada scowled from the mound. They didn't even look like they were having fun. Yet both boys, in interviews, turned out to be sweet and positive kids, Luca saying he was having the best summer of his life, Garrett marveling that he got to spend the whole summer with his best friends.

I get that a pitcher is concentrating, and I've been accused of being dour in the past when I was really just thinking. But I think there is more to it than that. It seems to me that we sometimes glorify anger and meanness, and not just in sports. When I walk into the local VA medical clinic, I am confronted with Trump's official "presidential" photograph, scowling and shadowy, intentionally made to look like the villain that he is. No one has done more to weaponize anger and meanness than our current president.

Yet, there are still athletes out there who bring joy to their sports, who seem to marvel every day that they get paid to play the game they love. One of those is Josh Allen, quarterback for the Buffalo Bills and last year's MVP. Allen, who seems to leak joy, didn't receive a single scholarship offer from a NCAA Division I football program, not even from the second tier Football Championship Division (IAA). He was playing for a junior college when he was accidentally discovered by a scout from Wyoming who was there to see another player. The rest is history, the stuff of legend.

I don't know how this year's football season is going to go. The Bills may once again fall to their nemesis, Kansas City, also led by a quarterback who seems to be having fun. But I know that in this time, we need to lift up joy whenever possible. Congratulations to all the teams who made it to South Williamsport this year, welcome to the hockey kids arriving in Elmira for the newly created hockey academy, and of course... "Go Bills!"