Weekday Devotion With Pastor Chris

     Seven years ago a movie called "42" was released.  It was about Jackie Robinson and his first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  "42" was a reference to the number he wore for his entire career.  He made it famous not only by the quality of his play, but also for his integration of professional baseball.

     Part of the power of the movie lay in the glimpse it offered of what Robinson endured as baseball's first black player. It took extraordinary character for him to accomplish what he did.  In one scene future Hall of Famer Pee Wee Reese approaches owner Branch Rickey.  He is one of the most popular players in all of baseball, and he has just gotten a disturbing letter.  He doesn’t know what to make of it.  Rickey walks over to a filing cabinet and pulls out a massive file.  It contains all the hate mail and threats that Robinson has received.  It puts Reese's letter into perspective, and he is clearly moved.

     We move to Crossly Field in Cincinnati.  It is May 13, 1947, and this is the first game of just the second road series of Robinson’s inaugural season.  Robinson is being harassed and booed.  The camera moves in to focus on a father and son in the stands.  The son talks about his hero, Pee Wee Reese, and then watches as his father begins to boo and curse Jackie Robinson.  The boy hesitates for a moment, and then joins in.   He wants to be like Dad.

     The camera shifts to the field.  Pee Wee Reese is watching as the abuse is poured down on his team-mate.  From his position at shortstop he walks across the diamond to first base where Robinson is standing.  There, in front of the entire stadium, he places his arm around Robinson’s shoulder and begins to chat him up.  Through that single gesture, Reese has made a statement to all the world: “I’m with him.”  The crowd is silenced.  It is my favorite scene of the entire movie.

http://brooklyncyclones.com/mcupark_mega/visit/statue/

     Did it actually happen?  Two different credible sources said they saw it firsthand.  The first was Lester Rodney, a reporter for the Daily Worker.  The second was Rex Barney, a Dodgers’ pitcher who recalled the moment nearly forty years later in an oral history of the team. 

     There are a couple of issues with those eyewitness reports, however.  Rodney didn’t actually write about the incident until years later, and Barney said he saw it happen while he was warming up to pitch in the first inning.  The problem there is that Barney wasn’t a starting pitcher until the following year.  Records show that in 1947 he didn’t come into the Cincinnati game until the seventh inning.

     IN an interview in 1952, Robinson himself described the event as occurring in Boston in 1948. He said the same thing in his book which came out eight years later.  Robinson's account is actually more consistent with Barney’s own, because on Aug. 14, 1948, Barney started a game in Boston – the same year and same place that Robinson himself said it happened.
    
     Chances are that Reese’s famous gesture came a year later and in a different city, but it certainly happened and it still would have carried great meaning: racism didn’t magically disappear after Robinson’s first season.  Today there is a statue of the moment outside the Cyclones home field in Brooklyn.  At its dedication in 2005 Robinson’s widow said, “It's a historic symbol of a wonderful legacy of friendship, of teamwork, of courage -- of a lot of things we hope we will be able to pass on to young people. And we hope they will be motivated by it, be inspired by it and think about what it would be like to stand up, dare to challenge the status quo and find a friend there who will come over and support you."

In the incarnation, God comes over and puts his arm around us.  In baptism, God places his sign upon us and declares to all creation, “I’m with them.”

“We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us-- and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16)