The world of baseball is a dramatic presentation of some of life's most important and universal lessons. Now I'm not saying that Abner Doubleday intended to make a theological statement about the meaning of life when he invented the game of baseball. But he did invent a game which dramatizes a very human predicament -- that of trying to measure up to a standard of perfection, and always falling short.

The Apostle Paul talked a lot about standards of perfection that are impossible to meet. To Paul, those standards were the Hebrew Law. Paul said that the law is a curse -- always reminding us of how inadequate we really are. The law, he says, is set up to show us that we cannot do right. We can never be good enough because we cannot live up to its standards. "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God," he says in his letter to the Romans.

Well, baseball is a lot like that too. Baseball is a game of measuring things against impossible standards -- a game of numbers. Everything is added up and written down somewhere. In any good different teams and different players. You can find the batting averages of all the players in the major leagues. You can read RBI's, and ERA's and fielding percentages -- all lined up compared against every other player in the league. A player's batting average is printed in the paper; it's announced over the radio and it's flashed in bright lights on the stadium scoreboard. All carried out to the three decimal points. Nobody says, "He's hitting pretty well." They say, "He's hitting .276." Very precise measurements. There is no way to pretend success. There is no way to hide failure. It's all right there in the book.

And the interesting thing about it is that nobody does very well. The very best hitters get about three hits in every ten tries. That's not a very good percentage for most jobs, but if you get three out of ten in baseball, they give you a million dollar salary. And if you do it several years in a row, they put you in the hall of fame.

Take Mickey Mantle, for instance. Mantle was one of the all-time greats of the game. He hit towering home runs from either side of the plate. Yet Mickey Mantle struck out 1,710 times in his career. That's a lot of strike-outs. And he is one of the all-time, all-stars!

Nobody is very good when measured against that absolute batting standard of 1.000. That's a tough standard to fall short of -- with the whole world watching. And everyone falls short of it. No one has even come half way to perfection over the course of a season. All have fallen short. Paul the Apostle would appreciate the similarities in the batting average standard, and the inability of anyone to come anywhere near living up to it. Baseball is a hard-judging master of anyone who sets out to be good at it. And life is a lot like that, too.

But there is another side to baseball. A side that is more like the gift of grace. In baseball, everyone gets a chance to bat. Everyone gets the same number of balls and strikes. Each team gets the same number of outs. And what makes baseball more fair than some other sports is that it has no clock. And maybe this makes the game even more fair than life itself. Because in baseball, you do not run out of time. Unless it rains, everyone gets their innings -- as many as it takes to decide who wins and who loses.

As that great baseball theologian, Yogi Berra said, "It ain't over til it's over." In baseball, there is always the possibility that the unexpected will happen. There is always time for redemption. Take the case of Bob Brenley, for instance. Brenley is now helping Harry Carey broadcast the Cubs games, but in 1986 he was playing third base for the San Francisco Giants. In the fourth inning of a game against the Atlanta Braves, Brenley made an error on a routine ground ball. Four batters later, he kicked away another grounder and then, while he was scrambling after the ball, he threw wildly past home plate trying to get the runner. Two errors on the same play. A few minutes later, he muffed yet another play, to become the first player in the 20th Century to make four errors in one inning.

Those of us who have made very public errors in one situation or another, can easily imagine how he felt during that long walk off the field at the end of that inning. Then, in the bottom of the fifth, Brenley hit a home run. In the seventh, he hit a bases loaded single, driving in two runs and tying the game. And then, in the bottom of the ninth, Brenley came up to bat again with two out. He ran the count to 3 and 2, and then hit a massive home run into the left field seats to win the game for the Giants.

Brenley's scorecard for the day came to three hits in five at-bats, two home runs, four errors, four runs allowed, and four runs driven in, including the game-winning run.

Certainly life is a lot like that, a mixture of hits and errors. And there is grace in that. Grace means you'll have another chance. Grace won't exactly erase your errors, but it will give you a chance to make up for them. If we are just .200 hitters, God will hit .800 to fill in the gaps. It's not over til it's over. There are still more surprises waiting.

Paul puts it in his own words, "Since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.....because in his divine forbearance he has passed over former sins."

Even the Apostle himself made a lot of errors in his life. He was the pharisee, the ultimate enemy of Jesus, the feared and hated persecutor of the early disciples, who had systematically attempted to destroy the church by annihilating its members. Jesus found him and turned him around, and set him on a new course, building a church in which the forgiveness of Christ was offered to everyone -- no membership tests, no lines of birth or race or accomplishment. A church for people who had made errors.

In fact, Jesus spent most of his time with people who had made a lot of errors. People who had gone 0 for 4 in life, so to speak; people who had often dropped the ball. "Losers" we might call them -- uneducated fishermen, prostitutes, people afflicted with unpleasant diseases, and mental disorders, tax collectors, adulteresses, the outcasts, the poor, the unacceptable, the lost.

Jesus came to seek and save the lost.

In Christ, the scorekeeper cancels the errors. Gives the losers another chance, a new start, a new beginning. Jesus looks past the errors to the possibilities of the future. With God, it's not over til it's over. Nothing is finished until God is finished with it. No one is finished until God has completed them.

One of the chances we all get in life is the chance to make errors. All of us do that to some extent. Some more than others. But with Christ, we always have another chance. We always have the possibility of a comeback. God's love is always seeking us -- always following us -- always overlooking the errors and giving us still another inning -- still another chance at bat.

Cause it ain't over til it's over.

David Hardin: Like baseball, the church is starting to get more involved with women in it. You are getting women in baseball and we are certainly seeing that, especially in the colleges. How about women in the church, that is, in the leadership part of it? Is it hard for women? What is happening?

Nancy Becker: It is becoming easier in the denominations in which women are permitted to become ordained. I have been ordained for ten years and I have found in that ten years that it has become much easier for me. I am not such an object of interest when I go out in public. People seem to have accepted it and have accepted me with great grace.

Hardin: The seminaries are getting fairly even now on men and women, aren't they -- that is the Presbyterian and the main-line church seminaries?

Becker: Yes, that is right. Many of the major seminaries are almost half and half now.

Hardin: It seems to me that if I pay strict attention to what I am hearing about Jesus' life in the gospels, He was a very balanced person in terms of having men friends and women friends. I would have to say that He was kind of focusing on equality. Would that be a safe statement?

Becker: I think so. If we look at the gospels, we certainly see Jesus was often ministering to women and had them among his disciples. Remember, it was the women to whom He announced His resurrection. It was they who first knew that the resurrection had happened. It was they who took the news to the male disciples. Jesus certainly was considering the women as part of his discipleship group.

Hardin: It may be that part of it is we are opening the church to the feminine side of God. How will that change things and the way we behave or act?

Becker: I am not sure. We will have to work it out as we go along in the future. Certainly there is evidence in the scriptures for the feminine side of God and the traditional feminine characteristics of nurturing and healing. Those are certainly aspects that we look upon in God.

Hardin: And, the avoidance of violence. It seems to me that the early histories of the Old Testament, for example, are quite violent. With the weapons today, the world can't handle violence.

Becker: That was one of the things that, of course, Jesus came to speak against, the kind of violence that we saw there among peoples in the Old Testament.

Hardin: Let's talk about your church a little bit. You have a church in Ogden Dunes which is right on Lake Michigan. It is kind of resort country, so you have the reverse of the usual church. Your church doesn't die in the summer.

Becker: Our church comes to life in the summer. Nobody stays in northwest Indiana in the winter unless they have to. In the summer, people come out to the lake community there. Some churches shut down in the summer. We double our services in the summer and generally double our attendance then.

Hardin: Is there anything unique about summer members that is different from the usual member?

Becker: No. They are all just good Christians, but they tend to be a little more casual and eager to get out into the sun and enjoy their day on Sunday. We have earlier services in the summer.

Hardin: What time do you have your services in the summer?

Becker: We have an 8:30 AM and a 10:30 AM service in the summer.

Hardin: You were an English teacher and then you decided to go into the pastorate. Tell us a little bit about that. What caused you to switch? That is a big move, to go back to school.

Becker: I am what they have been calling, a non-traditional student in that I entered the seminary in my late thirties after my children were already in school. I really felt a call early on in that process to study the scriptures and to become more familiar with the church.

It wasn't really until I was in seminary that I decided that I could possibly become ordained. In those years, it was a hard thing to have role models for women ministers. It wasn't something that I had thought of until around the time that things were beginning to open up for women in other professions.

Hardin: Your children were grown and gone and you had the freedom to do that.

Becker: They were actually in elementary school when I went to seminary. It is just recently that they are grown and gone.

Hardin: Did you live in New York?

Becker: We lived in Stanford, Connecticut and then in Darien, Connecticut.

Hardin: You commuted to Union?

Becker: I commuted to Union Seminary in New York City.

Hardin: With all of its famous teachers.

Becker: Right.

Hardin: Union strikes me as a place where there is a lot of activism. There are a lot of causes there. It is out there on the liberal fringes of the church.

Becker: I would say that it is. That is sort of its self-conscious intention to be that kind of a seminary. It also provides pastors for the church.

Hardin: It has had a great history.

Becker: Yes, it does -- a very great history of scholarship.

Hardin: You and your husband, Mike, have moved around. As you have changed pastorates, he has changed jobs. A lot of people are trying to do that today with husbands and wives both having important careers. How does that work? Is it a problem? How do you balance that?

Becker: It has all kind of worked out for us. We haven't had any intentions. Sometimes couples will take somebody's turn and then it will be the next person's turn to look for a job. We have kind of followed the path as it leads and God has always taken care of us and opened up places.

Hardin: You have really sensed his hand in this.

Becker: Absolutely, without any question. Where one of us has gone to follow an opportunity, there immediately has opened up some wonderful new opportunity for the other.

Hardin: It strikes me that as people talk about early mid-life change, you and Mike have both gone through a lot of changes. He left the business world and went into academia. You left teaching and went into the ministry. Joseph Campbell talks about finding what it is that you really want to do. A lot of people I know don't know. How do people find out what they want to do?

Becker: They follow the Lord one step at a time. You can't look too far down to the end of the path; you have got to take a step and you get a little more light. Then, you take another step and you get a little more light. I think all the experiences that you have on that path end up working into where you end. It is not always a matter of just taking wrong paths and turning back. You have to be formed into an individual person before you can become a strong Christian.

Hardin: You think people should be willing to change their life dramatically if they suddenly sense something they really want to do?

Becker: I sure do. Sometimes those feelings are buried down within us and they come up at some time and are the word of God to us.

Hardin: They have got to be willing to take chances.

Becker: Yes, they do. They have to take risks. You can't have any guarantees that it will all come out just as you expect it. I think we do have guarantees that it will come out all right if we follow the Lord.

Hardin: With you and Mike, it seems to have.

Becker: It sure has.

Hardin: It has been delightful having you with us.

Becker: Thank you very much. I enjoyed being here.