A Lutheran (Other) World View

Last night, Milwaukee County Stadium saw its final baseball game. In a matter of days and weeks, what had been a scene of sports and entertainment events, family gatherings, and, yes, even a Billy Graham crusade will be nothing more than rubble and pieces of memorabilia scattered around the country. The only evidence of a stadium will be the new stadium next door and the infield left intact and turned into a Little League diamond.

The residents of Milwaukee and Wisconsin saw this day coming--first, in the legislative battle for funding of a new stadium, then in watching the new stadium arise beyond County Stadium's outfield walls, and ending in the finality of yesterday's events--a finality affirmed by the presence of former Milwaukee Braves, Milwaukee Brewers, and Green Bay Packers jogging out before the crowd. Sadness descended--the end was here! What next? Will the new ball park hold memories like the old one had?

It may seem strange that I write about a stadium here on the Lutheranism topic. Well, okay, Milwaukee is made up of Germans and Germans tend to be Lutheran. Thus many German Lutherans sat and watched Braves, Brewers, and Packer games in County Stadium. In fact, I watched a number of Brewers games on special AAL days at the stadium. As a teen, I attended games with the Mt. Olive Lutheran Teens. And the lone World Series that the Brewers played was against the Cardinals from St. Louis--home of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, so a sense of WELS verses LC-MS as the synods' headquarter cities fought for the world title in 1982.

What made the day poignant and sad and melancholy was the sense that there was an end--the end of an era, of a stadium where people had memories, even stars fading with age. It is eye-opening to watch men who once ran across a field now being driven on a cart because they can move, at best, at a shuffle.

Audrey Kuenn represented a beloved former manager, who died twelve years ago. It was the closest I came to shedding tears. Tears because, for all the joy and all the memories and all the heroic feats, death still awaits to snag us and grab us and take us away. Yes, even those who seemed invincible will one day be claimed.