Explaining Golf

From time to time, all of us have been guilty of taking some remarkable
things for granted, simply because they have become familiar to us.
Take, for instance, the ancient and honorable game of golf. Most of us
understand the basic principles of golf. Some of us play golf. Some of
us play at it. But suppose you had to explain golf to someone who had
never seen it before -- say an Aborigine from the Australian outback.
Don't you think an Aborigine from the Australian outback might find our
game of golf rather strange?

"Why is that big man trying to punish that little ball by hitting it
with that long stick?" he might ask. "He's not trying to punish the
ball," you explain. "He's trying to drive it. He wants to put the little
white ball in the tiny hole way over there, about 500 yards away." "Why
not just walk over and drop the ball in by hand? It would be a whole lot
easier. Trying to hit such a small ball with such a long stick seems
like a waste of time." "Well," you respond, "that's part of the
challenge. Nobody wants to put the ball in the hole the easy way. In
fact, we pay an expert a lot of money to make sure the ground around the
hole is especially tricky. See the woods over there, and the rough grass
and the pond and the sand traps? Those are all places where the little
white ball can get caught or lost."

"Oh, now I get it!" says your friendly Aboriginal visitor. "If it takes
a long time to put the ball in the hole, everyone is happy."

You shake your head. "No, if it takes a long time to put the ball in the
hole, someone usually gets angry. See that man over there, throwing his
clubs around and cursing? He's furious because he just hit his ball into
the pond for the third time!" "Then, tell me," your friend asks, with a
puzzled look, "why does he bother to play golf at all, if it only makes
him angry?"

To which you respond, "That man comes here twice a week to play so he
can relax!"

And so it goes. Familiar things, like golf, that we take for granted,
can seem strange to others. At the end of the first century, in the time
of the early Church, in the days when the Gospel of John was written,
about 100 A.D. the sacrament of the Lord's Supper apparently seemed
strange to some. It was even controversial. The scripture lesson that I
read from John, chapter six, reflects the strangeness some found in the
idea of the Lord's Supper -- an idea to which we have become accustomed.
We agree as we take communion that we take the body and blood of Christ
into ourselves. Many of the Jews in the first century apparently
rejected that idea outright. And, John's passage indicates that even
some of Jesus' disciples found the teaching difficult to accept. Take
Christ's body and blood into ourselves? They thought it was just plain
strange.

Perhaps we have become so familiar with the Sacrament of our Lord's
supper that we sometimes take it for granted. Our lesson encourages us
to consider again what communion with Christ means.

Alex Gondola, Jr., Come As You Are, CSS Publishing Company.