In an article for The Wall Street Journal, writer Leonard Mlodinow shares a funny story from the life of baseball great Joe DiMaggio:

It was the summer of 1945, and World War II had ended. Former soldiers, including famous baseball stars, streamed back into America and American life. Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio was trying to be “Yankee fan Joe DiMaggio,” sneaking into a mezzanine seat with his four-year-old son, Joe, Jr., before rejoining his team. A fan noticed him, then another. Soon throughout the stadium people were chanting, “Joe, Joe, Joe DiMaggio!” DiMaggio, moved, gazed down to see if his son had noticed the tribute. He had. “See, Daddy,” said the little DiMaggio, “everybody knows me!”

I like the way Steve Farish reflects on this story in a paper he submitted to the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2009. He writes:

The junior Joe DiMaggio made the innocent child’s mistake of assuming all the glory at the Yankee Stadium that summer afternoon in 1945 belonged to him and not to his father. Human beings, however, make a far less innocent mistake when we live as if our lives were all about us and our glory, rather than about our Heavenly Father and his glory. The apostle Paul writes in Romans 1:21 that the fundamental sin of the human heart involves a purposeful failure to honor God as God or to give thanks to him, that is, to give the Lord glory in the form of worship that he alone is due.

We began a brand new sermon series, “American Idols” and will go through the month of October. We are going to look at the Proverbs and see try to identify the things that may have taken over our lives and may have if we are not careful taken the place that only God deserves. Come join us and bring a friend as we discover our “American Idols.”