Feel the Rhythm! Feel the Rhyme! Get On Up, It's Bobsled Time!

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 32-49:

In preparation for the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, Nike put up a billboard that said “You don’t win the silver, you lose the gold.” According to Nike, it was supposed to be inspiring, but for US wrestler Townsend Saunders, an Arizona State alum, when he walked out of the arena wearing a silver medal, he said those words stung. “It’s not terrible for everyone else to read” he said, “It’s just terrible for every silver medalist.” He went home depressed thinking he should have given more effort and won gold. “It was an honor to represent my country,” he said, “but to have come so close.” Eventual he came to terms with his loss and realized that not very many people have a silver medal either.[i] And really, the billboard seemed to be in opposition to many of the things the Olympics represent.  Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, said “The important thing in the Olympic Games in not winning but taking part. The essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.” And that, I think, is one of the things that make the Olympics great. Because while there are certainly those who win, who mark themselves as great, that we celebrate, people like Jesse Owens or Simone Biles or Michael Phelps, we are often just as amazed by those who give everything even know that they have little chance of winning. The Olympics are just as much, or maybe even more about those athletes. And so perhaps with that idea it’s appropriate that today’s film is Cool Runnings about the Jamaican Bobsled team who first participated in the 1988 Olympics in Calgary.

In trying to find films for this series, I was looking for a film about someone who was expected to win and didn’t, but there aren’t a lot of them out there. And so the next best option was films that celebrate the mere act of competing and there are some good films that do that, and this is one of the best. But, we do have to be honest and say that it says that this is based on a true story, and that is true. There was a bobsled team from Jamaica, and there are a couple of other things that are true from the story, but most of the rest of it is made up for entertainment purposes, and so that does mark this story as different from other Olympic films. It’s still very entertaining, but don’t take this as what actually happened, and in it also has a bigger connecting to the story of David and Goliath.

You Can Run. You Can Jump. But, Can You Win?

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Corinthians 9:24-27:

Last week as we began our worship series on the gospel message to be found in movies about the Olympics we looked at the movie Miracle, about the 1980 US hockey team who won gold. To help them prepare for that, their coach told them they were going to work harder than they had ever worked before, and wanted to know that they were actually going to be dedicated enough to actually get it done? That is often the difference between success and failure not just in sports, but in most aspects of life. How much are you willing to put into it? Are you willing to put in everything you have, and even more, or do you want to just do enough to get by? And more importantly in our faith lives, what are we willing to do? Paul really asks the Corinthian community, are you putting everything you have in to win the race of faith, or is your desire and wants somewhere else?

And so today we look at the movie Race, which is about Jesse Owens who is arguably one of, if not the greatest Olympic athlete of all time, having won 4 gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and I hope that didn’t ruin the surprise for anyone. There is so much we could talk about this film including that the movie’s title has sort of a double meaning to it, not only being about the races that Owens won as a track star, but also about the realities of being a black man in America and in Hitler’s Olympic games. But today we are going to focus on the fact no one gets to the Olympics by just talent alone. Talent will get you only so far on its own, but it takes more than just talent to be your best and especially the best in the world. And so Owens, whose family moved to Ohio from Alabama when he was a boy, goes to Ohio State University to run on their track team, at a time in which their football team was still another 7 years away from being integrated. And when he gets there, his coach, Larry Snyder, wonders what he has. Take a look…

The Name on the Front of the Jersey is More Important Than the Name on the Back

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Galatians 3:23-29:

Since the summer Olympics are set to start in less than two weeks, a year late and many billions of dollars over budget, and unlike any Olympics we’ve ever seen before. I thought now would be a great time to begin a new worship series which will go for the next four weeks looking at the gospel message, or the Christian message, we can find in films about the Olympics. And please notice that this is not the gospel according to the Olympics, as we have only four gospels we use, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but the gospel in Olympic films. That is seeing Christian stories or themes, or finding them, in areas in which we might not ordinarily think to look. We start with one of the best, and more recent Olympic films, and that is the film Miracle, about the 1980 US Olympic hockey team who, against all odds and expectations, and 40-year-old spoiler alert, defeated the Soviet hockey team, probably one of the greatest hockey teams ever to play, having won gold at the last four Olympics. And while the film certainly tells the story of that game, and does it extraordinarily well in my opinion, it’s the story of how they got to that point that makes the difference and leads us to what we are going to explore today.

Herb Brooks, played by Kurt Russell, was the coach of the University of Minnesota hockey team and was hired in 1979 to coach the Olympic team after several others had turned it down because they didn’t think they could compete, certainly with the soviets, but Brooks had a different idea, and a different way of constructing his team. He wasn’t necessarily going to take the best players, as he said “All-star teams fail because they rely solely on the individual's talent. The Soviets win because they take that talent and use it inside a system that's designed for the betterment of the team.” The only way they could beat the soviets, he said, was to play the best team hockey they could, not just having the best players they could get. And so rather than having tryouts as normal, Brooks instead handpicked all the players for the team. But that didn’t mean it was easy going because these were guys that had played against each other at the highest levels of college hockey for national championships, and so there was some bad blood existing. Take a look…

In-Person and Digital Worship

Several months ago we cut the cord on our cable (or actually our satellite dish). We had been talking about it and looking at all the different options and when the price was going up, and the company offered to upgrade me to a more expensive package, but not cut the price, we decided to bite the bullet and do it, and we haven’t really looked back. And we are not alone.

There were an estimated 25 million people who had stopped using cable or satellite by 2017. This year that number is supposed to reach 50 million, with another 5 million added next year, and still growing beyond that. Netflix now has more subscribers in the US than cable and satellite combined. Additionally cable viewership of those between 18-49 is down more than 27% in the past two years, even with people being locked up at home. This is the reality of the world in which we live, and it will only continue.

We live in an on-demand world. Other than for sports, or very special shows, people don’t want to have to wait until a specific time to watch a show, and then not be able to catch it again until much later. They want to be able to see it when they want to watch not when someone else says they can watch it. And then there is the whole issue of binging a whole series or season at once. Some entertainment companies have recognized this reality and embraced it, others are working towards it, and others who resist will simply disappear.  

This is not true just for TV, but for many other things that used to demand everyone to be in one place at the same time. While I do still “attend” workshops and trainings that are at a particular time and day, most of the things I attend or see offered that I might be interested in are on demand. I do the work when it’s convenient for me and interact with others who are doing the same thing at the same time. There may be time limitations, that is the class is only happening during a period of dates, but it still works on my schedule. Just look at what universities are doing in online classes and you’ll see how true this is becoming.

Now until the past year most churches have been anything but doing that. We offered worship at a particular time and if you couldn’t make that, then you were out of luck. And other than perhaps watching or listening to the sermon later, which even then was a rarity in most churches, there was no way to catch up. That is not conducive to a culture that wants things differently, and wants them when they want them. McDonalds now offers breakfast all day for a reason.

Now all this does not mean you can’t still offer things at a particular time, but unless you are really special, again think sports, people want other ways to interact when they want. Our streaming allows us to do this because you can now access our worship service any time after it happens, as well as to just watch the message if you want. I haven’t heard of anyone bingeing an entire worship series at one time yet, but I do know many people who are watching the worship service at a time that works better for them for many reasons.

Now one of the things that people get stuck in is either/or thinking, rather than both/and. It’s not that we are going to preference those in the sanctuary over online, or vice versa. Both are constituents of the congregation. As Phillip Ortega keeps saying, which I encourage, “we need to meet people where they are.”

You cannot make people do what you want them to do, but that they don’t want to do. If you are a parent or own cats you know is true. It’s about thinking of ways of being church in new ways in order to reach new people. We have people worshipping with us online on a regular basis, and sometimes just once, who don’t even live in New Mexico, let alone Los Alamos. Our possibility of growth online also becomes exponential over what we can do here.

In-person worship and gatherings are not going away, but neither is the digital, and both can inform and build on each other, as well as increase engagement, and as one person I recently read said, if we don’t embrace the digital, “your church will probably continue to function like a mall in the age of Amazon.” Malls are dying and to quote a book title, I refuse to lead a dying church.

But that’s just a start, and I’ll expand more in the next few weeks. So I want to know from you, where do you see opportunities for us in the digital world that we are not currently using, what are your concerns, and how do you think you might be able to assist?

With Liberty and Justice for All

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were Deuteronomy 10:12-13, 17-21, John 8:31-36 and Galatians 5:1, 13-25:

Today is the day we, as a nation, celebrate our independence, or achieving our liberty, from Great Britain. Although technically I agree with John Adams, that we should probably celebrate on July 2 because that was the day that the continental congress actually passed the resolution declaring independence. They then spent the next two days debating the wording of the declaration, which was then adopted on July 4, although it’s possible some signed it on July 4th, most didn’t start signing it until nearly a month later, and several never signed it at all. But as I was thinking of today and what I might talk about, I was thinking about the last line of the pledge of allegiance, “with liberty and justice for all.” And those are terms that have a particular meaning for us as Christians, that may be, and probably are different than those that we think of as a country and a culture, even though the writer of the pledge, Francis Belamy, was a Baptist minister. He was also a socialist and was removed from his church after denouncing the evils of capitalism. But what makes the story even more interesting is the fact that the first place that really published and pushed the pledge was a publication entitled The Youth’s Companion, but their motive was to encourage schools to buy flags for all of their classrooms, and of course who was selling those flags? The Youth’s Companion. I’m telling you you can’t make this up.

But anyways, we hear much in the Bible about justice, and in particular about God’s justice, which is part of that passage we heard from Deuteronomy, and the prophets have a lot more to say about it, because often the reason that Israel is being punished is because they are not upholding God’s justice. And what God also makes clear is that because Israel is God’s chosen nation and people, that they are held to a higher standard. That because they know of God’s justice that their acts of justice, or how they live out justice, must follow the same standard of that of the divine. And what is that? Well we don’t have time to go into that in detail, and one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it today was for me to begin thinking about it in greater detail for a possible worship series on God’s justice, and what that might look like and entail. And so Moses tells the people, sort of summarizing the law, or at least how it’s lived out, that God is impartial and takes no bribes, the sort of basics of what we might think of what justice in the world looks like, especially amongst judges, the police, prosecutors and politicians, those who carry out human justice, after all we say that justice is blind right? That she is blind so that everyone gets a fair shot, even if we might not actually live into that, that’s the ideal. Which is also being set out here.