That's a Mistake. It's a Perfect Ten.

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:43-48:

Just a week short of a year ago, as we made our way through Genesis, our passage was God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac, whom he loved. And I said that when we dealt with that story that we had to deal with the reality that we sacrifice our children for many, many lesser reasons. And I quoted Russell Baker writing in the New York Times who said, “Parents who make their children's lives hell in order to make the parents proud of themselves are a commonplace of American life.” Especially when it comes to sports and then I also reminded us that we also see our children sacrificed as victims of sexual and physical violence, neglect and homelessness, child labor and poverty. And I don’t think we can actually talk about the Olympics without naming those realities, especially as we look at the film Nadia, which came out in 1984 as a made for TV movie about Nadia Comaneci. While some of you may have seen it at the time, I doubt that it touched many of you with its cinematic brilliance. There is actually a Facebook page for fans of the movie and it has a whole 128 people who like it, so not at the top of the Olympic movie pyramid.

But, I choose it for several reasons. The first is that I wanted a film that featured a female athlete, and there just aren’t a lot of them out there. The second was that I thought Nadia’s achievement of perfection in the 1976 Olympics could provide us a good perspective to talk about perfecting our faith, as hear in the gospel passage we have for today. And third, it could also provide us some perspective on Olympic achievements and their aftermath, which are not always pretty, nor is the path to get there. Although today’s message is going to be very different than what I had thought it would be because of the events of this week in women’s gymnastics especially as they surround Simone Biles. If Biles is not the greatest female gymnast of all time, she and Nadia Comaneci are certainly in the conversation. And it turns out that they actually have a lot in common.

Core Values: Caring and Compassionate

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Colossians 3:12-17:

One of my favorite movies is Groundhog Day, and I watch it at least once a year on February 2, Groundhog Day, a moment where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather. And of course it’s sort of ironic that I do the same thing every year on Groundhog Day, because what the movie is about is Phil Connors, a weatherman, played brilliantly by Bill Murray who has to relive the same day over and over and over again. Every day is Groundhog Day. And when he starts out realizing that there is not tomorrow, Phil gives into a hedonistic lifestyle. But what he finds out is that this lifestyle doesn’t bring him satisfaction or true joy. In fact, it leads to him being miserable, which is probably best summed up by an exchange with his producer, played by Andie McDowell, whom he thinks he loves, or at least lusts for, and she says “I could never love you, because you’ll never love anyone but yourself,” to which Phil responds, “I don’t even like myself.” Not being satisfied, he then tries to end the endless cycle of being in the same day, which also doesn’t work, and finally there is a change and he begins to improve himself, not to impress others, but to make himself better, which also leads him start helping others.

At the beginning of the film he keeps walking past a homeless man asking for money, and he pretends that he doesn’t have anything, until eventually he is buying him meals and trying to help him survive through the night. Every day he goes to the same spot to save a young boy falling out of a tree, and performing the Heimlich maneuver, so that he endless repeat of the same day is helping people all day long. In many ways, the movie is a metaphor for Christian conversion. Moving from the ways of the world, to the ways of God. Moving from being self-centered and thinking only about ourselves, to becoming caring and compassionate towards the world, giving of ourselves for the needs of others. I think it’s a great metaphor for the core value that we look at today that we have identified as a congregation, and that is being compassionate and caring.