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.
