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…
A little after this scene the doctor and assistant coach are
listening to a news report about continuing escalation in hostilities between
the soviets and America. The Doc bemoans the hate and feat that exists and
worries that it’s bound to lead to disaster, and wonders why we can’t just get
along. The assistant coach, Craig Patrick, responds that it’s sort of like
bringing together hockey players from Boston and Minnesota, their own cold war.
As the team continues to train and prepare for the Olympics, they still aren’t
gelling or being as focused as Brooks would like them to be, and after a tie to
Norway, in which the players are more focused on the women in the stands then
the play on the ice, Brooks has them stay out on the ice and begin doing wind
sprints, or bag skates, or Russians, as they are known in hockey, I just
learned that. This turns out to be one of the turning points in their journey,
take a look…
Mike Eruzione, from Massachusetts, but he plays for the
United States, and with that the torture ends. Now I had thought about wearing
my Boston University hockey shirt today, but that would sort of defeat the
purpose and the message. And we’ll talk about the discipline needed to succeed
that Brooks is instilling in the team next week, but this focus here is on the
name on the front of the Jersey being more important than the name on the back.
As Brooks tells them, they don’t have the talent to win on talent alone,
although one of my favorite Brookisms, which wasn’t in the movie is, “You're
playing worse and worse every day and right now you're playing like it's next
month.” To be the best, to beat the best, they had to play not as a bunch of
individuals, but as a team, bonded together not just by what they go through
together to prepare for the Olympics, but bonded together because of the name
on the front of the jersey.
Now social divisions, who is in and who was out, who was
preferenced who was not, who belonged and who didn’t, who was truly a roman and
who wasn’t, who was doing the right things in being Christian and who wasn’t,
wasn’t really any different then than it is today. Although the categories may
have changed, the arguments are all the same. And so, as I said last week, Paul
was dealing with these arguments in many of his churches, the Corinthian church
in particular, but not just them and not just the church in Galatia, which is
in modern day Turkey. There are many thinking that they own Christ and get to
dispense his grace to those they like and those they don’t, or those who don’t
do what they want are out of luck. There is a sort of cultural imperialism, but
Paul is telling them that not only don’t the understand the freedom given to us
in Christ, as we heard last week, but they don’t understand our relationship to
faith and to baptism. And so he says that they are missing the point of
everything because of what happens when we are baptized.
There is much that we believe takes place in the moment of
baptism, but one of them, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, is that we become a
new creation in Christ and the old things have passed away. We die to our old
selves and are reborn in Christ; we clothe ourselves with Christ as we heard in
the passage from Galatians. This is more than just metaphorical, because in the
ancient church people were baptized naked, and so they removed their old
clothes and then when they came out of the water, they were given new white
garments representing their new life in Christ. But the metaphor is also there
because we often hear that we are to clothe ourselves in Christ, or that we are
to put on the armor of the light of Christ as we heard a couple of weeks ago in
Paul’s letter to the Romans. And so what we put forth to the world, the clothes
we wear, what we do, represent Christ. It is taking off our old jerseys
representing Boston University or the University of Minnesota or the University
of Wisconsin-Duluth and putting on the jersey of the national team, where the
name on the front is the most important.
And it’s even more true for us as Christians because we
don’t even have a name on the back of our Jerseys. When we baptize someone, we
don’t use a surname, or last name or family name, we baptize only with the
first name because we are baptized into the family of God. Paul says “in Christ
Jesus you are all children of God.” We don’t have a family name in the family
of God, because it’s all the same name. Do you understand the importance of
this and what Paul is saying? We are made family in Christ and that becomes our
identity and who we are and what we claim to be. The same thing begins to
happen with the team. After they have been playing together for several months,
and the Olympics are getting closer, Brooks brings in another player to try out
that he thinks will make the team better, but the players aren’t having it.
Take a look….
We’re family. And with that they have the team with which
they will compete, although Brooks still has to make one more cut to get the
team down to 20 players. And what makes this cut significant is the fact that
Brooks himself had been the final player cut on the 1960 US Olympic hockey
team, the last team that had not only won gold, but also beaten the soviets as
well. And as it turns out, several of the coaches in the movies we will
encounter are those who failed to fulfill their Olympic dreams, and perhaps
something else to be explored. But, to go back to the passage, it’s not just
that we become family in baptism, not just that we clothe ourselves with
Christ, and become heirs to the promise of Abraham, nothing to be sneezed at,
but that all the social distinctions we put up and say are important go away.
In Christ, there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer
male and female, for we are all. We are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you
notice Paul does change a little in that list from saying a or b, to male and
female, harkening back to the creation story when we are told that God created
them male and female, which again is emphasizing the new creation we become in
Christ. The identity markers that we claim, or that are put upon us, that give
status or exclusion are entirely wiped away, and the front of our jersey says
“child of God.” Or perhaps it even says, “child of God, just like you.” And so
baptism, which is an outward sign of an inward and spiritual grace, of the work
that God is doing in us through Christ, is not the end of the journey, but the
beginning.
And so to it is with the 1980 team. Just three days before
the Olympics, they get blown off the ice bet the soviets 10-3, and as one
person says it could have been 30-0. The soviet coach later said that game
became a problem because it caused them to underestimate the Americans later. But,
I think the opposite was true for the American’s, because even though they
lost, they were not as scared or as intimidated as if they would have been if
they had never faced them before. And before the game, Kurt Russell gives
probably one of the best pregame speeches in any sports film. Take a look…
I can imagine Jesus saying that speech, with some different
words, because each and every one of you was born to be in relationship with
God. Every one of you is not just loved but beloved. All of you are children of
God. all of you are unique and beautiful in your own way. The world may not say
you belong or that you are special, but I’m tired of hearing what the world
says, Jesus might say, because God says you are special and you belong and you
are all God’s family. And we couldn’t end this without seeing that immortal
game, and so we go with just over a minute remaining with the Americans, bonded
as family, showing that the name on the front is more important, up on the
soviets 4-3 and ending with one of the most famous sports calls ever. Take a
look…
Now one of the great stories is that Al Michaels had the
opportunity to make that call, and to say do you believe in miracles, because
when they gathered prior to the Olympics to assign play-by-play to the
announcers, Michaels was the only one who had ever called a hockey game before.
So he got assigned to cover the US Hockey team, and how many games had he
called before? Just one. Part of Christianity and probably its own message, is
to be ready when opportunities present themselves. Now many people erroneously
think that we beat the soviets for Gold, but that was the semi-final game. They
had to beat Finland two days later to win gold, which they did. And why did it
all happen? Because they came to understand and to live into the idea that the
name on the front was more important than the name on the back. If they didn’t
believe that there would be no miracle. And the same is true with us. If we
don’t put our identity as children of God, as Christians first, there will be
no building or coming of the Kingdom of God.
Our identity is to be found not in what we do, or what we drive, or where we live, or where we graduated from, or who we voted for, or who we root for, or even where we worship. Our identity is found in the fact that we are Christians, united in baptism, beloved sons and daughters of the Father, united in faith and blessed by God, who as Paul says in Romans, is generous to all who call on him. And unlike even gold medals, there is nothing that can take that away from us, nothing which can separate us from God’s love, nothing that can take that jersey that says beloved child of God off of us, because in the waters of baptism we have been clothed with Christ and become heirs to the promise, made one with all for in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for we are all new creations, and all one in Christ Jesus. And I know that is so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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