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.

When we looked at the movies Miracle and Race, we talked about the coaches telling their players that they were going to work them harder and longer than they had ever been worked, and if they weren’t willing to give it their all, then they should quit. In Nadia, Bella Karolyi tells Nadia exactly the same thing. Take a look…  Now there is a huge difference, at least in my opinion, between telling that to athletes in the late teens or early 20s and telling it to a girl who is only 8 or 9, and the demands are also radically different. Karolyi and his wife Marta, also decide to focus their gymnastics school and training on young girls because they mature faster and can do things that boys can’t do until much later, which also makes me wonder if it’s also because maybe young girls are much less willing to speak up or act out.

Many years after the Karolyi’s had defected from Romania and led the US female gymnastics program to Olympic gold medal heights, many of his former athletes came out and accused them, and Bella in particular of physical and mental abuse, and this includes Nadia. Now there were some athletes who defended Karolyi, but many of the things they were accused of doing are actually shown in Nadia, again which came out in 1984. Marta is shown smacking Nadia in the back of the head after a bad performance, and Nadia is also berated in one scene by Bela telling her she is stupid, and careless and a failure, and that is after the 1976 Olympics.

What is also brutally highlighted in the film is the denial of food which led to an eating disorder for Nadia. And the same accusations by US athletes were also made. In fact, Larry Nassar who is in prison for molesting more than 160 girls, of which at the very least the US Gymnastics association knew about and did nothing about, if it was not also known by the Karolyi’s, which many of the gymnasts believe, or at least they created a culture of silence and fear that allowed it to continue. One of the ways he groomed girls and got them to trust him was by sneaking them food that had been denied to them by the regimen of the Karolyi’s. And one of the reasons why Simone Biles said she stayed around to compete in these Olympics is that she is the last of the survivors still in US Gymnastics and wanted to use her fame and voice to keep a spotlight on US Gymnastics and their failures, and to make sure the story stays forward in order to protect others from a win at all costs mentality.

And so I do not believe that anyone can claim that Biles is weak or just doesn’t have what it takes. She has more than proven her strength and skill and abilities as a team mate or as a gymnast. She has 19 world titles and 4 gold medals, and has four gymnastics moves that are named after her. And what she did this week may have saved her life, because when you lose where you are in the air, you can kill yourself on the land. There was a college gymnast who died in 2019 as a result of a fall off the uneven bars, and two gymnasts in the Olympics have become paralyzed after bad landings. And many who know a lot more about gymnastics and the body than I do said they were amazed that Biles didn’t actually blow out her knee of the landing on the vault before she stepped away.

And here’s the truth, if she had blown out her knee, we all would have been sad and upset that she couldn’t compete because of her injury. But, we would have understood because her physical health had been injured. And yet when she talked about the demons she battles in her mental health people thought that made her weak, not a true athlete and someone who had quit and let down her team. But there is not physical health and mental health. There is only health. They are not separate things. They are connected, and just because we cannot see the injury, which is true with many physical injuries, doesn’t mean that it is not as traumatic or as limiting.  

As Dr. Brock Chisholm, the first director of the World Health Organization said, “without mental health there can be no true physical health.” And I can say, as someone whose family has a history of mental illness, which makes me vigilant of it in my life and in my daughters, the church has done and continues to do a terrible job about dealing with and talking about mental health. And yet we shouldn’t because it’s part of the healing I believe that Christ offers to the world. And that goes to where I thought we would be today and talking about perfection. And so to get there, from a different angle, let’s take go to the point for which Nadia Comaneci is known, which is the first gymnast to score a perfect ten in the Olympics, so take a look at that moment…

Talk about a lack of imagination to have a score board that doesn’t even allow for the highest score possible to even be displayed. And Nadia didn’t score just one perfect ten, she scored seven of them, and Nellie Kim, a gymnast from Russia also scored a perfect ten in that Olympic. And since Jesus talks about being perfect like God is perfect, this seemed like a great time to talk about what perfection means. And that’s especially true for us as Methodists because we believe in what John Wesley called Christian perfection, or entire sanctification, which doesn’t mean that we could go out on the uneven bars and not make any mistakes, or no longer misspell words. That’s not the perfection that we are talking about when we say, or at least I say, we are moving on to perfection. Instead Christin perfection is being so full of the love of God that we no longer willfully sin, and we should also note that this is only a temporary situation. It’s not that we reach perfection and we are always there, because that’s not the nature of being human. But I’m going to save that message for another time, or at least more details on that, and instead focus on a different type of perfection.

Because another translation for the Greek word that’s being used here that of completeness or wholeness, which I think is important as we think about mental health.  Because while I talk about sin being brokenness, and we can see that in our relationships, mental illness is not a sin. Let me say that again. Having mental issues is not a sin, just as much as physical problems are not a sin. Nadia Comaneci attempted suicide. Michael Phelps has talked about his suicidal ideation in dealing with depression. And Simone Biles, even before these Olympics talked about her depression, and wanting to sleep so that she didn’t have to think about suicide. These are athletes at the top of their game, some of the greatest athletes and Olympians of all time and they struggled with mental health. And what they also have all come to know is that admitting it and talking about it is not a weakness. They can only do that because of strength. Because they are seeking healing and wholeness and completeness, and in that they are seeking perfection. And they all now know that help is available.

And the one other piece is that this idea of perfection, of wholeness and completeness is surrounded with the idea of love. Love for everyone and relationship. Often mental illness will leave us isolated and alone, thinking that no one knows what we are going through, that no one else struggles with these issues, that we have to do it by ourselves. And nothing could be further from the truth. It does not have to be our secret shame. It’s a secret shame. One in 5 adults will experience some form of mental illness in any given year, and 1 in 25 will experience that an illness that seriously interferes with their life. And of those who have mental illness, a little more than half will never seek any assistance. The more we bring it out from the darkness, the more we talk about its realities, the more the talk about our own struggles, the better off we will all be,

Just as God’s perfection and completeness is found in relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so too is relationship part of our striving for completeness. And so again, if Simone Biles, or Michael Phelps, or Nadia Comaneci’s story rings true for you, please know that you are not alone. Hope is available, and help is available, and often that comes with what may be the hardest part of naming it for what it is and saying that you need help, and then knowing that you are never alone. That we as a community are here, as we are to carry one another’s burdens, as Paul says, and that God is here, and God’s love is here and there is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from that love, and that we are always strengthened in our weakness and made perfect in Christ’s love. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.