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…

Run The Race Before Us

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The texts were Hebrews 12:1-11 and 1 Corinthians 9:24-27:

Tonight many of the athletes will gather once again will gather for the closing ceremonies of the Olympic games, not including those who fled the country with the police on their heels.  At tonight’s ceremony, the head of the International Olympic Committee will declare that the Rio games are officially closed, and then the flag of Japan will be hoisted up in the stadium, as they will be the host nation of the next Olympic games, and the race to the next Olympics will be begun with stories of cost overruns, of the inability of the city to host the Olympics, of the worries of terrorism, and as we get closer the reality that many of the facilities are not yet completed, just like we hear every single time the Olympics come around.  We move from what has just happened, and we move forward to the next games. In some sense this is just one big relay race, one nation passing the baton on to the next, and on to the next, with everyone hoping the baton doesn’t get dropped, or perhaps with a little glee at the spectacle hoping the baton does get dropped.  But regardless, the athletes and Tokyo are now all working hard to prepare to be ready come back in four years to do it all over again, to run the race that is before them.  And so today we conclude this series looking at what we can learn from the games about our faith in how we run the race that is before us.

Last week when we looked at wrestling, I said that it was believed to be one of the oldest sports in the world and one that is found in every culture.  But, since walking is an Olympic sport we would have to go with walking as being the oldest sport, something we have been doing for some 4 million years, but running probably comes in as the second oldest sport in which we undertake. Although my guess is that the earliest races were not about being the fastest person, but instead only about not being the slowest person, because when you’re being chased by a wild animal intent on killing you, you don’t have to be the fastest one, you merely have to outrun the slowest person in order to survive.

Assumptions

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was John 1:43-51:

Today’s message is going to be very different from how I normally preach, because it’s going to be focused on four stories, and it’s also a little more personal than I normally like to be because these are also my stories.  But this message has been sort of bouncing around my mind for a while now, and I thought today was an appropriate time to say it.

The first two stories are about perceptions, or we should probably say assumptions.  When I was attending Harvard, I had to go to the cashier’s office one day and there was a long line waiting to talk with someone, and in front of me there was a very large man.  He was probably 6’4” and at least 250.  His neck was bigger than my thighs.  He was huge.  Now Harvard does not offer any athletic scholarships, nor do any of the other Ivy Leagues, although they still do quite well, including being undefeated in football this year and beating UNM in the NCAA tournament two years ago.  But that’s just bragging, but anyways this guy was huge and I instantly thought, I wonder if Harvard lowers its academic requirements in order to recruit and bring in some athletes to play for the school?  Does anyone want to make a guess as to the race of this particular student?  He was African-American.  The moment I asked myself the question I realized the outright bigotry that went into it, the assumptions that I had made, not only about him but about others like him.