Wrestling with God

Text this week: Genesis 32:22-32

My favorite Religion professor at Augustana College had a door filled with stories, quotes and comics, and I spent a healthy chunk of my undergraduate time reading that wisdom again and again. One story in particular always grabbed my attention. It was the story of a 17^th century man and his family who were shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They managed to swim to a small, desolate island where they struggled to get by. Nobody came to rescue them. Slowly over time the man’s family became diseased and died—first the youngest children, then the oldest and finally his wife, until the man alone was left. When it was only him remaining he turned to the sky and shouted, “God, I know you are trying to get me to not believe in you, but I refuse to give in. I will believe in you in spite of everything.”

            I can’t help but think of that shipwrecked man when I think of Jacob. In today’s reading Jacob was left alone at the banks of the Jabbok River. This is the first time, since Adam was without Eve in the Garden of Eden, that anybody in the Bible is described as being alone. And, just like the shipwrecked man, when he found himself alone Jacob wrestled. The man shipwrecked on the island wrestled with God’s will in the face of sorrow and loss; Jacob wrestles with something just as personal—a mysterious man, a kind of God-figure, who came in the night. The stakes are high for both. In the face of loss and terror, an uncertain future and a broken past, both Jacob and the shipwrecked man wrestle for the things that matter most: their faith and their lives.

            Jacob teaches us at the Jabbok River is that it is OK to grapple with God. In fact, God needs people strong enough to question everything dear to them in this hostile world. God needs people who can stand up in the face of tragedy and proclaim in spite of it all that “We know you are trying to get us to not believe in you, God, but we refuse to do it.” When Jacob stole the birthright of Esau he chose the harder path, and this is his reward. There’s a difference between wrestling and “wrassling,” a teacher of mine once said. When you wrestle you have to follow the rules, but in “wrassling” there are no rules. This man-God-figure Jacob encounters is most definitely a wrassler, and he shows it when Jacob refuses to let go. It’s painful, quite literally, when God gives you a whack, but incredibly even that blow is not enough to make Jacob let go. This is for him a matter of faith, as much as it is a matter of physical strength. Our world is in need of those willing to accept the challenge to their faith, to wrestle with God’s will for us and ask the most difficult questions. We need more Jacobs.

            Most of us don’t think about the hard side of faith very often, because the path of deference and obedience seems the more faithful road to travel. Yet, if we look close God was the one who initiated the struggle with Jacob. It’s not that God tested Jacob with misfortune—Jacob brought that upon himself—but God does challenge his faith. And when God wrestles he blesses those strong enough to prevail against him. This is kind of a crazy thought. I mean, nobody can actually hold down and subdue God. I’m not talking about making God do our will or suggesting that we can have any power whatsoever over the divine. Instead, I am talking about standing up when those challenges and tragedies come into our lives and proclaiming, along with the shipwrecked man on the island, that our faith is not dependent on receiving good things or easy times; in fact, our faith is about proclaiming Christ crucified in the face of every power of this world that’s shouting otherwise. That is what Jacob is doing by refusing to let go. He is proclaiming that his faith is strong enough to take the blows.

            There’s a Lutheran historian and theologian by the name of Jim Nestingen who is famous in Lutheran circles for his teaching and his stories that are almost completely untrue but also so utterly engaging that you cannot help but want them to be. So, I heard this story from Jim and it may or may not be true, but I’m going to treat it like it is, just like he would.

Jim was attending the funeral of his professor’s wife. His professor, whose name I can’t recall, but it was something like “Papa Schmidt” so that’s the name I’m going to give him, was a gentle giant of a man and also, by the way, a Lutheran theologian to the core. In the receiving line at the prayer service preceding the funeral, Papa Schmidt grabbed a hold of Jim Nestingen (who is not a small man by anyone’s definition), put him in a big bear hug, picked him off the ground and said, “Oh, Jimmy, I’m so glad you have come to remind me of the promise that my wife had in Jesus Christ, our Lord. I’m so glad you came to tell me that her sins are washed away in the waters of her baptism and that Christ died for her sake. Thank you, Jimmy, for coming to remind me of the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the dead.”

            He was doing this with every single person in the receiving line.

            But you know what? That is that man on an island screaming at God that I know the reality of my situation looks dire, I know you have taken from me what I love most, but what of it? I believe nonetheless. That is Jacob wrestling with God all night long and refusing to let go even when it is painful. To wrestle with God is to stare down our mortality. So for Jacob, or the shipwrecked man, or Papa Schmidt, giving up the fight is not an option. To prevail is to keep at it; to look mortality in the face and demand something better, because we know the promises—we know the end of the story. Death is met by resurrection.

            When we prevail against God, God is going to give us a good whack, just as the man did with Jacob. God’s going to give us a limp. None of us can walk in wholeness before God. The Hebrew word for limp here is “tsala,” which is the same word for “rib.” It all brings us back to Adam and Eve. From the rib of Adam came Eve; one set in need of another. Just as Adam needed Eve for companionship, Jacob limps through the world in desperate need of finding his other side. For Jacob it has a double-meaning. He is half a twin to Esau, and he is a half a man without God. We have very similar limps. We need that other side—that completing rib. For us, just as for Jacob, we are in need of God. The very thing that we are wrestling with through this long life is the thing that we need to make ourselves whole.

            So, wrestle away. Obedience has its place, but Jacob reminds us it is no less faithful to look God straight in the eyes and refuse to let go. There is no fear or pain so horrid that it is beyond God’s grasp. What Jacob understood is that when God challenges us the key is to not let go. It will be painful; it will be awfully tempting to say, “So long, God. You have been an absolute brute. I have no time for you.” But the blessing only comes after the pain. Jacob refuses to let go, just as the shipwrecked man refuses to let go of his faith. May each of you have a faith so strong to wrestle with God in the face of adversity. May each of you refuse to let go.

Is it OK to cheat? A sermon on Jacob.

Text: Genesis 27:15-29

As I was thinking about the Jacob story this week, a line from Ocean’s 11 got stuck in my head—not the 1960 original version but the George Clooney, Brad Pitt, 2001 version—where Tess says “You’re a liar and a thief” to which Danny replies, “I only lied about being a thief.”

Everybody lies. I mean, not all the time. Often we tell the truth, but every one of us has lied from time to time. Same thing with cheating: every one of us has bent the rules to our advantage. In spite of this, we have this default setting when reading the Bible that every character must be some kind of other-worldly rock of virtue. Some of you grew up watching those religious Sunday School movies about Jesus’ life, or about Moses and the burning bush, or Charlton Heston’s Ten Commandments. The one universal theme in these movies is that all the characters are incredibly pious people who, if they were living today, would probably be monks or at the very least would cross themselves every couple of seconds—and recite a few Hail Maries—to remind you how devout they are. So, basically what we have done in this mythologizing of the biblical characters is create models for our faith that are so incredibly unreal that we can no longer relate to them as human beings.

Who of you gets up in the morning and thinks, “I really want to be like Moses today?” This is a problem since the Bible is filled with these really human characters.

Let's start with Jacob. He is no pillar of virtue. He comes out of the womb grabbing on to his brother’s ankle, and his mother, Rebekah, takes one look and exclaims, “He cheats!” or in Hebrew, ya-chov—Jacob. And Jacob, for his part, lives up to the name—tricking his brother out of his birthright, lying to his father about his identity, and stealing the blessing that should have been Esau’s. If you’re looking for one of those stuffy, pious paragons of the faith it is not Jacob.

So what's the moral of the story: Should we be like Jacob? Is it OK for us to cheat others, to cast them aside on our way to the top as long as it is part of God’s plan? The great thing about this question is that I can ask it to five and six year olds and every one of them will say, “No! It’s not OK.” But you ask it of adults and they’re less sure. Well… no… but… sometimes it’s the way the world works. You hear this kind of justification all the time. We revel in Jacob stories. We love stories of the person who is born without means and rises to the top through sheer determination and grit—and perhaps some timely advantages—to become something great. If you haven’t watched the Olympics this year—or any year for that matter—I just summed up every single story that NBC has told you for the past couple of weeks.

If it’s OK for Jacob then it’s OK for us, right? That’s the conclusion we tend to draw… I mean, God did bless the people through Jacob and eventually form the nation of Israel from his progeny. That must mean that Jacob was justified in his actions, doesn’t it?

I think, intuitively, we know the answer. There is something not right about Jacob. He is clearly not the person we want him to be. He’s not a model of virtue. He’s not the kind of son we want to raise. He’s not the kind of person we want leading our country, even if he is exactly the kind of person who does end up leading our country. Jacob is a mess, and still, God works through him.

You see, this is not a story about Jacob’s morality. The future of Israel is not dependent on the conniving actions of a very determined man. It is not dependent on Rebekah’s guile in deceiving her husband, Isaac. It is not dependent on a dim-witted brother, Esau, who is more concerned with food than with the future.

This is not a story about Jacob. This is a story about God.

It doesn’t matter if you think Jacob is justified in his actions or not; God is justified in getting the job done. The job is to lead the chosen people into their future, and whether that’s through a starving brute of a man in Esau or a scheming genius in Jacob, God is the star of the show. But still, our little minds with our little desires keep us captive to the little questions raised by Jacob. Is it OK to cheat? Is it OK to cut corners to get what we want? Or most dangerously, could God be calling me to cheat? Do the ends justify the means?

Our trouble is that we live in a cheater culture. It’s become not just common-place but in some places completely acceptable to cheat on your taxes, to cheat on your spouse, or to cheat in school or sports. And for those of you who are feeling pretty good that I didn’t mention anything that you’ve done, I have one word for you: speeding. We have all cheated.

I have cheated in the past—and I’m sure in spite of my best intentions, whether it’s speeding down the highway, rolling through a stop sign on my bike (and yes, I do that A LOT), or something much worse—I will cheat again sometime soon. And I’m willing to bet so will you, and the worst part is that we cannot justify the choice to cheat. We are cheating the rules—yes—but more than that we are cheating ourselves. There’s a saying that cheaters never prosper; that might sometimes be true, but I think it’s more accurate to say that cheaters do initially prosper. But cheating also takes a toll. It makes us guilty, it compels us to lie to cover our tracks, it turns our consciences inside out and we don’t like what we see. Then, ultimately, we discover that cheating wasn’t worth it; not because we didn’t prosper but because the collateral damage was much worse. For example, it’s not that every person who texts while they are driving will have a horrible accident, but some will. Is it worth the collateral damage?

So our paradigm of cheating and prospering, Jacob, is struck down by the very blessing he receives. As it turns out, the easier life would have been to sit in Esau’s shadow. Jacob’s blessing means challenge after challenge. It means fleeing to strange lands, difficult relationships, the rape of his daughter, and the travails of his sons. It means pain, suffering and regret long before it means the adoption of Israel. Only then can we see how God was working through Jacob all along—not for his own prosperity but for the prosperity of a people yet unborn. Jacob’s foresight was pretty good—it is after all how he robbed Esau of his blessing—but God’s foresight trumped Jacob’s by leaps and bounds. His cheating meant both blessing and burden.

So does ours.

The church vs extra-curriculars: Changing a culture

I just came from a rather good ministerial meeting in Hallock where I was encouraged a good deal about the pulse of the wider church. We are getting together and doing things--gasp--across denominational lines. This is all very exciting, and for this idealist it is a great sign for a future where most everybody can learn to get along. However, there was one point of contention that concerned a statement crafted by a local pastor pertaining to times set aside for the church in the community.

In many (probably all) places, sports and other extra-curriculars have made family attendance at Sunday worship--shall we say--spotty. Sports now occupy a more valued place in the hierarchy of event scheduling than do religious traditions. You would probably not be surprised that most leaders in the church, myself included, take issue with this trend and would love to see it reversed. How to change the culture, however, remains in dispute.

The statement we were presented with today was, in my humble opinion, fantastic. It was designed to be a tool for parents to use so they would have words to speak against the organizations that have put strain on their ability to participate fully in the life of their religious community. It is supposed to be a help to parents who feel helpless raging against the machine that is club athletics in America. But, even at our meeting of religious leaders, it was controversial.

The concern was over the methodology. One church leader felt it was a matter of strong families picking themselves up by their own bootstraps and saying, "Enough." He felt this kind of statement was a waste of time, since parents were ultimately responsible for their children's priorities.

In a sense I think he's right that parents may be the most integral factor in determining their children's priorities, but let's not pretend that we live in a vacuum. Suggesting that parents alone can determine their children's participation and prioritization in activities without any environmental influence is both ignorant and a potentially dangerous policy of isolation. Such a policy creates young people who have a chip on their shoulder because their families were, depending on their view of it, either crueler or more pious than the families of other kids.

Sometimes a culture does change when individuals take a stand, but more often what is needed is the combined efforts of a group. Individual families have been upset about the trend toward sporting events on Wednesdays and Sundays for years. Some have given in and their kids are often absent on Sunday mornings; others have forbade their kids from playing. Neither of these choices is ideal. What we need is more than strong families. What we need is a culture shift. And these things only happen when people unite. That's exactly what we were doing this morning. It may not change the world--it may only give words to a single family, or it may do nothing at all--but to give up before the fact admits that our message isn't very powerful.

I tend to think the opposite. Setting God before our idols is the most powerful statement we can ever make. If it doesn't work it has nothing to do with the message and everything to do with our faithfulness to it.

New layout!

Hey friends, family, parishioners, folks I don't know, and whoever else is reading this!

Over the last couple of months I have been seeking a way to make this blog more interesting while, at the same time, keeping up on content. Sermons are particularly tricky, because they don't get very many page views (I can see why: I'd much rather experience a sermon in person than read it online... and if I don't want to read it why would you?). So, I've been searching to find a balance. Creating a second blog for sermons only was an option, but that too seemed a little silly. Finally, I settled on a dramatic layout shift.

Thanks to some nice upgrades in blogger the "dynamic" layouts should allow for better viewing. I also have a new policy: for sermon-posts there will be no images; for other posts there will always be an image. That way you can easily differentiate between sermons and non-sermons on the main blog page. A few other things may change. I took down the book review tab and I'll be looking to add another tab at some point but not until I know what I want up there.

Anyway, I hope you continue to find your way over to this page, and I'm always looking for advice/suggestions on how to make it better.

Thanks,
Frank

Great is Thy Faithfulness!

            There’s a temptation whenever we come together in public celebration to blur the hard edges of history—to glaze over the challenges of our past for the sake of our present. And it’s easy on a day like this to talk about fluff. It’s perhaps easier still to recite a litany of those ministries that this congregation has accomplished over the last century and a quarter. We’ve had much of that so far this weekend and there will be time later for still more. For my part I feel compelled to offer something different, because the readings for today so happen to be some of the most challenging and serious in all of scripture, and I’d be doing you a disservice to ignore them.

Two months ago, I first noticed that the narrative lectionary we are using for the summer was going to cross paths with our 125^th Celebration just as we hit the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, and so I found myself with a choice: change the readings or leave it alone. It would have been pretty easy to move things around—none of you would have even known about it had I done that—but something was nagging at me. Here we were making a big deal about “faithfulness” as the theme for this celebration, and what would it say about faithfulness, I wondered, if we ignored this story? That was my first thought and like many faced with tough decisions, my initial reaction was fearful. Are we brave enough to hear this on a day whose tenor is so distinctly celebratory? But importantly, fear did not have the final word. I had a second thought, and it was something like this: What would it say about us if we did tackle Abraham and Isaac head on? What would it say if we were unafraid of the most difficult questions raised by our faith? That this is a story where faithfulness is put to the test sealed the deal. The sacrifice of Isaac would stay.

This is a story about an ethical dilemma. Abraham is faced with a quandary that we may find to which we may find ourselves impossibly removed. It is awfully tough to put ourselves in Abraham’s shoes and ask, “What would I do if God commanded this of me? What choice would I make?” If you’re like most people, the question almost sounds like blasphemy. Nobody wants to decide between God and family, between love and faithfulness, between a child and a promise. We don’t want to think about a God who would ever ask us for such a choice, and yet here it is. For all of the wonder that we are as human beings we remain paralyzed by choice. When we have too many choices we are overwhelmed; but when we are left without a choice we bemoan our lack of options.

Faithfulness and choice often go hand-in-hand. History is made when men and women rise above the fear and paralysis that come from weighing difficult options, and finally make a choice to dive headlong forward, often straight into the unknown. One hundred and twenty-five years ago nineteen adults and seventeen children dove in and established a Swedish Lutheran Church in Hallock, Minnesota. One year later they chose to bring together resources enough to construct a building. In both of those instances somebody had to step out on a limb and dive into the unknown. Every one of those choices represented those early members of what would become Grace Lutheran taking the harder path, rejecting the status quo for the sake of a calling to create something new. Again and again over these 125 years Grace has been put to challenging decisions. Remarkably, we’re still here.

It’s remarkable because as far as I know at no point in the history of this congregation did anybody have all the necessary info to make a completely informed choice. And though our choices are not always as serious as Abraham’s, they are often no less convoluted. Sometimes we have to make a decision between impossible choices where no option can be considered good. That is Abraham’s dilemma: does he give up the son for whom he had waited over a century or disobey the God who gave him Isaac in the first place? Neither would do. The amazing thing about Abraham is not that he followed through on God’s command—we can debate the morality of that choice all day long—the amazing thing about Abraham is that he was able to make a choice at all.

Faithfulness is taking a stand for God even when God asks the impossible.

Our church stands where Abraham stood. Maybe the stakes aren’t as high, but then again maybe they are. Abraham’s walk up the mountain to sacrifice his son foreshadows Christ’s walk up to the cross, and as disciples of Christ we walk the same path in turn. To be a disciple, Jesus said to pick up your cross and follow. Choose the harder path. You have the choice between sacrificing yourselves or rejecting God’s promises. Neither looks like a very good choice, but it’s the same decision that Abraham faced. Do we live for ourselves or die to ourselves? Do we live for God, or, like Peter denying Christ in his time of need, do we become ashamed and fearful in a time of crisis?

It’s been said too many times that the church is always one generation away from extinction. The truth is that it’s much more dire than that. The church is always moments away from its death. Every time the church turns inward and loves only itself, it dies a spiritual death. Every time the church fails to proclaim Christ and becomes only a social club, it dies a spiritual death. Every time the church is paralyzed by choice or fearful of the repercussions, it dies a spiritual death. But every time the church makes the harder choice to walk where Abraham walked, to proclaim Christ crucified and risen and to shout it out in the face of every power of the world that says that’s not really such a big deal; every time the church is what the church can be, what the church has been, and what the church will be when Christ comes again, then this church has done the impossible and has picked up its cross and followed—to its death, yes; but ultimately to its resurrection!

A good church dies every day, just as a good Christian dies every day. Every day we get up and say to ourselves, “Well, church, we haven’t really been the kind of church we should be. We didn’t feed the hungry; we didn’t clothe the poor; we didn’t visit the homebound, or give hope to the hopeless. We didn’t do a very good job of being Jesus to the world. We’re sorry. We messed up. But today we will rise. We will be Christ. We will make the harder choice. We will reject sin, the devil and all his empty promises. We will be the church, not as we have been for the past 125 years but as we will be today and tomorrow—now and forever.”

As Abraham walked up Mt. Moriah to sacrifice Isaac he gave us the blueprint for everything that we do. He was faithful—even to a fault, even when faithfulness seemed to be the crazy thing to do. So we are faced with our own Moriah, our own Isaacs, our own things we love more than life itself. Are we willing to offer them up to God? Are we willing to step out on the most precarious limb and trade our comfort for uncertainty? It’s the question we face every day, and remember: the church is a moment away from failure; we’re a moment away from turning our backs on the God who brought us thus far by faith; we’re a moment away from death.

So was Isaac.

It’s only when the angel of the Lord breaks in at that last second, with Abraham’s knife raised precariously over his son, that we find the greatness of God’s faithfulness. A moment away from death, Isaac is saved. A moment away from our death, the church looks unblinkingly forward and says, in the words of Martin Luther,

 “I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is there I shall be also!”

Amen.

Making history from the margins

Preaching text: Genesis 18:1-15

            God is not the kind of God to do things in stereotypical, boring ways. So often when God enters the picture the rules of the universe bend; sometimes they are altogether shattered. And when God decides to do something radical—and I don’t mean sort of, kind of, just a little radical—but truly radical—when God changes the rules of the game and turns the world upside down—when God puts the divine foot down and makes a single moment in time into a game-changer for the history of the world; in those moments, God looks for strange people to get the work done. Have you ever noticed that? If any of us were going to go about altering the course of history our natural inclination would be to look for help from the important people—people who have money, influence, political power, fame. These are our game-changers, but that’s not how God does it.

            In fact, whenever God enters into history to really change the world’s priorities he does so from the margins. Sometimes it’s the poor, the outcast, the oppressed, the racial or cultural minority. Always it’s the apparent loser. Robert Farrar Capon has said that God is interested in “the least, the last, the lost, the lowly, the little, and the dead.” That’s it. It’s not that God doesn’t care about you if you don’t fit into those categories; it’s just that for the world-changing moments of history he’s going to look for somebody else, somebody forgotten, belittled and seemingly unimportant. The world changes from the margins.

            Look at Moses, a member of the oppressed with a fear of public speaking.

            Or Esther, forced to hide her identity to help save the Jewish people.

            Or Daniel, Elijah, countless other prophets; David, the least likely of many brothers; then there’s John the Baptist (eating locusts is a pretty good indication of living at the margins); Jesus, born in a stable; the woman at the well; the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet who is labeled only a “sinner”… it goes on and on.

            The margins are where history is made.

            And nobody lives as close to the margins as Abraham.

            Think about it. For ninety-nine years the only important thing that happened in Abraham’s life is that he saved his nephew, Lot, from some warring eastern kings and he fooled around with Sarah’s slave-girl, Hagar. If that were the end of the story, Abraham would fade into obscurity with a rather unremarkable legacy.

That’s when God snaps him up.

            Abraham wasn’t marginal in the way we often recognize. When I say “marginal” we tend to think people who are poor, or poor, or poor. We have a pretty small idea of the margins, which is pretty much exclusively concerned with wealth. That’s human beings for you. God uses people from all sorts of margins, and Abraham was marginal in two critical ways: he was old and he was childless. God could have picked anybody to be heir to the covenant—he could even have picked Abraham at a younger age—and still he waited on the ninety-nine year old, ancient Father Abraham, and he waited on Sarah, at the age of ninety, to bear the child who would be the antecedent of the promised people.

            It makes a person wonder: Either God is incredibly slow, or there’s a secondary moral to this story.

            Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Time and again scripture tells us that age is a human concern. Our fear of getting old is blinding, preventing us from seeing how God works through the old and the young alike. At no time in the history of the world have people tried so desperately to continue to look young as we do now. Age is taboo. Nobody likes to get old. But here we have a God that doesn’t care if you are nine of ninety-nine. God has no regard for how many cycles you have gone around the big ball of gas we call the sun. You are never too young—or too old—to be of use. In fact, God picks out the young and the old—the ones that society has rejected—and to them he gives the opportunity to change the world. It is the young and the old who are on the margins and therefore on the cutting edge of history.

            This kind of thinking is sadly absent from church politics. There’s this myth you hear sometimes that the church needs to get younger or, conversely, that the church will die without the older generation. With that kind of thinking, it’s easy to pit generations against one another. The world is always changing; parents have always experienced the world differently from their children, and those different experiences make it easy to fracture. No one generation has ever been better at being the church than others, though every generation has thought they have had the key to the kingdom. Yet, remember that God’s work comes from the margins. God changes us not through the dominant culture that thinks we have it right; rather, God speaks to us through those who have no voice—the ones we glossed over in our haste down the “right” path. That’s the strange way that the kingdom of God works. It’s also frightening to a people of comfort; because the moment you feel at ease is the moment you can be certain that God is working not through you but through somebody else.

            Nevertheless, there is something reassuring about God’s methodology. The oppressed of this world are uplifted again and again by a promise: they are the ones with the Gospel on their lips. Whether the least and the lost are the poor or the elderly, or the young or the forgotten, God not only remembers them; they are also the hands and feet of God’s work in the world.

This has some pretty awesome ramifications for our church. It means that God’s church is always progressing. It can never stay the same, since the forgotten and the lost are reforming it every day. The Reformed tradition got it right when it says that the church is “semper reformanda” (always reforming). We can give up the idea of looking backward at some idyllic age. A church impacted by the margins is in some sense never stable; it has to embrace chaos because, out of that chaos, comes new prophetic voices.

If embracing the margins sounds a bit frightening that’s probably because it is. This is really an awful business model. Large-scale economies are interested in stable growth, but the church economy is looking for something else: it’s not looking for growth or stability or safety; the church economy is looking for resurrection. It’s looking for everything that Isaac embodies: joy, laughter, chaos, and finally promise. Isaac is the big promise embodied.

            Out of the margins comes this word of promise: things will never be the same. Comfort? Overrated. Stability? An illusion. Change? Inevitable. There is nothing scarier than standing at the margins. Abraham knew that. His legacy was nonexistent until he was faced with the most frightening prospect of all: meeting God face-to-face. Then, from the unlikeliest of places grew a promise big enough to encompass the whole world. The margins reframed history; they did for Abraham and they do today. The margins, whether of the church or our society, are where history is made.

Unapologetic nationalism and other great things about the Olympics

In my more idealistic moments I resonate strongly with Eugene Debs' famous quote: "I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world." I tend to think that the things that separate us, especially nationalism in all its various forms, are exactly those things that dehumanize and vilify "others." In the long run, I'm not sure there's much difference between lifting up the virtues of one's nation above all others and lifting up one's race or one's ethnic heritage--with the small distinction that you can sometimes, but not always, choose your national residence. And yet, I am the most single-minded champion of rooting for Team USA in an array of sporting events every time the Olympics come around.

Stephen Colbert's satirical 2010 poster

Count me a hypocrite, I guess.

Sports are certainly not immune to violence in their nationalistic passions, so it's not as if I can excuse my enamorment for team USA on the grounds that nothing significant is on the line. We have to look no further than the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics or the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games to find the real-life cost of sport. And yet, here I am, cheering for the home team, and, perhaps more importantly, cheering against the rest of the world.

In order to rationalize this, we have to start with the essence of competition in sport: the desire to win. There's a rather (in)famous quote from Herm Edwards, in response to a question about his team playing meaningless games, where he lets loose with a punctuated and direct retort, "You play to win the game!" The goal is simple: win. Now, it might be too simple to keep emotions and passions out of that one objective, but at its heart sports is not about demoralizing or dehumanizing the opponent; it is about winning.

Things get more complicated when you introduce fans into the mix. Fans are crazy beasts. They don't know what they are doing and they have less justification still for their beliefs and passions. Some come armed with stats, but in sports everybody has stats and stats alone never won anything. The chasm between statistical evidence and actuality is a gulf we are hardly closer to bridging even in the sabermetric era. Fans try to justify their superiority, they get caught up in prideful arrogance and they lack even a grain of objectivity. It's the reason half the fans in the stadium will yell "Balk!" when an opposing pitcher wheels to throw to second while twiddling their thumbs when their own pitcher does the same thing. Fans are the folks who cause problems; fans are subject to the mob mentality.

That's why it's even more abhorrent that I have this passion for team USA since I am very much a fan. Yet, I'm hopeful that that's where the similarities end. There is something about the Olympics that encompasses more than nationalistic pride. For every controversial moment (including tonight when the USA will almost certainly not dip our flag to the queen), there is something about coming together in an event that rises above nationalism. My pride in team USA has little to do with dislike of other countries--even if there are certain athletes and even teams I cannot stand. The Olympics is a time when we don't need an excuse to root for those of us in our midst. It's not so different from rooting for the home team, except there is a clear sense that every American is in this together.

So I'm OK with rooting on team USA. It's not going to stop me anyway, but I hope the games remain more than that. I hope that even when the Americans lose the humanity of the games wins out. Sports are kind of a silly thing to make such a significant difference in the emotions of people all over the world, and yet, they are in some ways the fairest of grounds to meet one another and discover our common humanity.