Sermon: "A Long Sports Metaphor for Glory," March 21, 2021
Preacher: The Rev. Ryan Slifka
Scripture: John 12:20-33
A while back I was listening to a podcast about the intersection between sports and faith.[i] In America a huge number of athletes identify openly as Christians. It’s a different culture—I mean could you imagine Sidney Crosby, Stanley Cup overhead, thanking the Lord Jesus? Probably not.
Christianity there is big. And so part of many gameday routines include private and public prayer. One of the most common prayers is a petition for God to use their athletic talent and physical prowess to bring God glory. That’s why it’s not uncommon to see a quarterback clutching a silver trophy start off by thanking the Lord. It’s so fans across the world would see incredible acts of endurance and skill, and attribute them not to the athlete, but to the God who made them.
Now, I'll admit that I used to find this all kind of crass, and hokey. I mean, how high is the N.B.A. on God’s list of priorities? But I’ve come to appreciate it a bit. It’s kind of refreshing in the multi-billion dollar world of pro sports for someone to attribute their success to anything other than their own hard work and determination. There’s a humility there, a sense of gratitude. Anything to deflect and deflate an overpowering ego is good with me.
That being said, there’s something that doesn’t quite sit right. A little nagging issue about this whole glory thing. And that's scripture passages like today.
In today’s passage Jesus is at the height of his success. Last chapter he raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus was dead for three days, and Jesus called him out of the tomb. This was the moment where crowds of fans started to gather around, where opponents started to get nervous. He’s so popular, now, that some Greeks, it says, come looking for him. Greeks are non-Jews. These people are cultural and religious outsiders, they’re not in on the game. They’re like lacrosse fans who’ve never watched a game of basketball but find themselves courtside watching Michael Jordan. Jesus is incredible, he’s at the pinnacle of his fame. The movement’s picking up steam. A legion of fans awaits.
Jesus is one step away from honour, power and yes, glory. “Sir,” say the Greeks, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Maybe they’re expecting another, greater miracle. Maybe they’re expecting Jesus to gather an army to toss the Romans out, and crown himself King on top of the lifeless body of Pontius Pilate. Things can only go upward from here, right?
Yeah, not so much. When Philip and Andrew, Jesus’ disciples, bring new admirers just itching for an autograph, he gives a rather unexpected interview. Starts off good—“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” Jesus says. Big game’s ahead. Glory’s comin’ to God real soon. But then he shares this convoluted metaphor of a grain having to get buried and die before there’s any fruit. Then he says that “those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
You can see the reporters’ eyebrows raise. He said glory, but it doesn’t sound very glorious. Maybe its just the adrenaline.
But he didn’t misspeak. It’s not an error of any kind.
“Now my soul is troubled,” Jesus says. “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—“Father, save me from this hour?” I can tell you’re all unsettled by this talk. So am I. But I mean what I said about the seed dying. About giving up my life, and you giving up your life to follow me.
Then Jesus, hands out, palms upward, stares into heaven. “Father,” he prays. “Father, glorify your name.” It's one of only seven of Jesus’ prayers we have in the Bible.ii[ii] Even more rare is that this is the only time Jesus ever gets a direct response.
“Father, glorify your name,” Jesus prays. Then God replies, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” Jesus then goes on to tell the crowd that the powers of destruction are headed towards a brutal defeat. That when he’s lifted up in his crucifixion, he will draw all humanity to himself, and that his death is gonna be the thing that does it.
Basically it’s like Jesus saying “I’m gonna have the highest score in history without making a single shot. 100 to nothing in favour of the other team. Zero assists, no dazzling three-point plays. I’m gonna let stuff bounce off of me right into my own net. In fact, I’m gonna spend three days in the penalty box—atoning for the other team’s violations. I’m gonna lose, badly, brutally badly. And you know what? When I do, I’m gonna win. I’m actually gonna win, and when I do, everybody watching’ll be drawn to me like a magnet. And if you wanna win the ring with me you gotta learn how to lose in the exact same way. To which God—over the loud speaker—gives a hearty Amen.
This is what Jesus means by the word glory. According to John, it’s Jesus’ suffering, that glorifies God, not his positive attitude. It’s his failure, not his success that glorifies God. It’s his loss, and his shame, not his triumph or his pride. It’s not his notoriety, his wealth, his status, privilege or even his life that glorifies God. It’s his death. It’s on the cross, that he wins the pennant of righteousness. It’s on the cross where he drinks deep from the Stanley Cup of salvation. On the cross he is lifted up, his name raised above all other names,[iii] and it’s from there where he draws all people to himself, to the great cosmic tailgate party called the kingdom of heaven. His glory doesn’t look like glory at all. But according to John it’s Jesus' apparent loss that’s the ultimate triumph.
Now, I’m not exactly sure that this is what most professional athletes mean by the word “glory.” I don’t think it’s what any of us think of as glory. For us, glory’s all in the good stuff. It’s the control and peacefulness of stable circumstances. It’s in the virtue and nobility of doing good, the wealth, notoriety and esteem of success. And in the strength, beauty, and comfort of healthy bodies. For us that’s goodness. That’s glory. All the other stuff—pain, sorrow, suffering and humiliation—that’s disgrace. Embarrassment to be avoided at all costs. And we spend our lives trying to hit those high highs, and if we don’t, we see our lives as a blowout, a loss, a wash. A write-off.
But according to Jesus, there’s a different kind of glory. A different kind of divine activity. One that we can only know through the logic of the cross. This glory we can only know through weakness. One we can only encounter though loss, through sacrifice. Through shame and humiliation. And this glory is greater than none-other. One where God is drawing each and every one of us to himself.
A few months ago there was this great essay in the Christian Century magazine. It was by Laurie Hartzell, about her relationship with her elderly father. Her dad was loving, but always quite strict, and conservative. As she reached her teen years they started to fight over everything. They couldn’t really even have a conversation for fear of it escalating into full blown argument.
One thing they did have, though, was sports. They were both super-athletic people. Instead of talking politics, they’d play ping pong. Softball instead of sea-rise due to climate change. They had this way of bonding together and with her children, even though they couldn’t really keep on in basic chit-chat.
Eventually, though, her Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Gradually, this once active and physically imposing man lost control of much of the body he’d took so much pride in. Eventually, he was wheelchair bound and was moved into an assisted living facility. There he was in need of round the clock care and attention.
It felt like a double loss. Not only was he unable to play the game anymore, any game. They’d also lost this crucial buffer in their relationship that allowed them to be together without killing eachother. His glory days were over. He was out of the game of life for good.
In the midst of all this loss, though, something new and different happened in her father’s life and their relationship. They started watching football together instead of playing it. And one day while watching the game, her dad opened up to her in a way he’d never before. “Dad told me,” she says. “Dad told me that the hardest thing about having Parkinson’s was not being able to do everything for himself and needing the help of others.” Especially difficult was the deep humiliation of having someone else bathe him.
“It’s got me thinking,” he said. “It's got me thinking that I live my spiritual life that way, too [with self-sufficient pride]. I think I have to do everything. But I don’t. God’s grace means that is OK—I don’t have to do it. God does it.” She’d never had her dad share that way before. “That was a new kind of movement in my dad’s life” she says. "A movement of grace. And it created a new landscape in our relationship so we could move together. We could talk about faith and God’s presence and what it means to be healed.
We didn’t always agree, and we still didn’t venture into politics much. We surely couldn’t move together in that realm. But our relationship, by God’s grace, went from a familiar physical movement into a deeper, more internal movement that swirled with pain and, in the end, deep joy.”[iv]
Hartzell and her father had learned how to play the game of life in a whole new way. Not on the world’s terms—terms of success, power, health, and wholeness. But they’d learned glory of a different kind. The glory of the cross, a power made perfect in weakness. One in which Christ drew them to himself, and eachother. In his loss, they gained eachother. Because in Christ we discover—to our dismay—what we have in common is our finite human weakness, our deep need. In their loss, they experienced true grace, and gained a glimpse of the beauty of everlasting life. That's because for them glory days weren’t over. With Christ they were back to the very first inning. One that never ends.
Think about your own life. When have you failed at your life goals? When have you screwed up your relationships, hurt the people you love, disappointed people who’ve depended on you? When have you been betrayed, damaged by people you thought you trusted and still can’t get over it? When have you been so despairing of the state of the world and its politics? When have you been so weak, hurt and helpless that you couldn’t do anything about it? That is where God is at work right now, redeeming you and all of human history. If only you have eyes to see it.
Because guess what? God used the wicked, ugly incident of total human depravity in history, this negation of all things good and beautiful to show her love for the world, and to win the final victory over evil and the powers of Sin and death. God took that empty, meaningless nothing and turned it into Something itself. Into the ultimate instrument and symbol of love in the universe. And if God could do it with that nothing God can—like with Laurie Hartzell and her father—God can take all your nothingness, your lowliness, your weakness, your folly, finitude and failure and turn it in to something even more beautiful than human strength. If only we'll let him.
Friends, brothers and sisters. The Good News is that glory game we’ve been playing that only ends in disappointment, loss, and death, it ain’t the only game in town. There's a whole other league to join, one in which we have already been drafted in the first round by God’s electing grace, the contract sealed in our baptism. In it we’ve been given a whole new set of rules, where our weakness is Christ’s strength, and where our sin abounds his grace abounds all the more so,[v] and it's where we're being cheered on by saints—both living and dead—Saints like Laurie Hertzell and her father, who’ve got one foot in the endzone of the victory that Christ has already won.[vi]
The game of life isn’t over. Because our loss is where God’s glory begins. Thank God for that.
AMEN.
[i] I can’t quite remember which one! It might have been the Mockingcast by Mockingbird Ministries www.mbird.com.
[ii] See Laszlo Galluz, The Seven Prayers of Jesus (Downer’s Grove: IVP Press, 2017).
[iii] See Philippians 2:5-11.
[iv] “Movement: Essays by Readers,” The Christian Century, September 28, 2020.