2 Kings 4:42-44
John 6:1-21
On Friday, I threw away my sermon. And it was almost done.
It wasn’t awesome, but it was serviceable enough, focused on scarcity and abundance in keeping with today’s gospel reading. Sure, I took a potshot at late-stage neoliberal capitalism, a swing at social media, engaged in a little confession around my own problematic relationship with consumerism, and even cited a New York Times article from this past Thursday about a new social media counter-cultural campaign called “underconsumption core,” but it was kind of the same old same old. It had a call to action, one I have preached from a Christian perspective with Buddhist influences many times.
Then I turned on the Olympic opening ceremony. This is not something I normally do.
I remember the terrorist attack on the 1972 games in Munich, the Communist athletes jacked up on performance enhancing drugs, and the boycotts by one nation or another. I still don’t like professional athletes participating, though I have no good reason. The line between amateur and professional athletes no longer exists in the United States, with NCAA athletes being paid and transferring from school to school.
If all of that was not enough, we have learned that the cost of hosting the games is prohibitive, and I don’t just mean the social cost of dislocating the poor to create new stadiums and the Olympic Village, though that certainly happens, for they don’t put these things where the rich folks live.
We are at a point where the games can either be held in big cities, where previous hosts already have the basic infrastructure, or in autocracies that care little about social costs.
And honestly, I hate the chants of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” and the medal trackers. I would be perfectly okay with the single athlete teams from Belize, Liechtenstein, Nauru, and Somalia taking home medals, however improbable. I’m for the underdog that way, just like Jesus.
So yeah, I’m a little cynical. But the French usually put on a good show. And France shares some of the same aspirations as the United States, even if neither nation has lived up to our promise. In fact, they do us two better, for in addition to claiming liberty as a core value, they add equality and fraternity, while we wrote inequality into our constitution.
I needed some down time, not only with no multi-tasking, but with real life zero-tasking. So I sat on the couch and watched the show, the boat parade down the Seine, the parkour torch relay, the second torch relay to the unique caldron, and that finale by Celine Dion, performing despite a terrifying medical condition. And I made a decision.
I’m going to park my cynicism for the next couple of weeks.
Now, to be sure, the Paris Olympics are not the only thing that has me in a good mood. Many of us have embraced audacious hope in the last week.
But the Paris Olympics shows us a world where women are just as important as men, where the gold medal received by a girl on a skateboard is just as real as the gold medal won by an N.B.A. Star for his adopted nation, where that N.B.A. star might be a Nigerian immigrant with Greek citizenship with a championship ring and an M.V.P. trophy earned in Milwaukee playing a sport this fortnight not for millions of dollars, but for millions of fans, and love of his country and his sport.
The prophets of our tradition did not just denounce what was. They also told us what might be. Jesus didn’t just denounce his generation, the corrupt and hypocritical leaders of his own culture. He also announced the kin-dom of God, told us that God was love, and that there was more grace than we could ever imagine.
So this week, we’ll watch the Dutch ride bikes and the Australians swim and the Argentinians play football and Japanese-British 16 year-old skateboarder Sky Brown go for her second Olympic medal, having won a Bronze in 2020 at the age of 12. How cool is that?
For sixteen days, we will watch people use these amazing, miraculous bodies for the pure joy of what we can do with these bodies. We’ll watch them compete in individual sports though not one of them is there on their own, for there are parents and coaches and communities there with them.
We will watch them compete in team sports, communities of their own, which is awesome since life is a team sport, or at least was meant to be despite the stupidity that worships the god in the mirror, that preaches the false gospel of greed.
And while Mammon will sneak his destructive way into the story, through sponsorships, commercials, and the occasional billionaire son of an Apartheid emerald mine, in the end, we will see the same nations gather in peace to close the games.
Hope is what gets me out of bed, hope and faith, the faith that what we are doing matters, that someone is going to hear something they needed to hear this morning, that the family that leaves the I.C.U. in tears will leave with some peace and maybe some tools they can use as they journey through grief, hope that the work you do for your museum or advocacy group or constituency group contributes to human thriving, that we are in the business of opening doors and healing broken bodies and calling people out of fear and loneliness and into their best selves.
It is late July in an election year where everything we say we stand for is at stake. You don’t need a long sermon every week, and you certainly don’t need to be preached at. You know your mission. You need to believe. So let’s decide to believe. And let the games begin.
Amen.