Sports in Scripture: Boxing

I.

Boxing is a violent sport, and I can’t get into it at all; I may be in the minority, though. When the big name boxers fight, it is not uncommon for all seats in the arena to be sold out, and the Pay Per View reservations lines are jammed. People pay large sums of money to see a boxing match on their televisions.

Boxing has been around much longer than historians and archaeologists have thought. For quite a while, the oldest record of fighting with fists for sport was on a Sumerian relief card in the third millennium before the birth of Jesus and in an Egyptian relief around the second millennium before the birth of Jesus. A “relief” is a sculpture or carving technique in which figures are more prominent than the background on which they are created. A “low relief” raises the figures just barely from the background while “high relief” causes the figures in the art piece to be raised considerably from the background. All sorts of backgrounds have been used to create reliefs: strips of clay, wood, ivory, stone, and some gem stones such as jade.

Just last century, not so long ago, archaeologists digging around in Baghdad came upon tablets showing boxers in Baghdad that were about 7,000 years old--the tablets, not the boxers. Turns out boxing was an extremely popular sport in Rome and throughout the Roman Empire. Many of the nations over which Rome ruled as it expanded were introduced to boxing; thus, the popularity of the sport grew. When the Roman Empire fell so also did many of its historic records and artistic treasures. Not until last century did archaeologists begin finding evidence of boxing while the mighty Roman Empire was THE world power with which to contend. Ample records of boxing during the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries on THIS side of the birth of Jesus have been in hand for hundreds of years.

The earliest boxers were, from all indications, gloveless. They fought bare-fisted. The first boxers to fight with gloves as archaeologists put the story of boxing together were the Minoans. The Minoan culture was the first great civilization to develop in what, today, we call Crete. The name of the people was developed from the name of their legendary king, Minos.

The earliest boxing “gloves” weren’t designed to protect a boxer’s hand bones or to soften the blow to an opponent with padding. From the looks of things, these earliest hand coverings were bands wrapped strategically around a boxer’s hands and wrists to cause more damage to an opponent that modern boxing gloves allow--though they allow plenty. The first boxing gloves had metal studs embedded in them to inflict damage and cause pain through softening the blow overall.

A sculpture of a boxer from the century immediately before Jesus was born shows in detail the damage that boxing, even with gloves, could cause. This bronze boxer somehow got the name “Terme Boxer.” He is also called the “Boxer of Quirinal,” and the injuries to his face and head are impossible to miss. He has a broken nose. He has a cauliflower ear, maybe two, revealing that one or both of his ears, at least once, had been beaten to a pulp. Specialists believe that the sculpture is of a specific boxer and not a generalized representation of a composite boxer that took shape in the sculptor’s imagination.

Some early boxers also wore helmets and whole arm guards; this is especially interesting since they didn’t wear boxing trunks. As with many athletic games in the ancient world, the athletes ran or threw or boxed in the nude. If that practice were reinstated today, larger arenas would have to be rented out for boxing matches, and Comcast would double its income from Pay Per View at home viewers. We’ll leave that for another sermon too.

The Mycenaeans eventually overtook the Minoans as the dominant power people in the area Crete, and art from their era of dominance leads us to believe that the boxing match went on until one of the boxers held up one finger indicating that he was taking the loss. There is no evidence early on of an absolute knockout being permitted.

Paul knew a great deal about boxing and made reference to boxing on more than one occasion. In fact, we have every reason to believe that he had done some boxing along the way. As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Paul referred to the pointlessness and the waste of energy caused by a boxer’s attempted punch that hits nothing but the air. When you box, he insisted, you have to make every punch count; every blow, therefore, has to hit the opponent and stun or weaken him in some way. (Just to be clear, I’m not being sexist here. It’s just that there is no evidence that women boxed in the ancient world as some do today.)

Not everyone likes or approves of boxing. Joyce Carol Oates is a bestselling author who has been called our country’s foremost woman of letters. She has some very critical comments about boxing. I want to call three of her ideas about boxing to your attention:

1. “Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.”
2. “Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.”
3. “Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.”

Boxer Joe Frazier summed up his sport this way: “Boxing is the only sport [where] you can get your brain shook, your money took and your name in the undertaker book.”

Another boxer, Sugar Ray Leonard, looking back on his boxing career said, “Boxing was not something I truly enjoyed. Like a lot of things in life, though, when you put the gloves on, it’s better to give than to receive.”

Gifted contemporary musician Alicia Keys who plays the keyboard and protects her hands and fingers with great care says, “I love kick boxing. It’s a lot of fun. It gives you a lot of confidence when you can kick somebody in the head.” OK then. I guess it would.

I was introduced to boxing by the notoriety of Muhammad Ali, called Cassius Clay before his conversation to Islam. His unparalleled bragging and self-aggrandizement along with his ongoing stinging repartee with sportscaster, Howard Cosell, who had a self-understanding very similar to Ali’s, was tremendous entertainment regardless of what happened in the ring.

Ali used to make statements like, “I am the greatest,” all the time. Once he admitted to someone, “I used to say, ‘I am the greatest,’ even before I knew I was.” Another one: “I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.” Here’s one of the humdingers of his self praise: “I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I’m in a world of my own.”

By the way, regardless of what you think of boxing or Ali, the film about his life starring Will Smith is a superior film. There are some powerful religious and moral themes in the film.

So, as he aged, Ali became quite the thoughtful philosopher, struggling with the disease that took his strength and his ability to be mobile. Wisdom showed itself nonetheless:

1. “Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.”
2. “A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”
3. “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”

II.

Paul saw life as a series of personal battles or fights against forces of evil--one after another, with some resilient opponents returning for another match. Paul certainly believed in a spiritual reality or force, unseen, behind everything that comes into our lives. The good comes from God and has God in it or behind it, and conversely the bad or the evil have demonic spiritual forces in or behind them. Though unseen, these spiritual forces are just as powerful, if not moreso, than what we can see. Indeed, it is much easier to fight what we can see than what is invisible to us, and it is much more encouraging or consoling to see with our own eyes who or what is on our side trying to hold us up and/or protect us from attack.

Paul said, in the end, there is only one way to protect oneself from invisible enemies, from unseen evil relentlessly at work in the world, and that is to wear at all times a spiritually protective armor. This is all entirely metaphorical, as should be evident to any reader; yet, the truths are insightful and to be taken with seriousness.

Paul is creating these protective images for the benefit of the Christians at Ephesus as he closes his rather lengthly correspondence to them:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of divine power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints (Eph 6:10-18 NRSV).

Somewhat reflective of the armor a Roman soldier would have worn in Paul’s day, we get these rich spiritual images of what collectively fights evil even when we are rest, even when we have to let our guard down for a small period of rest and renewal. Paul says if his suggestion is going to work, the people of faith are going to have to put on the whole armor of God, not parts; not bits and pieces. Without putting on every piece of the armor, we leave ourselves exposed to the creeping, persistent effects of evil at work to do us in.

Paul doesn’t live under the illusion that even if every person of faith could get on the same page and uniformly unite our energies, we could defeat evil once and for all. The most we can hope for is to defeat parts of evil here and there, and one of the reasons for this, which would have to be taken up in another sermon or over a tall thermos of coffee, is that people of faith and followers of Jesus can’t even agree on what is evil. Not all of those who claim to live according to the teachings of Jesus would agree, for example, that racism is evil. But we have to leave that thought for now.

So, this “whole armor of God,” what are the various pieces into which we must fit ourselves? I doubt that Paul’s order is random. First things first, in other words.

Fasten the belt of truth around your waist. Truth is the single most important weapon against evil other than a recognition that evil, from whatever source or sources, is a reality that negatively affects individuals and the whole of humanity. Not being able to get all of humanity on board, however, we will often be fighting some of these battles, most of them, on our own. Thankfully, some of the battles that we win individually may benefit others, but the battle is ours to fight; and the evil must be resisted until we are prepared for the actual fight. It begins with truth. Starting, I presume, in our skivvies, the first part of the armor we put on is the belt of truth. Only the belt of truth will tell us what is truly evil and in need of defeat, and even this is no guarantee that we will always have clear insight into everything that is unmistakably evil and everything that is truly good. Some evil is obvious; some is not. Some is hidden; some is disguised. Truth will help us know the difference between MOST forces of evil and MOST forces of good.

Next, we put on a breastplate of righteousness. Truth will be the foundation of righteousness. “Righteousness” is one of those words once overused in Christian churches to such a degree that it lost clarity of meaning altogether, and in many churches today you don’t even hear the word at all, in this church for example. In Hebrew scripture, righteousness is the chief attribute or one of the chief attributes of God Godself; it has to do with conduct that is purely ethical from every angle. It has much more to do with action than with abstraction. If God is a righteous God, then God’s people should make every effort to be righteous as well. So over or atop the belt of truth, put the breastplate of righteousness. Truth will help us know what is right and wrong, good and evil; and righteousness will help us or cause us to act consistently for what is good and right and will protect us from attacks to that part of ourselves needed to act for the right, stand for the right, fight for the right.

Jesus once said that unless people who sought a connection with God demonstrating righteousness greater than the so called righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, who kept the letter of all religious laws to a tee, they could not be citizens in the Empire of God. So, there’s something more to righteousness than just keeping the rules; our ethical conduct has to be done with the proper motivation, for the right reasons, as acts of spiritual expression. In the Qur'an we find pivotal teachings on righteousness such as this one: “We will give the home of the Hereafter to those who do not want arrogance or mischief on earth; and the end is best for the righteous.”

We get to choose our own combat boots in this battle garb; the one stipulation Paul gives is that they have to be boots that will have us proclaiming or making peace--not with evil, but with others who oppose evil, and in ways that have made the most sense to us so far along our journey. Decked out for battle, the only fighting we do is against evil.

Three pieces complete the whole armor of God: the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit of God. The shield of faith is our best defensive weapon. Faith keeps us focused on God when it would be so much easier to give in to evil and join evil’s forces. After all, it looks like evil wins more often than good. Why not join the winning team?

The helmet of salvation is that part of the armor that keeps us in touch with the reason the battle is worthwhile in the first place, liberation from the effects of evil in this world and the next. That is what salvation is all about.

Finally, the most important, and actually the only, offensive weapon making up the whole armor of God: the sword of the Spirit of God, which is no blade, but which is the power of God’s word as Jesus interpreted it and made it known. This is clearly connected to the belt of truth, but it is something more. The belt is what we know within, and the sword is what we use to attack evil in an outward, sometimes overt, manner. When we unsheathe our swords we are protesting injustice; we are joining hands and locking arms with the oppressed; we are writing letters to lawmakers calling their votes and their public rhetoric that incites violence exactly what is it: EVIL.

III.

Paul believed that evil was brought regularly into the world through two sources: 1) demonic spirits, maybe a devil somehow; 2) human choice. The malevolent forces of darkness were real and actively at work to tempt human beings to follow the ways of evil; however, these cannot be fully empowered unless people choose to go the way of evil. The devil and demons and the mysterious elemental spirits of the universe about which Paul taught in the books of Ephesians and Colossians may in and of themselves have some mild sway on history, but none of these has any real power in the realm of flesh and blood unless people embrace the evil that temptation presents to them and act on it.

Though there are many Christians today who believe in a personal, active Devil who is both God’s antithesis and God’s nemesis, if one personalizes God and/or the Devil. The Devil has been very useful to Christians through the ages and remains useful today; the Devil is the chief scapegoat whom Christians can blame for their own freely-chosen, irresponsible, selfish, and destructive behavior. I cannot tell you there is no Devil (uppercase or lowercase “d”). I can tell you that I do not believe in a Devil; some of you will agree with me, and others of you will disagree with me. What an odd dynamic for Silverside Church! If you have had personal conversations with the Devil, then you can tell us about those at Sermon Talk-Back.

In my mind, the Devil is the dark side that most people must claim as a part of their personality or psychological makeup in some way. The real problems arise when dark sides are pooled in the human family and passed on to subsequent generations. I don’t believe a claim that the Devil’s influence or power made a criminal do what she or he did to require that she or he now stand before judge and jury will hold up in court; though I think it would be unusual to find a jury in which no juror believed in a Devil at work in the world. What might stand up in court as a kind of justification for some horrendous act of evil, like the shootings in Arizona a few days ago, is severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, which may cause a person to believe that she or he hears (they believe) literal voices prompting acts of evil.

Paul didn’t know about mental health or psychiatry, but he did know that people did evil things; he knew that he himself had participated in evil acts on occasion before his conversation to Christianity, and he did what he did in a particularly vile manner--that is, in the name of religion, in the name of God. When Paul thought of fighting against evil, boxing with evil as it were, he believed he was pushing away the demonic forces trying to tempt people to commit acts of evil, and he was trying to keep people, himself included, from caving in to the pressures of temptation to do evil.

One of the early artistic representations of a boxing match shows a number of men gathered around the two who were fighting each other. Some art and sports historians have wondered if there was an early phase in the sport of boxing when the rules permitted tag team boxing, where one boxer when fatigued, could tag a teammate to come into the fighting area and be the boxer for their team for a while. Another possibility is that the boxing match may have begun with only two men fighting each other, but as the match progressed one more and then one more and then one more from each team came into the fighting area so that there were multiple engagements going on at once.

If so, Paul would have liked that practice, and when he compared fighting evil as a boxing match he saw whole teams, whole groups of people joining together to take on some mighty foe, some hideous expression of evil destroying individuals and large segments of the human family. Boxer that he had been, that image was a rush for him--Christian people beating the daylights out of evil spirits that most people couldn’t see.

When Paul wrote to Timothy saying, “I have fought the good fight,” he was very likely in prison in Rome awaiting his execution. His sentence had been handed down, and he was waiting in the equivalent of death row. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race [or the course], I have kept the faith. There are no more rewards for me on this earth so I await my heavenly reward.” In the Greek text, the definite article “the” is clearly present so Paul did not write to Timothy, “I have fought A good fight,” but rather, “I have fought THE good fight.” What I think Paul meant by intentionally including the definite article in what he said here is that the fight against evil is an ongoing fight; there may be several bouts and matches, but there is one big fight. This fight has been going on ever since human beings believed they could live without having any need to keep their baser capabilities in check.

Paul tried to help the people to whom he wrote get a sense of the larger picture, the larger battle, by little flaws that in and of themselves weren’t necessarily wrong at all. They would only be problems if they got out of hand, if whole communities or societies began to live by one the many flaws Paul listed, and he loved lists, as if normative and/or acceptable. Let’s take lying as one example. OK, it’s not right to lie, but many of us lie frequently if for no other reason than to keep from hurting someone’s feelings, and we probably don’t lose ground in our moral standing when we tell her or him that the garment really is slimming when worn.

If, however, lying in that context makes us think we can tell larger lies with much more at stake than in an effort to make someone we love feel good about herself or himself until Nutrisystem kicks in a bit more noticeably, then we’re moving into a dangerous direction. That is what Paul wanted to help his charges avoid.

I doubt that drunkenness itself is a moral offense, but surely much of what is done under the influence of alcohol is evil; and I don’t believe that drunkenness should be considered an excuse for letting someone off the hook who has killed a purely innocent driver or pedestrian while under the influence. The choice was made to drink too much; the choice was made to drive while intoxicated.

My parents were so strict about this, and I went along with them and didn’t do anything more than taste beer--one swig, no kidding--until I was getting ready to go teach in Switzerland, and a friend said that he was going to have to teach me the basics of wine and beer in order for me to survive in the Swiss culture. I was very glad I’d had those little lessons once I arrived in Switzerland and began to try to maneuver in the culture. Not all Swiss people drink alcohol by any means, but many do; and there are some very important social experiences celebrated with a wine toast--such as being asked to call an older, wiser colleague by her or his first name.

Still, my parents’ thinking on the subject was that if you never have any alcohol, there will be no chance of being drunk and no chance, either, of finding out that you have the genetic disposition to succumb to the illness called “alcoholism.” Their logic was right on target. If you never drive, you can’t have a car wreck. If you never fly, you can’t be in a plane crash. If you never have sex, you can’t be a part of an unwanted pregnancy. If you never go to church, you won’t ever be able to say, “The church is filled with hypocrites!” If you never lie about little things, chances are you won’t lie about big things, and telling the truth will be a characteristic by which you live even if you become a politician. There are so many lies being told at any one time in Washington, DC, that no one knows what the truth is. The absence of integrity is a huge evil in this country and the world.

Some of the big evils humans have overcome, but the fight goes on. It’s a lifelong effort. How much difference any one of us can make or how much difference any group of which we are a part can make isn’t known. Evil is a long, long way from being eradicated so what we hope to be able to say as we look back on what we’ve done with our lives is an echo of what Paul said with a boxing match in mind, “I have fought the good fight, and I have kept the faith. The evil never convinced me that it was more powerful than God or that it was unbeatable. Even if only in tiny, tiny increments, evil is pushed back or diminished, that is still better than having it gain any ground at all.”

So we will keep on fighting against insidious greed that causes way too many people in our world to be hungry and homeless, and we will keep on fighting the evil of lying leaders and politicians whose lack of basic integrity warps our nation and our world. We will fight any evil that keeps any child from enjoying the innocence of her or his childhood. We will fight evil that destroys our lush habitat and leaves pollution for our grandchildren to eat and breathe and die in, because of what we leave in the land and in the air and in the water with which they will have to live. We will fight the big evils that cause some people to believe that others are beneath them because of race or economic status or sexual orientation. And if we can fight against these and other evils, and there are plenty more, with energy and focus and determination, then when we see a new generation of fighters taking on evil, we can say with integrity what old Paul once said shortly before the Romans put him to death for boxing with evil as hard as he knew how, “I have fought THE good fight.”

Amen.

Eating for Physical Exertion

I.

In this sermon series on “Sports in Scripture,” we began (last Sunday) by thinking about training, and today we move to appropriate diet for those who use their bodies in sports. With obesity on the rise in our country, it’s evident that many of our citizens don’t know how to eat correctly or are unwilling to eat correctly. I have no idea exactly the context to which he was referring, but Benjamin Franklin once said, “I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.” That’s sobering, isn’t it?

Before we start slamming the people who are overweight, which would be very rude in my presence since I am overweight and have struggled with weight-related issues my whole life, let’s remember that some people have weight problems because of physical and/or mental illnesses. Let’s also remember that much of the obesity in our country is caused among the poverty stricken because they believe they can only afford high calorie/low nutrient food at the grocery store even though it has been proven that an apple, for example, is cheaper than a bag of potato chips. It’s also worth taking into account that there are places in the world where certain societies think “plump is pretty.” You may remember that when Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” was singing about what it would be like to be a rich man instead of the poor man he was, he saw his wife, Golde, with a proper double chin, which the wife of any rich man should have.

All that aside, we know today that the proper weight is important for optimal health--not too heavy, not too thin--and that healthy eating is one of our responsibilities as people who see life as gift to be both cherished and cared for. There are special diets for unique demands made on one’s body by disease or determination.

My younger nephew, who is now a college student, found, to his surprise, that in high school he really liked the sport of wrestling where weight is a huge issue. Wrestlers have to weigh in before every match, and if their weight is one bit over the maximum weight for that class of wrestlers, the wrestler who went over the weight limit has to wrestle much larger guys in the next division up. For that reason, Lucas began aggressively to watch his weight. He preferred to be one of the heavier guys wrestling guys who weighed less than he did but in his same division than one of the lighter weight guys wrestling guys weighing in at the top of a class. He knew that his best friend was lean protein, and his second best friend was his skill as a runner, which would burn off rather quickly unwanted ounces as time for a match neared. Pretty smart boy!

In 1826, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French lawyer and politician, became quite the highly respected gourmet. In his book, The Physiology of Taste, he wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

German philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, published an essay in 1863, “Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism,” in which he made the assertion: “Man is what he eats.”

Speakers of English didn’t start tossing around any similar maxim until the 1920’s and 1930’s under the influence of a nutritionist named Victor Lindlahr. He devised what became called the Catabolic Diet, an eating program that has dieters eating those foods that expend more calories eating and digesting than the food item itself has in it. Presumably, there are those who still follow this diet, eating primarily the hundred or so foods that fall into this category. In an advertisement in a Connecticut newspaper in 1923, he was quoted as saying: “Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.” That was kind of catchy and caught on so You Are What You Eat became the title of a book he wrote and a statement he made frequently on radio broadcasts, and that is when the maxim, “You are what you eat,” became widely known in the English speaking world.

The Apostle Paul ranked healthy eating as a spiritual practice, an ongoing recognition of the value of life and the importance of the body in which we experience life in this world. He asked the Corinthians in one of the letters he wrote to them as a faith community, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” In some mystical--though very real--way, God Godself dwells within each of us. The question Paul asks is, “What kind of temple do you construct and care for with your body knowing that a spark of the divine lives in you?” It isn’t just about beauty or sex appeal, and it’s not simply about maximized physical health--though that is certainly a part of it. Paul’s argument for proper eating and drinking is spiritual: you don’t abuse your body with types or quantities of food because a spark of God dwells within you, and God should be given the best we can manage to offer.

Swiss people are generally regarded as one group of people who take physical health seriously. A Swiss nutrition group says,

A healthy diet is very important for both maintaining and improving your health. A healthy diet is possible by eating fresh, unprocessed foods instead of eating processed foods. A healthy diet is as simple as eating a sufficient quantity of all nutrients and ingesting enough water. This will require a good balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats as well as vitamins and minerals. The importance of a healthy diet on our health is enormous. Maintaining a healthy diet is very important. It can go a long way in the prevention of certain diseases.... A healthy diet can also greatly aid in the maintenance of your mental health. Research shows that eating healthy nutritious food can improve memory and other brain functions.

There’s a Chinese Proverb: “The one who takes medicine and neglects diet, wastes the skill of the physician.” Hippocrates himself said, “The wise person should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings. Let food be your medicine.”

We are working very hard to build up the membership of Silverside Church, not diminish it through any means, but for the sake of information only, I will share with you the five healthiest places to live in the world as of 2010. None of them are in the United States--or in France either even though France has been tapped repeatedly as the country with the finest health care system.

By the close of 2010, the healthiest place in the world was New Zealand. Next on the list was the Shangri-La Valley in Panama. Third, the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. Fourth, the Island of Sardinia off the Mediterranean coast of Italy. Fifth, Vilcabamba, Ecuador, nicknamed “the Valley of Longevity.”

According to Natural Health Magazine, the healthiest city in the United States in San Francisco, and this was reported in an article at very end of December 2010. San Francisco was followed by Washington, DC, which shocked me--then Seattle, Washington; Atlanta, Georgia; and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Healthy eating is one of the keys to health and longevity, but the positive effects of healthy eating can be undone is exercise is absent in one’s life and if there is out of control stress in someone’s life. Obviously, environmental factors enter into the protection of health too. If we live where industry poisons us with its waste or exposure to what threatens human and animal life, then a great diet will not see us through. Also, if we poison our own bodies by smoking or drinking alcohol to excess, the benefits of a great diet, even a perfect diet, will be down the tubes rather quickly.

It’s important for us to realize, too, that we can do all the right things and live in all the healthiest places and still find ourselves plagued with disease because of genetic factors and/or biological/chemical accidents in our bodies over which we have absolutely no control. The best we can do is eat well, exercise properly and sufficiently, and live in the healthiest place we can. There is no question that these will enhance our physical health, but eventually our bodies, not designed to last forever, wear out; and that is a part of being human.

II.

Professional as well as amateur athletes, the smart ones, realize that their diets have to be of a certain standard in order for them to maintain peak performance in their respective sports, and surely there is no “one size fits all” for every athlete in a given sport. Here, too--especially here--it’s the diet and exercise combination required for optimal performance, not one or the other.

What athletes need to eat in order to boost their athletic performance is a sub-speciality in the field of nutrition these days; it’s called “endurance nutrition.” What should I eat and what should I avoid eating if I want to give my best in a football game or if I’m going to go out and climb a mountain or if it’s getting to be about time for my tennis game or if a serious volleyball competition is coming up later today? Endurance nutrition says that while different diets may be required by athletes depending on the intensity of the sport, one thing all sports diets should contribute is proper alkaline pH level in blood and tissues. Also, mostly across the board, meals leading up to sports competition should be comprised of 60% to 70% carbohydrates.

Now, I have no idea what was carried out to them, but long before David was King of Israel, he was still just a shepherd boy back home working with and for his father Jesse. He was one of Jesse’s eight boys; he was the youngest, the baby of the family. His three oldest brothers were in Israel’s army, and they were fighting a war against the Philistines not so far from home. These brothers were Eliab the firstborn, and next to him Abinadab, and the third Shammah.

Jesse sent David to check on his brothers as well as to carry them some food to sustain them through the exertion of combat. This is what the writer of 1 Samuel tells us about that combat cuisine: “Jesse said to his son David, ‘Take for your brothers an ephah of this parched grain and these ten loaves and carry them quickly to the camp to your brothers; also take these ten cheeses to their commander.’”

An ephah was close to what we call a bushel today. So this wasn’t one meal. Their dad sent them a bushel of parched grain--sun-dried or cooked just enough so that it wouldn’t spoil. He also sent them ten loaves of bread. Presumably these were large loaves intended to last a while. So David’s brothers got their carbs; what they didn’t get in this particular delivery was any protein. Jesse sent their commanding officer ten different cheeses--quite a variety. Maybe a tasty gift to the commander would have something to do with keeping his boys as safe as possible. Who knows?

The book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible tells of the 40-year sojourn of the Israelites in their wilderness on their way away from their Egyptian slavery to the land God had promised to them, wherever that was, and they literally had no idea where they would end up or how long it would take them to get to their mystery destination. Only God knew where they were supposed to end up, according to the Hebrew version of the story. The Islamic version of the story, this part of the story anyway, is very different.

So here’s the thing. In Egypt, the Hebrews had been slaves to the Egyptians, but they had shelter and food provided for them by the Egyptians. Out in the wilderness, they had no steady food supply, and there was a really big bunch of them. They started whining and complaining, and you’d have done the same thing so don’t look down on them for that.

As the story goes, God heard their whining and complaining and understood. God came up with a plan. Every morning manna, a bread-like substance would fall from the sky, and after the dew dried up the manna could be picked up and eaten. God had a rule: take only as much as you need for the day; if you take more than you need it will spoil before you get to eat it anyway. There was their source of carbs, but they were getting no protein. God answered that complaint by saying that quails would be sent from out of nowhere every evening in time for dinner so their endurance nutrition for the hike that seemed like it would never end was manna--morning bread--for carbs; and quail in the evening for protein. God would not, however, send them more of either than they needed for that day only. That diet got them through.

When St. Francis of Assisi organized a group of friars to share with him in his ministry to the poor and the hungry, he decided that his troop of friars would be mendicant friars, a begging order. He had the same rule for his companions that God had for the Hebrews trying to find out where in Sheol the Promised Land was. You may not take more than you need for today. If some gracious person offers you more; you must refuse it.

Other than the Last Supper that Jesus had with his closest followers before his execution, I suppose the most famous meal talked about in Christian scripture was not for people exerting themselves in any active way at the time they ate, but rather for 5000 men and their families who were gathered to hear Jesus preach. They did have to walk home after the long sermon ended, but evidently that wasn’t very far because none of them had brought any food with them, which was silly in that context if you were going to be gone from home for any length of time at all. The interpreters of Jesus’ life told a story about how Jesus was able to take a lunch one little boy’s mother had packed for him, bless it, and somehow come up with enough food to feed all those men and their families with lots of leftovers. It’s a great story about how sharing multiplies goods for the wellbeing of all involved.

Preaching can require great mental and physical exertion--the physical part for those preachers who are very animated and maybe run up and down aisles as they preach or jump over the pulpit to help make a point or take a run through the sanctuary jumping from the top of one pew to the next. John the Bapitst’s preaching, partly because he was fiery and animated as he preached and partly because he preached in the wilderness, which sapped his energy, required for him a special diet. He found it right out in the wilderness where he lived. He ate locusts and wild honey. I assume he roasted the locusts and got himself some good crunchy protein that way. Part of the reason he wasn’t a sickly guy was that he ate that wild honey each day. That sustained him. Surely he ate other foods from time to time, but these two items sustained him.

No doubt, going back to the day when many small congregations in the South didn’t have money to the pay their pastors and paying them instead with food items--or, in the case of Kentucky and the hills of Tennessee, whiskey--there evolved a belief that became widespread, namely that preachers, every last one of them no matter what their denominational affiliation, loved fried chicken. I don’t know now widely that the perspective is held today, but in my younger years in ministry it surely was--especially when I served southern churches, New Orleans excluded. When I was a student preacher and later when I was a grown up visiting preacher here and there in the south, all families served fried chicken every time I ate with them, whether that was one time if I were a guest preacher or ten times if I worked in a church they attended.

Friend chicken is fine. It’s not my favorite dish, and I was grateful that anyone expended any effort hoping to please me. Inevitably, there would eventually be something said of a joking nature about how much preachers LOVED friend chicken. I was paranoid about it, and under no circumstances would I ever take a second piece. No telling what I’d have had to listen to, probably from the man of the house, if I’d dared to eat more than one piece of friend chicken. Now days, with my white hair and my white goatee and what remains of my southern dialect, no way I’m willing to be associated with friend chicken in any way.

III.

King Jehoiakim was ruling in Judah over the more southern tribes of the Hebrew people. Israel was the northern kingdom; Judah was the southern kingdom. The center of Hebrew life, the greatly revered city of Jerusalem, was in the south.

The Babylonians under their very powerful King Nebuchadnezzar were expanding their holdings, and they decided to take Judah. Eventually, Nebuchadnezzar would destroy the Temple, but during this first visit, some of the sacred and very valuable vessels in the Temple were taken to Babylon and placed in shrines erected to the gods of the Babylonians.

Many of the Hebrews were taken into Babylonian exile, and the King had an interesting plan for some of those exiles. He wanted some young Hebrew men, from royalty and nobility, brought into his palace to learn first hand core Babylonian teachings and ways of life. At first blush, this sounds like quite an honor for someone in exile. I mean, sure, it would have been better to have been back at home in the comfort of one’s own surroundings, but if you had to be in exile, and the King of your captors said you could live like his own people to whom he gave special privileges and opportunities as opposed to living in a prison camp, you’d have the best of what exile could offer. Upon closer examination, however, what was being offered or required was the perfect way for the brightest and best among the young Hebrew men to lose their Hebrew identities and begin to think as the Babylonians thought.

When Dr. Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist, was taken to the first of six concentration camps in which he would be imprisoned during Hitler’s Holocaust, the death camp officials took everything from him they could take to rip his “old” identity from him, leaving him easier to manipulate as a prisoner. In his profoundly moving book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he tells how he survived the Holocaust emotionally, he details the intake procedures during which the Germans took from him everything he’d brought with him. They took his clothing. They took a manuscript that represented his life’s work up to that point in time. They took his name and changed it to a number. They even shaved all the hair off his body to try to rob him of his past. We should keep this in mind when we notice what all Nebuchadnezzar was offering these Hebrew young men.

He directed his palace master, Ashpenaz, to pick out the cream of the crop from the young Hebrew men now under Babylonian control. They could have no physical defects of any kind. They had to be handsome, and since beauty is in the eye of the beholder I don’t know what constituted “handsome” in the eye of Ashpenaz. They had to be well educated, and, beyond being well scroll-read, they had to be naturally insightful people. I don’t what kind of test Ashpenaz put together to be able to determine who was suitable and who was not. He must have pleased the King, and he needed to since these young men would be eyed for future professional positions in the palace.

As I mentioned earlier, the whole goal for this program devised by the King was to teach these Hebrews Babylonian language, philosophy, religion, literature, and ways of life. Eventually, they would be living as Babylonians and not as Hebrews.

The King himself became very involved in the running of the program though he wasn’t a hands on guy. He called all the shots from his throne, though. He decided everything from what they would eat to what they would to how long the program of indoctrination would last.

Among the group of young Hebrew men selected were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. One of the first things the palace master did as the three-year program got underway was to toss their given names and replace those with Babylonian names. Remember what I told you about Viktor Frankl! Their new names were Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

I loved this story when I was a little boy, and it wasn’t until I was much older than I learned what their Babylonian names really were. As a kid, I thought the pastor kept saying, “Shadrach, Meshach, and to bed we go.”

Daniel realized that the rich food fed to the King and members of his court wasn’t designed to keep one physically fit for health and sports participation. He asked the palace master for permission to be excluded from that diet and fed instead pulse and water; no rich food and no wine. His three buddies asked for the same concession. Pulse was a combination of some kind of meal, perhaps corn meal, mixed with peas, beans, and lentils. There you have your carbs and your proteins.

Something that is easy to overlook here is that there would have been no way the Babylonian upscale menu would have honored Hebrew dietary laws to which Daniel and his friends were absolutely committed. How they ate was a part of their religious commitment.

This dietary control was yet another way the Babylonians were trying to knock all the Hebrew out of them. This is exactly what the United States government endorsed when Native American children were stolen from their parents and forced to live and study at the so called “Indian Schools.” Administrators there cut the beautiful long hair of Native American girls and boys, something that every tribe prized. Their tribal clothing was taken from them, and they all had to wear identical uniforms that happened to look very European or American and nothing at all like Native Americans would wear. Sad chapter in our history.

The palace master told Daniel and company that he had no objection to their request, but that the King was running the show and that, to be honest, he was afraid to ask the King to make any exceptions. If the King should pull a surprise inspection and find Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego pale and scrawny, he would do some investigation and find out that they weren’t eating the prescribed foods. The King without hesitation would call for the royal executioner to chop off the head of Ashpenaz.

Daniel understood that and struck a bargain with the palace master, Ashpenaz. He said, “If you will just allow us a ten day trial, I can guarantee you that my buddies and I will be healthier looking and acting that the others who eat the fancy food and drink wine every day.” To this Ashpenaz agreed.

As Daniel had predicted and promised, after ten days, he and his pals showed off their healthy, muscled bodies having lost no ground whatsoever. In comparison, were their other Hebrew colleagues who after ten straight days of heavy food and wine were already starting to show physique decline--nothing serious yet, but the way of the future was easy to predict. This being the case, the four Hebrew men who chose the vegetarian diet with water and no wine were allowed to continue that pattern. They grew healthier and healthier, which had something to do with why they excelled in all other aspects of the program. They never forgot who they were, however. Other tests were ahead of them, but they never forgot who they were. Eating healthily prepared them for whatever physical or mental challenge would come.

Training (First Sermon in Series: Sports in Scripture)

I.

My father had such high hopes that his first born son would be a great sportsman and have opportunities to play that he, as a child and a teen, never had. He began talking up baseball to me when I was about 7 years old so that I’d be mentally prepared to start playing Little League the summer I was 9. Halls Crossroads was a small place, and every boy I knew played Little League baseball. Tee ball hadn’t made it to Halls yet, and may not have existed anywhere in the summer of 1961. There were no organized sports for younger girls anywhere around Halls or surrounding communities.

Church was a big deal in the South in those days; still more people in the South attend church on a regular basis than folks who live north of the Mason-Dixon line. We managed, therefore, to get all our practices and games in without ever having to miss a Sunday morning or Sunday evening church service or even a Wednesday evening prayer meeting.

Before I started playing Little League baseball that summer, Dad tried his best to teach me the essentials of baseball. I wasn’t totally inept at the game, but “future star” was hardly written on my face. I caught better than I hit so Dad came up with a practice plan to improve my batting skill without having him chase the ball on the rare occasions that I managed to hit the ball. What he did was to take a baseball and drill a hole all the way through it. He threaded a piece of narrow rope through the ball and knotted it.

Avon sold soap shaped like a baseball with a yarn rope through it so you could hang your soap on a knob or the shower head. Maybe Dad got his idea from the soap that Mom bought for me every time she placed her Avon orders.

The rope was rather long demonstrating Dad’s guarded optimism that I’d really get a piece of the ball one day and knock it to the other side of the field separating our house from the closest neighbor in that direction. It was a brilliant idea that made perfect sense to his orderly, draftsman’s mind. In practice, there were a few problems, one of which was that the altered baseball didn’t always behave as predicted. The attached rope made the ball go in directions it might not have gone in had it not been tethered to Dad’s rope. A couple of times, I hit the ball, and before Dad could begin to reign it in, it wrapped around him a time or two, which irritated the pee-waddin out of him. Another problem was that the pitcher, Dad, had to leave exactly the right amount of rope when he pitched so that ball could get all the way to me, moving properly on its intended course. We noticed a problem a few times when the ball would get to me, and, though it was coming right into strike zone, at the last minute it would move up or down causing me to swing hard at what ended up being the wind, rather than the ball that suddenly moved.

Trying to fix that problem one time, Dad thought the ball was about to move out of strike zone, and he tugged ever so slightly on the rope, which caused the ball to move up instantly, busting my lips on its way. Pain. Shock. Blood spewing everywhere. I was an eight year old kid, and I began to cry involuntarily because it hurt so much. Dad was frustrated with the bugs in his invention and, at some level, with the evidence that I was not a born athlete. Normally a very compassionate Dad, my crying only further irritated him on that occasion, and instead of sympathizing with my plight, he began to speak sternly to me, “Shut up that crying. It looks much worse than it hurts.” I had no idea how he could have known that, but that’s what he said. Then the real reason for the reprimand came out, “If something like this happens on the field and you start crying in front of your teammates, they will never let you live it down. For the rest of your Little League career they’ll be calling you ‘Cry Baby’ so shut it up now!”

Despite my lack of promise as a baseball player, I went to tryouts and “made” one of the teams; of course, so also did all the boys who tried out. In fact, the coaches, and there were doosies among them, tried to even out the teams in terms of balance between more gifted and less gifted players. It would then be up to the coach to mold this raw material into a skilled, winning team.

Turns out, I wasn’t in the best or worst pile. I was in the middle; I was with the group whom the coaches thought might have some hidden potential so, even my first year, I started more than I sat on the bench; and the next year and from then on, I was on the “first team.” The second year, I was the right fielder. The third year the coach moved me to first base, and for my last year of Little League I was the team’s catcher. Generally, I was steady in the field. I caught well most of the time, but I never hit the ball well. Maybe I was just unskilled in that area, which is probably the truth, but I did wonder now and then through the years if the baseball busting my lips wide open hampered me and kept me from being a power hitter. On the few occasions when I did hit the ball, I hit well; the problem was, I rarely hit the ball and struck out most of the time; a walk was a real gift. No amount of practice helped, and each year when the All Star team was selected to play the best teams from surrounding communities, Farmer’s name was never called.

Because I grew taller more quickly than most boys in my classes, Dad pushed me to go out for middle school basketball. Reluctantly, I did. Same kind of thing happened and continued when I played in a church league during high school. I was a good defensive player and could block shots and impede the other team’s shooters till the cows came home, but I seldom scored any baskets. You can’t have a center in basketball who is unable to shoot the ball and win points. Neither did I do well with foul shots. My church league coach literally prayed during each game that I wouldn’t get fouled. I was relieved the year I went to work and couldn’t play basketball any more since I couldn’t make practices or games.

Given my lack of sports skills and a clear indication that sports would never be a part of my career, I thought over and over again when I got to seminary about how ironic it was that I would have a Hebrew professor who had been a professional basketball player while a student at that same seminary thritysomething years before I sat in his class trying to learn the language of Jesus’ Bible, as he used to like to call the Old Testament, since Jesus never read a word in, heard about, or saw any document that would become a part of Christian scripture; all of those were written long after Jesus’ death.

The professor’s name was J. J. Owens, John Joseph Owens, and he was a linguist and a Hebrew scripture scholar of the first degree. Owens was also so gifted with basketball that he made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. He was the guy, as of 1979, who had shot the most continuous foul shots with a trash can covering his head.

II.

Well, my Dad’s heart was in the right place, and his understanding of the importance of practice in order to play the game well was precisely correct. No successful athlete shows up for a big contest without having trained well to be there. Training is more time consuming and arduous than the contest itself. The contest may be a one-time event or a season of events, but the training is always longer and much more involved than the contest or collection of contests for which one has trained.

Lance Armstrong is an amazing person and an amazing athlete. He has won the Tour de France seven times. Training is a part of his life--a constant part of his life. Armstrong’s lead coach of twenty-plus years, Chris Carmichael, was himself a cycling champion and an inductee into the Cycling Hall of Fame over in New Jersey. Obviously, he had ideas about training before he began working with Lance Armstrong, but his views and practices changed over the years of working with a truly exceptional athlete.

Carmichael’s approach is to have Armstrong and other athletes with whom he works do target training. The athlete is to keep one target in mind for seven weeks during which time intensity increases. Carmichael firmly believes that the best training--even long term training--is built with seven-week blocks of target training, one goal at a time. Eventually, the different pieces come together.

Leaving the sports world for a minute. When I started studying organ in college, I could already play the piano; I don’t know of any place where the organ is a student’s starting keyboard instrument. The organ keyboards require a very different touch than does a piano keyboard. That alone takes work to learn. The minute your finger comes off an organ key, the sound stops. This isn’t necessarily true with a piano, which has a pedal you can engage to cause the sound to be sustained even after you’ve taken your hands off the keyboard altogether. That pedal, the furthest pedal to the right whether the piano has two or three pedals, is called, of all things, the sustain or the sustaining pedal. It is also often referred to as the damper pedal. In addition to the sound issue, another major difference between organ and piano is that there’s a whole keyboard for the organist’s feet. Conceivably and often, actually, an organist may be playing on three keyboards at one time--one hand on each of two keyboards and the feet on a third keyboard. I could manage the hands-only part, even if each hand was playing on a different keyboard, but I never mastered hands and feet working all at the same time. I can pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time. I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I cannot make my hands play music while my feet are running along a keyboard doing something that neither of my hands is doing!

My beloved organ professor, magnificent musician Mary Charlotte Ball, tried everything under the sun in four semesters to help me learn how to do that. Play the part for your righthand alone. Fine. Now just the part for your left hand. Very good! Now both hands together! You have that down pat. Now just your feet. Not bad. Now all together, both hands with feet. What happened?!? Neither of us were significantly successful, but we both ended up admiring each other for trying so hard. Eventually, I realized that she was working so hard to help me succeed because she not only cared about me as her student, but also a person. I appreciated her for that, and eventually I loved her for that. I also realized that she was genuinely a great teacher and a natural; my inability to learn to play the organ well was not her fault in any way. I just don’t have what it takes to master those skill sets. She and her husband, master pianist Dr. Louis Ball, became my treasured friends over the years. She died shortly before Christmas, and my Christmas this year has been colored by the sadness of the loss of a great person-teacher-musician and my concern for the love of her life left behind. I pause for a moment today to honor her: Professor Mary Charlotte Ball.

A voice teacher or a vocal coach may also focus on one skill at a time. A beginning student with no breath control can’t move ahead until that skill is embraced at, at least, a rudimentary level so the major part of a voice lesson for several weeks may be little more than vocal exercises that establish the student’s capacity to utilize healthy breath control. Otherwise, the great vocal sounds will never be produced, and the voice will be damaged in a relatively short period of time.

I think this basic approach applies to many skills development learning processes--whether they are physical or primarily intellectual. The preaching process is made up of numerous sub-skill sets. When I teach the basic preaching course to seminarians, I don’t drag a student into a pulpit on the first day of class and yell, “Preach!” There are vocal production issues to address. There are audience connection and rapport issues to address. Students must learn the difference between a Bible study, which is predominantly a past tense undertaking, and preaching, which takes the same ancient literature but finds a way to contemporize its core message. A student must learn how to create and build on a central idea or thesis statement. Structure and organization are important, and the points or moves of a sermon must be well illustrated. An effective preacher must understand how to interpret scripture and must understand both human needs as well as world events, historic and contemporary. We attempt to do this in twelve two and a half hour class sessions. Every semester, I hope that medical schools require of their students much more time in “Introduction to Surgery” than we do in “Introduction to Preaching.”

Back to sports. Effective personal training begins with work on one specific sub-skill at a time. If you go to one of the gyms around here and employ a well-taught personal trainer with common sense--and both of those traits is required--she or he isn’t going to rush you right over to the heaviest weights you can manage and push you to lift those as many times as you can until your arms are like overcooked spaghetti, so limp you can barely, after the training session, put on your coat, get your keys into the ignition, or confidently steer your vehicle. The wise trainer will start slowly and move slowly. All body areas may get lite attention in a week’s time, but the central focus at first is strengthening the body’s core and, in eastern-influenced training, building a trainee’s bodily balancing ability.

Coach Carmichael says his training approach for cyclists sounds “deceptively simple,” but it has proven superior over and over again to working on all skills at once; if you do this, he says, you will end up with the training version of “Hungarian goulash.” If he has only one year to work with a trainee, he thinks in terms of four-week training blocks rather than seven-week blocks for his trainees who are with him indefinitely. With this longer time period, he has more opportunity to cover all the bases. One skill and one skill only for a 4-week period, then another skill during the next four weeks, and continuing that pattern until near the end of the year when the trainee starts pulling all the pieces together.

Armstrong’s coach says this training style is called “periodization.” He believes it was used was for Eastern European athletes during the Cold War years. I have no idea why that was the case.

Coach Carmichael says: “Periodization puts enough stress on the muscles and supporting tissue involved in each skill to help a cyclist gain specific physiological adaptations. An added benefit--one that’s especially attractive to cyclists with hectic personal and work lives--is that periodization keeps your training program bone-simple and easy to follow.” So you won’t be a champ in four weeks, but in every four week segment, the trainee will be gaining not only skill, but also confidence because of what he calls “noticeable, progressive improvements, building on each other both over the course of the season and over the years of your riding.”

Obviously, it’s not just one’s body that is being trained when being prepared for sports performance. Carmichael again: “Mental toughness stems from the mind and body working together to achieve goals. The holistic approach of preparing both the mind and body were key to Lance’s Tour victory, arguably the toughest challenge in the world of sports. Everyone who achieves success, whether in cycling or any other pursuit, does so because of commitment and passion.” Commitment and passion!

III.

You may or may not be aware that the Olympic Games were initially religious endeavors. Named after the Olympians, the twelve goddesses and gods believed by the ancient Greeks to dwell atop Mount Olympus, the Games were intended to thank the deities for the strength and prowess of youthful manhood, the foundation of the power of the nation. To my knowledge, young women did not participate in the earliest Games.

The finest and most gifted of the young men were given the opportunities at the Olympics to demonstrate for the head god, Zeus, and the eleven others the results of their gifts to the Greek people. The young men who ran and jumped and threw trained for months and months leading up to the Olympic Games.

Most of the sports images or metaphors used in the Bible were chosen by Paul to help him illustrate some spiritual point he wanted to make in one of his letters. Though not himself Greek, he worked most of his ministry in the Greek world, and he, no doubt, was familiar with the Olympic Games and their origins. He may well have known about the Olympic Games independently of his association with the Greek world; certainly, what happened in the Greek world was heard of in the Roman world and visa versa. Another thing to take into account is that Paul was an athlete so wherever and whatever he learned of the Olympic Games naturally stuck with him.

In any case, in our scripture reading for today, Paul is concerned with the training aspect of sports. Even though only one person wins individual competitions, and only one team wins a team competition, all of those involved--even those who will not ultimately be the winners--try their hardest to be the winner or winners. I don’t know who coined the modern maxim, “Be in it to win it,” but it’s a paraphrase, known or not, of what Paul wrote in one of his several letters to the Church at Corinth. To runners he said, “Run in such a way that you may win it.” There are those for whom just being in a race, being one of the runners, makes them winners, but most of the runners want to be the first to cross the finish line so that they may get the prize.

Prizes have improved considerably from the races Paul knew about. Olympians today get the gold medal if they win and also bring a kind of honor to their country; they also get all sorts of big paying opportunities to be spokespersons for every product imaginable. The runners Paul watched when he went to the races, and he had once been one of those runners himself, were running for a much lesser prize--a garland of leaves that would dry up and die in a few days. Their win also brought intangible prizes such as honor to their families and/or to their favored goddess or god.

Winners run or box or jump or throw with a purpose. Every movement counts. No energy is wasted, and the focus for being able to accomplish such singularity of purpose starts with the training. Runners make every pace count, and boxers can’t afford to punch into the empty space where no opponent is standing.

Paul says that the best athletes “exercise self-control in all things.” They train and train and train so that every bit of energy used in the contest may propel them into the winner’s position.

This was not sports commentary on Paul’s part; it was a lesson in spirituality. I don’t care how smart any one of us may be or how well-intentioned or how adaptable or how willing, we simply cannot win in the big competitions into which life throws us unless we have trained steadily and intelligently beforehand. I’m not saying that we can or should have experiences with all of life’s tragedies and possible calamities in order to know how to handle them if they challenge us a second time. What I am saying is that we know life is going to throw us some curves; I’ve never heard of a pain free life. Our training is to learn to lean into the Love, which is God, as a matter of course; otherwise, we may find ourselves the losers in one of life’s big competitions. If leaning into the Love that is God isn’t a practice to which we have allowed ourselves to become accustomed then we will have no idea what to do when our foundations are shaken.

The way I read the first part of the twelfth chapter of the book of Jeremiah, the prophet is sort of thinking out loud in the presence of God, struggling to understand why evil seems to have the upper hand so often in life, even in the lives of those who have established a strong and positive connection to God. Jeremiah is in part talking to God and, at the next turn, talking to himself. Here is a question, hopefully a rhetorical question, he asks himself in his time of frustration and confusion: “If you have raced with foot-runners and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? And if in a safe land you fall down, how will you fare in the thickets of the Jordan?”

There must have been runners in Jeremiah’s day who raced not only against other people, but also against horses. Can a human being ever out run a horse? I don’t know, and maybe this a purely hypothetical scenario in Jeremiah’s mind. The comparison is well illustrated, however. So is the followup comparison. If we can’t manage to hike steadily over even ground and wide open spaces, what in the world are we going to do when the hike takes off the trail and into a pathless thicket with branches and underbrush there to trip us up every step of the way? The spiritual lesson is asked this way: If we do not train ourselves to face life’s smaller challenges day by day, how in the world can we keep standing when one of life’s more devious opponents takes us on?

Now, if you have embraced a theology that says God is responsible for everything that happens to every one of us; if you believe that God causes earthquakes and tsunamis and crippling illnesses and separations of people from those who have been the core of meaningful life itself to them, then it will seem odd indeed, dementedly incongruous, to believe that the same God will love you through your challenge and be the source of the strength you need to prevail over evil, tragedy, and pain of all sorts.

Therefore, on a good day like today when I have no pressing needs or pressures or challenges, I will still practice leaning into Love knowing that Love is God, and God is Love. Then when a day comes in which an event takes place that wants to rob me of my focus and make me a loser in the race of life, it will be natural for me to keep running life’s race, leaning into Love. Training is the key.

Amen.