According to a Saturday Night Live skit in which Jesus shows up in the locker room after Tebow and the Broncos beat the Bears, Jesus goes wherever he’s called to go, which means he spends a lot of time at football games, beauty pageants, and country music awards. And because he’s so busy running from one event to another, that’s why last season he didn’t have time to attend the whole of any one Broncos game – he could only show up in the fourth quarter – explaining all those wins in the last minutes of the game.
The Tebow phenomenon – complete with the one-knee gesture that for him is a prayer, for millions of others has become an icon of sorts, has made him famous, along with his Christian faith – causing both praise and ridicule. The logical, and faith difficulties of opposing teams offering prayers to win gave rise to a New Yorker cartoon. A grumpy-looking football player talks to a reporter after a game, saying, “First of all, I’d like to blame the Lord for causing us to lose today.”
In Tebow’s defense, he doesn’t seem to be praying for victory, according to an open mike recording of one of his prayers – he seems to be praying for strength and for the ability to give glory to God. And his is not an empty faith. He takes care to use his fame to help sick and injured children – flying a seriously ill child and his family to each game, paying all their expenses, visiting with them before and after the game. After losing badly to the Patriots in the playoffs, he still visited with a young man named Zach McCloud, saying, ”I got to make a kid’s day, and anytime you do that it’s more important than winning a game, so I’m proud of that.”
Tebow seems to have a solid handle on what is important to God in prayer. Perhaps other athletes don’t: he’s certainly not the first player to drop to one knee after scoring a touchdown, to cross himself before stepping up to the plate, or to give a post-game interview attributing his success to God, or to ask God for help with the game. The wife of Tom Brady, the Patriots quarterback, has requested prayers for her husband in today’s Superbowl, hoping God will help him win because he deserves it, because he’s worked so hard (as if the other athletes on field haven’t).
All of this begs the question, does God really concern himself with the outcome of football games? And with all those conflicting prayers ascending, how does God decide which ones to pay attention to? And most important, exactly how does God interact with this world?
Strangely enough, God does seem to have paid attention to the fact that today was Superbowl Sunday when inspiring church leaders to design the lectionary for this day. Because a verse from our Old Testament scripture is one that Christian athletes famously use for inspiration. Tebow has at least once etched it in eye black under his eyes. That scriptures is Isaiah 40:31: “Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
You can see how this verse would inspire young men who are hoping to play strong, but I have to say this verse was not intended to inspire football players. Instead, it’s a verse that can provide inspiration to anyone who is feeling weak or alone or troubled – it’s the idea that strength to face it comes from God.
Isaiah is writing five centuries before Christ, to a dispirited group of captives – the Israelites in Babylon. The empire of Babylon had invaded Jerusalem, burned the Temple to the ground, and carted away the Jewish leaders into slavery in Babylon. Interestingly, the Israelites’ time of failure and degradation in Babylon seems to have been an absolutely formative experience in development of Judaism, one example of how God can bring strength to us in our weakness. Where many captives, or immigrants, in foreign countries eventually assimilate, subverting their own culture and beliefs to the stronger culture that surrounds them, the Jews used that time in Babylon to more strongly define who they were in contrast to their Babylonian captors. Scholars tell us that a great deal of Old Testament oral tradition was probably put in writing by the Jewish people during their time in Babylon.
In the Old Testament reading, we see a long passage about God’s power in creation. By knowing the context in which Isaiah prophesied, we can understand more about what he is saying. The Babylonians worshiped nature gods, stars and suns, and had creation myths where the world was born out of conflict between gods. Isaiah proclaims a very distinctive truth: that there is one God who created everything, who is supreme over all nature, and all squabbling lesser gods.
“Have you not known? Have you not heard?” Isaiah cries. “Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” God is supreme over all powers of nature and over all powers of earth, those frightening powers that hold us captive and proclaim their own might. They will fade away like grass in the wind, and God’s power will be revealed.
When I read this, I am reminded of Carl Sagan’s billions and billions of stars, and our little star and our tiny earth taking our minuscule place on the edge of universe. Yet we may be tempted to think that a God so mighty as the creator of universe, could never be concerned with beings as small and inconsequential as we are, grasshoppers, in the words of Isaiah. But Isaiah counters this too: God is concerned with human beings, our lives, he says. Nothing is so small and so weak that God does not take notice of it: in fact, it is the weak who receive the power of God. And therefore this scripture tells how God brings strength to those who are weak: “Even youths will faint & be weary, & the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run & not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
Israel’s prophetic tradition shows that when Israel was strong, mighty and independent, God sent prophets to call them away from their pride and self-service to remember to care for the poor and weak, to put themselves in service to others. But when Israel is downcast and weak, God sends prophets of hope like Isaiah, and Jesus, promising that God will pour strength into them.
It’s an illustration of the truth that so often, it is not our strengths and successes that make us better people – it is our troubles, failures, weaknesses, our repentance and willingness to change and grow, that bring us closer to God. And it seems that God, who is concerned with not just great and mighty things, but also with the minutest events of human life, acts in this world not by hurling thunderbolts at the wicked or manipulating world events like toys, but by pouring strength into those who are weakened. By standing on the side of the downtrodden, by working through human beings who recognize their own weakness and open themselves to him in faith, and by giving them what they need to change human history and transform the world.
I do not mean to imply that God sends us troubles in order to teach us things. A woman once said to me, “I know that God gave my mother this sickness so he could teach me a lesson.” Well, I don’t believe God does things like that – I don’t believe God sends illnesses any more than I believe that he sends hurricanes or tsunamis. These things happen in the course of nature, because we live in a finite and imperfect world – nothing will ever be infinite and perfect within creation. Suffering, disasters and death will always be with us in this world, until God’s kingdom comes in its fullness.
What God does do is gives us strength to meet the challenges we face. Sometimes by curing, as Jesus does in today’s gospel, and as I have seen happen – miraculous cures that I can only attribute to God’s intervention. And sometimes not by curing, but by healing, which is not the same thing – healing sometimes involves a physical cure, but not always. Sometimes it involves a different kind of healing: a spiritual strengthening, an ability to learn new ways of confronting problems. A realization that God is present in the midst of our suffering. Why God cures some people and not others, I don’t know – it’s certainly not the strength of one’s faith or the fervency of one’s prayers that brings cure. But I do believe that prayer always works to bring healing of some kind. By opening ourselves to God’s power, we grow into stronger, braver people. And by allowing God to give us strength, we are healed whether or not we are cured.
So – does God care who wins a football game? I don’t really know, but I’d say if so, he cheers for the underdog. But does God care about the people playing and the people watching? Absolutely. He cares about the people who are there, and he cares about the sick kids who Tim Tebow brings to games. Because God cares about every aspect of our lives. And it is true that “those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
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