Proper 12 / Ordinary 17 (July 24-30)
Texts: Romans 8:26-39;
Matt 13:31-33, 44-52; 1 Kings 3:5-12
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Di5onnBBEYA
Excerpt Page from N.T. Wright
FROM FOOTBALL TO HUMAN SURVIVAL: LEARNING TO
MOVE BEYOND NATIONALISTIC TEAMS TO TEAM HUMANITY
It’s still baseball season, and I’m still hopeful about the Tigers prospects. The Brewers are looking good once again. But I’ve started to look ahead to the football season. Even though baseball is my first love, I have at least lived through two world championships, in 1968 and 84. The difference in being a Lions fan is summed up on this oldest of my Lion’s T-shirts: “Just once before I die,” it says. Technically, they did win their last championship in 1957 — when I was one years-old. I would like to be able to actually remember it. This shirt has gotten worn out through many miserable seasons, including the only 0-16 record in NFL history.
Being a Lions fan has had its good moments, cheering for extraordinary players like Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson. (I did get get the naming rights to our new cats, Barry and Calvin.) But the difference has been a lack of leadership in how to meld talent into great team efforts. Football is definitely a team sport. The difference in winning leadership is how to mold good talent into great team play. Think of the two most enduring names for you as Packer fans: Lambeau and Lombardi. Right? Not players but coaches. Two men who shaped good players into great teams. That’s been the difference in the last several years as a Lions fan. It looks like Lions ownership finally has assembled leadership who understand the team concept.
Such that I now actually wear this new T-shirt with excitement: “I was a Lions fan before it was cool,” it says. The Lions are actually good to the point where many other people are jumping on their bandwagon. I started exploring the fantasy football drafts this week and saw that the Lions running back Jamyr Gibbs is actually #1 on many draft boards. But the difference will be if the leadership can mold good players into a great team. Hey it’s cool to be a Lions fan now! Would it be too much to hope for the Lions to play in their first Super Bowl before I die? Would that mean hell has frozen over? Or signal the end of the world?
Speaking of the end of the world, this football thing has been a lighter way into the more serious prospect of our human survival. Last week’s reading in Romans 8 talked about the groaning of the whole creation. Once again, we are having a summer with extreme heat in many places of the world, so that even in the places where it is cooler we have to deal with things like smoke warnings. I have asthma and need to stay inside on these days in air that is filtered and cooled. I already alerted our Church Council that we may face some Sunday of my not being able to come and lead worship because the air in this room is neither filtered nor conditioned.
We are confronted once again with the reality of climate change: namely, extreme weather which is making more places on earth uninhabitable, already causing the beginning of mass migration. And what has been part of our response to huge groups of fellow human beings needing to move to new, more livable homes? The rise of nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism. Mix this with militarism and weapons of mass destruction, and what to you get? Increasing anxiety over our survival as a species. Don’t our children’s and grandchildren’s generations already feel this anxiety? How much of their culture has turned apocalyptic, depicting the end of our world as we know it? The zombie apocalypse?
One aspect of the football introduction is that it will take teamwork for our human survival. But the glaring difference from football is that our survival must move beyond the contest approach, pitting one team against the other. For human beings to survive, and a lot of the other living things on this planet with us, it will take all our human teams to work together, not against each other. As tensions rise along with the mass migrations seeking more livable conditions, the nations of this world will need to work together. Working against one another will only make matters worse. That’s crystal clear, isn’t it? If humankind continues its age-old way of nations competing against each other, I don’t think we can survive. In short, I think that reaching for nationalism once again is the worst possible solution to the problems that now face us.
We need a leader who can bring all of our human teams together, not one that will continue to pit them against each other. Who is that leader? We followers of Jesus think we’ve found that leader, the Messiah, the one appointed by God to help save not only humankind but all of creation, the creation God loves. But not if we somehow turn him into a nationalistic hero who will comeback someday and lead our team into the winning circle. Which is exactly what much of so-called Christian history has done. We’ve reshaped who Jesus actually was into what we imagine him to be someday when he returns, the one who will come back again to slay our enemies and bring victory for team.
But this is exactly what we don’t need. This world needs followers of Jesus to follow the Messiah who came that first time, looking for all the world to have been the world’s biggest losing Messiah, the one nailed to the cross by the Roman Empire. How could such a loser ever be considered as a Messiah? Which is why Jesus prepared his disciples with parables of the kingdom about tiny seeds and yeast in the dough.
But that’s the jaw-dropping truth at the heart of the Christian message. The world’s biggest loser is God’s winner, the one who God raised from the dead in order to be our true Lord. We human beings had fallen into the sin of nationalism, of thinking life is one long contest of seeing who the winning team might be. The cross and resurrection says that that way of being human leads to nothing but one big dead end. The biggest dead end of all. The end of our survival as a species. In order for us to survive as a species our various teams must learn not to keep following the deadend way of being human in the key of nationalism. We must learn a whole new tune of how to come together as nations and be one human family. That is the only long-term solution to our survival. We must stop thinking in terms of nation pitted against nation and learn to think in terms of nations coming together as the one human family God created us to be.
In short, team Christianity needs to help lead the way by forsaking our nationalistic and individualistic ways of practicing our faith. We need drastic changes, beginning with a substantial revitalization of our Gospel message and mission. For centuries, the church has approached its mission as being about a conversion of religions. “Join us,” we say, “and we will teach you the religion that saves you for the afterlife . . . and helps you be a more loving person along the way.” But that’s exactly the wrong mission. The anti-mission. The mission that pits religions against each other.
I think that’s the main point in Paul’s Letter to the Romans that we’ve been reading — for sure in Galatians. Following Jesus is not about converting to a new religion. It’s not about requiring Gentiles having to convert to Torah, the Jewish law. That would be pointless since the power of sin has corrupted all religions into nationalistic thinking, even Torah. That’s the import of what Paul has been arguing through the first part of Romans. Even Torah, even our religion, has been corrupted into this nationalistic thinking, where we think we need to go out and persecute others. Paul knew this firsthand as a persecutor of the church. Until Jesus knocked him off his horse and said, “Stop! I have a different way for you.” The most basic way in which sin has corrupted religion has been by making it a tool of division, persistently bringing us into conflict with one another, a major way of splitting the human family.
Jesus came not to give us a new religion, but to give us a new Way of being human. If we become human in the way God designed for us, following in God’s way of love and forgiveness, then we will be redeemed by coming to reconcile all our human divisions, including those spawned by religion. In today’s reading from Romans 8, Paul talks about God’s purpose not in terms of religious conversion but human conversion. He says that we need to “be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.” In other words, we need to become like Jesus so that we can start being the one large human family that God created us to be. Thus far, religion has mostly been at the heart of what divides us. Reconciling all those divisions calls for nothing less than a new way to be human. It calls for a religion that ceases to be a religion in terms that divide us. It calls for uniting our religions by discovering a God who is trying to unify us as a human family.
We’ve talked about some of the main strategies ever since the middle of the Easter season. How God didn’t send Jesus the Messiah as the One who would lead the Jewish nation to defeat its rivals. In fact, he looked like the anti-Messiah as he hung on the cross, if that’s what you think Messiah means. Jesus had to let himself die as a pawn in our nationalistic games — Rome against Jerusalem, and so forth — so that, as our Risen Lord, he could lead us into an entirely new direction.
We’ve also talked about how Jesus didn’t stick around like a nationalistic king or emperor to rule with a strong, deadly arm. No, Jesus ascended into heaven to make room for his spirit of oneness to be poured on everyone, so that everyone who opens their lives to his way of love and forgiveness might begin to forge a new way of being human community together, a way that welcomes all people of every nationality, race, religion, gender to come together as a human family.
So the word of the day from our readings today is synergy, which comes from the Greek word meaning to “work with.” It’s in verse 28 of our Second Reading, about how God calls us to work with God and with one another. It’s a great and important word! We haven’t left ourselves enough time this morning to fully explore the import of this word. It figures prominently in today’s Excerpt Page from N.T. Wright; I encourage you to read it. (It also explains how Protestants have misunderstood the word.) For now, let’s just say that it’s a word that sums up our theme of the day. Synergy. If we human beings are going to survive together, along with the rest of our animal and plant friends, we must learn to work with one another not against one another. That’s the most important thing to grab hold of today. As we move ahead in the weeks to come, there will be plenty of opportunity to develop this theme of synergy from both our continued readings in Romans but also our Gospels.
God not only calls us to work with God, but it’s because God needs to teach us — to lead us, following the Messiah Jesus — to work with each other. Synergy! In short, we must learn who to root for. That it’s not, “Go team U.S.A.!” Or even, “Go team Christianity!” If we are to survive, we must learn the synergy of, “Go team humanity!” Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, July 26, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/Di5onnBBEYA
Excerpt Page from N.T. Wright
