Article

Character

Creed

Sport

6 August 2024

6 min read

Letter to the Olympians

A veteran sports chaplain writes a letter to Christian Olympians, on how they can find joy amid the 'funerals and weddings' of the games.

Ashley Null

Ashley Null serves as a chaplain to elite athletes and coaches. He is also a priest and an academic.

A swimmer at the end of a race, looks to the result screen.

Adam Peaty after an Olympic race.

BBC.

Dear Friend,

Congratulations on being selected to compete in the Olympics - the greatest games in the world! I’m sure you can’t wait to get out there and show the world what you’ve got - your amazing talent and skill and all the hard work and dedication that has gone into becoming an Olympian.

Now, it has been said that being at the Olympics is like experiencing 10 funerals for every 1 wedding. You know this if you’re in elite sport - every one person’s victory is at the expense of many others’ agony of defeat.

These next few weeks will be full of the strongest emotions and potential challenges to how you think about your faith. What does it look like to integrate your faith and your sport in the midst of such pressure?

First, God has called you to the Olympics to experience true joy.

The first reason God gave the good gift of sport is for it to bring joy.

“In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course,” writes the Psalmist.

God compares our sport to a honeymoon - both physically and emotionally satisfying - what high praise for the joy of sport!

Every race, every match, every competition, is an opportunity to experience this God-given joy.

This joy will help you in the ups and especially in the downs over the next few weeks. The Bible makes this clear again and again, that it is joy that helps us endure the difficulties in life.

These next few weeks, make a conscious effort to count every blessing, thanking God for the joy of sport and the amazing experience he has given you.

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport... By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t.

Second, but Elite Competition isn’t only about joy. It includes uncertainty, fear, and even loss. God can use all aspects of sport, both the highs and the lows, to draw you closer to Himself.

The second reason God give gifts to his people is to use them as a school of discipleship.

St Paul writing to Christians in Ephesus said: “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ."

God has given you this vocation as a ‘school of discipleship’ to learn what it looks like to love God and love others.

As you compete and lean on the promises of God, you have endless opportunities to grow in living out your faith.

To remember your identity is based on the cross and not your success and failures
To remember the power you have to compete does not come from your own strength but from Christ who is at work in you
To remember your standing before God does not change because of God’s grace, whether you win or lose, fail or succeed
To remember that if you do lose, God will be there with you and use your pain, but that the pain will not have the last word in your life - God will work all things for good

Third, you can serve others as you compete.

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport:

By competing drug-free and within the rules you can show an alternative to the winner-takes-all attitude so prevalent in all sport.
By not treating your opponent as the enemy but valuing them as a ‘co-worker’ you can push each other on to excellence.
By showing humility and thankfulness in victory, recognising that other Christian athletes have worked just as hard and prayed just as much, but that God has set aside gifts other than Olympic success for them.
By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t.

In all this you can show the wonderful, transforming news of the gospel at work in your life as you experience joy in the midst of the funerals and weddings seen at the Olympic Games.

But what if things don’t work out as you hoped? God will be there for you and with you in the midst of the pain. As you grieve, look for Jesus.

He will give you the comfort you long for.

He will remind you that his love for you is stronger and will last much longer than your present pain.
He will assure you that he still has good things for you.

Ask his help to hold on to this truth. Because when you are hurting, it is so easy to listen to lies. You see, it’s a real danger to view God as your ultimate coach.

The lie says that if you make good spiritual choices then you will be on God’s winning team and blessed with success. But when success doesn’t happen, the lie says it’s because you have made bad choices and don’t deserve to be on the team, at least not until you can prove yourself spiritually good enough again.

In all of your sporting career you’ve probably been taught to only feel good about yourself when you’re winning, that if you lose, you’re nothing. Your coaches may have told you to use the shame of losing to motivate you to success.

Friend, you need to separate your sense of worth, your identity, from your performance. Equating significance and achievement will always leave your self-esteem at the mercy of the natural ups and downs of being a top-level sportsperson. But only love has the power to make humans feel significant, performance never will.

The good news of the gospel is that in God, you have unconditional love, not based on any of your performance. You are valued and loved not because of the talents you have or the way you compete. Your worth and value is seen in the love God proved he had for you when he died for you on the cross.

St Paul tells us:

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Now, as people reconciled to God there is no condemnation, nothing can separate us from God’s love and we are adopted as God’s children - this is who you are. This is where you identity alone can be found. This is where you can find peace, even in the midst of a major loss.

Friends, enjoy these next few weeks and the amazing opportunity it is. If you feel the pain of loss, know that with Jesus pain never has the last word. His love always does. If you win, know that it is a wonderful gift of God to be thankful for, and he will make good use of it, long after you have retired, giving you decades of joy.

Solo Deo Gloria!

Adapted by Jonny Reid, for Christians in Sport, from Pastoral Care in the Olympic Village by Ashley Null in Sports Chaplaincy: Trends, Issues and Debates.

Article

Art

Awe and wonder

Belief

Creed

7 May 2025

4 min read

The art of astonishment

Why I am still bowled over by Easter’s implications.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A painting depicts Jesus talking to disciples at a meal.

Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus.

The National Gallery.

Recently I wrote about how it would be helpful for those of us in the church to be honest about what we don't know.

Mary Oliver wrote:

'Truly, we live with mysteries too marvellous

to be understood…

Let me keep my distance, always, from those

who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say

"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.'

We begin life by thinking we know everything, and we end it by thinking we know nothing at all, or, very little. Easter confronts us with what we don't know, and what is too marvellous to be understood comprehensively. Sure, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is surprisingly staggering. Take Francis Collins, who was Director of the Human Genome project and led the US government's COVID-19 pandemic. He said that he grew up thinking faith was the result of emotionalism or indoctrination. Although his job was saturated in evidence-proving hypotheses, he hadn't taken the trouble to look at the evidence in arriving at his conclusion that God didn't exist, before doing so and giving his life to Christ.

But even when you've surveyed the wondrous cross and its aftermath, the implications of Easter are unscientific and unsettling, as well as documented and liberating. Try as we might, we can't pin down Jesus. Rowan Williams offers that:

"One of the strangest features of the resurrection narratives is precisely this theme of otherness, the unrecognisability of the risen Jesus… For some at least, the encounter with the risen Jesus began as an encounter with a stranger".

We see this as Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener at the tomb, and similarly with those on the road to Emmaus on the day of the resurrection. They had known Jesus up close, and yet here they travelled quite some way with him before realising it was him.

This is most beautifully depicted by Caravaggio in his 'The Supper at Emmaus', hanging in the National Gallery in London. As Jesus breaks the bread, their eyes are opened to see what the breaking of his body meant for them. Jesus was hidden in plain sight all along. With the echoes of Christendom, or the Christ-haunted cultures many of us live in, Jesus is hidden in plain sight for us too. We hear echoes, but do not hear his voice. We see fingerprints, but do not see the scarred hands of the Almighty. And in the renaissance master's painting, we see dramatic light and shade, the freeze-frame burst of astonishment of the disciples. As the National Gallery description offers,

'he has shown the disciples as ordinary working men, with bearded, lined faces and ragged clothes, in contrast to the youthful beardless Christ, who seems to have come from a different world.’

Amidst the mystery, this revelation comes in relation to us. And this is what Caravaggio depicts: that which we find difficult to understand is the joy of a risen saviour who chooses to walk, talk, eat with fellow humans on the day of his resurrection. But, as Williams writes,

'He eludes and questions our predictions and projections, recedes and hides before our attempts to arrive at adequate, definitive statements... A theology of the risen Jesus will always be, to a greater or lesser extent, a negative theology, obliged to confess its conceptual and imaginative poverty.'

Perhaps Caravaggio's imagination is less impoverished than most of us!

Intriguingly, Williams has also written a poem about how the resurrection changes the way those on the road to Emmaus viewed each other. Maybe the anonymity of one of them (the gospel writer, Luke, only names one) helps us to place ourselves in the middle of this mystery. And that is a good place to find ourselves, if we answer the invitation of the risen Jesus and the God who spoke to a captive people through the prophet Jeremiah

'Call to me, and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’

For the disciples, the penny drops, but there is still so much they don't know. This is not to say that they know nothing. Jesus is, in many ways, what Donald Rumsfeld would categorise as a 'known unknown'. Christians believe that Jesus revealed himself in the scriptures, but enough for us to know that there's a lot more to know that we don't know. For those with Christian faith, we don’t exchange the certainty of what we know for mystery, but one of the invitations of the resurrection is to incorporate mystery into faith. And this in itself is not difficult: for to encounter Jesus is to be met with wonder. Those on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognise Jesus at first but their hearts burned within them. For John Wesley, his 'heart was strangely warmed', which strikes me as a very British way of saying his heart was burning within him!

But many of us will attest that to encounter the risen to Jesus is to shout 'look!' and laugh in astonishment, and to bow our heads.

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