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.

Explainer

Belief

Creed

30 March 2023

4 min read

Beyond cold certainties

The Creeds set out a vision of reality – a vision that cannot be proved to be true, but which was found to be true by a community of people.

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University in 2022.

A red shutter door bears a large painted message reading 'io ci credo'

'I believe it.'

Paolo Gregotti on Unsplash.

“I believe.” For many, the opening words of the Christian Creeds are self-defeating. Why read any further, when all they offer is opinions, rather than certainties? Faith is just a lower form of knowledge – a kind of hesitant half-truth, which seems out of place in today’s more sophisticated world, informed by science and philosophy rather than outdated worldviews inherited from a credulous past.

It’s a fair point. We cannot believe anything we like; there has to be reason to believe it, evidence in its support. For those wedded to a hard rationalism, we can only believe what can be proved to be true. Yet the problem is that the secure truths of logic and mathematics are existentially inadequate. We seem unable to escape the lure of “ultimate questions”, to use Karl Popper’s term for truths about meaning and value in life that frustratingly lie beyond the scope of science to confirm.

We can prove shallow truths. Yet the truths that really matter to us seem to lie beyond rational confirmation.

When it comes to the really important things in life, we are confronted with a rationalist dilemma. We can prove shallow truths. Yet the truths that really matter to us seem to lie beyond rational confirmation, often leading us into vicious argumentative circles rather than offering clear and persuasive proof. Bertrand Russell made this point in his famous defence of philosophy: “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”

Albert Einstein was fond of using mental experiments to open up some fundamental scientific questions, finding that they combined imaginative reflection with rational analysis. Here is a useful mental experiment. Suppose we limit ourselves to a mental and imaginative world in which we only accept what can be proved to be true. What sort of world would that be? It would, obviously, be a world from which Christianity was absent. Yet, perhaps less obviously, it would be a world from which all beliefs – moral, political, social and religious – are excluded. It would be a world without moral values, which remain obstinately resistant to rational or scientific verification. My suggestion is that this mental experiment indicates that this world would be existentially, morally and personally uninhabitable.

The human quest for wisdom, goodness and meaning takes us beyond the cold certainties of logic.

The opening words of the Creeds need to be seen in this context. The human quest for wisdom, goodness and meaning takes us beyond the cold certainties of logic into a world in which we believe or trust certain things to be true, life-changing and live-giving – but cannot prove them to be true. The Latin word credo – traditionally translated into English as “I believe” – is better rendered as “I trust,” invoking the world of relationships rather than mere beliefs.

The Creeds set out a vision of reality – a vision that cannot be proved to be true, but which was found to be true by a community of people, who have passed down in the Creeds their collective witness to what they discovered. As C. S. Lewis remarked, “the one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the Christian community.” This vision is affirmed to be trustworthy – not merely something that is transformative and liberating, but something that can be lived, not merely thought.

Getting the bigger picture

Faith is thus not a half-hearted hope that there might be a God. For Christians, it is a broad recognition that we live in a world in which certainty is not possible, save in closed mental domains that have little relevance to the serious business of living well and authentically. It is about “getting” what things are all about in an epiphanic moment of putting everything together and seeing a bigger picture within which we realize we belong and can flourish. There are other big pictures, of course – but all of them lie beyond proof. In choosing any of these, we are making an informed judgement that goes beyond the available evidence. We may believe (and have good reasons to believe) that it is the best big picture; yet we cannot show that it is true. What we do know, however, is that others have grasped this vision in the past, and transmitted this way of thinking and living to us.

‘Decentring’

The Creeds are thus not a demand to believe, but a description of what has been found, an affirmation of its capacity to satisfy and sustain, and an invitation to explore, discover and inhabit this new world. The Creeds provoke us into looking beyond the world of familiar banalities, and being prepared to be receptive to strange truths, which others have found to be life-changing. The vision of reality that we find articulated in the Creeds might be described as “decentring” – a term used by Iris Murdoch to describe the process of breaking free from our worrying obsession to make everything focus on us. As Plato suggested in his famous analogy of the Cave, there is a greater world that lies beyond us which, once grasped, makes us see things in a very different way. For Christians, faith is about the discernment of this vision of reality, and deciding to act as if it were true, in the firm belief that it can be trusted – and living meaningfully and authentically as a result.