Sunday Stretch: Vol. 112

Start off your week with a grounded take on Bible, prayer, the world, and your life ...

Hi Readers,

Happy Super Bowl Sunday!

Re-sharing a few football-centric words I shared two years ago on this day …

This is always an interesting Sunday for me to spend time in worship, because the Super Bowl figures prominently in my own call story into ministry.

As many of you might know, my first career was in journalism, specifically as a sportswriter. I spent about five years working for newspapers and magazines, with my first job famously paying $6.70/hour to cover Big XII sports for the Columbia Daily Tribune while I was still in college. I then was paid what’s still my best-ever freelance rate, at age 21 in 2006, with $2/word to write for Sports Illustrated, a piece that I’m still proud of as one of the first to begin to convict the NCAA for its exploitation of college athletes, especially men’s basketball and football players, most of them Black.

My first post-college sportswriting job was for the Naples (Fla.) Daily News, where I got to go and cover the Super Bowl in 2009. It was then, on the media bus back after an exciting Pittsburgh Steelers victory against the Arizona Cardinals, that I made my final decision to leave Florida just six months later and pursue my master’s in Divinity and ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Maybe the fact that I just now had to go back to Google and double-check the score of that game tells you that my heart was never fully in the stats and scores of a sportswriting career, but at the same time, I loved the work. I grew up playing all kinds of sports, including volleyball, basketball, and track and field in high school; and one of my favorite parts of being a mom now is seeing my boys play team sports.

I considered it such a privilege and honor to share the athletes’ and coaches’ stories — to help people see more of the humanity behind their uniforms and helmets, and I especially loved writing profiles, like the one I got to write about Edgerrin James and his hometown of Immokalee, Fla., during that Super Bowl week.

Still, I was called to go from writing truth about sports to hoping to share the greater Gospel truth of love and justice for the world that came through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and I really haven’t looked back since. I still use my past as a sportswriter to expose Gospel truths through sports stories, like in 2017 when I wrote about Colin Kaepernick’s NFL kneeling protest against police brutality towards Black people, and the NFL and then-President Trump’s backlash against it.

Lots of sports fans and church leaders can see this story as two independently existing events, one built on consumerism and violence, and the other built on an antiquated tradition that doesn’t have relevance in modern-day America, and so we forget to talk to each other and learn from each other. The truth is that the NFL is built on consumerism and violence, and the Church in many ways has become a decadent and irrelevant institution, or worse a purveyor of Christian Nationalism and white supremacy.

But those aren’t the only truths on display today, this Christian Sabbath and Super Bowl Sunday day. There are also stories of courage and conviction, of hope and promise. Of ordinary people and their dogged hard work and perseverance. There is the way that people who have little in common can don the same colors and shout the same cheers. I see the best of these attributes all the time in little local churches, and on sports teams. So there’s hope for us all.

And for my husband, a KC native, Go Chiefs! She said while crying in Purple & Gold ..

Now let’s get to the texts …

Bible Stories

Isaiah 6:1-8

Is. 6:1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. ² Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. ³ And one called to another and said:

“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts;

the whole earth is full of his glory.”

⁴ The pivots^a on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. ⁵ And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”

Is. 6:6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. ⁷ The seraph^a touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” ⁸ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”

Can you hear that hymn, plaintively calling

Here I am, LORD. Is it I, LORD? I can hear you calling in the night …

Call stories can be confusing things. It seems to be popular to claim a lack of eagerness to pursue one’s calling, to be somehow forced into it by other people. My story, though, is more like Isaiah’s. Maybe it’s because I was a girl, but I don’t remember that many people growing up telling me I should be a Pastor someday. Instead, sometimes following God’s calling against the world’s preferences (especially for those of us who don’t fit the stereotype of what our “calling” looks like to the world) - can look more like a dogged persistence, against all kinds of high odds.

That’s where the beauty of Isaiah’s call story comes. Here I am! Send me! A willingness to serve is nothing to be ashamed of.

Questions to Ponder

What do you think is the significance of the seraphs saying “Holy, holy, holy” three times? Why three?

What does Isaiah mean by “unclean lips?”

What do you think the live coal symbolizes?

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

1Cor. 15:1 Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters,^a of the good news^b that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, ² through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain.

1Cor. 15:3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, ⁴ and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶ Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters^a at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.^{b 7} Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸ Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. ⁹ For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. ¹¹ Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.

As this chapter continues, Paul gives a beautiful witness to the promises of God, even against the tragedy of death. But he sets up those promises with this deceptively simple narrative of the Gospel. This retelling reminds us how important it is to know the story: