This may not sound at first like a chronicling of my feelings in retrospect on everything that has happened to my church in the past week. But rest assured, it is.
I grew up in a mighty football town. Kansas City has an amazing sports culture, and just as I grew up idolizing George Brett and Bo Jackson of the Royals (so great was my admiration for them that my mother used that to her advantage in parenting me: "George Brett doesn't cry when his mother clips his toenails!"), so too did I live for Sundays at noon when the Chiefs would be playing football on television. Tens of thousands of people did. And that sports-crazy atmosphere had a permanent effect on me: I haven't lived in Kansas City for eight or nine years, but I still follow its sports teams fervently.
So it wasn't just a freak occurrence when I read about the tragic murder-suicide perpetrated by starting Chiefs lineback Jovan Belcher this past Saturday, in which he shot and killed Kasandra Perkins, his girlfriend and the mother of his three-month-old infant daughter, before shooting and killing himself. This was a stranger, yes, but one whom I had followed for years. Even that thin layer of familiarity made it more traumatizing. I used it in my sermon in part because I was still trying to process and comprehend it.
As, I am sure, a great many of us are.
Enter, in the midst of this, NBC's Bob Costas' comments about the circumstances of the Belcher-Perkins murder-suicide--namely, the use of a handgun to perpetrate the crime. For this, Costas has already taken a heaping dose of criticism for bringing public policy into the world of sports.
Part of the criticism of Costas seems to simply be from folks who disagree with him--that guns don't kill people--but that's a different kettle of fish.
The criticism I truly cannot fathom is the argument that sports should be divorced from conversations such as guns, crime, and suicide. Because to me, that ship sailed a long time ago.
The spate of suicides of NFL players like Junior Seau, and of NHL players like Derek Boogard (and before them, the murder-suicide of professional wrestler Chris Benoit) means that these conversations HAVE to be taking place, no matter how hard they are to have, because this is peoples' lives we are talking about here. As Erik Wemple notes in his Washington Post piece that I link to above, we can't just take the easy route out here.
It may be easier for us to not imagine our athletes as regular people, as we so rarely see them not on the field or at some charity or media function, but that doesn't make it right. It may be easier for us to use sports simply as an escape from the real world, but that mentality is a fallacy. Sports are a part of the real world--a multibillion dollar enterprise that entertains us.
And this is a mentality that I worry overflows into how we view church as well. Not because I don't think church should be entertaining--I DO think church must be engaging and attractive, because what good is truth if we cannot communicate it--but because we expect churches to be simply comfort zones, not places to be challenged.
And on some level, it is fine to come to church wanting to feel uplifted, just as it is fine to come to a sports arena expecting to be swept up in the action for a couple of hours. I know I do it.
But if that is ALL that church or sports offers you, you're probably doing it wrong.
I feel like people are getting upset at Bob Costas for the same reason we sometimes get upset with the church: they challenge us rather than letting us live in cocoons.
I said essentially this in yesterday's TDN article on our recovery, but it's easy to preach, "Hey, Jesus loves you." It's a lot harder to preach, "Here's what you do because of that reality." And that's why I have this particular job--it's tough to do. If it were easy, people wouldn't need the help of a pastor.
But this means that church cannot simply be easy either. It MUST be difficult. It MUST be messy. Being part of a church is work. The minute it stops being work is the minute the grace God offers becomes cheap.
And that means tackling the tough stuff in church as well. It means tackling questions like, "How do we forgive people who broke into our sacred space?" It takes courage to ask those questions, and we cannot, on reflex or reaction, criticize those who do for rocking the boat. Jesus was all about rocking the boat (you know, when He wasn't walking on water towards the boat).
Put differently: church has to have a part in those questions if it is to retain its meaning, importance, and relevancy in today's world.
And everything that has happened to us in the last week has been a powerful, stark reminder of that reality.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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