The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
September 19th, 2021
Proper 20 (B): Proverbs 31:10-31; Psalm 1; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9: 30-37
The questions started before we even got to the field:
“Daddy, do you think I’m going to be the best player on my soccer team?”
“I’m not sure big guy. I hope we’re going to have a lot of good players.”
“Well, who do you think is going to be the best?”
“I don’t know bud, we’ll just have to see.”
“I hope I’m the best.”
“I know, buddy, I know.”
I did know. I do know. I knew exactly how my son was feeling. In my whole athletic career, there was never a practice or a game or a race that I went to where I wanted to be anything less than the best. But now as a dad, and as the new head coach of the Yellow Team in U8 YMCA soccer, not to mention as a priest, it’s…a little more complicated.
I share some people’s concerns about an overemphasis on winning for young kids; that it can take the fun out of the game at too young an age and encourage unhealthy behavior. But I am not someone who thinks competition is inherently evil and that losing is so traumatizing that every game should end in a tie. I think there is value in striving for excellence, in using failure as motivation to succeed in the future, and that resiliency and grit are essential characteristics to develop. As a former athlete, I found it helpful to have an arena in which to practice healthy competition. Because in many ways it prepares you for the “real world” where competition is a prominent part of many important aspects of our society. Our economic system, our political system, our education system all function with a highly competitive component at their core. We can argue about whether this is how it should be, but it’s undeniable that this is how it is. Subsequently we are encouraged in many areas of our life to be great; to strive not just to do our best but to be the best, better than everyone around us.
But there is a danger in our competition-based culture that we would do well to acknowledge. And that’s when that competitive spirit slips from the realm of attributes, abilities, and achievements, into the realm of morality and worth. In a world that relies so heavily on competition, we can very easily equate being great, with being good. And that’s a problem because it starts to ascribe moral judgment to superficial outcomes.
In his latest book, The Tyranny of Merit, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel calls our attention to this problem and traces some of its historical roots and current instantiations. In a competitive, nominally meritocratic society, Sandel writes, if you win, if you are successful by the metrics of modern life, you can easily start to believe that is because you are a good person. And at the same time, you can start to think that other people, who by those same metrics, have failed, are not. How could they be, they lost! And why did they lose? “They’re not hard working; they’re not smart; they’re not as good as I am.” And we can start to believe that we are not just better at something, we are better than someone.
This is a major mistake. There are very impressive people whose moral character is severely lacking. And there are others whose character is remarkable. And there are some for whom life has been hard, whose moral character is exemplary. And some not. No doubt you’ve met all those types. But make no mistake about it, there is nothing in your accomplishments and abilities that determines your worth as a human being. And being successful does not necessarily mean you are virtuous. As Sandel says unequivocally, “There is no necessary connection between being good and being great.” (p.49) To let yourself think so is dangerously wrong. Dangerous because it feeds a false sense of superiority to the winners. Dangerous because it feeds a false sense of inferiority to the losers. And dangerous because it frays the common bonds that hold us together as people.
Jesus knew how dangerous this conflation of great and good could be. He was aware of the threat it posed to individuals and to the community. Because clearly, the competitive spirit that burns so brightly in a 21st century, Western, capitalist culture was also smoldering in a first century, agrarian, Middle Eastern society as well. “What were you arguing about on the way?” Jesus asks his disciples. They were arguing about who was the greatest. Of course, they were! And Jesus nips that nonsense right in the bud. He sits them down and says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” And for an object lesson he calls in an assistant—a little child. Now, in those days, kids were not seen as cute little angels to be coddled and cuddled all day long. No, they had the lowest social standing in that culture. They had no value, because they added nothing, they simply drained your resources. But Jesus takes this little child in his arms, nonetheless, and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” In other words, if you want to be the greatest, show me how you treat someone from whom you can gain nothing, who has no “value” in the civic sense, who has already lost the game before it even began. How you treat one of these people will be the measure of your greatness, because if you welcome them, you are something much better than great, you are good.
This is Jesus’s answer to the danger our competitive spirit poses to ourselves, to others and to our common life. He doesn’t try to exorcise it like a demon from within our hearts. He redirects it. He channels it into a more productive place. A place where your greatness matters little, but your goodness matters completely. He makes it a race to the bottom, in order that all may be lifted-up. It’s a competition that affirms what has always been true: that when you plant your field with a heart of “envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind,” as the letter of James says. But if you sow in humility, generosity, and peace, there will be a whole harvest of righteousness to come. In God’s eyes, your greatness is of no interest and your desire to be great above all others can threaten the Kingdom he is trying to build. You may have been born on third base or you may have been born on the bench. You may have made millions of dollars or millions of mistakes. But the measure of your goodness will be based not on how much money you made, or how much influence you have, or where you went to school, or how many goals you scored or how many games you won, but in how many people’s lives are better for you having been in them—especially those from whom you stood to gain nothing. That’s the kind of competition God wants to inspire in you because that is truly a competition where everybody wins. That’s the kind of competition that turns this earthly kingdom into the Kingdom of God.
The conversation with my son about who is the best on the team has continued through the first two weeks of the season. And we’ve been trying to turn the desire to be the best into a drive to work hard and learn and improve. But more than that, we’ve been emphasizing that the best test of greatness is using whatever talent you may possess to make others better. I was sure we were making progress on this front. We were learning not to equate talent and virtue; greatness and goodness; victory and value. Then it came time to pick jersey numbers. He came running over to me with #10.
“#10? Why’d you pick that? That’s not your favorite number.”
“Because that’s the number the best player wears.”
“Well, yes, traditionally in soccer that’s true, but don’t you maybe want your favorite number?”
“No, I want to be the best.”
“Buddy, we talked about this.”
“I know, Dad, I know. I’m trying.”
“We all are, buddy. We all are.”