The Agony of Defeat

The Golden State Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in six games to take the 2015 NBA championship home to Oakland.  Cleveland must endure yet another defeat despite having native son and best player on the planet Lebron James back home.  There is an awful lot of Lebron hating to go around, but after "taking his talents to South Beach," and winning a couple of titles, a boy became a man and came home.  He joins now the ranks of Elgin Baylor, Jerry West and Allen Iverson as players who were transcendent in terms of talent, but simply didn't have the team to win it all.
I remember Iverson, the 6 foot nothing, 175 pound ball of tattooed lightning.
Philadelphia loved Allen Iverson, they identified with his scrappy, shoot-em-up, style and his gruff, cranky personality.  Most of all though, they identified with the fact that he just never seemed to catch a break.  He was spectacular, but he was never surrounded by enough talent to win it all.  He dragged a sub-par team into the finals and ran into the Shaq and Kobe show.  I can't help but think about the way that felt, to get so close and then run into a brick wall.  There was no defeat in that though, it was just a simple case of being over-matched.  The Lakers were able to hinder Iverson just enough, with a second tier player named Tyron Lue, leaving Kobe and Shaq free to do their thing.  The Sixers had no other real bullets in their gun.  Iverson scored over 35 points a night and at one point was actually a leading rebounder (at 6'0"), and "he" still lost.  Because it really was him against a whole team.
Just like it was Lebron against the Golden State Warriors.
Lebron is by no means the underdog that Iverson was, he's 6'8" and usually the strongest, fastest and most talented guy on the floor (Iverson was just the fastest).  Lebron is his team's best scorer and best defender, he makes triple doubles look easy (they're not), but he can't win on his own.
I like Golden State, I  think Steph Curry is a really likable player, I like their approach and I think they truly are the best team, but the Philadelphia fan in me aches for Cleveland, because I wonder if, like it was with Iverson's Sixers, having the best player on the planet is not going to be enough.  Cleveland and Philly share a penchant for institutional stupidity, they can waste Jim Brown and Allen Iverson, and Donovan McNabb and maybe Lebron James, and never win it all.
But maybe in some cases you can't win.
Maybe in some cases you don't need to win.
Maybe trying your best really is enough and you should hold your head up.
Sometimes you're fighting something that's just too much.
Like Jesus (you knew I was going there at some point, and no, I'm not saying that basketball players are messianic figures).
In Jesus' confrontation of the powers and principalities of his age he was alone and confronting something that could not be beaten alone.  His disciples were not quite up to the challenge, but they could learn from his sacrifice, they could see a new way of being, a way that went through defeat but was not beaten.
I saw it in Iverson and I saw it in Lebron: they lost, but they were not beaten.  I see it in Philly and Cleveland every year: hope, irrational hope, but hope all the same.
I don't think I'm overstating things when I say that sports have taken over a lot of the territory that used to be covered by religion.  Religion struggles for a foothold, but football or futbol can weather scandals and kerfuffles galore.  FIFA has just been unmasked as corrupt to the highest levels and yet no fans will stop watching the games.  Baseball has been proven to be riddled with illegal performance enhancing drugs and yet parks still fill up and the coffers remain full.  American football players are videotaped in the act of domestic violence, charged with assault and even murder, ex players commit suicide because of damage done to their brains due to head trauma during games, and yet there is no hue and cry for and end to it all, just the need to clean things up.
It seems to me that the church has lost the benefit of the doubt and the second chances that are given to athletes and sports.  Now people just want to see us lose.
And we are.
We're not dying, which would be far less troubling for a people who are essentially about resurrection, rather we are becoming irrelevant and unimportant.  We are like Allen Iverson at the very end, he was no longer the fastest and now he was just a pitiable figure that nobody wanted anymore, riddled with his own demons and suffering for the sins of his past.  But we are still stumbling around trying to play for sympathy and pity.
Meanwhile sports provide people with the inspiration and the hope (not to mention entertainment) that they used to find in God.
So what do we do?
Well, I don't know exactly, but I do know it's not going to be a solo effort, one superstar is not going to win this series, and we have, I think been relying too much on our pastors, leaders and public faces to be too much and to do too much, and then jumping on the bandwagon of critics when they fail.
Our superstars play into to it sometimes, like Lebron referring to himself as the best player on the planet, everyone from Rob Bell, to Billy Graham, to Pope Francis, and even my beloved Richard Rohr are capable being named our great heroes.
They don't seize the crown, they may even protest a bit when it's placed on their head, but in the end, they'll take the adoration and admiration of the masses, "for the sake of the Gospel," or something like that.
It's really not their fault.  From the time of Moses the rather remarkable ability of humans to lapse into idolatry has been a bugaboo of the faith.  One of our real challenges in "competing" with sports for the souls of humanity is that sports doesn't have to apologize for idolatry, we can openly call Lebron, Messi, Manning and Ronaldo our sports idols and icons, we can go to vast assemblies of enthusiastic fans (derived from fanatics), and we can pour our time talent and treasure into the worship of those idols and they will never make us feel guilty, the worst they will do is lose, but there's always next year (right Cubs fans?)
But we can't compete with the idols, because our God seems absolutely okay with losing, getting crucified, and being among the least, and the outcast and the leftovers.  He always seems to have a team full of role players and no real superstars.
So what then?  What do we do?
I just don't know.
Only about three months until Football!