Rector's letter for July Fowey News
Dear Friends
In the middle of the World Cup, the overwhelming emotion we’ll experience is disappointment. This past season, 20 teams competed for the English Premier League. 19 of them failed to win it. Only Arsenal fans were able to celebrate victory and even that was tinged with disappointment as they lost the Champions League final.
This World Cup has more teams than ever, 48 in total. The tournament has 103 matches, culminating in the final on July 19, after which one team will dance around the pitch with the gold trophy, draped in smiles and their national flag. The other team will slink back to the dressing room, feeling miserable.
For some, losing will be less painful than others. If Haiti or Curaçao win a game, or even get a draw, they will be over the moon. Cape Verde have already ‘won’ their World Cup with their astonishing draw against European Champions, Spain. Yet all three will almost certainly go out after the group stage. Yet for the bigger teams, like Argentina, Brazil, France or Spain, failure to win the tournament will be just that – failure.
England have an odd relationship with the World Cup. There is that solitary win, the iconic day of July 30, 1966, when Nobby Stiles danced, and Bobby Moore held up the Jules Rimet trophy in the early evening Wembley sunshine. That victory is both the glory and the curse of English football, because ever since, English football fans have expected another win. They have been disappointed 14 times so far.
Hosts USA usually end up top of the Olympic medal table, but when they lose the Ryder Cup, they have a national self-examination. Likewise, when New Zealand loses at rugby, gloom descends on the country. The expectation of sporting success is a burden hard to bear, precisely because sport is unpredictable - which is the point.
The reality is that even winners end up as losers. Liverpool won the Premier League last year but have been distinctly lacklustre this season. In a recent interview, Roy Keane said, “Sport is all about disappointments. If you survive long enough you get a few highs along the way. But if you want to talk about disappointments, we could be here all night.”
The Christian knows that we’re all failures, in fact “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3v23). An alternative translation might be, ”we are all, at the end of the day, losers”. Indeed, learning to lose is a vital skill in life. If you can’t lose well, with the humility to give credit to those who are better than you at something, then you are destined for a miserable existence. In that way, sport is a mirror to life. But for the Christian there is also immensely good news to cut through such a bleak observation. We all do fall short, “but we are justified by [God’s] grace as a gift” (Romans 3v24).
Kaka, the great Brazilian footballer, Ballon d’Or winner, and devout Christian, often struggled with the expectation and criticism of fans. He once said: “I gained the firm conviction that I was neither the best in the world nor the worst signing by Real Madrid – I was a child of God”.
We might all be losers, who just occasionally enjoy a win, but at the end of the day, unlike in sport, your performance doesn’t actually matter from an eternal perspective. Winning or losing is not the bottom line, but rather finding your value in the undeserved grace of the Lord Jesus Christ - something much bigger, more dependable and more predictable than winning a World Cup - and discovering you too can be adopted as a child of God because of him. (with thanks to Graham Tomlin)
with every blessing
Philip