Take a Swing for Jesus (Straining a Metaphor)

Most Canadians are laser-focused on the Toronto Blue Jays these days. And understandably so. They Jays are on quite a run, and they are an easy team to like. I’ve never been a huge baseball fan, but even I am enjoying watching them give the gazillionaire Dodgers all they can handle. When the Jays aren’t on, though, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Rolex Paris Masters, the world’s biggest indoor tennis tournament (here, too, a Canadian is doing well—Felix Auger-Aliassime is into the quarterfinals). Tennis is a sport that I’ve come to really enjoy in the last five years or so, both the viewing and the playing. And it’s given me a new window into some aspects of the Christian life.

Sport as a metaphor for the life of faith is, of course, nothing new. From Paul’s “running the race” and “winning the prize” language in 1 Corinthians 9 to cringey sermon analogies (“Let Jesus be the quarterback of your life!”), this has always been well-tilled soil. I’m sure there are all kinds of rich baseball metaphors that I am depriving my congregation of this October due to my relative ignorance of/inattention to the sport. But sports metaphors, whether of the rich or the cringey variety, often connect with people for obvious reasons. So here’s mine. Make of it what you will.

When I play racquet sports (tennis, squash, pickle ball, even ping pong), I tend to play fairly defensively. I keep the ball in play. I run down shots, I get it back in the court, I keep the rally alive, hopefully long enough for the person on the other side of the net to make a mistake. I’m not bad at this. But I’m not as good at attacking, at positively trying to end the rally or win the point. I tend to make the safe shot more than the aggressive shot.

This tendency extends to all sports. In soccer and hockey, I’ve always played defense. My focus has been more on keeping the ball or the puck out of my net than on putting into the other team’s net. In my relatively brief forays into the world of baseball, I was better out in the field than at batting—except the time I tried to catch a fly ball with my teeth, but that’s another story…

Over the last year or so, whenever I’ve played tennis, I’ve been reminded that there’s only so far you can get playing defensively. You can have a good game, you can get a good workout, you can have fun. But if your default is always to defend instead of being more positive and trying to actively win the point, there’s a limit to how far you can go.

Ok, let’s see if I can force strain a metaphor here. I think that it’s possible to take that same defensive approach from the world of sports into faith. For a big part of my life, I thought it was my task to defend the Christian faith. To fend off criticisms, to protect it against outside attacks, to prove that it was intellectually respectable, rational, believable. To demonstrate that you could be smart and religious. To show that it could be done. To take this thing called “Christian faith” that I had received and accepted and believed, to take the institutions of the church, the traditions, the practices, the ways of being and doing, and just preserve it.

There is value in this, just like there’s value in keeping the ball in play in a tennis match. It’s important to remove unnecessary obstacles to belief, to seek to answer challenges or to fend off criticisms. It’s important not to just cast aside traditions and practices and institutions that have served people well for generations. I have written a great many words over the years in the defense of Christianity and the church, and I don’t in any way think these words were wasted. But I think it’s important to move beyond just saying, “Look, I can defend this, this is believable, I can make a rational case for this” to “this is what actively draws me to Jesus.” Perhaps it’s a subtle difference, but I think it’s an important one.

It’s good if we can say of Christian faith, “This is defensible. There are enough good reasons for me to give my life to this.” It is even better if we can say, “I see in Jesus Christ and his gospel a life, and a faith, and a hope that is not just defensible, but good, and true, and beautiful.” It’s even better if we can say, “I see in Jesus Christ and his gospel a hope that corresponds to the deepest longings of a human soul—longings for forgiveness, for an incorruptible hope, for a life and a love that transcends all our losses and that binds up all our wounds.”

Of course, now that I look at this on the page I’m having a few second thoughts. Am I comparing robust, mature Christian faith to a kill shot in tennis? Saying that real Christianity is aggressive and about “winning?” Hmm. Doesn’t sound very Jesus-y. Ah well, all metaphors have their limits, I suppose…

(Go Jays!)