Included

The text below is a simplified, remixed write up of a message shared by Josh VonGunten at the Canvas gathering on August 6th, 2023.

The summer before my sixth grade year I somehow found myself trying out for a soccer team. Like so many things in this season of life, it was an awkward experience. Looking back, I was ill-prepared for the try-out. At the time, my understanding of soccer was pretty basic and mostly consisted of two main ideas: kick the ball into the goal and don’t use your hands. In addition to these rules, I was fast and could move pretty well but my awareness of positions, where to be on the field, and how to play the game as one of 11 was very limited.

My memories of the try-out are foggy but I’m guessing I chased the ball all over the field with maximum effort and very little awareness of how to play as part of a team. One memory that does remain painfully clear however is the last few moments of try-outs when the young, inexperienced, and well-meaning coach made cuts. What follows still makes me cringe a little. We were all lined up side by side, shoulder to shoulder, on one side of the field where we were thanked for our efforts and informed that due to capacity issues, around 1/4 of us who had come out for the team would be cut. Next, the coach walked 20 or so yards out from our line and announced that those who heard their name called should walk forward to the other side and gather as a team for a meeting. Those who did not, should gather their things and clear out.

As the coach began slowly reading names, relieved players walked across the great divide to gather in safety around the coach. Those who were included now proudly faced the line of nervous kids who quite visibly hung in the balance. With each name that was called there was an increasing quiet tension that came over me. What probably lasted 1 minute seemed to span an hour. On this day, along with a handful of other slightly confused burgeoning middle schoolers, I did not hear my name called. I stood there for a moment, on the wrong side, unsure of how to take it all in. While my desire and effort to make the team probably wasn’t all that great to begin with, there was something gratuitously brutal and dramatic about the way it ended. This was something my sixth-grade heart, mind, and body couldn’t fully grasp or take in, thankfully. It was a highly potent experience of being visibly and ceremonially excluded. Even though it was brief, it was powerful. Even though I was probably eating ice cream, riding my bike with friends, and playing Super Mario Brothers with a smile on my face an hour later, it was impactful. And, all these years later, it’s still something I think about and feel my way through from time to time.  

I share this story because as I have journeyed through life and listened to countless others tell their stories, I know this experience, at its core, is strangely relatable. In ways both small and subtle, others big and pronounced, this is a story we find ourselves in. More than just an awkward experience with a youth sports team, this, I believe, is also a story that says so much about our culture and way of life. It’s a story that works like a meta-narrative, or master idea—a grid or rubric for how we understand and relate with life. The fundamental questions sound like this: Am I in or out around here? Have I been included or excluded? Am I safe as one who has made the team or am I still trying out and hoping to hear my name called? If we spend some time in candid reflection, it’s not hard to find these questions quietly lurking and waiting to present themselves in so many of the contexts we exist within.

But what if there was an alternative? What if this meta-narrative is not actually what is most real or true? This sounds dramatic, I know, but what if this way of seeing the world (in / out) is actually a disease or sickness that seeks to raid, colonize, and overtake every system? If this were the case, it would take radical stories from the outside, stories that run on a very different heart, soul, and energy to wake us up and help us see that we’re living in a very sick, fabricated, and concocted system. It also takes prophets who boldly speak truth to power to help us see we do have a choice in the matter. Martin Luther King Jr. was one such voice. He rightly pointed out that the three evils of poverty, racism, and militarism are intertwined collaborative forces that keep our society in regression. Each of these issues, at their core, run on the paradigm of scarcity, the underlying premise that there’s just not enough for everyone to be included. The assumption is that someone has got to be left out or punished. The energy of scarcity lures us into believing we’re all competitors vying for limited spots on the team.

Sadly, the ethos of American (Western) Christianity, upon examination, has been far too complicit with the premise of scarcity and individualism. Coming up in various evangelical church settings and ministries through the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s, it was a regular occurrence to hear preaching and messaging that encouraged me to strive to stay on God’s good side. Much like my sixth-grade soccer try-out, I was encouraged to make the team and stay safe and accepted through good behavior. While it was never worded with such naked simplicity, the message was clear and consistent: avoid sin, do the right things, make the team. As followers of Jesus, it’s crucial we ask, how has this emphasis upon individual self-effort infected our understanding of what God is up to in the world?

The story being told in 2 Corinthians 5:18-21 is one that seems to run counter to our society’s obsession with individual merit and scarcity. In this text, God is described as taking the initiative in reconciling the world to himself through Jesus. God is described as not holding back or staying away because of people’s problems but rather moving closer. We’re told God decided not to hold people’s sin against them and made a grand, ultimate, sweeping move to invite everyone to the table. Simply put, life is not one big try out. We’re not here to prove ourselves faithful or acceptable. Rather, we’re here to discover that God is faithful, and we’ve already been accepted.  

This leads me to believe that the aim of evil in the world is to implement and sustain systems that divide people. The energies that perpetuate poverty, racism, and militarism are at their core fearful and divisive, creating separation between people in wicked displays of inclusion and exclusion. Interestingly, while Paul, the author of 2 Corinthians, does at times speak of sin as individual choices, he primarily speaks of sin in the singular, as a force or power in the world which wreaks havoc by creating division between people and misunderstanding of God. He writes of people being under the power, delusion, and oppression of sin, a force which leads humanity to strive and battle for goods and acceptance rather than accepting what has already been given. Against my own personal backdrop of primarily hearing about sin as individual choices or acts, this idea is revolutionary. This idea of sin as a force or power that creates division between people, and people and God, has led me to ask, what if sin is our addiction to striving to make the team? What if the underlying driver of sin is the belief that we aren’t really loved for who we are so we need to look out for ourselves, perform, numb out, or compete against others to have our needs met?

Further, if sin is an underlying obsession with performing and trying to earn love and acceptance (rather than simply accepting it as a gift), what if faith is the simple act of accepting that we have been perfectly and ultimately loved, embraced, and accepted by God? With this idea in mind, a professor I had in seminary put it this way, “….the primary question to be asked and answered is not, what must human beings do to have life or to be reconciled to God? Instead, the primary question is, what has God done for them?” This feels like very good news to me. Slowly but surely, I’m set on discovering that I don’t need to make the team, I’ve already been included.