NEVER GIVE UP… ON CHRISTMAS [12-15-19]

Basketball coaches and preachers are fond of lists of three things. It’s as high as coaches can count and as much time as a preacher has in a twenty-minute sermon.

Coach Jim Valvano, in his 1993 “Never Give Up” anti-cancer speech, says that there are three things you should do every day: laugh, think, and cry [be moved so deeply by something that you weep].

When I was a young preacher, I was told that every sermon should contain something to think, something to remember, and something to feel.

Essentially, they are the same lists.

As a preacher, I soon realized that telling people stuff wasn’t very useful, even in getting people to think. The more thoughts I pushed at people, the less thinking they did for themselves. And it certainly wasn’t very good at getting them to laugh with joy or weep with fulfillment. So, I told stories. In a story, the Holy Spirit has a chance to move each person in the way she or he needs to be moved, into thought, and laughter of joy, and tears of wholeness.

Valvano, as a coach, was a story-teller. He told his players the story of how they won the national championship, even though they hadn’t done it yet. Each year, as the season started, they practiced cutting down the nets after their national championship, even though they hadn’t played one game yet. It was a powerful acting out of a story.

He told cancer patients how they would defeat cancer, even if they died, by refusing to give up. It was a laugh-think-cry story just in itself.

I was three years into cancer when Valvano gave his speech. My first oncologist had told me right after my surgery that I’d be dead in “a year or two.” At three years I was beginning to think that if I did not give up, I might have a longer life. Valvano’s speech made me laugh-because he was always funny, even when he knew he was dying-and think, and cry.

In Christian faith, we have settled for one item only in the lists--thinking. Belief. Mental assent. It has led us to anger and exclusion. If we had spent more time laughing and crying together, instead of trying to get everyone to think the same way, we’d be much farther along in the story that starts with Christmas.

I wish I could tell you a story right now that would let you find yourself in it so completely that you would laugh at the absurdity of everything else, and cry with overwhelming joy at the gift of love. A story like God being with us so completely that it moves us to tears, the absurdity of God willing to be born into life as a helpless baby, so ridiculous that it makes us laugh… but we’ve heard that story so often that we no longer hear it… but, listen to it again, every time you get the chance. There are three things in it for you, every time. Never give up on the Christmas story.

John Robert McFarland