Olympic Games

The Olympic Vision: ‘My Way’

/ MurrayCampbell

The Paris Olympic Games began with the humanist anthem, ‘Imagine’ and closed with another, ’My Way’. 

This notion of a world where humanity climbs to the top of the Eiffel Tower (or Babel!) and no longer relies on God, is as common in France as the baguette. Indeed, the French Enlightenment has profoundly influenced how we look at the world today: secular humanism. 

Whereas Imagine empties the world of ultimate meaning, design and hope, My Way is the crooner’s funeral dirge. 

‘And now, the end is near

And so I face the final curtain

My friends, I’ll say it clear

I’ll state my case of which I’m certain

I’ve lived a life that’s full

I traveled each and every highway

But more, much more than this

I did it my way’.

French singer, Yseult, performed ‘My Way’ with gusto and fireworks, but the song is delusional. ‘My Way’ is a self-justifying way of looking back over life and saying, ‘yep, I screwed up, but at least I did it my way!’

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not an Olympic critic. I enjoy the Olympics as much as any diehard sporting fan. And watching the Green and Gold outdo the Red, Blue and White is kinda ‘slay’.

There was, however, a hubris weaving throughout the Games that tarnished the gold, silver, and bronze. The alkaline isn’t achievement and success, it’s Rousseau’s imagining that set the Olympic message from start to finish: secular humanism.

The humanist project is appealing for it hooks onto every aspiration for personal freedom and success. The dream is then set within the possibility of imagining no hell and heaven, and no religion too. It’s very French. It’s thumbing our noses at the establishment (whoever they may be), and a finger salute toward religion. Ironically, and as the Olympics have shown, secular humanism is as religious and worshipful as the Temple of Artemis and any local Mosque or Church across Paris.

Like the moon glistening over the Seine at midnight, the Olympic message is romantic… until you jump into the river. It is a myopic vision in these 3 ways.

The Backdrop

The backdrop to the Olympic Games is Venezuela, Myanmar, Gaza, Ukraine, and Bangladesh. Political and social unrest is found in English cities and Australian streets. Geopolitical tensions are so high that political leaders are not asking if there will be a global war, but when?

‘My Way’ just isn’t believable. Doesn’t the message feel somewhat empty when we look outside the Parisian bubble?

Tony Estanguet, President of the Organising Committee, presented this stirring offering at the Opening Ceremony,  

“Tonight you have reminded us how beautiful humanity is when we come together.

And when you return to the Olympic Village, you will be sending a message of hope to the whole world: that there is a place where people of every nationality, every culture and every religion can live together. You’ll be reminding us: it is possible.

For the next 16 days, you will be the best version of humanity.

You’ll remind us that the emotions of sport form a universal language that we all share.”

There is a smidgen of truth and goodness here. It feels kinda right. But then we see that the words are canvassed by imagining a world without God, and without ultimate justice and hope. It’s up to us and we can do it!

What’s the answer Mr Olympics? Sport unites?

I wonder how this resonates for those who can’t return home because of war or persecution?

The Backhand Swipe

The Olympic message also serves up a backhanded spin toward all those parts of the world who don’t buy into this self-human deification.  

I guarantee there are more than 3 athletes uncomfortable with the Imagine My Way vision of life, and more than 4 viewers. The message is a backhanded slap in the face to many people in the 2/3s world who don’t buy into humanism.  Today, much of the world is turning to the gospel of Jesus Christ and is looking at the West with weird fascination as they see celebratory pride in the midst of decline. It’s Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus. Except, Sisyphus is no longer pushing the boulder uphill it’s fast chasing him down the hill and yet strangely Sisyphus is shouting,  ‘Look at me, I’m free!’

There is an arrogance attached to the humanist project. It relies on hubris because humility requires depending on a source and foundation that is other. The ‘My Way’ syndrome can’t afford to accept the human condition and it relies on the notion that we won’t repeat the mistakes from the past.  And yet we do. Secular humanism has become a lame duck that employs all the boisterous noise of an Olympic triumph; mesmerising and leaving behind a truckload of debt. 

A Modern Heresy

A third way the Olympics is short-sighted is its failure to understand how secular humanism functions as a Christian heresy. It’s not a Monet original, it’s a third-rate copy.

Tom Holland, Glen Scrivener and others have effectively shown that the air we breathe in our culture is oxygenated by Christianity. The Olympics doesn’t derive notions of equality from thin air! Even our anti or post Christian beliefs are immersed in the teaching and person of Jesus Christ.

As Christopher Watkin notes, 

‘The most interesting migration of all concerns the secular itself. Claiming to have chased religion from its home, the secular has moved in and kept all the furniture. The secular is built on the assumption that there are two domains— the religious and the secular—and that one can grow as the other shrinks. As Tom Holland points out, this is a thoroughly and deeply religious idea, reaching back to Augustine’s notion of two cities. When secularism arrived on the scene it “came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian,” and the very idea of secularism witnesses not to Christianity’s decline but “to its seemingly infinite capacity for evolution.’

While trying to keep her love child in a backroom closet, secular humanism is courting a new friend from the depths of pagan Europe.

From Bacchus the Smurf crashing the Last Supper at the Opening Ceremony, to the ‘Hymn of Apollo’ that was set to music for the Closing Ceremony, neo-paganism is trending again,

‘I will remember, nor could I forget, far-shooting Apollo,

 whom gods tremble before as in Zeus’s abode he is striding—

 then as he comes up close to the place they are sitting, they leap up,

all of them, out of their seats, as he stretches his glittering bow back.’

Let’s leave aside the irony of thinking that it’s cool and inclusive to sing a hymn to fictitious gods, yet honouring the God who gives us breath and strength is anathema!  The repeated dipping into neo-paganism is more than acknowledging the Olympics’ story of origin, it’s looking into the murky Seine and needing to explain the world and provide a moral compass should Christianity be taken to the guillotine. It’s an impossible task of course, because without Christianity, all our best values lose their mooring.

Tom Holland exposes this forced marriage between Humanism and neo-paganism. He points out how the ancient gods of Greece and Rome, “cared nothing for the poor,” and “to think otherwise was ‘airhead talk”. 

It’s Christianity that changed everything and yet we want to sing ‘Imagine’ and ‘My Way’. It is Christianity that transformed the way we view the poor and the excluded. It is Christianity that gave rise to feminism’s first revolution in those early centuries AD. It is Christianity that altered the way society looks upon the young and the vulnerable. Any hints of moral goodness flowing through secular humanism has its roots in the very thing it wants to dismantle: Christianity. 

Because of this, perhaps ‘My Way’ was a fitting end to the Paris Olympic Games. The Olympic flame was snuffed out, its dying embers a sign of where ‘Imagine’ becomes reality.

Another Way

There were glimpses of a better way sneaking through the Olympics. There was Nicola Olyslagers at the Village, accompanying athletes from across the world on the piano in song and praise to God. There was the Fijian contingent in one voice proclaiming Jesus. Again, there was Nicola Olyslagers who chose to glorify God in her sport, 

“My worship may not be singing, it’s in my feet jumping over a bar”.

There is America’s gold medallist, Sydney Mclaughlin Levrone, 

‘What I have in Christ is far greater than what I have or don’t have in life…he has prepared me for a moment such as this. That I may use the gifts he has given me to point all the attention back to him”.

Hubris or humility?

Self-seeking or God-glorifying?

As the athletes flooded into the Stade de France for the final time, the music pumped out, ‘no time for losers’. Athletes swayed with arms raised to the heavens and shouting out, ‘no time for losers’.  Should we mention the 90%+ of the world’s Olympians who failed to medal in any event? And what of thousands more who failed to make an Olympic team?

Secular humanism is a temporary fix for the strong and successful. Christianity is the gospel for losers. The message of Jesus Christ is for those who have failed and lost and grossly miscalculated. This is the true Gospel of liberty and equality and fraternity because the onus and hope lays with  God and because this salvation is by grace. This message is about the God who came down and drew all the world’s evils and suffering and went to the cross.

As Jesus puts it (I’m mulling over these words before preaching this week)

‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.’

How?

‘“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep.’

Olympic ‘Last Supper’ depiction with a French Twist

/ MurrayCampbell

I do enjoy French quirkiness and the absurd. It is often playful and sometimes provocative. And sometimes it is attention-seeking and puerile.

I loved much of the innovation and freshness that the French gave the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The interplay between art and athletes, and the sitz im leben of the city instead of stadium was pretty cool.

During the Opening Ceremony, there were many highlights, and of course, there was controversy. There was the mass reenactment of Marie Antoinette’s beheading with geysers of blood reaching the skies. If blood lust didn’t do it for you, another scene was depicted, and unsurprisingly it was most controversial, consciously so. although as myopic and unoriginal as a school kid’s impression of Monet’s water lilies. 

I’m still unsure how Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper relates to the Olympics. Let’s leave aside that the painting is Italian, not French. The French do however enjoy the question and leave us without the answer.   In this Olympic staged drama, the French have, as artists previously mimed, revised this Biblical scene where Jesus teaches his disciples over the Passover meal, on the night before his crucifixion. The French Jesus isn’t a male. Of course, let’s turn Jesus into an obese woman with a halo hovering over her head. The disciples can’t be men either. No, let’s have men in drag and a child and a splash of androgyny. 

More than a few people are angered by or upset by this depiction of Jesus and his disciples. I don’t like it either. Mocking Jesus is kinda stupid and unoriginal. It’s a pale copy of the original setting where the crowds, Pharisees, and soldiers mocked Jesus every step to and on the cross.

Bear with me, but this reminded of the sermon that I’ve prepped for church tomorrow. W e are looking at that most famous and intriguing saying of Jesus,

“the truth will set us free” 

Without giving too much away ,there is a line in my notes where I explore contemporary understandings of freedom and at one point, already with the French in mind, I say this,

‘When it comes to art, in painting, music and film, it does is pushes into the absurd or obscene, because freedom requires difference, new and fresh.”

The French have just provided a classic example! In this sense, the artistic directors for the Opening Ceremony are doing little more than conforming to the overdone narrative that is now basic to university education, social commentary and Parliamentary halls. 

France is famous for revolutionary undertones; it’s part of the kindergarten curriculum: how to protest and exhibit violence 101.  For example, French Protestant Christians were nearly wiped out in the 16th and 17th centuries, and Christianity has been a tiny minority ever since. In a way, Christianity is an easy target for the French (and yes, for Aussies too). Although, if the organisers had thought for more than a French moment, they’d have realised that more many African and Asian and South American Olympians, Jesus isn’t a parody or obtuse figure of derision; he is worthy of more honour and glory than all Olympic gold combined. Maybe they aren’t so concerned about social and international tolerance!

If the French were really daring, they would imagine an Islamic scene and the prophet Mohammed But of course, we know how that would quickly turn into real bloodshed  (by the way, I think that would be a really dumb idea for all kinds of reasons: not least, because it’s not a way to love our Muslim friends).

So why depict Jesus and his disciples in feminine and trans robes? Is it a call to equality or sexual expression? Is the city of love trying to deconstruct the patriarchy? Like many things French, who knows! One thing on display however is this return to paganism that is popping up in Western cultures. The Olympic Games have their origins in paganism and as recent Olympic Games have intimated, we are returning to these superstitious waters.

This dramatic display turns the Last Supper into a hyper-sexualised trans orgy with Greek mythological overtones (hence Bacchus the smurf turning up).

I suspect this is not the intention, but there is in this boorish parody of The Last Supper, something that at least opens a question to what Jesus was showing that night.

The revolution planned by God before all eternity and carried out by his Son involved the shedding of blood, as the Passover meal vividly showed.  The bloodshed didn’t involve chopping off the heads of his enemies, but dying in their place for their salvation.

If we are looking for the absurd and obscene, the beautiful and original, the cross of Jesus Christ to which the Last Supper prepares, is as French as it gets. It is the efficacious symbol for the peoples of the world.  Not for the glory of sport, but where God’s good news draws people from everywhere corner in freedom and truth and love and grace. And yes, this will include people whom we find unlikable and uncomfortable or just different from us.  That’s true originality: the cross speaks volumes about the foolishness of freedom searching without God and of staggering Divine love for these very people. As those who don’t fit gaze upon the crucified and risen Christ, there is not an emptiness or sterile religion, but a holy and loving God who forgives and frees. Stick that in your baguette and enjoy it!

Update Jul 29.

Olympic organisers have apologised. They confirm that the scene was depicting the Last Supper, infused with Greek paganism (Bacchus the blue smurf). It was a conscience artistic and moral judgment to sexualise and trans the Last Supper and with pagan elements added into the mix.

The apology sounds like the unrepentant juvenile caught stealing on CC TV, but I can afford to accept the apology.

One wonders what the closing ceremony will include!

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/jul/28/paris-olympics-organisers-apologise-to-christians-for-last-supper-parody

https://www.yahoo.com/news/paris-olympics-producers-confirm-last-173957068.html?

The Most Christian Olympics Ever?

/ MurrayCampbell / 1 Comment

First things first, there is no such thing as a Christian Olympics, just as Christian-science and Christian-music are not things. There can of course be Christians who participate in the Olympics, as there are athletes who adhere to all manner of world views.

The Olympic Games in Ancient Greece certainly took on a religious shape, and even many of the modern games have included various spiritualities as part of their opening and closing ceremonies. The Olympics however is not given to a particular view of God, and yet some athletes take the opportunity to express their belief in God.

As I’ve watched the Games each day, I haven’t sifted the channels to find those athletes waving the Jesus flag, and one hasn’t needed to, for there seems to be a greater boldness among Christian Olympians in Rio to express their faith in Jesus Christ.

There is no way of knowing how many athletes adhere to various religions; for every athlete we see acknowledging God, there are probably another 100 whose prayers and praises we do not see.

Among the Olympians who profess a faith in Jesus Christ are Allyson Felix, Simone Manuel, the Fiji Rugby 7s, Anna van der Breggen, and Usain Bolt.

In the women’s 5000m qualifier, we witnessed one of the Olympics special moments; not with a gold medal or world record, but when and Nikki Hamblin (NZ)and Abbey D’Agostino (USA) tripped and fell. D’Agostino stood up quickly but instead of continuing the race she turned to Hamblin and helped her to her feet, and only then did they complete the race together, despite D’Agostino being injured in the fall.

In an interview with NBC Sports, she said,

“Although my actions were instinctual at that moment, the only way I can and have rationalized it is that God prepared my heart to respond that way,”

“This whole time here, he’s made clear to me that my experience in Rio was going to be about more than my race performance – and as soon as Nikki got up I knew that was it.”

“I know there’s often criticism of athletes praying before a competition, or thanking God for their victory. I like to think this is why we should pray before a sporting event. Not that God will favor us with victory, but that we will be aware of His presence and have the Grace do what He would have us do.”

It is interesting listening to commentators as they respond to this talk about God: sometimes it is met with silence, or explained away as ‘ritual’, and other times the media leave out the Christian testimony altogether.

The Olympics is the ultimate test and glory for many of the world’s sportspeople, and to reach this goal they have sacrificed in ways most of us, including myself, do not comprehend. And yet, on this world stage we have heard many athletes declaring that there is greater glory, and that belongs to God.

Giving thanks to God for athletic ability and success is indeed honouring to God. Of course many non Christians also achieve Olympic success, and we watch their skill and strength with awe; the difference is, some athletes attribute their gifting to God.

Perhaps the best summary of a Christian perspective on the Olympics, comes from the American duo, Steele Johnson and David Boudia, who won silver in the synchronised diving:

“When my mind is on this and I’m thinking I’m defined by this, my mind goes crazy, but we both know that our identities are in Christ.” (Baudia)

“Knowing that my identity is rooted in Christ and not in the competition, whatever the result might be, I can just enjoy the experience.” (Johnson)

 

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dailymail.co.uk

 

Making the Olympic team is an amazing feat. Winning an Olympic medal is a dream only a few of the world’s best athletes will ever reach. Knowing Christ is greater again. Now, that is a perspective of reality which is truly worth contemplating.