Be careful who you worship

London is preparing for the Olympics. 

That is the headline of the day.  I am planning to watch the opening ceremonies and to be amazed and amused by the spectacle as well as gratified to see the fine young women and men who are gathered together to do their best as individuals and as teams, on behalf of themselves and their native lands.  There are few events as dramatic, joy-filled, impressive, poignant and amazing as the Summer Olympic Games. 

Compare and contrast if you will the sad news of late out of the central Pennsylvania community that I called home for the four years I was an undergraduate at Penn State. 

Any Nittany Lion is saddened beyond description by the revelations of foul deeds hushed up or hidden away.  We have heard the Freeh Report, in which the former FBI director indicts President Graham B. Spanier, Senior Vice President‐Finance and Business Gary Schultz, Athletic Director Timothy Curley and the late head football Coach Joe Paterno for showing "no concern" about the then alleged and now proven victims of Jerry Sandusky, the one time assistant football coach.  (The account of the events covered in the report is sickeningly chilling to read).  We have shed many a tear for those young boys who were horribly abused.  And we have shed more than a few tears for the students, professors, administrators and townspeople in and around State College whose good and excellent work has been wrongly tainted by proximity to (without any association with) a few very bad apples. 

We have seen Joe's statue taken down. We have seen the football team's record revised dramatically.  We have read about the financial consequences, the NCAA sanctions and decrees.  You will have your opinion on that and our minds will perhaps run along the same lines in many ways.  Some of what could have been done or should have been done, the Freeh Report makes clear.  Some, we may never know. 

London.  Penn State.  As in any other human pursuit, in amateur sports we experience the good, the bad, and everything else in between. 

We live in a broken world and we cannot fix it on our own.  We need the healing, wholeness and hope that can be found only when we place our lives into the hands of the Living One, who came that we might have live and have it abundantly.

I fear that something of Louis Freeh's report will be lost amid the other dramatic scenes from Happy Valley.  His report cautioned against the decades-long cult of hero worship with regard to sports figures.  I believe that he or someone close to him must be a true Presbyterian, mindful of John Calvin's teaching that while we can think of and name many kinds of sins, there is really only one sin: Idolatry.  If we do not have God at the center of our lives, that place is not "empty", it is taken by something or someone less than God. 

We have seen it in sports as we have in so many other realms, business, politics, academics, the entertainment industry, yes, and in the church, where people put a person in the place where God ought to be--center stage, on a pedestal, as the be-all-and-end-all of their adulation.  We all could mention the names of those who have been celebrated for their gifts in any particular field to the point of idolatry.

I find that the Second Hevetic Confession is helpful here, in speaking of these higher forms of human endeavor (what we might call the arts and sciences, but what the confession calls the arts):

"UNDERSTANDING OF THE ARTS. For God in his mercy has permitted the powers of the intellect to remain, though differing greatly from what was in man before the fall. God commands us to cultivate our natural talents, and meanwhile adds both gifts and success. And it is obvious that we make no progress in all the arts without God’s blessing. In any case, Scripture refers all the arts to God; and, indeed, the heathen trace the origin of the arts to the gods who invented them."

Be careful who you worship.

As we turn away from the tragedy of Penn State, and look instead to the  triumphs of London, may we remember that any of the gifts we see on any field of play are not "self made" but God-given.  And thereby, keep those who do well in the proper perspective in our own estimation, as having been endowed by their Creator with these gifts, and not the source of them. 

My fellow alumni from PSU and all who live in Centre County might do well to keep that in mind, too.