Champion

When it feel like livin's harder than dyin'
For me givin' up's way harder than tryin'

One of my favorite sermon illustrations was told by pastor Simon a few years ago back in our GracePoint days. It was about a slightly obnoxious work friend who was also an obsessive sports fanatic. The day after his team won some important match, he would come into work wearing the team colors and loudly boast, “We won! We’re the champions!”

Everyone’s got a friend like this. It would be a perfectly fair response to ask, “We? What do you mean, we? What did you do to help your team win?”

You don’t have to be a sports fanatic to talk this way. “Just when our defense got good this year, our offense starts sucking.” Excuse me, in what way is it your defense? Did you draft key players? Draw up strategy and plays? Train and coach the players? Did you fill any wax cups with gatorade on the sidelines during a game?”

Why is it that fans of a certain sports team are allowed to count their team’s wins as their own? They don’t just celebrate the victories, they own and share in them.

Of course, we all kind of intuitively get why. The answer is embedded in a word that is ubiquitous in just about every sport: Champion. These days, the word “champion” basically just means, “person or team who won so much that they basically beat everyone and so we gave them a trophy so that everyone will know that they are the best”. But in the olden days (and on GoT), the meaning of champion was more technical; it was a person who fought on behalf of someone else or a group of people. Your champion does the work, but if they win, you get the victory.

In a way, my team is actually my team. Even before they win the championship, they are already my champions in the sense that their wins are my wins; their losses, my losses. That’s the whole point of sports. And that’s why sports fandom is the perfect illustration for the deeply Reformed idea of federal headship. It’s probably one of the last vestiges of communitarian thinking in our hyper-individualistic culture. There aren’t many other places in our lives where we allow our identity and our fate to be shaped so deeply and radically by someone else. As a native New Yorker from Queens, I bear the shame of being a Mets fan. And now, so do all the Wongs, because a month after we got married, I took Jo to Modells and made her and Benita and Brendan all buy David Wright jerseys, because Jo said to me, “Your people will be my people, and your baseball team my baseball team.”

Jesus Christ is our champion. He superceded our previous, sucky, fruit-eating, serpent-listening-to federal head, and now we share in his fate, not Adam’s. “Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people.”

“We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”

This is the theological concept known as “Union with Christ”. John Calvin made it a central concept in his theology, because to him it is the explanation for why faith in Christ = eternal salvation. How is it that God can give us eternal life on the basis of our trust in Jesus? Or another way to put it is, how could it be that someone else could take the punishment for the sins that I committed? Because through our spiritual union with Christ, we share in all of Jesus’ victories. So when he died for sins, he died for our sins as well. When he had victory over death in his resurrection, that’s our victory too.

Faith in Christ is not what saves; it is the instrument by which the benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection are imputed to us. It’s how we get to share in the spoils of Jesus’ victory. This also helps explain, by the way, why faith itself isn’t works. Faith doesn’t get you anything; it’s just trust that Jesus did all the work to get you everything.