Honoring the Champions
January/February 2010
by Martin Marty
“She has her nerve!” That may be the first thing that comes to mind when you sit down to confront Sarah Henrich’s choice to regard Jesus as “champion” in Session 5 of her Bible study. The second thing should be, “And we are glad she has the nerve!” She has to know the risks she takes when she associates a military or athletic metaphor with our Savior. The risk is rewarded and, for us, rewarding. Thanks to it, we are able to add another concept to the way we think of Jesus, or of God’s activity, and our place in relation to both.
Why risk? That’s easy to see. She is leading us right up to the edge of the dictionary page, and, teetering, we could lose heart and back away. It is much safer to think of Jesus as Shepherd or Friend or Host than Champion.
If you are reading this in a Bible study group or planning to discuss it, for a warm-up exercise bring up the images of champion. “The champ”? Muhammad Ali? He may have been good at his profession, but it doesn’t match requirements for identification with Jesus. Champion? That means blood on the floor, pennants on the wall, trophies in the case, and swagger in the walk: “I’m Number One!”
I cannot resist saying that, while thanks to the Billie Jean Kings of the world and the opportunities offered women to become champions in sports even as they have long been such in other areas of life, it’s still natural to think of a champion as a macho, muscular-brute sort who pushes women off the floor and into the stands. Yet, here is Jesus as champion.
The idea is not wholly new, at least not to those who sing two Evangelical Lutheran Worship versions of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” “No strength of ours can match the enemy’s might, . . . But now a champion comes to fight, whom God himself elected. . .” The German original spoke of “the right man” at our side, the righteous Christ Jesus, who does what champions should do, “He holds the field victorious.”
Standing up, standing in
The minute you mention the Jesus of the Gospels you bring up images that are attractive and useful to everyone. He champions those who are weak, vulnerable, beat up, friendless, and defenseless. They get their strength and victory from the One who wins through his weakness, not by overpowering with muscle but in that very weakness. His doing that—and our getting to win with him—establish the ground rules for our measuring those we would think of as champions, our champions. Once we have them in mind, we can observe the special days of the Christian year in a way different from what those who love power would have surmised.
One way to do a reality check-up almost every day is to think about the people who make it into our church’s calendar. Some of them are called saints. Others are called a variety of names; for example, during these two months of January and February you find renewers, deaconesses, witnesses, missionaries, and martyrs. If you read their biographies you will see that they not only are champions who display many kinds of strengths, but—here is the verb—they champion others. To champion is to be skilled in standing in for, standing up for, and standing in back of those who need someone on their side.
The current January and February calendars provide plenty of options. Think of the all-star trio of champions (on January 27): Lydia, purveyor of luxury goods—“purple and fine linen”— the champion of those who bridge two worlds: evangelizing and marketing. Dorcas, remembered for her charities and bearing a name meaning roe or gazelle. Maybe she was a marathon-running champion? And Phoebe, Paul calls her “the radiant one” and trusts her with the rugged task of delivering the mail, one of his letters. Think of their strength and you can remind yourself why we do not need words like championess or championette. Champion does as well for women as for men.
I can’t turn the calendar page without mentioning another champion from nearer to our own time and place, Elizabeth Fedde. Never heard of this calendar girl for February 25? Homework assignment: Forget about celebrities that day and look her up! She came from Norway to the United States in 1883 and started a vocation of championing those whom so many deaconesses champion: those in need of food and cover, cheer and beauty and gospel, among immigrant settlements in New York, Minnesota, and Chicago. Her American mission wore her out, so she retired to Norway, after a dozen years, married and championed marriage there.
One Martin
That leaves among a score of other choices two men who, in anyone’s book, would merit the title “Champion of Champions,” Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr. One these Martin Luthers, as we all know, was Lutheran. The other, originally named Michael, had the good fortune to be at least informally renamed Martin. Look up that name, as your writer (this near-pacifist who also bears it) could not resist doing. You will find that it comes from the Latin for war-like. Some of the language the 16th-century reformer championed was indeed militant-sounding. Luther conceived of himself and his generation standing at a crossroads, and he had to block some traffic as he waved others on, rather strenuously.
Needless to say, as I have done at biography length, I am a champion of Martin Luther, but dealing up close with him teaches me what we learn from dealing with champions: none of them are perfect. I can picture that the households of Lydia, Dorcas, Phoebe, and Elizabeth sometimes reflected the weariness and even rage that being a champion can inspire. Luther has a lot to teach us about the gospel for all, but he is at best an ambivalent model for how Christians should deal with Jews, how the well-off relate to the poor peasants, and the rights of women. He and all the champions remind me of a line in a Pogo comic strip: “We have faults we have hardly used yet.”
Champion Luther had—and through discipline, practice, and grace, believers can also have—virtues they have hardly used yet. Being championed part of the way, part of the time in the journey of faith with Luther, we are gifted with homework to complete what he failed to do.
Two Martins
As for Martin Luther King, Jr., the issues are similar. Those of us who knew him were more than somewhat aware that his enemies in high places of state and church kept track of his every move. They let the world know both verifiable and unverifiable features of his life and work. One did not have to be very discerning to see how hard he had to work to restrain himself and not strike back in his nonviolent quest. To know of some of his moral lapses, which made it easy for those who hated him to tarnish his trophies and difficult for those who had to work hard to restore luster when it was obscured, is to be aware of human limits.
Both Martin Luthers were champions. It is their causes that keep generations returning to read about them, to watch older films and newer television, and to subject both of them to criticism in university classrooms. From such study we can learn how to use them to show that causes worth championing are not obsolete, stored away in the family Bible when someone closes the book on the stories of ancient champions.
So January and February give us two flawed but also exemplary champions named Martin. Some of the goals to which they aspired and for which they wanted to ready others went on parallel lines. Some they overlapped and usually they complemented each other. I would choose the concept of freedom as being central to both, though they each had a different focus. Those who want to go into training to compete with—compete? Forget it: I mean copy Luther could find a nice manual in his little book on freedom which begins (well, it finally gets around to beginning, on this edition’s page 53) with a paradox:
A Christian is lord of all, completely free of everything.
A Christian is a servant, completely attentive to the needs of all. (The Freedom of the Christian, translated and edited by Mark D. Travik, Augsburg, 2009.)
To encourage the would-be champions-of-freedom-in-training Luther cheers us on: “These two assertions appear to conflict with one another; however, if they can somehow be found to be in agreement, it would serve our purposes beautifully.” To cut through it all and eliminate any suspense, they are thus found and we are thus served.
Editor Tranvik helps us rookies along in a section on “Luther and ‘Freedom.’” It has little to do with economic or political freedom, but has often served those who had little or nothing of it: We do not “distinguish between friends and enemies or anticipate their thankfulness or ingratitude. Rather we freely and willingly spend ourselves and all that we have. . . .” Learning that qualifies us to try out for any races we will encounter.
Moved by champions
The modern champion of freedom, here of a somewhat but not completely different cast, is Martin Luther King, Jr. “Free at last . . . free at last. . . . thank God Almighty, free at last!” King was quoting, condensing, and paraphrasing what could have been heard—had others been willing to listen—from the voices of the enchained, flogged, and those robbed of dignity but not of dreams. King knew that new freedoms could only come, if not by war—something abhorrent to the nonviolent—then by politics at a time when the political order was more set to keep millions in slavery or segregation.
Because he had to use the threat, language, and techniques of boycotts, demonstrations, and strikes, many Christians wrote off King’s promise and his efforts as being beside the point to the Christian seeker of freedom—perhaps even a stumbling block. Never mind. King quoted the prophets and Jesus in such a way that people even outside the faith traditions had to be moved. He and his allies and followers did their championing in the churches and the streets, seeking to reach legislative halls and law-enforcement agencies until change began to come.
Those who champion causes and people in them have to be participants. When Martin Luther worked for freedom, many Germans yawned and sat it out when the cause came to them. Many of them later caught on to what was going on and profited from the work of champions.
Keep your eyes open, in nurseries and senior citizens’ homes, chapels and stadiums, campuses and markets, and you will see that not all of the faithful want the championing to go on; others do not understand it; but still others, moved by champions, become champions.
Observing those champions—named and unnamed, unknown and never to be known by the public and the powerful—is one way to respond to God’s call, Christ’s example, and the privileges that come with citizenship.
Martin E. Marty, an ordained ELCA pastor, is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and author of Martin Luther (Penguin).