By Ivy Merrill
I was listening to one of my favorite singers this week, Noel Paul Stookey, of Peter Paul, And Mary, singing a song byWilly Welch.
“ Saturday summers when I was a kid, We’d run to the schoolyard and here’s what we did. We’d pick out the captains and choose up the teams. It was always a measure of my self-esteem. ‘Cause the fastest, the strongest, played shortstop and first. The last ones they picked were the worst.”
Does this ring true for any of you? A time when you felt you really didn’t belong? You weren’t of any worth or value in the moment? Nobody would’ve missed you if you weren’t there?
For me, it was gym class, junior high, and high school gym class. When teams were chosen for whatever game we were to play that day. Of course the captains were chosen by the PE teacher, who always picked the best players. The rest of us stood on the painted gym floor line as the captain, sometimes advised by their already chosen teammates, scanned the line and called out a name. I hated it! I had no athletic prowess to bring to any team sport and it was demoralizing to wait on the line and see if this time I would be anything other than next to last or last. Not ever really chosen, just on a team by default.
Fast forward, 15 or more years. I was in my mid 20s the first time I volunteered to be a camp counselor at one of our American Baptist church camps in upstate New York. Pathfinder, aptly named after one of James Fenimore Cooper‘s novels. It was a beautiful place of Faith, friends, and fun in the forest along the shores of Glimmerglass Lake in Cooperstown, New York.
I had never gone there as a camper so I’m not sure if it was naïve or bold of me to willingly immerse myself in all the well-known, much-loved traditions of church summer camp and assume responsibility for a cabin full of junior high girls. Because I was a newbie at this, they were many surprises. But the most memorable of those happened during the last full day of camp at the much-anticipated, annual water carnival.
Everyone, campers and staff looked forward to the water carnival. It was a friendly competition composed of contests on the waterfront appropriate for energetic summer campers. The canoe swamp, the rowboat race, and the capstone event: the cracker relay! You know what the cracker relay is right?
Explain….. team of four, two on the lake shore, 2 on the dock, which marked the farthest corner of the swimming area. Participants, one at a time, swim from the shore to the dock, where they get a saltine cracker, eat it and whistle before their teammate can jump into the water, swim to the shore, and do the same thing, back-and-forth- swimming, eating a cracker, and whistling. First team with all back on the shore wins!
Imagine my surprise, when three of the staff approached me after lunch, the day before the carnival, to recruit me as their fourth team member. I laughed and told them they were ridiculous! They cajoled. I said no. But they had already decided.
It’s important for you to know at this point that all three of these staff members, two men and one woman, were each very good athletes. In fact, two of them had gotten their teaching degrees in physical education. The third one was an all-around athletic ace. What could they possibly want or need from me? But there was no wiggling out of it, no begging off, they chose me.
As surprising as that was, there was an even bigger surprise the day of the event. Moments before the cracker relay was to begin they told me I would swim the anchor leg. Great, I could embarrass myself and disappoint my new friends by losing the lead these three would inevitably create and turn in an under-achieving attempt, losing the relay for them.
The feelings of ineptitude, embarrassment from gym class washed over me as I stood on the shoreline waiting my turn. Oh how I wished my new friends knew the history of my athletic failures. I had repeated beginners tennis all 3 years of High School. My first attempt at bowling in junior high yielded a total score of 10. I was convinced if they had witnessed my sporting incompetence they would have chosen a more suitable teammate.
I don’t know how much time passed after that event, hours, days, weeks, maybe even months, before I realized, my new friends chose me not for any athletic ability I had. They chose me for me. Remarkably, surprisingly! That insignificant summer swim fun relay was more meaningful to me than anyone else there that day could have imagined.
For me, it was a newly opened door to being valued just for being me me. As I have thought about that cracker relay team, and decades have passed since, the verses we read from the gospel of John this morning, always come to mind. “You did not choose me, but I chose you. I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.” I was chosen by strangers who had become friends in less than a week, and that has become a powerful touchstone, a watershed moment (pun intended) reminding me: God chose me, without any qualifications or prior achievements, God chose me, in the words of Jesus, “to bear fruit, fruit that lasts.”
To be chosen is to be valued immeasurably. To be chosen, is to be compelled into a community where you belong, regardless of any flaw or shortcomings or inabilities. To be chosen for who God created you to be is life-giving, life-affirming, life-changing. All of you here this morning, all of us, have been chosen by the Lord of Light, to love one another, to love all God’s creatures, to live the way of Jesus so others know and believe they too are chosen. No one is left on the painted gym floor line, or any other line, alone. No one is a default member of the team.
If we do what Jesus’ asks of us, “that we love one another as we have been loved,” everyone will be welcomed at the table of love and life. Everyone will be valued on the only team that matters.