OPINION: The potential of celebrating people like Snoop Dogg at the Olympics

I loved watching clips of the Olympics this year. Who emerged as the star of the games, at least from the perspective of the United States? Snoop Dogg. He was everywhere, cheering on the athletes like a grandad at a peewee football game. I admire the fresh perspective he brought to the competition. His presence at the games led me to reflect on our call to embody God’s love, “to be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood” as my church prays during our Communion liturgy. Yes, I know that Snoop Dogg enjoys the fruits of God’s creation differently than is legal in Tennessee. Yes, I know that his vocabulary includes words people (usually) don’t utter in front of a pastor. Yet I also know that his presence at the Olympics modeled incarnational love like nothing I can remember.

Toward the end of the letter to the Ephesians, Paul instructs believers to be kind, tenderhearted, to walk in love. Our greatest capacity to love arises when we choose empathy, when we choose to experience as best we can someone else’s world. Jesus was the ultimate model of that, choosing to empty himself and become human, to become like us to understand our temptations and our weaknesses. What the scriptures don’t say, but what follows logically, is that Jesus also experienced joy and admiration for the awesome things humans do. It takes imagination, but can we not picture Jesus joining in the games of children as he walked through towns? Can we imagine Jesus closing his eyes in rapture when someone cooked him something delicious? Or marveling at the teamwork of a group of fishermen bringing in their catch?

I picture Jesus’ unrecorded interactions among humanity looking much like Snoop Dogg at the Olympics. He entered the world of the athletes to help the rest of us understand their lives a little better. Fencing, judo, badminton, swimming; he was all over the events. He tried many of the sports and tried to understand the athletes’ experiences. He swam with Michael Phelps. He put on a coat, boots, and breeches for the dressage competition. He met up with unlikely but longtime friend Martha Stewart who patiently explained French cuisine while he reacted like a 10-year-old, eating bread and picking the bacon off the salad while accidentally-on-purpose tossing the escargot off his fork. Was it an act? Maybe. Some of the athletes’ families reported that he was genuinely interested in their stories. Performance or not, I know that he modeled a celebration of people that I can’t remember in any of the recent Olympics. It was a far cry from the hyper critical commentary we’ve seen parodied on Saturday Night Live. It was delightful fun.

What do we Christians look like if we put away all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice? We might look like a child at heart rapper running amok in Paris. I know that my own witness has fallen short of that. I know that I’ve been so fearful of sin-by-association that I’ve forgotten that I asked for God’s help to be the Body of Christ to the world. Our attempts to share the good news have started, not with embodying God’s love, but with judgment. Most of us who’ve lived in this region have experienced well-meaning but ineffective attempts to bring us to repentance. Tracts, signs, street preachers, and family members with good intentions will speak truth forgetting that it’s supposed to be spoken in love.

I personally have zero experience that bad news as a starting place is an effective way to share my faith. “Bad news with an escape clause is not good news,” as Dr. Heather Lear from the Foundation for Evangelism says. That strategy worked to call people back to faith in revival movements, but it’s not effective at sparking new faith.

I propose a different strategy. I propose that we engage with the people around us with curiosity and delight at what they’re doing well, as cheerleaders and encouragers who embody the same care and concern that Jesus has for all humanity. I propose we conduct ourselves a little more like Snoop Dogg at the Olympics. It’s a more effective witness than leading with judgment, and it’s certainly more fun.

Mary Beth Eberle is the pastor at Grace UMC Jackson and the Director of the Wesley Foundation at UM Lambuth. Contact her at freerangepastors@gmail.com.