A few stats to help you understand the giant that U.S. Women’s Soccer is on the international stage:

• Since 1991 (the first official Women’s World Cup) the United States has won 4 World Cups (1991, 1999, 2015, 2019). 
• In the years they didn’t win, they have one 2nd place finish and three 3rd place finishes. 
• The next closest country is Germany with 2 World Cup titles and 3 top-4 finishes. From there it tapers off relatively quickly. 
• The U.S. also boasts two of the top-4 goal scorers of all time and holds the record for most goals scored in World Cup matches at 138. 

There are other individual accolades, as well, but this gives you an idea of just how long the U.S. Women’s National Team has been the team to beat internationally. They are, without question or debate, the juggernaut of the women’s game.

At least, for now. Because, this year none of that mattered. They came into the tournament with a little less swagger than usual, failed to impress the critics in their first 3 matches (even though they played well enough to advance to the knock-out stage), and were eliminated on penalty kicks against Sweden in the wee hours of the morning, U.S.-time. (The southern-hemisphere location and time zone seemed to poetically speed up the result. No last-minute comeback.) Just their earliest exit ever from the tourney.

What surprised me the most, however, and quite honestly usually does when it comes to sports journalism, was how critical much of the media was over the loss. Men. Women. Americans. Internationals. Other coaches. Even some of the American players themselves. It didn’t matter. The common refrain was one of shock, almost disgust. Megan Rapinoe, who missed one of the penalty kicks, said afterward, “It felt like a sick joke.” Others looked to rationalize it by assigning blame or finding excuses where they could. “Heads will roll,” they said. I admit, it was easy for me to join in with the critics.

But these kinds of responses are also short-sighted. Yes, we just saw Goliath collapse to the ground, dead. But we’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again. What exactly are our long-term expectations for this program? What’s good enough? 

I don’t claim to be an elite soccer mind here, but 4 World Cup titles is pretty good, right? I don’t think this U.S. women’s team has anything to really hang their heads about, at least as a program. What else is there to prove? 

Well, it turns out this stuff is more ingrained than we might like to think. It’s a big part of how we, as fallen human beings, try to make sense of the world. Success often has less to do with getting to the top and more to do with staying on top. And even though that’s an impossible standard for anyone, we scratch our heads looking for the reasons for such untimely and surprising falls from grace. “There must be a rational reason for the imperfection, right? What small tweaks can we make in order to right the ship?”

Christian theology says to all of this that high expectations are actually what cause us to fall. The Apostle Paul says in Galatians 5, if you let yourselves live under a part of the law, then you are obligated to obey the whole law. If you place yourself under the burden of doing in order to be (and stay) saved, then what’s required is nothing less than lawful perfection: “The one who does these things will live by them” (Lev 18:5). And now when we read the law today, it continues to shout at us from the top of the moralistic stat sheet, “Come up here!” Or worse: “Stay up here! Don’t lose your footing!” … when in fact we’re always in a state of slipping.

Solomon calls this a “chasing after the wind” in Ecclesiastes 1 — a type of treadmill existence that never really gets us anywhere. Josh Cohen, in his article The Perfectionist Trap, says, “Something about being human makes it difficult to feel that we have done, or are, enough. We are unwilling to extinguish the hope that, one day, we will be recognized as exceptional.” And so we keep running. What we need is something (or someone) who comes apart from the law and all of its trappings. Instead of chasing the wind, we need the Wind to chase us, save us, and tell us that we actually don’t have to get anywhere at all in order to be whole.

And that’s really where all of this is heading: the fact that it’s never enough (that we’re never enough) drives us to stop looking inward and to start looking outward. Grace alone speaks a word of acceptance to both winners and losers alike because it’s given to us completely apart from human merit, and only through the one who became a “sick joke” on a wooden cross for us, dying in our place, and loving us to the uttermost. If God could become that low for us, then maybe there’s hope for us chronic-looker-uppers, and hope that the voice from the top of the stat sheet might grow fainter and fainter with time.

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It was here, when I first learned that practice doesn’t make perfect. Instead, it simply makes more of whatever it is you’re practicing. If you’re practicing something incorrectly, you will become better at doing said thing, incorrectly.

Bad practice leads to bad results.

The principle is nearly universal but it’s especially true when it comes to reading the Bible – plainly seen in the third chapter of the gospel of John. The chapter begins by getting acquainted with a guy named Nicodemus and his resume: he’s a top dog from an authority standpoint, is well practiced in religious traditions, and knows his way around the Old Testament.

He comes to Jesus at night perhaps hoping to get a professional edge over his peers or maybe to simply engage in some intellectual sparring. In a sentence, Jesus responds with what may appear to be a riddle to be solved:

“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again”

Puzzled, Nicodemus wonders how someone can possibly be born again when he or she is old? Nicodemus’ response seems straightforward enough, perhaps a bit naïve, but it, in fact, exposes a lifetime of bad practice.

After a brief back and forth on the necessity of being born again, Jesus humbles Nicodemus with a simple question. Don’t miss this.

He says, “you are Israel’s teacher, and do you not understand these things?”

Any who teach Israel do so from one textbook: the Old Testament. Jesus reads and teaches from THE SAME textbook. It’s based on this Old Testament that Jesus challenges his conversation partner’s teaching credentials because he’s failed to understand its core message. Imagine a pilot receiving a license to fly without ever having been inside a plane – he has the title, but it means nothing! He’s never been in the sky, never taken anyone anywhere. Just a person with a piece of paper.

Like many of us, Nicodemus approaches the Scriptures as a manual for what God expects of him. It’s too easy to miss this — look again: God says the way to see His kingdom is to be born again, Nicodemus responds as if it’s part of his job description: “how do I make this happen? How could anyone possibly do that?”

A lifetime of forcing the Scriptures onto a to-do list, has caused Nicodemus to make even this message about himself and what he is supposed to do to maintain favor with God. No one plays a role in their own birth. Of course not!! When we seek to make the Bible about us, we work against the grain of the story God has been telling for thousands of years. Functionally, we form ourselves into little Nicodemi (plural? seems right…) — deaf and dull to God and his word of life.

But Jesus isn’t here to belittle Nicodemus, or anyone for that matter. Instead, he’s teaching that the Bible is not about us. It’s not a life improvement plan, a to-do list, or a religious manual with a set of DIY instructions.

The main character of the Bible and your life is not you — it’s God! This is good news meant to be received. It’s an invitation out of our incessant “I need to do more” feeling. It clears away the fog of our murky understanding of God and helps us see that he is in the business of giving, not expecting; revealing, not hiding. After speaking from behind a veil for thousands of years, God brings unexpected clarity through the person of Jesus, who is the ultimate Word of God. His substitutionary death is the climax of human history, inviting all to see and say back to God, “Now you are speaking clearly.”

If bad practice leads to bad results then the opposite is true. When we take up the Bible, the best outcome is to behold the main character — the one who was lifted up in our place — literally brought to an end that we might be born again. The story is all about him.

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And even if the fastest does win the race, the reason for their victory is, well, complicated. I was recently watching Tiger Woods’ hall of fame induction speech and you could tell he struggled to clearly articulate how much of his success was due to his mother and father’s sacrifice and how much was due to his hard work. Between truisms about working more than everyone else and earning your way in this world, Woods fought off tears describing how much had been given to him by his parents. Malcolm Gladwell observes this phenomenon in his book Outliers:

People don’t rise from nothing. We owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.

Success has many layers and many inconsistencies. More is given (vs. earned) than we sometimes like to admit.

In the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon disseminates all of this. He says: “I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent … There once was a city with a poor but wise man who in his wisdom saved the city from a powerful king who came against it.”

Ecclesiastes is more interested in how we relate to God than athletic competitions, but it isn’t disinterested in the latter either. Instead, it leads us to ask: what do these upsets and surprises teach us about deeper spiritual matters — even about God himself? Solomon essentially shows us in proverbial form the principle of being saved by something outside of us rather than a strength that gets pushed out from within. If we were made right before God by our hard work then we would expect to see that idea reflected by the strongest always winning. But, we don’t. So there must be something else — other than karma, hard work, and tit-for-tat spirituality — that rules the universe.

As we approach the New Testament, we see that churches are, by God’s design, communities of impoverished losers to show that something other than our prowess must be the ultimate determiner of who is reconciled with God, namely the love and grace of Jesus Christ. In the end, it’s his nail-pierced hands, not our calloused hands, that matter. In fact, that’s the final twist here. Jesus in his de facto “slowness” won the greatest race of all time. He’s the man in Ecclesiastes who in his cruciform poverty saved the town from the onslaught of the enemy. By his stripes we are healed.

Maybe this is truly why we all love watching a 15 seed beat a 2 seed, because whether we realize it or not we are cheering for the gospel. Though the law says “Work harder or you’re out!”, grace upsets the score and tells us the last will be first. To use Gladwell’s term, it’s the “hidden advantage” that we owe everything to, so that no one may boast in themselves, but that all might boast in the Lord.

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This post originally appeared on mbird.com

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