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In September 2011, I got a weird email inviting me to speak to a sports team I'd never heard of about humility. I could tell from the email signature that they were, I don't know, maybe...
Good amateur, semi-professional, looked like, you know, a real design logo. But I had never heard of the Green Bay Packers. So I had to quickly text my son, who's sports mad, and ask him about it. I have the text in front of me, actually. Josh, check your email. I've been invited to speak on humility to the Green Bay Packers team. Are they any good? Dad.
He replied back pretty darn quickly, What? You are kidding. No, no. There are so many exclamation marks here. They won the Super Bowl last season and are winning so far this season. Can I come with you, please?
Well, he did. Two months later, Josh and I are in Green Bay talking to a team of, you know, fit, large blokes about humility the day before their game against Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It was literally my first viewing of American football, whether live or even on TV.
Suddenly, I was thrust into the universe of NFL, which is unlike anything I'd witnessed before. And I've seen Manchester United at Old Trafford. Nothing prepares you for the sensory overload that is NFL. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Every week, we'll explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
As an Aussie, I was raised on the fine tradition of mocking players who thanked the Almighty for their victory. I used to think to myself, but what about the losers? But I was thrown into the weird reality that religion is a huge part of professional sports in the U.S.,
I was seeing full-time chaplains, chapel services for players, prayers before the games, prayers after the games. It was really confronting. Then there's the Tim Tebow phenomenon, which occurred around the same time.
He was the quarterback of the Denver Broncos. He would often write Bible verses on his eye black. That's the black strips players would paint under their eyes to kind of reduce the glare of the stadium floodlights.
In a national championship game in 2009, Thiebaud wrote John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son and whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. That verse was the most Googled item of the day. More than 92 million searches, according to Time magazine.
You might also have heard of Tebowing, an internet meme craze that swept the world after Tebow knelt on one knee to pray beside the field after a win while his fellow players celebrated around him. Here's a reminder from ABC News in the States.
Even before Sunday, we knew Tebow was big, with fans making customized Jesus jerseys and posting pictures of themselves online Tebowing, imitating Tebow's signature on-field prayer position. But after Tebow engineered yet another impossible last-minute win with this 80-yard overtime pass, we now have solid evidence that the dude is genuinely huge.
Today, we're celebrating the start of the NFL season because I can now say I'm a huge fan of the sport. And I'm excited to be speaking to a bunch of people who are part of my favorite team, the Green Bay Packers.
We'll answer the question, are we right to be cynical about the displays of faith we see in our sports people today? Are they deceiving us and themselves about whether God really cares for football or baseball or cricket? We were just outside Lambeau Field and you can almost hear the preparations and excitement. I feel it, don't you? I'm excited. It's going to be a new season, exciting.
I'm still a fan. Even though I'm a part of it, I'm still a fan. So I'm sucked into the excitement energy. Does the city live from season to season? Do you lose the will to live come January? The city really does live on the Packers. And I've been here for now 15 years. But when I first came, they were in a losing drought. And I remember it was a losing season.
And I think it was the end of December. I think it had to be 20 or 30 below. We were playing Detroit of all teams, which they were terrible. The game meant nothing, and the stadium was packed. I'm talking to Troy Murphy, the chaplain of the Green Bay Packers, standing outside Lambeau Field, the home of the Packers in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Troy's been chaplain for the team for 10 years and he says the Green Bay Packers have had a strong Christian influence for a long, long time, at least since the era of its famed head coach, Vince Lombardi. Lombardi is so highly regarded in the NFL. His name is on the Super Bowl trophy and he was a devout Roman Catholic.
Yeah, there are many quotes about his faith, and one of them was, it was faith, family, then football. The irony is we joke around here, it actually is not that way. It's football, family, then faith. But really, Lombardi was a good Catholic up in this region. He would have been very devout. The Lord's Prayer was a kind of almost superstitiously part of the team ritual from his days. Tell me about that.
Yeah, it really was. I mean, and you would probably find most of the years here, they would still do the Lord's Prayer. It was the NFC Championship game against Chicago where I had actually did a chapel saying, it's an anthem of allegiance. And so don't pray it unless you know what you're hearing. So I basically taught the team, here's what you're saying. Here's the really the pledge of allegiance that you're giving.
God in that. And from that day forward, they were, I'd say they would budget their use of that and actually started to actually pray their own prayers. You're the man who removed the Lord's prayer from the Green Bay Packers. All right. Okay. We can move fast. As a rabbit's foot. Yeah. That lovely American phrase, a rabbit's foot. A rabbit's foot. Good luck, Charm.
the rubber band around your wrist, the finger tied here. That's Pepper Burris, the Green Bay Packers' long-time trainer, who's just announced he's retiring after 26 years with the Packers and 42 years working as a trainer in the NFL. Pepper tells me that along with the Lord's Prayer, there are plenty of rabbit's feet tied up in faith and sport. It's a little bit like how he saw faith during his time in the Vietnam War.
The common cliche is there's no atheist in a foxhole. When the bullets are flying, everybody's praying for safety and just get me out of this. I think some players, some people go to church, go to chapel, go wherever because, well, let me add a little bit of extra good luck to whatever I'm about to undertake. And I find when I go to chapel that
One, it's a learning experience, and it just helps to center me on what's important. I'm worried about what time the bus leaves and what I'm going to have for the pregame meal and do I have my bag packed right. And you just need to be centered. And it's not a good luck charm to me. It just reaffirms what's important to me, and that's my spirit life. ♪
Pepper has seen lots in his 42 seasons in the NFL, both with his first team, the New York Jets, where he worked for 16 years, and the Packers. He's been there for players' high moments and their lowest. But for Burris, no moment is quite so low as when Jets defensive lineman Dennis Bird slammed his head into the chest of another teammate in a game against Kansas City Chiefs.
Here's how ESPN reported the event. Ran onto the field, and he happened to call me Pepe. And he said, Pepe, I can't move my legs. I've broken my neck.
And I said, okay. And that okay was an entire paragraph where I said, okay, we've got you. We got you. We're taking care of you. And spine board, ambulance, lights and siren. He could not move anything from his neck down. And his wife, Angela, was in the ambulance with me. I was tending to some of his athletic equipment to get it off of him. And he was praying with his wife, Angela.
And it almost made me fall out of the ambulance when I heard him say, thank you, Lord Jesus, for putting me in this position because you know I'm strong enough to stand up under it. And even the fact he used stand is, I don't know if it's an oxymoron when you're paralyzed, but whatever the correct adjective is, but I will remember that day like it was yesterday. And
That was the November of my last year with the Jets, came out to Green Bay in 93. And that fall, he walked onto the field at the New York Jets. All of a sudden, a game that 10 seconds earlier was a game. You're talking life and death.
I've got an NFL ball signed by loads of the Green Bay Packers. Yes, Aaron Rodgers, Jordy Nelson and the rest, the coach. Just the fact that I have this on display in my office, you know, the big pose item sort of indicates how successful these guys are. But so much of being an athlete is on tenterhooks. Well,
One injury and a player can be out of the game for good. I look at the signatures on my ball just from a few years ago and some of these guys are gone. They're out of the spotlight completely. Even when it's not as serious as life and death, for these players, success or failure can hang on just one throw, one catch or a bad one.
If you've trained your whole life to be a defensive linebacker or a wide receiver or a kicker, who are you if you can't be that? Chaplain Troy Murphy says that sadly it's actually in the low moments, and there are many of them, where he feels best able to make a real difference. My role is I want to move them forward in their faith and sadly and yet I would say in a
a fruitful way, most of the adversity actually helps me in that dialogue. When a fellow is injured, I have some of the best conversations or when their future is unsure with contract or it's a losing season. I have other friends that are chaplains and when their teams were at their worst, ministry was at its highest. If you think about the life of these elite athletes, it's a very short part of their life.
And I would almost liken it to what I just taught last Sunday at our church, Jesus pushing the disciples into a boat and saying, get in this boat, and he's going to shove them into a storm. He knows the storm's coming. I almost view the life of these athletes storm-like and really refining what do they believe in, what do they trust in. And obviously some are really successful, most aren't.
And I think it's in those seasons of adversity where faith obviously surfaces in any of our lives when we hit troubles. And whether it's contracts or injury or they're not as good as they thought they were, all those things, I think, factor into really good faith stories or faith conversations. And that's where I think faith really hits a lot of these players.
And then, of course, there are the big highs. In the NFL, winning the Super Bowl is the ultimate prize. But what does it feel like? After the break, we speak to Mason Crosby, the kicker for the Green Bay Packers, who's actually been on the field for their win of the Super Bowl in 2011.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.
Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. In the ancient world, humility was not a virtue.
The idea that I would address gladiators in ancient Rome about humility is just bizarre. And yet this was the topic I was invited to speak on to the Green Bay Packers.
In the ancient world, part of the reason humility wasn't a virtue is that that world operated according to honour and shame. Scholars often think of the ancient world, at least the Mediterranean world, as an honour-shame culture. That means that honour is almost the greatest good that you have to pursue for your family, for your tribe, for your city, or even just individually. And shame
And shame is the greatest evil to be avoided at all costs and many decisions in life, political, military, moral, relational, family. They're decided along this axis of does it bring honor? Does it bring shame?
Even the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, who was more ethical than most in the ancient world, didn't see humility as a virtue. In fact, he says that honor and reputation are amongst the most pleasant things to a human being, mostly when you really are honorable, but it's still great when people think you are honorable and great.
This is the way the ancient mind thought. And they used the word humility in a kind of derogatory context. So you could be humble toward the emperors, of course, because they could kill you. It made sense. You are low before them. You could be humble before the gods, and you ought to be, because we are, in a sense, debased before the gods. But the idea that you should be humble toward an equal...
let alone a lesser, was unthinkable. So what happened? How did our culture come to prize humility and despise honour-seeking?
The answer has to do with the incredible influence of Jesus. Now that sounds like the sort of thing any Christian would say, Jesus gave us this. But this is pretty well attested in scholarship today, that the influence
Influence of Jesus on our culture gave us this virtue of humility. And it probably wasn't that Jesus said humble things. He did say humble things. He said stuff like, whoever wants to be great among you must be a servant. But historians think the real thing that triggered this humility revolution was his crucifixion.
Because crucifixion was the most shameful point in the Roman world. The idea that a great person would end up on a cross voluntarily just upends the whole Greek and Roman honor-shame system. But the Christians watched their master die on a cross, and they had to do some fancy thinking. They had to work out, does this mean Jesus wasn't as great as they really thought he was?
Or does this mean we have to actually reinterpret greatness to include the willingness to lower yourself for the sake of others?
Well, that's what they did. And they suddenly started to use the word humility, tapenos in Greek, to refer to a positive virtue, a decision to lower yourself for others, not a kind of being forced down low. And perhaps the first text in Western history to make this apparent is in Philippians 2.
It says,
Here it's pretty clear that this word tapenos, this word that usually meant to be crushed, is now used for Jesus' own decision to give himself for others. And the Apostle Paul, who wrote this letter, is playing on that idea and he says your attitude should be the same and therefore you should humble yourself before others. By the end of the first century...
many people are beginning to use the word humble yourself before others. By the end of the 5th and 6th centuries it's spread out so that even secular folks are talking about the virtue of humility. And now it doesn't matter whether you're an atheist or a Christian most of us think when you're great but humble it's beautiful. That is just one small impact of the life of Jesus on Western culture. You can press play now.
Hello? Mason, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. How are you? Yeah, really well. Mason Crosby is now in his 13th year in the NFL, and he's the kicker for the Packers. When I speak to him, the NFL season is just days away, and he's been in training camp with the rest of the team. Tonight, the Packers play their last preseason game against the Kansas City Chiefs. Oh, I'm speaking to you on game day, am I?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, we got a game tonight. The Green Bay Packers have won the Super Bowl on two occasions, most recently in 2011. I didn't have any of the excitement that went with that because I only got to know them the year following. But Mason Crosby was on the field for the Super Bowl, and he says it's his absolute career highlight. And then winning a Super Bowl, being part of that,
that team, you know, the moment when we won it was so special, the lead up to it, the, the week of, and the, you know, the pregame and the halftime show and like all the stuff around the, the Superbowl is extreme and, and kind of indifferent and, um, you know, everything just seems to be heightened. But once you get into the game, um, you,
It just kind of, you settle into playing football. You start realizing every game in the NFL, regular season or not, is big and important, and you have to go out and play well. So within those lines, the game itself didn't feel, like, bigger than any other moment. But...
the sideline, the crowd, the entertainment, all the other stuff kind of surrounding the game was more extreme than any other game I've ever played. That moment on the field when the confetti falls and like we stopped them on fourth down and the game was over and you just kind of realize you just won the Super Bowl and you're
Then my family coming out onto the field. My son was six months old at the time, so my wife's son came out on the field. I got to carry him around and get those pictures and those images of just us
Just full of joy and excitement for what we had accomplished. That one is probably... That's definitely the highlight and the biggest high moment of my career, for sure. The pinnacle of sport is the win. And that's where we'll get most of those players who give glory to God. But Pepper Burris isn't convinced that's the right way to display faith in sport. Some people...
just gets so wrapped up in the fact that it's just a game. And it has no eternal value. When people pray about winning and losing, there's Christians on both teams. There's non-Christians on both teams. There's people praying on both teams. And I like to say, God really doesn't care who wins or loses.
God tends to care what you're doing with the talents that you've been given, and are you using them essentially to please the Creator? I mean, if you're wasting your talents, your money, your gifts of hospitality, you're cheating someone. Mainly what I pray for and what I ask God to kind of protect on the field, safety, things like that. I guess in my mind, I don't always pray. I don't pray to...
get a win. I pray for safety. I pray for, you know, the, the ability to, to go out on the field and, and give my, my all, you know, and to, to be free in that. And those are, those are the prayers that, uh, that I think all elite athletes, uh, who are Christians, um, you know,
Especially here on our team, whenever guys pray before the game, I hear them praying for that, praying for safety, praying for not only our team but the other team to be healthy and not have injuries. And then just praying to play at the –
what God's given us talent-wise and the ability to play this game, to go out there and do it to the best of our ability. So those things are never above praying for, and I think God answers those prayers all the time. Mason Crosby did a lot of praying in 2012. He tells me about one particularly hard season when nothing seemed to be going right for him on the field. 2012 was...
by far my my worst uh my worst year percentage was it was a it was a strange year it was a year where I didn't feel you know I didn't feel bad over the ball like I didn't feel bad when I got my stance and then it was it just uh I went through a stretch I think I missed a field goal in seven or eight straight games something like that it was it was craziness but but
But we were a good team. We kept winning games. A bad day at the office for Mason Crosby is a bit different from the rest of us. He was still making 63% of his kicks, which is not too good for a professional kicker. But, you know, in academia, that's a pretty good pass. Still, he's one of the only players to have scored well over 1,000 points in the NFL.
Some of the kicks weren't really like meaningful kicks. We were up by two touchdowns or something and I'd miss a goofy field goal late in the game or in the middle of the game. So that year was just, was
was so strange and you know all the the bad stuff going on on the field where I just could not find a way to to be consistent and and make all my kicks uh led to something that uh that that I'm so thankful for all the time is just uh just a different perspective for this game and uh and how I view view all those moments
that year, you know, kind of changed my life. I was living, living on performance of like what I did on the field. So it was like everything, you know, hinged on what my performance was on the football field. Um, instead of really living in, in relationship with Christ, living in relationship with my family, my friends, and then, um,
Really treating this as a job, something I'm privileged to get to go out and do and enjoy. All the fun things that go with it and being a better teammate and doing all that. I felt like I became a better teammate. Through that trial of missing kicks on the field, I grew so much in my personal life and in my professional life.
I have no doubt there's always going to be adversity and there's always going to be moments that don't go my way. And through my faith, I'm able to just kind of move on to the next moment and see the beauty in it.
Moments like what Mason is describing are where Chaplain Troy Murphy earns his stripes. He understands the pressure these guys are under. He himself is a former U.S. Marine. And he understands how important it is that these guys set their sights on the right type of success. I think the hardest thing about faith for them is to make it the center of
versus football and their career being the center. If we can get that to be the center, then football becomes a joy, a gift, a privilege, something that God gave. But if faith just sits out there in the peripheral, and it's more of an addition to what's center to their life, and I think that's the hardest thing about Christianity. ♪
Football players are just like us then. They're just figuring out how God works in their lives. They're just doing it on the field instead of the elevator or the office or walking to the next meeting. So should we be sceptical about faith in sport? I'm not so sure.
Perhaps it's more about having fewer expectations about the way our sporting heroes express their faith in public. Because with guys like Troy and Pepper in the background helping them along the way, they're just like us. They're a work in progress. Somehow, someway...
God through me can put a pebble, a spiritual pebble in their shoe that just irritates to the point that they have to actually take that off and confront it. And I would hope for that. And even if that means they don't have a good career, if they can find Christ in the middle of that, oh, that's a win.
Papyri one week, the Packers the next. I hope you're enjoying Undeceptions. Have you got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them and we'll answer them or try in upcoming episodes. Leave your question as a voicemail by calling 02 9870 5678.
That's 02 9870 5678. Or head to undeceptions.com and while you're there, check out everything related to this episode and the others. And sign up for the Undeceptions newsletter to get access to bonus content and plenty more from each episode. We'll be back next Monday talking science and the cosmos with my favourite Irishman, Professor John Blennings. See ya.
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So this is episode two of Undeceptions and we're doing the theme set. Take one in three, two. Suddenly I was thrust into the universe of NFL, which is unlike anything I'd witnessed before. And I've seen Manchester United at Old Trafford. Nothing prepares you for the sensory overload that is NFL. No!
You know, I don't think we need to do this.