Lots of people notice that I’m tall. After they notice this, they often ask, “Did you play basketball?”

I did! But I wasn’t very good. I was not coordinated. It was time spent away from watching movies and playing video games. It wasn’t until 6^th grade when this kid showed up next door to visit his grandma. His name was Brandon, he was my age, and he LOVED basketball. Every Saturday, I knew he was there when the sound of dribbling started. I liked Brandon, and the price of hanging out and talking to him was playing basketball. So I did, and I got marginally better.

I played through sophomore year of high school but quit because I didn’t like the coach and the politics of high school sports and didn’t want to face that I wasn’t a starter. My ego couldn’t take it. I am not a confident person. I’m an OVER-confident person. I try to hide behind this inflated ego and over-state the case. I do this to hide the sense of not being worthy or good enough or frankly that I’m an imposter. To keep my sense of “I’m a good basketball player” my friends and I started a YMCA rec league team. We were okay. We averaged about .500. Not winning, not really losing either. One game my senior year I had a rare great game. I went up for an offensive rebound and found that I had an open layup wait… no. I was over the rim! I threw down my first dunk. A few plays later, I landed funny, my right ankle popped and that was the end of my high school rec league career. Broken ankle.

The next year in college, I signed up for a leg study. I’d get paid $500 to lift weights. I like my stick-figure frame and never lifted in my life, but for $500, sure! I did leg presses and extensions and squats until I couldn’t walk. After the study, I was feeling pretty good. My friend invited me to play some basketball and so I did. I had a break away steal and I ran down the court, wide open and I jumped up and sure enough… my second, and what turned out to be my final, dunk!

Irish people weren’t meant to dunk. We were meant to sing in pubs. Slovaks weren’t meant to fly, we were meant to walk up and down hills with our thick legs. Put them together, and you get me: the perfect combination of ankle breaker. After I sprained my other ankle on that second dunk.

I played basketball here and there, but my interest waned. In 2011, Kate and I took up running. We’ve been doing 5ks ever since. I like running, it’s a full-body prayer. I can get out and see nature, observe my community, and exercise. And I exercise so I can eat! I love to eat! We should sit down sometime and talk over lunch or dinner, it’s my favorite thing to do! I’ll listen to podcasts on a run or think of sermons. Sometimes it’s just to revisit music I like and spend 30 minutes on a task I know I can accomplish in under a decade. A lot of my work at church is done in the slow process of soul formation and healing. The timeline for such work isn’t really set, usually the work is in decades. Don’t get me wrong, this ministry job is a good gig if you can get it but sometimes it’s nice to start something you can see the results of shortly after you’re done.

All this leads us to last February. I’m at a minister’s gathering and this guy, Pastor Doug looked at me and said, “Hey! You’re tall! Do you play basketball?”

“I did!” I said. “But now I’m more of a runner.”

Pastor Doug invited me to join a group that plays Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at the Rec Center at 6:30 a.m. The guys were all older and just loved playing basketball. I said I’d try it.

As I was walking in, I pumped myself up. I can run 3 miles in under 30 minutes. In many ways, I’m in better shape than when I was in high school. I got this. These are old guys, I can run the floor. Let’s see what happens! Let’s get pumped! Let’s go get ‘em! And the first game, I was all over the court. I was running all over. Jumping around. I scored 5 of our 6 points of our game to 7 but we lost by one. Pretty great first outing for the first week. “I’ll see y’all on Wednesday! Thanks for the invitation again.” Doug looked at me funny and said, “Yeah man, we play loser’s bracket. We go for at least an hour.”

What?! That next game… I was dragging. I could barely pick my feet up. I was moving in slo-mo. I didn’t take as many shots and missed the ones I did. It was awful. I went home after the second game and was sore for the next 4 days.

I called my buddy Jon. “DUDE! I played lights-out the first game! I couldn’t even make a second game. I can run 5 miles! What’s up with this?!”

Jon calmly replied, “It’s a whole different set of muscles man. When you run, you don’t start and stop. You don’t go side-to-side. You’re going at your own pace, not trying to catch up with someone else. Entirely different set of muscles.”

Oh yeah… I was confident in that answer. It sounded and felt true. Over the course of the next months, I would continue to be sore. But I got stronger, got some great ankle braces, and I can now last the full hour, sometimes playing for another half-hour past. The soreness isn’t there like it was. What I have found is that I still struggle with the offense. I’m confident playing defense. I love to rebound and block shots. I also like to score, but some days I’ll miss layups. Some days NOTHING is going in, and it’s frustrating. I’m not confident in that area of my game, never have been, but maybe someday I will be.

I’m playing against former college players. Great high school starters. I’m playing against the gym class heroes. I’ve had to grow into my confidence that I belong on the court. Like this past week, I couldn’t hit a barn. Sometimes I feel like an imposter.

Imposter Syndrome is something Amy Cuddy writes about in her book, “Presence.” Imposter syndrome is the deep and sometimes paralyzing belief that we have been given something that we didn’t earn and don’t deserve and at some point, we’ll be exposed.[1] “Imposterism,” Cuddy writes, “causes us to over think and second guess. It makes us fixate on how we think others are judging us… We’re scattered worrying that we’ve underprepared, obsessing about what we should be doing, mentally reviewing what we said five seconds earlier, fretting about what people think of us and what it will mean for us tomorrow.”

Someone who I think might also struggle with imposter syndrome is King David. Psalm 27 sounds like the familiar language of someone over-stating their confidence. David shouldn’t be king. He’s a shepherd! He has no idea how to govern, he could barely control his flock. It’s why he was out that day when the prophet Samuel came to his house. All his brothers were in because they had successfully gotten all their sheep in their pens for lunch. But David was out struggling. So when Samuel looked at the bunch and said, “No. There is no future king here! Are these all your sons?” Jesse asks where David is, the passed-over brothers roll their eyes and go out to get the youngest who can’t even get his sheep in the right pen.

David was confident in two things. The first thing he was confident in was his skill with a sling. He didn’t have much interest in getting the sheep penned up, but he did like fighting wolves. He would practice for hours on his shot. He would sling rock after rock. There was something about the ritual. Something about the craft. Something that sang in his soul when his body met up with what he was feeling and he launched that rock and it hit right where he wanted it to go. It was like he tapped into a deeper magic than just basic physics. His soul would sing! Oh how his soul would sing.

And speaking of singing, he was confident in music. He loved playing the harp and lute and singing songs to his sheep who weren’t really impressed.

When he was brought forth and anointed to be king he thought it was a sick joke his brothers were playing on him. But it wasn’t. This launched him into fighting with his best friend’s dad, King Saul. There were cat and mouse games with him. And there was that one time… they put him in the armor of a solider and they put him out in front of their army to face down a giant. Goliath was a mountain of a man, the champion of the rival Philistines who could break men in half. His power renowned. His name known. GOLIATH! Now that was a warrior!

Yet David knew he wasn’t that kind of warrior. There was no way he could beat Goliath at the same game, he would have to switch it up. He would have to do something other than the same old psalm and dance. So he took off all the armor. He knelt down and found the right stone. He had confidence in his shot. He stepped up, and he made it. There have been plenty of shots in our day and age. like in big pro basketball games.[2] Then start here: We’re still talking about those shots. And we’re still talking about David’s shot a few millennia later. David’s shot is the one that all other stories of shots are unconsciously linked to.

But making a shot with a sling isn’t the basis for a form of government. And maybe David felt that on some level. That’s what leads him to pen these words we recited today. He’s overstating to cover up his imposter syndrome. But as David aged and grew into his role as king, I imagine he would look back on this psalm and say, “Covering up my imposter syndrome… yes… And I was also naming where my confidence comes from. I have to place it in the Lord. That deeper magic beyond just physics. That magic I tap into when I’m shooting around with my sling. That confidence I feel when writing music and playing the harp and lyre.”

Maybe you have such a space. A place where you don’t feel like an imposter. A hobby that you can do that all the thoughts drain away and you can just… BE. I have heard from some of you that knitting and quilting are the hobbies where you feel yourself. For others, it’s reading a good book where you can just fall into the story. For others still, it’s golf or working out or some sport. A place of confidence where you know you’re supposed to be there. Maybe that’s what David is trying to put into words today as well.

I’ve struggled with self-esteem. The church has been a place of confidence building for me. It’s part of what led me to become a minister. I want this to be a place where confidence grows. That you can find a new level of giftedness that you didn’t even know you had. That YES! You can do hard things. You can make ideas come to life. We can figure out how to do the impossible together because there’s no greater feeling than making the impossible happen. Like stepping out in faith and putting on a $1.5 million-dollar expansion to make the building more accessible. You did that! And it had its challenges, but I know on some level it was pretty cool making the impossible happen.

That’s why I’m hanging around church still. In spite of our imperfect witness. Here are things I have confidence in:

That our universe is creative.
That we all want a thriving church.
And that church is at its best when people are fully alive.

Our existence isn’t an accident. Through whatever forces we still don’t understand through our years of science, we exist. Through processes beyond our control, life is here. What could be a universe of chaos and meaninglessness instead has order amid the chaos and meaning that’s beyond the sum of all the parts. The universe wants us to be here. And life finds a way. We always generate something new. The universe is generous and generative. And that idea I have so much confidence in that I personify the universe and call it God, believe I’m guided by God’s spirit, and that spirit was fully expressed in a Palestinian Jew who lived 2,000 years ago who was killed by an evil government and his own religion.

Out of that story, so many have found meaning, confidence, and community. That community they called the ekklesia, “the called out.” The church. And you are it. You are the church. And we all want our community to thrive. We want meaningful children’s programs and bible studies. We want mission that impacts the lives of others. Its why when a group from our church asks for 200 boxes of mac and cheese for Feeding Medina County, you provide 240! That’s thriving. Having 8 weeks of totally filled out Garfield donations. That’s thriving. Meeting with your pastor over coffee or chatting over social media and sharing your life story, that’s thriving. Sure we’ll have conflicts and weird feelings and fights over silly things, but it’s out of our mutual wish for a thriving church that these conflicts arise.

And in these conflicts and places of thriving, we find ourselves. We find ourselves fully alive. When we find we truly do love God and out of that love we try to love our neighbor as ourselves, we become fully alive. When we face down our giants, we have the confidence to take off the heavy armor… words that have been said about us that don’t quite fit. Expectations of others that we aren’t called to fulfill. The feeling of being an imposter and people finding out, we can put all that down. Step up, and take our shot. We can tap into that deeper magic and have confidence in a generative universe and a God who loves us wildly.

I might struggle on the court, but those times when it all clicks… yeah! There’s nothing like it. And I love the feeling of stepping out and saying “GOOD MORNING, CHURCH!” Or being in the pulpit. My confidence comes from knowing the story. From my seminary training. From my time spent in Bible study. From listening to the wisdom of my communities of faith, the church of Jesus Christ and the collective wisdom of the Holy Spirit moving among the people. I have confidence there which leads me here. This for me is taking that shot. And I thank you for the opportunity to be your pastor and preacher.

I can do that each and every Sunday and sometimes… Every now and then… The confidence I have on Sunday carries over to Monday morning at 6:30… when a bunch of guys gather at Medina Rec for a pick-up game of basketball. We can take our shot, church. Are you in?

Works Cited

[1] Cuddy, Presence. Page 89.

[2] There’s THE SHOT.  Starting from the right side, Jordan dribbled toward the key and rose up for a jumper from inside the circle. Craig Ehlo, one of Cleveland’s top defenders, leaped out to block the shot, but Jordan seemed to hang in the air until Ehlo was out of his way, then released his shot. Nothing but net. Then in 2016, game 7 against the Warriors at Golden State. The game has been back-and-forth and Kyrie Irving takes a shot from the right side of the key and shoots over Steph Curry and drains a three that proved to be what the Cavs needed to win the title!