Croquet & the Faith Journey

How is committing to a faithful and Christ-centered life similar to playing CROQUET?

Croquet court in Maine

Croquet is a partner sport. Christian life works better with a companion.

Croquet requires strategy on each shot, and strategy is long-term for partner/multiple plays.

The Christian life requires strategy for how to live out faith values. Strategy is for community wellbeing, long term goals.

In both croquet & the Christian life, regulating power well is key.

In croquet, it’s easier to get the ball where you want it if you actually know where you want it.

In our faith life, it’s easier to think, feel, and behave as you want if you’ve thought through your values and goals in advance.

In both croquet & the Christian life, choices must be made, played out.

Croquet develops ones humility. A Christ-centered life encourages humility.

When playing croquet, you cannot know what the other team will do on their play until they do it- be in that moment.

When living faithfully, you cannot know what challenge will arrive until it comes. Face it then.

As I learn croquet, I have found that settling down before a shot helps.

Which is just like my faith life: settling down before doing anything helps.

It looks easier from the sidelines than it is to hit that 3 & 5/8 inch croquet ball through a 3 & 11/16 inch wicket. And similarly, it looks easier from the sidelines than it actually is to love, to extend grace, to be gentle, to offer kindness, to stay grounded, to forgive.

Croquet Semifinals 2024

In croquet it pays to know your limits. Some plays you work up to— you need to really practice before you are competent at it, like a jump shot.

Some aspects of the faithful & Christ-centered life deserve training, working up to—we need to practice before we feel ready to do the really advanced spiritual action involved in reconciliation, or in forgiveness.

One big difference is the end result. In croquet, the first team to reach a score of 11 wins, and the other team loses. In the Christian life, we all win. There are no losers.

One choice built upon another choice executed to the best of our ability, with our best skills given the experience we have– these become the building blocks of a faithful and Christ-centered life.

In our ancient texts from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures today we hear accounts of choices being offered:

We hear the voice of Joshua, the one who replaced Moses as the leader of God’s people – the people who chose to walk out of the oppressive life of enslavement in Egypt and they chose to trust God in the wilderness and now Joshua is asking if the people choose to follow God. God continually invites agency, invites them to make a choice to become the people who will trust in God, and live according to godly values for how they work and interact and care for one another.

We hear the voice of Jesus asking his followers

“Do you also wish to go away?”

because many did turn away-- many left the group after Jesus described himself as the bread of life that must be consumed in order to experience union with God, after Jesus revealed that he is the manna from heaven sent to sustain us so that we can sustain all that is good and just and freeing for all people. This bread talk, this manna talk, this union with God and eternal life talk- I think people understood Jesus’ meaning, that they would be one with Jesus and with God, and this was too much, too hard, asked too much of them. So they left. They had agency. God does not force us into a relationship with God. We are invited, and we can walk away, or walk back to God.

Several years ago I was with a group of youth in Tegucigalpa as partners in a ministry responding to the needs of families for education, food, and healthcare for their children. We went every summer. We witnessed Honduran adults and children who had few material resources, yet were generous, courageous, good-natured, committed, hopeful and deeply faithful to their belief in Christian community, their belief in Christ working through them to create a place where children were safe, understood that they belonged, were given dignity as beloved Children of God.

Another Christian denomination from another part of North America arrived on the afternoon of our fifth day and wanted to do a presentation for the children. They gathered the children and teachers and our group into an auditorium and spoke to the children as if they had no knowledge of God’s love, as if they were lacking something. Then they passed out candy and stuffed animals, and left.

Now- our group was expressly not allowed to give gifts to children -and I was a bit jealous of how fun it looked to pass out toys. That is, until the other group left and the gates of the school closed and children started crying and arguing because – well, because they were children with different size stuffed animals. Our young people, and adult mentors, were angry at this other group that assumed they owned the Gospel and treated the children and teachers as souls needing to be saved – many uncharitable comments were being made. When someone suggested that we might want to extend some grace to the other group, to even forgive them for any harm they had unwittingly done, another adult leader replied, quite honestly,:

“This is why I’m not sure that I can really ever call myself a Christian.

It is just so hard to truly be one.”

It is hard. As followers of Christ we are faced with hard choices, choices that cost us something, at every turn. We may have to choose the good of community over the good of our own self, or we may choose to stand for something that makes us unpopular. We may have to give up the delicious satisfaction of being right -in order to connect with someone, to extend some grace, to move forward in a more faithful direction.

When we receive the bread of Holy Communion, that binds us to Christ, we are choosing to move forward in a more faithful direction, and to do this,

we require good partners and companions,

we strategize prayerfully,

we appropriately regulate our power,

we set clear values and clear goals.

Choosing a life of faith in Christ requires a great deal of courage. It takes great courage to trust in God and make the hard choices to extend grace and to forgive, to reconcile and to love.

It costs us something to witness that the One who came to teach us to love--

he will be exposed to the most violent impulses of humanity on a cross.

We will need to trust, over and over again, that the hope we hold onto in Christ is the redeeming love of God that wins over violence, so that when the dream of God is fully realized in this earth, there will never again be winners and losers, oppressors and oppressed.

There will only be winners-- winners who know the power of God’s love. This dream of God is built up by our choices, our commitment to be the bread of God’s love for a hungry world.

This dream of God is built up through our humility and our courage, our confidence in choosing what is beautiful and true over anything less.