The World Cup
About an hour before this newsletter was sent out, the first match of the 2026 World Cup got underway. I casually follow international soccer, and I support a particular English football club, but, like many Americans, I love the World Cup because it gives me the chance to pretend that I care a lot more about soccer than I really do. I need not know the difference between Christian Pulisic and Cristan Roldan to act like the USMNT means more to me than almost anything else.
As you probably know, the United States has never won the men’s World Cup. Unlike our women’s team, which has won four times, the best our men’s team has ever achieved is the third-place trophy in the inaugural tournament. Back in 1930, FIFA held the first World Cup in Uruguay because its amateur national team had won the gold medal in the 1924 and 1928 Summer Olympics, and it needed some legitimacy for its attempt at staging an international competition for professional athletes. Only four teams from Europe made the voyage across the Atlantic in the middle of the Great Depression, and the United States took advantage. It remains the only time we have cracked the top four teams.
That lack of dominance is another reason I enjoy watching the World Cup. Although our hegemony in other sports is waning, it is hard to be too boastful about our national team winning an international trophy in basketball, baseball, or American football. But, if the USMNT makes it out of the group stage and into the bracket, it will be a significant accomplishment. And, if we make it to the round of sixteen or even the quarterfinals, it would be a truly amazing result. How often do we celebrate something as flawed as a top-twenty finish?
Still, despite my national pride and unrealistic dreams, what I love most about the World Cup is its ability to captivate people across the globe in a singular way. Like the Olympics but with a much narrower focus, the World Cup allows devoted soccer aficionados and casual fans of the game and people who care nothing at all about soccer but enjoy national celebrations to come together for a single purpose. At the World Cup, teams representing former colonies and their former colonizers will play against each other. Nations that are at war with each other engage on the soccer pitch instead of the battlefield. Even the war in Iran has not stopped its national team from showing up in our country for this year’s tournament.
Similarly, in a way that I think contemporary Christians take for granted, our faith is something that unites all people across national, ethnic, cultural, and economic boundaries. In Acts 11, we read how, as a result of the dispersion of Jesus’ disciples which took place because of the persecution that followed Stephen’s martyrdom, the good news of our faith spread to Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch. At first, the disciples who had reached those places only shared the gospel among fellow Jews. The Way of Jesus was, after all, a distinctly Jewish movement. But, as those missionaries spread beyond the geographic center of Jerusalem, their message also spread beyond its familiar cultural and ethnic boundaries.
Perhaps as they overheard what was being discussed among their Jewish counterparts, Hellenists or Greek-speaking and Greek-enculturated Jews from the diaspora caught on and became followers of Jesus. Recognizing how quickly the gospel was spreading around him, Barnabas went from Antioch to Tarsus to recruit Saul, a recent convert to Christianity who had a gift for preaching and teaching. Under the leadership of Saul, who among the Greek-speakers would have been known as Paul, those converts to the Way of Jesus discovered that they were now a part of something that united them to other disciples across geographic and ethnic divides in real, meaningful ways.
It was in Antioch, Acts tells us, that Jesus’ disciples first called themselves “Christians,” and Paul’s experience of that diverse community coming to think of itself as a full part of something that stretched back to Jerusalem and that included people of different cultural backgrounds shaped Paul’s theology in profound ways. Later in his ministry, he would write to churches about the ways in which the Holy Spirit united all of them as members of Christ’s own body. He would argue fiercely that what God had accomplished in and through the cross of Jesus Christ meant there could no longer be any divisions along ethnic, economic, or even gendered lines. He would urge congregations across the Roman world to give generously to provide financial support for those Christians who suffered persecution back in Jerusalem as if they were their own siblings.
Even in a world that is vastly more interconnected than the world the apostle Paul knew, I still instinctively feel profound divisions between myself and others along national, political, cultural, ethnic, and economic lines. Of course I am cheering for the USMNT in the World Cup. This is my country and my team! But the World Cup reminds me that those instinctive divisions lie merely on the surface. There are more important, more significant, more fundamental things that hold us together. And the gospel teaches me that those surface distinctions, while real in this life, are actually a fiction. The hope that Jesus gives us is that those artificial distinctions will someday disappear completely.
The challenge offered by both the World Cup and the gospel is to make the hopeful elimination of what divides us more than an occasional experience and a far-off dream. If Iran and the United States were to compete against each other in the World Cup, might the leaders of our nations use that as a reason to build a lasting peace? As history has proven, however, the fulfillment our greatest hopes will never be achieved through human effort, no matter how much goodwill is manifest in a quadrennial athletic event.
Instead, it is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which not only promises the end of all that divides us but, in fact, has already accomplished it, that gives us hope. Because we believe that what God has done in Christ has made our differences irrelevant in the eternal sense, we must, with God’s help, pursue that which is eternal here and now. If we believe that the outstretched arms of Jesus Christ on the hard wood of the cross has broken down the barriers that divide us, granting all people access to the one true God, we must refuse to accept a world in which those irrelevant barriers still exist.
As Christians, we get to experience that hopeful reality more frequently than every four years. It is as near to us as the next celebration of the Holy Eucharist.
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner
