More than a Championship
Why the Thunder’s Win Was About More Than Basketball
I've lived in a lot of cities, but I keep coming back to OKC because, in my opinion, it reflects aspects of the ancient Greek cities I've spent my life admiring and studying. If you were a Greek born in 450 BC, your world would've been organized in a coherent, threefold way.
The Greeks used the word cosmos (from κοσμέω, to order or arrange) to understand the different, divinely ordered ecosystems in which they lived and moved and had their being. The first was the world as a whole—what we might think of as the universe; the second was the polis, or city, in today’s parlance; and the third was the individual.
Being ordered, not chaotically or haphazardly thrown together, each of these cosmos’ had a purpose, both in themselves and for the others. The self was properly ordered to live within and serve the city by acquiring greater civil virtue; the city was ordered to serve that pursuit of virtue in the individual and to bring honor to God through the right functioning of the city's people and enterprises; and the world, or universe, was ordered so man could thrive and gain greater communion with God over time.
It's rare to think about our world this way today, but I see vestiges of it in this Midwestern city, smack dab in the middle of Oklahoma. And I saw it again, with glaring clarity, yesterday.
Sports are more than escapist portals for us to lose ourselves in; they're a necessary part of a city aimed toward the Good. At least they were for the Greeks. And I see it every day in how Oklahomans root for and support the Thunder.
Sports are an embodied exposition of excellence, where teams train with fervor and dedication to do the one thing they are built to do: win. Because winning, proving that your devotion to embodied excellence is better than every other team, and claiming the honor that every team strives to claim, is a silent declaration of our highest ideals. Ideals rooted in the three-part cosmos of the ancient world—namely, that winning a championship for the city calls its citizens to pursue excellence in their lives and vocations, whatever they may be.
Whether people were conscious of it or not yesterday, as hundreds of thousands of Oklahomans crowded the city's streets to celebrate the Thunder’s win, they were participating in a parade that reinforced the idea that we live in an ordered world, where our lives, our virtue, our excellence, serves the city.
And the city, when it wins, whether a championship or a civil rights achievement, reflects and glorifies the God "who orders all things with perfect justice” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon).
