Is your bracket filled out? My bracket is completed and looks nice until I have to start marking out my failed picks. My wife and I do a little bit of wagering on who can fill out the best bracket and this year was a little more exciting making our picks when the NCAA bracket was released. As I have mentioned before, my wife and I are celebrating 10 years of marriage this month and so we will be enjoying an Elite 8 game in Indianapolis as a fun way to celebrate. We are both fans of college basketball and both of our favorite teams (Duke and the University of Kentucky) happen to be in the Midwest Region which will be played in Indy. Hopefully one or both of us will get to see our teams play live for the first time!
The big first step for our teams was getting the invitation to the ‘big dance’ as it is so often called. Sports analysts often make comments about getting their dancing shoes ready or about whether Cinderella’s shoes will fit the particular team hoping to be in the tournament. Since Lori and I cheer for a couple of the top programs in the history of the game we rarely have to worry about getting an invitation. Each year there are teams on the ‘bubble’, unsure of whether they will get an invitation or not. Analysts give their list of the last 4 making it in and the last 4 who missed the dance altogether.
There are 351 Division 1 NCAA teams but only 68 get the chance to play in this tournament. There is, however, another tournament that the rejected teams have a chance to play in called the National Invitational Tournament, or just NIT. As you can probably already guess, even if you’re not a sports enthusiast, this isn’t the tournament that teams were hoping to play in at the end of the year and NIT gets a negative connotation added to it. Fans who want to let an opponent know they are a step down from ‘their beloved team’ need only chant ‘NIT, NIT, NIT’ to get in a cheap shot. Fans also have their own names for that tournament using the NIT initials. This is an excerpt from wikipedia:
"Because the post-season NIT consists of teams that failed to receive a berth in the NCAA Tournament, the NIT has been nicknamed the "Not Invited Tournament", "Never Important Tournament", "Nobody's Interested Tournament", "Needs Improvement Tournament", "No Important Team", "National Insignificant Tournament," or simply "Not In Tournament". It has also been called a tournament to see who the "69th best team" in the country is (since there are now 68 teams in the NCAA Tournament)."
Not Invited. Nobody’s Interested. Needs Improvement. You get the feeling. Have you been that team? Have you been that person who is left out? It hurts to be uninvited and unchosen. There is something special happening and you don’t get to be a part. I had this happen to me recently which is why the topic of being uninvited is on my mind in the context of March Madness and Easter.
Prior to the bracket being released, analysts critique the resume of teams on the bubble. They use criteria such as a teams Rating Percentage Index (RPI) so you know how tough of a schedule they had. They look at wins against ranked opponents, losses to bad opponents, non-conference schedule, and on down the line as they evaluate whether a team has earned an invitation. The apostle Paul gives us his tourney resume in Philippians 3:
If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.—Philippians 3:4-6
There is no question that this guy falls into the ‘Invited’ column if you’re looking for the most qualified Israelite, and by the looks of things he’s getting a #1 seed. In Genesis we see an invitation given to Abraham and his offspring to be God’s chosen people. Paul comes from a long line of invited people and his pedigree is spotless.
But what about the rest of us? What about us Gentiles (non-Jews) with no pedigree whatsoever? What about the uninvited?
I don’t want to jump ahead past Easter. It’s easy to do and there are many, like my wife, who prefer to do just that. Skip past the solemn Good Friday service so we can celebrate resurrection morning. I get that. No one wants to remember what it was like to be uninvited prior to the invitation that comes through Jesus Christ. Two thousand years ago a huge proportion of today’s church folk would have been the ones on the outside. We would have been the uninvited. The early church started with a bunch of Jewish followers of Christ trying to figure out what to do about these previously uninvited Gentiles that were coming to faith in Christ. There were some that thought Gentiles needed to get circumcised and give up bacon so they would better fit the profile of an invited Jew. "If you want to be ‘in’ the church then you have to go through these hoops." There were others, like Paul, who opposed putting barriers in the way of unbelieving Gentiles. He even opposed Peter to his face! (Galatians 2:11-14)
Peter, the Rock, had trouble figuring out how to interact with people who had previously been uninvited and unclean and so he found himself acting one way with his invited buddies and another with his newly invited buddies. It was awkward to say the least. Circumcision conversations generally are. Despite the difficulties, the early church managed to plow on through toward unity in the power of the Spirit.
We still have a few weeks until Easter and reconnecting with church history means reconnecting with what it means to be uninvited. That’s where the story for a majority of us starts. We were not God’s people. He was not our God. And along comes Jesus proclaiming good news to the uninvited.
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