AND GOD CREATED FOOTBALL

I make no apologies about it, I enjoy sports. Nothing is more relaxing to me than a well-played game. I can sit for hours watching the minute strategizing carried out by two baseball managers, calling pitches and positioning players and shifting lineups like chess pieces to win a contest. The sheer athleticism of football players, especially those young men in college football, bring me great pleasure. Once while vacationing with my wife and daughters, I parked my bicycle and climbed into the stands to watch a Little League baseball game between kids I did not know, My wife said to my daughters as the three of them rode out of sight, "He needed his baseball fix."

I am not alone. Over half the American population watched the Super Bowl last Sunday night. The NFL and College Football are among the real growth industries.
Recently my region was hit with a series of massive snowstorms (more than 40-60 inches in various locations). When a news reporter asked the weary and beleagured highway supervisor in mountainous Perry County how he was holding up, the man replied "We are Pennsylvania people - we have our Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles. We'll survive."

Some people say that sports, and football in particular have reached the level of a religion rivaling things like Christianity. Mark Galli, writing for Christianity Today has done an excellent review of the issues and dynamics of both religion and football. But he also puts an observation forward that I find refreshing. Instead of bashing and smashing sports like some idol, he encourages Christians to see its consistency and focus in living as believers in the world. Galli writes:

"Sport—in this case, football—is not a quasi-religion or a civil religion or a form of idolatry as such. Like anything in creation, football can become idolatrous. But it is not football's sociological parallels with religious life that make it a possible rival religion—all of creation, all these sociological forms (speech, music, discipline, camaraderie, ritual, and so forth) can partake in and hint at transcendence. If we really were convinced that football was a rival religion because it shared these forms, we Christians would not only have to abandon football, but life itself. For we cannot escape God; his love overflows into all of life, and does so—mysteriously, elusively to be sure—in more forms than we can imagine.

Some Christians do practice civil religion, and for some, football has become an idol. Such is the nature of the human heart, that desperately wicked thing (Jer. 17:9). But one reason many Christians are not concerned about football as religion is that what seems to make it a religion to some scholars is precisely the thing that makes it another sign of God's presence in the world, a sign that comes in the most mundane ways—through ritual, physical sacrifice, a sense of brotherhood, shared joy and despair over little things (like if our team wins or loses).

This is the reason Christians participate freely and fully in all of life. For we, of all people, have eyes to see and ears to hear God's elusive presence, to discern his handiwork and love everywhere. The clearest revelation of God's love comes to us in the preaching of the Word and the sharing of the sacrament, but it is precisely because we've learned to make out the outlines of the God-man Jesus with repeated participation at these specifically religious events that we can spot him in a glass of fine wine, in the startling lines of a skyscraper, in conversation with friends, in a timely block or a well-executed screen play."

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And God Created Football - Books & Culture