Sermon:
January 28, 2001
Sunday Night Alive!

Scripture:
I Corinthians 9:24-27

When this service is done, I am going to not one, but two Super Bowl parties. But I find myself in the incredibly strange position of not caring who wins. I do have a slight wager riding on the outcome. But it is with Hunter. It involves ice cream (as most of our wagers do). So whether I win or lose, Hunter and I are going to pig out. Which will bust our bellies. But which won't break our banks.

My lack of passion concerning the outcome is uncommon for me, given that I believe football is not a game that should be played simply for the fun of it. Meaning that outcomes are important. Which is probably why I'll get into it by halftime, especially if it's close. That's when I will decide I really do want one team to win ... and will do my level best to root them home.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons I am less "into" pro football has to do with the fact that it has been years ... some might say "lifetimes" ... since our Lions won anything that mattered. We have grown tired of losing. As, apparently, has the Ford family. So they have cleaned house. Pretty soon we will hear the new regime say things like: "This team's gonna play hard every Sunday." Which, after 40 years, is not going to cut it for some of us. For what we want the Lions to do every Sunday ... or at least most Sundays ... is win. Which raises the question: "Is that attitude unchristian?"

Some years ago, a friend bought me a book entitled Friday Night Lights. It was the story of one town's obsession with its high school football team. The town was Odessa, Texas.

The book covers one entire season and, at times, paints a less than flattering portrait. To be sure, there are plenty of stories about quarterback sneaks, stacked defenses, pep rallies and homecoming queens. But there are also stories about racism and exploitation, about school boundaries being re-drawn to recruit star tailbacks, about lowered academic expectations for athletes, and about injections of illegal painkillers administered behind the closed doors of the trainer's room.

The author, who lived with the Odessa program, its players, coaches and parents for an entire year, gives us a portrait that alternately captivates us, angers us, indicts us and moves us to tears. He tells us of the school's previous head coach who finally gave up the pressure of coaching to become Regional Director of Athletics. His name was John Wilkins and he was remembered as a cold and aloof man, disliked by many who played for him. Yet his record spoke for itself. Thirteen years. One hundred forty-eight wins. Sixteen losses. Fifty-five shut outs. A pair of state titles. Wilkins is quoted as saying that he knew he wasn't close to his players and that he sometimes rode them harder than he should. But he never believed that the role of a coach was to build character or lasting relationships. The role of a coach was to win. After all, this was high school football and this was Odessa. He concluded: "You don't keep your job on the basis of how many good guys you turn out. In this community, you keep you job on the basis of how many games you win."

But you don't have to go to Texas to find a similar attitude. Until recently, you could have gone to Traverse City, where (for years) high school football was "king." People camped out for days to buy season tickets, given that the stadium wasn't able to accommodate everyone who wanted to come. The Booster Club raised tens of thousands of dollars annually to make sure that the program (and its players) never wanted for anything. And while a swelling population base in Traverse City mandated ... years ago ... the building of a second high school, one of the largest pockets of resistance was the fear that a second high school would dilute the football talent pool at Traverse City Central.

Which, when they finally built a second high school on the west side of town, was exactly what happened. The talent pool was split and Traverse City Central ceased to win like it was used to winning. But before that happened, listen to the description of an autumn Friday night in Traverse City.

The high school girls are throwing adoring glances toward the players. The parents are beaming. God is in his Grand Traverse heaven. The Trojans are kicking the living bejesus out of whoever lines up on the other side of the ball. And, for the moment, it is perfectly permissible to drink it all in and ask: Is there more to life than this?

Concerning Traverse City football, a former player who now teaches in the high school admitted:

It got to be a disease. We were treated like stars. Some of the breaks we got in the classroom were wrong. I don't know that this is healthy. But I still remember how I went to games as a kid and just wanted to "touch" a player. And then I became one. To this day, I remember it all. Every practice. Every play. Every block. Every tackle. Now, I would hope that things are a little more in perspective.

One who would say "Amen" to that is Rev. Laurie Haller. Laurie is a Methodist preacher (full-time). And, thanks to the sporting inclination of one of her daughters, a girls' softball coach (part-time). Concerning her coaching career ... not her preaching career ... this is what she wrote:

From the outset, I made it clear to my girls that our goal in playing softball was not winning. Our goals were to learn how to play, to work together as a team, and to have fun. Toward that end, we had two basic rules. Rule number one: Everybody bats. Every batting order included every girl, regardless of her ability. And we varied the order from game to game so each girl had a chance to bat first.

Rule number two: Everybody plays every position. Our competitors had their best girls playing the positions of greatest activity, with weaker players being left to languish in the outfield.

Then Laurie added this curious, albeit fascinating sentence:

Although I am not all that vocal about it, I believe that this kind of coaching best witnesses to the love of God. Just as God welcomes into the Kingdom all kinds and abilities of people, so I tried to give all of the girls an equal chance to play.

Now, there's much to applaud in that. Especially when one adds Laurie's third rule: "After every game, I give all of our girls a hug, just to let them know that with God, every one of them is a winner."

But I also balance Laurie Haller's words against my own experience in coaching. I was a Yale seminarian, coaching a basketball team of fifth and sixth grade boys. We represented East Pearl Street United Methodist Church in a league which featured teams from all over inner-city New Haven. I, too, began with the philosophy similar to Laurie Haller's. "We are here to learn the game of basketball," I said. "We will all play an equal amount of time. We will rotate every position. No one kid will start every game. Etc." What happened, of course, was that we were not competitive. We were regularly getting our pride kicked ... along with everything else. Embarrassment was diminishing the value of everything else we were learning. The games were no fun. Interest in coming to practice waned. Whatever value basketball may have had in keeping these kids off the street (and in church) was fast being lost.

Finally, some of the boys urged me to modify my philosophy. To be sure, they wanted to "get in" every game. But they also wanted me to play Andy and Steve, my two Italian Catholic ringers, more minutes than the rest. They wanted me to start Andy and Steve at the two most important positions, center and point guard. They wanted to be on the floor with Andy and Steve (not in place of them), thus ensuring that time spent on the floor would hold the promise of stopping somebody defensively and making an occasional basket offensively. In short, they were discovering that being a team means sublimating your own ego for the good of the team, fitting in where best you can, and being supportive of others who may be more gifted and talented than you. I realized that these were also good lessons to be learned through basketball ... and good Christian concepts to boot.

Ironically, that shift in coaching philosophy made us more competitive. We even won a game before the season was over. By being more competitive, we showed respect for our opponents, in that we were putting forth our best effort to win. What's more, losing became far more tolerable (to the point where we could actually learn something from it) because we were going all out to win.

People who know me tell me that I am a rather competitive human being. I have debated that. But I am far from the best judge of my nature. I am also told that clergy, as a group, tend to score abnormally low on competitive instincts, when measured on standard psychological tests. Perhaps I have simply masked my competitive nature, the better to fit in with my peers. I don't know. What I do know is that I tend to have a natural resonance with people who are as comfortably competitive as I am.

As a Christian, I am not afraid of competition. Indeed, I welcome it. I think we compete as a means of discovering and expressing the gifts that God has given us. Some process of testing seems essential to that discovery. That is what competition is all about. It occurs, I think, on three levels.

1. Some of us test ourselves against an opponent. We compete against another individual (or team). Sometimes we win. Sometimes they win. Ideally, we try to compete at our own level, or just a little it above. Mismatches are seldom fun, and almost never teach us anything.
2. Some of us test ourselves against an image of perfection. We compete against a standard. It could be a subjective standard such as some judge's perception of a perfect ten. It could be an absolute standard like a 300 game in bowling or a par 72 in golf.
3. Still others of us test ourselves against our own prior effort. We compete against our previous best. We strive to lower our time, raise our count or improve our score.

Occasionally, we compete on all three levels at the same time. Perhaps one of the reasons that bowling is such a popular sport is that one can bowl against an opponent ... against an absolute standard ... or against one's personal best. Three ways to win. Three ways to pursue excellence. Three ways to maximize satisfaction.

Obviously, there are pitfalls. Competition, like every sphere of human activity, is subject to corruption. Competitors, too, fall from grace. It happens all the time. What are the warning signs? I'll give you ten.

• When it isn't fun anymore (when the pressure obscures the pleasure).
• When you aren't learning anything anymore.
• When you find yourself bending, breaking or forgetting the rules.
• When you view an opponent as someone to hurt or humiliate.
• When your need to "shine" supersedes your team's need for you to "sacrifice."
• When money becomes the primary reason for going out there.
• When somebody else's expectations become the primary reason for going out there.
• When perspective is lost, so that winning leads you to think more highly of yourself than you ought to think, and losing, less so.
• When identity becomes confused with outcome, so that it takes more and more victories to make you feel like a winner and fewer and fewer defeats to make you feel like a loser.
• When God is no longer honored by your effort.

Jesus, to my knowledge, said absolutely nothing about competition. Paul, who seemed fascinated by the subject, is quoted as saying: "By all means, run to win the prize." But if you read Paul carefully, one does so not because the prize is important, but because the effort put forward to win it is important.

I believe a winning attitude matters. Filmmaker Woody Allen is fond of saying that ninety percent of what life is about is simply showing up. But I'm not sure that merely "appearing" counts for all that much. The coaches of the Giants and the Ravens have little doubt that, come 6:18 p.m., their teams are going to "appear." What neither coach knows ... and won't know for the next two or three hours ... is how badly their respective players "want it."

You have all heard the old quatrain:

And when the one Great Scorer
Comes to write your name,
It matters not who won or lost
But how you played the game.

To which I hear the Apostle Paul adding: "As long as you play it to win."

* * * * *

As I said moments ago, I do not particularly care ... at least this year ... who wins the Super Bowl. Nor does God. But for the sake of those of us who are looking for a good game, I sure hope the Giants and the Ravens do.

* * * * *

By the way, Hunter is picking the Giants. But he is not giving points. That's because Hunter, for all of his seven years, is both a lover of good ice cream and a tough Christian competitor.