Christ In Winter:
Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter
Preachers will go to any
lengths to raise money for a good cause. And to humiliate someone they love. Which
is the nature of sports.
Yesterday was pay-off
Sunday at our church. To raise money for the recent mission trip, our pastors had
placed two jars, with their names, where people could drop money in. The loser,
the one who raised the lesser amount of money, had to pay a penalty. The winner
got to enjoy the public humiliation of the other. To make it more interesting,
they are married to each other! Apparently love of team comes way before love
of spouse!
Both Jimmy and Mary Beth
are die-hard Cubs fans, Mary Beth because she is a Chicago girl with
generations of forebears who were Cubs fans, and Jimmy because… well, how do
you know why a Mississippi boy does anything, except that 108 years of losing
comes naturally. [1]
Years of losing served him
well yesterday, because he was the loser of the “jar wars” competition. His punishment
was having to preach wearing a White Sox shirt! Oh, the humanity! Or lack of
it! What could be more embarrassing for a Cubs fan?
You cannot be both a Cubs
fan and a White Sox fan. [2] Mary Beth said that as she was growing up, she was
taught that if the Cubs won and the Sox lost on the same day, the Cubs had won
twice.
Why should that be? The Cubs
and Sox are in different leagues. They did not play each other for 100 years. It’s
only been in the recent few years of inter-league play that they have met on
the same field, and that seems actually to have dampened the intensity of their
rivalry a bit. They inhabit the same city, suffer from the same corrupt
politicians. Their fans go to the same schools, shop at the same stores. [“The
Jewels”] Sometimes they are even members of the same family. Why should they
not only enjoy the victories of their own team but enjoy the losses of the
other, sometimes even more than their own victories?
It’s like the Jews and
Arabs in The Unholy Land, or Catholics and Protestants in North Ireland. They are
the same people. They have the same heritage. They look alike. The only way you
can tell them apart is by whether they wear Cubs or Sox jerseys.
Not everyone is a baseball
fanatic, but we all seem to want competition, the chance to cheer for someone
over someone else. I know a couple of guys who don’t know a curve from a Chevy
but can almost come to fisticuffs over which opera diva is better in which
role.
Fortunately, we have
social science to explain this to us. Even better, we have L. Jon Wertheim and
Sam Sommers to summarize that research for us in their excellent book, This Is Your Brain on Sports. The only
problem is that the research proves both sides of every rationale for our
sports competition fanaticism.
It’s not really that much
of a mystery. The reason is “original sin,” that tendency in each of us to say,
“There is not enough to go around, and so I must get mine at the expense of
others.” For every winner there is a loser, and I hate being a loser even more
than I like being a winner.
The antidote to original
sin is Christ, the one who feeds five thousand on one fish sandwich, who says, “If
you just give thanks for what you have, and share it, there is enough to go
around.”
Theology and sports are
very much alike. God gives them to us for fun. It’s when we begin to take them
seriously that we get into trouble.
JRMcF
1] Elaine Palencia, the
poet, and her friend, Vanda, once went to Oxford, MS on a Faulkner pilgrimage
tour. They were looking at the Confederate monument when an old codger came up
and said, “You know what that is?” They thought they knew but declined to
speculate. He spat on the ground and said, “That’s a trophy for second place.”
2] That is the reason Barack
Obama has been so pilloried and obstructed by so many in Congress and
elsewhere. They are all Cubs fans. Or maybe it’s really not because he
is a White Sox fan…
One of the strangest
baseball games ever must have been Labor Day in 1926 when the Ku Klux Klan beat
the Hebrew Stars 4-0.
I tweet as yooper1721.
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