Musings: Notes From My Daybook

This evening over 90 million Americans will gather in living rooms and dens to watch Super Bowl XL. With mountains of dip and chips, pepperoni pizza, and the latest culinary art (how about a football helmet carved out of a watermelon) dedicated to the sport, America turns to this annual ritual. What is it about football that attracts us so?

Christian Sheppard, a lecturer at the University of Chicago, notes the violence that surrounds football. Violence, or as Sheppard notes NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s term, “contrived adversity,” is indeed a dominant image with football. But it isn’t just violence. Sheppard argues in this past week’s issue of Sightings that it the relationship of violence with a larger set of virtues that creates the attraction. It is the epic dimensions—the mythic symbolism of war—that focus on tenacity, discipline, and courage, that attract people to the game.

Sheppard goes on to suggest that these virtues of football acted out in concrete fashion before the viewer find usefulness in larger life. Competition and the striving for victory on the field mimic the economic realities of contemporary life. Such things, of course, were not always the case for Americans. Instead of economic determinism and other varied forms of Darwinism (“the survival of the fittest”), America understood her identity as being rooted in a covenant with God.

Rather than a model of beating each others’ brains out—in the level fields of fair competition, of course—to see who can get ahead in the world, early Americans saw the need to work together in community for an ordered and structured world that was held together by God’s divine blessing and promise.

Some cynics might just be thinking that just because the Colts got themselves beat by the Steelers, I’ve suddenly decided to get philosophical and all high and mighty about football. Of course, you might be right. I must admit that I’m disappointed that I won’t see Manning or Harrison or James this afternoon.

And yet—I guess I’m wondering if maybe America could use a higher, better vision for what it means to be an American than a football game (after all, it’s not college football!) Maybe, just maybe there is a place for people who believe that God is at work in the world gathering and redeeming and loving and healing to offer an alternative framework for the world.

I know that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when we are accustomed to think that power and speed are the way to move the ball down the field. Getting ahead means doing things better than your competitors. So to imagine that a few Christians could embrace each other across ethnic, social, economic, and political lines and work together for the good of other people is a stretch for the imagination. Such things don’t really stand up to 300 pound linemen. And to top it off, these Christians have the audacity to believe that real hero is not one of us—it’s God. How do you cover God on the front page of the paper tomorrow morning! And yet.

Jesus said that the kingdom would be like a mustard see or little bit of leaven. Who knows? Just about anything can happen. Just ask the Steelers after their playoff game with the Colts!