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Engaging Sports on a Deeper Level

Blog / Produced by The High Calling
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Spring is an exciting time to be a sports fan. Baseball’s opening day is around the corner (not counting the games played last weekend in Australia between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks), the NHL’s regular season is quickly determining playoff positions and of course the NCAA basketball tournaments are prompting nearly everyone to fill out their own brackets. I, too feel the excitement that comes from loving sports this time of year.

However, I can’t help but notice that a big time sports attorney has filed yet another antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA and the major conferences. The essence of the lawsuit challenges the right of the NCAA to limit the value of the athletes’ labor to a scholarship rather than what the market may bear. It doesn’t take much for a story like this to remind us of the complexities of big-time athletics and potentially tarnish our ‘‘love for the game.’’ Geneva History Professor Eric Miller captures this disillusionment nicely when he writes, “All fans know that three words, whether spoken by villains or saints, kill the spirit of whatever sport of which they’re said: It’s a Business.”

What is a Christian to do in the face of the reality that our favorite sport or favorite team is intermingled with these other concerns and institutions? Should I love them less? Should I stop watching and cheering?

As Christians, recognizing the multi-dimensionality of God’s world potentially makes life more difficult, but it also opens up new paths for living faithfully, even for something like being a sports fan. It also helps us more clearly see the ways in which human sinfulness has misdirected much in our culture, including sport and sporting institutions. (See the Illustration)

How then should believers in Christ function as sports fans?

Andy Crouch helps us see these complexities in his book Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power. He argues that institutions are made up of four cultural goods: “artifacts, arenas, rules, and roles.” During March Madness, we see all four of these. The “artifacts” include the basketball jerseys that not only the players wear, but also the fans in the stands and in their homes watching TV. The games are played in various “arenas” around the country, and we should think about things like how these arenas came into existence, whose name is advertised on them and why, what else goes on in these arenas (like concession sales). The “rules” of basketball are found in the NCAA Basketball rulebook, and the role of each player is to play within the confines of those rules while the “role” of the officials is to enforce these rules fairly. Of course, our judgment of how good the officials are doing greatly depends on whether or not our team is winning!

Once I recognize these, I have to be willing to ask some hard questions. For example: Where did my favorite jersey come from? Was it manufactured under fair labor conditions? Where did the materials come from for its manufacture? Are there corporate logos on the jersey that I am uncomfortable advertising? Questions like these are not meant to condemn but to serve as prompts so that I can be an agent of renewal within God’s gift of athletics and sports.

I could also explore the variety of roles that make up my sport. For example, What if I tried to learn how to hit a curveball? Wouldn’t attempting to do so deepen my appreciation of major league hitters? Who are the best sports writers for my favorite sport? How can reading their work open up how I see and love the game?

And I might better enjoy the game if I dig more deeply into the rules of the game by reading the rulebook or what people have written about the history of the sport and how the sport could be improved. I could expand my appreciation by volunteering as a referee at a local youth or recreation level.

God is inviting us to not only think more deeply about the sports we love but to also engage them more deeply and more humanly for his glory.

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Sports for the Glory of God

If God has created humanity with bodies that are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” we need to develop a Christian way of living that incorporates play and recreation, leisure and competition, sports and athletics. Faith in the Creator and Redeemer should lead us to identify the way sports and athletics are meant to be, discern when something is wrong with sports in our broken and sinful culture, and imagine ways to be instruments of redemption in this sphere. In this series, Sports for the Glory of God, we engage with stories of people who are working through these issues on a daily basis.

Image by Luke Martin. Used with permission. Sourced via Flickr.

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