Sermon Illustrations on Sports — page 2

Caught: Where Transformation Can Lead [2 Versions]

You probably saw the catch on TV. Or maybe you saw it on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The grab made by New York Giants wide receiver David Tyree may be the greatest catch in Super Bowl history. It certainly was a pivotal moment in the Giants’ 2008 victory over the New England Patriots. But it was not the most pivotal moment in young David Tyree’s life. That would be when Tyree found himself behind bars in a jail cell.

“What looked to be the lowest point in my life ended up being the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Tyree told the New York Times, referring to his 2004 arrest.

Tyree drank and smoked pot from an early age — habits he carried with him into the NFL. In 2004, to pay a $10,000 fine for being late to a team meeting, Tyree decided to sell marijuana — and was arrested. That is when his girlfriend issued an ultimatum: “her lifestyle or his.” He began reading a Bible he spotted on her bed.

A month after his arrest, Tyree went to church and listened to a woman singing with joy. He realized he had none. He hung his head and sobbed. “I had no joy. I had no peace,” said Tyree. “My life was in disarray.”

Now committed to Christ, Tyree’s story is “bigger than his Super Bowl catch,” he says. “It is about destiny and purpose.” He is more concerned with “changing lives,” which he and his wife do through an organization called Next in Line, counseling teens.

Caron Butler of the NBA’s Washington Wizards has a similar story. He made his first drug deal at age 11 and was in juvenile court 15 times before age 15. Then grace broke down his front door at age 17, when the cops barged in to arrest him for drug possession.

Before that incident, while at a juvenile institution, Caron had decided to clean up his act. He read Bible verses his grandmother sent him. While there, he spied a basketball court outside his window. “God puts stuff in front of you for a reason,” he says. He honed his basketball skills, promised to stay out of trouble, and was headed to college before that day the cops broke in to arrest him.

One of the officers, Richard Geller, exercised grace when Butler’s mother promised Geller, “If you give Caron a chance on this, you will never look back.” Geller felt confident the drugs the police had found were not Butler’s and let him go.

“God put his hands on my life,” Butler said. “[God] said, ‘I’m going to touch you so that you can touch others.’” Today, Caron uses his NBA success to give back to his hometown of Racine, Wisconsin — with coat drives, bike giveaways, and holding a basketball camp for youth.

“The good that has come out of it has benefited this community a whole lot more than Caron’s arrest would have,” said Officer Geller.

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Version used in 2/2/2014 sermon:

It has become known as “The Catch.” ESPN Sportscenter designated it the greatest play in Super Bowl history.

Eli Manning had eluded a sack and threw 32 yards downfield toward David Tyree. Tyree leaped and caught the ball fully extended, bringing it down against his helmet with his right hand. Meanwhile, New England Patriots’ Rodney Harrison pulled violently downward on that arm, simultaneously wrenching Tyree arching backwards towards the turf. Tyree managed to get a second hand on the ball during the descent, and kept the ball only inches from the turf. Harrison struggled to steal the ball away from him on the ground but Tyree kept possession. It was a pivotal moment in the Giants’ victory over the New England Patriots.

But it was not the most pivotal moment in young David Tyree’s life. That would be when Tyree found himself behind bars in a New Jersey jail cell. Tyree had had an inauspicious start in football. He was a second-round draft pick. He had some bad habits, too. Tyree drank until he passed out, smoked pot from an early age, and continued doing these things in his football career. He chased a lot of women, too.

In 2004 he was fined $10,000 for being late to a team meeting. Tyree’s solution was to sell some marijuana to raise the money. Apparently he wasn’t very good at it, because he was arrested. That is when his wife issued an ultimatum: “my lifestyle or yours.” He began reading a Bible he spotted on his wife’s bed. Tyree said “for the first time, the words on the page made sense” to him.

He had never been religious. His mom was not a Christian and they didn’t attend church. A month after his arrest, Tyree went to church and listened to a woman singing with joy. He realized he had none. He hung his head and sobbed. “I had no joy. I had no peace,” said Tyree. “My life was in disarray.”

He committed himself to Jesus Christ. Not only that, but after David Tyree became a Christian, his sister did too. And after his mom saw the changes in the life of her son, she got saved, too, not long before she died from a heart attack.

Tyree says his conversion is “bigger than his Super Bowl catch.” “It is about destiny and purpose.” He has given up the booze, drugs and women. He is a regular speaker at Christian youth rallies in our area. He is more concerned with “changing lives,” which he and his wife do through a ministry that counsels teens.

Tyree told the New York Times, “What looked to be the lowest point in my life ended up being the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

Learn from your lowest points. They can point you to God.

An Evangelistic Slam Dunk: the Roots of Basketball

It was the basketball game for the ages. On Monday night, the Duke University Blue Devils survived a desperate, last-second shot by the underdog Butler University Bulldogs to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship.

It was a great game — a classic “David and Goliath” matchup, given that Duke has appeared in eight championship games under head coach Mike Krzyzewski, and that Butler had never even made it to the Final Four.

You may hear folks talking about the game for some time. When you do, you can add to the conversation by revealing an interesting fact: Basketball was invented more than 100 years ago by a Christian theologian as an evangelical outreach tool.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, one of our Centurions, John Murray, recalled the story of the game’s founding. The inventor of basketball, James Naismith, became convinced that he stood a better chance of exemplifying the Christian life through sports rather than through preaching. So he took a job as a physical education instructor at the YMCA’s International Training School for Christian Workers in Springfield, Massachusetts. Naismith’s vision was “to win men for the Master through the gym.”

In 1891, Naismith set out to invent a new indoor game that students could play during winter. He spent weeks testing various games, including versions of soccer, football, and lacrosse, to no avail. “Finally,” Murray writes, “Naismith decided to draw from all of these sports: with a ball that could be easily handled, play that involved running and passing with no tackling, and a goal at each end of the floor.” In short, he came up with basketball.

From the beginning, Naismith and his athletic director, Luther Gulick, held the players to a high standard. As Gulick wrote in 1897, “The game must be kept clean.” A Christian college cannot tolerate “not merely ungentlemanly treatment of guests, but slugging and that which violates the elementary principles of morals.” He recommended that a coach should “excuse for the rest of the year any player who is not clean in his play.”

Basketball served as an important evangelical tool during the next 50 years, Murray noted. In 1941, Naismith wrote that “whenever I witness games in a church league, I feel that my vision, almost half a century ago, of the time when the Christian people would recognize the true value of athletics, has become a reality.”

In the last 100 years, we’ve seen no shortage of Christian athletes who use their skill, self-discipline, and sportsmanship as a witness to Christ — from Olympic runner Eric Liddel in the 1920s, to football player Tim Tebow in our own generation.

In fact, so many athletes give the glory to God after a game that sportswriters sometimes get irritated with them. To which I respond: Which would you prefer — players known for their faith and good sportsmanship, or players who are arrested for assault or drug use?

If you have a young basketball fan in your family, tell him or her the story of how basketball was invented. And pray for Christian players who can use the public’s love of sports the way Naismith envisioned when he invented basketball — as a witnessing tool to “win men for the Master through the gym.”

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Football's Bad Boys Find God Is Good -- With Practice

If quarterback Ben Roethlisberger can lead his Pittsburgh Steelers to victory in Sunday’s Super Bowl, it’s a good bet he’ll look into the television cameras right after the game and thank God for his remarkable pilgrimage from pariah to hero -- a player who started the season with a four-game suspension after his second sexual-assault accusation in a year, but ended it with a championship ring.

It’s also likely that more than a few of the 100 million viewers will roll their eyes (or worse) at Roethlisberger’s piety, figuring him to be just another scandal-tarred bad boy using Jesus to protect his lucrative career and maybe position himself for some sponsorship deals.

Yet new research on religion and National Football League players suggests that if Roethlisberger isn’t being cynical about the role of faith in his life, then we shouldn’t be either.

Indeed, sociologist Eric M. Carter found that while pro football players are much more likely than most Americans to engage in “deviant” behaviors -- no surprise to anyone who recognizes the names Brett Favre and Michael Vick -- the athletes who embrace religion and practice what they preach are much better citizens than their peers.

“I was really surprised to see the impact it [religion] had on this group of players,” said Carter, a professor of sociology at Georgetown College in Kentucky and author of “Boys Gone Wild: Fame, Fortune and Deviance Among Professional Football Players.”

“Those players who believed in God and actually practiced their religion in terms of service in their community were far less likely to be engaged in law-breaking behaviors or other forms of deviant behavior like attempted suicide or especially drug or alcohol abuse,” he said.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that NFL players apparently need saving more than everyone else.

In fact, Carter was prompted to launch his study when he reconnected with a couple of friends who had played in the NFL and recounted hair-raising stories of rampant domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse and sexual deviance. “I don’t know how many guys I know that beat women, their wives or their girlfriends, or, for that matter, both,” one player told Carter during the course of his research. “It seems to be a common thing.”

Between 2001 and 2006, Carter interviewed 104 pro football players, with a mean age of 30. That is just a slice of the total NFL roster of some 1,700 players, but it provided Carter an insight into the scope of the problems that players face, and the misconduct they get away with.

“We see a lot of what goes on, because of the media,“ Carter said. “But I was amazed at how much goes on that isn’t picked up -- how powerful the NFL is in combating some of the potential bad media. I couldn’t believe how many guys contemplated suicide or attempted it, or were that unhappy with their lives that they engaged in these self-destructive behaviors.”

Carter found that 32 percent of the players he interviewed had been arrested after they entered the league -- and others said they often evaded arrest by dispensing autographs to star-struck police officers -- and nearly half described themselves as unhappy people.

“Fifty percent? That’s a big number,” he said, especially when you consider that these are young men who make on average more than $1 million a year to play football, and many of them much more than that.

“It just goes against our contemporary American conceptions of what happiness is. They have it all. They have the wealth, the fame, the power, the status -- all of those things that many people equate with a happy life.”

Yet evidence of the dysfunction just beneath the surface abounds.

Ben Roethlisberger made headlines when a 20-year-old college student accused him of sexually assaulting her in a bathroom in a Georgia bar where he was celebrating his birthday last March, the second such incident for the quarterback in the space of a year. (In 2006 Roethlisberger also made headlines when he got into an accident while riding his motorcycle; he was not wearing a helmet and did not have a valid license.) Georgia investigators said they did not have enough evidence to press charges in the sex assault case, but the NFL suspended Roethlisberger for the first six games of the season, eventually reducing it to four games.

Then there was the pathetic melodrama of aging superstar Brett Favre and allegations of immoral conduct. Michael Vick had a sparkling season this year with the Philadelphia Eagles, which is what he needed to complete his rehabilitation from the notorious dog-fighting convictions that led to a two-year jail term and suspension from the league. Former Giants star wide receiver Plaxico Burress is still in jail on a weapons conviction -- he accidentally shot himself in the thigh in 2008.

But there are far more tragic episodes, too. Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chris Henry was killed in 2009 when he fell off a pickup truck driven by his fiancée during a domestic fight. Earlier that year, Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte’ Stallworth struck and killed a pedestrian with his Bentley after a night of partying at a swanky Miami hotel.

A Denver Broncos cornerback, Darrent Williams, was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2007, and just last September another Broncos player, 23-year-old Kenny McKinley, committed suicide, apparently distraught over knee surgery that had sidelined him. Team officials said they had no clue McKinley was depressed.

Players say “NFL” really stands for “Not For Long.” When they get out of the sport, things aren’t much better. Two years after leaving football, an astounding 78 percent were bankrupt or suffering “severe financial distress.”

As one player told Carter: “If you ain’t got no family, no loving wife, or other things like that, it’s God ... He’s the only thing that’s gonna save you.”

As to whether all the public expressions of godliness are authentic -- especially when they come from players seeking to polish a tarnished image -- Carter said it’s hard to tell. Anyone who has watched an NFL game knows that Christian piety in particular seems integral to the game, as players routinely make the sign of the cross or point skyward after a big play, or gather with opponents in a midfield prayer circle at the final whistle. And players like Michael Vick have said faith has been part of their comeback.

Yet for every professing Christian like New Orleans Saints QB Drew Brees or Matt Hasselbeck of the Seattle Seahawks, there are other players who reflexively say they believe in God but don’t really engage their faith.

In September 2010, Roethlisberger was telling interviewers that he had rediscovered the Christian faith of his childhood and it had changed him for good. Friends and teammates have said they noticed the change, too.

“It’s a calming feeling when the Lord runs your life,” Roethlisberger told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “And it’s something I’ve always known as a church person, but I’ve never really believed it. I think I’ve known it but never believed it. And now I know it, and it’s a great thing.”

But Roethlisberger conceded that skeptics would likely roll their eyes at any pious pronouncements, so he’s just going to let his actions speak for him. “You’re not going to win people back overnight. You’re not going to win all of them back, period. But, like I said, my actions will speak volumes over the next days, weeks, months and years...”

“I’m not going to be going out there and trying to push it on people and make it seem like all of a sudden I am this great person. That’s not who I am. That’s not what religion and faith is all about. You’re not going to see me getting cross tattoos and wearing cross necklaces. That’s not what it’s about. So if they want to roll their eyes, that’s fine. Because I know where I am at and God knows where I’m at, and that’s all that really matters.”

A Baseball Hero's Rocky Road

All of Josh Hamilton's life, baseball has been his passion. In high school, Hamilton was named the country’s No. 1 amateur player of the year by USA Baseball. In 2010 he was the American League’s “Most Valuable Player.” He loves to smash homeruns. One of his Texas Ranger teammates has said, “Josh Hamilton is the best baseball player to ever walk the planet.”

But it almost didn’t happen.

Two years after he began his professional career, he started hanging around a tattoo parlor and was influenced to turn to booze and crack cocaine. The team suspended him -- repeatedly. For three years Josh did not play baseball at all. He made several attempts at rehab but always relapsed.

Finally his grandmother confronted him and he made a commitment to stay clean. He found he was able to do this through Jesus Christ. When asked about it, Hamilton says simply: “It’s a God thing.” His team tries to support him by celebrating victories with ginger ale instead of champagne.

But he is never far from failing. In early 2009 a sports webpage posted photos of Hamilton shirtless in a bar in Tempe, Arizona, with several women. According to reports, witnesses saw Hamilton drinking, heard him asking where he could get cocaine, and heard him say he planned to go to a strip club later that evening.

Even before the incident became public knowledge, Josh told his wife, his team and the league the next day. When the photos surfaced he called a press conference and said:

“It was one those things that reinforce that I can’t have alcohol. I got away from the one thing that kept me on the straight and narrow and that was my relationship with the Lord. That should always come first.

“Hopefully some good will come out of this. Since that night, I have not had another thought [about having a drink]. I know it’s something I shouldn’t do because it leads to other things.”

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Adapted from "Josh Hamilton" in Wikipedia.org, and "Josh Hamilton: Rescued by Faith," by Ben Brown, BleacherReport, February 28, 2009, http://bleacherreport.com/articles/131756-faith-delivered-josh-hamilton-from-the-control-of-heroin-and-alcohol

The Jocks We Deserve: Athletes and Controversy

Luke 6:22

A few weeks ago, the college basketball game between Cincinnati and Xavier ended in a bench-clearing brawl. The fight got so bad that the referees decided not to play the last nine seconds. The media and fans were rightly appalled and demanded harsh measures.

This debacle came only a week after the NFL announced that eleven players had failed drug tests. Two of the players, from the Washington Redskins, were suspended for the rest of the season because this was their third offense. The media and Redskins fans were appalled and wondered how anyone could be so foolish and irresponsible.

These stories represent the tiniest tip of a huge iceberg. It seems that no news cycle is complete without a story about some athlete getting into trouble both on and off the field.

Yet, by many accounts, the most controversial athlete in America is a God-fearing man who grew up serving the poor overseas and whose teammates would walk through fire for.

I’m speaking of course of Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow. A recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly named him as one of the “15 Most Divisive Athletes in Recent History.” Others on the list included Michael Vick, Barry Bonds, Dennis Rodman, Pete Rose and O.J. Simpson.

So, let’s see...that’s one man convicted of animal cruelty, another of obstruction of justice, yet another of tax evasion and banned from baseball for betting on games, someone who probably killed his ex-wife, and a guy who appeared at a book signing wearing a dress.

What did Tebow do to make this august list? Essentially, he is upfront about his Christian faith and that he made an ad saying that he was glad that his mother didn’t abort him.

Even with this, the controversy over Tebow is hard to understand. After all, he’s hardly the only Christian football player or even quarterback. Players kneeling on the sidelines in prayer is almost as much of the NFL as cheerleaders.

Neither is he the first player to publicly take a pro-life stand: in 1989, members of the New York Giants and owner Wellington Mara made a pro-life video which was far more direct in its condemnation of abortion than anything that Tebow has done.

When you add the appalling, often-criminal, behavior of many athletes, calling Tebow “divisive” brings to mind the words of Jesus’ denunciation of the Pharisees for their hypocrisy. It also brings to mind the story He told about, “we played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.”

There is nothing that Tebow can do, it seems, that will really please people. And that’s ironic because there’s never been a time when people wanted more good role models for their children.

I guess they want the role models — especially religious ones — to be silent, however, about what motivates them.

Ultimately, what makes Tebow “divisive” and “controversial” has little, if anything, to do with what he does on the field. It’s all about our increasing intolerance of faith in public life. Tebow isn’t trying to “impose” anything on anyone besides himself.

Yet, even that is too much for some people. I can’t help but suspect that our generation is getting the kind of athletes it deserves. So, maybe, Tebow should just wear a wedding dress...

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Should Christian Athletes Tone It Down?

Mark 1:44

Denver Broncos quarterback and former University of Florida football star Tim Tebow has been getting a lot of advice lately about how much he should be talking about Jesus.

In November former Bronco quarterback Jake Plummer said about Tebow, “I think that when he accepts the fact that we know that he loves Jesus Christ then I think I’ll like him a little better. I don’t hate him because of that, I just would rather not have to hear that every single time he takes a good snap or makes a good handoff ... like you know, I understand dude where you’re coming from.” In other words, Tim, tone it down.

Just before the turn of the millennium, another Christian quarterback, Kurt Warner, was the Cinderella story of the NFL. Never in the history of professional football had a player so rapidly ascended from unknown to Super Bowl champ and MVP. When the lights were shining the brightest and the platform was the largest, Warner seized the opportunity to boldly proclaim his faith in Jesus Christ to millions.

For a decade, through ups and downs, Warner was consistent in his bold public witness. During the postgame celebration of the 2009 NFC Championship, a game in which Warner led the Arizona Cardinals to victory, Warner declared before millions watching on TV, “Everyone’s gonna get tired of hearing it, but I never get tired of saying it. There’s one reason why I’m standing up on this stage today ... that’s because of my Lord up above. I gotta say thanks to Jesus. You knew I was gonna do it; I gotta do it.”

So one would think that if anyone is excited about Tebow’s bold witness, it would be Warner, right? Well, not necessarily. Not long after Plummer’s comments, Warner weighed in on the issue with the Arizona Central’s Dan Bickley: “Put down the boldness in regards to the words, and keep living the way you’re living. Let your teammates do the talking for you. Let them cheer on your testimony.” Again ... tone it down, Tim.

Is this the same Kurt Warner who told the masses, regarding his very public verbal witness for Christ, “I never get tired of saying it” and “I gotta do it”? Why the change of heart? Warner explains, “There’s almost a faith cliche, where (athletes) come out and say, ‘I want to thank my Lord and Savior.’ As soon as you say that, the guard goes up, the walls go up, and I came to realize you have to be more strategic. The greatest impact you can have on people is never what you say, but how you live. When you speak and represent the person of Jesus Christ in all actions of your life, people are drawn to that. You set the standard with your actions. The words can come after.”

Sounds a lot like the words commonly attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, “Preach the gospel. Use words when necessary.” Sounds really good. Sounds strategic. The only problem is that it’s not biblical.

Jesus Christ opened his ministry by reading from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news ... to proclaim liberty ... to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18). Apparently Jesus was not strategic enough; the people tried to throw him off a cliff.

The apostles and early church did not pull back from their consistently bold public witness. Religious officials warned them not to talk about Jesus. Peter and John replied: “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19-20). In other words, “We gotta do it.” And they did it.

The prophet Jeremiah could not tone it down: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:9).

The Apostle Paul certainly could not tone it down. Arrested, imprisoned, whipped, beaten, mocked -- no method worked to mute Paul when it came to talking about Jesus. To him, to tone it down was unthinkable: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16)

The New Testament pattern and the natural response to the Great Commission is to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with boldness. Tim Tebow’s bold public witness is right in line with the prophets, the apostles, the early church and the Savior.

Tone it down? No.

Keep it up, Tim.

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Brett Maragni is senior pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel of Jacksonville, Fla., and a frequent columnist for BP Sports (BPSports.net).

How Sports Is Like Religion

Acts 20:24

With organized religion in decline in the U.S., what is filling the void? asked Michael Serazio. The Baltimore Ravens. The Red Sox. The Miami Heat. And so on. Even in our increasingly secular country, people still crave the sense of tribal belonging and mass transcendence that they once found in churches and temples. And “if you look hard at sports, you can’t help but see the contours of religion.” Today, the cathedrals are called Wrigley Field, Madison Square Garden, and the Superdome; there, fans with allegiances that often date to their forefathers fill the pews, don the revered team’s sacred vestments, and melt into a collective identity. At the game, at bars, or in living rooms, we experience ecstatic exaltation when “we” triumph, and collectively mourn our losses. We even imbue relics like players’ jerseys, autographs, and Curt Schilling’s bloody sock with iconic significance. Through sports, we fill in the empty places in our lives. We identify with something larger than ourselves. The salvation our devotion provides may not be everlasting – but it sure looks like religion to me.

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27% of Americans believe God plays a direct role in determining which teams win sports events. 53% believe God rewards athletes who have faith with success.

(Public Religion Research Institute, as it appeared in The Week magazine, February 15, 2013)

How Baseball Is Like the Christian Walk

Romans 7:15

Baseball means dealing with failure. “There is more Met than Yankee in all of us,” as Roger Angell has poignantly written.

Every person who has ever played the game of baseball has been a consistent failure. It has been more than 70 years since the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams, finished the 1941 baseball season with a .406 batting average. Williams’ failure rate of 60 percent means that he failed less often than any batter in the seven subsequent decades. In fact, only five other players in the live ball era (since 1920) have matched the success of his 60 percent failure rate. Babe Ruth, known for hitting 714 home runs, struck out 1,330 times in his Major League Baseball career. The Cy Young Award is baseball’s most coveted honor for the game’s best pitcher each season. And yet the award’s namesake lost 316 games as a major league pitcher.

The reality that baseball is a game of managed failure for every player, even the great ones, is one of the reasons the game imbedded so deeply in the fabric of American culture. Baseball became the national pastime because it reflected the national character -- a collective team endeavor that called consistently for individual responsibility and personal sacrifice for the greater good. John Updike noted, baseball is “an essentially lonely game.” Once the batting order is set there is nowhere to hide; your turn at the plate is coming. The fact that the whole team is counting on you in that moment produces the possibility of personal exultation or humiliation. Unlike other youth sports, baseball doesn’t permit a game to be dominated by a star player whose teammates are simply along for the ride.

I fear that one of the reasons for the waning popularity of baseball in American culture is not because the game has changed but because we have changed. It takes time and patience to understand the game of baseball, and becoming a proficient player is hard -- very hard. Natural physical gifting and innate athleticism are no predictors of baseball success. In fact, the baseball Hall of Fame extols the virtues of the game’s greatest players, and the shocking reality is not the amazing size, strength and speed of the game’s heroes but the almost comical diversity of body type and physical ability. The game’s greatest players have been tall and short, skinny and fat, slow and fast, muscular and flabby, intelligent, and well, not so intelligent. But they all have one thing in common. Every one of them developed the emotional capacity to persevere in the face of frequent, chronic failure, and occasional humiliation.

If my suppositions are correct, what was once seen as a part of the glory of baseball -- learning to persevere in the face of consistent failure -- is now perceived to be a reason to avoid the game. Parents simply looking for ways to keep their children busy and happy will choose sports that do not include the pressure and individualized responsibility that baseball has always demanded. Baseball requires a kind of moral courage that keeps persisting in the face of inevitable repeated personal failures. That is the sober unalterable reality for Albert Pujols and every little leaguer as well. Thus, baseball demands a huge time commitment for dads, not simply in teaching and repetitively practicing the fundamentals of the game, but also calling sons to the kind of moral courage the game demands. Rarely ever will a boy persist in baseball if his dad has little interest in the game. As Diana Schaub avers in her essay “America at Bat,” “Without fathers, there is no baseball, only football and basketball.”

Baseball does not fit well with the current trend of sports leagues that don’t keep score and where the goal is for everyone to be successful and know that they are always a winner. Such a notion does violence to a game that is structurally committed to constant reminders of the participant’s finitude and allows no room for such utopian fantasies. One of the reasons baseball has been so slow to embrace instant replay in the sport (and rightly so) is that a game marked by chronic managed failure propagates no delusions of human perfectionism in its players or its umpires. When a baseball purist asserts, “Bad calls are a part of the game,” he is saying something about the warp and woof of the game.

Only genuine baseball fans understood the reaction of Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga during the 2010 baseball season when he was one out from throwing a perfect game (there have only been 23) and veteran umpire Jim Joyce made one of the worst big moment calls in baseball history. Joyce, inexplicably, called the batter safe at first base. When the next batter was retired, Galarraga was saddled with the most disappointing one hitter in the history of the game. How did Galarraga respond to the injustice? When it happened he offered a stunned grin and after the game he said, “He is human. Nobody’s perfect.... I want to tell him not to worry about it.” That moment was a beautiful window into what makes baseball unique.

No baseball player can survive and thrive without hope. When Henry Aaron was asked if he arrived at the ballpark every day knowing he would get two hits his reply was, “No. What I do know is that if I don’t get ‘em today, I’m sure going to get ‘em tomorrow.” Babe Ruth was fond of saying, “Every strike gets me closer to the next home run.” Persistent, daily plodding in the face of chronic managed failure, driven by future hope sounds a lot like my daily Christian walk.

The Apostle Paul wrote, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). But he went on to write, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! ... There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 7:25a, 8:1). The reality of his persistent failure and limitations did not paralyze him because he knew his story fit into a larger picture of the story of Christ. In the Kingdom of Christ, “all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” and those who love God are being conformed to the image of Christ (Romans 8:28-29).

As players prepare for Opening Day, every one of them knows perfection is impossible. No team will win 162 games; no one will bat 1.000, and no regular starting pitcher will go undefeated. Nevertheless, they practice with a sense of hope that this just might be their year. Despite their constant failure, if they keep stepping up to the plate and heading out to their position in the field, it all might work together for something special and if not there is always next year.

The very existence of another baseball season, another 162-game, seven-month exercise in hopeful, managed failure is a faint echo of the glorious promise James offers to all who have put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness” (James 1:2-3). Every one of us has the tendency to compare the highlight reel of others’ successes to our daily failures and lose heart. But baseball, for those of us who love it, provides a constant reminder that everyone (even the superstars) strikes out, but the game still goes on.

Like most years, I think this just might be the year for my beloved Atlanta Braves to win it all. But whether they do or not, I am thankful that the chill of winter is giving way to spring and umpires will soon yell, “Play Ball!” Angell was right, “There is more Met than Yankee in all of us” but as much as a Braves fan hates to admit it, there is a glimmer of a greater glory that the Mets keep taking the field.

The Ferocious Christian Gentleman Behind Jackie Robinson's Famous Moment

Matthew 10:16

The number “42” is sacred in Major League Baseball. On April 15, 1997, it became the only number retired throughout the entire league. It is prominently displayed in every Major League park. Forty-two is synonymous with the man who most famously wore the number on his jersey -- Jackie Robinson. Beginning in 2004, Major League Baseball permanently named April 15th Jackie Robinson Day each year, marking the day in 1947 when Robinson, a 28-year-old rookie, courageously ran onto Ebbets Field transforming one of the most sacred spaces in American culture.

As I write, baseball fans are eagerly anticipating the release of “42,” the biographical film about Robinson’s monumental life and historic achievement. The lionization of Robinson as a significant hero of civil rights in America is heartening but there is an oft-forgotten hero of the saga. Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodger president who signed Robinson, were equally indispensible partners in what Rickey deemed the “great experiment.”

Rickey meticulously planned and shaped the master narrative for integrating the national pastime but it could not have been accomplished without a unique player of great ability, personal courage, and unfathomable self-control. Rickey said of Robinson, “God was with me when I picked Jackie. I don’t think any other man could have done what he did those first two or three years.” And Robinson would say that in his estimation Rickey did more for African Americans “than any white man since Abraham Lincoln.”

It is easy to miss the historical magnitude of that moment in 1947 for the advance of civil rights in America. Consider that when Rickey signed Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color barrier in baseball, it was a year before President Truman ordered the US military desegregated, seven years before the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, eight years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, 10 years before President Eisenhower used the US military to enable the Little Rock Nine to attend Central High School in Arkansas, 16 years before Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I have a Dream” speech, 17 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and 18 years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Looking back on his role in the integration of baseball Robinson concluded, “I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor.” Robinson’s overstated, self-deprecating, observation is helpful in remembering that breaking the color barrier in baseball did not begin with the “great experiment.” Mr. Rickey’s drama began with his family’s Midwestern Baptist and Wesleyite Methodist roots. His father was described as a “pious, devout, religious man ... a genuine New Testament Christian” and his mother is said to have taught Branch countless Scripture stories even before he could read. Biographer Murray Polner described Rickey as a conservative evangelical Christian whose religious faith was the decisive factor in his commitment to racial equality. Rickey would often repeat the family motto he learned as a child, “Make first things first, seek the Kingdom of God, and make yourself an example.”

Biographer Jimmy Breslin argues, “It was Rickey who broke the color line in baseball” and his motive was that “he thought it was God’s work.” Breslin unflinchingly states, that because of the consequences, Rickey accomplished “the single most important act in the history of this nation.” Rickey said, “I believe a man can play baseball as coming to him from a call of God.” Looking back on Rickey’s life and legacy, one would have to conclude that he viewed being a baseball executive as a call of God as well.

Branch Rickey was a baseball man to the core. He loved the game from childhood. Playing professionally for the St. Louis Browns, Rickey told a reporter his goal in life was “to be both a consistent Christian and a consistent ballplayer.” By all accounts, he was successful in the former but his professional playing career was less than stellar. He possessed a career batting average of .239 with three home runs in three seasons and as a catcher he holds the record for allowing 13 stolen bases in a single nine-inning game. In 10 years as a Major League Baseball manager, Rickey accumulated a pedestrian 597 wins and 664 losses.

In 1926, Rickey moved exclusively into his role as a baseball executive that would lead into his induction in the baseball Hall of Fame. Rickey-led teams won four World Series championships in his 29 years. He revolutionized baseball and gained a competitive edge over other clubs by his innovation of using farm clubs to develop players for the big league club. Rickey was known as a Bible-quoting, tight-fisted Republican, a fierce competitor, and a shrewd negotiator whom players referred to as “El Cheapo.” It was said that Rickey’s everyday speech resembled a sermon and second baseman Eddie Stankey once retorted after negotiating his contract with Rickey, “I got a million dollars’ worth of free advice and a very small raise.”

In 1903, Rickey was the 21-year-old head baseball coach at Ohio Wesleyan University when his Christian conviction collided head on with his love for the great game. Charles Thomas was recruited by Rickey to play catcher and was the only black player on the team. OWU traveled to South Bend, Indiana, for a game against Notre Dame. When they arrived the hotel clerk refused to allow Thomas to stay because of a whites-only policy. Rickey persuaded the hotel to allow Thomas to go to his room and later requested a cot. That evening Rickey found his catcher sobbing and rubbing his hands and arms convulsively while muttering, “It’s my skin. If only I could wipe off the color they could see I am man like everybody else!” Rickey told him to “Buck up!” and said, “We will beat this one day!” but later noted, he never felt so helpless and vowed at that time that he would do whatever he could to end such humiliation.

As an executive for the St. Louis Cardinals, Rickey unsuccessfully pushed for an end to segregated seating at the park and tested the waters for racial integration of the team but feared that a premature attempt in the wrong place would set back the cause. When Rickey left the Cardinals for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1942 he immediately took the initiative to integrate baseball. The cultural moment and the location of the Dodgers in Brooklyn made it an opportune time for Rickey to act. Americans of all races were fighting in World Ward II against racist ideology in Europe while racist Jim Crow laws were in place back home. The tragic irony was slowly becoming apparent to many Americans. In Brooklyn, Rickey was in a place where he could make a credible case to ownership of potential profits if they were the first club to sign black players. Rickey used his business acumen to serve his conviction that segregation was morally indefensible.

In March 1945, Branch Rickey met at Joe’s restaurant with Red Barber, the beloved Dodgers broadcaster, to tell him of his plan to sign a black man to play for the Dodgers. Barber was initially appalled but recalls Rickey telling him that he had to act because he had heard Charles Thomas crying for 41 years. At that time, he did not know who that player would be but later that summer scouts had narrowed the list down to a handful of players. It seems the initial plan was to sign several players at once but instead Rickey settled on Jackie Robinson.

In their first meeting, Aug. 28, 1945, Rickey stunned Robinson with the news he wanted him to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He grilled him for hours and made him commit to three years of non-retaliation. Rickey read to him from Giovanni Papini’s book “Life of Christ” and pointed him to the biblical account of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. Rickey told Robinson, “We can’t fight our way through this, Robinson. We’ve got no army. There’s virtually nobody on our side. No owners. No umpires. Very few newspapermen. And I’m afraid many fans will be hostile. We’ll be in a tough position. We can win only if we convince the world that I’m doing this because you are a great ball player and a fine gentleman.”

Rickey believed that the right player, who was also the right person, full of moral courage, willing to commit to non-retaliation for three years -- except with his play on the field -- could end what he called an “odious injustice.” There is a sense in which Rickey laid out an incipient strategy that would be later utilized by Martin Luther King Jr. in the larger Civil Rights movement. Rickey said about signing Robinson, “I couldn’t face my God much longer knowing that His black creatures are held separate and distinct from His white creatures in the game that has given me all I own.”

In his excellent biography on Branch Rickey, Lee Lowenfish describes him in the sub-title as “Baseball’s Ferocious Gentlemen.” What an apt and powerful description. He was ferocious. Journalist John Chamberlain described Rickey as “one of the slyest men who ever lived, but in all fundamentals, a man of honor.” He was passionately driven to succeed and made no apologies for turning a profit in the process. Yet his aggression and fierceness were guided by his Christian conviction and worldview. His life embodied Jesus’ admonition to His disciples, sheep in the midst of wolves, to “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16).

On November 13, 1965, Branch Rickey stepped to the podium to speak after having been inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. Baseball’s ferocious gentleman had left the hospital against the advice of his doctors because, as he often said, “it is better to die ten minutes sooner than to live doing nothing.” He rose to speak about a topic he had lived -- courage. He spoke of having objectives on which there is no price and began to tell the biblical story of Zaccheus, who he said, “Had the greatest amount of courage of any man in the Bible.” He did not get to finish telling about one of his favorite biblical characters because -- while still speaking -- he collapsed, and less than a month later died.

Perhaps adding one word to Lowenfish’s descriptive title of Rickey would prove helpful -- Baseball’s Ferocious Christian Gentleman. But I fear the moniker, “ferocious Christian gentleman” sounds oxymoronic in contemporary evangelical circles where manhood is often reduced to being a nice guy and God is envisioned as a kind of cosmic smiley face. Where Christian discipleship is cheapened to generic niceness, men pursue comfort and respectability in the place of self-sacrificial “great experiments” that demand ferocious Christian gentlemen.

Billy Graham said of Branch Rickey, “He was a man of deep piety and integrity -- that rare combination of a ‘man’s man’ and a Christian man, at the same time.” Here’s hoping Graham is wrong and the combination is not so rare, because our churches are in desperate need of some ferocious Christian gentlemen.

Winning Takes Care of Everything: Our New Heroes

John 13:15

Most of you will recall several years ago when golf superstar Tiger Woods took a nose dive. The man who had the world at the tip of his putter lost respect, fame, millions in sponsorships and, of course, his wife after revelations surfaced of various and tawdry extramarital affairs. Despite Woods’ profuse apologies to fans, colleagues, and competitors, his career was in the rough, and no one knew how long it would take him to get back on his game — professionally or personally.

Four years later, Woods has made a comeback and has had little trouble racking up enough victories to reclaim not only his number one ranking in the sport but also the sponsorships.

Of the few corporate sponsors that stuck with him through those troubled days, Nike may deserve its own award for sheer tenacity and guts — especially in advertising. One controversial commercial, which the company aired shortly after the scandal, shows Woods clad in the Nike hat and shirt as his late father, Earl, asks his son if he learned anything from his experiences. Tiger doesn’t reply.

This year, on the heels of Woods’ latest victory, Nike has taken an even bolder shot with a single image released on Twitter and Facebook sporting the caption, “Winning Takes Care of Everything.”

This, of course, has been the catchphrase Woods has been using for years to silence critics of his game. But as Washington Post columnist Cindy Boren points out, in this context, just as Woods’ career is taking off again, Nike’s implication is all but stated: His delivery on the golf course compensates for his indiscretions in private. Athletic victory is far more important than moral character.

Woods himself has said nothing about the ad, and it would be wrong to speculate about his feelings. But this instance of “Nike being Nike” as one sports marketing consultant told USA Today, might reflect a far broader trend in our culture — one that reaches beyond golf or even professional sports into the realms of entertainment, business and politics.

Our heroes are changing, and you can see it all around us. The generation of Jackie Robinson, the Lone Ranger and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has given way to vampire boyfriends, doped-up athletes, and politicians whose moral indiscretions do little to damage their popularity or influence. Nike’s daring ad reminds us that the assumption of moral success going hand-in-hand with professional success is a thing of the past.

Not that we’ve completely given up on the old kind of hero. I mean, we still admire the honest athletes of the world, the consistent Tim Tebows and especially the courageous first responders who rescued bombing victims in Boston last week.

But alongside these timeless role models of generations past, a new breed of hero has cropped up: brazen, volatile, self-absorbed, often promiscuous, and proud of it.

I was reminded of this when reading a profile last week in the Washington Post on former NBA great Allen Iverson. Throughout his career, Iverson personified this new type of hero, most famously in a post-game rant against his coach Larry Brown who had criticized his bad practice habits and sense of entitlement. At the time, sports analysts and commentators defended Iverson for his independence and “don’t care what anyone thinks” attitude.

But today, they pity him. Iverson, who made millions and was probably the best player ever of his size, is now broke and lost, according to the Post profile. Having been enabled in his delusions of self-importance without responsibility, he has no idea what to do now that he can’t play basketball anymore. It’s a sad story, and indicative of the fact that a culture that leaves moral clarity out of the equation for a hero does even the heroes themselves a grave disservice. The assumptions of Nike and of our culture, that somehow winning fixes everything, and that moral integrity just can’t compete with a good swing, is delusional. It just isn’t true — not today, not ever.

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Is A 91-0 Loss Proof of Bullying?

What do you do when your son’s football team is defeated by a score of 91-0? One thing I would not recommend is filing a bullying complaint against the other team.

To say that Fort Worth Western Hills was outscored by the undefeated Aledo High School Bearcats would be an understatement. The No. 1 team in Texas’ 4A classification crossed the goal line 13 times during the Oct. 18 contest.

It is worth noting that in seven games this season Aledo has outscored its opponents 485 to 47, which averages to a score of 69-6 per game. The Bearcats have two games where they scored 84 points and one in which they scored 77.

According to everyone involved, including the head coach of Western Hills, Aledo did everything it could to keep the score down. The Bearcats’ first team only ran 21 plays in the game.

Yet one Western Hills parent took umbrage to the defeat and promptly filed a bullying complaint against the Bearcats coaching staff.

The CBS affiliate for Dallas/Fort Worth, Channel 11, obtained a copy of the compliant and included it in a story on the station’s website. The perturbed parent wrote:

“My son plays for western hills football team on friday night we all witnessed bullying first hand, it is not a pretty sight. Picking up my son from the field house after the game and taking him home was tough, I did not know what to say on the ride home to explain the behavior of the aledo coach for not easing up when the game was in hand.... During the game the aledo players showed respect to my son and I thank them for their good sportsmanship....”

I feel for the parent who wrote the complaint. I, too, have had to console my children after lopsided losses. One of my daughter’s soccer games was a 13-0 defeat. If the game were scored according to the rules of football, it would have been a 91-0 loss.

So how does a parent address a sports loss, especially a lopsided one? Allow me to suggest some ways to approach a defeat in such a way as to mitigate the humiliation factor.

First, you need to be prepared. What happened to Western Hills was not unexpected. After all, Aledo had twice scored 84 points. As a parent, I would remind my son that Aledo is a formidable opponent and encourage him to play his best.

“But each one must examine his own work,” the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the church at Galatia, “and then he will have reason for boasting in regard to himself alone, and not in regard to another.”

The best is all a player can ever give. Sometimes an opponent is just better. When this is the case, I would look for any positive and point it out.

Next, I would I want to help put things in perspective to lessen the impact of the loss as much as possible. A quick Google search will reveal that in 1927 a football game between two Kansas high schools resulted in Haven defeating Sylvia 256-0.

In a 2007 baseball game, Dallas Lake Highlands defeated Samuel High 53-0. The game was called after the fifth inning due to a Texas high school baseball mercy rule.

I would use these examples to lighten the mood a bit and indicate, with a smile, others have been beat by bigger margins. I would also point out that my son’s team had fared about as well as others had.

I would also remain positive. I would make sure my child understood that in life a person’s self-worth is not determined by athletic performance. Character counts more than winning a game.

“Therefore, encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing,” Paul told the Thessalonian believers. If ever someone needed encouraging, it would be a child after a lopsided sports loss.

I would point out that a person’s character is revealed by how one reacts after a loss. I would encourage my son to pick himself up and look to the next opponent, which is likely to be more mortal than the team he just played.

Finally, I would practice patience. I would allow a good night’s sleep to take away some of the sting of the lopsided loss. I would certainly wait until the morning after the defeat before deciding to file a bullying complaint, which I would refrain from doing.

Everyone must be “quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger,” the Bible says in the book of James, “for man’s anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness.”

The complaining parent was upset after his son’s team was drubbed. However, his complaint did not help the situation. Some would argue it made it worse by calling undo attention to the loss.

What do you do when your child’s team is defeated 91-0? You do everything you can to mitigate the sting of defeat and point them to the future. One loss, no matter how lopsided, does not define a person’s life.

A Football Quarterback's Quiet Faith

In Peyton Manning’s book Manning, which he co-wrote with his father Archie Manning in 2001, the record-setting quarterback gives a rare description of his faith and its importance to him. The description is a rare one, not because Peyton’s faith is an insignificant part of his life, but because, as Peyton explains, he has intentionally chosen to speak more by his actions than by his words:

For me generally it had always been the big four: faith, family, friends, and football... as important as football is to me, it can never be higher than fourth. My faith has been number one since I was thirteen years old . . .

Some players get more vocal about it ... and some point to Heaven after scoring a touchdown and praise God after games. I have no problem with that. But I don’t do it, and don’t think it makes me any less a Christian. I just want my actions to speak louder, and I don’t want to be more of a target for criticism . . .

My faith doesn’t make me perfect, it makes me forgiven, and provides me the assurance I looked for half my life ago. . .

I’ve been blessed - having so little go wrong in my life, and being given so much. I pray every night, sometimes long prayers about a lot of things and a lot of people, but I don’t talk about it or brag about it because that’s between God and me, and I’m no better than anybody else in God’s sight.

But I consider myself fortunate to be able to go to Him for guidance, and I hope (and pray) I don’t do too many things that displease Him.... I believe, too, that life is much better and freer when you’re committed to God in that way.

Religion Runs Deep For Football

John 14:27

Faith and football — with themes of adversity, dedication and striving to improve — have always seemed tied together. Players and pastors frequently use themes of war to describe the physical and spiritual battles they encounter on the field and against sin. The National Football League (NFL) and faiths such as Christianity [=Evangelicalism] and Catholicism share Sunday as their marquee day.

“There is a sense that ‘We have to fight,’ and football provides the best metaphor in all of sports for that,” said Seth Dowland, an American religious history professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. “There’s something about the adversarial nature of the game that appeals to Evangelicals who have for decades, if not centuries, felt this sense of being in a war, whether it’s a spiritual war against Satan or a cultural war against forces of secularism.”

Added George McGovern, a team chaplain for the Giants: “It’s a contact sport and because of the emotions that come with the violent nature of the game, it just tends to get guys more spiritually involved. It seems to pull at the core of a guy more than other sports.”

During the long, physically and emotionally draining hours of the NFL week, players say Bible studies and chapel services provide order and help clear their minds. Players often draw a powerful sense of comfort and strength from leaning on their religion as game day approaches.

“The Bible tells us that Jesus is peace,” said Okung, the cornerstone of the Seahawks’ offensive line. “It’s peace of mind. It’s a soundness of mind. When you have those things, that’s a power from God. We can rely on that and know that we have peace of mind in situations, regardless of whatever circumstances we may be in.”

Several of the Seahawks have used the run-up to 2014’s Super Bowl to spread their thoughts on religion. "We understand the attention that football brings," Chris Maragos said. "This is a big deal. But to us, there’s more to it than that. It’s not just about football. Jesus is bigger than that."

How To Wear Superstar Status

John 13:15

Isn’t it great when sports superstars live as well off the field as they do on it? I’ll tell you about a couple of them -- and their faith.

A few weeks ago, Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter made his last All-Star game appearance, becoming the oldest player ever to collect two hits in the mid-summer classic.

As my colleague Roberto Rivera pointed out on the BreakPoint blog, on the day of the game, a Washington, DC, sports talk radio show asked listeners if any superstar in sports had “worn” his superstar status as well as Jeter.

Well, if you’re wondering what it means to “wear” your superstar status well, you’re asking the right question. The show’s hosts referred to all the famous and beautiful women Jeter had dated without any hint of scandal. They cited his opulent lifestyle — his mansion in Florida is nicknamed “St. Jetersburg” — and his ability to preserve his privacy.

The consensus of the radio listeners was, no, no one wears his superstar status as well as Derek Jeter.

Well, I beg to differ. Not because I dislike Jeter or even care about what he does off the field. And I won’t deny that his on-the-field deportment is the embodiment of class.

No, my problem is that I think there’s more to “wearing” your superstar status than where you live and with whom you sleep. And while I think avoiding scandal is a good start, it’s setting the bar much, much too low.

In fact, I can think of several superstars whom I would prefer my children emulate more than the Yankee captain and the future first ballot Hall-of-Famer.

Like Clayton Kershaw. This Dodger southpaw has also been in the news lately. In late June and early July Kershaw threw 41 consecutive innings without allowing a run — the fifth longest such streak since 1961. He also became “the third pitcher in the last 100 years to win eight straight starts in one season while striking out at least seven batters in each one.” The other two were named Sandy Koufax and Juan Marichal.

Kershaw’s latest accomplishments only built on his growing legend: his career ERA is the lowest of any starting pitcher in the live ball era with at least 1,000 innings pitched.

But that’s not why Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci argued that he should have been that magazine’s “Sportsman of the Year” in 2012. Verducci cited Kershaw’s work with AIDS orphans in Zambia and the young people in his hometown of Dallas as examples of what he called “the awesome power of faith.”

Verducci wrote that Kershaw, “is one of the best pitchers in baseball who is making an even bigger impact without a baseball in his hands.”

Kershaw isn’t the only superstar whose impact off the field is greater than his impact on it. The winner of the NBA’s “Community Assist Award,” given each year to players for “community engagement, philanthropic activity, and charity work” is, as the inscription on the plaque reads, “Following the standard set by NBA Legend David Robinson, who improved the community piece by piece.”

While playing for the San Antonio Spurs, Robinson, a member of the original USA “Dream Team,” founded the Carver Academy, an inner-city school that offers “a challenging academic program ... and a nurturing family-like environment based upon the foundation of Judeo-Christian scripture.”

Not surprisingly, both Kershaw and Robinson are Christians. They’re doubtless aware of our Lord’s words, “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required.”

Thus, they use what God has given them to further the Lord’s work of restoration in this broken world — at home and abroad. It may not be the stuff of drive-time sports talk radio, but it is the stuff of lives worth emulating.

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The Communion of Sins

Jude 1:23

Late February [2015] brought the sad news that Josh Hamilton of the Angels may have had a relapse in his fight against alcohol and drug abuse.

Hamilton’s story arc — from first overall pick in the 1999 MLB draft, to being out of the game because of drug and alcohol addiction, to recovery and a spectacular comeback — has inspired many people, including many Christians. Hamilton credited his faith in Christ with helping him overcome his demons and finally fulfill his enormous potential.

I don’t know Hamilton, or even anyone who knows Hamilton, but I know a thing or 75 about personal demons and patterns of sin. I suspect that among the many things going through Hamilton’s mind is the idea that he has let a lot of people down, many of whom he has never even met.

That last part is the biggest, if not only, difference between Hamilton’s story and mine. (Or yours.) His struggles and failure are public and, thus, the stuff of potential humiliation; mine are private and “only” the stuff of guilt and shame.

Many years ago, I heard someone change the words of the Apostle’s Creed from I believe in “the communion of saints [and] the forgiveness of sin” to “the communion of sins [and] the forgiveness of saints.” The phrase has stuck with me all these years because I’m frankly counting on God enjoying the play on words as much as I do. I derive comfort from the possibility that when St. Paul told the Philippians that he was confident “that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus,” he was suggesting that along the way forgiveness will abound.

I need it. We all do.

My favorite illustration of what the “communion of sins” might look like comes from Brennan Manning’s “The Ragamuffin Gospel.” In it, he tells the story of an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting in which a guy he calls “Phil” admits that he fell off the wagon after being sober for seven years.

Phil knows he screwed up. He even has an idea of why: He didn’t pay enough attention to what A.A. calls “H.A.L.T.,” which stands for “hungry,” “angry,” “lonely,” and “tired,” the emotional states that make you more vulnerable to taking that first drink.

The response to Phil’s confession wasn’t condemnation, disappointment, or even surprise. Instead, his fellow recovering alcoholics said things like “Thank God you’re back,” “Boy, that took a lot of guts,” and “Let’s get together tomorrow and figure out what you needed relief from.” At the end of the meeting a woman Manning calls “Denise” kissed Phil and told him, “You old ragamuffin! Let’s go. I’m treating you to a banana split at the Tastee Freeze.”

Phil’s confession did take guts. It also took belonging to a communion of sinners where the forgiveness of saints, or people who would be saints, is lived out. Stated plainly, Phil felt safe to be what he was, a man struggling with his demons, instead of striving to be what Manning calls “the imposter,” the false self that everyone admires and no one knows.

I don’t know if your church feels safe. I suspect not. Unlike A.A. meetings, where, in Manning’s words, “Everyone is there because he or she made a big slobbering mess of his or her life,” churches are invested in seeming to be filled with shiny, happy people even when they’re not. I know. I’m one of those people who doesn’t always find it easy to be shiny and happy.

So I pray that Josh Hamilton finds such a safe place. And that I do, too.

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Comments:

I agree completely. “I don’t know if your church feels safe. I suspect not. Unlike A.A. meetings, where, in Manning’s words, ‘Everyone is there because he or she made a big slobbering mess of his or her life,’ churches are invested in seeming to be filled with shiny, happy people even when they’re not. I know. I’m one of those people who doesn’t always find it easy to be shiny and happy.”

I attended 12-Step meetings for two years, and, sad to say, in one month I found more honesty about problems there than I saw in the church in ten years. People in 12-Step groups attend because they feel a need, ‘cos they know they are messed up, and desperately need help. (Dare I say, ‘a Savior’?) Otherwise, what’s the point?

What is an increasing wonder to me is that we are the people and this is the entity by which our Lord Jesus has chosen to change the world, and to change Eternity. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “Who can duly adore such a Love...?”

Posted By: Kevin Peet on March 04, 2015

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Thank you, Roberto. This is the best thing I’ve seen here in a long time. I pray our churches learn not to project “Shiny and Happy,” but project forgiveness.

Posted By: Dan Gill on March 03, 2015

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Also see HolwickID #35389 and #63433.

Ballplayers Putting Faith In Christ [updated]

John 2:10

Religious belief is being seen throughout baseball. Dodgers catcher Gary Carter's locker has a sign which reads, "With God, all things are possible." Angels third baseman Gary Gaetti's locker has a Bible. Darryl Strawberry was converted this season and his home run production sagged, reviving old baseball stereotypes that Christian ballplayers become complacent in the field or that they accept losses as God's will.

Some managers are uncomfortable with religious faith. Baseball lore has it that crusty Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver once asked outfielder Pat Kelly to curtail the team's Bible study. "Don't you want me to walk with the Lord?" asked Kelly. Weaver: "I'd rather you walk with the bases loaded."

Dodgers outfielder Brett Butler says, "Christians are, quote, coming out of the closet. Back in the olden days, they wanted hell-raising, beer-drinking, womanizing, cussing, hard-nosed players. Well, that's the old days. You can be a Christian and still be a hard-nosed player. If Christ were a ballplayer, he'd be the best there was."

Sometimes conversions lead to friction. Gary Gaetti is the leader of the Minnesota Twins' drive to a World Series title in 1987 and became saved in 1988. His close friendship with Twins first baseman Kent Hrbek was strained. His says his performance may have been affected some. "You're so afraid of that old nature that you had that you want to put it totally down. It's not like you've lost your aggressiveness. But you're totally submitted to Jesus, and you're playing by a different set of rules."

Darryl Strawberry says, "People have criticized me, saying I'm not hitting because of my religion. But they don't realize the importance of a total transformation of a person's life. Baseball was everything. Now it's a part of your life."

Butler gave Strawberry this advice: "You can get frustrated and mad and upset without sinning. I said, 'Darryl, get your fire back.' God doesn't say you can't get mad or frustrated. Jesus flipped tables in the temple." (Strawberry had a recent surge at the time of the article.)

==================

"Baseball great Darryl Strawberry says true power comes from God," by Scott Barkley, March 30, 2023, .

Opening Day defines what baseball fans love about the sport.

The sights, sounds and smells funnel together in the game day experience. There is a near-giddy optimism for the months ahead. Hopes hang on the concept of potential, whether in fast-twitch young players ready to make their mark or veterans eager to show they still have something in the tank.

Darryl Strawberry had a lot of potential when the New York Mets made him the top draft pick in 1980. And by all accounts, he delivered.

A member of the Mets Hall of Fame, he rewarded that organization by winning 1983 Rookie of the Year honors, the National League home run title in 1988 and collecting seven All-Star appearances.

An eighth All-Star showing came in 1991 with the Dodgers. Strawberry’s baseball career ended in 1999 with the Yankees and his fourth World Series championship. Fans remember the leg kick and looping swing that led to 335 home runs in a 17-year career.

Legal troubles dogged him late in his career and into the 2000s, however. He spent time in drug treatment facilities and prison. He battled cancer and at one point told a judge he had stopped chemotherapy because he had lost the will to live.

But then came a reawakening thanks to a decision he had made in 1991. He began a new lifestyle and new identity.

Potential took on a whole new meaning, and Strawberry has delivered.

The cost of (pausing) discipleship

In 1991 he said he prayed in a conversion experience to be a Christian, but ignored the concept of discipleship.

“If you don’t get discipled, you go back to your old lifestyle,” he told Baptist Press. “Discipleship came after the storms of life, all the trials and tribulations.”

Strawberry didn’t know his mother had always been praying for his relationship with God. She died from breast cancer at 55 years old. He learned of her prayers when his sister found their mother’s journal under the bed.

“I was emotional. Behind the scenes, mama had been praying for all of her children,” he said. “She was faithful in her walk with God. It kind of knocked me off my throne.

“She was concerned about my salvation instead of my celebrity status.”

The other key figure in his life is his wife, Tracy.

“Tracy came into my life and brought me back into church,” he told Baptist Press. It led to an experience Strawberry had rarely felt on the baseball field.

Their testimonies of overcoming addiction and sharing the Gospel have made both popular speakers. But to get to the 250-plus appearances he makes annually at churches, events, prisons, schools, addiction centers and other locations, Strawberry needed discipleship.

“God sat me for seven years [for discipleship],” he said. “We’ll go to God to turn things around for us, but He’s like, ‘You didn’t get into this mess overnight. I need to develop you into the man that I want you to be.’

“Sitting in church for seven years was a growing process of knowing Christ, not just His name but knowing His power at the cross.”

A new strength

“Power” was an adjective used to describe Strawberry’s feats at the plate. The game he loved taught him a lot of good things – facing a challenge, overcoming adversity and dealing with slumps and your mistakes.

Those concepts still show up whether he speaks at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes benefit, men’s event or the weekly talk he gives at a detention center for boys. They were there at the December 2022 address he gave at Shorter University, affiliated with the Georgia Baptist Mission Board.

It’s through a different kind of power, though.

“The message I speak is the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said. “You can’t save yourself. You can’t change the things that have occurred in your life. I realized my life was never going to change until I repented of my sins.”

Strawberry spoke with Baptist Press while in Orlando for a speaking gig with the Mets during spring training. He hasn’t completely left baseball, but it doesn’t compare with the drive he has for preaching and sharing what Christ has done in his life.

That started with dealing with his own ego. He defines it as Easing God Out.

“If you can’t put that down, then you can’t truly find the purpose for how God is going to use you,” he said.

He’s about 20 years into his new relationship with Christ. Sixteen years ago, he felt God calling him to preach. Former teammates, he said, are still waiting to see if it’s a phase.

“They don’t realize that when you have a true encounter with Christ, you don’t go back,” said Strawberry. “I’m not perfect; Jesus is. But when you pick up the Bible and learn it for yourself, you understand why God called people. They all had issues, just like us.

“The Bible is a simple book for complicated people.”

A different direction, then and now

He’s careful in his daily habits, avoiding television and the news. His social media accounts – @darrylstraw on Facebook and @darrylstrawberry18 on Instagram – focus on his ministry. It’s nothing personal, he says, about being careful in the company he keeps. It’s just that “If you’re around foolishness, you allow foolishness to rub off on you.”

At 61, he’s wiser and sees things differently. His Mets teammates were known for their wild living, with Strawberry smack in the middle of it. But today, he has a much greater appreciation for Gary Carter and Mookie Wilson, two who didn’t fit in for all the right reasons.

“I admire them the most,” he said. “They both lived for Christ. They didn’t go out to bars. They didn’t chase girls. They didn’t drink. I admired them for that even though I was on the other side of it. I wanted what they had; I just didn’t have the guts to do what they were doing.”

Standing for Christ means you won’t be liked by a lot of people, said Strawberry, and that’s OK. Going in a different direction opens up more possibilities, and something with far more potential.

“People ask me how I found Jesus,” he said. “I tell them that Jesus was never lost. It is us, as a people, who are lost.

“Jesus has always been there, and He will set you free.”

Local Pastor Stops Attending Sports Events!

The pastor’s reasons for not attending sports events:

1. Every time I went, they asked me for money.

2. The people with whom I had to sit didn’t seem very friendly.

3. The seats were very hard.

4. The coach never came to call on me.

5. The referee made a decision with which I could not agree.

6. I was sitting with some hypocrites – they came only to see what others were wearing.

7. Some games went into overtime and I was late getting home.

8. The band played some songs I had never heard before.

9. The games are schedules when I want to do other things.

10. My parents took me to too many games when I was growing up.

11. Since I read a book on sports, I feel that I know more than the coaches, anyhow.

12. I don’t want to take my children because I want them to choose for themselves what sport they like best.

Setting An Example Rather Than A Record

Nate Haasis, a high school quarterback from Springfield Southeast High School in Springfield, Illinois, recently broke his conference's all-time passing record. But then Haasis did something even more remarkable -- he turned the record down because of his sense of honor and integrity.

In the last game of the season against Cahokia -- and the last of Haasis's high school career -- he was only 30 yards short of breaking the conference passing record. The only problem was that Cahokia had a 16-point lead and the ball with less than a minute left. Unless something drastic happened, Haasis would fall short.

That's when the coaches from the two teams made an underhanded deal without Haasis's knowledge. Southeast would allow Cahokia to score so that Southeast could get the ball back. Cahokia would then let Haasis complete a pass to break the record.

I think Southeast Coach Neal Taylor's heart was in the right place, and he was just trying to do something nice for his star player. But it was a poor decision, and Taylor has since resigned as the team's coach.

The end of the game unfolded just as the coaches planned, and Haasis became the Central State Eight's all-time leading passer. He should have been thrilled. But the more he thought about it, the more uncomfortable he felt about the way it happened.

“I felt disrespectful to the other players who had played football before me,” Haasis said in a story on abcnews.com. “I know teammates fought with me as hard as they could to get me every yard I had and it just didn't feel right the way I got it.”

So Haasis petitioned the conference to disallow the questionable pass, thus negating his record. He wrote a letter to conference president Chuck Hoots: “Dear Mr. Hoots, in respect to my teammates, and past and present football players of the Central State Eight, it is my hope that this pass is omitted from any conference records. ... I would like to preserve the integrity and sportsmanship of a great conference for future athletes.”

The conference granted Haasis's request, and removed him from the record books. Griff Jurgens, who previously set the record during his years at Chatham Glenwood High School in the late 1990s, still holds the mark.

The record is important to Jurgens, and he's happy that he'll be holding it for a while longer.

“I think it's very admirable what he did,” Jurgens said. “I appreciate him doing that. By doing that, everyone can kind of let it go a lot easier.”

Admirable, indeed. Haasis could easily have let the matter go, and few would have thought anything about it. After all, cheating is becoming more and more common in sports, as athletes are always looking for a way to get an edge. Just look at all the allegations about widespread steroid use in Major League Baseball, as well as other sports.

But Haasis would have always known the truth, and he didn't want to settle for that. He knows what sportsmanship is about, and he did the right thing. In so doing, Haasis has earned himself more deserved recognition and admiration by turning down the record than he ever would have achieved with it.

*

Just A little boy

He Is Just a Little Boy

He stands at the plate

with his heart pounding fast.

The bases are loaded,

the die has been cast.

Mom and Dad cannot help him,

he stands all alone.

A hit at this moment,

would send the team home.

The ball meets the plate,

he swings and he misses.

There's a groan from the crowd,

with some boos and some hisses.

A thoughtless voice cries,

"Strike out the bum."

Tears fill his eyes,

the game's no longer fun.

So open your heart and give him a break,

For it's moments like this,

a man you can make.

Please keep this in mind,

when you hear someone forget,

He is just a little boy, and not a man yet.

The Superbowl - and Beyond

In the two-week buildup to a championship game with hundreds of different plotlines, Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck leaned forward in his chair at the Super Bowl media day as if he intended to divulge one of the secrets for his team’s successes.

“I don’t think many people realize,” the softspoken, seventh-year quarterback from Boston College said as reporters learned forward for what they expected to be a juicy tip from the Seahawks playbook, “how many Christian guys we have on this team and how united we are.”

“There are a lot of us on this team from all parts of the country, but we are united in Christ, and the unity you see on this team is very encouraging,” Hasselbeck said.

Encouraged by their quarterback and their league MVP running back Shaun Alexander, Christian players on the Seahawks spent a majority of their hour-long session with the media sharing their faith and the need to focus on more than just Sunday’s final score.

“We believe life itself with Jesus Christ is more important than what we do on the field,” Alexander said. “We want to make sure our focus is on more than this game. We have a bigger calling.”

Nearly half of the Seahawks players and coaches who were given their own platform on media day spoke freely about their personal faith to the media.

Hasselbeck, whose father Don played in the NFL, has completed a remarkable personal transformation on the field: from a first-round draft choice of the Green Bay Packers when he came out of college, to a late-1990s trade to the Seahawks, where he lost his staring job to good friend and fellow believer Trent Dilfer, only to regain it when Dilfer signed with Cleveland last year.

He has received much of the credit for the Seahawks’ first-ever trip to the Super Bowl this year inside Detroit’s domed Ford Field.

Hasselbeck said his whirlwind of a football season, which will be highlighted on an international stage Sunday before a worldwide viewing audience of 1 billion people, has been made easier through his personal faith in Jesus Christ.

“If you let it bother you, the pressure of this week could really get to you. There is so much happening with interviews and posing for pictures and talking with ESPN and ABC and everything,” Hasselbeck said.

“I just remember what Trent [Dilfer] always prayed in the tunnel before the games, ‘Lord, may we perform for an audience of one.’ To know that I have God in my heart and that I’m performing for an audience of one on Sunday, and I want to be a good teammate, is very comforting.”

Fullback Mack Strong has been bashing his body into bigger and stronger defenders for almost a decade, clearing the way for Alexander and other more publicized backs, but he said the greatest moment of his career was when he became a Christian in 1997.

“We have been given a great opportunity to play football, but it’s short-lived. Five years from now people won’t remember that I sat in this chair on media day or even what I said unless they look at the video.

“We believe in something bigger than this game, that we have to stay strong for a bigger purpose.”

Asked to describe himself by one of the many non-sports reporters at media day, Strong, a committed husband and father of two kids, said his commitment to Christ as the biggest thing in his life.

“My turn-ons? Humility. My turnoffs? Pride before the fall. Am I afraid of a commitment? No, I already have a commitment to Christ. Have I had breakups in the past? Yes, I broke up with those who have a different philosophy.”

Backup quarterback David Greene, a rookie who starred at the University of Georgia where he was active in campus ministries and greatly influenced by his Christian head coach, said those looking to explain Seattle’s success coming into Sunday’s game need to look closer than wins or statistics.

“We have a lot of guys on our team who don’t get caught up in the extra stuff. We have guys who are in the Word every day when you could be getting stressed out.

“When you’re living with pressure, you have to surround yourself with good people and that’s what we try to do. If you believe in Christ, then you can live with pressure regardless of what happens on Sunday.”

Starting offensive guard Chris Gray spent 14 years in the league before ever realizing his dream of being in the Super Bowl, but he said the better blessing for himself and his teammates is knowing Christ.

“That’s the best blessing you can have,” he said.

Defensive tackle Michael Boulware will have the responsibility of helping slow down the Pittsburgh offensive attack Sunday [Feb 5, 2006], but he said he has been spending a good deal of his pre-game preparation working on another attack.

“The devil always tries to attack you along the way, but when I focus on Jesus Christ and put my heart on God, that’s the kind of focus I need for this game. We have great leaders on this team which lead the great way. That’s what its takes to be successful.”

===============

The other team:

While former Chicago Bears quarterback Jim McMahon once got media attention for writing offbeat messages on his headband during Super Bowl week, Pittsburg strong safety Troy Polamalu plans his own method of expression during Sunday’s championship contest, even if it will never be seen by the millions watching in TV on in person.

He will be wearing his simple, silver wedding ring under his black gloves as he goes about his defensive exploits against the Seattle Seahawks.

“I don’t think we put any value on marriage any longer in our country and, to me, the wedding band is a symbol of my wedding bond with my wife [Theodora] and my bond with God,” Polamalu said during the Super Bowl media day Jan. 31, 2006.

He was one of several Steelers happy to talk about their faith in Christ to the assembled worldwide media at Detroit’s Ford Field, the site of Sunday’s championship game.

Wide receiver Antwaan Randle El eagerly surveyed the chaotic media scene of hundreds of journalists with notepads in hand, dozens of video cameramen and countless live radio interviews being conducted. Then he gave his assessment of the proceedings:

“People think this game may go down in history, but it’s really only temporary. I thank God that I am here, but I know I have to ask Him for guidance because I didn’t know what to expect....

“I can’t let this game get me too high or too low,” El said. “I have to stay focused on God and stay focused on His word.”

Steelers starting center Jeff Hartings, a former Detroit Lion who was nervous being a favorite target of local media welcoming home a former player, said his faith in God extended even into the media session.

“I’ve been praying every day that I would honor Him and I’m praying now that I don’t embarrass Him during this time,” Hartings said. “I want to give Him His praise all the time and use this time as a platform not for me, but for Him.”

Hartings accompanied Steelers chaplain Jay Wilson on a mission trip in 2004 and said that trip, along with the knee injury he overcame to gain his Pro Bowl status, has changed his career.

“God humbled me with the injury, but over last three years I’ve been able to refocus on Him and honor Him with my play. Every year, I just take it one step at a time if He wants me to continue to play. That’s the way it’s been lately for me and the way it should continue to be,” Hartings said.

“I just want to be a Christian man giving Him the glory. That’s my plan for this game.”

Steelers fullback Dan Kreider said the familiar routine of daily prayer times with his wife over the phone and morning Bible reading in an unfamiliar city is helping him overcome temptations connected with the Super Bowl.

“There certainly is a lot of temptations here with parties and women and things we know we shouldn’t be a part of,” Kreider said. “It keeps you humble when you can pray over the phone every night with your wife or spend time at the team Bible study.

Offensive tackle Max Starks said the annual media gathering, which drew more than 3,000 participants, was seen as a God-given opportunity to the Christian Steelers players, not a hindrance.

“I’m just a tool from God and this life is just a test from Him,” Starks said. “God has given the Christian guys a world stage in this big game and promises us a reward in the end. You have the opportunity to use your faith in everyday conversation. That’s what we need to be doing.”

Polamalu has been nicknamed the Tasmanian Devil for his frenetic on-field defensive style, but didn’t hesitate to use his opportunity to promote his faith as a key to success.

“Keep God No. 1 in your life all the time,” he said in response to an ESPN Argentina reporter who asked how his soccer-mad country could be successful in American football as well.

Former Philadelphia Eagles offensive lineman Barrett Brooks, who is in his 10th year in the NFL but only his third with the Steelers, said the constant shifting of players among teams has made it difficult when Christian brothers face each other on the football field.

“You know a lot of Christian guys in this league, but we just have to keep strong for Him and give God the time He deserves,” Brooks said.

“God will have His will regardless of what we seek on the field,” he said.

With less than five days to go before the final showdown between the Steelers and Seahawks, there will be plenty of time to talk, scheme and study every possible way to defeat the opposition.

But for a number of the players, their focus is on more than just a three-hour encounter.

“This [Super Bowl] is big to the world,” Hartings said. “But I have to separate myself, give God the glory and honor He deserves. Give my best on the field on Sunday and off of it every other day.”

We Stink, So We Quit

Luke 8:15

A school district in Michigan apparently doesn’t believe the wisdom of Winston Churchill.

In one of the British prime minister’s most famous speeches, he encouraged the boys of the Harrow School in 1941, “Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Oscoda Area High School officials, however, have canceled the remainder of the school’s football season after the team went 0-4 and hadn’t scored a point. The team will forfeit the rest of its games.

According to an Associated Press story, coach Kyle Tobin said his recommendation for canceling the remainder of the season -- which school officials upheld -- was based on the welfare of his players. Tobin’s position, as reported in the Oscoda Press, is that the players weren’t committed to the physical conditioning necessary to be competitive and thus were at risk of serious injury.

“When you go to a game on Friday night and see a team physically dominated, those are the indisputable facts,” Tobin said in the AP story. “I have 28 years of coaching experience in high school and college, and I know the difference between a team playing bad and a team that’s unsafe.”

Tobin and the school board ignored requests from players to let them keep playing.

“The students didn’t feel the going was tough,” said Holly Nelson, co-editor of the Oscoda Press, who’s been covering the story. “The players wanted to continue. They were all in favor of continuing. They didn’t really like losing, but at least they’re still playing football.”

Nelson pointed out that in 1991, while coaching at a different high school, Tobin also canceled the season when his team started 0-4.

“These are the only two schools I’ve ever heard of canceling a season other than for violence on the field,” Nelson said.

Makes you wonder if Tobin would have done the same thing if the team was 2-2. Several members of the Oscoda community were quoted in the Oscoda Press as saying the decision stemmed from Tobin’s ego, and not from a concern for the players.

Tobin didn’t return a phone call seeking comment.

But let’s just assume that Tobin and other school officials reached this decision out of genuine concern for the players’ physical welfare, which I certainly hope is the case. It’s still a bad decision. These kids know what they’re in for when they go out for football. And unless they’re growing an abnormally large bunch of pipsqueaks up there in Oscoda, they can’t be in that much danger from another high school team.

Board member Neal Sweet apologized to the players and told them they weren’t quitters. “You went out there and did your best,” he said in the AP story.

Sweet is right -- the football players aren’t quitters. The quitters appear to be the school officials who voted to end the season prematurely.

What a lousy way for a school to teach students about persevering through difficult times. The message the school is sending is obvious -- when the going gets tough, quit. A few years from now, these same leaders will wonder why their students never excel at anything.

It makes you glad that Churchill was running things in Great Britain, instead of officials from the Oscoda Area High School.

A Football Quarterback's Quiet Faith

In Peyton Manning’s book Manning, which he co-wrote with his father Archie Manning in 2001, the record-setting quarterback gives a rare description of his faith and its importance to him. The description is a rare one, not because Peyton’s faith is an insignificant part of his life, but because, as Peyton explains, he has intentionally chosen to speak more by his actions than by his words:

For me generally it had always been the big four: faith, family, friends, and football... as important as football is to me, it can never be higher than fourth. My faith has been number one since I was thirteen years old . . .

Some players get more vocal about it ... and some point to Heaven after scoring a touchdown and praise God after games. I have no problem with that. But I don’t do it, and don’t think it makes me any less a Christian. I just want my actions to speak louder, and I don’t want to be more of a target for criticism . . .

My faith doesn’t make me perfect, it makes me forgiven, and provides me the assurance I looked for half my life ago. . .

I’ve been blessed - having so little go wrong in my life, and being given so much. I pray every night, sometimes long prayers about a lot of things and a lot of people, but I don’t talk about it or brag about it because that’s between God and me, and I’m no better than anybody else in God’s sight.

But I consider myself fortunate to be able to go to Him for guidance, and I hope (and pray) I don’t do too many things that displease Him.... I believe, too, that life is much better and freer when you’re committed to God in that way.

Religion Runs Deep For Football

John 14:27

Faith and football — with themes of adversity, dedication and striving to improve — have always seemed tied together. Players and pastors frequently use themes of war to describe the physical and spiritual battles they encounter on the field and against sin. The National Football League (NFL) and faiths such as Christianity [=Evangelicalism] and Catholicism share Sunday as their marquee day.

“There is a sense that ‘We have to fight,’ and football provides the best metaphor in all of sports for that,” said Seth Dowland, an American religious history professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. “There’s something about the adversarial nature of the game that appeals to Evangelicals who have for decades, if not centuries, felt this sense of being in a war, whether it’s a spiritual war against Satan or a cultural war against forces of secularism.”

Added George McGovern, a team chaplain for the Giants: “It’s a contact sport and because of the emotions that come with the violent nature of the game, it just tends to get guys more spiritually involved. It seems to pull at the core of a guy more than other sports.”

During the long, physically and emotionally draining hours of the NFL week, players say Bible studies and chapel services provide order and help clear their minds. Players often draw a powerful sense of comfort and strength from leaning on their religion as game day approaches.

“The Bible tells us that Jesus is peace,” said Okung, the cornerstone of the Seahawks’ offensive line. “It’s peace of mind. It’s a soundness of mind. When you have those things, that’s a power from God. We can rely on that and know that we have peace of mind in situations, regardless of whatever circumstances we may be in.”

Several of the Seahawks have used the run-up to 2014’s Super Bowl to spread their thoughts on religion. "We understand the attention that football brings," Chris Maragos said. "This is a big deal. But to us, there’s more to it than that. It’s not just about football. Jesus is bigger than that."

A Story of Basketball and Persistence

We take our spiritual insights wherever we find them, even from Sports Illustrated. Theologian Martin Marty recently drew my attention to an article in that magazine [March 1999] with some bittersweet spiritual lessons. The article profiled a team that has the dubious distinction of being one of the worst basketball teams in recent memory. But the story has to do not only with lopsided scores and discouragement, but also persistence and attitude.

The girls’ basketball team of ChristWay Academy in Duncanville, Texas, has seen hard times this season. According to Coach Jennifer Marks, playing Arlington Oakridge was certainly a low point. As Marks tells the story, when Oakridge pulled ahead 37-0, she thought, “IF ONLY WE COULD SCORE,” and then later she began to pray, “IF ONLY WE COULD GET THE BALL TO MIDCOURT.” Calling time-outs didn’t help. ChristWay lost 103-0. Marks’ husband, a theology student, helped her get through the sleepless night that followed. “He did the best thing he could do, which was to just hold me and listen.”

ChristWay lost two more games, 86-7 and 76-15. John Walters puts it this way - and this is our lesson for the day: “A funny thing happened to the ChristWay girls: nothing. Nobody quit. Nobody whined. Nobody, including Marks, blamed anyone else.” Almost all the players were new, just learning to play.

How about a happy ending? Late in January, ChristWay played Gospel Lighthouse of Dallas, which had a 1-19 record. Gospel Lighthouse only had five girls to suit up for the game. Then followed examples of un-Christianlike conduct, with Lighthouse players having to leave the game because of technical fouls, ejections, and foulings out. Despite this, Gospel Lighthouse was still ahead 43-40 with 17 seconds left, and the ball - with only one player remaining! but this was a critical problem - she had no one to whom to pass the ball inbounds. “Game over!” shouted the referee. Officially the score became a 2-0 victory for the non-quitting, non-whining ChristWay Academy. It was their first and only win of the season. [Holwick: how does 40-43 become a 2-0 victory?]

I love the fact that a Sport Illustrated writer sits up and notices that these kids and their coach didn’t do what most people would do in their shoes: point fingers, complain, and quit. They just kept going. No one wants to cheer a losing team, but you’ve got to hand it to the ChristWay team for their attitude and persistence.

There’s an old saying: “90% of success is just showing up.” In the spiritual life, we might modify that: “90% of success is just keeping going.”