a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday March 18th, 2007
I know I don't look it (and although it is certainly no secret, I almost hate to admit it out loud), but for as long as I can remember, I have been something of a closet "jock." Not an athlete, mind you — my daughter Stephenie is an athlete, and I'll have more to say about her a little later. But a jock: someone who from a very early age has spent a good portion of his "free" time throwing, catching, kicking, hitting, bouncing, batting, dribbling and dodging balls of various shapes and sizes in a fairly focused (one might even say passionate) sort of way, and who has continued to do so well after the time that gravity and good sense would have suggested I give it up.
I come, in fact, from a large extended family of jocks: two brothers, three cousins, and countless nephews, spouses and shirt-tail relatives; and when we all get together on the Fourth of July, we play touch football games so intense they make the fabled contests of the Kennedy Clan at Hyannis Port look like, well, childsplay. Or at least we used to, until a few years ago, when my oldest cousin Earl tore up his knee so badly he had to have surgery (again) and missed several weeks of work, and we all kind of decided it was time to start acting our ages. But it was just an act — the following summer we were all out in the driveway again playing half-court basketball, with Earl (his knee in one of those big metal braces) hopping around on one foot and firing up long bricks from well beyond the three-point line.
Football, baseball, basketball, soccer, volleyball, softball, tennis, racquetball, golf…our basements, garages, attics and “wreck” rooms all look like used sporting-goods stores. Except for mine, of course, which looks more like a used book & sporting-goods store. Which brings me to the reason I'm a little embarrassed to be confessing all this to you. Because you see, jockishness is not really encouraged in my line of work. Clergy (and especially liberal clergy) are expected to be bookworms, not ball hogs: spiritual leaders, for whom competition is the work of the devil, and winning or losing are supposed to matter far less than making sure that everybody gets a chance to play.
There are exceptions to these unwritten expectations, of course, but they are minor ones. It's OK, for example, to exercise, to work out, provided it's on something really tedious like a stairmaster or a stationary bike. Real bicycles are OK too, as are swimming, jogging, and hiking, but anything even moderately competitive tends to be taboo, especially if you compete to win. Being a minister is a little like golfing with the President; no matter how poorly your opponent may play, courtesy requires you to play even worse, so as not to hurt their feelings.
Watching competitive sports as a spectator is allowed, especially if it's a summer sport like baseball, or the Olympics, and you're not too fanatical about it. Fanaticism is only allowed if you root for teams like the Chicago Cubs or (of course) the Boston Red Sox — perennial underdogs with proud, long-standing traditions and a heritage of finishing somewhere other than first. In fact, there was a time when you could pretty much tell where a UU minister went to Divinity School by the kind of baseball cap they were wearing at General Assembly. Harvard graduates, naturally, rooted for Boston. Meadville graduates rooted for the Cubbies. And Starr King graduates were allowed to root for whoever they liked, provided they were expansion teams that had never played in a World Series. (My home town Seattle Mariners used to be very popular with Starr King students, at least in the days before Junior, A-Rod, the Big Unit, or Ichiro).
These are unwritten rules, of course; you can't just go to the Weidner library and look them up. Other ministers would probably have a little bit different take on them than I do. But believe me, they're real; and those of us who are closet jocks are intimately aware of them. I use the word "jock" and not "athlete" because in my mind, at least, there is a very subtle yet important distinction between these two concepts, and it's essential that you understand it before we proceed any further.
As I mentioned earlier, my daughter Stephenie is an athlete. Steph started attending summer volleyball camps when she was in the fourth grade. She played three years of varsity ball in High School, competed with a club team at weekend tournaments in the off-season, played intercollegiately four years for Mount Holyoke College (right here in Massachusetts), then went on to Springfield College (the birthplace of Basketball, I might just mention) where she earned a Masters Degree in Exercise Physiology, and discovered her current passion for racing bicycles and competing in Triathlons.
Even now as a working firefighter in Portland, Oregon, she still trains year-round for strength, conditioning, and specific skills; her most recent competition was the Annual Firefighter Stairclimb Challenge, which involves racing up one thousand, three hundred and eleven steps to the top of the sixty-nine story Columbia Tower in Seattle while breathing through an oxygen mask and wearing approximately 60 pounds of firefighting equipment. Steph ran those stairs in 18 minutes and 27 seconds, finishing 243rd overall (and 4th among the women), out of a field of approximately thirteen hundred other firefighters from across the United States and Canada, and as far away as New Zealand.
Now THAT’S an athlete....
But Steph comes by this insanity honestly; her mother began swimming competitively at the age of six, and in 1971, as a student at the University of Kansas, was (for five brief, shining hours between the morning qualifying heat and the Finals later that afternoon), the Women's NCAA National Intercollegiate record holder in the 400 yard individual medley. Margaret competed in and completed her first Marathon at the age of 50; she ran it in 5 hours, 26 minutes and 35 seconds, finishing 80th in her division, and 4712th overall, out of a field of nearly 13,000. Yet neither mother or daughter could hit a baseball if you served it up to them at home plate with a knife and a fork, nor do they seem to have any desire to want to.
Stephenie, at least, has shown some signs of becoming a jock; in college, for instance, she discovered the game of Lacrosse, and learned that it's a lot more exciting to run toward a goal (carrying a weapon) than it is just to run in circles. And she will occasionally consent to play football against the cousins (even though she's not very good at it), as well as volleyball at the beach (where she's far and away better than anyone else, yet sometimes still gets blocked at the net by a 50-year-old guy who is easily 50 pounds over his ideal playing weight (and yes, I still can get up that high; it’s the coming down again that hurts). Even so, she's learning how to play simply for the joy of playing rather than the ephemeral glory of personal triumph.
But like I said, this is a subtle distinction. Jocks still like to play to win, and some degree of athleticism certainly comes in useful in that regard. But real Jocks continue to play, win or lose, long after the last vestige of their athleticism has deserted them. It's not just an activity, nor even a lifestyle, but in many respects an entire way of living and being in the world that borders on the religious, and embodies a spirit all its own, complete with its own ideology, values, and sense of personal identity.
Of course, most Jocks don't think about their lives this way at all. Most Jocks just lace up their sneakers and hit the court, and don't really worry too much about whether what they do is better described as a "lifestyle" or an "entire way of living and being in the world." It takes a real bookworm to be able to appreciate that distinction, and fortunately there doesn't seem to be any shortage of those these days either.
Some contemporary intellectuals have suggested that Sports are really America's Civil Religion: that in order to see clearly who we are as a people, and the values and principles that are ultimately important to us, one must look to the metaphors of athletic competition. Fair play, hard work, a level playing-field, finding a competitive edge, pushing the envelope, going "faster, higher, stronger" — these are the qualities that define the American character, that make us who we are.
Others would say that this overstates the case: that Sports are more accurately characterized as a form of "folk religion" that has strongly shaped our civil religion, but which has also been shaped by it. These scholars point to things like the "muscular Christianity" of the late nineteenth century, the YMCA movement, and the founding of the modern Olympics a century ago, and suggest that whatever "religion" we find in Sports we put their ourselves in order to make organized athletic competition something more than merely an excuse to gamble.
And then there are those who would say that sports are actually the enemy of true religion: that they substitute the pursuit of "victory" and worldly success for the humble, compassionate, contemplative spirituality on which all authentic religious faith is based. It's a complicated debate: far more complicated than merely whether High School football games should begin with public prayers, or if "Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life" is a ludicrous parody of a naive religious piety or an inspiring example of indigenous American vernacular hymnody.
But whatever your personal opinion may be in this debate, it seems to me that there are certain observations that can be made which are common to them all. The first of these is that there are indeed, in a strictly sociological sense, elements of the culture of sport as we practice it in this country that resemble a form of folk religion. These elements go far beyond the simple ideology of "a sound mind and a sound body" and the suggestion that somehow athletic participation builds strong character and a sense of fair play. Rather, there is an entire repertoire of symbolic meanings and ritualistic style practices associated with Sports that go well beyond pedagogical considerations regarding values and character. Think about something as simple as “March Madness,” or “playoff fever,” where the fortunes of an entire city or University seem to rise and fall with the success of its athletic team. The historical continuity and sense of tradition created by the ongoing presence of an athletic team serves to create "a community of memory and hope," in which the recollection of past glory fuels future expectations for the coming season.
And this is true of sports teams at every level, and not just professional franchises. I don’t know whether any of you have been watching this new television show, “Friday Night Lights,” but I remember when I was first interviewed as a candidate for the pulpit of the Unitarian Church in Midland, Texas in 1984, I was a little annoyed that in the next room, as I met with the Search Committee on that first Friday night, there was a radio carrying the play-by-play broadcast of the local High School football game between the Midland Lee Rebels and the Odessa Permian Panthers (the team about which Bissinger’s book was originally written). The radio was just loud enough that when the stadium cheered one could concentrate for a moment and hear the announcer explain what had happened, provided one stopped listening to the ministerial candidate first. I later found out that 75,000 people had attended that game (the town itself only had a population of 90,000).
The following year, when these same two teams met again on their way to the State Tournament, the local television station chose to tape-delay broadcast of the World Series in order to air the High School Football contest live. Obviously, there was more going on there than twenty-two young adults chasing an inflated pig bladder for an hour up and down a one-hundred yard long grassy field. For those who participate in the spectacle by dressing in their team's colors, sitting in a certain part of the stadium and shouting encouragement to the players, the events on the field clearly embody a much greater significance that what would merely meet the eye of a visiting Martian anthropologist.
This brings us to what might be thought of as the "demonic" aspects of Sports in America — that is to say, the potential they represent for the corruption of our religious values, and the qualities of character and virtue that we would hope to protect. Organized sports often merely represent money and power, and the competition to obtain greater and greater amounts of these things to the exclusion of all other concerns. Sports is entertainment and that makes it Big Business; combine that with television, and what you get is a self-perpetuating money generating machine.
Ordinary people simply become part of an economic calculation; I’m certainly not the first person to wonder why twenty-something college drop-outs who can run a little faster or jump a little higher or throw a ball a little further than “ordinary” human beings should be paid such extraordinary amounts of money, while someone like myself (with five university degrees) can stand up here and pour out my soul Sunday after Sunday, and earn less (so far) over the course of an entire 25 year career than someone like Tom Brady (whose base salary is only about a million dollars a year, but whose overall contract will pay him about $60 million dollars for his six-year deal) makes in a single Sunday afternoon.
But let’s face facts: it’s simply a matter of supply and demand. So long as people are willing hundreds, or even thousands of dollars to watch these kids play, or even just sit home watching on TV, and then buying millions of dollars worth of chips and beer and cars and sneakers and whatever else “our Corporate sponsors” choose to advertise during those games, it’s worth whatever it costs to pay those astronomical salaries.
And this has nothing to do with religion; rather, it is simply the soul-less process of reducing human beings solely to their economic value alone, whether it's $27 million a year for the only player in the NBA who shoots free throws worst than I do, or the mere pennies a day paid to the Third World sweatshop workers who manufacture the high-priced, highly-promoted shoes Shaq and his team mates play in every night.
It may seem unreasonable (and even unfair) that someone like Michael Jordan should be paid more each year by Nike simply for lending his name to the promotion of their shoes than the entire annual payroll of the Vietnamese factory where the shoes themselves are made, but without the “Air Jordon” brand to drive the product line, nobody gets paid at all. It’s nothing personal; it is merely a reflection of the logic and “winner take all” values of the Business of Sports, where at the end of the day, the only inherent worth that matters is what you can contribute to the bottom line.
And I bet you're starting to wonder when I'm finally going to get to the Buddha.…
The one thing about participation in sports that I personally find intrinsically valuable is the opportunity sports sometimes offers for self-transcendence. Let me explain what I mean by this. By taking the universe and temporarily focusing it down to what happens, say, between the lines in the 94 feet of a basketball court, sport creates a laboratory of concentrated human experience. And in this laboratory it is possible for us to experiment with our lives in two very important, yet interrelated ways. The first of these involves the individual. With disciplined hard work and frequent practice, sport offers its participants the opportunity of achieving true excellence for its own sake — of performing a certain skill at such a high level of perfection that the barriers between who you are and what you do become transparent, and temporarily slip away.
It's an almost mystical feeling, this experience of "being in a zone," and you don't necessarily have to be the best in the world in order to experience it — you just have to give yourself permission to stop striving to do more than you are capable of doing at the moment, but rather let the activity come to you, so that you become free to function without self-conscious inhibition at precisely at the cutting edge of your skill and competence, yet not a whisker beyond it.
The second experience is one of community, and involves the self-transcendence of truly becoming a member of a team. There's even a koan to go with this experience: in "team" there is no "I." When a team has "chemistry," when it comes together in such a way that the individual talents and egos of its members meld together seamlessly into a single, highly-functioning unit, the group becomes more than just the sum of its participants, even though each of the participants themselves may be functioning at a level slightly lower than the "peak" performance they are capable of as individuals. But by giving up a certain part of their individuality, they gain back more in the form of synergy, and this is what it means to be a member of a team. To paraphrase Scripture, You lose your Self in order to find yourself, and thus become connected to those around you in a way that transcends the limitations of individuality.
Which brings us back again to the place where we started, and the words of Bart Giamatti:
"I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods…I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of each other and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know...."
***
READING from The Joy of Sports by Michael Novak.
Suppose you are an anthropologist from Mars. You come suddenly upon some wild, adolescent tribes living in territories called the "United States of America." You try to understand their way of life, but their society does not make sense to you. Flying over the land in a rocket, you notice great ovals near every city. You descend and observe. You learn that an oval is called a "stadium." It is used, roughly, once a week in certain seasons. Weekly, regularly, millions of citizens stream into these concrete doughnuts, pay handsomely, are alternately hushed and awed and outraged and screaming mad. (They demand from time to time that certain sacrificial personages be "killed.") You see that the figures in the rituals have trained themselves superbly for their performances. The combatants are dedicated. So are the dancers and musicians in tribal dress who occupy the arena before, during, and after the combat. You note that, in millions of homes, at corner shrines in every household's sacred room, other citizens are bound by invisible attraction to the same events. At critical moments, the most intense worshipers demand of the less attentive silence. Virtually an entire nation is united in a central public rite.…
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