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Where there is sport, there is scandal.

The latest examples, all from fall 2004: Football phenom Terrell Owens and sultry starlet Nicollette Sheridan glorified illicit sex in a pre-game network teaser. Baseball stars Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds (of the New York Yankees and the San Francisco Giants, respectively) admitted they illegally used performance enhancing steroids. And there was that professional fight (the Detroit Pistons vs. the Indiana Pacers), at which a basketball game finally broke out—after Piston Ron Artess, among others, was pulled from the stands while punching out a fan.

Finding God in Sports Learn more from our downloadable Bible Study

The problems of sports run long and wide. One well-known writer has said "Television threatens to engulf many of the inherent values of sports," and "Throughout our sports programs there is an undue emphasis on violence." Another book summarizes the problem of modern American sports culture: "cheating, rule violations, ego exaggeration."

There is nothing new under the sports sun. The first two quotes come from James Michener's Sports in America, written nearly 30 years ago. The last quote is from Tony Ladd's and James A. Mathiesen's Muscular Christianity (1999), and goes on to note that these problems "came to fruition in the 1920s and affected sport for the remainder of the twentieth century." And the first part of the next century, we might add.

As Paul put it in Romans 1, too many professional athletes are "filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are … insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil … foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless." Okay, he wasn't talking about athletes but idolaters. Unfortunately, too often the shoe fits.

The temptation for Christians is to drone on that things have gotten out of hand, that sports is a waste of time at best and as a form of idolatry at worst, that winning has became too important, that we take sports way too seriously.

We beg to differ. The problem is that we no longer take sports seriously enough.

Signal of transcendence
Sports is supposed to be a form of play. Catholic scholar Johan Huizinga, in his classic Homo Ludens, said play is "a free activity standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being 'not serious,' but at the same time absorbing the play intensely and utterly … . It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner."

The great Green Bay Packers coach (and amateur Catholic theologian), Vince Lombardi, put it well: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." This doesn't mean "win at any cost," or "do anything to win," because play proceeds "according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner." But when one is absorbed in play "intensely and utterly," the game will be played as if winning is "the only thing"—as if there is really nothing more important in the world at that moment than the game itself.

This type of play, one that fully absorbs our attention and joy, is, according to scholar Michael Novak "the first act of freedom … . The first free act of the human is to assign limits within which freedom can be at play. Play is not tied to necessity, except to the necessity of the human spirit to exercise its freedom, to enjoy something that is not practical, or productive, or required for gaining food or shelter." Or multimillion dollar contracts.

In other words, it is play precisely because it is, in respect to our day-to-day lives, pointless. Like the Sabbath—a day in which nothing useful (by human reckoning) gets done. The Sabbath is not merely an occasion to rest from labor, to get ready for another blistering weak of work—as if God thought up the Sabbath because, exhausted after six overtime days, he was just too pooped to go on. Instead, the Sabbath is the seventh and final act of creation, the culmination of Creation—the point of it all.

The Latin Vulgate translation, the church's only version for 1,000 years, translated Proverbs 8:30-31 like this: "I [Wisdom] was at his side putting together everything, my delight increasing each day, playing before him all the while, playing in this world made of dust and my delight was to be with the sons of men." Wisdom in this passage has been commonly seen as a reference to Christ, the Word. After reflecting on this passage, medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas concluded, as one scholar summed it up: "God plays. God creates playing. And man should play if he is to live as humanly as possible and to know reality, since it is created by God's playfulness."

Perhaps liberties were taken with some Hebrew words here, but Aquinas's point is more than amply illustrated in the sweep of salvation history, which begins with the creation of the Sabbath and culminates with the Eternal Sabbath. Whenever we take a Sabbath, as a day or as an activity in the midst of a day, we proclaim this fundamental truth of existence. This is why Peter Berger, in his Rumor of Angels, notes that play is a "signal of transcendence."

But from Little League to the Super Bowl, we often see the very opposite of play. We have traded play's freedom and joy for pottage that is merely useful: Money (from college scholarships to gaudy professional riches), sex (increasingly a part of the package of professional sports), and power (or, more precisely, cultural status).

How exactly we retrieve the freedom and joy of sports is a complex matter. But Christians have a crucial voice in our ongoing cultural conversations that take place from children's leagues to professional sports. It is not a voice that whines that sports is "just a game," but one that demands that we take sports as seriously as possible, as if it were play.

"The Lost Joy of Sports," Christianity Today editorial

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