You all know I’m a big sports fan. Some recent stories from the world of professional sports, however, have been of some concern to me.
In football, as many of you know, coaches and players from the New Orleans Saints have been suspended for varying lengths of time for having a “bounty” program. What this means is that players would get extra money for injuring players on the opposition team.
In baseball, pitcher Cole Hamels of Philadelphia admitted to deliberately hitting Washington’s Bryce Harper with a fastball. Harper had done nothing to Hamels which would justify this assault. Hamels’ only stated reason for throwing at Harper is that Harper is young (nineteen years old) and “this was my way of saying ‘Welcome to the big leagues, kid.’”
In basketball, Chicago’s Joakim Noah was injured during a playoff game in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia fans enthusiastically cheered the injury, because it would give their team a better chance to win.
What bothers me even more than the fact that these things happened, though, is the number of sports fans and announcers I’ve heard who are trying to justify them. Now, some say that all of these things have been going on for a long time, and they’re probably right. Still, such behavior is not justifiable, and it bothers me. I love sports, but I also believe in the ideas of fair play and sportsmanship. The idea was to defeat your opponent on the playing field, not to try to injure them or to cheer when they were injured.
So, I started wondering, what’s going on here? Why do people feel this way? Why are a lot of people okay with the players on one team trying to injure the players on the other team?
This isn’t the whole answer, of course, but I think one aspect of this is that professional team sports are pretty much a zero-sum game. When you look at the standings, there have to be an equal number of wins and losses in the league. When you watch a game, you know that it’s impossible for both teams to win. That means that what’s bad fortune for one team is good fortune for the other, and vice versa. If you root for your team to win, you are, whether you intend to or not, rooting for the other team to lose. That’s just the way it is.
That’s true of sports, but does not have to be true of life. One person’s success does not have to cause another person to fail. Someone else’s success does not doom me to failure, nor does someone else’s failure help me succeed.
That’s true in churches, too. I want the United Methodist Churches of which I am pastor to grow. However, that does not mean that I want the other churches in town to shrink. I want us all to grow. The more people there are going to Christian churches—any Christian churches—in our communities, the more influence Christianity will have on our communities. That will create an environment in which all Christian churches will grow.
We all want to succeed. For Christians, though, Jesus defined success as spreading his gospel to all the nations. That’s a bigger job than one Christian denomination can handle. If we’re going to succeed, all Christians going to need to work together to get it done.
The goal in sports is to try to defeat the other team. The goal of Christians, however, is to bring people to Christ. We don’t need to defeat anyone to do that. We just need to work together. If we do that, we’ll all win.
No comments:
Post a Comment