Superbowl Theology

Like many Americans (apparently 135+ million of us), I watched the NFL's championship Superbowl on Sunday night. Let me be clear from the outset that I like American football in general. I played football (not on the professional level of course). It has become the one sport that I follow closely on a regular basis, both on the collegiate and professional levels. 

I used to follow baseball like that when I was younger, as it was the first sports love of my youth, but Major League Baseball has done everything in its power to alienate old school baseball fans like myself. I watched the Cubbies and a bit of the Braves last season for the first time in years, but baseball is just not a joy to watch anymore. It's largely just run by computers and sabermetrics now with the added nonsense of incoherent rules changes to try and speed up the games. There are ways to speed up baseball naturally without dumbing it down or becoming dependent on computers, but that's a discussion for another day. 

About this time of year, there is a meme that tends to float around social media which is a quote from columnist and intellectual George F. Will that goes something like, "Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings." I used to like reading George F. Will's newspaper column, as he used to have interesting things to say.  He was always a bit on the intellectual snarky side, but at least he liked baseball and his sports writing was generally on point. Over the last several years, he's unfortunately morphed into a strange atheist intellectual libertarian whose writings are dripping with vitriol and what I call "more intellectualer than thou" snotty disdain for anyone who does not hold his opinions. I hold out hope he may one day return to the more mannered version of his younger bow-tied self, but I fear he's now old and set in his ways. 

My personal opinion of George F. Will aside, I return to the quote attribute to him. It sounds like something he would say, but I was not able to definitively verify if he actually said this precise quote about football. I have heard him talk about his disdain for American football, so I presume if he did not say that precise quote that he would at least be in agreement with the sentiment of the quote if nothing else. 

I would actually argue the opposite of what George F Will was saying here. Is American football a rough sport? Yes. I have two plates and six pins in my left ankle to this day, courtesy of college football, but my ability to play football was my ticket out of the Appalachian economy and a career in the Tennessee mines. Football allowed me to go to college myself. The roughness of football was well breaking the cycle of the poverty of my youth, as it was for hundreds of other athletes who could not have otherwise afforded college. 

I would also quibble with the snark about committee meetings. Every sport now has officiating committee meetings. Baseball went down that rabbit hole a while back. Baseball now has double committee meetings. They have the umpires on the field, and if they can't determine the call, they have to "send it to New York" and have the Major League overlords in New York look at the replays. At least football can still generally keep the committee meetings in house. They may have to send it upstairs to the review booth, but at least it's only one committee and not several to make a simple call.

This leads me back to the spectacle of the American Superbowl. It is such a big phenomenon that there is debate on whether to make the Monday after the Superbowl a Federal holiday. I doubt that would ever happen for several reasons, not the least of which is they could just move the Superbowl to the Saturday night. But in a country of 330+ million people, when at least half the country is watching a singular event, is a cultural phenomenon by any definition of the word. I have no idea how they calculate Nielsen ratings like with factors like "Do they count children?" or "how do they account for Streaming or viewing in public places like Sports bars?" I've even seen that the 135 million is "households" and not individual people. So, who knows? 

My point is, the Superbowl in largely the one secular event that most Americans tune into the watch for one reason or another. Some (like myself) for the actual football game itself. Some for the commercials. Some just come to parties to socialize and eat tasty foods. This year, the buzz was about some artist named Bad Bunny and his half time show. I have never even heard of the artist before he was announced as the half time show. I watched the opening 3 minutes and turned the channel to something else because it simply didn't interest me. (Most halftime Superbowl shows don't, regardless of artist.)

Social media was ablaze the next day about Bad Bunny's show. The reactions seemed to be along the usual right/left political and cultural divide. I found that interesting as a cultural trend because usually the morning after, people are talking about the commercials or the game itself. As both the game and the commercials were both stinkers, I guess all that was left for people to fixate on was the halftime show. The disdain for the show from large segments of the population was somewhat egged on by the President who came out guns ablazing on social media against it. I think all that accomplished was to make more people want to watch it. Again, I didn't care one way or the other. I thought it was stupid, like virtually all other Halftime shows of days or yore. An atonal Puerto Rican talking way too fast in Spanish just wasn't my jam, but to each their own. 

I have since gone back and picked my way through the replay of the Halftime show. There was a lot of in your face political themes, virtue signaling, and scantily clad butt cheeks aflapping, running through it, but it did end with the takeaway message of "The only thing greater that hate is love" or words to that effect. It reminded me of the same generalized buzzword theme of the Michael Jackson Halftime show of about 30 years ago. 

It all did get me to thinking about how Christians might actually want to take note of that because I think because in that at least is the fingerprints of the Christian message. Bad Bunny was using those words for secular and political points, but, as Christians, we, too, use Christ's words about love and hate, albeit in different and (hopefully) more nuanced theological ways.

English is a funny language. While some of the greatest works of literature were conceived and written in English, English is also a bit of an impoverished language when it comes to words like "love" and "hate." There are several different words for different types of love and hate in other languages, particular like Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. For whatever reasons, English conflates both words down to one apiece, and we have to add a bunch of modifiers to distinguish them. The love I have for my wife and the love I have for my dog are two entirely different types and levels of love, but in English, it's all just the omnibus word "love." The same is true for "hate." The hate someone has for another ethnic group and the hate someone has for extremely bad behaviors like child abusers are likewise all shoehorned into "hate." 

I think it would behoove us as Christians to make sure when we talk about "love" and "hate" that we ground those words in meaning and context. "Love" and "hate" should not become corporate buzzwords. Corporate buzzwords become meaningless drivel, and people tune them out. The love we talk about as Christians "surpasses all understanding." 

Unlike a Superbowl show that will be largely forgotten by next week, our Love should not be something that glows bright on the scoreboard but for an instant, only to fade away the minute the fireworks burn out and the game is over.