I am old enough to remember the legendary sportscaster Red Barber chatting with Bob Edwards on NPR’s Morning Edition every Friday for over a decade beginning in 1981. If Fridays were for Red, Wednesdays were for Frank, that other great sports journalist, Frank Deford, who continued on NPR for several more decades.
It was Deford that we heard in today’s first reading, on loyalty to our hometown sports franchises, a test I fail miserably. I grew up in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, the closest major sports franchises located in the District of Columbia, but Major League Baseball’s Senators, the second version of the Senators, for the old Senators had already become the Twins, would also be gone by the time I was eight, off to Texas, and besides Mom was and is a Dodgers fan, her loyalty heading west with that team from Brooklyn. NHL and NBA franchises came to D.C. a couple of years later, but my family wasn’t that interested in hockey or basketball.
No, the only professional sports team followed in our house was the Washington Football Team, then known by their former racist slur of a name. And even with that name changed, I’d have no reason to be loyal to a franchise with such toxic and predatory ownership, for we must remember that professional sport is a billionaires game, an increasingly, an oligarch’s game.
No, by and large, I’ve been willing to cheer for the local team wherever I lived, except for the three years I was at Divinity School, because, you know, the Red Sox.
Though Big Papi is cool.
And while I am still troubled by the brain-destroying violence of professional football, by the institutional racism and despicable collusion that drove Colin Kaepernick out of the National Football League, I’m watching games again, cheering for what passes for our local team, the Buffalo Bills.
So it was that I stood in this pulpit last week and cheered on our home team, and so it was that I turned on the game last Sunday night, though I confess to being asleep long before the game ended in an overtime loss.
The Bills were robbed, not by poor officiating, but by NFL overtime rules that are quite frankly stupid, factually unfair, the team winning the toss at the start of overtime having a ten percent better chance of winning the game since the current system went into place.
Still, it is a great sport. I’m not a fan of the college game despite their better overtime rules. Division I college football is a real world example of our economics, where wealth snowballs into greater wealth, where the Southeastern Conference gobbles up all the talent and wins all the titles.
But gosh, it sure is fun to watch Josh Allen tear down the field, to see Patrick Mahomes casually toss the ball for a completion. I swear he could throw it behind his back with a blindfold on and they’d still catch it. And I begrudgingly confess that Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback to ever play the game professionally.
Competitive sports, especially team sports, may be filled with the language of warfare, but honestly, I am not inclined to believe that the deep drive that makes us race and compete is generated by our fear and rage. I actually believe that children spontaneously try to outrun one another, throw and build and balance and touch, that sports, that athletics is an expression of a simple quotidian miracle. These bodies are amazing.
Yes, some of us are getting old and stiff, trust me, I know. These bodies don’t last forever, even with the growing list of replacement parts, but gosh, our bodies are wondrous things, something children start to realize at some point right around “Woah! I can move this thing!” and “Hey! That noise is me!”
The three children dancing along the snowbank at the bus stop across the street as I drink my morning coffee are as miraculous and mysterious as any number of angels on the head of a pin, as any notion of trinity conceived by the human spirit.
Jeremiah may well have been called by that mystery we name as God from the womb, may have been hard-wired to be a cranky voice speaking uncomfortable truth. But one thing we know is true: Jeremiah himself was a red-hot miracle from the womb until he breathed his last, whether or not God was speaking sour nothings in his ear..
Among my favorite fantasy fiction universes is the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, where Death is a character, one who speaks in all caps and shows up at inconvenient times, as death so often does. In one of the novels, a character notes that Death had said people see what they expect to see. His Grimness replies “Children don’t. Too often they see what is there.”
And there you have Jeremiah in a nutshell, seeing what is there, maybe not with the wonder of a child, but certainly with the honesty of a child, for who but a child would speak aloud what we dare not say? Who else would note the nakedness of the lie that walks among us?
For childhood is not just a time of discovering the body, the amazing things we can do an experience as embodied selves. It is a time of discovering generally, and where children are safe and and healthy, each discovery is a source of wonder, the trail of ants back to the hill miracle and mystery.
Every child is a prophet to the nations, and like Jeremiah, is about the business of digging up and of tearing down, of building and of destroying. They are creation embodied and agents of the mysterious and amazing cycle of creation, mud pies and dirty hands and runny noses.
What wonders! What wonders these bodies, this world, this galaxy among so many galaxies, this story in which we locate ourselves! How beautiful this churn and spin and birth and even death!
Even in the midst of all that is wrong with the National Football League, with the billionaires and the cheats and the overtime rules that are just plain dumb, even there we can still see holiness, see mystery and miracle, an ephemeral museum there for a magic moment then gone, spirits and bodies and creativity, pounding hearts and churning legs and gasps of “How did he do that?” For holiness, mystery, and miracle are the order of the day every day, worthy of our wonder.
We do not need to believe that God is the sort of puppet-master that assigns to each a particular purpose in the way that Jeremiah understood himself to be chosen, to believe we have only one divinely assigned task. But we have each been given a purpose, hard-wired into the unfolding creation that allowed one particular branch of primates to evolve in one particular way. We are programmed for wonder and curiosity and learning and love, for adaptation and transformation, for following trails of ants and seeing how far we can slide down that snowy hill, and how fast. For wrestling with the other cubs and for pondering morality and mortality, and loving and painting and crying, and all things that connect us with one another and with the wonder that is this day, for we are improbable and perfectly imperfect, a splash of beauty in an infinite field.
So maybe my loyalty isn’t quite fixed, what with all the moving around I’ve done, and maybe the team that beat our team had a little help from dumb rules and has a team name that is problematic, if at least not as bad as that slur that identified the team in D.C., but it is amazing that we even exist, that we build stadiums and watch playoff games and Olympics that are taking place a thousand miles away, thousands of miles away, on the other side of the world, the choreography of the Buffalo Bills in action or the New York City Ballet or Chloe Kim on a snowboard in the half-pipe.
What better prayer than wonder?
The great Christian author Ann Lamott, source of so much that is real and inspiring, says there are really only three prayers: help, thanks, and wow!
Wow! Wow!
Wow that there is something instead of nothing. Wow that life is insistent and resilient. Wow that tug that makes us cheer for the Bills and fall in love in Freshman comp and close our eyes and get lost in a Bartok string quartet. Wow that I remember Bob Edwards and Red Barber talking sports on a Friday morning decades ago, and that God was in that too, all miracle and mystery, and still is.
So maybe I’ll watch a little football this afternoon, open a good book and a good bottle of red as the stars come out, and sleep in gratitude and wonder. Wow, what an amazing God we have.
Amen.