Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.
On this Super Bowl Sunday, in this month when our theme is inclusion, I want to talk not about winning, but about having fun, about enjoying the game.
Growing up, the only sports fan in my family was my maternal grandmother. Baseball was her favorite. She was a big Philadelphia Phillies fan. Football came next. The Philadelphia Eagles were her team. She spent the last years of her life in a nursing home. She had Parkinson’s disease. She was at home with help until she fell and broke her hip. With her osteoporosis, it did not fully heal. Needing two people to help her in and out of the bed, and in and out of the bathroom, meant she could no longer stay at home. Over time she also lost some cognitive function. That did not mean, however, that she lost her love of sports.
One evening we came to see her, and she told us how tired she was. She said she had been playing football all day. After she had been less than coherent for over a year, the nursing home sent her to Hershey Medical Center for a readjustment of her medications. With that change, her cognition was much improved for another year. And what was one of the first things she noticed? That she didn’t know a baseball team playing in the game she had on TV. It was a new team, formed in the year she had lost. The Seattle Mariners, perhaps.
While my parents, siblings, and I were not sports fans, we were game players. If it was just Mom and me, it was Scrabble. If it was Mom, me and my siblings, it might be Clue. If it was just my siblings and me, it might be War or Hide and Seek. If it was Mom, Dad and the three children, it was likely to be Yahtzee, Rummy, or—as we got older—Pinochle. And on holidays, when it was us plus aunts, uncles, grandparents, and perhaps a great aunt, we went through phases: Password for a while, Trivial Pursuit for a period, Balderdash for another couple years. At summer picnics it was cornhole. My father made the boxes and had a friend sew the beanbags.
I have said I am not a sports fan, and baseball was my least favorite. When my high school band was invited to play at a Phillies game, I took along a book of word searches. So, I was less than thrilled when someone in the Bowie, Maryland congregation I served decided that as a congregational social event, we would go to a Friday night doubleheader at the nearby Bowie Baysox stadium. I was the minister, I should show up, but I had no desire to sit through 18 innings. My oldest grandson, Dorian, was 3 or 4 at the time. I decided I would pick him up from daycare and take him with me. We would miss the first inning till we got there, and then I would stay until he got bored and use that as an excuse to go home.
This plan did not work. Dorian paid more attention to the game than most of the adults. The catcher particularly caught his interest. He began taking up a catcher’s stance in front of our bleacher as he watched the games. We were among the last to leave, and I returned to many more Baysox minor league baseball games with him. After a while, I decided I kind of liked minor league baseball.
It seems that a number of men in my life are sports fans. Twentieth-century American humorist Erma Bombeck wrote, “If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.” My gentleman friend Don probably would have been buried in his twenties, but he is eighty-six. The Commanders are his team, but he will watch whatever team is playing, pro or college. He enjoyed playing football when he was younger. He tells a story about when the coal mine where his father worked was closed down, and his family moved to Rand, West Virginia, closer to Charleston. His house was in the Black section, but it was on the edge and close to the white section of the community. He went out to find someone to play with and found some white boys playing football. He asked if he, a Black boy, could play, was told “yes,” and ran several touchdowns. He was in.
As a community minister, Don started an after-school and summer program at a housing project in DC. It was just him with some snacks and homework help to begin with, but over the years its athletics programs became the biggest draw. Beacon House Community Ministry now says this on its webpage: “Our Athletics Program serves over 300 girls and boys annually in football, basketball, baseball, softball, and competitive cheerleading. Our student-athletes must demonstrate a commitment to their schoolwork to be eligible to practice and play.
“Athletics are a critical part of our education-focused mission, as it encourages academic accomplishments and social-emotional growth. Students’ participation promotes connectedness, increased resilience, and a greater ability to resist peer pressure. It has become a power vehicle for youth development, distinguished by its ability to generate what Dr. Monica Ruiz of The George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health has called ‘the Beacon House effect.’
“Athletics often provides a path to college for many of our participants. Longtime volunteer Robert Wade Jr. described how our Athletics Program reinforces the importance of school: ‘We emphasize education—preach it first. We set an expectation that they will do well in school. We tell our youth that if you can learn on the court or the field, then you can learn in school,’” (ATHLETICS PROGRAM – Beacon House).
My now 16-year-old grandson is super into football too. But when he says “football,” he means soccer. He knows more geography through following soccer teams than he ever retained from school classes. He also enjoys playing, and if he is outside, he is likely at the nearest soccer pitch.
I have five grandchildren and the four oldest are all super into their video games. I expect they’ll have their seven-month-old sister playing too, as soon as she is able. I know what they want for birthdays: Roebucks or V-bucks. Dorian plays with a young man who lived next to us when they were in high school. Dior is in the Navy now, but he and Dorian regularly play online. The younger boys regularly play with their cousins. The miles between where they live don’t matter online.
Games connect us and keep us connected, and they are fun. Brazilian soccer player Neymar says, “I do not play football to win the Ballon d’Or. I play football to be happy, because I love it and want to play football.” But you can’t play soccer alone.
Sure, you can play Solitaire or Candy Crush by yourself, but a big part of most game playing is the camaraderie. American professional basketball coach Erik Spoelstra says, “It’s not just about winning or losing, but to learn about teamwork, learn about sportsmanship, learn about discipline. The value of working together for a common goal….”
My grandsons maintain relationships through games. The young people who come here on Friday nights for Heroes Journey have relationships with one another through their gaming.
At least some video game companies don’t want to limit who can be in those gaming relationships. They aren’t giving up on diversity, equity and inclusion. They are working with people who are blind, deaf, quadriplegic, missing a hand, neurodiverse to make their games available to all. It’s good marketing strategy. Who wants to buy a game that they’ll never be able to play well? As former professional football quarterback Carson Palmer says, “You don’t have a real rivalry unless both sides are great teams.” I may be moving my controller with my head or my feet, but if I can play as well as you can with your hands, we can still have a great game.
I have always been good at word games, not so good at sports, and terrible at strategy games, but all of what I know from all those types of games may inform my decisions about what I do to address real life concerns.
I know I need a team. I know I need allies. I know that if I want to keep playing the game, I cannot obliterate my opponent. I need someone I can challenge and someone to be challenged by.
Though winning a game is exciting and most of us want to win, that is not always what is most important in the moment. Most of us may know a story or two of a race where a fellow competitor helped a fallen runner to the finish line, giving up their own place in the race.
It is not always this race or this game that we have to win. Sometimes doing the right thing—or the right thing for the moment—is more important than the win. At this moment in our country, we may think we need to concentrate on winning, but if we concentrate on doing what is right, we are more likely to win in the end.
On our Unitarian Universalist website with worship resources, The Worship Web Rev. John Manwell shares this story.
“I want to tell you about a T-ball game, a story credited to storyteller Bill Harley. If, like me, you grew up before T-ball, you’ll need to know that it’s a game like softball, but with gentle rules for 5- to 8-year olds, kids just starting out in life.
“Now, the particular T-ball team Bill described had a girl we’ll call Tracy on it. Tracy had Coke-bottle glasses and hearing aids on each ear. She came every week, though she wasn’t very good. She tried hard, but she never hit the ball, not once. Never came close. Everyone on both sides of the game cheered for her anyway.
“The last game of the season, Tracy came up to bat, and through some fluke, she creamed the ball. Smoked it right up the middle, through the legs of the 17 players who had all come in close expecting an easy out. Kids dodged as the ball went by or looked absentmindedly at it as it rolled unstopped, heading into centerfield. When Tracy saw what she had done, she stood at home plate, delighted at her feat.
“’Run!’ yelled her coach. ‘Run!’ Her parents were on their feet screaming. All the other parents rose, too.
“’Run, Tracy, run, run!’ Tracy turned and smiled at them, and then, happy to please, galumphed off to first base.
“’Keep going, Tracy, keep going!’ yelled the first base coach. Happy to please, Tracy headed to second. By the time she was halfway to second, seven members of the opposition had reached the ball and were passing it among themselves. The ball began to make its long journey home.
“Tracy headed to third. Adults fell out of the bleachers. ‘Go, Tracy, go!’ Tracy reached third and stopped, but she was very close to her parents now and she got the idea. Tracy started for home.
“Then it happened. During the excitement, no one had noticed the 12-year-old geriatric mutt that had lazily settled itself down in front of the bleachers five feet from the third-base line. As Tracy rounded third, the dog, awakened by the screaming, sat up and wagged its tail at Tracy as she headed towards home. The tongue hung out, the mouth pulled back in an unmistakable canine smile, and Tracy stopped, right there. Halfway home, 30 feet from a legitimate home run.
“Tracy looked at the dog. Her coach called, ‘Come on, Tracy! Come on home!’ The crowd cheered, ‘Go, Tracy, go!’ She looked at all the adults. She looked at her own parents shrieking and catching it all on video. She looked at the dog. The dog wagged its tail.
“She looked at her coach. She looked at home plate. She looked at the dog. Everything went to slow motion. She went for the dog! It was a moment of complete, stunned silence. And then, perhaps, not as loud but deeper, longer, more heartfelt, everyone applauded as Tracy fell to her knees to hug the dog.
“Two roads diverged on a third-base line. Tracy went for the dog.”
Don’t let winning the game keep you from reaching out to another. It was the last game of the season for Tracy, but there would be other seasons. When everybody plays, it is not about winning as much as it is about making sure we are all in the game. Go enjoy the day, even if your team is not the winner.
When we know who is on our team, we will be ready for the next game, the next season. And our team will be better if it can include Tracys and dogs.
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