Another SuperBowl, Another Wasted Chance

SuperBowl Sunday was the same-old, same-old here. It was a chance to get together with some old friends to watch a game. Of course, being with the old friends far outweighed the game in importance and enjoyment. None of us don't know why we wait until the SuperBowl to get together, we would all like to see each other more often. But such is life.

Not that I am a big sports fan, in fact, I am even less of a pro football fan. But the team I favor ever so slightly over the others was not only in the SuperBowl, it won. Coached by fashion-god Bill Belichick, the New England Patriots edged the Seattle Seahawks in a game in which both teams had played well enough to be called champions. It is unfortunate that only one team won this game.

In a FirstThings.com blogpost, Westminster Theological Seminary professor Carl Trueman blogged (click here) that sports are a Pascal-type distraction from the realities of life, not a religion. And just as it is sometimes a shame that there can only be one winner of a SuperBowl contest, it was sad that, rather than applying a Miller Lite beer commercial logic to his list of options, Trueman could recognize only one truth: that sports are a Pascal type distraction to life. By identifying a distraction as a Pascal type one, Trueman is saying that we sometimes use sports and entertainment in order to be happy as we ignore the realities of our own limits and accountability before God. We might add that happily ignoring what the immediate realities of life could be for us and others is another distraction we often embrace. Those realities that we might want to ignore would be how all of us suffer. But somehow, like our own prosperity, distractions can numb us to pain.

But us Christians also need to consider how sports and entertainment can be a gateway enjoyment into idolatry. At least, that is how I Corinthians 10:7 describes the lifestyles of those who are having too much fun (click here). For it seems that too many of us work in order to have as much pleasure as we can after work. That is that we've made the compartment of our lives set aside for enjoying things bigger than what God intended it to be. Thus, many pleasures could indicate that many of us Christians are polytheists at heart.

When we combine the truths that sports and entertainment are a distraction from the pressing realities of life and the hereafter and that sports can lead us down the path to idolatry, does it make sense for the Christian to invest as much into sports and entertainment what the unbeliever does?