The Idolatry of Youth Sports

Imagine for a moment that you live in another country, one completely foreign to this one, and you have an opportunity one fall to spend a week in Birmingham. So you come on a Sunday morning and you observe many people, maybe even most slowly rising to make their way to a building they call a church. They groggily approach that building for some sort of ceremony. Clearly, whatever happens at the beginning of that ceremony is not that important because most of the people don’t come until after it has started. I’m not looking at anybody. I’m just saying.

And so you watch them file in and begin to mouth the words to songs. Many of them almost expressionless, virtually emotionless. After which they sit down and passively listen to someone talk to them for a period of time. You notice people starting to get a bit fidgety, uneasy at the time for the ceremony to end approaches. When it’s finally over, they quickly walk out. But as you walk with them, you listen to them and you hear many of them talking with one another about something that had happened the previous day. They smile and they laugh as they recount another ceremony they’d been to, apparently a bit more interesting than this one, a ceremony that happens apparently on Saturdays.

The Idolatry of Youth Sports

In fact, the rest of the week, that’s almost all you hear people talking about the coming Saturday ceremony. Even the people who were at the Sunday ceremony are strangely silent about what they heard and sing about there, but very enthusiastic about the Saturday. They can’t seem to get here soon enough. So as your curiosity is piqued, you begin to eagerly anticipate the coming Saturday ceremony with them. That Saturday comes and you see people wake up and leave their houses dressed in some sort of outfit that they love to wear for these types of days. Many of them drive out of the city, some an hour west, others a couple of hours south, where they gather together on what they call hallowed grounds for the Saturday ceremony.

They get there early for this ceremony, way early where they eat and drink and laugh and play, not just with their family or with their friends, but with complete strangers. You’ve never seen community like this. And when the time comes, they all, tens of thousands of them enter a shrine together. You can’t think of another word for it, where they raise their voices with passion to applaud some sort of assembly of children they don’t know playing a game on a field. As that game begins, they shout and chant and sing until they virtually lose their voices with far more passion than the previous Sunday ceremony for sure.

People don’t look at their watches at this ceremony. They’re so engulfed in what they’re seeing and experiencing. They actually get excited when it goes into what they call overtime because going long like this is a sign of a really exciting game and the fun doesn’t end after the ceremony is over anyway. When the boys that everybody has been cheering for win the game, the celebration has only begun.

The amazing thing is that it’s not just the people who are at the ceremony who are celebrating. You come to find out that back in Birmingham, thousands and thousands of others who couldn’t get here stayed there to watch this game on what they call a TV, though many of them are large enough to be virtual movie screens. They’re actually designed that way to make the most of watching ceremonies like this.

And back in Birmingham, scores of people have circled up together around their screens to be a part of the ceremony from a distance. They too in their homes are jumping up and down and high-fiving each other, celebrating the ceremony when it’s over. And then when it’s all over, late in the evening, almost as if there’s nothing to be prepared for the next day they go to bed.

Let me ask you a question.

Sports Consume Our Affections

If you were that visitor from another country and you came to this city on a week during the fall, be honest, which would you identify as the religion that is most important to this people, as the religion that most excites this people, as the religion that most consumes this people. We live in a land where sports war for our attention and our affections and our devotion, our time, our money. It’s not just college football, that’s the glaring example, particularly as we entered in this fall. That’s the timing even for this. But it’s professional sports as well.

It’s children’s sports. It’s playing sports and watching sports and running our children all over the city and the state for the sake of sports, whether it’s football or golf, basketball or baseball, soccer or CrossFit, running or biking or swimming, gymnastics or cheerleading or any number of other athletic activities to which we devote so much of our lives and our family’s lives too.

To this church in Birmingham, we are not too far removed from the church at Corinth. We in a land covered with church buildings and filled with professing Christians are tempted every single week to commune with Christ on Sunday, only to dine with idols every other day, particularly Saturday. We must consider how to flee idolatry and live every single moment in Birmingham, eating, drinking, and even playing to the glory of God.