Unlimited

My husband likes sports—all sports, even crazy stuff like curling, although Red Wings hockey is his favorite. So I learned long ago how to talk the talk, but I’ve never made any attempt to walk the walk. I am a fair-weather fan of just about any sport you can name.  When “our” teams are winning, I follow along, cheering. When they aren’t doing so hot, I have no interest whatsoever.

When I worked for a denominational magazine, I can’t tell you the number of times men would say something like, “You should do an article on the relationship between Christianity and sports. Teamwork, using gifts, building character, blah blah blah.” So about once a year we would run pieces on Christianity and sports, and some of them made valid points, but I never really bought it. There’s nothing wrong with sports; they are not unchristian or antichristian. But to try to put a holy spin on the sports industry never sat well with me.

I now work for a different Christian organization, and the men there talk sports, because that is what men talk about in our society. From my cubical, I hear them reviewing the previous day’s events. They seem particularly partial to Tigers baseball, and who can blame them? Until the actual World Series, it’s been a great season for the Tigers.

On the day of the final game of the American League playoffs, two of my coworkers were predicting the night’s events. “I guess it would be okay if the Yankees won tonight, to stretch out the series and give the Tigers less time off so they don’t lose their momentum,” said one fan.

“No!” said the other, indignantly. “Never, never give them a reason to hope.”

And there it was. The clear and definitive difference between Christianity and sports. Christianity is about hope, and sports is about crushing it.

That evening, at choir practice, our director mentioned a book about the feminization of worship, particularly music, and “the boyfriend song,” in which God (or Jesus) the almighty is portrayed as a tender, almost romantic soul mate who meets one’s every need. Men, it seems, prefer stronger music, with more masculine images of God and Christianity. Songs where Christians are called to battle against our foes and where God crushes the enemy.

Like all art, music is a reflection of culture, so it is no surprise that we are shaping God into characters we know from popular culture. We want God to be the romantic lead in our life stories, or the hero who slaughters the bad guys or scores the winning homerun. We want God to be Indiana Jones or Jason Bourne, someone who is tender with us but ruthless with our enemies. He always has a plan, and he always wins, all within a two-hour timeframe.

Like the authors of Scripture, we want to make God one of us, or comparable to something we understand. In the Bible, God is wind and God is shepherd; God is a mother and God is a father; God is light and God is a rock. If we were still adding to the Canon today we might equate God to a quarterback or a rock star or any number of contemporary images.

God is all of these things, and none of these things. God is more than we can imagine or put into words, which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to put it in words, or in music. But our images of God should help us to explore all of who God is. It’s dangerous to cling to an idea that is comfortable for us and never move beyond that. We need to push the boundaries of our own understanding in order to begin to appreciate the scope of all that God is. We are limited, in our power and our imagination and in our understanding, but God is limitless.