our worship

The religions of sports and TV in America are phenomena worth studying. I don't think I'll do too much research, but I can't help but make a few observations this morning.

In our early days of marriage, Mike and I had a small 9" black and white TV. In 1990, we moved to Guam for a few years, and we shipped that little box on over with our stuff. When we were packing to come home in '92, we couldn't even GIVE that TV away. No one wanted a b&w TV that was 4 x smaller than they'd like to have in their family rooms. We shipped it home.

Over the course of the next few years, a friend from our church couldn't stand it any longer. He called to tell us that his family was upgrading and would we please accept the gift of their used, much bigger, color TV.

A similar move happened this last week. We've had that TV for years, but last winter when television went high definition, you either had to have cable or get a little converter box to transition into the digital age. We didn't have cable, and we didn't buy the converter box. We kept the TV, however, to watch dvd's with our family. Last weekend, a family friend came over with the gift of a converter box for us.

We plugged that converter box in yesterday to watch four teams contend for a place in the SuperBowl. As I listened to the sound of TV filling our living room for the first time in a year, I was just struck anew with the power that sports and TV has in our American lives. Fierce identity and loyalties, loads of money laid down, hours and hours consumed, appetites whet by advertising, culture formed through programming. These thoughts came on the same day I listened to my friend Alice teach at church about how the majority of our adult church population opens their Bibles once or less a month. Can you even begin to imagine the release of the power of the Gospel if it was Scripture that gained our affections in such a way as sports and TV? Identity, loyalty, money, time, appetites, mindsets all found and spent in Christ? People coming over to our house to make sure we had a Bible rather than a TV? Excitement and passion for the Gospel as freeflowing? That's just an amazing thought road to go down for me.