Sermon Central
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Cheering For Clothes
Contributed by Davon Huss on Aug 28, 2024 (message contributor)
I love sports. Lately, I have been unable to watch sports so instead I go to ESPN and look at the stats for my favorite teams. Chicago Cubs (this year they are pathetic), North Carolina Tarheels basketball, Indiana Pacers NBA and now the Indiana Fever (Love Caitlin Clark). Been to several of the games. If at the game or watching on TV I talk throughout the game. To the players. The umpires. To the fans. Why do I place so much importance on my favorites team’s performance. Why do their wins make me happy? Why do their losses make me sad? Why do I get angry when they make mistakes? Why do I feel proud when they make the playoffs? They are my hometown team, sure. But what does that mean? As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify. Because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city. You’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city.” What’s that all about? Why do we invest such effort and emotion into sports teams and their performance? I think it has something to do with the universal human need to worship, to identify with someone or something greater than ourselves. In Rick Warren’s book, the Purpose Driven Life, he wrote: “Anthropologists have noted that worship is a universal urge, hard wired by God into the very fiber of our being- an inbuilt need to connect with God. Worship is as natural as eating or breathing. If we fail to worship God, we always find a substitute, even if it ends up being ourselves.”
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