“Why the Victory of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl
is Good for the First Parish in Bedford”

Sermon by Rev. John Gibbons

Delivered on April 2, 2006

At The First Parish in Bedford

 

 

 

Rev. John Gibbons:

 

When former First Parish minister David Weissbard was here a year or so ago and reminisced about his Bedford years, he acknowledged that, of all the sermons he preached, the most ill-advised and worst was one on the topic of auto safety.  It was one of those things, he said, that seemed a good idea at the time.  Today I honestly can say that I would dearly love to be preaching a sermon about auto safety (auto accidents are the world’s 3^rd greatest health risk according to a front-page article in yesterday’s newspaper!)  But here I am having instead learned the meaning of a 2-point safety. 

 

I have never been a football fan; I’ve never cared about football; I know essentially nothing about football.  I attended one University of Illinois college game when I was about 10, and I was cold and bored.  When required to play football in high school, in the unlikely event I ever handled the ball, I deliberately ran the wrong way down the field out of sheer perversity.  Pleasurably, it is true: I have watched Patriots games on TV; the pleasure deriving in large part from the nachos and beer.  I’m beginning to suspect that I will never again be invited to a football party at the home of Steve Hagan – though, again Steve, I have to compliment you on the nachos and beer.

 

I’ve tried to write this sermon.  I’ve googled Super Bowl (that term comes from the 10 year old daughter of a 1960’s team owner in Texas.  The girl had one of those high bouncing balls and she drawled, “Daddy, look at my super ball.”  Daddy had an idea and the rest is history.

 

I’ve googled “Steelers” and boy did I learn a lot: The hypocycloids, as noted in your order of service, were the symbol of the American Iron and Steel Institute; yellow for coal, orange for ore, and blue for steel scrap: “steel lightens your work, brightens your leisure and widens your world.”  They are the only NFL team with their logo on only one side of their helmets.  Their mascot used to be a dancing I-beam.

 

I’ve googled “football in the bible” – and I was referred to the time that “Jesus went up for the cross.”  If I were preaching on auto safety, there are also numerous biblical references, such as it being revealed that the disciples drove a Honda: for it is said in Acts “They were all in one accord.”

 

And so it came to pass (get it?) that I telephoned our former student minister Marty Kuchma who grew up in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.  Marty is now pastor of the St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in Westminster, Maryland (we made a good Christian out of him) and there this morning Marty is preaching a Lenten sermon from the book of Jeremiah on the topic of The Assurance of Pardon – which is, along with auto safety, another sermon I would prefer to be preaching today and may need to be preaching very soon. 

 

I interviewed Marty on our topic today and Marty says that the Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl victory represents “the resurrection of hope.”  “The one for the thumb,” he said.  Apparently the Steelers won four Super Bowls in the 70’s and 80’s; they got their Super Bowl rings; and then there was a long drought until this year when hope resurrected and they got “the one for the thumb.”

 

The Steelers are the most widely followed team in the country, Marty insists, and they foster unity – peace, truth, beauty, love, heaven on earth.

 

Pittsburgh is a hard-working, blue collar, plain-spoken, get-it-done, fallen-on-hard-times, down-but-not-out sort of city; and the Steelers are all that.  While he was with us, Marty taught me to listen to Shania Twain and Garth Brooks and you had to watch out for Marty’s Styrofoam Dunkin Donuts cup ’cause it was his chewin’ tobacco spit cup.   Pittsburgh’s men in tights are not like our men in tights.

 

Why is the victory of the Pittsburgh Steelers good for the First Parish in Bedford?  Foremost, indeed, because it inspired Steve Hagan to put down a wad of good money on all our behalf.  I can imagine being asked to preach about worse things.

 

It is good when we are asked to get out of our comfort zone and do something differently.  Root for another team.  Learn something unfamiliar.  Read something from an unaccustomed point of view.  Get to know someone unlike oneself.  In our political, religious and social views, far too often we are unrelentingly homogeneous and, despite our lofty aspirations, Unitarian Universalists at the First Parish in Bedford are remarkably un-diverse.  Seeing something good in the Pittsburgh Steelers is a way of getting over our chauvinistic Patriotic self-involved selves.

 

Of the Boston clergy, Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “They are like peas in a pod.  I cannot tell them apart.”   We would be better people would we, once in a while, see something good in a team that is not our own.

 

Now of course these Steeler men in tights are highly compensated pawns in a capitalist stratagem that diverts our attention from the money made by no-bid contracts with Halliburton in Iraq; and the shrinkage of democracy at home; and global warming; and AIDS; and worldwide torture (our speaker last week, by the way, after the service, described how in Kenya, her human rights lawyer father was murdered by American agents while she, as a little girl, held his hand going to church.  And our speaker Atema Eclai, she came to this country because she too was tortured; and on television last week I saw that 1 in 5 children in Kenya today dies of starvation).  And football does take our mind off such things.  Opiates are the religion of the masses.  But that’s too easy a sermon to preach.

 

I went into ministry, in part, due to reading some of the writings of a Catholic author named Michael Novak who used to be liberal and now is a leading neo-conservative.  But in one of his early books Michael Novak suggested that we should understand the word “spiritual” in the same way that we might describe a horse as “spirited”:  graceful, free, powerful and energetic.

 

When I consider the Pittsburgh Steelers or any of the mostly-benign manias and dramas and entertainments, opiates and passions that overtake our culture, I too – beyond the nachos and beer – get a sense of what it’s like to be embodied with spirit.  Sports, at their best – both when we are participants and when we are observers – sports get our adrenaline pumping, infuse us with the perception that the outcome matters, and in the very best sense raise our spirits.  (To tell you the truth, for me, Grateful Dead shows used to do a better job of this but to each your own.)

 

Would that we might be so spirited in our pursuit of love or kindness or wholeness or justice; and if it’s the Pittsburgh Steelers that raise Steve’s or anyone’s spirits, better that than to languish with the dull perception that the outcome of human events doesn’t matter.   

 

In another book, The Joy of Sports, Michael Novakwrites:

 

Sports are religious in the sense that they are organized institutions, disciplines, and liturgies; and also in the sense that they teach religious qualities of heart and soul. In particular, they recreate symbols of cosmic struggle, in which human survival and moral courage are not assured. To this extent, they are not mere games, diversions, pastimes. Their power to exhilarate or depress is far greater than that. To say “It's only a game” is the psyche's best defense against the cosmic symbolic meaning of sports events.

...To lose symbolizes death, and it certainly feels like dying; but it's not death. The same is true of religious symbols like baptism or the Eucharist; in both, the communicants experience death, symbolically, and are reborn, symbolically.

If you give your heart to the ritual, its effects upon your inner life can be far-reaching.

 

Someone once said to a Steelers fan, “Football is more important than life and death to you” to which the Steelers fan said “Listen, it’s more important than that!”

 

So listen:  If you give your heart to the ritual, its effects upon your inner life can be far-reaching.  Howsoever it may be accomplished for you: may you give your heart to rituals that cause your adrenaline pump, may you be convinced that the outcome matters, may your passions be fired, and may your spirits be raised.  Amen.