Day 33 of 365 (Quiet Plans for Super Sunday)

I don’t care about football. Let me state that un-American proposition again, I don’t care about football. Don’t get me wrong I don’t hate sports, I love hockey, but football leaves me cold. Who is playing in a professional football game is irrelevant. Where the game is played and to what end are also immaterial. By and large the spectacle of a big “game” especially “the big game” seems to me to be empty. To my tastes the buildup and hoopla are nothing but annoying. While I understand that it some ways the celebration of the Superbowl has been a kind of secular Christmas complete with cooking and feasting of those near and dear, hasn’t Christmas become a secular Christmas? I don’t care about the Superbowl not one whit.


Tonight at about 6:45 p.m. if the roads are clear and if we can get the car unstuck from the front drive I will go to the evening service at the chapel where I attend. For years this has been what I do on Superbowl Sunday so I know what to expect. At maximum there will be 20 people in attendance in the church. At minimum my fellow congregants with total 12. Those numbers are derived from the maximum and minimum I have seen attending in the 9 years or so the evening service has been conducted. I know who most of those 12-20 will be. They have been with at each of these services through the years. Five of them will be the pastor, the pastoral assistant, the piano player and a soloist for offertory music.


We will most likely go through a communal absolution, an old Lutheran hymn, a lesson, a gospel reading and then the sermon. Invariably the sermon will contain one lame joke about the size of the group tonight or some other football based joke. We will move on to the offertory and end with the Eucharist. If as usually happens in these circumstances the people who were supposed to show up for ushering do not I will light the altar candles and take the collection. Mind you I am not writing this to imply any kind of moral superiority to any person that will be at this service tonight. Nobody in this life has sufficient moral superiority to judge anyone else for watching a football game or a hockey game, etc. I am just saying there is a constancy to the rituals I observe. In that constancy


I find a modicum of peace, at least for a moment in this hard, hard world we live in. Others may find there joy in their communal celebrations of over-sized men in similar colored laundry pounding other men is slightly different similar colored laundry into a pulp and that is okay. Where you find your peace as long as it is not causing pain or suffering for others, well that is okay for me. And I am not worried about the pain of those players, they are getting paid very big bucks to endure what they endure.