The Liturgy of Sports

By Dr. Gene Edward Veith

It has been said that the only places people sing anymore are in church and at ballgames. Now many churches are phasing out singing, in favor of hiring professionals to perform the music or piping it in electronically. But ballgames are far more conservative. In fact, at a time when many churches are abandoning liturgy, no one is asking sporting events to get rid of their rituals, rites, and ceremonies.

The liturgy of sports exists on two levels: the ceremony of the game itself, involving both the players and the spectators. And the inner order of service, those formal actions that constitute the game. Notice what happens when you go to a game, whether football, baseball, basketball, basketball, hockey—you name it. There is an opening.

The flag is presented, and we sing our national anthem. The teams are introduced—in the NBA with smoke, lights, and a musical fanfare; in baseball with the players taking their positions. Coins are flipped; a dignitary throws out the first pitch; teams huddle and break. Then and only then does the game begin.

As the game goes on, the crowd chants in unison. There are half-time ceremonies. Baseball has its Seventh Inning Stretch, where the crowd rises as one to sing the Baseball Hymn (“Take me out to the ball game...”). When the game is over, there is the clipping of the net, the awarding of the game ball, lining up to shake hands, sometimes even kneeling to pray.

Ceremonies are natural, and rituals emerge whenever groups of people gather together in some meaningful activity.

But on a deeper level, liturgy—following a structure of meaningful actions—is at the essence of any sport. One might say that sport is a liturgy. To play a game means to fall in with its rules and conventions. Lining up for football; dribbling and shooting in all of their conventions about when, where, and how; the numerology of baseball (three strikes; four balls; three bases; four points on the diamond; three outs; nine innings)—these are formal actions, following historic conventions, but the game is impossible without them.

Imagine an “informal” football or baseball game, in which all the players spontaneously do whatever they want. Or a basketball or soccer league that changes the rules every time the game is played, so that no one knows what is going to happen or what they are supposed to do. The game would no longer be fun.There would be no exhilaration in playing. The game would cease to exist.

And so it is in church.The pattern of action (we rise, we sit, we kneel, we listen, we respond, we go to the altar) and of language (we pray, we recite, sing, listen to, and hear the Word of God) is no mere game, of course, but, like a game, it lifts us up out of our normal unstructured lives into something dramatic, orderly, and meaningful.

Just as the rules in a game are not confining—but rather make the game possible—the liturgy of the church makes worship possible. When you are playing a sport, you don’t find yourself thinking about its rules, you just get caught up in the action, with all of the thrills and personal challenge that go along with the flow of the game. In worship, the liturgy likewise helps us get caught up into the relationship with God that it embodies.

It may be that one reason sports are so popular in the United States is that American Christianity has lost its sense of liturgy. To fill in the void, people go to a game on Sunday instead of to church. But individuals need to feel themselves as part of a larger, collective group, whether a congregation or an assembly of fans, and the way we feel part of that group is through participating in common rites.

In the church, of course, we are part of a group that extends back further than any team’s glory years: the communion of the saints stretches back through time and forward into eternity. The analogy breaks down as the magnitude of what we do in church is infinitely more significant than what we do or watch on the playing field. And the dramatic actions of church—in which we confess our sins and receive God’s forgiveness, indeed, receive the Body of Christ Himself—is real, not play.

Dr. Gene Edward Veith is the Culture Editor for World Magazine, he is the Director of the Cranach Institute at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, and he is also on the Board of Directors of Higher Things magazine.