Athletics and Christian Community #9

Introduction

Suppose that some families, new to the area, were getting acquainted over a meal. They had all recently moved here, and so the husbands were explaining what they do, and how they make their living. “I am an engineer,” one says, and so forth around the room. And suppose that when they were done, one of the young boys piped up and said, “And I am a professional kid.” If offered as a joke, everyone would laugh. But suppose it was not so obvious that it was a joke.

The Text

“And he said unto them, the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

Summary of the Text

Our Lord was in any number of Sabbatarian controversies, but in this passage from Mark He gave us the principle that was at the root of absolutely everything else that He taught on the subject. In this place, He taught us what the sabbath was for.

The sabbath is a gift to man. It is not God’s intention or purpose that man must be tied up and sacrificed on a sabbath altar. Man was not created in order to provide the sabbath with a requisite number of sabbath observers. God was not giving the sabbath anything. The sabbath itself was the gift. In other words, the sabbath was created as a means of granting to man the precious gift of rest.

This means that when someone becomes a sabbatarian and immediately starts making a list of “things he now cannot do,” he has started at the wrong end. That is not the sabbath mind. That is the sabbath-breaking mind—never forget that the Lord was not the sabbath-breaker. The gnat-stranglers who regularly confronted Him were the true sabbath-breakers. This was because they didn’t understand the gift aspect of it at all, which means there was no grace in it.

So there are two kinds of sabbath-breakers. There are those who ignore the grace of the day, and who are simply violators. Then there are those who are overly fastidious about it. They are sabbath-breakers also, but they are the ones who also give sabbath-keeping a bad name. “Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?” (Ecclesiastes 7:16).   

Not from a Physics Textbook

The fourth commandment is given to us in Exodus 20, and then again in Deuteronomy 5. In those two places, different historical events are being commemorated. In Exodus, it is the creation of the world, and in Deuteronomy it is the deliverance of Israel from Egypt.

If we look carefully at the content of the command we see the gift of rest. And the nature of the rest on that one day is defined by the nature of the work on the other six days. Work is not defined by a physics textbook, as in, any expenditure of energy. If you play frisbee-catch with your kids in the park on the Lord’s Day, you are expending energy—but it is not the work you do making your living on the six days. If you shoot hoop with them in the driveway, it is the same thing. The activity prohibited is having your nose to the vocational grindstone, seven out of seven days.

So the center of the command is rest. Take it easy. That rest can lawfully be interrupted by the work of worship, by a work of necessity, or by a work of mercy. Playing frisbee with the kids is not mercy, not necessity, and not worship. But it is restful.    

The Book of Sports

If we define work and rest in this way, athletic competition does not become a sabbath question proper until you get to the level of professional sports—when many of the games are scheduled on the Lord’s Day, particularly in the NFL. And at that point, you would have two issues going—one would the reality of having to miss worship regularly, and the other would be that of competing for pay vocationally on the Lord’s Day, even if late in the afternoon. But this is only going to be a significant issue for those of you who are thinking of turning pro. You guys can ask me questions after the service, as many questions as you want.

In 1618, King James of England issued the Book of Sports, and required that it be read from all the pulpits of the land. He was pushing back on Puritan efforts to ban Sunday recreations entirely, and numerous Puritan ministers lost their positions later on when King Charles I reissued the Book, and enforced it more strictly than had James. On this question the two kings were “the liberals,” and the Puritans were the stricter ones. The kind of sports they encouraged and permitted were archery, dancing, leaping, vaulting, etc. But get this: in order to participate, only those who had attended the full service at their own parish church were allowed to participate. Catholics, who would not worship in Anglican churches, could not participate.

I bring this up because even King James and company were honoring what might be called a broad sabbatarian vibe—prioritizing worship, and in a way that modern evangelicalism has lost.

The Commodification of Childhood

A recent article by Aaron Renn was most informative. In 2014, a couple of private equity firms bought Varsity Brands, a sports-apparel company for $1.5B. Four years later Bain Capital bought them out for $2.5B. In 2024, KKR bought them for $4.5B. Other private equity firms were also piling into the game. They were buying up the other components of the kids-sport-ecosystem—teams, camps, facilities, and so on.

Now if you buy a ticket for an old-fashioned ball game, and buy a bag of peanuts there, you really are the customer. The ballpark is the merchant. Just enjoy the game. But in this system we are starting to slide down into, described above, your kid is the product. A travel team can be owned by SportsBucksUnlimited, and the team goes to a tournament owned by them, and they stay at a hotel owned by them, and they get their tickets through a platform owned by them. By the time they are done, there is no more juice left in the lemon. And you have got yourself a professional kid, introduced to corporate soullessness early, where there is no rest.  

But as Renn also notes, some of this might be driven or made possible by the collapse of standards elsewhere—meaning that this corporatizing of the sandlot is the equivalent of gated communities springing up in cities with a bad crime problem. There’s always something.  

Rest for Your Souls

So the point is not that it is a sin for your child to be on a travel team. The point is that we live in a time when there is a culture-wide bias against sabbath rest and, like the devil, this beast is a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour (1 Pet. 5:8). The corporate world is a machine that eats people. They want to recruit you into a life of frenetic busyness.

But in order to find real sabbath rest, you must first acquire a sabbath mind. And the only place where that can be found is in Christ alone. It is not for nothing, that He makes this offer to us.