Fantasy Sports

Hey there. Fantasy football time here in the United States of America.

It's time when all of us who like numbers on a screen indicating performance on a field of play can match our skill at choosing who is going to have the highest numerical value each Sunday and why that makes us have value as human beings.

Cynical way of looking at it. I enjoy fantasy football-sometimes baseball too.

In case you are not familiar with Fantasy sports it is when you field an imaginary team of athletes from the particular sport and place them on your imaginary roster. Then you keep track of their real life statistics during a specific game to come up with your "team" score. It is your fantasy team-hand chosen-to produce the best set of stats you can-to outscore your opponent for that week-who also has fielded a team.

It is because I have a fantasy football team that I can honestly say that I have imaginary friends.

I was thinking how it would be amusing to have fantasy Bible study. Choose biblical characters and score them according to their accomplishments vs. their sinfulness. For instance David gets negative points for having Bathsheba's husband murdered-but gets positive ones for inspiring some of the Psalms. Then we have teams made up of a prophet, two Hebrew Bible people, a disciples, and then maybe Jesus is the all time quarterback.

How many points would John the Baptist get docked for losing his head?

Would the Pharisees get penalized for their abuse of the rules?

Maybe if it was Bible fantasy study we could say a prayer before the games and all the right wingers would be happy-and we could take proceeds from the games and give them to justice projects in the area and that would make all the left wingers happy.

The concept of fantasy sports plays along with our desire to rank and rate things in the United States. Maybe because we all have some areas where we don't find self worth happens easily. And so we rank and rate so many facets of our world that it becomes the norm to judge rather than accept. This is against the basic truth of Christian faith-to love, to know we're loved, and to proclaim God's love.

Truth is our value is something given to us at birth-all of us have it-and we can choose to believe in it or not. Its there-and its infinitely more than we imagine it. Each person has value-no one more than another...although sometimes I think Jessica Alba comes close...all of us are precious in God's eyes.

No matter how we perform the Grace of God helps us be everything we are called to be.

Grace,
Dwight