Super Pilgrims

What do you suppose it is which makes a professional football championship game the most-watched television event of the year? Not just of this year, but every year.  It seems like it doesn’t matter which teams are playing, or what the narrative (the current in vogue word for “story”) is; more televisions are tuned to that program than any other single television program, year after year after year.  Seattle beat Denver in a blowout, but people kept watching right to the end.  Why?

I think the marketing people for an adult beverage company sum it up best.  Stay with me on this one.  You know all the old sayings: “Life is a journey”; “Enjoy the Journey”; and so forth.  They all pick up on a theme older than the Bible, but contained there, in words like this, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize…” (Philippians 3:13-14, NIV)  The theme of pilgrims on a pilgrimage is a powerful narrative (there’s that word again), which draws our minds and stirs our hearts, but the church has a hard time getting the word out in the midst of all of the noise.  Words like “Pilgrim” and “pilgrimage” have lost their meaning for so much of the English-speaking world.  But leave it to the folks in marketing to give us a better way of saying it.  Consider this copyrighted print ad content, printed side by side on a page in a national sports magazine:

“DEAR DENVER, NO LEGACY IS BUILT ON LOOKING BACK. IT’S THE NEXT STEP THAT MATTERS. KEEP WALKING.”

“DEAR SEATTLE, NO LEGACY IS BUILT ON LOOKING BACK. IT’S THE NEXT STEP THAT MATTERS. KEEP WALKING.”

You see why that is true, for the losers and the winners both, right?

Why do we watch? Because we identify with contestants striving for a prize; with people who keep walking, win or lose; because we are all Pilgrims walking toward a Prize.