Good morning, I'm the Rev Steve Page from St Patrick's Anglican Church, and you're
listening to the Daily Devotional moment, sponsored by the Hudson Bay
Ministerial.
This month, I'm
drawing our images of Christian faith from happenings in the world of
Sports.
In January, the
sports pages are dominated by hockey and football. For a change of
pace, let's talk basketball today. Specifically, a 1962 game between
the New York Knicks and the Philadelphia Warriors, the team we now
know as the Golden State
Warriors. In fact, they moved from Philadelphia to the San Francisco
bay area not long after this game.
This game in March
1962 was not the most meaningful regular-season game. The Knicks were
well off the pace for the playoffs, and the Warriors had little hope
of catching the powerful and eventual champion Boston Celtics. The
game counted as a Philadelphia home game, although it was played, not
in Philadelphia but in tiny Hershey, Pennsylvania, a town of just a
few thousand people located almost 100 miles west of Philly.
Hershey is a
charming town, famous as the home of the Hershey
chocolate company. I have personally visited Hershey several times,
and it smells pleasantly of chocolate almost everywhere!
Well, because of
the small town size and the distance to Philadelphia, only 4,000
people took in the game. But what a game they saw!
The Warriors'
centre was 7-ft-1-inch Wilt Chamberlain, and he put on one of the
greatest single-game performances in NBA history. Chamberlain scored
23 points in the first quarter, and another 18 in the second. Then he
got hot. He pumped in another 28 points in the third quarter, and
topped it all off with 31 more points in the 4th. Wilt
Chamberlain wound up with an incredible 100 points, all by himself, a
league record that still stands today.
How does it
compare? Michael Jordan's best game was 69 points, what Chamberlain
had after 3 quarters. Kobe Bryant has the 2nd-best single-game total;
he once scored 81. But that's still 19 fewer points than what Wilt
Chamberlain did that night in 1962 in Hershey.
But here's the
real kicker: there were only 4,000 people on hand. None of them had
cell phones or camcorders. No TV station covered the game, so you
couldn't watch it on TV. Good thing some newspaper beat writers were
on hand to write about it afterward, because so few people saw it!
What a contrast to
today! It seems that celebrities, and especially famous athletes are
always in the public eye. Now that they have Facebook and Twitter
updates, the whole world can know what they're up to, down to the
detail of what they thought of their salad at lunch.
Us normal people,
we're not watched in nearly the same way. Or so you might think. Yet
people are watching us. They will notice when we slip up, do
something that contradicts the faith that we profess to live by. All
the more reason to “be very careful how you live” as Ephesians
says, and as we spoke about yesterday.
And there's one
more person who also sees us when we're sleeping and knows when we're
awake, and knows if we're being bad or good. And no, I don't mean
that jolly fellow who reportedly lives a few hundred miles north of
us. I mean God.
God knows when we
do something good, something self-sacrificial, something brave and
courageous and just right. Even if no one notices and we get
no reward, God knows. And God remembers. And the flip-side is that
when we cut a corner or cheat or do something we shouldn't, even if
no one notices and we think we've gotten away with it, again: God
sees. God knows. And God remembers. The beautiful Psalm
121 ends with the reminder, and it is meant as a word of
encouragement, not a threat, that “the Lord will watch over your
going out and your coming in from this time forth and forever.”
Oh and by the way,
if you know someone who does good and few seem to notice, give them a
word of thanks and encouragement today.
For St Patrick's
Church, I'm Steve Page.
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