Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth, where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith today. Goodbye, good friend football. That is my theme today. And it's with a tear in my eye that I say goodbye, good friend football.

How we loved you and how I loved you too. The American sport, football, yes. As pastor of New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I find this subject to be an important one for Americans. The National Football League, college football, high school football, sandlot football, football served a spiritual inspiration as a spiritual inspiration for America for generations, my generation and for me included. When I played football and believe me, I wasn't very good at it, but I loved the game.

I played a little bit of it in high school and I learned a lot from playing football. I learned discipline. I learned teamwork. I learned how to sacrifice myself and my wants for the good of the team. I learned valuable skills.

I learned that I could acquire skills too. My coach was a Christian. My coach prayed before games and after games as well. In fact, I had a friend who became a Christian because of the inspiration and example of his coach. So for me, football is a spiritual subject, a spiritual inspiration, not only for myself, but also for my friends and for entire generations.

But those days are over for an increasing number of Americans, including myself. Americans who have rejected pro football in particular for its increasing arrogance, contempt for basic American values, and the culture of thuggery amongst the players. As an example of the waning interest in pro football, note these statistics, dear listener. For example, Thursday night football, Monday night football, and the Sunday games have experienced cumulatively as much as a 19% decline in viewers on television.

And of course, the fewer pairs of ice a broadcast brings to the screen, the fewer dollars advertisers are prepared to fork over to feature their product. Analysts also warn that the TV networks could lose as much as $200 million in revenue and earnings this year. I've also seen, and you have seen as well, if you watch television, attendance at home games is also plummeting, especially in California. Even a casual fan notices the empty stadiums on television broadcasts, or at least partially occupied venues for even top market teams like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. The National Football League is in decline, and for good reason.

Americans sense in their gut that the NFL of today is not the game, the football game it was, when they watched it as kids with their dads, their uncles, their friends, and their neighbors. I have noticed that. I remember, for example, my Thanksgivings being filled with faith, family, food, and football. Yes, I loved Thanksgivings because I would go over to my uncle's house, and I would sit there with my uncles and my cousins. We'd watch the Detroit Lions play, whomever it was.

Oftentimes, it was the Green Bay Packers on Thanksgiving Day, and my day memorably filled with food, faith, family, and football. Those days are gone. However, this is not the game I watched as a kid with my dad, uncle, friends, and neighbors. What has changed? Let me point out a few things.

First of all, the NFL can no longer disguise their contempt for American values. The mask is finally off, dear listener. The NFL can no longer disguise its contempt for American values. This is most striking in the players' refusal to stand for the national anthem before games. This has been rife, especially this year.

All of these supposed arguments for doing it, that is, taking a knee, as it's called. First Amendment rights to express themselves, protests against racism and discrimination, respectful consciousness-raising for causes. They all fall on deaf ears for most Americans. Most Americans understand the galling irony that only in the United States of America does one find the wide-ranging liberty to express oneself without fear of reprisal from government, which the flag and the anthem symbolize. Disrespecting the flag and the national anthem, ipso facto, disrespects the country and the constitution for which those symbols stand.

You are a free, spoiled child of a now petulant father to express your wrong-headed opinion by kneeling at the national anthem, but we too, the used-to-be fans of the game, we also are free. Free to turn away in disgust and refuse to watch anymore. The image of ignorance, spoiled, arrested development, athletes who are millionaires, multi-millionaires, kneeling and disrespecting the very nation that enables them is just too much for most of us. I'm sorry. The fathers of Steelers fans used to work eight to ten hours a day, six days a week in the Steel Founders of Pittsburgh to provide for their families.

Part of that paycheck sometimes went to buy a ticket or two to Steelers games on Sunday or more often buy a TV to watch it in grainy black and white. I grew up in western Michigan where the same scenario obtained for Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids, which formed the hub of the automaking industry. My father and uncles worked five to six days a week making cars for a paycheck and gathered at my grandma and grandpa's house on Sunday afternoon after church to watch the Detroit Lions play football. For us kids, it was always debatable, which was more sacred, the church service in the morning or the football game in the afternoon.

Once or twice in a lifetime, a few of us had the money and the privilege to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, football Mecca, that is Detroit, to watch a game in person. So the National Football League in its younger days used this love and reverence of the game by the fan and its traditions. The NFL used these things to build an empire of their own. They used to respect the love and reverence of the fan, but that has long since died. Now they take that love, reverence and dollar of the basic blue collar fan for granted as if the NFL is owed fan loyalty.

As if the fan is beholden to the game rather than the game being beholden to us, the fans. Whether the average fan can express it this way or not, he certainly feels it and is voting with his feet, his channel remote, and is increasingly meager dollar. We have noticed attendance at stadium venues is down. Fans are watching something other than NFL games and NFL merchandise sales. That is the jerseys, caps, sweats, and paraphernalia.

They have plummeted by 20%. The American public is increasingly turning their backs on a sport that no longer represents them. And this trend has been aggravated by several other factors as well. For instance, Colin Kaepernick, the sometimes quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, is the trigger for the practice of other NFL players taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem at the commencement of games. Kaepernick began doing it in 2016 as a protest for what he saw as racial injustice in the United States.

And many fans, including myself, could not help but note the irony of a pampered black man enjoying tremendous advantage, making a fortune in a free market economy based upon his athletic skill and not his race. Nevertheless, pretentiously accusing the very country that showered all of these things on him of racial injustice. Would he slap his own mother for nursing him on her right teat versus her left teat? Why does he slap his own nation that birthed his career for a supposed injustice that is no injustice?

Like the spoiled brat that he is, Kaepernick has since been recycled out of the NFL owing to a decline in his football skills rather than discrimination, as he alleges. Kaepernick has filed a grievance against the NFL and its owners, accusing them of colluding not to hire him because of his stance in kneeling during the national anthem. But alas, the very principle that exalted him to his status as a Super Bowl quarterback, that is, talent and performance on the field. In the United States, this principle is known as a meritocracy.

That is, you merit your place and your income by your skills and by what you do, not because of who you are, the color of your skin or any other thing. This very principle humbled him to a place on the bench too. The fact is he lost it. He was no longer able to perform to the level expected of an NFL quarterback. And so he was sidelined.

It was not because of his politics. It was because of his performance, not politics, but performance or lack of it that he was benched. Yet it is a measure of how corrupt our culture has become in that progressives across the country insist that Kaepernick be given a starting job as a quarterback for an NFL team just because of his politics. He has become the darling of the progressives. GQ magazine asserted this in their cover story, naming Kaepernick citizen of the year.

Media outlets like ESPN and Time magazine cheered him on in his protests as if he were another Martin Luther King Jr. The Washington Post has run endless stories sympathetic to Kaepernick, treating him as if he were St. Colin and the world is out to crucify him. But is this socialist impulse of politics over performance right? Is it correct? Should we give the captain's chair to a pilot who can no longer see or hear just because he's a progressive liberal in his politics?

Should we give the surgeon's scalpel back to a doctor who has developed a nervous tremor just because he voted for Hillary? Why should any NFL team give a starting quarterback position to Kaepernick if he hasn't earned it just because of his politics? So Colin Kaepernick and those in his week have been an aggravating factor to the decline of the National Football League. Also, another contributing factor, like blind sheep, other NFL players kneel and NFL teams tolerate the practice.

Like lemmings pouring over the cliff into the sea, hundreds of other NFL players are now kneeling during the national anthem, many of them with no clear reason for doing so. One Cincinnati Bengo player, when asked why he was kneeling during the anthem, responded by saying, I'm not sure what cause it is specifically, you know, but I just want to be in solidarity with Colin, unquote. For many of the players and some fans, disrespecting the flag and anthem that symbolizes us is now trendy and not much more than being trendy.

And as well, the numbers vary, but a significant population amongst the teams choose to kneel during the national anthem before each game, the networks sometimes turn away the cameras, coaches try various tweaks and gimmicks to keep the team together. Mike Tomlinson recently kept his team in the locker room tunnel rather than allow them on the field during the anthem. But the net effect is inescapable. NFL players are in significant numbers opting to make progressive political statements in the teeth of patriotic conservative fans who only want them to shut up and play.

And of course the thought is hold any view you want, lobby for it, just don't denigrate and disrespect the very country that gives you the liberty to do so and makes you a rich superhero to boot. Oh, there are also liberal politics of the NFL that also aggravates this situation of a decline in the popularity of the NFL with the average fan. The NFL has, the NFL, I'm sorry, as it has burgeoned into a multi-billion dollar industry has sought to burnish its image and enhance its reputation too by donating to social causes, largely liberal social causes.

For example, in response to the protests by the players, the league tried to essentially buy off the players so that they would begin to stand again and relieve the league of embarrassment. They did this by giving almost a hundred million dollars to the players coalition as it's called. The players coalition represents players protesting social injustices and racism. The players coalition in turn disperses the money to causes of their choice. Part of it now goes to the United Negro College Fund and to Dream Corps, which are both liberal social justice warrior groups.

The liberal mainstream media praised this move as promoting racial equality, helping African-American communities, and aiding social causes. But as Amanda Head of Fox News, Amanda Head did a piece on this recently, and she says, don't be fooled. The NFL's donation isn't about social causes or racial equality. It's about America's favorite football league caving to left-wing activists, unquote. Well, another aggravating factor in the decline of the National Football League in the eyes of the average American is the arrogance and isolation of pampered players.

This has created a thug culture. The arrogance and isolation of pampered players has created a thug culture. Yes, football used to be known as a sport that produced young men of talent and character. I saw this in the players that I saw on television. Roger Staubach, for example, was a model for me.

My father pointed to him and said, grow up, be like him. In football, one learned discipline and hard work and how to win as a team member, not as a spoiled brat. But all of that seems to have changed over the past decades. Players have been convicted of serious crimes and misdemeanors, just plain thuggish behavior, including shootings, gambling on games, drugs, physical and sexual abuse, to catalog a few of the two numerous crimes by players who see themselves as above the common standard for other mere humans. 104 NFL players have been arrested since 2015 Super Bowl.

Drugs, DUIs, animal abuse, domestic abuse, child endangerment, hit and run traffic accident, burglary are just a few of the crimes for which National Football League players have been arrested since the Super Bowl of 2015. And perhaps iconic for pro football is the case of Aaron Hernandez. You may remember him, a Super Bowl player for the New England Patriots, who was convicted for the murder of Odin Lloyd in June of 2013. Behold, the convicted murderer, the ultimate thug, Aaron Hernandez, who was an arrogant bully of a man, who delighted in associating with gangsters and drug dealers and real life thugs.

Yet he was protected, coddled by the league. They knew these things and they treated him as a hero. Who can point today to an NFL player and say, I'd like to be like him? What father can put his arm around his son as my dad did and pointed to Roger Staubach, but who can you point to today and say, there's a man you should strive to be like? Finally, then let me make a few observations on the shifting cultural reasons for sports like pro football and show you why we no longer need it too.

Football not only used to be a character builder, did it not? But football was also culturally a vicarious warfare substituting for real warfare in our culture. Football was vicarious warfare for the American male substituting for real warfare. Cultural historians have long observed that societies create games and sports that serve as substitutes for heroic exploits, feats of physical excellence. It's true, especially of martial cultures.

That is, those cultures predicated on warfare as an essential component of their existence. This was true of ancient Greece. And of course, they developed the Olympics too. Many of the Olympics, um, were not, um, the kinds of sports they are today, but they were much more life-threatening and using war skills in the Olympics. Rome, of course, with the gladiatorial games had literal life and death war games, did they not?

And the United States of America too, I would submit to you, uses football as vicarious warfare. Make no mistake about it. We are a martial people. The United States of America. As General George Patton said in his speech to the Third Army, I quote, and men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war is a lot of horse dunk.

Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle, unquote. Patton had it right. The United States of America is one of those martial cultures. And as such, its games must reflect the love of a good fight and the sting of battle, as Patton would put it.

Behold football. Behold football, dear listener. Do you know? Do you remember? The violence and risk that football embodies is indeed a warfare.

Is it not? A warfare, vicarious warfare, the violence and risk of football. The original Olympics, the gladiatorial games, all incorporated copious helpings of violence and risk to a competitor's life and well-being, didn't it? Football, from high school to the pro level, is America's most popular violent sport. It's not the only one.

We can have a debate as to whether hockey is more violent or football is more violent, but football is one of the most popular violent sports. As one wag used to put it, football has become 22 men on the field desperately in need of rest, being watched by 80,000 plus spectators desperately in need of exercise. Football indeed does incorporate violence and risk, does it not, as a substitute for warfare? Well, it also involves skill and teamwork, football does, even as genuine warfare does. Football is a sport that has evolved from a simple variation on rugby.

Primarily, it was in its beginning a running and kicking game until the advent of the forward pass that changed everything. It is now a complex game of strategy and tactics that requires a myriad of coaches' assistants to play a book that looks like it was composed at West Point by rocket scientists. Most players have very specific designated roles to play in a coach's overall scheme. And if each player plays that role to perfection, then the team becomes a dynasty in the history of the game, winning Super Bowl after Super Bowl. A well-oiled team executing a cleverly crafted game plan can be a wonder of complex strategy to behold.

This was true of great generals of the past, isn't it? And in fact, head coaches of great football teams were often likened to military generals. In this way, and others, football is very much like vicarious warfare for the average American fan. Well, we must also note the tribalism of football. Pro-football perfectly personifies the ancient human tendency towards tribalism.

This is the practice of dividing people into homogenous groups whose homogeneity is characterized by familial clans, culture, and region. Tribes are then pitted one against the other based upon their heterogeneous differences they have of clan and culture and region between the tribes, right? Consequently, tribalism. We have Sioux versus Comanche, Tutsi versus Hutu, Hatfield versus McCoy, North versus South, English versus French, Black versus white, and on and on with the seemingly endless reasons to divide and fight amongst ourselves. Tribalism.

But tribalism was indeed a so-called healthy outlet when it comes to football because tribalism is difficult to escape. One is born into a tribe. One's identity is bound up with a tribe. Loyalty is expected and given to the tribe, and one fights for and defends the interests of the tribe. Behold, pro-football.

Pro-football has always been vicarious tribalism as well as warfare. One tribe being at war with the other tribes. For example, I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan into the tribe of the Detroit Lions. Their colors were Hawaiian blue and silver. That was pro-football.

And close behind it was the University of Michigan, the maize and blue, my tribe in college football. And of course, our chief rival tribe was the Ohio State Buckeyes. Oh, yes, the red and the silver, right? Against the maize and the blue. Traditionally, every year, the biggest game in Michigan was that game between Ohio State and Michigan.

My loyalties, if you will, are to these tribes, or excuse me, these teams that I grew up with. I invested so much of my youthful sports passions in these teams. I have great memories. It also helped to build and shape my character and my attitudes, but no more. Goodbye, good friend football.

Now, what we also see then consequently as a consequence of tribalism is we also see great fanaticism in sports. Do we not? The word fan is just a shortening of the word fanatic. And do we not see fanatics associated with sports teams? Just look at some of the end zones of some of these teams.

You get very creative and scary and terrifying fanatics, don't you, in the end zones. All dressed to the T's with their faces colored. They look like ancient Celtic warriors who used to paint themselves and then get themselves all hyped up on everything from alcohol to drugs and go fiercely and violently and noisily into combat. That's exactly what we have with some of the fans, some of the fanatics in the end zones of some of these pro sports stadiums. We see it every Sunday, don't we?

When I lived in the greater Chicago area, I had a good friend who used to shave his head and then paint his head and face midnight blue and orange, which were the colors of the Chicago Bears. Go Bears! And the coach was coaching. That is, Mike Ditka was coaching the Chicago Bears at that time when I remember the Super Bowl year of the Chicago Bears. And my friend used to shave his head, paint his head and face in midnight blue and orange.

And he had this huge cardboard slash paper mache contrivance that he had put on his shoulders that looked something like the shoulders and head of a huge fearsome bear, right? And he used to wear this to the game and used to get drunk and jump and shout and scream like a madman, like a demon from hell. Go Bears! Go Bears! When the cameras would be on him, he would look fearsome and terrifying.

And then on Monday morning, when he'd come to work, he'd call me a religious fanatic for going to church on Sunday. Well, I tell you what, fanaticism is bred by the tribalism of the NFL, isn't it? And this indeed is one of the characteristics of football that for me is dying. I'm saying I do not need this anymore. We are fighting a real war now, no more vicarious warfare as we are in indeed a warfare, a cultural warfare for the United States of America now.

And now that we have these child games behind us, we need to fight for the basic values and core of what America stands for. So there's a real warfare now. There's no more need for vicarious warfare, brothers and sisters, because the real warfare has now obtained in the United States of America. And I suggest to you that if you are still an NFL fan, an NFL fanatic, that you need to open your eyes and see the game for what it is, a distraction so often for Americans now, rather than anything of substance, it no longer teaches you basic American values, but it teaches you progressive, decrepit, declining values.

Instead, wake up, eschew football, put it behind you and take up the real warfare that is now obtaining in our culture. We don't need to fight vicariously anymore. Take up your cultural weapons. Fight not only for the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, but also for the values that used to obtain in America. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth.

And we invite you to join us at New Geneva for our worship services. We worship at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. We, if you've been thinking about joining us, cross our threshold, use this opportunity to join us on Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. Check us out, find out who we are, meet us. You'll find our friendly welcome and response as we worship at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard.

And you can call us for more information at 208-523-0196. That's area code 208-523-0196.