I was at Fenway Park this week for a game, and was reminded once more what I have always loved about sports, baseball or otherwise. I love the idea of two teams representing different towns meeting to compete, to determine a winner and a loser. I love how skilled the players are, how much pressure under which they perform, how their personalities enter into their performance, how exciting—how inspiring?—it is to see such a high level of competition. And I love the crowd—so many people all focused on the game, rooting with genuine passion for their team, riding highs and lows with every pitch or play. I love the intensity of sports, how the baseball fans at Fenway Park, there to see the Red Sox play, broke into a spontaneous chant of “Beat L.A.” about a basketball game happening 3 thousand miles away the next night. I love how when the Sox’ star reliever, Jonathan Papelbon, comes in from the bullpen, the crowd roars, the flashbulbs go off, and there is a palpable sense of delirium.

I grew up watching Wide World of Sports on Saturday afternoons, with Jim McKay—who died this past week—talking about the human drama of athletic competition, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I was nurtured in a sports family, and now embrace a sports culture, which, as we all know, is absolutely huge. There were 35,000 people at Fenway on Wednesday night! What other cultural phenomenon draws so many people so consistently and so passionately? If only the population felt that way about coming to worship services on Sunday. And why don’t they?

That, of course, is the point. I am not about to condemn sports because I think that, in their appropriate place, our love of athletics, as participants and as spectators, is a healthy and wholesome thing. But let’s ask the obvious questions: why are sports so popular and church not nearly so? Why is it that the typical sports fan, including many of us, can talk for hours and argue endlessly about subtle points of sports history and statistics and analyze upcoming games or matches or series, but the typical citizen, even the churchgoing citizen, has quite a bit less to say about the details and issues of religious belief?

In the broadest terms, there are two reasons behind this situation. First of all, sports are immediate, right there in front of us; they’re win-lose, but the high or low of one day always gives way to another chance to feel differently again tomorrow, or next week, or next season. It’s right there in front of our eyes, right there on the sports pages, right there on our hats and shirts and the bumpers of our cars.

And while religion has beautiful buildings, and many activities and opportunities that are concrete, what the Christian faith offers is more invisible than a hard ball in your catching glove, more internal, much harder to pin down, practically impossible to quantify or compare like batting averages.

But secondly, and much more significantly, I think, sports so trumps religion in popularity because the life of faith just does not work by the same sort of clear rules that govern all of athletics. The Christian faith isn’t based on merit, on earning victories, like everything—everything—else in our lives. You can’t win the discipleship game, because the prize is already given before you jump in. That’s a concept that just doesn’t easily compute.

And whenever we try to turn faith into a game with winners and losers—which we do all the time—we end up making discipleship into a job interview, or a class in which we can pass or fail, or a process where our salary goes up with years of good service. We’re so used to achieving that we fall into the trap of believing faith in God works like everyone else: that if we study more, if we put in more hours, if we obey all the rules, then we’ll get more blessings than if we didn’t.

Why shouldn’t we believe this? If you study hard you get into a good college, and if you graduate from a good college, you’ll earn more money, and we all want more money. If you are kind and generous and don’t say anything offensive, people will like you, and we all want to be liked. If you produce at work, and please your supervisor, you have more job security, and we all want job security. And, in exactly the same way, we think that if we go to church, and follow the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments, and contribute to the stewardship campaign, God will like us, love us, bless us more than if we don’t, and we all want God to approve of us, care about us, right? But that’s a dangerous path, because, conversely, we also think that if we don’t do those things, God will be angry, disappointed, put us on probation and withhold blessing.

Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact, nothing could so confuse the truth than that perspective. Paul writes to the Romans and says God isn’t first interested in what we do, but in what we believe and who we trust. He wrote, “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.”

To be justified is all about how we stand with God. And Paul says that where we stand with God has nothing to do with our good deeds, or full obedience, or great beauty, or deep intelligence. God accepts us and loves us as a gift, not as anything earned. That distinction is so important. It’s what changed Martin Luther’s whole life. We are so used to earning everything we have—our jobs, our friends, our homes, our security, our self-image. And we love sports because we can see how earning, how trying hard and doing your best, is rewarded—with the glow of victory, the adulation of fans, the camaraderie of being on the winning side with the people around you, the praise in the paper and on TV the next day. Sports plays out in concentrated form how we know the world works and, unfortunately, how we begin to think God works.

But relating with, connecting to, knowing God isn’t like thta, and because we don’t have to—in fact, cannot—earn God’s approval, we humans find ourselves feeling like fish out of water. When we apply the “earn it” approach to God, it all falls apart. Bad things still happen to good people, and good things to bad. You can obey all the rules and be the most scrupulous Christian and still not know that “peace that passes all understanding.” Later in our verses Paul talks about how “rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.” He means that you can be a great rule follower—a righteous person—but that doesn’t necessarily make you lovable to others, and not even necessarily to God. God is more concerned with the heart, not the playbook. A scientist who follows established procedures will be able to produce a predicted result again and again. But the grace of God is not a result that we can control by what we do or don’t do. It’s a gift, received by faith—by living as if the promises are true and finding out that they are.

Unlike sports, unlike the business world and the stock market, unlike class distinctions, unlike politics, there are no winners and losers in the Christian faith, no in-group, no special favorites. In fact, ironically, the more we try to earn God’s favor, the harder it becomes for us to see it is already there with us. Grace is a gift already given, and rather than try to get it by cajoling, or persuading, or praying poetically, or playing the game of being good in hope of reward, we’d be far better off trusting the gift that has been given, that we already have it and then seeing how our lives unfold. Paul believes we’ll see that what we want so badly—to know and trust that God is present and loving—is already the way it is, and has been, and will continue. And if that’s really the way it is, all the things that can go wrong in a life are not consequences of doing faith the “wrong way,” and really don’t have to be avoided or feared; instead, it means we already have a foundation on which all that drama can play out, and if we can stop trying to avoid it, deny it, and just trust God enough to go through it, we’ll come out on the other end, come full circle, and discover we’re in the same place we were all along: loved by and connected to God.

That’s why Paul says, “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.” The Christian who stops trying to make discipleship into a game that can be won with points earned along the way, and trusts in grace already given for no good reason other than God wanted to give it, discovers the solid, lasting peacefulness that puts life’s hurt and disappointment in a whole new perspective, peace that has been there all along, but which was so often overshadowed by wanting to make grace a commodity that is obtained like every other commodity. Too often, it’s like fighting to get into a lifeboat and not realizing that the ship has already arrived at the dock. And, ironically, when we can accept this justification by faith, discover this grace and peace that isn’t earned, we are then inspired to be more obedient and do all those good things we had thought would get us the prize in the first place.

So fathers—and others—do enjoy your sports. I know I will. But perhaps we can also remember that as great as it feels when our team wins, with God there are no winners, because there are no losers. When it comes to faith, that feeling of victory isn’t earned, can’t be earned, it’s already given, and we access that feeling and conviction simply… by trusting it first. That is unbelievable good news that we’ll just have to take on faith.