Well, this is the eve of the greatest secular high-holy day in American culture.  Tomorrow there is a lot of spectacle and celebration around a game of American football played by one team named for a meat packing plant and another named for an industrial economy that has been gone for decades.  If you want to play the religious geography, you can think of it as the game between the team from the Presbyterian hills of western Pennsylvania versus the one from the Lutheran coast of Wisconsin.  I am nominally pulling for the black and gold, not because of Presbyterian connections but because I have a few ties to that part of the world.

(And in another development my pastor is starting a new sermon series tomorrow on… wait for it… the Sabbath.  When I asked him later about the coincident timing he was surprised and admitted that he had not paid attention to the calendar and did not realize what else was that day.  This is going to be interesting.)

But I’m not here today to talk about the fight for global supremacy.  I’m here to revisit a story about “the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”  I’m here to talk about the

Two years ago, in this very spot and on this same occasion, I shared a series of vignettes from football that were positive, inspiring, inspirational, instructive and even religiously significant.

One of those was about the high school football game that past fall between the Grapevine Faith Lions and the Gainesville State School Tornadoes.  You probably remember hearing about the game.  This was the one where the Grapevine Faith coach encouraged his parents, students, fans, and everyone else, to become a “home team” for the kids from the state correctional facility.  Half the fans sat on the Tornadoes’ side and cheered for them by name.  It was a demonstration of respect and affirmation that most of the visiting players had never experience before.

The story was broken by Rick Reilly of ESPN and was picked up widely across the media.  The Grapevine coach became a minor short-term celebrity, even being invited to the Superbowl that year.  And it is still being used as a sermon illustration — I know I heard it used very recently.

But what happens when the lights go out and everyone goes home.  In the case of Grapevine Faith they went back and did it again the next year and again the next.  Welcome to the One Heart Bowl.  Even though the schools are no longer in the same conference Grapevine Faith has made sure the tradition continues.  As the web site describes it:

One Heart Bowl™ is an annual football game between Grapevine Faith
Christian School and Gainesville State School, a maximum-security
facility of the Texas Youth Commission for juveniles.  Coach Kris Hogan
committed to this game in 2008, and with it, taught his players about
the consequences of bad decisions while showing the players at Gainesville State that they were “just as valuable as anyone else on
planet Earth.” Students, family and faculty all attended the football
game and cheered on the Gainesville Tornadoes. Because the game was such
a positive success for the Gainesville youth and Grapevine Faith
Christian’s students, it is now a permanent game held annually.

This is your opportunity to be a part of this life altering event.

And when they say it is “life altering,” they mean for both the Grapevine and Gainesville sides.  As a 2009 article from Pegasus News says:

Several sports teams from around the nation have followed Grapevine
Faith’s example and conducted similar outreaches to opposing teams
comprised of incarcerated, at-risk, underserved, or disabled youth.

Members of the Grapevine Faith community continued to reach out to
the inmates at Gainesville. Several of them serve as mentors to boys at
Gainesville, visiting them on a regular basis.

So the story continues.  This was not a one-time event but the start of an ongoing ministry.  So mark your calendars for the next One Heart Bowl on Friday September 9, 2011.  For those who heard about it the first time but then lost track of it, please know that the exhibition of the Kingdom continues.