Disciples, Apostles, and Saints!
You don’t have to care about football to know that people watch the Super Bowl. It remains, in the era of streaming, the only thing that pulls in large numbers of live viewers. Some for the game and others for the commercials. But this year, something else: halftime. More people watched this year’s halftime show than any other. And that number of viewers was seven million more than any minute of the game itself.
One of the hardest things for a lot of Americans to deal with is when they are not in the cultural majority. Some of us do it on purpose, choosing to prefer our entertainment more “high brow,” we might say, even as a pulitzer prize winner commanded the stage. Or perhaps we don’t like rap music, but the plurality of people clearly do. This can make us feel like we don’t understand something.
What is most remarkable about this moment is not the stories we tell ourselves, the opinions we share, or even the tastes we defend. It is the simple fact that so many people saw it live in 2025. We don’t do that anymore. And just as we might tell ourselves a story about how we ought to feel about the music, many people of faith will want to put Jesus onto that stage just as easily as they shove him into ads during commercial breaks which are designed to convince the public to buy things they don’t need. An ironic, and poor association, if you ask me.
Considering how hard Jesus works in the gospels to avoid fame, prestige, and power, I don’t think it would be good for us to put Jesus on a stage any more than to force him onto a throne. His place isn’t to be above us, but with us, beside us, inviting us to do the work of love together.
With love,
Drew+